
Ask HN: I have trouble completing my work because it's mind-numbingly boring - throwaway20256
Howdy everyone, I&#x27;m using a throwaway account for plausible deniability if any of my coworkers see this.<p>I have been at one of the big large megacorporation &quot;brand-name&quot; companies for almost two years now, and in the last year I have become incredibly bored with the work, due to most of it reducing to &quot;add a field to this class, make a PR, wait two hours for it to be approved, repeat&quot;.<p>In a bit of irony, I have trouble actually completing these tasks because I find them so boring that I can&#x27;t actually focus on them.  With COVID exacerbating things, I am afraid that I&#x27;ll be fired, or arguably worse, &quot;professional purgatory&quot; with no chance of ever being promoted to receive more interesting work.<p>I plan on talking to my manager about this, but due to past events that would be too personally identifying to go into, doing this is likely not going to lead to an optimistic outcome.<p>I guess I have two questions:<p>1) what do people do to stay motivated if you&#x27;re given work that doesn&#x27;t interest you in any capacity?<p>2) What do you do if your manager is uncooperative with you?  Do you quit your job? Do you look for a transfer within the company?
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tech4all
1) There will always be "boring" work regardless of whether you run your own
company or you are a Jr. Software Dev. When faced with boring work I always
recommend: A) Challenge yourself do to this in the most excellent way
possible: Is everything perfectly named? Layout is beautiful? Met all of the
coding standards in place at your workplace? Is the change documented in end-
user facing documentation? B) Could this be automated? If it is truly that
mind-numbing and routine could you write scripts to do this with a few inputs?
C) Can you delegate this to a more junior staff member?

2) Not sure "how" your manager is being "uncooperative"... Is he/she only
giving you boring work? Sometimes managers dole out boring work if they think
the person cannot handle more challenging tasks. Have you proven that you can
be Excellent (See 1A) at all times? Have you nicely asked to be given the
chance for a greater challenge?

It is going to be a tough "sell" to your manager if you are not completing
boring tasks because you cannot focus on them. You'll probably need to prove
your competence and excellence before you'll be granted tougher assignments.

Best of luck!

~~~
throwaway20256
I know there will always be boring work no matter what job I were to have; the
issue is that _none_ of the work I've done in the last year has been
stimulating.

Your ideas aren't wrong, though the codebase that I work on is almost 20 years
old, and making the code perfect, or even reasonably improving it, is going to
require a lot more planning than a single engineer can provide. However, I
will ask if this work can be delegated

I've brought up concerns about this to my manager (though admittedly in a
tangential way since, again, there are reasons to avoid mentioning
dissatisfaction that I can't go into). I have no doubt that the issue might be
a feedback loop now; I underperform on the boring work and as a result I keep
getting assigned worse work.

EDIT: I want to make it clear, I'm not trying to be defensive; I'll take
criticism from your perspective and I appreciate the input.

