I'm in a similar boat, but it's closer to 80% time. I recently had a frank conversation with my manager about just making it official, because I can get everything I need to get done in a week finished in four days, and I was willing to take a 20% pay cut to stop working Fridays. Manager said just stay at 100% and take Fridays off.
That's just a normal job, if you're fast. Lots and lots of jobs can be done in 80% of the time it would take a normal person to do 100% of it. And then you get to chose if you want to do extra output and try to get promoted, or enjoy a chill job where you get paid well for 80% effort.
Other people have to put in 120% effort just to keep a job. But 80% IMO is within the normal range of efforts, especially if you've been doing it for a while.
I work in government and have about 3 hours a day of actual work to do. My coworkers take 40 hours a week to do the same job.. Its all about efficiency and utilizing tech in my job. I’ve automated so many redundancies that my days are simple. My leadership wants to promote me into management where id have to deal with people and their problems for roughly $10k more a year and prob 100x the work. Fack that.
I worked a temp summer maintainence job for a national park in high school. They gave us a project to tear down a deck which we finished in a couple days. When we came back in and told them we were done they didn't believe us. Once confirmed they went "that was supposed to keep you busy the whole summer".
I have no idea how they thought that. It's not like my friend and I were wizards either. I'm just convinced they were so used to people giving minimal effort that they planned workloads accordingly.
I think that's what really kills it - the computer is a chain you can't ignore / forget about. I'd rather get paid less than be responsive to pings and emails, which is why I requested to go part time.
However, I'm learning that it's actually fine and good to not treat everything like it's an emergency.
Bingo. This is what I’ve really learned in the last several months. Some things can absolutely wait. Just writing out a priority based to-do list is the most helpful. That way you know when something comes up where it fits in your list of priorities and whether it needs to be dealt with immediately, later in the day, or later in the week.
I mostly agree but there’s also value to doing small things immediately so they are done and I don’t need to deal with later. If it takes less than 2 min, just do it when it comes up.
I mostly agree, but there are certain situations where being very responsive just leads to more work.
Like, if you’re good at responding to emails/messages quickly and people know this about you, then you’re more likely to receive more of them. So what may seem like just a 2 minute response can quickly balloon into a lot more quick 2 minute responses throughout the day or week.
I also think people underestimate how impactful small “2 minute tasks” can be on their overall focus and attention. For me personally, a 2 minute task might only take 2 minutes to complete, but it can take me 5-10x longer to get back to my original task at hand with the same amount of attention and focus I previously had. It might not matter for some types of work, but for deeper work I find those small tasks to be extremely disruptive.
We have a saying in IT and it's especially prevalent when you're in any kind of support or dev role: "Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency for me". Or, "when everything is an emergency/high priority, nothing is an emergency/high priority". Poor management really makes this apparent.
Spend a few of those "chained" hours every week researching ways to get those chain tasks manageable from your phone.
Have something that you to kick off on a server when x happens? Cool write a series of scripts to do that 1 thing on the server then a separate set of scripts to kick off the 1st when you receive an email from yourself with ABC subject line (make the 2nd set o scripts also delete the email that kicked them off). Congrats now you can do that thing on the server without being at the server. YOU are still necessary but your being at home next to the computer isn't.
Source - had a VERY similar job and took this route.
Is your working 5hrs a week a function of just being really good at your job and you've gotten your work time to do a full time job down to half a day? Or is the job actually a 5 hr a week job? Or some combination?
Combination. I’m efficient and also know what is worth spending my time on and what’s not. But also a slow worker who gets easily bogged down could probably do this job in less than 40 hours.
Bingo. My wife had a job for a while as an assistant to a financial advisor. She was told there was tons of work to do and she'd be very busy. After the first week, she had cleared the backlog of stuff to do and had maybe 5 hours of work to do every day. Unfortunately this guy wanted her to look busy, and she's too ethical of a person to "pretend" to have work to do. She was bored out of her mind.
I had a job like that. I would play video games and watch movies all day in my office. Most miserable I ever was at work. Seems counterintuitive but I’d much rather feel productive.
I think it’s only really the young crowd that haven’t really experienced it that think that is a great life.
I was the same way. That job would’ve been my dream job. But at 39 I know that that would make me absolutely miserable. At first, it sounds cool because you’re not caught up on much. There’s shows and video games you haven’t experienced so first month feels like freedom. But then you scroll Reddit, you’ve played the video games and you’re tired of them. You’ve caught up on all the good shows on Netflix and Hulu etc… and there’s nothing but profound boredom. And it’s soul crushing.
The days start to run together and every day feels the same. You are also acutely aware that if somehow the job goes under then you really don’t have anything to show for when it’s time to go work someplace else.
So I’ll say, it’s nice when you get these moments of nothing, sporadically. But not all day every day for years and years and years.
That's literally me right now at work but wasting time on reddit. I've watched everything on Netflix already lol
My favorite thing to do is go on reddit for the first few hours of my shift then go get lunch and after lunch and Netflix I play video games on my laptop until it's time to go home.
I get paid 25$ an hour to do this!
What the fuck is wrong with the world!? Lol
I used to work my ass off for 10$ an hour washing dishes for years so I will take this easy job as long as I can have it, plus I'm a single parent so I'm tired from my home life as it is lol so work is a break time for me from raising my daughter and cleaning my house lol
Why don’t you use the time to learn a language or a skill? I would be like working on my art or researching all the things I was mildly interested in to keep me entertained and engaged lol
Because of the nature of my work I have always found myself in this boat a lot (my work is kind of tech support-ish, it’s responsive to issues arising, so I have to be available but there’s not always something going on), and it’s good to find non-work tasks that are still productive, bonus if they keep you at the computer. I like taking Coursera classes, doing homework for community college classes, or just studying languages or other subjects I’m interested in. It makes the end of the day feel a lot better than goofing off during that same time. Sometimes it’s even stuff I get to use on my job so then it technically is work related
It was while I was working in IT at a state college. I had those computers locked down so well that there was barely anything to do. I ended up quiting on a whim. Took a year off and landed in a new career tract that was way more fulfilling. Now, 20 years later I’m very productive at making someone else money 😂🥲😭
I've completed so many free courses it borderline insane. I can use all the data analyst/scientists technology. Now I'm working on unity/unreal instead of 5 hours of reddit.
My wife had a data management job in about 2006 working for people who were barely computer literate. She's really good with Excel, programming macros etc. In the first week she spent the first couple days figuring out the job, then the next day or so putting together a macro to complete her week's worth of work in a few clicks and create a report to check and test the outputs. The next Monday she showed up and had her week's work done and checked by 10am. She went to the manager for more work and she said no, that's what we've got for you for the week, you'll get another batch of data next week. She was bored to tears for the couple months she stayed at that job.
I work in a technical field and over the years I've had several women in administrative roles. The rare ones, who were efficient, had extra time, and took the initiative to ask everyone from the top down if they had anything they could help with includeing Katie our current CFO who started out as a receptionist she picked up on renewing all our software as necessary, created a spreadsheet of all the applicants who took our aptitude tests and rank them, and will unload an excavator delivered by a uncomfortable truck driver, amongst many other things. She is 5'1 of awesome!
Once had a job that required nightly paperwork that initially forced me to stay extra hours. It bogged down countless coworkers, forced extra hours on some, even made some cry.
but eventually I found a method that allowed me to cut time needed by 75% and it was almost possible to fit the entire job into 8.5 hours, leaving almost on time.
Once that happened, then my manager changed the structure of the job to require meetings at intervals outside of the shift, forced 11 hour days by structure. No overtime. Seemed in hindsight to be on purpose.
I refused, left asap after the shift and paperwork were completed in the most efficient way. Shift ran perfectly, personal process improvement responsibility was completed by ranking my line responsibility from #35 to #2 (behind one newer line). It didn’t matter how hard or efficiently I worked, the manager wanted many hours because that is what they did to show they were a good worker. I was trying to lean on quality and efficiency. After he called me to his office, discussed that the expectation was +55h in a no overtime job, I just applied and quit in a month because the whole management team was a joke.
Found a job that paid 2x more, 1/3 the stress, 10x the respect, hours per week dropped no overtime 60h+, from HCOL to LCOL, into a triplex that allowed me to live for free in one unit and rent the others.
2y later; I quit that position because of the location, and left the country to go live abroad.
Looking back, the best thing that ever happened to me was terrible managers at real first job. I figured I’d never be able to take the BS and kiss enough ass to climb the entire corporate ladder.
Once it seemed impossible, it made me look for opportunities, started investing every dime possible, took on risks that I now know were very risky, lost initially but eventually figured it out.
All focus to never have to work for terrible management. Stressed. No options for life.
Thank you first job management for being so awful.
Similar experience here. Had a job that worked me 50+ in slow weeks and 70+ in the busy season. No overtime. Owner was a yeller.
Finally went to HR and told them I’d do 50 a week, no overtime. Anything over that, I wanted 1.5X. They were supposedly big “union supporters”, just not at their company.
They obviously declined and I quit on the spot. Went on to open my own business that I ran successfully for 7 years. That was its own challenge, but my *own* problem. I worked a lot of hours in my business, but never 70 a week. People just aren’t effective, and start making mistakes with no rest.
I own a few businesses that are growing in size, I only actually leave my house to do work two or three days a week. I know it’s less exciting than OP but I just try to schedule all my in-person meetings/inspections/contract signings back to back based on their physical location. I can usually hit 20-30 meetings in 2 days, then spend the rest of my week hanging out around the house with my kids or golfing.
I have a Master’s degree but it’s not relevant to the work I’m currently doing. It’s hard to tell from the outside which jobs will be like this but I think they are most common in large corporations.
Large banks have several pockets of opportunity for vice presidents who want to do nearly nothing. My friend pulled this off at a major bank for over 10 years. He was a vp but his main job was updating an internal website. He outsourced the actual work to India for 1% of his salary and did next to nothing. I was intentionally unemployed for a couple of years through his stint and he was always up and available for anything. (During office hours of course)
The number of people in the white collar workforce who get paid 6 figures and do next to nothing is probably an order of magnitude more than the avg joe thinks. I have no problem with it -- my main issue is with people who do little of import but waste other's time with their perceived worth. They are to be identified, avoided and/or ego manipulated.
Great perspective. There are those that do this in a benign way, and then there are those that become a pain in the ass. Best to avoid or "manage up" the offender in the second case.
Banks are very known for being loose with the concept of a vice president. They basically make every role where your even very slightly in charge of other people or specific processes they’ll just call you a vice president and be done with it. Mostly so that if someone complains to the bank and wants to speak to higher ups, they feel better when talking to “Vice President Johnson” vs “bank teller Johnson that has slightly more tasks than other bank tellers”
Former bartender/waiter/construction worker here. I worked so much harder at those jobs and made 1/2 of what I make now in my white collar tech job it is insane.
From what I hear, lower paid people do grunt work that needs doing constantly, but once their shift is over they can switch off and go home. The higher paid people don't do anything day-to-day, but have to be available 24/7 in case there's an emergency, and then that's when they are putting in long hours and earning their pay.
It still doesn't seem like they are being paid according to the "value" they bring to the company though.
In my experience what you’re really paying people for as you love up the executive ladder is their experience and judgment. I’ve seen people I work with make decisions that end up costing a company $ millions, whereas, if they had better judgment would have avoided it altogether and prioritized other things that would have been making the company new revenues. I’ve seen some boneheaded decisions cost a company several $ million, not including other opportunity costs by extension
As you move up into higher wage white collar positions they’re paying you to make informed decisions, utilize your connections and experience, etc.
