Ask HN: I have nothing to do at work and it's killing me
I'm really running out of patience with this whole thing. I'm being paid $25/hr to sit around and look busy. I ask my manager for work, he says things will pick up after Christmas. The other day I was too depressed about this situation and slept in, and showed up at 1pm. No one batted an eyelid or said anything. There wasn't a single email addressed to me, I had no calendar invites, no nothing, so why should I even be here? What do I do with my time? Well, I am trying to teach myself a bit of Ruby on Rails in AWS, do some freecodecamp (I desperately want to learn to code, under the impression that it will liberate me from this, but it might just be a pipe dream).
My manager told me that a coworker would like my help with "business continuity forms" (this is healthcare IT, so this is a thing). I've approached her and reminded her that I'm happy to help whenever she wants but she just grumbles about not being able to find someone to walk me through the EpicCare web app things.
So I am really losing my motivation to keep learning important things, and find myself drifting over to Reddit memes. I spend about 3-4 hours a day on this site and the rest of the time trying to teach myself computer science stuff. But it is extremely demoralizing doing this alone and "secretly" while waiting for something to happen.
I would look for a new job but frankly, I don't even know if this experience is transferable anywhere else. I get declined for internal job postings, so I think I just need to turn my 6 months' experience into a year to appease HR. Please advise.
66 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadThat's just what coding is. Please don't lose motivation. I know it's hard and demoralizing, but I strongly encourage you to not give up hope.
Even now I'm learning a new language (clojure) and despite 'knowing how to code' and working in this field for 3+ years, I still spent all day setting up a development environment and learning to loop through a list. That's just how it goes.
I still feel like the same idiot I was on day 1. Except now younger people at work look up to me, as though I actually can code or know what I'm doing. How this happened I do not know. All I know is that I kept at it every day for years, starting from that first day when I tried to understand what a difference between a list and a dictionary is.
At 8 I was indeed "just stuck trying to make your stupid loop not give you a syntax error". Probably lack of an ego at such a young age you just get on with it and not care much.
Adult learning to code is going to be like adult learning foreign language or adult learning to swim. Just like a child but the ego getting in the way getting stressed that it is hard.
I would sign up for an online training course Rails is a good choices or Laravel (Laracasts.com) or Wes Boss's javascript courses. Both of those have some free courses.
Get learning and enjoy a laid back position while you can.
Learn and look busy, enjoy the holidays, good luck.
But pair programming with one experienced developer and someone who knows nothing is essentially tutoring.
If you want normal, boring work to do why are you complaining about having nothing to do? The most normal, boring work of all.
I am complaining about having nothing to do because I want work to do, to contribute to a team, to work with other people and befriend them, but it's hard when I feel so arbitrary.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4920136/
Such an odd statement. Automation (and programming in general) is probably not for you.
Perhaps look at other opportunities to help in the company? Surely they would be happy you have completed your duties...
Most companies are not busy between the end of November and the end of January due to everyone taking vacations, so you probably won't be getting much work until after the holidays.
I wasted most of my time and regret it.
It's not that easy to sit there and learn something with the stress of having a manager walk over and "catch" you doing nothing. In the last 6 months on the job I stopped caring if I got fired and spend all my time developing a few small C projects (I set up a complete developer environment). No one ever noticed or cared. In big companies, they want people in chairs.
Anyway, good luck!
I treated it as a paid job-search opportunity and put in my two weeks as soon as I got a good offer.
If you don't have that option, try to find anything you can build that would improve the lives of your coworkers and get them to use it. Put it on your resume and start looking.
It's not (doing nothing productive and pretending to look busy when your boss knows you have no real work isn't experience that's going to open any doors elsewhere), and the more of it you have the worse off you are. So you should be looking for something else, if you can't make it something else.
It's possible to sell yourself when you've been unemployed, so surely it's got to be easier when you have a job no matter how meaningless.
Like they have nothing for you to do and you feel guilty for not doing anything because you're getting paid. Then you gravitate towards laziness and when you finally do get some non-task you know it's of zero value to anyone and your time would probably be better spent recycling old files on your desktop. So then you feel scared talking to anyone because you feel like you don't belong and are getting paid for not doing any work.
Either go full on Costanza, quit, or get used to feeling weak. ...I spent much of my time filling out job applications.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kafq7yrKAOQ
Like some other things in life, people that haven't gone through this are not likely to understand the experience.
Since you care about increasing your employability I recommend that in addition to self-learning you also do the following.
Write up 1 or 2 short paragraphs that are mostly BS about the positive business impact that your work is having. Break this paragraph down into small work tasks or interactions that you would have needed to have in order to accomplish. Over the course of the next few months start mentioning those tasks casually when talking with coworkers. It is important to do this gradually so that people have enough time to absorb the false memories you are seeding.
