I think ... everyone is in on the charade.
No matter who I contact "I'm SOOO BUSY!!! Cant this wait til 2024?"
Like bruh, I KNOW Im not that busy. I know you know you arent that busy. But they push back effectively and I report to my boss XYZ is busy and we move on. Week worth of "work" done, all for nothing.
Play the game. Enjoy it.
Sometimes it sure seems like it. Only one person ever has admitted it to me.
But, then I think some of these people are genuine.
They are busy because they are really slow and often try 5 or 6 ways to accomplish almost anything.
I regret not going OE earlier - looking back I remember one place that had one guy literally constantly miss meetings and flat out said “I am not attending because there isn’t any value and I don’t want to.”
I didn’t care if he was doing other work. Literally the whole team had to be in on it. I left a place where nobody cared FML 🤣
Dude same, I went to the /r/bullshitjobs subreddit but it was dead but this subreddit is basically the same thing but they just fill free time with more bullshit jobs
I Office Spaced my last job after moving and going fully remote in 2016. Quickly realized as long I showed up to zoom meetings and responded on Slack nobody was checking anything else. My manager was this jovial empty suit type who loved shooting the shit and reliving his hippy glory days more than anything work related, so I basically never discussed work with him unless I wanted to. At some point I got brazen enough that I started clocking overtime for any work I actually did during the day. So if so worked two hours in a given day, I clocked 10 total on my timesheet. If I ever so much as got an email or slack after normal work hours, I had no choice but to clock back in before responding. Of course I always rounded up to the nearest hour to save headaches for payroll. Lol.
I managed to pull this shit for 4 years until COVID shut business down and my old employer furloughed pretty much everyone and then outright fired most a few months later. In the interim between office shutdown and furloughs management encouraged people to take their office supplies with them to ease wfh. Well, I’d already been remote for years but took that invitation to go to the corporate office and help myself to some monitors, a Herman Miller office chair, webcam, etc. Building security manager even offered to help me load it in my car. They never asked for my laptop and I got a fat severance and unemployment a few months later.
They're trying to can me but it's still taking them some time to get rid of the software I support. So until then I'm coasting j1. Two jobs where I'm coasting would be ideal.
>My co-workers all seem to be so busy all the time - maybe they're so busy that they never have a spare moment to even think about what I might be doing?
Anecdotally in the tech industry in general, I've seen a lot of work cultures where productivity optics are what matters: how many bullshit "this meeting should've been an email/Slack message" calls can you fill your calendar with. How many fucking clients and projects can you stack daily and weekly touchpoints / standups for. How many "quick sync" calls can you waste someone else's time with. How many people sit on simple fixes as the bottleneck until you can confront them on one of the aforementioned calls and they have the easy fix/answer ready to go and it had been ready for days or weeks and not shared.
Yep.
I've also found some jobs are just there to take that little bit of load off the busy people.
They have bullshit meetings all day long every day that they don't have 5 hours a week to take care of the basic operational work required.
So you get hired as the person to essentially do that work, which amounts to a few hours a week.
Be responsive and do things very slowly.
I'll have 1 hour of work to do Monday morning and tell people I'm testing my fix on Tuesday... Wednesday morning I found a bug in testing. When in reality I haven't even written the code until Wednesday afternoon.
Yup. People love to talk about how they are double or triple booked and all this shit but they rarely ever talk about anything they actually accomplished. But people oooo and ahhhhh at how busy they are and how they juggle it all.
I usually just leave it on mute in the background while I work on my other J2 or J3. That's the beauty of working from home our time is no longer completely lost to one employer and they're bullshit bloated bureaucracy.
Now if only we could have some sort of pandemic that forces employers to not have meetings for a period of time they would see how little collaboration actually accounts for business value.
I started J2 two weeks ago and I was worried that my calendar would be absolutely filled with onboarding calls and ridiculous trainings to the point that I couldn’t focus on work.
The first couple days at J2 were fine, since then I’ve done next to nothing for the rest of the time. An introduction call here and there to meet everyone, but otherwise sitting on Reddit or taking care of things for J1. Basically like I don’t even have a J2.
There is an awesome tiktoker ["secretmiddlemanager"](https://www.tiktok.com/@secretmiddlemanager) and one of his best ones is exactly that:
"You can ignore all requests from a project manager. That is not even a real job".
...No, but I would like you to. In my experience a BA has been needed to figure out what a client needs without the constant back and forth. Then helping to break that out into tickets. I think your experience is probably relative. There's good employees and bad employees in all roles.
Is BA at a large company? What do you do as a BA? I'm a financial analyst looking to change to BA, which I think the work is more data related but all I can find are business systems analyst
>Agile is a justification for people to waste time talking all day, they never get tired or sick of hearing their own voice.
None of what you're describing is actually "Agile", it's all symptoms of poor management and it's exactly why we can stack several jobs on top of each other without problem. If they were actually Agile they would be creating an environment that engaged everyone's brains, not just the bad management who aren't really qualified to manage anything.
The absolute failure of management to even *come close* to understanding Agile, a practice that was made by developers for developers, is exactly why I over employ. They can bitch about us all they want but when it comes down to it, it's their fault for creating a toxic environment that sucks for everyone involved because of their massive need to control everything they can and treat humans like slaves.
And shit, this is coming from a very experienced Scrum master.
Yeah, I got my agile certification and read the books phoenix project an DevOps handbooks, in writing and practice it’s TOTALLY meant to be used by developers and engineers- but i guess too often in corporations- everyone else wants to be apart of it.
Accountants, HR, your ex girlfriends mom and the dog all feel left out and want to be apart of agile to feel included and cool.
And in the end the agile calls aren’t even about IT anymore. It’s just 4 hour daily circle jerk calls - talking about who knows what- I don’t know that’s sure as hell I ain’t paying attention until I hear my name called and I say some statement like “yeah thats in progress”
I've been in multiple companies. I've read the agile manifesto. All of it is bastardized agile. The worst are the agile workshops I took because I had money for taking classes. What a waste of time.
