The new American dream: getting paid to do nothing?

https://www.theverge.com/c/22820291/tech-jobs-outsourcing-infosys-bench-paid-to-do-nothing

by Tomte • 5 years ago

26 12 5 years ago

theverge.com

bthallplz• 5 years ago

The headline here doesn't seem to line up with what the article is about.

halfjoking• 5 years ago

Here's a more relevant one:

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

otoburb• 5 years ago

I ran a worldwide telecommunications consulting division for several years so many of the concerns in the article around bench time are familiar to me.

But if there was ever an optimal circumstance where individuals could maximize extended bench time to level up through self-directed learning, then software engineers such as those profiled in the article were in the best possible position. Instead of "researching hobbies" or complaining about "nothing coming from the laptop or the phone that you need to respond to", taking the initiative to start something (anything) on their own serves the dual purpose of developing their skillset and giving oneself an opportunity to plan ahead in their career.

To be fair, there also seems to be a serious breakdown in the US Infosys onboarding process, since junior staff should ideally be paired from the outset with a mentor and ideally also be receiving regular check-ins with their line manager (e.g. senior consultant, engagement manager or principal). But it sounds like none of these standard HR processeses were established for the US junior staff highlighted in the article.

Exendroinient• 5 years ago

it was entire point of American dream from the beginning

soared2• 5 years ago

Is some of this inherent to tech jobs in general? 90% of my work is reactive, so once I finish my 10% proactive work all I do is wait for people to give me tasks. Some weeks I work 15 hours, sometimes I work 45. But I don’t think there is anything useful to the company I could be doing in the off time, as I’d need to be able to drop it instantly for other work. I can’t build new things/etc.. the company is 1000 people, does mostly deep learning, and the product is insanely complicated. Of course there are little things I can do, but nothing that impacts the bottom line.

But just like in the article, my friends and I are all gainfully employed and play video games together most days.

(To be honest I only got through 30% of the article, it’s pretty dam long)

ryandrake• 5 years ago

These comments seem so alien to me! Everywhere I've worked in tech, there was at least 10x more work to do than people to do it. Every company has a "Idea guy" to engineer ratio so high that there are more ideas being generated than capacity to do them. Every company has bug lists that grow faster than they can be drained. If you were done fixing your bug, there was always another one of sufficiently high priority waiting for you to do next. And outside of a few breaks to brainstorm, mess around on HN, go to the bathroom, etc., we were expected to fill our queue up (or for junior folks, our managers were expected to fill them for us). Very much the blue-collar "If You've Got Time to Lean, You've Got Time to Clean" mentality, but moved into the white collar development world.

When someone says "Oh, I only do about N hours of actual work a week" where N is significantly less than the amount of time you're in the office, it seems so strange. I get that this must happen somewhere but hell if I've ever worked in a place like that.

mecha_ghidorah• 5 years ago

I think the issue is more at many places people don't feel empowered to just go and fix/build something. I've worked places where if I pull stuff in from the next sprint my manager gets annoyed because it screws with the metrics being reported, and where if I were to start any projects started on my own initiative and it was noticed I'd be reprimanded or at best be given busy work instead (some fuzzy bullshit task which I'd hate). Because of this whenever I had down time I'd goof off instead of say, writing optimizations to our parser which was slowing down a big data ingestion process.

I literally did start doing that once when I had nothing on and I basically told "yeah it's not worth your time because it isn't billable". Of course later clients complained it was slow and I was told to look for optimizations (but not to that part, because that part was complicated, even though that part was the slowest part and I had already half implemented something).

soared2• 5 years ago

Part of it is likely that engineers/etc can build, where as the entirety of my job is ensuring things continue to run as they should. I have ~5 clients, and if things are going well the machine runs without me doing much. If the data doesn’t look good or the client wants a change, then I go do some work. There are prebuilt alerts in the system, but I don’t have any sort of access to create or automate my own.

For me there literally isn’t work I can do outside of that. I’ve automated a few things here and there, but that’s about it. Like the other commenter said, I’m definitely not allowed to do anything else. I don’t even have admin access to download software on my laptop.

Pay is great, hours are low. No complaints here :)

sefrost2• 5 years ago

The description of Infosys in the article is exactly the same as what I witnessed at Accenture in the UK 10 years ago.

selfhoster112• 5 years ago

Yup. The bench at Accenture is basically a limbo.

sefrost2• 5 years ago

Some of us were never lucky enough to spend any time on the bench! Although a number of people in my "start group" were on the bench for months. It was a really bizarre scenario. My project could be drowning in the amount of work we had to do, while the company had people twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do.

The new American dream: getting paid to do nothing?

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