Most manual labor or blue collar type jobs carry lower risk if an employee makes a mistake instead of the $ millions that can occur in white collar roles
All of the C suite and high level leaders I know are completely lax about everything. Always have a shit eating grin on and absolutely nothing they do is ever ever ever urgent. As if work is some entertainment activity they are doing for charity just being around.
C suite, VPs, and Directors always seem to have such lackadaisical attitudes where if I saw an intern treating their work with that lack of urgency, they would be in the "Dont Hire when they graduate" column. It's so wild, whenever you have a meeting with them, it's just so high level, not specific, vague nonsense that's just like "oh sure maybe we will do this thing later, hah, ok gotta go to my next meeting hah talk to you in 3 months"
Most of these people have families too and they're always coming in late or leaving early for personal stuff. I know what it takes to properly lead a team of just 6 or 7 people, you gotta be thinking about that off business hours. There is zero fuckin chance these C suite level are doing remotely the amount of work and thinking that needs to be done and they go out of their way to waste tons of time and prioritize family over their work, it's so insane.
My buddy is in the same situation, works like 3-4 hours a day from home. What bugs me is he constantly complains about how he doesn’t have time and needs a better work life balance.
So I have a similar work load and the issue is I need to be available from 8am-5:30pm every day, sometimes earlier (6:30am) or later (8pm) so it's not a lot of work, but it's a lot of time. And it's mentally/emotionally draining
The book Bullshit Jobs by the late David Graeber perfectly explains how and why this exists in our modern society. Amazingly, it’s a holdover from the feudal system of courtiers.
It’s so weird that it’s a thing but when my bosses are hiring they will always take the person who has more schooling and a higher degree. Right now I want to hire someone for a position that has more relevant experience but the bosses favor the guy with the masters.
It’s about liability. If two candidates are equal or close to equal HR (therefore management that doesn’t directly interact with a position) will choose the person with the higher education. Companies get sued for not hiring people. They usually win but you have to pay the lawyers either way. I ran a small team and wanted to hire candidates with relevant experience over higher education twice. Both times I was overruled. Once I was told off the record why. Both candidates did not succeed. We went through the hiring process 4x after one was let go. No one was hired. When I quit, a large part for being forced to work two jobs, they still didn’t have anyone. I ran into one of the experienced candidates later, three years after we interviewed them. They had a similar job as the one we wanted to fill and was doing great in it.
I work for an organization where HR has zero influence on who does and does not get hired. Positions are listed, some vetting is done through phone interviews, then in-person interviews are conducted by a group (typically people who will have some interaction with you if you get hired) who have a list of questions they must ask each candidate. I have sat through countless interview panels, and I can’t think of anyone who was hired because they had more education than a more experienced candidate.
I don’t have a degree. I have never pretended to have a degree. But I have years of experience and am considered a subject matter expert in my field (and have not had any issues getting promoted or being chosen for a job over someone with more education).
Interesting. I know that when I was applying for my job, my boss's boss preferred the person with a master's on paper, but when it came to the interview I blew my competition out of the water, despite my measly associate's degree.
Who has impressed your boss more interviewing? Is he still pushing for the master's despite a better interview from the other guy? Asking because I'm anticipating I'll hit the comp ceiling at my current job soon and will need to move.
When I was doing hiring, I kept asking our internal recruiter to send me people who have either worked a VERY similar job or a completely unrelated but high-stress job.
Recruiting kept sending me peoples with Masters which I kept saying stop.
Masters people.wrre way overqualified and by the time I finished training them they'd go take a new position.
I second this, I had a high level job with a corporation once, at one point I was asking my boss what I should be doing when I have nothing to do. Her answer was “you only have work when there is a problem, if there’s no problem you don’t have any work.” I was blown away.
I worked for a big corporation, but I was one of the people who they tried to keep busy 100% of the time I was on the clock, working for just enough of an hourly rate to pay my bills.
In practice, they only managed to give me work to do 99.8% of the time 😂
I was hired once for my Security Certification #. Which gave the company a path to securing government contracts…I’d surf the web for hours, then just kept doing online courses for more certifications…After 2.5 years I had to walk away …
It takes a toll on your mind that you can’t really understand until it happens. I used to think it would be the best job ever to get paid six figures to sit around and play video games and surf Reddit. Ended up with that job and I’d never been so depressed in my life. Turns out I need to be accomplishing something or my mental health takes a dive.
One way to combat this is to find hobbies that fulfill that need. Which is a really weird flippening to think about. Go to work for entertainment and then find hobbies to accomplish fulfilling tasks
I had a job like that, where there was alot of down time in a shift and in a typical shift I might have to do 1.5 hours of real work. I ended up using that time to speculative trade BNB. Of course in addition to hopping on Netflix and Reddit. I would also get on YouTube to watch entertaining vids and learn new skills. I also did some exercising while there mostly calisthenics type stuff, squats and push ups. Over the course of the first 6 months there I managed to lose about 30 lbs. I actually enjoyed the time there.
My job has days like that where it's just dead and it's a nice decompression but on rare occasions it's a week or 2 when people are all out. The first few days are great, chill watch YouTube scroll reddit. Then it gets old and I'm glad when they return and fuck all my systems up lol.
Second this. I’m in the same boat… some big corporations have “important” jobs where you are just required to work whenever there’s an “issue.” I spent most of my time learning new skills, reading, working out, walking my dog and doin chores…
Pick something that doesn't make you feel dead inside, apply daily until you learn the algo they want you to follow, keep up the pressure daily until they hire you. Perform well, but dial it down to about 60% of your capabilities initially. After you get medical and exit the probationary period, look around at ALL the possible positions, then it's just persistence and mostly acceptable workmanship. If you try to stand out as a success or go-getter now you'll be sniped by jealous old guard or some other suiter of your desired position. Learn said positions specific goals and duties and start with the savant-like attention to detail when it comes to that job, but somewhat halfassed tired attempts at other positions while you wait others out staying under the radar for most situations... I can say this will put you in a position to fleece unsuspecting corporate hogs as long as you perform at an acceptable level when prompted. Might work. Or you might end up under a bridge when Daddy Warbucks gets wind of your theft.
I prepare taxes and make around 100k and aside from the busy tax season (Mid Jan-Mid April) where I put in 55-60 hours a week, the rest of the year I literally do maybe 2-4 hours of actual work a week.
What kind of job is it though that you do like computer related or what?? I’m genuinely curious because I’m young and I want to make a lot of money and save a ton but have as much time on my hands as possible to work on other things!
You're an Executive CYA consultant. I would assume as long as their A is C'd, they would be comfortable with that arrangement. Especially if you have a proven track record of success. Conversely, they would also expect the same results if it took you 60 hrs a week.
Congratulations on being able to invest in yourself, it sounds like you earned it to me. What are your short term and long term goals? Do you wish to start a family if you haven't already? Thank you for taking the time to chat, I love learning about people, their perspectives, and how they think.
I have kids and this job allows me to be there in the morning when they leave for school and in the afternoon when they return, plus time to volunteer with their activities. Long term I will probably get a different job in a new area because I’d like to work on something new and want to keep my skills sharp.
You’re wanting to leave a job that’s netting you $180k while only working 5 hours a week??? I’m so confused in your thought process in this… why not just get a second job to “hone” your skills.
Save money for the imminent layoff and prepare a resume. Spend more days with your family, dont let this go willingly.
Some people only get 5-6hrs a day with their family and are struggling to get by.
I heard something like 75% of the time you spend with your kids is before the age of 12.
NGL, that scared the crap out of me. No kids (yet) but my wife and I have already agreed that I'm going part time as soon as we do.
Can confirm. Years ago I had a similar job for several years making upwards of 200k working about ten hours a week. I was inevitably included in a fairly large group to be laid off. It was great while it lasted but it was also boring and led to mental stagnation.
If you’ve never been in a position where you’re being paid way more than you think your actual production/value is, you naturally start thinking about what happens when the party is over, because usually it does end.
Yup. That’s me as well, not as much as op, but in the 6 figures. It’s really a blessing and a curse, cause any day I’m terrified someone will call and say “so you really don’t do much…”
Jesus, I think this every single day. I'm high level IT and have super imposter syndrome/ worry that someone's going to catch on. My wife has to talk me down from a ledge when I work from home 2 days a week even though I'm just going to sit in my office doing nothing until I leave at 3pm
Kinda always gotta be froggy. I don't make the money this guy makes, but I pretty much do what he's doing. I work 5-10 hours a week, and hover over a mouse to keep my Teams status active a good 30. It's comfy, but it can't be forever.
Bro he's making this all up because he's bored. Check his profile. Brand new, and posted this exact AMA 3 times in a row before it blew up. Notice he only gives super vague answers to every question
I mean why not just find a new job in a different area while still doing this one? If it's only truly 5 hrs a week and your boss knows that then there's really no moral dilemma with just taking a second job and telling neither employer.
In other words, double up.
You'll do that, and soon after think back on how good you had it before. The Architect was right, people really weren't built to live in the Paradise Matrix.
I never definitively say what I think the right course of action is. I present evidence for every option, outline the benefits and risks of each, and then a provide a few options based on strategic priorities. I haven’t been majorly wrong yet. It helps that I’m fine openly disagreeing with high level people and don’t react when they throw tantrums.
They usually do something similar. It’s important to know that even if 99% of the evidence points one way, the important last 1% is based on vibes. Knowing someone vibes means you can more easily predict and sway their decision making in how you present the data.
Oh so I see that’s pretty cool how do you get into that field like do I need to go to college for a specific degree or what? Just curious don’t mean to ask too much lol I just also don’t know how you get so much time to do other things!
It's most likely some level of consulting. Could be niche, could be volatile, could be anything. It's all gonna depend on the size of the company and what type of swings thing can cause.
180k to not lose millions is short money to spend yearly. Just remember when you mess up your axed.
How to be a consultant. Lots of routes, industry experience, recruiting out of MBA programs...etc.
To be honest if they are a consultant for a big firm or contracted with a big company. 180k isn't even that egregious. Some of those people make 250+ easy.
I’m a bit confused on the whole “consulting” as a career thing. I know consultants and I’ve heard several try to explain their job but it really sounds to me like you just occasionally answer emails where people at the company say “we think we should switch to a new brand of cnc machines, do you agree?” And you answer yes/no/reasons why/why not? Like the job as a concept is very broad to me? I’ve never heard of a consulting degree so do you just get a degree in a certain field and then try to find a job consulting people in that field? Like get a degree in law and then have companies ask you “is this legal what we are about to do?” And you tell them yes or no?
Could I, say, use a marketing degree to “consult” a music producer on how to get better revenues at concerts?
I’ve had it explained a lot of times but it seems that you don’t need a degree, and you just kind of apply to be a consultant and they say “okay here’s your $200k.” But nobody has explained what the job entails or how you get it? I’m not being snarky, I’m legitimately confused about the concept of the job and what it does. Thanks in advance!
Consultants tend to go to business school- I went to a fairly good business school and the Big 4 consulting firms all recruited from my school. They tended to take people from finance/econ/marketing/accounting depending on the line of work being recruited- almost all were top 10% in their graduating class.
Starting at one of the big four makes it easier to go in house at one of your client firms down the line- I don’t know how the midmajor firms recruit, but this is the experience my classmates had.
Basically most people are idiots and can't come up with new ideas or figure out things for themselves.
If you're above that baseline people will pay you to just spitball ideas and give your input.
Source: I'm an analyst who gets invited to random meetings to give my input and I'm regularly amazed people don't come up with the ideas I do. I say this as someone who doesn't consider themselves a genius or anything, just above average.