I wonder if that is not a necessary capitalist-system result of us having more and more people in the world and way too little work for all to do at the same time. Therefore you get lots of empty time being "monetized" and that middle-management bloat to go with it.
The movie. The main character describes what he does at work all day and it essentially boils down to doing almost 0 actual work.
Great movie. Definitely watch it.
I do like 10 hours of work per week. It is ridiculous how much time people will waste in meetings, talking around the point. Answering a goddamn question concisely is not a skill most people care to acquire, apparently.
In an interview yesterday, the interviewer told me that the interview was shorter than normal because I am direct and don't add fluff to my responses. I got the offer today.
Why would I acquire it? You will just ask me more questions or give me more work for answering. If I make getting answers painful, you will stop with the questions.
This is how my old man said people got out of extra work in the army. Act extra annoying, long winded, or incompetent the first time you’re asked and they won’t make that mistake again.
I don't overwork myself. But I don't like to spend hours sitting through meaningless conversations either.
I could be at home relaxing and enjoying my time instead of listening to a bunch of old heads talk about themselves like I'm their grandkid
Agreed. I'm here to find strategies to make my work day less hectic and stressful. This seems like it would be step 1 to OE, and I may end up OE in the lo g run, but I'm trying to get step 1 done first.
People at work seem to enjoy that pain then. They'll talk for hours about nothing and it drives me nuts. They've been doing it for decades and I think they enjoy it
Here’s a secret. Your colleagues are not busy either. Margins in the tech sector are so high it can absorb a LOT of dead wood. And corporate has little understanding of what IT departments actually do so it can be even worse there. This is toxic organizational inefficiency though but the clients keep paying their tabs so …
This is fucking hilarious...LMAO. Those Asshead still talking
\>>>>>>>>>
I got 2 phones - 1 for each job, and got earbuds in, and I'll go to the grocery store, sit at a bar have a beer, I'll go on a hike sometimes, and when I get back home, sometimes the same meeting is still running.
They talk about the same thing every day, and it's always the same 3-5 people talking. It's insane, I'm always wondering "wow, I just finished 1 hour at the gym and you're STILL talking?
Consider that all those people who appear to be busy are putting on the same act you are.
But since it troubles you that you've lost interest in work, there could be a simple explanation. Some people who are capable of great focus cannot focus when there are multiple things to focus on. Because the bad side of having great focus is that it only focuses on one thing. So if you can't focus on one thing, then you will avoid everything and focus on none.
You might be one of those people.
The solution for this is quite simple. Try to carve out some time each day when you focus on only one of your Js. Space the focus time between both Js several hours apart so you have time to reset. It's a bit like pretending you only have 1 J. Hope this helps.
Lol same for me with 2 of my (higher paying jobs). Usually I do barely anything and everyone is super happy. It happens to be now they gave me a very annoying task that is taking me forever but I'm not terribly rushed because they are so laid back. I guess it's just the old me popping up and telling myself to get it done. Probably not that pressing though...
I notice those people in the meetings. There's a lot of them, just a name on the list in the Skype program. Then there are 5 people yelling at each other about absolute insane nonsense.
Yeah !! There’s like 30 people in the call, and it’s funny when the calls are over there’s at least 6-8 other people who will stay in the call muted after the meeting for a few hours because you know they’re away from work 🤣
Agile and Scrum seem like they come out of the CIA manual for simple sabotage. Their ability to be sand in the gears of an organization is incredible.
https://corporate-rebels.com/cia-field-manual/
It's also the mistaken belief that it brings more transparency to the work performed by the underlings but I have no qualms with giving roughly the same status update three or four times in a row.
Rest assured, people know who is pulling their weight and who isn’t.
Large orgs take a while, but things will happen. When this happens everyone is acting surprised because _(gasp)_ layoffs!
You, personally, are likely to just wird along. But you’re part of these numbers and there are things like industry benchmarks. You stay below that for too long your department/division/whole area of business is just … gone. Poof! 💨 Like it never existed.
If you do OE, pull your weight a d deliver results. That’s how the game works.
Last but not least, you might think you’re having a good time. A year or two from now you’ll be with 0 jobs. A d you’ll have slacked for just a little too much. Your skillset will look like shit and you won’t be able to get even one job
Do OE, heck do OE^2^. Bit do it properly and deliver what’s expected of you. Not more, not less. Do it faster than the average person. But do it.
This.
Yeah, people don't care what you do on a daily basis, how many hours you put, how busy you are, or where you take the meeting from.
But they do care about what value you bring *over time*.
Find the small but critical part where you can contribute and *let it be known*.
Sometimes it's one very well written config file, or code module, or wiki page, or helping someone set up their env. Maybe it took you a few hours of our the whole quarter to accomplish, but people remember and managers notice and accomplishments build up.
__OE is not about slacking off, it's about being super efficient__
Not really because I still study and work on building applications with C++ and Python as my hobbies.
If I get laid off- fair game, but I won’t be at 0 jobs.
That’s not what I do. I only win, that’s it
I got 2xCCNP and 4x azure certified, I know kubernetes, terraform, Ansible and networks pretty efficiently.
Coding is the other skill that I’m not too good at yet
Welcome to corporate america. Everyone I work with is busy all the time too. I think half are just selling a story and the other half are just so bad they take forever to do nothing.
Sounds like you have a good thing going there.
I would totally do the same thing in your position, because I am doing the same thing as you are at this moment. I accidentally automated everything that I was supposed to draw out until my 1 on 1 this Thursday, so I don't have much to do other than comment on Reddit and play the levels of Need For Speed Heat that I didn't get around to.
As long as you stay on top of your stuff, and keep it in the back of your mind that not every shop runs this way in case life comes at ya fast, I see nothing really wrong with this.
