A general question that happens to be my predicament at current. I’m a general safety admin/manager that has automated most of my tasks(emails/excel sheets)
Most days I doomscroll fediverse and lurk irc/matrix channels on the work desktop but am curious about more practical or useful things I should be doing instead. It’s looking like this will be my life for a good while since job market is abysmal and promotions are hyperstagnate(have also hit a wall in improving my scripts). If anyone has any similar experiences, please share and advise, as I feel quite lost and trapped :/
First of all, DON’T TELL ANYONE.
I’d use the time to learn a new skill, though at this point I have no idea what to recommend.
Automate the undesirable tasks of my life. Probably means learning to write mobile apps. But maybe some AI tools for like making a meal plan every week. Or contribute to existing open source projects that accomplish the same.
You just need to find a hobby that you can do at work. Can be reading books, making music, playing video games, watching TV shows, chess etc.
Working on some hobby coding project could also be fun. When work is slow I work on an HTTP client that’s terminal based.
Also check if you can go out for a haircut or do misc errands and with enough excuses you could put a gym workout while at work. Maybe you say you have a dentist or a doctors appointment but go to the gym instead. Kids are also a great excuse like “my kid is sick today so I’m going to pick him up and leave early” and you just go to the gym and do groceries.
If I had that type of situation I’d play tons of video, right now I’d play factorio and go to the gym. I might also see if there are some nice people at work that I can schedule a meeting with to just banter.
I see lots of people suggesting non-work things, but that gets old fast and depending on your work environment can be stressful as you might get caught “not working”
I’d be trying to take on new projects. Start by getting to know your coworkers. If you have other people in your department, talk to them about what they’re working on, things they’d like to see done. If you’re the lone person in your area of work you could alternatively walk the floor and start talking to anyone who could be the stakeholder for a future project. Learn what their pain points are, where the current practices have blindspots.
You mentioned being a safety admin, I’m guessing that’s industrial safety right? Start looking into whatever the current buzzwords are in the industrial safety field and make it a project you take to your boss and try to get funding. Find ways to improve the current processes and data tracking. If you don’t already use a fancy incident tracking system outside of Excel, start doing some research and getting some numbers from vendors and have a chat with your boss about how using an actual purpose built database can improve compliance (that’s about 70% of my duties right now is managing and configuring my organization’s SAAS risk management database, but we also have ~10k workers in the field so it’s highlighting useful data points in the data we’ve already collected primarily)
Unless your position is stuck below a manager with zero flexibility for process improvement, there’s always new projects to be discovered and started to improve existing processes
My job has a fair amount of down time. I’ll use it to study for career certifications or work on personal projects that are work-adjacent.
I made a little game in excel and then just kept adding stuff to it, it LOOKS like youre doing something important cuz youre coding but no youre fighting goblins :)
I made an excel plugin, at first to automate the job, and just kept learning new stuff and adding to it.
Had entire ribbon sets enabled by current user presets.
Good times
Contribute to opensource you use! Honestly I ping pong back and forth between swamped and bored , with contributing back as a good way to get ahead of future issues and involved in future work
Where can I find a job like this?
Office work. For years, I was afraid of working in an office because of films showing people how boring it is and it’ll make you want to kill yourself.
But yeah, spend a year or two actually doing your job, then automate it.
I read. Right now I don’t have anything to read so I do origami.
This is me.
I do 30 minutes of checks in the morning, check email, and attend the standup. After that i got hours to kill.
I teach myself things.
Learned how to mine crypto.
Learned advanced bash.
Learned boto3 and started automating aws shit
Wrote 2 books on automating aws shit.
Played alot of online dungeon crawlers.
Learned how to code a dungeon crawler.
Leaned how to code a 2d scoller game
Inked alot of comic sketched from (then) deviant art.
Just to name a few
Getting paid to make personal advancement is a pretty good deal.
- take professional development on my employer’s budget
- bring a book
- don’t be afraid to take slightly longer than usual lunches for errands or for exercise or whatevs
- if monitoring is lax enough, and there’s unmonitored guest wifi, bring your personal laptop and play some vidya
what is professional development?
money given to you to obtain certifications, for example
Courses or other training to develop your professional skills, preferably provided or funded by your employer.
