slowly divert my work to different people in the company
So youâve been promoted to a management position.
You can make fun of managers not doing work. You know whatâs worse than someone at manager/director level that doesnât do any work? One that insists on doing so! Trust me, first hand experience.
The absolute worst are the micro-managers. They donât want to do work, but they also donât want to delegate.
Instead they opt for that limbo between, where the only âworkâ they do is redundant at best, and every employee under them feels like a vole being tracked by a hungry hawk.
I worked for basically Michael Scott at some point in my life. Everyone knew that he had the easiest job on the planet, and he still didnât do it, and we were all glad he didnât. He could talk to a room full of people for hours and explain his position in the company for so long that you forgot what you even asked.
If you think the connection to Michael Scott ends there, youâd be wrong. You would always know when he had a new girlfriend, because he would talk about her all the time. One time he connected his laptop to the projector and the first thing that opened was a picture of his girlfriend. He looked at it, said: OH. Made sure everyone saw her and then pretended to hurry to start his speech.
One day he came to work, sat in my car (i was on my way to a jobsite and had no idea why he was there.) i didnât want to talk, so i just took off. After some awkward silence, he said: iâm not even supposed to work today. I nodded, i had no idea. He asked if i knew why heâs here. I said nope. He said he was supposed to get married today but his girlfriend fucked two dudes in the jacuzzi yesterday.
There are countless stories like that and all i could think about was: this guy makes 60k a year by working two days a week. And i donât mean because he was slacking off the rest, he was only employed 20%
OP is working for a huge corporation, so slacking off and getting paid for that is ethical.
Iâd go even one step further and say that slacking off is more ethical than actually working in that situation.
Red cross, EPA, and FDA are all large organizations imo. Definitely outliers, but theyy do exist and I wouldnât consider it ethical to take their money without working.
Anon playing a dangerous game with management.
Itâs all well and good until they find you, figure out what youâve been doing (or rather not doing), then fire you and attempt to sue you for damages.
CYA. Make at least some attempts to be noticed. If they do notice you, at least you got a little bit of easily excusable free time - if they donât, now you get the easy life AND a paper trail so they canât say âwhy didnât you try to tell usâ.
I donât know if they have much of a case to sue you, if you fall through the cracks on their own negligence. Fire you, yes. Sue, I am doubtful most larger businesses would even try. Theyâd rather solve the problem and sweep it under the carpet in my experience. Not USA experience of course, but still the attitude would be similar I expect.
I would worry a bit about whether theyâre allowed to give negative references though. Because if so, it might not be so easy to get another job after.
Best move would be to line up another job to start like a month before the review, and never reach the review stage. Even if discovered, most people that would âknowâ wouldnât really be driven to report anything if theyâre leaving anyway. The ânot my problem, and this will make it my problemâ attitude in big companies is real.
I think in Spain there was a legal case, but that person was paid for decades without any work. And it was also public funds, as the employer was some municipality iirk
I looked at that. Actually I would argue that was even more negligence by the management there. I mean they couldnât even say how long heâd not been working for.
But in reality he was paid for at least 6 years of work (and they suspected more) and only fined for 1 year of pay. So, heâs still a winner I think. And yes, public funds likely did help in bringing that case forward.
Most larger private businesses tend to avoid going to a court for such things unless they need to in my experience.
There is no case to sue them. Itâs the management responsibility, not the workers to assign work. They donât need to go out seeking it.
While this is technically true, some pissed off business wanting to make an example of you, can most definitely cost you a lot of money trying to sue you in court.
trying to sue you in court.
Hmm, Youâd probably get by fine representing yourself. Given itâs a bad ideaâŚ
Iâd probably pick up a remote side job to work during the first job and store about 10k away to handle eventual legal fees. You wouldnât need much of a lawyer to defend yourself.
I heard many similar stories like that from friends and itâs always a bit shocking to me. Iâm no go getter or anything, i run my own business, but even then, i donât want to work more than i really have to. But i just really canât imagine what that must be like.