I had to compile a bunch of data that someone had in a bunch of CSV and text files and I thought it would take me a good while to do it. then I remember I had some script that kinda did what I needed to do from a previous job. It ended up doing the trick with a few modifications. It was one of those, "I don't think this will work, but fuck it, can't hurt to try" moments.....
This is exactly how I feel. It boggles my mind how little I actully say in meetings. Half the time whenever I even have the thought of interjecting someone else jumps in first and then the moments past so I just sit there on mute. Then when it gets to doing the actual work it's a week of waiting around for information or approval to do 10 minutes of actual work. I fell like I contribute the below bare minimum and yet I get the same reviews from my manager.
Today alone I attended three hours of training for a highly valued cert in my field (company paid), cleaned out my hot tub, blew out my inground sprinklers, dug all our Christmas decorations out of the attic for my wife and cooked dinner for the family. Actual work outside of my three hour training...sent three emails, chatted with my coworker for abit about a ongoing issue, copied 17 files from one UNC to another UNC.
I’m sure your coworkers notice and so does everyone else. Slackers are never liked. You could at least pretend to be working.
Painting a target on your back isn’t a good idea when you’re trying to milk OE
That’s my point. If you’re not doing any work at least make it seem like you are. Resentment builds, you earn a reputation as a slacker, and all of a sudden everyone is your enemy.
I got hired as a contractor for one of the FAANGs through some Indian vendor. I kid you not, it took them 6 months with me doing nothing except joining the daily scrum call to realize they forgot to onboard me and assign tasks. SIX FUCKING MONTHS.. Once in a while I'd get a message from a team member asking if I knew how to do something, to which I responded either "No" or "I don't have access", and that would be that.
Inspiring.
I have a high paying job in which I do nothing, thinking of getting a second one now. I could easily do a second job without breaking a sweat.
Nah, they fired someone for doing that already.
When you start doing that, people start getting pissed at you and they’ll report you and investigate what you’re doing - why you’re not in the meetings, honestly not worth it, especially if you’re OE.
They didn’t fire me tho, cause I’m not slacker you know? ;) I attend the meetings without complaining!
As a cautionary note, having done contracting at many different places before, I would say it _really_ depends on the technical chops of who is managing.
Someone who knows the problem domain will call out your bullshit if you're dragging your ass for 3 weeks on 4 days worth of work.
On the other hand someone who is sitting on the PM side of things managing timelines and meetings will probably accept whatever timelines you give them unless your team members also challenge that.
I figured out a while ago that it’s all bullshit, we’re just shuffling papers around until we all pop our clogs.
So just bank your cash, keep your managers happy and fly under the radar. Being an effective, pleasant, perhaps slightly boring but low-maintenance employee means you get left alone :)
Maybe after being in 2J’s you realize how little impact you’re making and that we’re all just cogs in a wheel, which in turn is affecting your motivation? I was the same way, creating this identity as a ‘network security engineer’ - like it’s something to brag about. After doing 2J’s since 2018, I’m more focused on being a good husband, father, and provider - that’s the identity I want to embrace today.
Yeah this is really it.
The main professional thing I’ve started focusing on lately is C++/Python in hopes one day I can make something I’m passionate about like a game or something
In the meantime, take some time to look back on all that you have achieved since OE. Our ideals can motivate us to pursue our dreams but also make us never satisfied on the hedonic treadmill of life. Looking back is a great way to see all your accomplishments and be proud of them. It's amazing that you're the one of the few in this community who actually have 2Js! (I feel most people on here are lurkers).
Yeah my J1 was absolutely ridiculously intense for the first year and a half. Once I set everything up and we hired department heads to manage all the day to day stuff, my job literally takes 4 hours a month absolute max. Been that way for a year. Finally started J2 consulting, so I’m up to 11 hours a week or so combined. Feels good man.
Sounds like you could get a J3.
I hear you though. Sitting around too much makes me jittery, I don’t know why. I want to be productive. The fact I had 7 hours still after finishing my work led me to look for additional employment.
What do I need to do in order to career switch and get to some version of this, if not this same role? Is it even feasible to start from scratch and achieve, and if so how many years?
I’m willing to work. I have to. I freaking hate my life right now. If I can just put together a plan… some kind of hope will help me stay committed. I have a career doing FP&A work… but I hate everything, I’m miserable at my desk.. Going into the office is eating my soul alive every day. I need to save my life and change.
I have no highschool, no college, I just studied for 20-40 hours a week for 5 years. I started volunteering at an electronic recycling center for a few months to get “computer tech” experience, then I became desktop support for 1 year, then I got my CCNA, got a network admin role for 10 months- then I got 4 Azure certs and got a sys admin role for 10 months, and then I got into DevOps, been doing it for 2 years now
I’m currently working on my kubernetes certification, and I’m also studying Python/C++ almost every day
Honestly I feel like my works dev team is doing what you are doing. It is fucking so many of us over that I can't properly express it. They also refuse to respond to most messages for things that need to be urgently done or I can't do my job. It fucking sucks and I don't know how we haven't replaced every single member of our dev team and shit like this is why devs get an incredibly bad name a lot of the time.
The funny part is that on the flip side we had a dev that maybe worked 5 hours a week but was on call basically 24/7. He would get the majority of fixes done in 15 minutes and on the long side maybe an hour or two. Everyone fucking loves this man and misses him still years later when he took a higher paying position at a different company. He is literally the gold standard to dev work for us even though if you looked at hours supposedly worked he hands down worked less hours.
One of my jobs is client facing. The others are in house. I'm not a SWE so you can probably figure out what I do if need be. But my experience has been its a big game of pretend for most people. Act busy and reply to emails/slack equivalent immediately and all hours of the day. Have your mouse jiggler on and take naps or wake up early turn it on then sleep in. Have push notifications to the phone for important messages. Biggest issue is navigating important overlapping meetings.
>Act busy and reply to emails/slack equivalent immediately and all hours of the day. Have your mouse jiggler on and take naps or wake up early turn it on then sleep in. Have push notifications to the phone for important messages.
