
Bored to Tears by a Do-Nothing Dream Job - thehoff
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/jobs/bored-to-tears-by-a-do-nothing-dream-job.html?_r=0
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amatxn
I've had one of these jobs for years. Each day I come in and expect the gig to
be up. It never happens. This has been across 2 companies, for 10 years. From
the outside it looks like a dream job, from the inside I'm highly depressed
because the work is so unfulfilling. I have a need to be busy constantly,
instead it's slowly seeing your skill set rot and dying a bit each day.

~~~
davman
Does this not grant you the perfect opportunity for personal improvement?

Work on some pet projects to keep your skill set fresh, and in an ideal world,
come up with something that makes you money and you can eventually turn into
your full-time job.

~~~
pjc50
Usually workplaces ban working on pet projects, or at the very least claim all
IP rights on them.

~~~
Phlarp
This is quite true, but if the goal is to develop skills more than it is to
develop IP, this shouldn't really matter.

I suspect very very few individuals have hit a grand slam startup idea out of
the park while simultaneously learning a new language or domain.

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zappo2938
I was a chef on private yacht. Fortunately we had satellite TV, internet in
marinas, I was expected to fish if we were underway, if it was windy the
mister would ask if I needed help getting the windsurf board off the top deck,
I could use the boat credit card at all the tiki bars at the end of the dock,
unlimited food budget, cook anything I wanted, and crew and owners always made
them selves breakfast. Bored I started teaching myself how to code. Now I'm
stressed not having done that in a few years distracted by Hacker News trying
to build an Angular directive wondering why I didn't use React which I know
nothing about. :(

~~~
loblollyboy
should have taught yourself how to sail and become a pirate

~~~
saiya-jin
or do a course for captains

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moonchrome
>We all need a reason to get up in the morning, preferably one to which we can
attach some meaning.

Author makes a generalization here - one I have seen first hand not to be true
on many occasions.

My first job was effectively working 2-3 hours a day in a medium sized company
(>400 employees). The company inherited local market monopoly and a lot of
employees had shares after privatization from communist era - which kept the
communist hiring/work policy for almost 15 years after the fall of the regime.

Very few people actually disliked the fact that they accomplished little to
nothing in their 8 hours at work, a lot of them were involved in stealing
(drivers using company gas for their cars, reselling raw materials, stealing
product labeled as "defective", etc.)

I would say 95% of the people were not only happy but probably proud that they
were getting decent salaries for below reasonable amount of work (by any
standard). There were people who didn't like that kind of environment and
incentives (myself included) but we were in minority. I would say that what
separated us from the others was ambition - we actually wanted to accomplish
something in our career and majority of people working there were perfectly
happy where they were.

Eventually the financial crisis hit, the market shifted, company profits went
to shit, employees dumped their shares in panic and all of those incompetent
people found themselves on the street with no career prospects after 20+ years
of doing practically no work. The guys who were semi competent were long gone
by then.

My point is - this sentiment of needing to accomplish something at work is not
shared by everyone (some may pay lip service to it but in practice won't
behave accordingly) it's not something I would generalize.

~~~
gutnor
It does not mean they didn't have a reason to get up in the morning, just that
those reasons were unrelated to the business line they "worked" in.

I have known a bunch of such people, in a variety of mostly governmental jobs
(but one high level banker too and even one in a tiny 5 employees company !).
They were going to work like you go to the pub. They went to socialise, engage
in petty status/influence wars, and indeed, there was this competition to see
how to profit from the system.

And even then, all of that is relative. Money alone is a powerful reason to
get up in the morning for the vast majority of the world. That's really a
first world problem that you want to be paid to do something with meaning.
Hiring people to do nothing all is routinely done in third world outsource
centre. You keep team around for months before a project starts and you don't
hear much whining.

~~~
moonchrome
> It does not mean they didn't have a reason to get up in the morning, just
> that those reasons were unrelated to the business line they "worked" in.

I agree - but it seems implied in the text (maybe I am misreading it).

I would say people who actually want meaningful work are an exception not the
rule - most see it as a way to get money. Which I am not criticizing btw. -
everyone has their own values - I am just saying you shouldn't assume that
people care about the work they do on their jobs (and I've seen many people
idealistically assume it, even I believed it before I started working).

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mikeknoop
If you liked this article, you'll like this one too:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935)
("forgotten employee, something awful forums")

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bane
I had a kind of job like this once...weeks might go by with nothing at all
assigned to work on, and then a sudden hellstorm of unstoppable shit for a few
days, then back to boredom.

I tried to work on other things, but you never knew when a pile of nonsense
would end up on my table (and the boss was one of those terrible managers who
exemplified all the things managers shouldn't do), if I tried to work on
anything outside of what my job description entailed, I'd immediately get shot
down.

So I slept a lot, worked out, studied languages, anything that could keep me
occupied, but wouldn't count as "IP" the company could claim since I did it
all on company time.

It was one of the most stressful jobs I've had and I finally just left, even
though the pay and benefits were phenomenal.

It would have been better, and I would have been more productive when they
needed me, if they had just turned me into an on-call employee with benefits
and just let me do whatever else I wanted on the side.

