I mean absolutely nothing, except occasionally make an appearance of working.
How long before people would catch on?
How long until there would be consequences?
Me? Definitely 3 days.....maybe 3 weeks during slow season.
I mean absolutely nothing, except occasionally make an appearance of working.
How long before people would catch on?
How long until there would be consequences?
Me? Definitely 3 days.....maybe 3 weeks during slow season.
I feel horrible about this now but in my old job maybe a month.
Which I did.
I used to leave my office door open and unlocked and go out with my friends. They assumed I was "working"
We were usually in a bar.
Oh well.
what kind of job? are they hiring?
why feel bad? I'm assuming they didn't go out of business because of this...
I'm a teacher. So about 10 mins. Or 10 weeks come the summer.
Probably 1 day before I was called out on it. Telecons, urgent emails, face-to-face interactions are near constant.
Why would you want to do nothing? It's not just dishonest, it's boring. Time goes much quicker when you're busy.
Testing the waters wrote:
I mean absolutely nothing, except occasionally make an appearance of working.
How long before people would catch on?
How long until there would be consequences?
Me? Definitely 3 days.....maybe 3 weeks during slow season.
Maybe a day...but I wouldn't push it. I love my job and would prefer being productive rather than slacking off.
I can’t remember the last time I did anything productive.
Every now and then I take trips overseas and find a way to get reimbursed. I got caught last week though, and has to cancel
why>?> wrote:
Why would you want to do nothing? It's not just dishonest, it's boring. Time goes much quicker when you're busy.
Government employees that are political appointments or the relatives of powerful people are notorious for it. They get no show jobs with little or no responsibilities, same with union leader hacks.
Get a job at the DMV, you can do that indefinitely.
I'm a software developer, have to get deliverables done on two week cycles. Would definitely be noticeable it I didn't have all my stuff done at the end of the two weeks, but they wouldn't have any idea until the end of that two weeks.
Literally an hour or less. Not trying to sound self-important at all, but about 4 other people rely on my productions to do their job every day, and work starts almost as soon as I arrive each morning, so if I didn't show up or didn't do anything, multiple people would notice right away.
My girlfriend, however, consistently only works about 25 hours per week for her full-time job, and by "work" I mean she's only actually at work about 25 hours per week; I don't know how she spends her time when she's there. She arrives at least 2 hours late every single day, leaves work early once or twice per week, and "works from home" (ie does no work at all besides responding to a few emails) 1-2 days per month. She couldn't get by on doing nothing for very long, but she could probably get by on 10 hours of work per week for at least several months, possibly indefinitely.
I also have a coworker who really does get by on about 10 hours of work per week. She sometimes spends hours putting puzzles together at work right in front of everyone. I'd complain, but it doesn't affect me at all, and I think it's embarrassing enough already to everyone but her.
I’ve gone pretty long stretches before. Maybe a few weeks with maybe 2 hours of work per week?
Regularly I put in about 35 hours of face time and actually work maybe 15 hours?
Here’s the kicker: I make $500K
Our boss went on vacation last summer and one of the guys who was already on double secret probation made a joke about his own vacation when he found out. Boss was gone for 2 weeks and the other guy was "working remotely" the entire time. Stayed out the week the boss came back, I'm assuming to keep up appearances. Was let go the week after that.
Me - I show up and pretend to do stuff but don't really. Been doing it for a couple of months. It's boring but we're slow right now. Haven't gotten any complaints yet.
I'm going on a year now of 10 hours of work a week out of 40. I'm amazed my boss hasn't noticed. Maybe they are too busy to not delegate tasks. So hard to do nothing, but being in the office and replying to a few emails is enough. I'm trying to switch jobs due to boredom but I guess the better question is how long would someone would want to continue that. It's just so hard to find a job that pays as well with the benefits so figure I'll ride it out til that comes along. Eventually I need to improve resume, so doing nothing is not a good long term plan.
I've gone a full week a couple of times, just sitting at my desk browsing the web, or probably responding to threads on LRC. No one ever noticed, and there's no way they could anyway, since I'm expected to be self-directed and generally work on long-term projects that can take a couple of months to complete.
It's a bad feeling though. At the end of the day of doing absolutely nothing I feel like a total loser. At the end of a full week...I usually end up working on the weekend to kick myself back into gear.
About 5 minutes. Apparently nobody here actually works for a living.
Software Developer wrote:
I'm a software developer, have to get deliverables done on two week cycles. Would definitely be noticeable it I didn't have all my stuff done at the end of the two weeks, but they wouldn't have any idea until the end of that two weeks.
Same boat, except that our project managers are much more on top of it, looking at burn-down charts, etc (because to them this is the only true metric of performance..lol) so we constantly get IMs and have little group meetings. I'd say maybe a day, at best.
Less than 1 hour.
I listened to an interesting podcast called Hidden Brain and the episode was called Bullsh*t jobs. They interviewed a lot of workers who did nothing all day long, sometimes for great sums of money and it was intriguing. Mixed responses.
I am a major gift fundraiser for a charity and deal with gifts mostly in the high five and six figure range. My job has huge stretches of downtime and other times where I'm working 55-65 hours per week (around the holidays; in summer when the rich people arrive). This uneven schedule presents its own problems --I don't like sitting doing nothing (okay, LRC fills some of the boring times).
So I have a side gig that I developed, billing out at about $75/hour. Nothing immense, but it keeps me busy while I'm in the doldrums at my day job. Some day I will be discovered and they will frown on me, but if I keep the faucet on, they *probably* won't unload me. And if they do, I'll try to replicate my current situation elsewhere. Busy is good -- the time flies by that way.
God bless America!