Ynow I wouldn’t mind if anything i did made even the slightest sense. Like there’s no work to do because there isnt any work. Businesses are just like circle jerking bullshit on all levels while 1 goblin in the basement is keeping everything ticking over so the rest of us can play political battles and kiss ass while doing nothing of value.
Like they’re talking about ai automating jobs but there was no job to automate because we dont do anything.
I keep thinking about the black books sketch of working in the office. Nobody knows whats actually going on or what their job even is you just carve out some niche, get a few consumers of it and thats where you sit in the little piss bucket you have made for yourself knowing deep down it doesnt really benefit anybody.
Just need to mentally check out until i get fired i guess. Use my office hours to make a game the thing i actually want to do.
A good strategy, if you work in software development, is to carve out a software fiefdom by writing a system so arcane that only you understand it and now you can’t be fired.
You can use management priorities against them.
Justify the arcane coding practices as prioritizing feature development over tech debt. Let that tech debt GROW.
Spaghetti other systems with integrations with your framework, like a worm. This makes it too expensive to replace your shitty code.
Use a mix of technologies in the name of being agile. A bit of python here. Some Go. You can easily fit 3 JavaScript web frameworks into this.
You can even increase your salary by implementing an “on-call” roster.
The best places to look are internal document management, assets management, invoicing, something process-heavy, compliance-heavy, some place they simply can’t cut costs on and which is far enough away from customers that your stakeholders are all internals who don’t really give a shit.
Ideally you’re attached to a non-tech department so they think you’re a wizard who is solving all their problems, and you always have a smile and helpful attitude. You’re always clocking in late nights to fix their problems (because you didn’t do anything during the day), and they don’t know what SCRUM is so you just have to answer their support tickets. Attitude is everything. You’re their best friend.
I already made such a framework and it was a glorious mess but everyone had a dependency on it. Ran that con for 4 years until the lead engineer said it has no value now all the users are sitting on a rotting codebase that our leads refuse to support. Now the thing is they didnt axe support because they were intelligent and saw i was inventing work they did it cos they legit dont understand the job we do. Outcome was the same I suppose so it doesnt matter. Now im part of a different wider spaghetti mess effect hundreds of people that im not allowed to do anything to but watch burn while getting flogged for not adding features to it fast enough while they say no to me fixing anything ever.
It was a good time though. I was the genius and everyone loved my garbage.
The fixing is supposedly the responsibility of our outsourced support team who doesnt actually do anything but sit on incident tickets for months then get us to unfuck it. Or if theyre bored break things on purpose.
Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.
Just need to mentally check out until i get fired i guess. Use my office hours to make a game the thing i actually want to do.
based. dont let them burn you out.
If you can fall between the cracks of corpo structures where every person thinks you are busy doing stuff, just not for their Department/Team, you can get by for years while doing very little. Just make sure to always look busy and that any work you do end up doing is good, so that people will think fondly of you for managing to bang out that great Server/Report/App/McGuffin in your limited time. They will be grateful that you did that so well in spite of the many chairs you are filling leaving you so busy and won’t actually care that it took three times as long as it could have.
Think of it as getting your stolen wages back.
And never feel guilty. Most people employed by corporations do not do useful work for those corporations, nevermind for society. Capital has removed itself so far from these concerns that, somehow, a product made by minimum wage employees who do the actual assembly needs to have, at minimum, three separate departments and at least sixteen separate bosses managing those departments that all get paid way more then the people who do the work and that all raise the price of the product, which is okay because, well, the other corproations are just as bloated so it’s normal to still make profits while tacking on all that graft. You didn’t create this stupid system and you shouldn’t let it consume you.
I thankfully have real work to do generally, but the corporate stuff on the side is completely infuriating to me.
Just pointless rituals one after the other, driven by people who serve as the middle men who keep the executives safe from harm and from having to talk to workers, while fully believing that their fake busy work is something of essense.
Most of it consists of logging our work to various company platforms every day, when it’s completely possible for management to derive all of that data from a single source instead. One of the tasks is updating the task’s story points (an effort estimation of sorts) after the task is complete according to the time it took, while the time is also separately logged by us and updating the estimations defeats the point of estimating in the first place.
It’s complete insanity, and the only real purpose of it is so some corporate analyst/consultant/whatever who has not the slightest idea of what the real job consists of, gets to see some red and green lines on a chart, thinking that any of that data bears any relation to reality.
S C I E N T I F I C M A N A G E M E N T ™️
yeah after awhile you just start to think total all-seeing surveillance would be more merciful
in the latter 3 years of my previous job i worked on development of 2 products that ended up being duds, one was canceled right after completion but before it hit the market and the other was released but there’s no demand so they stopped further development immediately (which tmk is still the case).
nobody at the top really knows what to do anymore, even though that’s their whole job
ceo sure loves posting about how great AI even though the guy barely knows what AI is, maybe grok can replace him
and for extra icing on the cake, this place is run by trump bois but in his second term trump passed a law that basically makes that second product pointless, so it’s never breaking even lol
in the latter 3 years of my previous job i worked on development of 2 products that ended up being duds, one was canceled right after completion but before it hit the market and the other was released but there’s no demand so they stopped further development immediately (which tmk is still the case).