~~~
amatxn
Exactly this ^^^. In fact those that leave my company all end up as
contractors.

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Sniffnoy
To me this just says "I don't know how to find interesting problems by myself;
I need somebody to supply them for me."

There's plenty of people out there who have problems they care about
independently of anyone telling them to, and have to just work on these in the
time left in the day that isn't taken up by their job and chores. If I got one
of these do-nothing jobs I could get plenty of math done with that!

~~~
agentgt
Yes but that is because you are a mathematician (or at least appear to be so).
Private math can be done in so many places. I'm not criticizing as I would do
the same with coding (and is how I started my own company).

However I would say predominantly most vocations/interest require considerable
infrastructure (other people to work with and/or other resources) and cannot
be done during a menial office job.

Even most academic studies require resources (like telescope time) that you
really can't do with out full commitment. I would argue even the most
brilliant will probably run out of creativity with out the right social
interactions.. I could be wrong.

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dirktheman
I had a similar experience. I worked at a travelling agency in the early
2000's. There were days without a single customer, and I was the only employee
at that particular office. Internet access was shielded (and monitored!), and
we had no radio. On 9/11 someone barged in and told me the news, because I was
unaware.

Anyway, I got some books about HTML, and later PHP from the library and
started coding in notepad. To this day I think this has been a blessing, a lot
of my friends learned by copy-pasting scripts, but I had to learn from the
bottom up.

Long story short: I learned how to code and got the hell away from that dead-
end job.

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pilatesfordogs
I think living a stress free life can turn out to be a bad thing. You need
physical stress i.e exercise makes you healthy + happy. I wouldn't be
surprised if purely mental stress had similar effects on Humans.

Obviously there's a threshold after which it starts affecting people
negatively.

Also, just because a job seems like a dream doesn't mean that the day to day
grind is for you. I know a lot of pilots who, after a few years of flying
commercial airlines, can't stop bitching about the tedium of the job.

~~~
Terr_
I think that's conflating "stress" with "challenge". One makes you and grow,
while the other is just an incentive not to die.

There are challenging things which are not stressful, and stressful things
which are not challenging. (Especially if they hinge on something beyond your
control.)

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aggieben
>I’ve often wondered why the so-called Masters of the Universe, those C.E.O.s
with multimillion-dollar monthly paychecks, keep working. Why, once they have
earned enough money to live comfortably forever, do they still drag themselves
to the office? The easy answer, the one I had always settled on, was greed.

>But as I watched the hours slowly drip by in my cubicle, an alternative
reason came into view. Without a sense of purpose beyond the rent money,
malaise sets in almost immediately. We all need a reason to get up in the
morning

I enjoyed the article, but this is painful. Is it really that hard to imagine
why someone with a lot of money would want to keep doing what they do, or that
it might not be primarily about the money?

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olemartinorg
A very related TED talk: The way we think about work is broken, by Barry
Schwartz [1]

I found the book in a bookstore this weekend, and I ended up buying the
audiobook [2].

[1]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_way_we_think_ab...](https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_way_we_think_about_work_is_broken)

[2] [http://www.audible.com/pd/Nonfiction/Why-We-Work-
Audiobook/B...](http://www.audible.com/pd/Nonfiction/Why-We-Work-
Audiobook/B013PWR1YW/)

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techman9
Hey, the grass is always greener...

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StavrosK
Why does this guy seem to have jobs where he either does nothing or where he
works every waking moment? Seems to me like he should read up on work-life
balance.

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saiya-jin
yeah, the wonderful effects of real-life socialism & communism. same
experience here, luckily I am young enough to only see and hear about it, not
experience it (on) myself. luckily i moved away, since this mentality ain't
gone completely yet.

every time I hear people b __ching about capitalism and glorifying some nice-
on-the-paper utopias, where all will be happy and working for greater good of
mankind (ie not entirely but in same ballpark - basic income), I just recall
good old memories of this. haven 't yet heard a theory that is "this"-proof,
but boy I sure would like to...

~~~
moonchrome
Yep, I noticed it on this forum recently as well. People complain when profit
incentives don't lead to value creation in some instance and see that as a
basis to reject capitalism. They don't consider what happens when you replace
profit with politics - incentives end up being perverse by default (as we are
seeing more and more in the West with regulatory capture and government
granted monopolies).

I think basic income is the least disruptive of all as it keeps the incentives
for industry there but still creates a floor for everyone. It would change
availability of various services/disrupt pricing but I would prefer that to
socialism any day.

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makemonies123
Did he now have a computer with internet? How can you be bored when you have
the internet.

~~~
makemonies123
not _