Your goal is to build up a working memory among your coworkers of the awesome stuff you did while working there. You can then write these accomplishments into your resume and they will be backed up by your coworkers. Your manager especially will appreciate this as it makes them look like a great leader.
Good luck and keep yourself focused on the future!
I also recommend connecting with some of the people that are more involved in the EHR transition project because if they also want out then they will probably be happy to get you more involved somehow.
It's amazing just how badly sitting in a small, tall room with only incandescent light will fuck you up. After a particularly stressful day, having to "work" for the rest of it completely broke me and I spent an hour crying (without anyone noticing).
After that, I knew I had to get my shit together, so I saved up for a decent laptop and started doing web development again. By the time I quit, I was making decent money by freelancing and had gotten some valuable references.
Even the people around me told me I looked happier and "more alive". Ironically enough, doing nothing was the most exhausting thing I've ever done. Web dev in Django was what got my motivation back, but I see no reason why Rails wouldn't work. Good luck!
If you're a problem solver and need problems to keep you motivated, my advice is to try and help people on StackOverflow, forums, lists, etc. Research their problem and provide solutions. Maybe blog post about something interesting. That way you're learning, solving problems and have something to show.
You could also start contributing to some open source project with tech support, docs and other administrative work while you learn Rails too.
Also once you got the basics try to think of a simple project. I'd even help you find one, just comment below. (depends a lot on what you want to learn). A project is really the best way to learn things beyond the very basics, learning without a clear goal is quickly demotivating. As a bonus you have something to show afterwards.
I learned web stuff while I was in school and became a front-end developer afterwards. Now I dipped in to AI and got an AI related job (not as a dev, but having some experience helps to propel you in the direction you want to go).
Here's what I want to make: recipe-based website/app, in which user can choose one of four seasons, with perhaps a slider for {Vegetarian} or {Instant Pot} (or something), and it spits out some recipes. The ingredients <div> will default to serving for 1, but user can choose servings for 2, or 4, and the app re-calculates (1 cup -> 4 cups, etc.)
I personally want to learn (and am more interested in) the backend stuff to make it work. And I am worried that even if I get it work, I will get lost in the CSS mess of trying to prettify and arrange things. But I should just focus on learning to and making a working skeleton app first, I suppose.
Thanks for your comment.
I have a slight preference for starting from the front so the UI does not get skewed in the direction the technology leads you. Going front to back in ideally also leaves you with presentable stuff before everything is done: A pretty website with your fav recipe, A pretty website with your fav recipe and an ingredient calculator, ...
About CSS: I guess it makes sense to learn it a bit, but as you want to dive in to the back-end anyways, maybe also check out frameworks like bootstrap with a nice material design theme¹. I'm not sure if it teaches you some bad practices though, so take it with a grain of salt. For my taste the html becomes to ugly, I prefer to keep most of the design part in my CSS.
Oh and if you need help the guys on the freenode IRC are very friendly. Just make it as easy as possible to help them: isolate and reproduce your problem, for front-end stuff make a "fiddle" at jsfiddle.net.
¹ e.g. https://ayroui.com/ Also helps building "mobile first". Today consumer stuff will mostly be consumed on smartphones.
I briefly worked for a healthcare subsidiary of a public university, and it was a very...relaxed pace. But we had to clock in and out every day, a minimum of 8 hours. And new employees were specifically warned that we could be fired if we fell asleep at our desks...
My suggestion is try to work from home, sounds like your company is flexible. Use your home time for self-learning and applying to other jobs/going interviews.
I had a job like this, where my boss said "We need to add a button to this form. That should keep you busy for the rest of the week, right?" and I said ".... Yes. Yes, it would." Then finished it in 2 hours, and spent the rest of the week leveling up my skills.
Learn a little programming. Learn Python or Javascript or Go (my preferred lang) or any other programming language that catches your fancy. Learn some HTML and CSS. Build a website for yourself. Put whatever you want on it. Then make it better. Then make it better. Then make it better.
Find some small projects that you can build. The best things to do for learning are to build things where you only really have to think about the code and not the business logic. For example, you know how a To Do list app works, because you've used them forever. You add a new item and you mark it complete. Maybe you can edit or delete. That's the easy part. Now pick a language and make it! You'll spend a lot less time wondering "what does this app need to do?" And more time on "how do I make the code do this?"
Keep doing the tasks you're assigned, but if you aren't assigned anything, you're free and clear to do what you can.
One controversial idea is to automate all the things you do at work. The downside is that you might be morally/ethically obligated to report that to your employer. They might get pissed off if you automated the work and sat there doing nothing instead. But on the other hand... more free time.
Personally, I'd do the work assigned and then spend my free time learning. It's "professional development", which only makes you more valuable to the company. Over time, you can level up your skills enough to leap to another full-time job elsewhere making more than $25/hr.
Good luck!
I will keep learning on my own (as well as taking a 201 course next Jan, it looks like) and try to dig myself out of this. I appreciate your response.