It's not like the parent would have accomplished nothing in the 10 years. I think they are just talking about framing it in language palatable to the interviewer across the table.
Even in the most dysfunctional organizations you can't spend 10 years doing nothing.
GP was achieving what their bosses asked of them. It's just that it didn't align with their own professional goals of improving the product they work on.
Sorry, 20 years experience of actually doing things here. I've spent 10 of those years now doing consulting with everyone from 3-person pre-series-A startups all the way up to the Fortune 50.
Let me unequivocal: you can spend 30-40 years at a company doing absolutely nothing while getting paid for it.
Do not let anyone try to convince you otherwise. I've seen such much unethical bloodsucking in my career that at this point I wouldn't mind seeing a few companies collapse under the weight of their own karma.
“Absolutely nothing” is still doing what is asked of you by a boss. Unless you’re talking CEOs fooling the board, of course.
Not contributing meaningful things is an arbitrary metric that is often only used to put people down. One can build the whole product and there will still be some asshole claiming they did the easy part or “you didn’t work enough in it to know what’s like”.
The incompetence here lies 100% with person keeping the employee.
oh man, respectfully but this cannot be further from the truth. SWEs have successfully convinced everyone that profession “is not about just coding” (you see a sea of these statements here on HN in 100x daily posts “will LLMs replace us”) and hence tools like Jira only amplify ability to do (mostly) nothing
unfortunately I have. It is indeed a hellscape of, as the kids say, "aura farming". Microsoft really seem to want to turn it into Instagram for some reason.