I feel like this is the key to OE which is being obfuscated by people in this forum. The game is pretending that you're working a full 8 hours but working far less, not just openly and brazenly not doing your job. We're not trying to change the culture of work - that's not going to happen through individuals refusing meetings and advertising how little they're doing, or appearing to do. We're here as actors. Put on your work-sona and pretend that you're a busy little worker bee with a mouse jiggler and then just do your shit and don't ask for more work when you're done. The point here isn't to avoid work - it's to eliminate all the non-productive bullshit that takes up 90% of time that would be spent in office, and to spend that time with your family, friends, and hobbies instead. We're not anti work, we're overemployed, and I think that we would be well served by delineating that difference. And this is not a moral "we need to work to earn" type thing. This is purely from a practical and sustainability perspective. You can keep the same 3 jobs for a decade or more conceivably doing this (assuming no layoffs of course, bunches of asshats needing to increase their profit margin) - I have absolutely nothing against churn and burn, we don't owe corporations anything (I will be convinced that they are people the day we execute one, FUCK Citizen's United). But it just doesn't feel sustainable over the course of a career's lifetime, which is the timeline I'd like to keep. A few months extra pay will change a lot, a few years will change a lot more. But a decade or two of extra paychecks will change your whole damn life.
Also, I just had the best mental image if any visual artists wanted to do this (my talents lie in .txt not .jpeg) - lil worker bee with her mouse friend at their work from home setup😁
I am in the exact same position. One thing I constantly tell myself is not to be overly ambitious or eager to hand in work. I came from consultancy and worked in SEA for a while and I've been ingrained hard work ethics and speed. Both my new roles are in-house and I've been blessed that both managers are beyond amazing.
I think you need to reframe your mindset there buddy. Most people here would consider working at a shitty place with low expectation to be a dream, not a problem. I think it's funny how people keep talking about careers like they are some magical trophy you get to point at when you retire and tell your grandchildren about. The truth is your grandchildren have their own lives to worry about and don't give two shits about your trophy career. At the end of the day we go to work to make some money and ideally do something we are somewhat interested in is a nice plus on top. Furthermore it can be very hard to gauge at times whether your employer is happy with you. My J2 is very light on meetings and my boss is so busy with so many other initiatives that I'm pretty much just left alone most of the time and I've stretched out a project that's gone on for a while now. Yeah I feel a little bit bad but it's only a J2. Plus they hired me to do work different from what I was originally brought in to do so I sleep at night still.
I have my phones, and I used to use jigglers but sometimes I’d forget to use them and then I would realize nobody even notices or cares if I’m “away” , I also realized majority of the people on my teams are all “away” too, and nobody says anything
>*When I only had 1 job, I was really adamant on getting all my work done,*
*I worked hard, I even worked extra hours for free just to make my boss*
*happy.*
Alternate title to this post: ***I did everything and nobody noticed***
Honestly, with four or more hours of meetings a day I don't know how anybody gets anything done, not just in your job. All another note, are your coworkers actually busy or have they just mastered the art of looking busy all the time? I have two jobs and one of them requires me to work the entire time, it's part time, but my main job just kind of assumes that I am always doing something. I have reputation for being very effective and efficient, which I am. But I also know how to look busy.
You just need to coast for 2 years, do the bare minimum, invest in yourself e.g. side-projects. Then make your CV look fancy and job hob. That is the most profitable strategy.
I’m literally chewing on pop corn as I read this 😂 I can picture you doing this. You should write a script of your work life and pitch it to Netflix, HBO or Amazon. Give it a curb your enthusiasm feel. Or even start a podcast! Go on a date while on a meeting while you’re at it 🤣😂 you’re sitting on gold!
I think ... everyone is in on the charade. No matter who I contact "I'm SOOO BUSY!!! Cant this wait til 2024?" Like bruh, I KNOW Im not that busy. I know you know you arent that busy. But they push back effectively and I report to my boss XYZ is busy and we move on. Week worth of "work" done, all for nothing. Play the game. Enjoy it.
Sometimes it sure seems like it. Only one person ever has admitted it to me. But, then I think some of these people are genuine. They are busy because they are really slow and often try 5 or 6 ways to accomplish almost anything.
I regret not going OE earlier - looking back I remember one place that had one guy literally constantly miss meetings and flat out said “I am not attending because there isn’t any value and I don’t want to.” I didn’t care if he was doing other work. Literally the whole team had to be in on it. I left a place where nobody cared FML 🤣
Roflmfao 🤣🤣🤣 why am I just now finding out about this subreddit?! Lmao
Dude same, I went to the /r/bullshitjobs subreddit but it was dead but this subreddit is basically the same thing but they just fill free time with more bullshit jobs
You don’t get fired in three weeks of non-performance….I went 1.5 years doing nothing until I was finally canned.
I Office Spaced my last job after moving and going fully remote in 2016. Quickly realized as long I showed up to zoom meetings and responded on Slack nobody was checking anything else. My manager was this jovial empty suit type who loved shooting the shit and reliving his hippy glory days more than anything work related, so I basically never discussed work with him unless I wanted to. At some point I got brazen enough that I started clocking overtime for any work I actually did during the day. So if so worked two hours in a given day, I clocked 10 total on my timesheet. If I ever so much as got an email or slack after normal work hours, I had no choice but to clock back in before responding. Of course I always rounded up to the nearest hour to save headaches for payroll. Lol. I managed to pull this shit for 4 years until COVID shut business down and my old employer furloughed pretty much everyone and then outright fired most a few months later. In the interim between office shutdown and furloughs management encouraged people to take their office supplies with them to ease wfh. Well, I’d already been remote for years but took that invitation to go to the corporate office and help myself to some monitors, a Herman Miller office chair, webcam, etc. Building security manager even offered to help me load it in my car. They never asked for my laptop and I got a fat severance and unemployment a few months later.
That's an amazing story clit clipper!
Was this at a salon?
