Source
r/cscareerquestions•
inky95

Thoughts on 'bullshit' jobs? (getting paid for not working?)

No Big N 400k salary goals here.
I'm talking about coasting-jobs - administrative bloat, poorly allocated govt funding, the ones where you might do some minimal hrs/week remotely on a full-time salary, or outsource 90% of the role.

The biggest pay:workload ratios (with a priority on low workload over high pay), no fulfilment/job-satisfaction necessary.

Do these exist or are they unicorns? Are they all they're cracked up to be? Can they be targeted as a profession, and if so, what would be your strategy to speedrun from 0xp into a career in one of these roles?

unnecessary personal context - i'm a data/coding nerd whose initial career-plan was the standard SWE route.
record scratch, and i've found myself in a different profession that's intrinsically rewarding but also high-effort+low-compensation.

So a CS job that's the opposite of that -- a high-compensation+low-effort 'coast'-- is a nascent 'plan-b' that might be useful if/when I eventually burnout on my current path.

Posted Sep 14, 2022, 9:14 AM UTC

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dopkick•

I've had a job like you're probably describing. If you just wanted to coast and do extremely little, you could do that. However, like the other poster mentioned, you're going to have a persistent feeling that the gig could be up at any time. If you're in the office it's going to be even worse because you will undoubtedly attract attention from coworkers and managers by way of your physical presence. You could get lucky here, though, and nobody could care.

If you use the time to keep your interview skills fresh and grow your coding skills you could definitely use it as a stepping stone to a sweet spot where you make good money, you have a reasonable workload, and your coworkers are great. Having, say, 25 hours per week, every week, to focus on this without having to spend that time fighting some legacy codebase or doing rote tasks that don't improve your skills will be a golden opportunity.

However, if you coast and do next to nothing you might suddenly find yourself unemployed and playing catch up to get any job, of which you wouldn't be able to be picky.

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inky95OP•

Good points. Out of interest, what was your job like- the one that you mentioned at the start? How did you get into it, and you use it as a stepping stone?

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dopkick•

I got "lucky," as I had no idea coming in and there were some personnel shifts (retirements and resignations) that enabled this. Everything was totally outside of my control and I truly fell into it.

The job was, honestly, a disaster. I had to sit in a small office with a team lead's son who would enter fits of autistic rage if the lights were on so it pitch black. He also knew EVERYTHING and I got to hear about it. And his nascent streaming career, despite having zero personality. I found out this guy had drove several people to resigning, as everyone who was forced to sit with him resigned within a few months.

Their processes were also a dumpster fire. Our daily scrum was at least 30 minutes because "while I have you all I should make it worth it." It would frequently exceed 45 minutes and had on a handful of occasions come close to 2 hours. Our appointed "scrum master" had some sort of dyslexia and we would watch her type updates/notes on JIRA tickets as we sat there. A single sentence could be a 2-3 minute endeavor.

It drove me nuts and I had to move on ASAP. Just be aware that bullshit jobs will very likely be a double edged sword - if everything is going smoothly you're not going to have bullshit jobs. I did not have the foresight to take full advantage of it as I was still much earlier in my career. Sitting in pure darkness, listening to the SME's SME lecture me on every topic, and sitting through marathon meetings was too much for me.

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nutrechtLead Software Engineer / EU / 18+ YXP•

In general companies don't pay you to do nothing. If these roles exists it's generally because they have not found out that they could just get rid of the role without impact. Company profits are simply an optimization of costs versus income and thus for any company it makes sense to minimize costs.

So if you'd go this route, you're going to constantly live in fear of being let go. Your current manager doesn't care? Well the next one might. And when you then are laid off you might just suddenly find out you didn't really learn anything.

If you want to go this route; go for it. But it's pretty darn risky.

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inky95OP•

True, the economics of it is a good point. But we know not everything is 'priced in' and there's plenty of sub-optimality around...
The warnings about the lack of job-security or long-term learning is fair and seems to be good advice.

If you want to go this route; go for it. But it's pretty darn risky.

Off the top of your head, if you were going to go 'this route' - what would your strategy be?

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mythmakerseven•

It sounds very depressing on a day-to-day level (especially if it's in-person), and you'll miss out on learning stuff which could make your next job harder to get.

My dad worked a "bullshit job" for a while when I was a kid. It didn't start off that way, but the company spent years gradually laying everyone off, and his vague support-related position had fewer and fewer duties as the people around him disappeared, so his last few years were mostly just hanging out browsing the internet. When he finally got laid off, he didn't have any significant transferable skills and had a very hard time finding a new job as a result.

On the other hand, in college I worked in the administration building and there were a lot of "administrative bloat" types who spent an hour a day on light office work and just hung out the rest of the day. They made around $40-50k and seemed perfectly happy. I guess it depends on what you find fulfilling.

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AppState1981Programmer for 42 years•

We have these jobs but they go to people close to retirement. You keep them on the payroll but give their duties to others so they can learn them. The retirees are there to provide guidance and expertise.

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lhorie•

I know someone who was working a job like this. One week estimates for things that took 2 hours in reality. They quit recently. The main problem is that you stagnate and if you're ever in the job market again, you might find yourself struggling w/ interviews, questioning your abilities, suffering from lack of motivation, being too used to procrastination, maybe even depression, etc.

If you're like most people, you're going to have at least one big spending event in your life (e.g. a house purchase). It's not exactly a great feeling when you suddenly realize you can't afford the price tag because you've been taking it too easy.

Both of these boil down to a choice between incremental progress vs catching up on a steeper uphill. There's a reason why traditional advice is generally to prefer incremental progress.

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