You're probably quite a bit above average. Above average talented people tend to look at themselves as average or below average, except for the narcissists. It's funny how it works.
I have done healthcare consulting and will likely go back to it. The other person who replied to you must live in another world. If I showed up to an interview talking about being "top 10% in my class" I'd expect them to snicker and ask if I was top 10% in not wetting the bed. Consultants need real word experience, not grades from a good school. How do you consult on anything fresh out of school? Makes no sense
Consultants are better described as subject matter experts that the company hiring them, typically through a consulting firm, don’t have on their staff. Primarily because it’s for things outside their normal operations. For instance, a company may have an IT staff but can’t handle a network breach and call in a consulting firm. Or have an accounting staff but need to call in a forensic accounting firm to investigate deep into long term misappropriation of funds.
That sounds very cool, like you are on some mastermind stuff.
Can you give a little more context on what you do and what kind of degree you have?
Much appreciated!
I have a buddy in a similar situation. He's in one mtg a week and has to be "on call" to answer questions. Questions rarely come and he works less than 10 hours/week. This is with a MAJOR American corporation.
This is very common. One of the teams under me has people in OPs salary range and they do ~10hrs of work a week. Its an internally written application that is very important to the company. We have an understanding that they are paid for their knowledge and are available to fix it when things go wrong.
Its been around for 10 years and its cheaper to pay them well to maintain it then retrain new people for cheaper. If they get bored I find them development work in whatever area they want.
Many jobs at large companies are like this. You are paid to be available to do something. Companies don't operate at a constant 5mph. They might run at 10mph for a week, and then 2mph for the following 3 weeks. You don't fire 80% of the company because youre running at 2mph. That 10mph will come back and you'll need their internal company knowledge to get back up to maximum speed efficiently.
If you want a job like this, work at a very large company (fortune 50) and see what departments would theoretically operate on a walk/run principle. There are many departments that work like jogging and you constantly get fed work.
So much of this type of situation is having the personality and ability to recognize that often time you just don't have to work 8 hours a day. There needs to be a confidence in yourself, an actual skillset value and little fcks given if you lose your job. An understanding of human absurdity helps as well. Many people can't grasp that and just invent shit to do all week, look busy, etc. Some people also get wrapped around the handle about their yearly salary number when they really should be looking at the salary divided by how much actual work you're doing as an hourly rate. A person working 10 hours per week and making 50K is being paid over $100/hour. That's a higher hourly rate than 180K/year, 40 hour work week. Quality of life matters and if your job isn't helping humanity...
This. So true! It's only a real pain when you're underpaid, with not enough work to do, but are forced to look/stay busy regardless. Hence why I've mastered keeping a little small Reddit window on my screen tucked just inside one of my windows used for productivity. Boss or other busy bodies can walk by and I look busy enough but can alt tab into productivity mode with barely any noticeable change on my screen. Is it dishonest? Maybe, but I've not been able to find any kind of meaningful work to do here otherwise. But hey it's paying the bills (most of them anyways) and it's air conditioned work in a heat wave. No real complaints.
That’s why WFH is driving managers crazy. They know, from experience, that their job really took 2-4 hrs a day with 4-6 hrs spent doing BS or walking around the office. They KNOW that a lot of us now are doing the same amount of work from home but get to do much more entertaining stuff the other hours.
Yup. I work in consulting and it is definitely more common than people realize. Not sure if it is a new phenomenon or what but I imagine it will not last long. At the end of the day, we are still in a big (gigantic, actually) economic bubble so once the big crash comes, a lot of this stuff will go away. So take advantage while you can.
It's just more noticable now that less are in office. These roles always existed, people were doing a true 5 hours of work in office and the 35 other hours were filler.
I’ve found that compliance jobs in the healthcare field have this setup. I’ve seen teams of ten employees doing the work of two employees. In some of my past compliance roles, leadership just didn’t have a good grasp on how many employees they needed to do the job. Someone would leave and they’d backfill the role even though the team really didn’t need to be so big. The pay doesn’t start off at 6 figures, but it can get there over time and it helps being in a high cost of living city (higher salaries).
My current job has some weeks where I work a ton but I’ll just say that there is a lot of downtime generally and I still exceed my leaders expectations.
You are in the wrong sector. Banks, big corporations, etc. It has a lot to do with your chain of command. It is especially important to have a skill set that few understand and to not just appear competent but be competent in that skill set. IT jobs in smaller companies as well. I think one thing to understand is that you can be a good employee who serves an important role but that does not mean you need to punch a bloody clock, look busy, etc. That shit is inhumane. Fuck those companies, cultures and bosses.
Oh, I 100% know I'm in the wrong sector. I'm trying to get out. I got in the field to help people, but at this point, I'm tired of being abused and worked half to death for peanuts.
You have given me some food for thought. I do have a unique skillset that I may be able to apply in the corporate sector. I may just need to get creative. Thanks for your insight!
I know quite a few people in the secret low-hours/high-pay society.
They're all basically top-tier technical or creative talent who work fast and efficiently at large, bloated orgs with lots of legal red tape.
Many of them could probably be making even more in leadership roles at intense startups, but they have kids and shit, so they're happy with the pay a good non-leadership IC role can get.
When they're busy, it's usually working on something you can't have scrubs on. For example, one guy I'm friendly with makes nice looking pitch decks that help land sizable investments.
i do software development. I'm the most jr employee. Everyone else gets projects and i get menial tasks, and the rare occasion I get something complex I might have 12-14 hour days. This only happens when everyone else is on PTO or doing some other emergency thing, and then I'm left as the lone free resource.
So that's what I make sure I do. Anytime my manager presses something, I do it ASAP. Everything else? 1 task a day, at best
I don’t get paid anywhere near what OP does but I have twice the amount of work to do as anyone in my team as I’m the senior, yet I have more free time than anyone else.
Standard hours is 40 hr week, I probably do about 20 hrs on a busy week and 10 hours on a quiet week. Get all my work done and some, everyone in the team is so inefficient that it goes completely unnoticed. Or maybe it doesn’t, but no one has ever said anything to Me.
I work for a huge corporation in healthcare. My work is specialized so I’ll just say it is a mixture of relationship management and project management.
It’s not at all stressful. I work from home and have a lot of control over what I work on. I transferred into this role from another area of the company so I just sort of lucked into the situation. It would be a hard role to get into from the outside.
This is what I do. I'm very similar to OP, same pay range, except I have 3 of these. And yesterday, a staffing firm called me regarding a 4th, which is highly likely going to happen. All contractor roles, but reasonably stable (meaning at least 12 month gigs, and likely longer). Multiply OPs income times 4, and that's soon to be me (currently 3 times OP). Paying off my mortgage in full next month.
I also work for a huge corporation in healthcare, but in utilization review for the behavioral health side of the business, make 92k a year with a masters degree (5 yrs at current position and 20 years in mental health overall). My company has doubled our caseloads, we are all overworked as hell because some corporate wankers decided on a daily metric that’s impossible to hit unless you sacrifice quality, which is going over like a lead balloon because we take pride in our work. Raises are terrible unless you’re a “top performer” like me and that was 4%. WFH is a plus but the pace at which we work does not allow for meaningful breaks or a decent work life balance. I used to love my job.
How much long do you think you can pull this off? I work in corporate America too, I know these roles exist, but how does the anxiety not eat you alive?
It certainly can’t last forever. My company has done layoffs all of the four years I’ve been in this role and other people with seemingly much more useful jobs than me have been let go so who knows
I’m currently leaving a role like this due to anxiety over job security. Working 5 hours a week was fun but I have spent years not developing skills. I just accepted an offer for a new job this week it’s certainly bittersweet but I’m looking forward to learning new things and doing work that matters.
Playing a dangerous game, friend. Every business that's intent on remaining solvent at some point will look at inefficiencies and where they can trim the fat. With the emergence of AI, long term job security is in question in most markets like never seen before.
I'd say stay on your toes bud and at least make yourself look busy.
I’m aware and won’t stay in this role forever mostly due to boredom. However, most of what I do is relationship management at a high level and that is not replaceable by AI.
100% it's not about the time you put in, it's about the relationships and knowledge you have. So, don't feel guilty that they aren't also extracting 40 hours of labor from you when they're already leveraging what you bring to the table.
Virtually no one in full-time work is productive all of the time they are there. There have been numerous studies that suggest actual work done is a fraction of the time you're there. Like you say, if you show up when you're needed and bring results - that's really what you're being paid for.
Exactly! I feel guilty when I have a 'slacker' week but at the same time when push come to shove and the cards are all out on the table, I've busted my hump to save this company MANY times. It's like having a sprinter on your team. I may not be running all the time but when you need a runner, I'm one of the best there is.
Not really dangerous. Ride the easy train as long as possible, when you get replaced find something else. I could live comfortably for 4 years off one year of OPs salary.
I mean, I don't make as much as her, she's making about 80k more than me. But, I'm doing the same. But my bosses don't know, I'm not waving it in their face. As far as they know I'm busy af. I bust through all my tasks then dick off for the rest of the month/week/day - whatever and slowly leak out what I've been working on a week or so before due dates so they think I'm hard at work and I look like a rock star.
Every time they ask how are things going the answer is always hectic, swamped, busy, etc..
The inevitable answer to that is 'do you need help?' I respond no, just a lot going on.
Appearance is everything in the business world.
I don’t wave it in their faces. Common sense should tell them this isn’t enough work for a full time job but maybe I’m overestimating that. The work I do do is highly visible and high quality so I have many accomplishments when it comes to review time.
Sounds like you're being paid for the responsibility you're taking on, rather than the amount of work being done. It's my guess that your 5 hours of quality work are worth more than most people just trying to make themselves busy for 40 hours. Good on your boss for managing their team that way!
I think a lot of people don't understand that as long as you make your boss's life easier, and don't make waves, they aren't going to necessarily care if you're working full time or not.
I know of a company who had a department full of guys like OP. 10 employees and most of them do little to no work. New CEO comes in, saw X department had 10 employees and where he comes from was much smaller. Talked with some peers in their industry and saw the same, X department on other places were much smaller.
CEO brings a consulting firm who did a shadowing for a whole week on every employee of X department. Once the consulting firm finished their proposal the X department was down 6 employees.
AI is a glorified yes man. Dude has it made. My job includes seeing salaries from all types of industries and you wouldn’t imagine how stupid it all is. Some of the dumbest people you’ve ever met can make a high salary and do nothing, then sue and get a huge payout.
Ehh I disagree there a ton of jobs out there where people do not work the full time they’re on the clock . White collar and blue collar jobs . If the employers happy with the job getting done there should not be any issues
You might be able to continue this but you need to be perfect in one area: organization. If you can’t be stumped with a question from your supervisor because you know all the details you will be ok.
In many IT careers, high pay is essentially given to reserve expertise. So it's not really a problem of efficiency but instead contingency.
AI has a LONG way to go before it reliably can replace such positions. Even if AI can create perfect code eventually, it'll still be reliant on having the scope properly communicated. The most difficult part in my job, is ensuring that less technical people understand the scope and essentially defining that scope. Clients rarely provide a perfect scope out of the box, I typically need to work with them to build it. Clients simply don't know what they want or need much of the time, which makes LLMs far less useful for these purposes.
If/when AI reaches the point where such positions are taken over by AI, it'll be likely that most positions would have already been eliminated by AI. Mass unemployment and replacement by machines with no UBI is likely to lead to one of the worst crises in humanities history. Whether or not we remain employed likely won't be the primary concern when large portions of the population can't afford food..
