• EnderMB@lemmy.world
    56·
    7 days ago

    I’ve told this story a few times now, but I never get sick of it.

    Back in 2011 I left a startup that got acquired. On my last day we had a Christmas Party with our parent company, and we got to speaking to one guy that was on his own. After a few drinks, he blurted out that he had worked there for maybe 12 years, but at least 5-6 of those he was “unassigned”. When we asked what that meant, he said that his manager left and he was never assigned to a new team. He badged in every day, and after doing maybe 6 months of busy work and asking “wtf am I doing” to no answer from his department or HR he just came in to do his own stuff or play Unreal Tournament. He had yearly reviews with the head of department, and these were just high-level goal meetings where they reviewed the department, asked what he wanted, and left at that. Each year he was getting between a 2-5% pay rise, and outside of badging in he was only ever judged on his department output.

    I always wonder what happened to that guy. The company is quite large and is still going strong, so he’s probably still there. I won’t name them, but another thing I loved about them was that they didn’t really know where to put Software Engineers, so they just assigned them to Marketing and gave each engineer a marketing budget to personally use - around £10k each. The best part? Everyone in marketing knew it was bullshit, but they pushed everyone to spend it because otherwise their budget would go down. Some highlights were a trip to Toronto to buy some books, a full team trip to Amsterdam to go to a React conference and live in basically 5-star accommodation, and renting a hotel lobby to quickly burn some money on interviewing interns. I think they actually have a tech department now, but I know many people I worked with that stayed for close to a decade because the WLB and perks were just too good to ignore.

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
    851·
    7 days ago

    OP is working for a huge corporation, so slacking off and getting paid for that is ethical.

    I’d go even one step further and say that slacking off is more ethical than actually working in that situation.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    42·
    7 days ago

    I’ve seen this happen with coworkers of mine. Folks who never did any work. And slipped under the radar for many years. at least two (and one other to a lesser extent) come to mind.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
      141·
      7 days ago

      Take the opportunity to acquire skills for the inevitable firing that’s coming later.

      There was a story like that on Tales From Tech Support (buddy automated all his work while not making himself essential to support the automation) and when the guy got caught and had to find another job, it had been so long since he had actually worked that he had forgotten all about programming.

      • TheSlad@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        7 days ago

        Right? Like at lease pick up some hobbies or something. I can’t imagine having all that free time and just sitting there letting my brain and body fester.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
          41·
          7 days ago

          There might be an issue with some contract clause about the company you work for owning anything you create while at work so if you’re working two jobs at once it can create quite a mess

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            6 days ago

            Eh, they can’t touch anything that’s not on their equipment, and they would have to prove that you did it while on their clock. It could be that you took your “breaks” from that job (legally allowed) to get all the work done for the other company, and you are just really productive in those 15-min breaks or whatever (or you pre-work outside of work hours and submit your work in those “break” periods). If it’s not on their hardware, they’d have a rough time proving it.