I did no work for a year and no one noticed

tim-tday

Congratulations you had a bullshit job, insufficient oversight and not enough personal and professional pride to do the work you were paid to do (a job is a promise, they promise to pay you and you promise to work. The fact that I have to say this kills me a little bit inside) You broke your promise and lied about it every day for a year. You proved that your career (that you presumably worked hard to build) was a farce. This says nothing about the nature of work and everything about the quality of person reporting the “problem”. People like this make me never want to employ anyone ever again. Congrats you destroyed what little faith in humanity I had left. I’m glad you finally quit and I hope you never apply for or are offered a job again. (Clearly not mature enough to manage your own work without an extreme amount of oversight). Might I suggest something real and tangible? Serve beer or keep chickens. At least when you violate your promise people will know immediately. (Here’s your beer. The glass is empty. No I filled it I promise. It is clearly empty. That’ll be £6. Again, no beer) Oh maybe this was satire! “Here’s how a bullshit person operating in bad faith would conduct themselves” I don’t think it was satire.

jazz9k

Not everyone has a bullshit job. If I stopped working for even a couple of days, people would notice, and I would eventually get fired.

_doctor_love

There's a lot of this in the industry world-wide. The bigger the company, the more likely this is to occur. I think this kind of phenomenon is why I feel that some people rightly should be worried about AI automating their job away.

connoronthejob

I've worked with these people. I noticed.

evklein

Something the author sorta neglects to mention is that this makes you feel like shit, if you have any sort of conscience at all. Corporations largely don't care about individuals, and so maybe you shouldn't care about loyalty to your employer, but if you pride yourself on a skill or being able to do your job competently then doing mass time theft comes up with a nasty side effect; the time you spend planning trips or doing hobbies, or doing anything that you shouldn't be, isn't time that can be fully enjoyed. Additionally, you're taking a big risk, and you're opening yourself up to all kinds of scrutiny and potentially even losing your job if you're caught.

nusl

This seems like a very stupid thing to put on the open Internet attached to your name

dasil003

I get that working in the corporate world is often alienating, and also that one might have to accept a bullshit job in order to put food on the table, so on some level I say do what you gotta do. But beyond that, man this is such a depressing way to live. I've worked a lot of jobs I don't like and put in varying degrees of effort based on how I feel about the people and the situation. But generally one value I live by is that if I'm paid to do something I'm going to try to do a good job at it. That doesn't mean burning myself out or going above and beyond for a boss or company that doesn't deserve it. But for my own integrity and self-worth I have to at least put in a baseline professional effort. If I can't stomach even doing that then it's a clear sign I need to be planning my exit, anything less is disrespectful to my basic self.

AbbeFaria

If you have the self-awareness to realise that your job is BS and is deleterious to your well being the path of least resistance is to simply quit and find another job hopefully that is more relevant to what you’re skilled at. All this chicanery to escape work would only eat at my conscience. I don’t believe for one moment that I should be emotionally attached to my employer but at the same time I am a professional and am paid to do a job. I should hold up my end of the bargain. Being deceitful 24X7, 365 days a year will eventually wear me out because there’s always the chance I will be found out. There’s also the reputational risk of being found BS’ing which is non-trivial and could ruin chances of future employment. The path of least resistance is simply to quit.

silexia

This is just straight theft, and is completely unethical and immoral.

burnt-resistor

Unethical and unprofessional. Full stop.