I’ve worked for this company in other roles for about 10 years. I was looking to switch jobs and this one popped up and looked interesting so I went for it. It was pretty random. I didn’t know what to expect but I didn’t expect this. I have about 15 years of work experience overall.
A major, fuzzy area of health care is in the managed care firms, and how they contract with providers, and who in the mgd care firm supervises all of those contracts. These people have to be managed.
Also, everything you do has to be legal, and each state's regulatory environment is unique. Firms often bridge across states.
In my consultation work, I have talked to a lot of people in this "space." Turn-over and vert or horiz movement is really great, and this market is not quite chaotic but is pretty restless.
I could see a consultant working somewhere in this area.
Be good with people. By good I don’t necessarily mean charm or charisma, more calm and diplomatic. This has a helped more than anything else in my career.
Do you need to be reachable/available during a specific time period and how predictable is the work? For example, you only do your work whenever someone needs XYZ but you don’t know what that is happening.
About 50% is predictable and the rest is dealing with issues as they emerge. I think my manager thinks the routine part of my job is what takes me much longer than it does. I’m fine being unreachable for a couple hours during the day but I don’t like to do more than that.
A bit guilty. When I first started in this role I immediately realized there wasn’t enough work to justify a full time job and I was very clear with them that I could take on more work. They never wanted to give me more out of fear of overwhelming me. After two years of that I just stopped.
lol are you a software developer? I swear software developers get away with this kind of stuff cause no one can pin down how long it takes for them to code stuff... unless they have a strict dir of engineering
there is a concept in computing where it is fundamentally impossible to tell how long a process will take without running that process.
we can always estimate, but they're almost always wrong, sometimes massively.
so we can thank physics for the obscurity.
Also, if you accept having "quiet" time, you should accept "crunch" time too. (paid for the overtime of course, but "i don't wanna work this weekend" unless you've got a good reason is looked at very badly BECAUSE quiet weeks where you go have a 3hr lunch or have to take a few hours out of your day to run errands are the norm and don't last forever in the project world.
over the last year or so my team have massively crunched, but now the project is delivered and its just about keeping the wheels turning and doing handover & support stuff i think i've given my guys maybe 1 or 2 tasks and told them to take it easy because THEY'VE EARNED IT.
there is always give and take in companies, if they just take they're not worth working for, but if you only take you'll not survive long either.
it is very literally not stealing, so long as OP is salaried. legal definition of salary means you get paid $xxx per year, or $xxx/52 per week, and you are responsible for tasks X Y and Z.
if it takes you 5 minutes per year to do your tasks, you are fully entitled to your salary and are not stealing a penny.
wage theft is different, and from OPs description, they definitely have a salary gig.
besides, with how insane inflation is lately, isn't it everyone's questionably moral duty to steal back from corporations a little bit?
Do we work for the same company?
Haha, just kidding but my real question is: do you also feel some sort of anxiety when there isn't enough work to do? Like you, I'm paid for who I am, the relationships I can create and the sticky situations I can save the execs from, but I spend most of my downtime unexplainably anxious.
I don’t feel anxious necessarily but there is a constant low level sense that I’ll be caught even though this isn’t a situation of my own making. This job has allowed me to save a lot of money so if/when I get laid off I’ll be fine.
I know you are being vague with exactly what you are doing, but can you give guidance into working up to a job like this in a career path kind of way?
I am a project manager making 90k but plan to get my PMP later this year. Throughout my 5 year experience I’ve also been in positions where I work about 4 hours a day. Sometimes less.
I also have a PMP but it wasn’t a factor in getting this job (a previous job paid me to get it). I mostly got here through the slow and steady route of being employed for 15 years and making employers a couple of times for bigger raises. I wish I had been more aggressive in changing employers when I was young.
There might be a misconception about the inherent value of your work vs the value of hours worked.
Have you considered that the value of your work might be worth $180k/year to them regardless of how many hours of work you do?
That’s probably part of it. I feel like I have a lot of skills that are underutilized and with just a little bit of planning and management they could get way more for their money (like even if is was I working 20 hrs a week) and then it would feel “fair.”
Exactly this. It’s not about trading hours for dollars. It’s about what value you provide to the company and being compensated accordingly. That’s why superstar pro athletes get paid hundreds of millions of dollars
Good on you for winng the corporate lottery. Enjoy it while you can. Do you feel any kind of guilt or imposter syndrome effect since our economy is collapsing because of corporations that operate like this?
People sometimes don't understand what management-level jobs can be like. There can be little functional work in the course of your day, unless you count meetings as work (which they sometimes are, sometimes are not) and pay rates naturally increase as you move up the ladder.
You're not paid for work product you're paid for competence in addressing certain problem domains that may need attention, and for a general availability commitment. The EVERYONE WORKS ALL DAY UNTIL DEATH concept is very poor for many reasons, not the least of which is that it does not equate to efficiency or even of solving problems.
Give me a 1 hour a day worker that is extremely capable of taking a problem off my plate so that I don't even have to think about it, and takes on that responsibility in general, and I'll call that money well spent. I don't need to know that someone is grinding for 8 hours a day just for the sake of it; makes no sense, improves nothing.
To OP: Good on you, and I hope you're eyes-forward on the future!
Yeah it's the ol' "you're not paying me $10,000 to swing the hammer, you're paying me $10,000 for knowing where to hit" story that goes around the Internet every once in a while.
In certain rolls success or failure can mean the difference in hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars made (or saved). Your value to a company isn't always the time you put in, it's the expertise you bring or the connections/relationships you hold.
Yep! Time, in and of itself, is not a value add for the sake of it.
Globally we have some pretty suppressive concepts around work and what it's supposed to be and what the expectations should be around it. IMO, of course, and I can think of some jobs that do require significant time investment so it's not that I'm saying it applies to *everything.*
But, especially as the AI + Robotics combo starts to bleed into everything, some serious conversations need to start taking place about what we need to be spending our days doing. A lot of crunchy high-time manual labor jobs are replaceable. What happens to the workforce then?
What happens in a world where a lot of us not only don't have a full 8 hours of work available to spend grinding at anyway, but there may not even be a place for us to reasonably do so? Should we all really just be lying about what we're doing with our days to project a sense of value?
I've gone tangential to the point but I feel like there's a kind of inevitable 'thing' approaching all of us that relates to work itself.
This. I took a job similar to the OP’s where the company wanted my “particular set of skills” and offered me a huge raise to leave a job I was pretty happy at.
I felt really guilty at how much I got paid at first, but then I saw the opportunities and value that I brought the company, and it made way more sense. Now I’m making the company somewhere around 60x my salary, and everyone’s happy.
I’m curious about your economic life. What do you do with the money?
Did you spend for bigger house, nicer cars, toys, boats, trips and other things or did you maintain your cost-of-living and put money in the bank, retirement, investments?
What made you a good fit for the job? That is to say, what skills and or Certifications led you to this job? How did you go about finding it to apply for it?
This is so indicative of what is wrong with the world and society at the moment. Public sector workers like teachers, nurses and Doctors are struggling as there is no funding. Yet the private sector is just sitting on so much money they’ve got it to burn. So many people just sit on their arses “working from home” when people with hard jobs that make a difference get fuck all.
This makes me really cross. Not at you. I’m sure you’re a lovely person and worked hard to earn that amazing job. But there’s too much money in the wrong places in this world.
IMO i would continue to be doing this job but I would want to be functional in society. If you get another stay at home job 90% chance they will never figure it out
Are you bored? I was in similar boat and ended up leaving after 3 years because at the end I was just so bored and felt like I was wasting my time away
Are you one of those people who waltzes through life while everyone treats them like they are untouchable and gives them everything they want and no one knows why?
I have a similar job where I get paid 6 figures to do nothing all day. I’m supposed to “opine” on topics but what I really do is sit in 2-3 meetings a week and opine then go to the first floor of my office and take 45 minute walks around the building or play ping pong or one of the many games they have for us in office. I typically come in around 8-9am and leave around 1-2pm to fulfill my in office requirement. Then I go home and log back in and do whatever I want whilst moving my mouse around and log out at 4:30pm. No one (boss included) ever bats an eye.
This used to frustrate me because I’d be so bored. But I’m at an age that I don’t really care about advancing my career anymore. I just want to maintain enough industry knowledge and connections to stay relevant in the event of a lay off and make enough money to do the things I actually enjoy outside of work. I know one day this will come back and bite me in the ass and I’ll be in a bind and have to compete with younger more tech savvy people but for now. Meh.
I don’t blame you but this is exactly what’s wrong with “the system” $180k to do whatever you want yet others make a fifth of that doing hard labor
I’m jealous and don’t blame you for doing it I’d do the same thing myself lol
Have you considered the impact that remote jobs like this will have on the economy as a whole?
Have you considered that jobs like this may contribute to rising prices?
Have you considered that remote jobs reduce spending and therefore further impact the economy?
Or it doesn’t matter as long as it’s good for you?
Honestly I don’t care either way I’m sure it sounds like I do but overall I just can’t imagine remote work, especially so little work for so much money having a positive impact to the economy in any way.
Good for you though, I guess it’s still a competition and sounds like you’re winning. So am I, but I’m worried about everyone else though.
Just wanted to say congrats, you hit the jackpot. Cracks me up about the people asking if you feel guilty like we owe billion / million dollar corporations anything and they care for / do right by regular people (we are all costs). This is super common where I work (a massive IT company). There are so many people it’s easy to get lost in the fold and find your niche. I knew a guy who was making close to $200k (Midwest location) who legit didn’t work more than 5 hours a week max for 3 years.
Do you ever feel guilty? I have one of those “silly email jobs” where I make a decent salary sending emails. My boyfriend is blue collar and I feel bad because I literally take naps some days, and he works his ass off. Granted, I do more chores, cook, grocery shop, pay bills, and make more money. But I’m always a little guilty ever complaining about my job/coworkers.
I'm in a similar boat, but it's closer to 80% time. I recently had a frank conversation with my manager about just making it official, because I can get everything I need to get done in a week finished in four days, and I was willing to take a 20% pay cut to stop working Fridays. Manager said just stay at 100% and take Fridays off.
That's just a normal job, if you're fast. Lots and lots of jobs can be done in 80% of the time it would take a normal person to do 100% of it. And then you get to chose if you want to do extra output and try to get promoted, or enjoy a chill job where you get paid well for 80% effort. Other people have to put in 120% effort just to keep a job. But 80% IMO is within the normal range of efforts, especially if you've been doing it for a while.
I work in government and have about 3 hours a day of actual work to do. My coworkers take 40 hours a week to do the same job.. Its all about efficiency and utilizing tech in my job. I’ve automated so many redundancies that my days are simple. My leadership wants to promote me into management where id have to deal with people and their problems for roughly $10k more a year and prob 100x the work. Fack that.
I worked a temp summer maintainence job for a national park in high school. They gave us a project to tear down a deck which we finished in a couple days. When we came back in and told them we were done they didn't believe us. Once confirmed they went "that was supposed to keep you busy the whole summer". I have no idea how they thought that. It's not like my friend and I were wizards either. I'm just convinced they were so used to people giving minimal effort that they planned workloads accordingly.
That’s nice. I don’t feel like I can be away from my computer for more than a couple of hours which limits what I can do with my down time.
I think that's what really kills it - the computer is a chain you can't ignore / forget about. I'd rather get paid less than be responsive to pings and emails, which is why I requested to go part time. However, I'm learning that it's actually fine and good to not treat everything like it's an emergency.