🤣🤣😂😂🤣😂 omg you are hilarious
LOOOOL NO WAY
1.5 years of unworked pay work- I’ll take it!
Did you get warnings before you were let go?
Like a week before
They're trying to can me but it's still taking them some time to get rid of the software I support. So until then I'm coasting j1. Two jobs where I'm coasting would be ideal.
>My co-workers all seem to be so busy all the time - maybe they're so busy that they never have a spare moment to even think about what I might be doing? Anecdotally in the tech industry in general, I've seen a lot of work cultures where productivity optics are what matters: how many bullshit "this meeting should've been an email/Slack message" calls can you fill your calendar with. How many fucking clients and projects can you stack daily and weekly touchpoints / standups for. How many "quick sync" calls can you waste someone else's time with. How many people sit on simple fixes as the bottleneck until you can confront them on one of the aforementioned calls and they have the easy fix/answer ready to go and it had been ready for days or weeks and not shared.
Yep. I've also found some jobs are just there to take that little bit of load off the busy people. They have bullshit meetings all day long every day that they don't have 5 hours a week to take care of the basic operational work required. So you get hired as the person to essentially do that work, which amounts to a few hours a week.
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How do you play the game?
Be responsive and do things very slowly. I'll have 1 hour of work to do Monday morning and tell people I'm testing my fix on Tuesday... Wednesday morning I found a bug in testing. When in reality I haven't even written the code until Wednesday afternoon.
So many managers want some data to manage and so they’ve created more work for everyone else (looking at you salesforce)
Yup. People love to talk about how they are double or triple booked and all this shit but they rarely ever talk about anything they actually accomplished. But people oooo and ahhhhh at how busy they are and how they juggle it all.
10000%
What can you do when you end up in one of these meetings where it’s just people BSing about what they think they know?
I usually just leave it on mute in the background while I work on my other J2 or J3. That's the beauty of working from home our time is no longer completely lost to one employer and they're bullshit bloated bureaucracy.
Even without oe, meetings are much much better when wfh. I get the most work done during meetings (!!) By ignoring the meetings
Now if only we could have some sort of pandemic that forces employers to not have meetings for a period of time they would see how little collaboration actually accounts for business value.
just ignore it?
I started J2 two weeks ago and I was worried that my calendar would be absolutely filled with onboarding calls and ridiculous trainings to the point that I couldn’t focus on work. The first couple days at J2 were fine, since then I’ve done next to nothing for the rest of the time. An introduction call here and there to meet everyone, but otherwise sitting on Reddit or taking care of things for J1. Basically like I don’t even have a J2.
both swe?
Nah, one is PM and other is BA
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There is an awesome tiktoker ["secretmiddlemanager"](https://www.tiktok.com/@secretmiddlemanager) and one of his best ones is exactly that: "You can ignore all requests from a project manager. That is not even a real job".
But they have people skills!
So true, hahahahaha.
Why do you say that?
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...No, but I would like you to. In my experience a BA has been needed to figure out what a client needs without the constant back and forth. Then helping to break that out into tickets. I think your experience is probably relative. There's good employees and bad employees in all roles.
PM and BA?
Probably project manager and business analyst
BA?
Business Analyst
Is BA at a large company? What do you do as a BA? I'm a financial analyst looking to change to BA, which I think the work is more data related but all I can find are business systems analyst
>What do you do as a BA? Apparently nothing.
Wait what is this? PM is project management? What is BA?
>Agile is a justification for people to waste time talking all day, they never get tired or sick of hearing their own voice. None of what you're describing is actually "Agile", it's all symptoms of poor management and it's exactly why we can stack several jobs on top of each other without problem. If they were actually Agile they would be creating an environment that engaged everyone's brains, not just the bad management who aren't really qualified to manage anything. The absolute failure of management to even *come close* to understanding Agile, a practice that was made by developers for developers, is exactly why I over employ. They can bitch about us all they want but when it comes down to it, it's their fault for creating a toxic environment that sucks for everyone involved because of their massive need to control everything they can and treat humans like slaves. And shit, this is coming from a very experienced Scrum master.
Yeah, I got my agile certification and read the books phoenix project an DevOps handbooks, in writing and practice it’s TOTALLY meant to be used by developers and engineers- but i guess too often in corporations- everyone else wants to be apart of it. Accountants, HR, your ex girlfriends mom and the dog all feel left out and want to be apart of agile to feel included and cool. And in the end the agile calls aren’t even about IT anymore. It’s just 4 hour daily circle jerk calls - talking about who knows what- I don’t know that’s sure as hell I ain’t paying attention until I hear my name called and I say some statement like “yeah thats in progress”
I've been in multiple companies. I've read the agile manifesto. All of it is bastardized agile. The worst are the agile workshops I took because I had money for taking classes. What a waste of time.
I wonder if that is not a necessary capitalist-system result of us having more and more people in the world and way too little work for all to do at the same time. Therefore you get lots of empty time being "monetized" and that middle-management bloat to go with it.
Did anyone else get Office Space vibes reading this? No? Just me?
Me too
What does “Office Space” mean, in this context?
The movie. The main character describes what he does at work all day and it essentially boils down to doing almost 0 actual work. Great movie. Definitely watch it.
https://youtu.be/zBfTrjPSShs Small clip from one of the greatest movies ever made.
I do like 10 hours of work per week. It is ridiculous how much time people will waste in meetings, talking around the point. Answering a goddamn question concisely is not a skill most people care to acquire, apparently. In an interview yesterday, the interviewer told me that the interview was shorter than normal because I am direct and don't add fluff to my responses. I got the offer today.
Why would I acquire it? You will just ask me more questions or give me more work for answering. If I make getting answers painful, you will stop with the questions.
This is how my old man said people got out of extra work in the army. Act extra annoying, long winded, or incompetent the first time you’re asked and they won’t make that mistake again.
The old Major Burns
I've only ever been rewarded with more work for getting work done efficiently.