This is always fun when you’re working on “wholesale” (strictly in-org) projects, dump a ton of capital hours into something, and then it gets rugpulled right at the end of implementation because it turns out that the middle management ghoul who requested it never actually vetted the new automation process with the finance department stakeholders that it directly affects, and it turns out that the “automation” actually dumps a fuckton more manual work on them. And there are no consequences because the aforementioned middle management ghoul just retires a few months later anyway, after the poor sap who had to do all the development work – and requirements re-analysis because the project “docs” were screenshots of XML pasted in a multi-tab Excel sheet – missed like four holidays in a row AND I WILL NEVER GET THAT TIME BACK YOU SONS OF BITCHES
Every fucking year they pull this shit. I get handed some massive project near the beginning of the year, and then I keep getting pulled off of it in order to do random break-fix work on other shit that keeps breaking because we have no QA, no standards, no accountability, not even code reviews, and then October rolls around and it is suddenly the massive project from Q1 is The Most Important Thing Ever because the capital work order funding goes bye-bye on December 31st, so now it’s motherfucking crunch time baybee, and guess who’s the Cap’n.
Between the 60+ hour weeks and the RTO chumpfuckery, I’m barely keeping it together.
If I worked 4 years at a job with prestige wages/salary in the USA, I would never need to work again for the rest of my life.
Dont think for a second adding in qa and code reviews makes it better. Im over here with all the supposed quality engineering processes and its just more oversight more micromanagement more reviews from people who shouldnt be working here at all and it doesnt actually release better code it just makes the job slower and more miserable. I actually wanna go back to qa free cowboy zone because id at least get my autonomy back. Now all i do is make uml diagrams and argue with security teams most recent batshit take that makes me want to snap my laptop in half. Oh and our lead admitted that if theyre in a bad mood they just reject our requests as catharsis.
Otherwise very much the same. Crunch time but not even sure what for or what were making. Just gotta make sure we’re looking miserable because making things isnt even relevant anymore its just a suffering mill thats perpetuated by having too much money and being too big to fail.
My first job i worked at small company with some old boomer ceo but margins were razor thin and products had to succeed otherwise the company would collapse. Even though he was a massive asshole he actually did and enjoyed doing a lot of the companies work and knew what the product should be, then sold it and managed all the customers. Did sales did marketing shaped everything relatively well. So other than the pay being utter dogshit the job was actually quite fun cos i made actual products that got sold and used.
Now i work in big business the leadership genuinely have no context or understanding of what the job we do is because they slipped in from consultancies where just lying and sounding clever is the name of the game. All they do is sit there and smugly repeat some buzzword or soundbite and look really proud of themselves while giving no direction at all. But they still love to micromanage? So they have no holistic view of anything but will make ridiculous demands of this small insignificant part of the work making it take months longer just to feel useful.
See when I was a designer (structural/mechanical drafter, mostly bulk materials handling systems like conveyors and piping), I kinda loved it when I designed something that never got made. I still got paid, still got to solve all the neat little puzzles that go into a design, BUT I didn’t have to suffer any anxiety that I made an error that might cost time, money, or, god forbid, blood! Win-win-win! Now part of that is how atomized we all were anyway, how little connection we had even to the projects that did get built, but even so.
Idk what exactly you do for a living but I work for a manufacturer of enormous industrial electrical systems and holy fuck do people work here. In the office, in the shop, out in the field. It’s basically unlimited overtime, travel time, double time on Sundays, per diem, annual 10% bonuses company wide. But people that dick around all day tend not to last. Everyone is slammed busy all the time, overworked, trying to get everything perfect because electricity can be life or death, esp when you’re dealing with high voltages and thousands (or 10’s of thousands) of amps.
I realize this is the exception, not the norm.
I was always more of an artistic and creative person before I entered the working world. I’m so glad I pivoted to math and science and engineering. My job is just all testing and QA and a bit of field service and I love it. You can nerd out with the nerds, or shoot the shit with the country folks, or I’ll talk about random shit around the city since I’m in city limits and so are some other people.
Maybe it’s time for a career change? Idk
I’ve heard of people that use their bullshit job time to go to online school or otherwise learn new skills to get out of the hell that is office work. Maybe thats possible?
Yeah I think im gonna start doing that. I have the privilege to not be physically watched all day so i can work on other stuff in a corner somewhere. Problem is most of my day is useless calls and useless questions
What is your overall plan in your life that is supported by working a Bullshit Job? What economic threshold are you trying to reach?
Oh yeah, after I burned out from a major project failure last year I decided to never let that shit happen again. I’m only putting effort into getting hired. (I’m a contractor, aka the company’s own on demand personal surplus army of labor.) Otherwise, I bullshit most of my job, and now that they refuse to let us have an in person supervisor (we cared too much about each other’s well-being, so they divided our team into two and switched to an out-of-state supervisor directly under corporate’s watch) and have taken away our paid OT opportunities, I don’t really care what happens. The new supervisor is trying to build trust with us, but it’s so superficial that nothing is ever going to come of it when push comes to shove. I come home early on in office days and no one notices or cares now that we’re separated from the older employees. Thanks for removing the snitches I guess.
God I wish we could unionize, but hey, we’re not real employees. All part of the
keikakuplan.Lol, what do you do?
I’m a maintenance man and I spend most of my time on hearthstone or setting up gigs for my videography side hustle
The most nebulous meaningless job on the planet right now… software engineer. Also devops as well, and a scrum master, and a lead, and whatever other ridiculous role they decide to assign to our skeleton crew of needless torment. The job is trying not to kill everybody
Maybe its time to play some Helldivers 2 so you can relax a bit.
Gonna fart on your face