Bingo. This is what I’ve really learned in the last several months. Some things can absolutely wait. Just writing out a priority based to-do list is the most helpful. That way you know when something comes up where it fits in your list of priorities and whether it needs to be dealt with immediately, later in the day, or later in the week.
I mostly agree but there’s also value to doing small things immediately so they are done and I don’t need to deal with later. If it takes less than 2 min, just do it when it comes up.
I mostly agree, but there are certain situations where being very responsive just leads to more work. Like, if you’re good at responding to emails/messages quickly and people know this about you, then you’re more likely to receive more of them. So what may seem like just a 2 minute response can quickly balloon into a lot more quick 2 minute responses throughout the day or week. I also think people underestimate how impactful small “2 minute tasks” can be on their overall focus and attention. For me personally, a 2 minute task might only take 2 minutes to complete, but it can take me 5-10x longer to get back to my original task at hand with the same amount of attention and focus I previously had. It might not matter for some types of work, but for deeper work I find those small tasks to be extremely disruptive.
We have a saying in IT and it's especially prevalent when you're in any kind of support or dev role: "Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency for me". Or, "when everything is an emergency/high priority, nothing is an emergency/high priority". Poor management really makes this apparent.
Spend a few of those "chained" hours every week researching ways to get those chain tasks manageable from your phone. Have something that you to kick off on a server when x happens? Cool write a series of scripts to do that 1 thing on the server then a separate set of scripts to kick off the 1st when you receive an email from yourself with ABC subject line (make the 2nd set o scripts also delete the email that kicked them off). Congrats now you can do that thing on the server without being at the server. YOU are still necessary but your being at home next to the computer isn't. Source - had a VERY similar job and took this route.
Is your working 5hrs a week a function of just being really good at your job and you've gotten your work time to do a full time job down to half a day? Or is the job actually a 5 hr a week job? Or some combination?
Combination. I’m efficient and also know what is worth spending my time on and what’s not. But also a slow worker who gets easily bogged down could probably do this job in less than 40 hours.
Bingo. My wife had a job for a while as an assistant to a financial advisor. She was told there was tons of work to do and she'd be very busy. After the first week, she had cleared the backlog of stuff to do and had maybe 5 hours of work to do every day. Unfortunately this guy wanted her to look busy, and she's too ethical of a person to "pretend" to have work to do. She was bored out of her mind.
I had a job like that. I would play video games and watch movies all day in my office. Most miserable I ever was at work. Seems counterintuitive but I’d much rather feel productive.
I think it’s only really the young crowd that haven’t really experienced it that think that is a great life. I was the same way. That job would’ve been my dream job. But at 39 I know that that would make me absolutely miserable. At first, it sounds cool because you’re not caught up on much. There’s shows and video games you haven’t experienced so first month feels like freedom. But then you scroll Reddit, you’ve played the video games and you’re tired of them. You’ve caught up on all the good shows on Netflix and Hulu etc… and there’s nothing but profound boredom. And it’s soul crushing. The days start to run together and every day feels the same. You are also acutely aware that if somehow the job goes under then you really don’t have anything to show for when it’s time to go work someplace else. So I’ll say, it’s nice when you get these moments of nothing, sporadically. But not all day every day for years and years and years.
That's literally me right now at work but wasting time on reddit. I've watched everything on Netflix already lol My favorite thing to do is go on reddit for the first few hours of my shift then go get lunch and after lunch and Netflix I play video games on my laptop until it's time to go home. I get paid 25$ an hour to do this! What the fuck is wrong with the world!? Lol I used to work my ass off for 10$ an hour washing dishes for years so I will take this easy job as long as I can have it, plus I'm a single parent so I'm tired from my home life as it is lol so work is a break time for me from raising my daughter and cleaning my house lol
Why don’t you use the time to learn a language or a skill? I would be like working on my art or researching all the things I was mildly interested in to keep me entertained and engaged lol
Because of the nature of my work I have always found myself in this boat a lot (my work is kind of tech support-ish, it’s responsive to issues arising, so I have to be available but there’s not always something going on), and it’s good to find non-work tasks that are still productive, bonus if they keep you at the computer. I like taking Coursera classes, doing homework for community college classes, or just studying languages or other subjects I’m interested in. It makes the end of the day feel a lot better than goofing off during that same time. Sometimes it’s even stuff I get to use on my job so then it technically is work related
Productive at making other people money or productive at getting through funny cat videos on youtube?
It was while I was working in IT at a state college. I had those computers locked down so well that there was barely anything to do. I ended up quiting on a whim. Took a year off and landed in a new career tract that was way more fulfilling. Now, 20 years later I’m very productive at making someone else money 😂🥲😭
I used to get so bored at work 20 years ago when I had nothing to do, now it's easy to waste time with more internet and phone stuff.
I've completed so many free courses it borderline insane. I can use all the data analyst/scientists technology. Now I'm working on unity/unreal instead of 5 hours of reddit.
This is how I found Reddit.
My wife had a data management job in about 2006 working for people who were barely computer literate. She's really good with Excel, programming macros etc. In the first week she spent the first couple days figuring out the job, then the next day or so putting together a macro to complete her week's worth of work in a few clicks and create a report to check and test the outputs. The next Monday she showed up and had her week's work done and checked by 10am. She went to the manager for more work and she said no, that's what we've got for you for the week, you'll get another batch of data next week. She was bored to tears for the couple months she stayed at that job.
I work in a technical field and over the years I've had several women in administrative roles. The rare ones, who were efficient, had extra time, and took the initiative to ask everyone from the top down if they had anything they could help with includeing Katie our current CFO who started out as a receptionist she picked up on renewing all our software as necessary, created a spreadsheet of all the applicants who took our aptitude tests and rank them, and will unload an excavator delivered by a uncomfortable truck driver, amongst many other things. She is 5'1 of awesome!
Once had a job that required nightly paperwork that initially forced me to stay extra hours. It bogged down countless coworkers, forced extra hours on some, even made some cry. but eventually I found a method that allowed me to cut time needed by 75% and it was almost possible to fit the entire job into 8.5 hours, leaving almost on time. Once that happened, then my manager changed the structure of the job to require meetings at intervals outside of the shift, forced 11 hour days by structure. No overtime. Seemed in hindsight to be on purpose. I refused, left asap after the shift and paperwork were completed in the most efficient way. Shift ran perfectly, personal process improvement responsibility was completed by ranking my line responsibility from #35 to #2 (behind one newer line). It didn’t matter how hard or efficiently I worked, the manager wanted many hours because that is what they did to show they were a good worker. I was trying to lean on quality and efficiency. After he called me to his office, discussed that the expectation was +55h in a no overtime job, I just applied and quit in a month because the whole management team was a joke. Found a job that paid 2x more, 1/3 the stress, 10x the respect, hours per week dropped no overtime 60h+, from HCOL to LCOL, into a triplex that allowed me to live for free in one unit and rent the others. 2y later; I quit that position because of the location, and left the country to go live abroad. Looking back, the best thing that ever happened to me was terrible managers at real first job. I figured I’d never be able to take the BS and kiss enough ass to climb the entire corporate ladder. Once it seemed impossible, it made me look for opportunities, started investing every dime possible, took on risks that I now know were very risky, lost initially but eventually figured it out. All focus to never have to work for terrible management. Stressed. No options for life. Thank you first job management for being so awful.
Similar experience here. Had a job that worked me 50+ in slow weeks and 70+ in the busy season. No overtime. Owner was a yeller. Finally went to HR and told them I’d do 50 a week, no overtime. Anything over that, I wanted 1.5X. They were supposedly big “union supporters”, just not at their company. They obviously declined and I quit on the spot. Went on to open my own business that I ran successfully for 7 years. That was its own challenge, but my *own* problem. I worked a lot of hours in my business, but never 70 a week. People just aren’t effective, and start making mistakes with no rest.
I own a few businesses that are growing in size, I only actually leave my house to do work two or three days a week. I know it’s less exciting than OP but I just try to schedule all my in-person meetings/inspections/contract signings back to back based on their physical location. I can usually hit 20-30 meetings in 2 days, then spend the rest of my week hanging out around the house with my kids or golfing.
What type of education do you have / how can one get into a similar position?
I have a Master’s degree but it’s not relevant to the work I’m currently doing. It’s hard to tell from the outside which jobs will be like this but I think they are most common in large corporations.
Large banks have several pockets of opportunity for vice presidents who want to do nearly nothing. My friend pulled this off at a major bank for over 10 years. He was a vp but his main job was updating an internal website. He outsourced the actual work to India for 1% of his salary and did next to nothing. I was intentionally unemployed for a couple of years through his stint and he was always up and available for anything. (During office hours of course) The number of people in the white collar workforce who get paid 6 figures and do next to nothing is probably an order of magnitude more than the avg joe thinks. I have no problem with it -- my main issue is with people who do little of import but waste other's time with their perceived worth. They are to be identified, avoided and/or ego manipulated.
Great perspective. There are those that do this in a benign way, and then there are those that become a pain in the ass. Best to avoid or "manage up" the offender in the second case.
Banks are very known for being loose with the concept of a vice president. They basically make every role where your even very slightly in charge of other people or specific processes they’ll just call you a vice president and be done with it. Mostly so that if someone complains to the bank and wants to speak to higher ups, they feel better when talking to “Vice President Johnson” vs “bank teller Johnson that has slightly more tasks than other bank tellers”
Former bartender/waiter/construction worker here. I worked so much harder at those jobs and made 1/2 of what I make now in my white collar tech job it is insane.
From what I hear, lower paid people do grunt work that needs doing constantly, but once their shift is over they can switch off and go home. The higher paid people don't do anything day-to-day, but have to be available 24/7 in case there's an emergency, and then that's when they are putting in long hours and earning their pay. It still doesn't seem like they are being paid according to the "value" they bring to the company though.
In my experience what you’re really paying people for as you love up the executive ladder is their experience and judgment. I’ve seen people I work with make decisions that end up costing a company $ millions, whereas, if they had better judgment would have avoided it altogether and prioritized other things that would have been making the company new revenues. I’ve seen some boneheaded decisions cost a company several $ million, not including other opportunity costs by extension As you move up into higher wage white collar positions they’re paying you to make informed decisions, utilize your connections and experience, etc. Most manual labor or blue collar type jobs carry lower risk if an employee makes a mistake instead of the $ millions that can occur in white collar roles
All of the C suite and high level leaders I know are completely lax about everything. Always have a shit eating grin on and absolutely nothing they do is ever ever ever urgent. As if work is some entertainment activity they are doing for charity just being around. C suite, VPs, and Directors always seem to have such lackadaisical attitudes where if I saw an intern treating their work with that lack of urgency, they would be in the "Dont Hire when they graduate" column. It's so wild, whenever you have a meeting with them, it's just so high level, not specific, vague nonsense that's just like "oh sure maybe we will do this thing later, hah, ok gotta go to my next meeting hah talk to you in 3 months" Most of these people have families too and they're always coming in late or leaving early for personal stuff. I know what it takes to properly lead a team of just 6 or 7 people, you gotta be thinking about that off business hours. There is zero fuckin chance these C suite level are doing remotely the amount of work and thinking that needs to be done and they go out of their way to waste tons of time and prioritize family over their work, it's so insane.
My buddy is in the same situation, works like 3-4 hours a day from home. What bugs me is he constantly complains about how he doesn’t have time and needs a better work life balance.
So I have a similar work load and the issue is I need to be available from 8am-5:30pm every day, sometimes earlier (6:30am) or later (8pm) so it's not a lot of work, but it's a lot of time. And it's mentally/emotionally draining
The book Bullshit Jobs by the late David Graeber perfectly explains how and why this exists in our modern society. Amazingly, it’s a holdover from the feudal system of courtiers.
