Ask HN: Do you have a do-nothing job?

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t ready. HR can&#x27;t get visas to bring in this consultant, because we were all running on agile and didn&#x27;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&#x2F;software, dev&#x2F;QA, front end&#x2F;back end. You can extend a deadline unnecessarily long.<p>You&#x27;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 I got put on a poorly managed team that is supporting an outdated and undocumented application that is super complex.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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t and &quot;coast&quot;, then you may find yourself unemployable later when the job is (belatedly) eliminated.

There&#x27;s only one positive thing for people who don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t know what drives people to work for other people... Well, otherwise no one would work for your own business I guess :)

Why do you want a do-nothing job? That sounds horrible.