Ever been paid to do nothing at work?

Have you ever been in a situation where you really had nothing to do except join meeting and some small talk on projects?

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stormchaser

Yep. mostly my last gig. first 6 months was

JasminLandry

Pretty often these days.. I take that time to study or look for bug bounties!

xxxkaliboyxxx

Most of my Military career.....

E Double U

Whenever I have downtime I study so I prefer to think of it as getting paid to learn instead of getting paid to do nothing. There is always something to do.

sillymcnasty

Yes. Two jobs currently. Same deal.

PC509

If it's not busy, I'm organizing shelves, cleaning up wiring, cleaning server rooms/closets, studying, reading up on new processes to share with the team, etc... So, I get paid pretty well to study or read or clean up.

MontagueVandervort

I would never be paid to do nothing. I couldn't stomach that. There is always something you can find to do.

PCTechLinc

When I was slated to be laid off at my last job due to IT outsourcing / offshoring, my boss was so angry at Corp that he told me "I don't care what you do from here on out, be productive on your own terms." So I used my extra time to work on break-fix tickets and study for CCNA Security then Security+.

revbox

My last job, but granted I had been there for over ten years. That gave me plenty of time to automate tasks so I could follow my true passion of wasting my life on Reddit. Unfortunately, the company made cuts to our health plan that were unacceptable so I had to look for greener pastures. Oh well, less boring now that I have to actually work.

scaredoftests

Yes, it stinks

DatabaseHead

CiscoASA2202 wrote: »

Have you ever been in a situation where you really had nothing to do except join meeting and some small talk on projects?

Best job in the world.

Freeguy

Yes. It was the absolute worst, and to complicate things, I was working from home. I mean I had the occasional project to work on, but there were many days without any kind of clear deliverable to work on.

I used the free time to gain a lot of knowledge and certs and tried everything I could to load more work onto my plate and get my name out there. Eventually things took off and it was all worth it, but that ramp-up period was excruciating. If I had let myself relax it wouldn't have been so bad, but I was too stressed out that I would lose my job unless I could find something to do.

DatabaseHead

Freeguy wrote: »

Yes. It was the absolute worst, and to complicate things, I was working from home. I mean I had the occasional project to work on, but there were many days without any kind of clear deliverable to work on.

I used the free time to gain a lot of knowledge and certs and tried everything I could to load more work onto my plate and get my name out there. Eventually things took off and it was all worth it, but that ramp-up period was excruciating. If I had let myself relax it wouldn't have been so bad, but I was too stressed out that I would lose my job unless I could find something to do.

Interesting take

My friend was experiencing this a few years back. I told him to chill, out and relax. He has been doing that very thing at home now for 2 years and has a wonderful life.

Work is first, but that's only 10-15% of the time, he then mows his yard, shops, plays tennis. It's a really great work life balance. In fact the other day I stopped by at 2:30, and he was able to step away for a few hours while we had drinks and ate Thai.

Perfect set up if you ask me.

hurricane1091

Yeah, and I took advantage of it by studying. It gets old eventually though. Too much to do now at my new job - need a middleground.

anhtran35

Overseas.

chrisone

E Double U wrote: »

Whenever I have downtime I study so I prefer to think of it as getting paid to learn instead of getting paid to do nothing. There is always something to do.

+1 Amen!

jibtech

It was never that I was paid to do nothing. More often, I had 30 things to get done but I was at a standstill on each until someone else had done something, or decided something.

The "decided somethings" took the longest.

The result was generally, half the time to do the same thing, only now it was a rush.

Not a pleasant feeling at all.

TheFORCE

Once you are comfortable im your rule that feeling that you are being paid to do nothing crips in.

JoJoCal19

DatabaseHead wrote: »

Interesting take

My friend was experiencing this a few years back. I told him to chill, out and relax. He has been doing that very thing at home now for 2 years and has a wonderful life.

Work is first, but that's only 10-15% of the time, he then mows his yard, shops, plays tennis. It's a really great work life balance. In fact the other day I stopped by at 2:30, and he was able to step away for a few hours while we had drinks and ate Thai.