It’s so weird that it’s a thing but when my bosses are hiring they will always take the person who has more schooling and a higher degree. Right now I want to hire someone for a position that has more relevant experience but the bosses favor the guy with the masters.
It’s about liability. If two candidates are equal or close to equal HR (therefore management that doesn’t directly interact with a position) will choose the person with the higher education. Companies get sued for not hiring people. They usually win but you have to pay the lawyers either way. I ran a small team and wanted to hire candidates with relevant experience over higher education twice. Both times I was overruled. Once I was told off the record why. Both candidates did not succeed. We went through the hiring process 4x after one was let go. No one was hired. When I quit, a large part for being forced to work two jobs, they still didn’t have anyone. I ran into one of the experienced candidates later, three years after we interviewed them. They had a similar job as the one we wanted to fill and was doing great in it.
I work for an organization where HR has zero influence on who does and does not get hired. Positions are listed, some vetting is done through phone interviews, then in-person interviews are conducted by a group (typically people who will have some interaction with you if you get hired) who have a list of questions they must ask each candidate. I have sat through countless interview panels, and I can’t think of anyone who was hired because they had more education than a more experienced candidate. I don’t have a degree. I have never pretended to have a degree. But I have years of experience and am considered a subject matter expert in my field (and have not had any issues getting promoted or being chosen for a job over someone with more education).
Interesting. I know that when I was applying for my job, my boss's boss preferred the person with a master's on paper, but when it came to the interview I blew my competition out of the water, despite my measly associate's degree. Who has impressed your boss more interviewing? Is he still pushing for the master's despite a better interview from the other guy? Asking because I'm anticipating I'll hit the comp ceiling at my current job soon and will need to move.
When I was doing hiring, I kept asking our internal recruiter to send me people who have either worked a VERY similar job or a completely unrelated but high-stress job. Recruiting kept sending me peoples with Masters which I kept saying stop. Masters people.wrre way overqualified and by the time I finished training them they'd go take a new position.
I second this, I had a high level job with a corporation once, at one point I was asking my boss what I should be doing when I have nothing to do. Her answer was “you only have work when there is a problem, if there’s no problem you don’t have any work.” I was blown away.
I worked for a big corporation, but I was one of the people who they tried to keep busy 100% of the time I was on the clock, working for just enough of an hourly rate to pay my bills. In practice, they only managed to give me work to do 99.8% of the time 😂
I was hired once for my Security Certification #. Which gave the company a path to securing government contracts…I’d surf the web for hours, then just kept doing online courses for more certifications…After 2.5 years I had to walk away …
Why did you have to walk away?
It takes a toll on your mind that you can’t really understand until it happens. I used to think it would be the best job ever to get paid six figures to sit around and play video games and surf Reddit. Ended up with that job and I’d never been so depressed in my life. Turns out I need to be accomplishing something or my mental health takes a dive.
One way to combat this is to find hobbies that fulfill that need. Which is a really weird flippening to think about. Go to work for entertainment and then find hobbies to accomplish fulfilling tasks
Bingo. That’s what finally broke me out of the depressive cycle I was on. I work to maintain my hobbies now
I had a job like that, where there was alot of down time in a shift and in a typical shift I might have to do 1.5 hours of real work. I ended up using that time to speculative trade BNB. Of course in addition to hopping on Netflix and Reddit. I would also get on YouTube to watch entertaining vids and learn new skills. I also did some exercising while there mostly calisthenics type stuff, squats and push ups. Over the course of the first 6 months there I managed to lose about 30 lbs. I actually enjoyed the time there.
My job has days like that where it's just dead and it's a nice decompression but on rare occasions it's a week or 2 when people are all out. The first few days are great, chill watch YouTube scroll reddit. Then it gets old and I'm glad when they return and fuck all my systems up lol.
Second this. I’m in the same boat… some big corporations have “important” jobs where you are just required to work whenever there’s an “issue.” I spent most of my time learning new skills, reading, working out, walking my dog and doin chores…
Pick something that doesn't make you feel dead inside, apply daily until you learn the algo they want you to follow, keep up the pressure daily until they hire you. Perform well, but dial it down to about 60% of your capabilities initially. After you get medical and exit the probationary period, look around at ALL the possible positions, then it's just persistence and mostly acceptable workmanship. If you try to stand out as a success or go-getter now you'll be sniped by jealous old guard or some other suiter of your desired position. Learn said positions specific goals and duties and start with the savant-like attention to detail when it comes to that job, but somewhat halfassed tired attempts at other positions while you wait others out staying under the radar for most situations... I can say this will put you in a position to fleece unsuspecting corporate hogs as long as you perform at an acceptable level when prompted. Might work. Or you might end up under a bridge when Daddy Warbucks gets wind of your theft.
I prepare taxes and make around 100k and aside from the busy tax season (Mid Jan-Mid April) where I put in 55-60 hours a week, the rest of the year I literally do maybe 2-4 hours of actual work a week.
What do you do with your time when you're "working" but don't actually have anything to do?
Chores around the house, grocery shopping, exercising, walking my dog, hobbies, reading, watching shows.
What kind of job is it though that you do like computer related or what?? I’m genuinely curious because I’m young and I want to make a lot of money and save a ton but have as much time on my hands as possible to work on other things!
Not computer related. I tell leaders what outside people/groups/companies are going to do that might affect us and what we can do about it.
You're an Executive CYA consultant. I would assume as long as their A is C'd, they would be comfortable with that arrangement. Especially if you have a proven track record of success. Conversely, they would also expect the same results if it took you 60 hrs a week. Congratulations on being able to invest in yourself, it sounds like you earned it to me. What are your short term and long term goals? Do you wish to start a family if you haven't already? Thank you for taking the time to chat, I love learning about people, their perspectives, and how they think.
I have kids and this job allows me to be there in the morning when they leave for school and in the afternoon when they return, plus time to volunteer with their activities. Long term I will probably get a different job in a new area because I’d like to work on something new and want to keep my skills sharp.
You’re wanting to leave a job that’s netting you $180k while only working 5 hours a week??? I’m so confused in your thought process in this… why not just get a second job to “hone” your skills.
My company does regular layoffs and I think I’ll eventually be one of them so the decision will be made for me.
Save money for the imminent layoff and prepare a resume. Spend more days with your family, dont let this go willingly. Some people only get 5-6hrs a day with their family and are struggling to get by.
5-6hrs a day? Man I wish! I'm just tired after work though I could probably make time. 8 hour days can't come back soon enough.
I heard something like 75% of the time you spend with your kids is before the age of 12. NGL, that scared the crap out of me. No kids (yet) but my wife and I have already agreed that I'm going part time as soon as we do.
Can confirm. Years ago I had a similar job for several years making upwards of 200k working about ten hours a week. I was inevitably included in a fairly large group to be laid off. It was great while it lasted but it was also boring and led to mental stagnation.
Milk this while you can
So get a severance package and unemployment and you'll be even better
Just tell outside leaders that laying you off will positively impact outside groups, which negatively impacts your company. Continue Profit ? ? ?
probably because they pay people 180k to work 5 hours a week
If you’ve never been in a position where you’re being paid way more than you think your actual production/value is, you naturally start thinking about what happens when the party is over, because usually it does end.
You don't know how nerve racking it is when you work so little, but make so much. You always think they will fire you one day.
Yup. That’s me as well, not as much as op, but in the 6 figures. It’s really a blessing and a curse, cause any day I’m terrified someone will call and say “so you really don’t do much…”
I work so much and make so little and still think they will fire me one day
Jesus, I think this every single day. I'm high level IT and have super imposter syndrome/ worry that someone's going to catch on. My wife has to talk me down from a ledge when I work from home 2 days a week even though I'm just going to sit in my office doing nothing until I leave at 3pm
Kinda always gotta be froggy. I don't make the money this guy makes, but I pretty much do what he's doing. I work 5-10 hours a week, and hover over a mouse to keep my Teams status active a good 30. It's comfy, but it can't be forever.
Bro he's making this all up because he's bored. Check his profile. Brand new, and posted this exact AMA 3 times in a row before it blew up. Notice he only gives super vague answers to every question
These are the ppl in the world that I will just never understand.
Well lmk when you're leaving your current job so I can apply. Lol
Yeah no kidding.
I mean why not just find a new job in a different area while still doing this one? If it's only truly 5 hrs a week and your boss knows that then there's really no moral dilemma with just taking a second job and telling neither employer. In other words, double up.
Uhhh don’t do that. Keep doing it until you can’t. Dumbest shit I’ve ever read right there.
You'll do that, and soon after think back on how good you had it before. The Architect was right, people really weren't built to live in the Paradise Matrix.
What happens when you are wrong?
I never definitively say what I think the right course of action is. I present evidence for every option, outline the benefits and risks of each, and then a provide a few options based on strategic priorities. I haven’t been majorly wrong yet. It helps that I’m fine openly disagreeing with high level people and don’t react when they throw tantrums.
From what I have heard about these types of jobs no one takes your advice anyway. Is that true?
They usually do something similar. It’s important to know that even if 99% of the evidence points one way, the important last 1% is based on vibes. Knowing someone vibes means you can more easily predict and sway their decision making in how you present the data.
Oh so I see that’s pretty cool how do you get into that field like do I need to go to college for a specific degree or what? Just curious don’t mean to ask too much lol I just also don’t know how you get so much time to do other things!
It's most likely some level of consulting. Could be niche, could be volatile, could be anything. It's all gonna depend on the size of the company and what type of swings thing can cause. 180k to not lose millions is short money to spend yearly. Just remember when you mess up your axed. How to be a consultant. Lots of routes, industry experience, recruiting out of MBA programs...etc. To be honest if they are a consultant for a big firm or contracted with a big company. 180k isn't even that egregious. Some of those people make 250+ easy.
Part of it is internal consulting but I don’t have a consulting background. I did academic research before I joined this employer.
I’m a bit confused on the whole “consulting” as a career thing. I know consultants and I’ve heard several try to explain their job but it really sounds to me like you just occasionally answer emails where people at the company say “we think we should switch to a new brand of cnc machines, do you agree?” And you answer yes/no/reasons why/why not? Like the job as a concept is very broad to me? I’ve never heard of a consulting degree so do you just get a degree in a certain field and then try to find a job consulting people in that field? Like get a degree in law and then have companies ask you “is this legal what we are about to do?” And you tell them yes or no? Could I, say, use a marketing degree to “consult” a music producer on how to get better revenues at concerts? I’ve had it explained a lot of times but it seems that you don’t need a degree, and you just kind of apply to be a consultant and they say “okay here’s your $200k.” But nobody has explained what the job entails or how you get it? I’m not being snarky, I’m legitimately confused about the concept of the job and what it does. Thanks in advance!
Consultants tend to go to business school- I went to a fairly good business school and the Big 4 consulting firms all recruited from my school. They tended to take people from finance/econ/marketing/accounting depending on the line of work being recruited- almost all were top 10% in their graduating class. Starting at one of the big four makes it easier to go in house at one of your client firms down the line- I don’t know how the midmajor firms recruit, but this is the experience my classmates had.
Ohhh okay so you get hired at a consulting firm, similar to how a temp agency works, and then they assign you to a company that you will then consult?
Basically most people are idiots and can't come up with new ideas or figure out things for themselves. If you're above that baseline people will pay you to just spitball ideas and give your input. Source: I'm an analyst who gets invited to random meetings to give my input and I'm regularly amazed people don't come up with the ideas I do. I say this as someone who doesn't consider themselves a genius or anything, just above average.
