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I have so much empathy for your situation because I was there about 3 years ago. I had a job with a fortune 500 company and would have everything finished by 9A

I have so much empathy for your situation because I was there about 3 years ago. I had a job with a fortune 500 company and would have everything finished by 9AM everyday (with one task at 4PM that was laughable). 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!

TurkishPoptart 7y ago
Thanks for your comment. Yeah, my manager "caught" me tinkering with an AWS thing and some tutorial open, but probably assumed it was important. It's even weirder because my old manager person went away on parental leave, so my new person doesn't really know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I have some freedom and I'm going to try to use it productively.
- godot 7y ago
  This sounds similar to a part time job I had while in college (15+ years ago). Caveat: I was already a programmer (studied computer science in college). I was hired as a part time student programmer at this place. The hiring manager that gave me the offer either transferred to another department or was on leave (can't remember which now), either way, I basically hadn't seen him during the entire 7 months or so I worked there. His subordinate was the only person who had any idea I was even there and could give me any work. He would give me some simple task of writing up some documentation or code some simple demos using some libraries, every once in a while. Everything I did over those 7 months amount to about 1 week of work for me. Every time he gave me a task, I would finish within a few hours, and there wouldn't be anything else for me to do for the next couple of weeks. I was a student at the time so I was able to spend most of my work hours doing homework or programming assignments for classes. If it was a full time job I would definitely do what you do, tinker with AWS, code up projects, etc.

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

Thanks for your comment. Yeah, my manager "caught" me tinkering with an AWS thing and some tutorial open, but probably assumed it was important. It's even weirder because my old manager person went away on parental leave, so my new person doesn't really know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I have some freedom and I'm going to try to use it productively.

godot 7y ago
This sounds similar to a part time job I had while in college (15+ years ago). Caveat: I was already a programmer (studied computer science in college). I was hired as a part time student programmer at this place. The hiring manager that gave me the offer either transferred to another department or was on leave (can't remember which now), either way, I basically hadn't seen him during the entire 7 months or so I worked there. His subordinate was the only person who had any idea I was even there and could give me any work. He would give me some simple task of writing up some documentation or code some simple demos using some libraries, every once in a while. Everything I did over those 7 months amount to about 1 week of work for me. Every time he gave me a task, I would finish within a few hours, and there wouldn't be anything else for me to do for the next couple of weeks. I was a student at the time so I was able to spend most of my work hours doing homework or programming assignments for classes. If it was a full time job I would definitely do what you do, tinker with AWS, code up projects, etc.