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Getting paid to do nothing

6 points by hikerclimb ↗ HN
I just joined as a full time employee at a company and there is no work to do. Or my boss isn't assigning me any work. They are going live in a like a week so everyone except for me is busy. Should I get familiar with the code base? They are using microservice architecture.

5 comments

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ohmichel
Yeah. Read the code, get famliar with everything, ask a lot.
LifeQuestioner
did you ask what you can do?
hikerclimb
Yea I asked what I can do many times but still same response. They have a 35 hr work week. I feel like I have so much free time.
twunde
A few years back, we had a junior candidate join us right before a major launch. He ended up being fired after a few months because after he spent 3 weeks doing nothing, when we tried to ramp him up, he struggled with the tasks he was assigned. I suspect that he struggled to find his next job because he b had worked for us for 3 months and had essentially done nothing in that time. You don't want that. You NEED to get familiar with the codebase. The team after doing the launch, will be busy dealing with post launch issues and will struggle to onboard and train you. Anything you can do to get more familiar with the product and the codebase will help. Some suggestions are to ask for a bug list for the current launch and work on those or volunteer to QA issues for the launch or work on automated tests. Ask the PM what you could do to help.
slipwalker
checkout the code, run it though a coverage tool and a static analysis tool. And start writing tests for the less covered parts of the code base ( unit, functional and/or UI, go bold, go crazy ). You will learn a lot, won't break anything important and people might even think you are useful later on. Just don't sit on your ass wasting time, quality is everyone's job ( you can quote me on that, when your boss asks what you have been doing ).