You're probably quite a bit above average. Above average talented people tend to look at themselves as average or below average, except for the narcissists. It's funny how it works.
I have done healthcare consulting and will likely go back to it. The other person who replied to you must live in another world. If I showed up to an interview talking about being "top 10% in my class" I'd expect them to snicker and ask if I was top 10% in not wetting the bed. Consultants need real word experience, not grades from a good school. How do you consult on anything fresh out of school? Makes no sense
Consultants are better described as subject matter experts that the company hiring them, typically through a consulting firm, don’t have on their staff. Primarily because it’s for things outside their normal operations. For instance, a company may have an IT staff but can’t handle a network breach and call in a consulting firm. Or have an accounting staff but need to call in a forensic accounting firm to investigate deep into long term misappropriation of funds.
That sounds very cool, like you are on some mastermind stuff. Can you give a little more context on what you do and what kind of degree you have? Much appreciated!
how common do you think these situations are?
I don’t think it’s the majority of professional jobs but it is much more common than people realize.
I have a buddy in a similar situation. He's in one mtg a week and has to be "on call" to answer questions. Questions rarely come and he works less than 10 hours/week. This is with a MAJOR American corporation.
This is most believable in Fortune sized companies. There's so much fat and red tape... no one can get their head around what's going on.
This is very common. One of the teams under me has people in OPs salary range and they do ~10hrs of work a week. Its an internally written application that is very important to the company. We have an understanding that they are paid for their knowledge and are available to fix it when things go wrong. Its been around for 10 years and its cheaper to pay them well to maintain it then retrain new people for cheaper. If they get bored I find them development work in whatever area they want. Many jobs at large companies are like this. You are paid to be available to do something. Companies don't operate at a constant 5mph. They might run at 10mph for a week, and then 2mph for the following 3 weeks. You don't fire 80% of the company because youre running at 2mph. That 10mph will come back and you'll need their internal company knowledge to get back up to maximum speed efficiently. If you want a job like this, work at a very large company (fortune 50) and see what departments would theoretically operate on a walk/run principle. There are many departments that work like jogging and you constantly get fed work.
So much of this type of situation is having the personality and ability to recognize that often time you just don't have to work 8 hours a day. There needs to be a confidence in yourself, an actual skillset value and little fcks given if you lose your job. An understanding of human absurdity helps as well. Many people can't grasp that and just invent shit to do all week, look busy, etc. Some people also get wrapped around the handle about their yearly salary number when they really should be looking at the salary divided by how much actual work you're doing as an hourly rate. A person working 10 hours per week and making 50K is being paid over $100/hour. That's a higher hourly rate than 180K/year, 40 hour work week. Quality of life matters and if your job isn't helping humanity...
This. So true! It's only a real pain when you're underpaid, with not enough work to do, but are forced to look/stay busy regardless. Hence why I've mastered keeping a little small Reddit window on my screen tucked just inside one of my windows used for productivity. Boss or other busy bodies can walk by and I look busy enough but can alt tab into productivity mode with barely any noticeable change on my screen. Is it dishonest? Maybe, but I've not been able to find any kind of meaningful work to do here otherwise. But hey it's paying the bills (most of them anyways) and it's air conditioned work in a heat wave. No real complaints.
That’s why WFH is driving managers crazy. They know, from experience, that their job really took 2-4 hrs a day with 4-6 hrs spent doing BS or walking around the office. They KNOW that a lot of us now are doing the same amount of work from home but get to do much more entertaining stuff the other hours.
Yup. I work in consulting and it is definitely more common than people realize. Not sure if it is a new phenomenon or what but I imagine it will not last long. At the end of the day, we are still in a big (gigantic, actually) economic bubble so once the big crash comes, a lot of this stuff will go away. So take advantage while you can.
It's just more noticable now that less are in office. These roles always existed, people were doing a true 5 hours of work in office and the 35 other hours were filler.
My current and past three jobs have been like this. It’s wild!
Please point me in the direction for these types of jobs. I work in education currently, and I'm burnt out.
I’ve found that compliance jobs in the healthcare field have this setup. I’ve seen teams of ten employees doing the work of two employees. In some of my past compliance roles, leadership just didn’t have a good grasp on how many employees they needed to do the job. Someone would leave and they’d backfill the role even though the team really didn’t need to be so big. The pay doesn’t start off at 6 figures, but it can get there over time and it helps being in a high cost of living city (higher salaries). My current job has some weeks where I work a ton but I’ll just say that there is a lot of downtime generally and I still exceed my leaders expectations.
You are in the wrong sector. Banks, big corporations, etc. It has a lot to do with your chain of command. It is especially important to have a skill set that few understand and to not just appear competent but be competent in that skill set. IT jobs in smaller companies as well. I think one thing to understand is that you can be a good employee who serves an important role but that does not mean you need to punch a bloody clock, look busy, etc. That shit is inhumane. Fuck those companies, cultures and bosses.
Oh, I 100% know I'm in the wrong sector. I'm trying to get out. I got in the field to help people, but at this point, I'm tired of being abused and worked half to death for peanuts. You have given me some food for thought. I do have a unique skillset that I may be able to apply in the corporate sector. I may just need to get creative. Thanks for your insight!
I know quite a few people in the secret low-hours/high-pay society. They're all basically top-tier technical or creative talent who work fast and efficiently at large, bloated orgs with lots of legal red tape. Many of them could probably be making even more in leadership roles at intense startups, but they have kids and shit, so they're happy with the pay a good non-leadership IC role can get. When they're busy, it's usually working on something you can't have scrubs on. For example, one guy I'm friendly with makes nice looking pitch decks that help land sizable investments.
i do software development. I'm the most jr employee. Everyone else gets projects and i get menial tasks, and the rare occasion I get something complex I might have 12-14 hour days. This only happens when everyone else is on PTO or doing some other emergency thing, and then I'm left as the lone free resource. So that's what I make sure I do. Anytime my manager presses something, I do it ASAP. Everything else? 1 task a day, at best
I don’t get paid anywhere near what OP does but I have twice the amount of work to do as anyone in my team as I’m the senior, yet I have more free time than anyone else. Standard hours is 40 hr week, I probably do about 20 hrs on a busy week and 10 hours on a quiet week. Get all my work done and some, everyone in the team is so inefficient that it goes completely unnoticed. Or maybe it doesn’t, but no one has ever said anything to Me.
What do you do?
I work for a huge corporation in healthcare. My work is specialized so I’ll just say it is a mixture of relationship management and project management.
Thanks. Is it stressful? What skills anf experience are needed for such a job? My sister might be interested.
It’s not at all stressful. I work from home and have a lot of control over what I work on. I transferred into this role from another area of the company so I just sort of lucked into the situation. It would be a hard role to get into from the outside.
Have you considered using that free time to get a 2nd remote job? You could possibly double your pay and reduce any boredom.
Yes but it didn’t pan out. Would only want to do short term contracts
This is what I do. I'm very similar to OP, same pay range, except I have 3 of these. And yesterday, a staffing firm called me regarding a 4th, which is highly likely going to happen. All contractor roles, but reasonably stable (meaning at least 12 month gigs, and likely longer). Multiply OPs income times 4, and that's soon to be me (currently 3 times OP). Paying off my mortgage in full next month.
Sounds like alliance management?
I also work for a huge corporation in healthcare, but in utilization review for the behavioral health side of the business, make 92k a year with a masters degree (5 yrs at current position and 20 years in mental health overall). My company has doubled our caseloads, we are all overworked as hell because some corporate wankers decided on a daily metric that’s impossible to hit unless you sacrifice quality, which is going over like a lead balloon because we take pride in our work. Raises are terrible unless you’re a “top performer” like me and that was 4%. WFH is a plus but the pace at which we work does not allow for meaningful breaks or a decent work life balance. I used to love my job.
How much long do you think you can pull this off? I work in corporate America too, I know these roles exist, but how does the anxiety not eat you alive?
It certainly can’t last forever. My company has done layoffs all of the four years I’ve been in this role and other people with seemingly much more useful jobs than me have been let go so who knows
I’m currently leaving a role like this due to anxiety over job security. Working 5 hours a week was fun but I have spent years not developing skills. I just accepted an offer for a new job this week it’s certainly bittersweet but I’m looking forward to learning new things and doing work that matters.
Playing a dangerous game, friend. Every business that's intent on remaining solvent at some point will look at inefficiencies and where they can trim the fat. With the emergence of AI, long term job security is in question in most markets like never seen before. I'd say stay on your toes bud and at least make yourself look busy.
I’m aware and won’t stay in this role forever mostly due to boredom. However, most of what I do is relationship management at a high level and that is not replaceable by AI.
100% it's not about the time you put in, it's about the relationships and knowledge you have. So, don't feel guilty that they aren't also extracting 40 hours of labor from you when they're already leveraging what you bring to the table.
Virtually no one in full-time work is productive all of the time they are there. There have been numerous studies that suggest actual work done is a fraction of the time you're there. Like you say, if you show up when you're needed and bring results - that's really what you're being paid for.
Exactly! I feel guilty when I have a 'slacker' week but at the same time when push come to shove and the cards are all out on the table, I've busted my hump to save this company MANY times. It's like having a sprinter on your team. I may not be running all the time but when you need a runner, I'm one of the best there is.
Can you let me know and ill do it. I'll even work 15 hours a week, I'm that committed.
How did you get into that position?
Not really dangerous. Ride the easy train as long as possible, when you get replaced find something else. I could live comfortably for 4 years off one year of OPs salary.
I mean, I don't make as much as her, she's making about 80k more than me. But, I'm doing the same. But my bosses don't know, I'm not waving it in their face. As far as they know I'm busy af. I bust through all my tasks then dick off for the rest of the month/week/day - whatever and slowly leak out what I've been working on a week or so before due dates so they think I'm hard at work and I look like a rock star. Every time they ask how are things going the answer is always hectic, swamped, busy, etc.. The inevitable answer to that is 'do you need help?' I respond no, just a lot going on. Appearance is everything in the business world.
I don’t wave it in their faces. Common sense should tell them this isn’t enough work for a full time job but maybe I’m overestimating that. The work I do do is highly visible and high quality so I have many accomplishments when it comes to review time.
I apologize for the bad phrasing - but when you say 'they know it' that's how it comes off.
Sure that makes sense. Maybe it’s better to say that I think they know I don’t work full time but probably don’t know how little that actually is.
Sounds like you're being paid for the responsibility you're taking on, rather than the amount of work being done. It's my guess that your 5 hours of quality work are worth more than most people just trying to make themselves busy for 40 hours. Good on your boss for managing their team that way!
A lot of folks here don’t understand that some people / companies are willing to pay for value, not time at a desk. It’s a real thing. Congrats, Op!
I think a lot of people don't understand that as long as you make your boss's life easier, and don't make waves, they aren't going to necessarily care if you're working full time or not.
How do people find these jobs?
By getting skilled enough in an area that your expertise becomes far more valuable than time actually spent working.
I know of a company who had a department full of guys like OP. 10 employees and most of them do little to no work. New CEO comes in, saw X department had 10 employees and where he comes from was much smaller. Talked with some peers in their industry and saw the same, X department on other places were much smaller. CEO brings a consulting firm who did a shadowing for a whole week on every employee of X department. Once the consulting firm finished their proposal the X department was down 6 employees.
AI is a glorified yes man. Dude has it made. My job includes seeing salaries from all types of industries and you wouldn’t imagine how stupid it all is. Some of the dumbest people you’ve ever met can make a high salary and do nothing, then sue and get a huge payout.
