
Ask HN: Job with Little Work - saulthom96
I have full time remote job with little work. I was hired to do front end development for startup, have not made anything big in more than 8 month. ask for more work but I have been given task of working on skeleton.<p>Sometimes, the work is less than 20 hours per week. There is no project manager and only 3 other engineers at company. Superior does not want to meet or set tasks, so i have to do my own time tracking.<p>Do not understand why I was hired, there is no product or requirements or deadlines. Very different from what was promise at interview.<p>Some call this dream job, I don&#x27;t feel good wasting company&#x27;s money. I am concerned poor management will reflect on my performance review when it happens, and also future referrals.<p>I am revising an app skeleton for 8 months, changing libraries with no reqs. When I have gone ahead and implemented relevant features, I have been push back.<p>It is small startup so CEO may not be aware of this poor management. My career is not advancing because of little work done.<p>Is it better to speak directly to CEO? Requests for management, issue tracking, estimates to my superior have been ignored.<p>Any legal danger of letting this go on...?
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RandomOpinion
I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. That being said, as long
as you have been doing what you've been directed to do, doing it to a
professional standard, and have a paper trail to demonstrate that, it's
unclear what grounds they would have for legal action against you. I would
recommend, if you have not been doing so already, having periodic meetings
with your supervisor to request feedback. This will help document that your
work was satisfactory.

Re: referrals, I would give that up as a lost cause. If nobody cares what you
are doing, they are not going to give you a referral.

Re: talking to the CEO, I would recommend do that but _only_ when you've got
everything lined up to find a new job and not one second before. It's a high-
risk tactic that may simply leave you working under a (now angry) supervisor
or, since by your own words, they have no need for you, out of a job. In the
meantime, put in your 40 hours a week building the app skeleton, use what
opportunities you can to learn new technologies and build a portfolio, and, as
I said, prepare to find a new job.

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Gustomaximus
Rather than asking for work, is there anything you can value add off your own
initiative? Anecdotally my fist serious job I got about half a months admin
work down to 3 by re-building process. I then went to my boss with what I did
and what I wanted to do with the extra time. It let me turn a junior admin
heavy role to a level up. And generally do more interesting work.

In this way where mention "My career is not advancing because of little work
done". The guys that will have the best careers are the ones that find
opportunity and offer to deliver. Not sit there and hope your boss realises
your available and gives you another task.

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blinkingled
I don't think talking to anyone will help based on what you wrote. It doesn't
sound like there's anything meaningful going on there unless they're somehow
sidelining you and someone else is doing the work, in which case yeah
escalating to the right people can be explored.

I of course cannot comment on the legality of anything but you have a few
options you can evaluate - be the initiator and implementer of work - maintain
a separate branch and implement features/improvements there whatever you see
fit and hope that some day you can pitch those and get it in the official
product.

Second option is to see if contributing to Open Source is permitted - if it is
you can find some projects to help in your free time and in parallel keep
looking for a better more meaningful job. This will keep you busy and it will
help you with the job hunt as well.

The third option is to just keep looking for a better job - invest most of
your time and resources to that end. I know it feels very wrong to be paid to
do nothing but ultimately you have to consider what you can control and what
you cannot and do what's right for yourself.

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mickelsen
Where did you find this job? I'm really looking for something like this.

~~~
RandomOpinion
Having seen this type of Dilbertian situation occur before more than once,
it's really not as pleasant as it sounds. You're not being given free time to
do as you please. You're being ordered to "do something productive" with no
definition as to what "being productive" actually looks like and with the
threat hanging overhead that someone will eventually notice your predicament
and ask "Well, what the deuce have you been doing all this time?". (The answer
had better not amount to "Nothing." unless being terminated on the spot sounds
like your idea of a good time.)

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JSeymourATL
> It is small startup so CEO may not be aware of this poor management.

Can you manage-up? That is to say can you show some leadership initiative to
add value to the enterprise? What would the next iteration look like? Ping the
heads of business development/sales/marketing to see if they have anything you
could help them with. That might also smooth over the push-back issues on new
feature implementations.

It may be helpful to consider your role as almost a FT retainer, on-call as
needed. During your down-time, suggest doing some cutting-edge research,
create important projects that apply to the business. This could be a great
opportunity to create your own space for professional growth.

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meric
Here's a positive way to frame this: Maybe they hired you because they
anticipate ramping up work but due to delays in other sectors of the company
the ramping up is also delayed, but they don't want to fire you because it's
not nice and they still anticipate the ramp up to be coming soon. "Once we
finish X we'd have lots of work to give to him so let's keep him around".