I very annoyingly have yet to see this suggestion - go talk to your fucking coworkers!! If everyone is showing up every day, then you have a whole office full of work friends to make! Make a habit of hanging out at the coffee maker or water cooler or whatever and shoot the shit. Ask people how their weekend was. Introduce yourself to people you haven’t met before. Just chat with people for 15 min or so at a time, and then go back to your desk and do something fun/for personal development/for professional development. Then you have things to talk about - and then just always have some job related task on the backburner that you can keep working on, so when people ask about what you are doing at work, you can say “oh yeah, I’m working on X, which will have Y benefit.”
THIS IS HOW YOU PROGRESS IN YOUR CAREER. Yeah, working on your skills is super valuable. But the people who go far, the people who are never short on job offers or pay raises, are the people who have lots of friends.
Unfortunately, this will not help when working with people who are only interested in sports. I was asked which team i followed for the World Championship in football, to which i responded “I don’t watch football”.
Response: “Then what sports do you watch?”
“I don’t watch sports.”
His eyes widened while he stood there thinking for a second. “Then what do you do in your spare time?” He asked, flabbergasted. I told him there are other things in life than watching sports.
It’s like this for everyone I work with. They’re all hillbillies. I need to get out.
I’ve had good luck sharing my own interests instead. A few years ago I got super into watching SpaceX’s rocket launches because it’s honestly spectacular and they know how to do a really good livestream, plus watching the booster come back from orbit and softly touchdown is pretty incredible (I’ve had a hard time enjoying the live streams since Musk’s involvement with Trump of course)
But popping over to a coworker and going “hey there’s a rocket launch in 2 minutes, wanna take 8 minutes and watch it with me?” is a brilliant ice breaker
Trust me, my coworkers would not care about anything as exciting as a space launch! I’ve tried sharing my own interests with them, but they’re not interested. The only thing I can talk with them about is my dog (because he’s allowed in the office, and they love him).
Have you tried… watching sports? I’m kidding. However, with something like the World Cup coming up it’s pretty easy to feign a passing interest. Even my mother seems in to it, and she usually couldn’t tell a football from a pinecone.
I have tried. Just not my thing lol. Like, at all. I love playing sports, I just don’t see the fun in watching someone else play.
And don’t get me started on the people who’s complaining about what someone on their team did wrong; they wouldn’t be able to do what the athlete do if they got 1000 tries!
You need BLUFFBALL. A Bit from a TV show that somebody made kinda real.
Holy shit, that’s awesome!!! Also, I haven’t watched IT Crowd this year, so thanks for reminding me!
I mean, yeah, get out. But in the meantime I would suggest trying your best to find some way to relate. In 2 years maybe one of those guys will hear about a good job opportunity and pass it along to you “because he’s a nice guy who gets his work done - even if he’s a bit screwy to not watch sports”
The people I’m referring to are warehouse packers and repair technicians, while I create the automations for the warehouse. I highly doubt they’ll be able to recommend me in the future.
Talk to people?! That’s insane. Far better to deep dive into arcane coding disciplines and submerge oneself in niche strategy/fantasy roleplay. Fucking norm.
I’m making a browser based game about losing your job and then picking up cans to deposit them at 10c a piece for a living. Like the existential paperclips game.
I’ve expanded the scope of my job. From sysadmin to Information Security Officer etc. etc.
You guys work 40 hours per week?!
Is this your way of saying you work more or less than 40? lol
Less. And it barely feels like work.
what do you do?
I teach machining in Scandinavia.
Lathe and mill, both manual and CNC. ISO programming, CAD drawing, etc. The studens are have 32,5 hours of school (including breaks), and I rarely give them homework. I have, in theory, 4,5 hours of preparations per week, but I don’t use it.
Students are happy. 4 gift baskets from 9 classes in the four years I’ve worked there.
I present myself to the office for 40 hours a week.
Do I work for 40 hours a week?
No.
My job requires 45.
You fill out your own timesheet. Mine varies from 39 to 50 hours. They dont care what it says. But if you turn in a lot of timesheets under 45 hrs and dont get your work done and people complain that youre bad to work with, you may get asked whats up. If however you always get shit done, it doesn’t matter what it says for hours.