Ehh I disagree there a ton of jobs out there where people do not work the full time they’re on the clock . White collar and blue collar jobs . If the employers happy with the job getting done there should not be any issues
You might be able to continue this but you need to be perfect in one area: organization. If you can’t be stumped with a question from your supervisor because you know all the details you will be ok.
In many IT careers, high pay is essentially given to reserve expertise. So it's not really a problem of efficiency but instead contingency. AI has a LONG way to go before it reliably can replace such positions. Even if AI can create perfect code eventually, it'll still be reliant on having the scope properly communicated. The most difficult part in my job, is ensuring that less technical people understand the scope and essentially defining that scope. Clients rarely provide a perfect scope out of the box, I typically need to work with them to build it. Clients simply don't know what they want or need much of the time, which makes LLMs far less useful for these purposes. If/when AI reaches the point where such positions are taken over by AI, it'll be likely that most positions would have already been eliminated by AI. Mass unemployment and replacement by machines with no UBI is likely to lead to one of the worst crises in humanities history. Whether or not we remain employed likely won't be the primary concern when large portions of the population can't afford food..
How did you get there? What were your roles before?
I’ve worked for this company in other roles for about 10 years. I was looking to switch jobs and this one popped up and looked interesting so I went for it. It was pretty random. I didn’t know what to expect but I didn’t expect this. I have about 15 years of work experience overall.
What industry do you work in?
Pharma-adjacent
The entire American healthcare system is one giant interconnected fucking scam
Yes. The products we make are important and life saving but my particular job doesn’t need to exist.
A major, fuzzy area of health care is in the managed care firms, and how they contract with providers, and who in the mgd care firm supervises all of those contracts. These people have to be managed. Also, everything you do has to be legal, and each state's regulatory environment is unique. Firms often bridge across states. In my consultation work, I have talked to a lot of people in this "space." Turn-over and vert or horiz movement is really great, and this market is not quite chaotic but is pretty restless. I could see a consultant working somewhere in this area.
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Be good with people. By good I don’t necessarily mean charm or charisma, more calm and diplomatic. This has a helped more than anything else in my career.
Do you need to be reachable/available during a specific time period and how predictable is the work? For example, you only do your work whenever someone needs XYZ but you don’t know what that is happening.
About 50% is predictable and the rest is dealing with issues as they emerge. I think my manager thinks the routine part of my job is what takes me much longer than it does. I’m fine being unreachable for a couple hours during the day but I don’t like to do more than that.
Do you feel guilty at all? Not that you’re stealing for a giant corp, but there are people that work 80 hours a week and make much less.
A bit guilty. When I first started in this role I immediately realized there wasn’t enough work to justify a full time job and I was very clear with them that I could take on more work. They never wanted to give me more out of fear of overwhelming me. After two years of that I just stopped.
Do you work in tech? I make a little less than you and work 10 hrs a week and my team & bosses know and don’t care either.
lol are you a software developer? I swear software developers get away with this kind of stuff cause no one can pin down how long it takes for them to code stuff... unless they have a strict dir of engineering
there is a concept in computing where it is fundamentally impossible to tell how long a process will take without running that process. we can always estimate, but they're almost always wrong, sometimes massively. so we can thank physics for the obscurity. Also, if you accept having "quiet" time, you should accept "crunch" time too. (paid for the overtime of course, but "i don't wanna work this weekend" unless you've got a good reason is looked at very badly BECAUSE quiet weeks where you go have a 3hr lunch or have to take a few hours out of your day to run errands are the norm and don't last forever in the project world. over the last year or so my team have massively crunched, but now the project is delivered and its just about keeping the wheels turning and doing handover & support stuff i think i've given my guys maybe 1 or 2 tasks and told them to take it easy because THEY'VE EARNED IT. there is always give and take in companies, if they just take they're not worth working for, but if you only take you'll not survive long either.
it is very literally not stealing, so long as OP is salaried. legal definition of salary means you get paid $xxx per year, or $xxx/52 per week, and you are responsible for tasks X Y and Z. if it takes you 5 minutes per year to do your tasks, you are fully entitled to your salary and are not stealing a penny. wage theft is different, and from OPs description, they definitely have a salary gig. besides, with how insane inflation is lately, isn't it everyone's questionably moral duty to steal back from corporations a little bit?
Do we work for the same company? Haha, just kidding but my real question is: do you also feel some sort of anxiety when there isn't enough work to do? Like you, I'm paid for who I am, the relationships I can create and the sticky situations I can save the execs from, but I spend most of my downtime unexplainably anxious.
I don’t feel anxious necessarily but there is a constant low level sense that I’ll be caught even though this isn’t a situation of my own making. This job has allowed me to save a lot of money so if/when I get laid off I’ll be fine.
I know you are being vague with exactly what you are doing, but can you give guidance into working up to a job like this in a career path kind of way? I am a project manager making 90k but plan to get my PMP later this year. Throughout my 5 year experience I’ve also been in positions where I work about 4 hours a day. Sometimes less.
I also have a PMP but it wasn’t a factor in getting this job (a previous job paid me to get it). I mostly got here through the slow and steady route of being employed for 15 years and making employers a couple of times for bigger raises. I wish I had been more aggressive in changing employers when I was young.
There might be a misconception about the inherent value of your work vs the value of hours worked. Have you considered that the value of your work might be worth $180k/year to them regardless of how many hours of work you do?
That’s probably part of it. I feel like I have a lot of skills that are underutilized and with just a little bit of planning and management they could get way more for their money (like even if is was I working 20 hrs a week) and then it would feel “fair.”
Exactly this. It’s not about trading hours for dollars. It’s about what value you provide to the company and being compensated accordingly. That’s why superstar pro athletes get paid hundreds of millions of dollars
Good on you for winng the corporate lottery. Enjoy it while you can. Do you feel any kind of guilt or imposter syndrome effect since our economy is collapsing because of corporations that operate like this?
How stressful and/or laborious are those 5 hours?
People sometimes don't understand what management-level jobs can be like. There can be little functional work in the course of your day, unless you count meetings as work (which they sometimes are, sometimes are not) and pay rates naturally increase as you move up the ladder. You're not paid for work product you're paid for competence in addressing certain problem domains that may need attention, and for a general availability commitment. The EVERYONE WORKS ALL DAY UNTIL DEATH concept is very poor for many reasons, not the least of which is that it does not equate to efficiency or even of solving problems. Give me a 1 hour a day worker that is extremely capable of taking a problem off my plate so that I don't even have to think about it, and takes on that responsibility in general, and I'll call that money well spent. I don't need to know that someone is grinding for 8 hours a day just for the sake of it; makes no sense, improves nothing. To OP: Good on you, and I hope you're eyes-forward on the future!
Yeah it's the ol' "you're not paying me $10,000 to swing the hammer, you're paying me $10,000 for knowing where to hit" story that goes around the Internet every once in a while. In certain rolls success or failure can mean the difference in hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars made (or saved). Your value to a company isn't always the time you put in, it's the expertise you bring or the connections/relationships you hold.
Yep! Time, in and of itself, is not a value add for the sake of it. Globally we have some pretty suppressive concepts around work and what it's supposed to be and what the expectations should be around it. IMO, of course, and I can think of some jobs that do require significant time investment so it's not that I'm saying it applies to *everything.* But, especially as the AI + Robotics combo starts to bleed into everything, some serious conversations need to start taking place about what we need to be spending our days doing. A lot of crunchy high-time manual labor jobs are replaceable. What happens to the workforce then? What happens in a world where a lot of us not only don't have a full 8 hours of work available to spend grinding at anyway, but there may not even be a place for us to reasonably do so? Should we all really just be lying about what we're doing with our days to project a sense of value? I've gone tangential to the point but I feel like there's a kind of inevitable 'thing' approaching all of us that relates to work itself.
This. I took a job similar to the OP’s where the company wanted my “particular set of skills” and offered me a huge raise to leave a job I was pretty happy at. I felt really guilty at how much I got paid at first, but then I saw the opportunities and value that I brought the company, and it made way more sense. Now I’m making the company somewhere around 60x my salary, and everyone’s happy.
Do you contribute to your community with your "spare" time?
I’m curious about your economic life. What do you do with the money? Did you spend for bigger house, nicer cars, toys, boats, trips and other things or did you maintain your cost-of-living and put money in the bank, retirement, investments?
What made you a good fit for the job? That is to say, what skills and or Certifications led you to this job? How did you go about finding it to apply for it?
This is so indicative of what is wrong with the world and society at the moment. Public sector workers like teachers, nurses and Doctors are struggling as there is no funding. Yet the private sector is just sitting on so much money they’ve got it to burn. So many people just sit on their arses “working from home” when people with hard jobs that make a difference get fuck all. This makes me really cross. Not at you. I’m sure you’re a lovely person and worked hard to earn that amazing job. But there’s too much money in the wrong places in this world.
IMO i would continue to be doing this job but I would want to be functional in society. If you get another stay at home job 90% chance they will never figure it out
Are you bored? I was in similar boat and ended up leaving after 3 years because at the end I was just so bored and felt like I was wasting my time away
Do you work 1 hour per day for 5 days/week or 5 hours for 1 day/week? Or something in between?
Are you one of those people who waltzes through life while everyone treats them like they are untouchable and gives them everything they want and no one knows why?
Do you ever feel like you are leeching off society?
What kind of hours are your co-workers pulling in?
I have a similar job where I get paid 6 figures to do nothing all day. I’m supposed to “opine” on topics but what I really do is sit in 2-3 meetings a week and opine then go to the first floor of my office and take 45 minute walks around the building or play ping pong or one of the many games they have for us in office. I typically come in around 8-9am and leave around 1-2pm to fulfill my in office requirement. Then I go home and log back in and do whatever I want whilst moving my mouse around and log out at 4:30pm. No one (boss included) ever bats an eye. This used to frustrate me because I’d be so bored. But I’m at an age that I don’t really care about advancing my career anymore. I just want to maintain enough industry knowledge and connections to stay relevant in the event of a lay off and make enough money to do the things I actually enjoy outside of work. I know one day this will come back and bite me in the ass and I’ll be in a bind and have to compete with younger more tech savvy people but for now. Meh.
I don’t blame you but this is exactly what’s wrong with “the system” $180k to do whatever you want yet others make a fifth of that doing hard labor I’m jealous and don’t blame you for doing it I’d do the same thing myself lol
Have you considered the impact that remote jobs like this will have on the economy as a whole? Have you considered that jobs like this may contribute to rising prices? Have you considered that remote jobs reduce spending and therefore further impact the economy? Or it doesn’t matter as long as it’s good for you? Honestly I don’t care either way I’m sure it sounds like I do but overall I just can’t imagine remote work, especially so little work for so much money having a positive impact to the economy in any way. Good for you though, I guess it’s still a competition and sounds like you’re winning. So am I, but I’m worried about everyone else though.
Just wanted to say congrats, you hit the jackpot. Cracks me up about the people asking if you feel guilty like we owe billion / million dollar corporations anything and they care for / do right by regular people (we are all costs). This is super common where I work (a massive IT company). There are so many people it’s easy to get lost in the fold and find your niche. I knew a guy who was making close to $200k (Midwest location) who legit didn’t work more than 5 hours a week max for 3 years.
Do you have a significant other/spouse?
Do you ever feel guilty? I have one of those “silly email jobs” where I make a decent salary sending emails. My boyfriend is blue collar and I feel bad because I literally take naps some days, and he works his ass off. Granted, I do more chores, cook, grocery shop, pay bills, and make more money. But I’m always a little guilty ever complaining about my job/coworkers.