[zabzonk]

pay me lots of money to do nothing? sign me up!

sadly, in a long career, this never happened to me. most well-run companies are always looking at ways of getting rid of dead wood.

i thought this article was BS, and went on too long.

[broupannoiffuto]

This is not how it works... i have been there, and the thing is you have to pretend you are doing something extremely demanding which justifies your salary. This basically becomes your job, and comes with surprising stress, since you are essentially constantly faking something that may be uncovered.

Glad I took a salary hit and went on to do something I truely enjoy....

[Sohcahtoa82]

Yup. That was me ~2 years ago at a well-known Fortune 500 company.

I was on an Cloud and Application Security team that was almost essentially a skunk works, but we were a great team and got a lot of good shit done. But then the actual corporate cybersecurity team got their shit together, started enacting and enforcing policies, and took over all our job functions. During this transition, my direct manager quit, and so everyone on the team was reporting to his manager, who really didn't know what the team did.

At that point, there was basically nothing for us to do, working for a manager that didn't know what we should be doing either way. But we still had to appear to be doing something.

Shortly into this, our best two people left, and about a year later, I left as well. All of us for the same reason: Security often has interesting work to do, and we had none of it anymore. Our salaries were also wayyyy below market, but that's another thing entirely.

[zabzonk]

it's how it has always worked for me - i have never pretended anything, and if i had i'm pretty sure i would have been found out.

[dagw]

most well-run companies are always looking at ways of getting rid of dead wood

So get a job at a badly run company. Find a huge multinational which works in a wide variety of fields and apply for a job in a department without clear deliverables. Send lots of emails, attend lots of meetings, be friendly to everybody and always look busy. If anybody asks, you're mostly working on a vaguely defined internal project being run out of the Singapore office at the moment.

[fallingknife]

> send lots of emails, attend lots of meetings, be friendly to everybody and always look busy

Sounds like work, which kind of defeats the purpose here.

[imtringued]

The topic is pointless jobs. Not pointless paychecks.

[nathan_compton]

Sounds like you're just working for the wrong companies, then.

[zabzonk]

so i was getting well-paid to be busy, but this is wrong???

[nathan_compton]

"pay me lots of money to do nothing? sign me up!"

Your words.