to those of you who get bored at work if there's lots of downtime, why?

vestmoria@linux.community to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 116 points –

I read posts about people quitting jobs because they're boring or there is not much to do and I don't get it: what's wrong with being paid for doing nothing or not much at all?

Examples I can think of: being paid to be present but only working 30 minutes to 2 hours every 8 hours, or a job where you have to work 5 minutes every 30 minutes.

What's wrong with reading a book, writing poetry or a novel, exercising, playing with the smartphone... and going home to enjoy your hobbies fully rested?

Am I missing something?

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I'm still in the beginning of my programming career (maybe also the end, looking at how AI is going, lmao) and at my previous job I had fuckall to do. I spent nearly a year without a project, working basically 30 minutes a day. I quit mainly because I was afraid that when I change jobs I will have say 5 years experience on paper, but the knowledge for 1, because I've barely done anything.

Work isn't always about money, you also want to learn stuff so you can make even more money in the future. You can't really do that if you get paid to watch Youtube all day.

I had a job that was kind of like this. I spent pretty much all of my down time writing a web game that later got me a software job.

I wasn't bored, though. I miss working on that thing.

That's a big thing for tech jobs, especially with the relatively low security. If you're not working you're not learning, and if you're not learning you're behind the curve and seen as "less valuable".

Especially with how specific job postings are, if you don't have the right combination of experience, you're worthless. So if you're bored maintaining some ancient irrelevant stack, you're worse off.