slowly divert my work to different people in the company
So you’ve been promoted to a management position.
You can make fun of managers not doing work. You know what’s worse than someone at manager/director level that doesn’t do any work? One that insists on doing so! Trust me, first hand experience.
The absolute worst are the micro-managers. They don’t want to do work, but they also don’t want to delegate.
Instead they opt for that limbo between, where the only “work” they do is redundant at best, and every employee under them feels like a vole being tracked by a hungry hawk.
I worked for basically Michael Scott at some point in my life. Everyone knew that he had the easiest job on the planet, and he still didn’t do it, and we were all glad he didn’t. He could talk to a room full of people for hours and explain his position in the company for so long that you forgot what you even asked.
If you think the connection to Michael Scott ends there, you’d be wrong. You would always know when he had a new girlfriend, because he would talk about her all the time. One time he connected his laptop to the projector and the first thing that opened was a picture of his girlfriend. He looked at it, said: OH. Made sure everyone saw her and then pretended to hurry to start his speech.
One day he came to work, sat in my car (i was on my way to a jobsite and had no idea why he was there.) i didn’t want to talk, so i just took off. After some awkward silence, he said: i’m not even supposed to work today. I nodded, i had no idea. He asked if i knew why he’s here. I said nope. He said he was supposed to get married today but his girlfriend fucked two dudes in the jacuzzi yesterday.
There are countless stories like that and all i could think about was: this guy makes 60k a year by working two days a week. And i don’t mean because he was slacking off the rest, he was only employed 20%
Don’t worry Anon, I’m sure it’ll work out.
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.
depends on what huge organization it is
Organizations don’t get big from kindness.
Red cross, EPA, and FDA are all large organizations imo. Definitely outliers, but theyy do exist and I wouldn’t consider it ethical to take their money without working.
I would absolutely consider it ethical to take money from the american red cross without working.
Fuck this guy. Living out my dream ;'(
What would you say, you do here?
If I did this I would immediately try to get a second job with the extra time and save like crazy.
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.
This is why downsizing isn’t always bad
Imagine being so poorly managed that you downsize to cut back on unnecessary spending but literally lose track of an employee. Let’s keep the expense of an employee with none of the revenue generation!
Well… Let there be some fun in this world.
Apart from this … middle management is a real bloat nower days. Layers after layers of managers without contact to the actual product. (Now seen in Microsoft, Google and Enshittification)
Oh god, i only once worked in a company large enough where it felt like there were more middle managers than actual workers. The middle manger that was assigned to my team suddenly got sick. Like cancer sick and he basically stopped working within a week. They panicked, because there was no one to replace her. Some guy that i have never seen before told us that we just have to hang in there for 2 weeks or so until they found a replacement. They never found a replacement and i think they just forgot, because nothing has changed about our job, we did the same amount of work and everything. Legitimately the only difference was that they had one less paycheck to pay.
Long ago I worked at Wal-mart’s tire center while going to college and to get as many hours as I could they let me work with the overnight people after we closed at 7. In theory. The problem was the overnight managers never got told about this so I would just hang out doing nothing for 3 hours every night and getting paid. This went on for 3 months until I got a better job and no one ever questioned me about it.
Don’t you still feel bad about defrauding Walmart for 180 hours worth of pay?
Cause I don’t.I do not.
2022
So, how did it go?
Anon playing a dangerous game with management.
It’s all well and good until they find you, figure out what you’ve been doing (or rather not doing), then fire you and attempt to sue you for damages.
CYA. Make at least some attempts to be noticed. If they do notice you, at least you got a little bit of easily excusable free time - if they don’t, now you get the easy life AND a paper trail so they can’t say “why didn’t you try to tell us”.
There is no case to sue them. It’s the management responsibility, not the workers to assign work. They don’t need to go out seeking it.
I heard many similar stories like that from friends and it’s always a bit shocking to me. I’m no go getter or anything, i run my own business, but even then, i don’t want to work more than i really have to. But i just really can’t imagine what that must be like.
I had a friend who worked as a static engineer. He then worked for a company that made bearings for big machines, which wasn’t his line of work but he liked it. The company got bought by another company who did something different and he just fell through the cracks. At first he was super anxious and just pretended to draw on his drawing board and had excel open on his computer. But no one cared, a lot of people switched jobs and suddenly he didn’t really know anyone anymore and after a few month he told me that he doesn’t really know what his job is.
I’ve had jobs that amounted to sitting around waiting for work and hated it. I’m the first to tell people that I work just hard enough to not be bored and to keep everything under control
disclaimer: I’m not a bootlicker, all’s fair game for how you earn your keep
but there’s no way a competent person finds themselves not knowing what their job role is
that being said: a dubs a dub I guess ?
‘Systemic dysfunction? Sounds like a personal failing.’
Have you ever worked in corporate?
