
Ask HN: How do you deal with being well paid while having nothing to do at work? - idealjobsbeware
This might come as a strange question to some, but I&#x27;ve been recently wondering a lot about it. I&#x27;ve been working for the past ~5 years at a fortune 500 company, and have switched my positions a few times (generally advancing my tech skills, so think tech support -&gt; QE -&gt; software engineer type of a thing).<p>It has happened to me multiple times that I came to work and if I simply read a book the whole time, nobody would notice. So, I&#x27;d desperately try to find some work for me in each of my positions. Paradoxically, that would make me stand out, because I&#x27;d be extremely receptive to PR reviews and collaborative processes, which would be a huge factor in the promotion process. At the same time, I dislike this feeling of &#x27;all jiras done, what now?&#x27;, and so the fact that a position had prolonged periods of it was the major, deciding factor in me abandoning it.<p>I thought, until recently, that this was mainly a &#x27;me&#x27; thing, i.e. I&#x27;m too green to actively look for work even when none is given. You know, these people that always have a ton of ideas, and the only thing you have to do is manage their priority. I&#x27;m not that, and so I&#x27;ve been kind of hard on myself for not being creative enough to see what needs to be done without being explicitly told.<p>That said, my wife recently joined a new company, and was complaining at home that she had 0 things to do. They hired her, and now, she&#x27;s sitting there re-reading documentation, managers scrambling to give her some tasks. She&#x27;s also at a fortune 500 company. She also mentioned that her fellow new hires said the same thing.<p>I&#x27;m now beginning to wonder, is this a common thing? How do you deal with these periods? What is the correct, productive way to deal with it?<p>For me, these are mostly &#x27;time to train&#x27; and &#x27;is there really nothing that could use my attention&#x27; kind of periods, but I can&#x27;t do that for a long time and not feel down about it.
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airbreather
3 years, one of the biggest O+G companies in the world, seconded into a
function that 90% of the time was 5 or 10% busy, also away from home on 2
weeks on 2 weeks off.

Everyone else thought it was a dream. I went from doing complex h/w and s/w
systems design and troubleshooting to adding little to no value every day,
plus 2000km away from home.

I started to lose my mind, mostly manifested as internet shopping and
pranking/teasing the juniors, followed by a fairly long period of over a year
with some kind of pseudo narcolepsy I could not control. Photos abound of me
asleep at the desk...

Did Comp TIA+ and a few other courses, but somehow it is hard to keep the
apathy at bay and focus on something you are just doing without a specific
purpose.

Some days I ran out of internet to browse, which is saying something.

I agreed to go because we were a little quiet for work in the office and pay
was pretty high, but in retrospect it wasn't worth it and I should have just
gone back and taken what projects came up.

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3ds
I go through the Jira backlog and find something. If can't find something I'll
refactor a code smell and open a pull request for it. Even if it gets lost or
not accepted I'll have something to show for.