I had a friend who worked as a static engineer. He then worked for a company that made bearings for big machines, which wasnât his line of work but he liked it. The company got bought by another company who did something different and he just fell through the cracks. At first he was super anxious and just pretended to draw on his drawing board and had excel open on his computer. But no one cared, a lot of people switched jobs and suddenly he didnât really know anyone anymore and after a few month he told me that he doesnât really know what his job is.
disclaimer: Iâm not a bootlicker, allâs fair game for how you earn your keep
but thereâs no way a competent person finds themselves not knowing what their job role is
that being said: a dubs a dub I guess ?
From what i gathered, the whole company was a huge mess. It was basically a very small company buying A big company that was going under. It was kind of the inverse of how these things would usually go. So the new company moved their things into the old factory so to say. With the merger, new people working with old people and new working spaces and what not. He shared his little office with another guy who quit in the merger because he was 62 and wasnât gonna have it. People kinda just started working.
Fuck this guy. Living out my dream ;'(
If we ignore the actual stress of a manager suddenly finding out and asking you to report what you have been doing. Probably still possible to bullshit long enough in a big company to recover a normal situation or find another job.
This is why you shouldnât get rid of all your work. Keep a bit and make it immaculate. If they ask why you havenât done more, just say ânobody asked me to.â
Problem with that approach is that they will argue that if you didnât have enough work to do, you should have asked for more. OP knowingly slipped through the cracks to, so the argument of âI donât have a line manager to give me anyâ probably isnât going to cut it as their work will argue that OP shouldâve gone to HR to sort their responsibilities as soon as they were aware.
âIâve been awaiting my next jobâ
Probably get fire but oh well, easy run until that point.
Nah, when you jam up the machine in an unexpected way, more likely than not theyâre going to keep it quiet. A manager isnât going to want to go to their boss with a problem no one noticed⌠Itâs going to do nothing to benefit them and itâll make their life harder
All you have to do is play dumb. Insubordination is one thing, waiting for orders is just having a job with little autonomy. If you maintain you were just a good little cog waiting to be reconnected to the machine, theyâre better off sweeping it under the rug.
They might get upset instead, but what are they going to do? Sue you for not being more proactive? Theyâd probably lose more in legal fees than they could get back from most people
Iâve told this story a few times now, but I never get sick of it.
Back in 2011 I left a startup that got acquired. On my last day we had a Christmas Party with our parent company, and we got to speaking to one guy that was on his own. After a few drinks, he blurted out that he had worked there for maybe 12 years, but at least 5-6 of those he was âunassignedâ. When we asked what that meant, he said that his manager left and he was never assigned to a new team. He badged in every day, and after doing maybe 6 months of busy work and asking âwtf am I doingâ to no answer from his department or HR he just came in to do his own stuff or play Unreal Tournament. He had yearly reviews with the head of department, and these were just high-level goal meetings where they reviewed the department, asked what he wanted, and left at that. Each year he was getting between a 2-5% pay rise, and outside of badging in he was only ever judged on his department output.
I always wonder what happened to that guy. The company is quite large and is still going strong, so heâs probably still there. I wonât name them, but another thing I loved about them was that they didnât really know where to put Software Engineers, so they just assigned them to Marketing and gave each engineer a marketing budget to personally use - around ÂŁ10k each. The best part? Everyone in marketing knew it was bullshit, but they pushed everyone to spend it because otherwise their budget would go down. Some highlights were a trip to Toronto to buy some books, a full team trip to Amsterdam to go to a React conference and live in basically 5-star accommodation, and renting a hotel lobby to quickly burn some money on interviewing interns. I think they actually have a tech department now, but I know many people I worked with that stayed for close to a decade because the WLB and perks were just too good to ignore.
Well⌠Let there be some fun in this world.
Apart from this ⌠middle management is a real bloat nower days. Layers after layers of managers without contact to the actual product. (Now seen in Microsoft, Google and Enshittification)
Oh god, i only once worked in a company large enough where it felt like there were more middle managers than actual workers. The middle manger that was assigned to my team suddenly got sick. Like cancer sick and he basically stopped working within a week. They panicked, because there was no one to replace her. Some guy that i have never seen before told us that we just have to hang in there for 2 weeks or so until they found a replacement. They never found a replacement and i think they just forgot, because nothing has changed about our job, we did the same amount of work and everything. Legitimately the only difference was that they had one less paycheck to pay.
Imagine being so poorly managed that you downsize to cut back on unnecessary spending but literally lose track of an employee. Letâs keep the expense of an employee with none of the revenue generation!
