Be a manager.<p>Update Jira every day. Be in all the meetings. Know what everyone else is doing. Know the status of what you're responsible over.<p>At higher ranks, you manage managers. Your whole job is automated, you just have to sign approvals.<p>When there are enough managers, your job is just to stay up-to-date and to keep the other managers up to date. You argue for weeks on how to shorten the deadline by a week.<p>In rare cases, you will be asked to do a job - increase resources for your team or extend a deadline. The hard way would be to communicate well. Explain why you need extra resources, back it up with evidence that your team is working hard.<p>The easy way would be to blame it on another team. The front end team is slow because the API team has bugs. The back end team can't start without approval from the UI director, who is on maternity leave. The UI team just got a change request from the CEO, causing a chain reaction of delays. Sales team is slowed down because the product isn't ready. HR can't get visas to bring in this consultant, because we were all running on agile and didn't realize we needed him next week, not next month.<p>An advanced trick would be to tag team the blame. You blame this manager, that manager blames you. Some roles fit into this naturally - hardware/software, dev/QA, front end/back end. You can extend a deadline unnecessarily long.<p>You'll have some weird effects going on, like 2 weeks dev time and 4 months pre-development preparation. But everyone above you is management and understands how difficult the job is.
I have a do-nothing job as a junior level dev at a bank. I got put on a poorly managed team that is supporting an outdated and undocumented application that is super complex. So the amount of value I can add without a little bit of hand holding (never get it) is very low. So I just do the minimum to get by and seem like I'm on the team.<p>I hate it. Best way out? Maybe I just need to apply to a new job and take a jump. I hate the banking domain, everything seems pointless to me and adds zero value to society. Feel stuck.<p>The good thing is I work 9-5 (if that) and can spend my time doing other things. But of course it is difficult to pull yourself up and make something of that free time. I mostly just work out, study human languages, go to concerts.
No one willingly creates a do-nothing job, and people are not hired to be useless. In the rare cases where this DOES happen, there's usually an ulterior motive such as vanity.<p>What does happen with great regularity is that do-nothing jobs evolve: a capable person is hired to do a productive thing, the need for the thing is obviated, but no one fires the person. This is an emergent condition based on limited information: in a large organization it's impossible to know what everyone is doing, and everyone was hired to do something useful at some point, so the default strategy is to assume usefulness. In the case where a person's work is no longer useful, there is no reason for the employee to acknowledge this fact, and so the do-nothing job often continues (paired with powerful self-delusion).<p>So how do you get one of these jobs? You don't. They just kind of grow up around you. However, the correct response in this situation is to evolve your role or quit. If you don't and "coast", then you may find yourself unemployable later when the job is (belatedly) eliminated.
There's only one positive thing for people who don't want to stay in a 9-5 job for life - being able to free up your brain on a daily basis in order to work on your personal project. It's a huge plus if you have a lot of bills to pay (mortgage, kids, etc.), while trying to launch your own business and to get rid of your 9-5 life.<p>I personally don't know what drives people to work for other people... Well, otherwise no one would work for your own business I guess :)