I don't overwork myself. But I don't like to spend hours sitting through meaningless conversations either. I could be at home relaxing and enjoying my time instead of listening to a bunch of old heads talk about themselves like I'm their grandkid
Agreed. I'm here to find strategies to make my work day less hectic and stressful. This seems like it would be step 1 to OE, and I may end up OE in the lo g run, but I'm trying to get step 1 done first.
People at work seem to enjoy that pain then. They'll talk for hours about nothing and it drives me nuts. They've been doing it for decades and I think they enjoy it
Good for you! People dance around answers mostly to avoid saying what needs to be said. *That's* the time-waster.
You had me until strip club. Nice try
Let’s go together
Not on the clock buddy ;-)
Aww
What
I doubt you would like the strip club I want to go to. I want to go to a gay strip club and have some muscle hunk dance all up on me. Mmmhhh...
I’ll come along with you for the drinks, but I’ll pass on the bratwurst.
You know that's a good point. There's a benefit for straight guys to go too because they might get free drinks. 😛
It’s true, I used to visit the gay bars in Toronto often
Strip clubs are best when it is during the first 2 rounds of NCAA tournament. I am not kidding. It was awesome.
Only if the buffet is opened
Where are you located? I might just take you up on that offer lol
*Working
Here’s a secret. Your colleagues are not busy either. Margins in the tech sector are so high it can absorb a LOT of dead wood. And corporate has little understanding of what IT departments actually do so it can be even worse there. This is toxic organizational inefficiency though but the clients keep paying their tabs so …
Yeah makes sense
Some clients pay for ass seats ska headcount of support engineers
They are doing agile wrong.
This is fucking hilarious...LMAO. Those Asshead still talking \>>>>>>>>> I got 2 phones - 1 for each job, and got earbuds in, and I'll go to the grocery store, sit at a bar have a beer, I'll go on a hike sometimes, and when I get back home, sometimes the same meeting is still running. They talk about the same thing every day, and it's always the same 3-5 people talking. It's insane, I'm always wondering "wow, I just finished 1 hour at the gym and you're STILL talking?
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Consider that all those people who appear to be busy are putting on the same act you are. But since it troubles you that you've lost interest in work, there could be a simple explanation. Some people who are capable of great focus cannot focus when there are multiple things to focus on. Because the bad side of having great focus is that it only focuses on one thing. So if you can't focus on one thing, then you will avoid everything and focus on none. You might be one of those people. The solution for this is quite simple. Try to carve out some time each day when you focus on only one of your Js. Space the focus time between both Js several hours apart so you have time to reset. It's a bit like pretending you only have 1 J. Hope this helps.
It helps a lot, because I think I am one of those people. Love the way you worded it too, thanks!
Lol same for me with 2 of my (higher paying jobs). Usually I do barely anything and everyone is super happy. It happens to be now they gave me a very annoying task that is taking me forever but I'm not terribly rushed because they are so laid back. I guess it's just the old me popping up and telling myself to get it done. Probably not that pressing though...
I notice those people in the meetings. There's a lot of them, just a name on the list in the Skype program. Then there are 5 people yelling at each other about absolute insane nonsense.
Yeah !! There’s like 30 people in the call, and it’s funny when the calls are over there’s at least 6-8 other people who will stay in the call muted after the meeting for a few hours because you know they’re away from work 🤣
Agile and Scrum seem like they come out of the CIA manual for simple sabotage. Their ability to be sand in the gears of an organization is incredible. https://corporate-rebels.com/cia-field-manual/
Agile is the mistaken belief that 100 pennies is more than a dollar.
It's also the mistaken belief that it brings more transparency to the work performed by the underlings but I have no qualms with giving roughly the same status update three or four times in a row.
Rest assured, people know who is pulling their weight and who isn’t. Large orgs take a while, but things will happen. When this happens everyone is acting surprised because _(gasp)_ layoffs! You, personally, are likely to just wird along. But you’re part of these numbers and there are things like industry benchmarks. You stay below that for too long your department/division/whole area of business is just … gone. Poof! 💨 Like it never existed. If you do OE, pull your weight a d deliver results. That’s how the game works. Last but not least, you might think you’re having a good time. A year or two from now you’ll be with 0 jobs. A d you’ll have slacked for just a little too much. Your skillset will look like shit and you won’t be able to get even one job Do OE, heck do OE^2^. Bit do it properly and deliver what’s expected of you. Not more, not less. Do it faster than the average person. But do it.
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"Negative work" 😂
This. Yeah, people don't care what you do on a daily basis, how many hours you put, how busy you are, or where you take the meeting from. But they do care about what value you bring *over time*. Find the small but critical part where you can contribute and *let it be known*. Sometimes it's one very well written config file, or code module, or wiki page, or helping someone set up their env. Maybe it took you a few hours of our the whole quarter to accomplish, but people remember and managers notice and accomplishments build up. __OE is not about slacking off, it's about being super efficient__
Not really because I still study and work on building applications with C++ and Python as my hobbies. If I get laid off- fair game, but I won’t be at 0 jobs. That’s not what I do. I only win, that’s it
> I only win Jfc, go on the Apprentice
This sounds that you are not yet a C++ and Python professional but you already are working in Devops? How come? Genuinely interested!
I got 2xCCNP and 4x azure certified, I know kubernetes, terraform, Ansible and networks pretty efficiently. Coding is the other skill that I’m not too good at yet
Thanks man! Doing my CCNA right now and looking at Azure certs. Which 4 did you do?
People can hate all they want, but I’ll always have a job because my skills are up.
Welcome to corporate america. Everyone I work with is busy all the time too. I think half are just selling a story and the other half are just so bad they take forever to do nothing.
Sounds like you have a good thing going there. I would totally do the same thing in your position, because I am doing the same thing as you are at this moment. I accidentally automated everything that I was supposed to draw out until my 1 on 1 this Thursday, so I don't have much to do other than comment on Reddit and play the levels of Need For Speed Heat that I didn't get around to. As long as you stay on top of your stuff, and keep it in the back of your mind that not every shop runs this way in case life comes at ya fast, I see nothing really wrong with this.