Perfect set up if you ask me.

Haha this is me right now. I love my job. I just have deliverables to do and when I'm done, it's study time! Bonus is I can arrange my days exactly how I see fit. I block time to go to the gym, spend time with my girls, do lunch with folks, etc.

Mike7

I was paid to do something, but i automate so much that I do very little related to what i was supposed to do.

Ryan9764

Just like Kaliboys said, in the military but I made that up by going on long convoys almost everyday. Good times. I do missed it.

Mike7

Sometimes you use IT to create free time for yourself and improve productivity. In a previous job in the late 90s, our tech support team had to upgrade all 100 UNIX workstations OS to resolve the Y2K bug. Those were the times of CD caddies
where the CD read speed is 150 KB (yes kilobytes) per second. It takes a support engineer an entire day to upgrade a single workstation, so you are paid to do nothing while the CD spins.

Our tech support manager allocated a few engineers and 6 months for the upgrade. The UNIX vendor had a free solution that allows you to upgrade OS remotely via network within an hour. I installed the solution on my workstation, upgrade all my department's workstations and trained his engineers on the usage secretly. (For political reasons, the manager refused to use the tool). His team finished the job within a month.

jcundiff

when we hired my current boss, he had a 90 day "quarantine" contractually at his old gig... he spent 90 days getting paid to do nothing, exiting his old company before joining us :O

UnixGuy

One of my Unix admin gigs, I automated everything that needed to be automated....I did many migration projects within that environment, but there were many days with NOTHING to do. I had to work lots of weekends for migrations and patching and other stuff...but yeah, I had weekes 9-5 with nothing, and I hated it. I studied tho

CiscoASA2202

MontagueVandervort wrote: »

I would never be paid to do nothing. I couldn't stomach that. There is always something you can find to do.

That's why it is making me sick and I can't take the stress anymore. Yes not working, troubleshooting, building configs, being useful is pretty boring situation to be in

Currently, I'm doing all I can and even studying however, I just don't know anymore, I was told there is more and more work coming our way etc.. Well how long does it take, why is everything such a long process sometimes?

I was also thinking of just going in the labs, and documenting/cleaning up a little bit just do so something... I get paid very well for what I do and my title, but I want a lot more work than this

CiscoASA2202

Freeguy wrote: »

Yes. It was the absolute worst, and to complicate things, I was working from home. I mean I had the occasional project to work on, but there were many days without any kind of clear deliverable to work on.

I used the free time to gain a lot of knowledge and certs and tried everything I could to load more work onto my plate and get my name out there. Eventually things took off and it was all worth it, but that ramp-up period was excruciating. If I had let myself relax it wouldn't have been so bad, but I was too stressed out that I would lose my job unless I could find something to do.

I also work at home and really no need to be in the office, but I will force myself to go just to be around this environment

CiscoASA2202

hurricane1091 wrote: »

Yeah, and I took advantage of it by studying. It gets old eventually though. Too much to do now at my new job - need a middleground.

I am actually studying now and even though people at work think it is a useless cert and not really needed , I have started studying for the CCNP route and I have to be honest, this is why I fell in love with the field, I am so excited to troubleshoot routing/switching again this is awesome, but the work itself there just is not much to do right now.

CiscoASA2202

jcundiff wrote: »

when we hired my current boss, he had a 90 day "quarantine" contractually at his old gig... he spent 90 days getting paid to do nothing, exiting his old company before joining us :O

I just started with the company, and I feel like they are not using me to my full potential, I am being paid to learn and do nothing. This is a new feeling to me, I used to be one of the most busiest engineers on staff at the last company, I guess old ways of thinking never die, I just want to work on some type of configs at this point...

shimasensei

Right on. Downtime = Study time

Mike7

jcundiff wrote: »

when we hired my current boss, he had a 90 day "quarantine" contractually at his old gig... he spent 90 days getting paid to do nothing, exiting his old company before joining us :O

Common for employees in certain positions and/or joining a direct competitor. Another phrase is "gardening leave".