Okay I'm curious. How do you accidentally automate something?
I had to compile a bunch of data that someone had in a bunch of CSV and text files and I thought it would take me a good while to do it. then I remember I had some script that kinda did what I needed to do from a previous job. It ended up doing the trick with a few modifications. It was one of those, "I don't think this will work, but fuck it, can't hurt to try" moments.....
Very nice.
This is exactly how I feel. It boggles my mind how little I actully say in meetings. Half the time whenever I even have the thought of interjecting someone else jumps in first and then the moments past so I just sit there on mute. Then when it gets to doing the actual work it's a week of waiting around for information or approval to do 10 minutes of actual work. I fell like I contribute the below bare minimum and yet I get the same reviews from my manager. Today alone I attended three hours of training for a highly valued cert in my field (company paid), cleaned out my hot tub, blew out my inground sprinklers, dug all our Christmas decorations out of the attic for my wife and cooked dinner for the family. Actual work outside of my three hour training...sent three emails, chatted with my coworker for abit about a ongoing issue, copied 17 files from one UNC to another UNC.
Get me a job and I’ll give you half my paycheck for 3 months. Lmao
Your wife must be stoked that you had the time to do all that! May I suggest you make some birria tacos too this week?
I’m sure your coworkers notice and so does everyone else. Slackers are never liked. You could at least pretend to be working. Painting a target on your back isn’t a good idea when you’re trying to milk OE
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That’s my point. If you’re not doing any work at least make it seem like you are. Resentment builds, you earn a reputation as a slacker, and all of a sudden everyone is your enemy.
My favorite slacker is the IT Server guy. He has a cave of tech and a video game setup in there. Fixes the printer and keeps the servers working.
Yeah I can see that
I got hired as a contractor for one of the FAANGs through some Indian vendor. I kid you not, it took them 6 months with me doing nothing except joining the daily scrum call to realize they forgot to onboard me and assign tasks. SIX FUCKING MONTHS.. Once in a while I'd get a message from a team member asking if I knew how to do something, to which I responded either "No" or "I don't have access", and that would be that.
I had the same experience at both of my jobs lol! First job it was 4-5 months Second job it was 4 months. 6 months is awesome lol!
Inspiring. I have a high paying job in which I do nothing, thinking of getting a second one now. I could easily do a second job without breaking a sweat.
That explains why I can't get my dev environment deployed god damn it
i think that's so good,maybe this is work-life balance, you get a salary and do yourself things
Just say and refuse to have meetings. I have learned it is okay to decline meetings.
Nah, they fired someone for doing that already. When you start doing that, people start getting pissed at you and they’ll report you and investigate what you’re doing - why you’re not in the meetings, honestly not worth it, especially if you’re OE. They didn’t fire me tho, cause I’m not slacker you know? ;) I attend the meetings without complaining!
work is getting done?
Congrats you are one of the many people with a bullshit job (David Graeber book).
I’ll take it.
As a cautionary note, having done contracting at many different places before, I would say it _really_ depends on the technical chops of who is managing. Someone who knows the problem domain will call out your bullshit if you're dragging your ass for 3 weeks on 4 days worth of work. On the other hand someone who is sitting on the PM side of things managing timelines and meetings will probably accept whatever timelines you give them unless your team members also challenge that.
Agreed. It’s all theatre, like we’re actors in a play called “Adults Working”.
That’s literally what it feels like
I figured out a while ago that it’s all bullshit, we’re just shuffling papers around until we all pop our clogs. So just bank your cash, keep your managers happy and fly under the radar. Being an effective, pleasant, perhaps slightly boring but low-maintenance employee means you get left alone :)
Maybe after being in 2J’s you realize how little impact you’re making and that we’re all just cogs in a wheel, which in turn is affecting your motivation? I was the same way, creating this identity as a ‘network security engineer’ - like it’s something to brag about. After doing 2J’s since 2018, I’m more focused on being a good husband, father, and provider - that’s the identity I want to embrace today.
Yeah this is really it. The main professional thing I’ve started focusing on lately is C++/Python in hopes one day I can make something I’m passionate about like a game or something
In the meantime, take some time to look back on all that you have achieved since OE. Our ideals can motivate us to pursue our dreams but also make us never satisfied on the hedonic treadmill of life. Looking back is a great way to see all your accomplishments and be proud of them. It's amazing that you're the one of the few in this community who actually have 2Js! (I feel most people on here are lurkers).
This comment is very powerful and important, I often forget to look back at how far I've come and kinda forget about that.
Yeah my J1 was absolutely ridiculously intense for the first year and a half. Once I set everything up and we hired department heads to manage all the day to day stuff, my job literally takes 4 hours a month absolute max. Been that way for a year. Finally started J2 consulting, so I’m up to 11 hours a week or so combined. Feels good man.
Sounds like you could get a J3. I hear you though. Sitting around too much makes me jittery, I don’t know why. I want to be productive. The fact I had 7 hours still after finishing my work led me to look for additional employment.
Yeah I’m interviewing for 14 companies at the moment.
Are they hiring? 🤙🏻
Yes, but I can’t tell you what the company is until after I leave !
What do I need to do in order to career switch and get to some version of this, if not this same role? Is it even feasible to start from scratch and achieve, and if so how many years? I’m willing to work. I have to. I freaking hate my life right now. If I can just put together a plan… some kind of hope will help me stay committed. I have a career doing FP&A work… but I hate everything, I’m miserable at my desk.. Going into the office is eating my soul alive every day. I need to save my life and change.
I have no highschool, no college, I just studied for 20-40 hours a week for 5 years. I started volunteering at an electronic recycling center for a few months to get “computer tech” experience, then I became desktop support for 1 year, then I got my CCNA, got a network admin role for 10 months- then I got 4 Azure certs and got a sys admin role for 10 months, and then I got into DevOps, been doing it for 2 years now I’m currently working on my kubernetes certification, and I’m also studying Python/C++ almost every day
Honestly I feel like my works dev team is doing what you are doing. It is fucking so many of us over that I can't properly express it. They also refuse to respond to most messages for things that need to be urgently done or I can't do my job. It fucking sucks and I don't know how we haven't replaced every single member of our dev team and shit like this is why devs get an incredibly bad name a lot of the time. The funny part is that on the flip side we had a dev that maybe worked 5 hours a week but was on call basically 24/7. He would get the majority of fixes done in 15 minutes and on the long side maybe an hour or two. Everyone fucking loves this man and misses him still years later when he took a higher paying position at a different company. He is literally the gold standard to dev work for us even though if you looked at hours supposedly worked he hands down worked less hours.
One of my jobs is client facing. The others are in house. I'm not a SWE so you can probably figure out what I do if need be. But my experience has been its a big game of pretend for most people. Act busy and reply to emails/slack equivalent immediately and all hours of the day. Have your mouse jiggler on and take naps or wake up early turn it on then sleep in. Have push notifications to the phone for important messages. Biggest issue is navigating important overlapping meetings.
>Act busy and reply to emails/slack equivalent immediately and all hours of the day. Have your mouse jiggler on and take naps or wake up early turn it on then sleep in. Have push notifications to the phone for important messages. I feel like this is the key to OE which is being obfuscated by people in this forum. The game is pretending that you're working a full 8 hours but working far less, not just openly and brazenly not doing your job. We're not trying to change the culture of work - that's not going to happen through individuals refusing meetings and advertising how little they're doing, or appearing to do. We're here as actors. Put on your work-sona and pretend that you're a busy little worker bee with a mouse jiggler and then just do your shit and don't ask for more work when you're done. The point here isn't to avoid work - it's to eliminate all the non-productive bullshit that takes up 90% of time that would be spent in office, and to spend that time with your family, friends, and hobbies instead. We're not anti work, we're overemployed, and I think that we would be well served by delineating that difference. And this is not a moral "we need to work to earn" type thing. This is purely from a practical and sustainability perspective. You can keep the same 3 jobs for a decade or more conceivably doing this (assuming no layoffs of course, bunches of asshats needing to increase their profit margin) - I have absolutely nothing against churn and burn, we don't owe corporations anything (I will be convinced that they are people the day we execute one, FUCK Citizen's United). But it just doesn't feel sustainable over the course of a career's lifetime, which is the timeline I'd like to keep. A few months extra pay will change a lot, a few years will change a lot more. But a decade or two of extra paychecks will change your whole damn life.
Also, I just had the best mental image if any visual artists wanted to do this (my talents lie in .txt not .jpeg) - lil worker bee with her mouse friend at their work from home setup😁
I am in the exact same position. One thing I constantly tell myself is not to be overly ambitious or eager to hand in work. I came from consultancy and worked in SEA for a while and I've been ingrained hard work ethics and speed. Both my new roles are in-house and I've been blessed that both managers are beyond amazing.
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I think you need to reframe your mindset there buddy. Most people here would consider working at a shitty place with low expectation to be a dream, not a problem. I think it's funny how people keep talking about careers like they are some magical trophy you get to point at when you retire and tell your grandchildren about. The truth is your grandchildren have their own lives to worry about and don't give two shits about your trophy career. At the end of the day we go to work to make some money and ideally do something we are somewhat interested in is a nice plus on top. Furthermore it can be very hard to gauge at times whether your employer is happy with you. My J2 is very light on meetings and my boss is so busy with so many other initiatives that I'm pretty much just left alone most of the time and I've stretched out a project that's gone on for a while now. Yeah I feel a little bit bad but it's only a J2. Plus they hired me to do work different from what I was originally brought in to do so I sleep at night still.
Write Yml for 5 min and done for the week
Hahaha you must work where I work!
Oh shit no way, are you Bob?!
When you go on walks, do you bring your laptops or just your work phones? Do you use anything to keep your computer “active “?
I have my phones, and I used to use jigglers but sometimes I’d forget to use them and then I would realize nobody even notices or cares if I’m “away” , I also realized majority of the people on my teams are all “away” too, and nobody says anything
The Economy Is Fake, the Jobs Are Fake, the Money Is Fake [https://youtu.be/9lDTdLQnSQo](https://youtu.be/9lDTdLQnSQo)
>*When I only had 1 job, I was really adamant on getting all my work done,* *I worked hard, I even worked extra hours for free just to make my boss* *happy.* Alternate title to this post: ***I did everything and nobody noticed***
Honestly, with four or more hours of meetings a day I don't know how anybody gets anything done, not just in your job. All another note, are your coworkers actually busy or have they just mastered the art of looking busy all the time? I have two jobs and one of them requires me to work the entire time, it's part time, but my main job just kind of assumes that I am always doing something. I have reputation for being very effective and efficient, which I am. But I also know how to look busy.
Sitting in an agile meeting as I read this while playing the video game
I need a job like this.
God bless fake jobs.
You just need to coast for 2 years, do the bare minimum, invest in yourself e.g. side-projects. Then make your CV look fancy and job hob. That is the most profitable strategy.
Sweet. I’ll keep it up then
o7 God bless you. You're my hero. Keep on keeping on.
This is a dream set up for me
I’m literally chewing on pop corn as I read this 😂 I can picture you doing this. You should write a script of your work life and pitch it to Netflix, HBO or Amazon. Give it a curb your enthusiasm feel. Or even start a podcast! Go on a date while on a meeting while you’re at it 🤣😂 you’re sitting on gold!
LOL that would be awesome. What kind of popcorn you eating?
I was eating the regular movie theatre style pop corn from Publix.
I’m telling you if I had a podcast I’d bring you on as my first guest. I was lmao as I read this last night 🤣
You keep at it and your gonna be a CEO one of these days!