I remember seeing Silicon Valley and watching Big Head do nothing at a big company and thought that was never possible.

Working at a FAANG company for 6 years and just completed 3 months of sitting around doing nothing, with 6 more months to come.

Life is indeed stranger than fiction.

I recall working while my sister was still in school.

She'd read the Dilbert comic strips and say "I don't get it."

A year after she got her first job ... she had a daily Dilbert calendar that she loved.

They don't think it be like it is, but it do... it do.

When I worked at a company that had "projects" and "overhead". We would get notes from our managers about telling them when we were on overhead so we would get "make work tasks". The make work tasks were always crap. So I found that if I said, "learning linux" or "learning to program x" when I was on overhead, my manager never assigned me these make work tasks.

@AtuM mid QA. Team got dissolved and now I’m in corporate limbo. They don’t want to fire me due to a big severance and I don’t want to apply to anything since managers don’t want to get me a visa so…it’s been a lot of just nothing

@llcamp

Gonna need you to move down to Storage B llcamp ...

@N00bPancakes Did you take his stapler too!?

Must be very boring

@N00bPancakes that would at least mean that my manager wants me to do something

Yeah, big corps...

But you are a dev. So you actually can entertain yourself without a manager holding your hand.
Learn all the stuff you always wanted to.
Finally get to refactor all the crap that needs it.
Profile the stuff you ever felt was slower than expected - and then make it fast.
And if you are really desperate, you still can improve the test coverage or fix bugs ;P

Not even once in my life as a developer had i the impression that there was nothing to do...

@Oktokolo actually I’ve been just learning stuff for personal projects since all my code was given to other teams. Thinking to get through a postgrad and make the change to mobile dev

@Demolishun researching how to improve our codebase is a good one too. You'll always find problems, and you can actually follow what interests you. It's rewarding and very productive.

@llcamp paid well to do nothing... Wish I had that...

im paid ok.... but do everything.... And well it's not dev work... More support stuff... Chasing other teams to fix their issues

Now the highest paid on team but still doing grunt work a Jr could do...

It sounds like most of my placement where I was paid and had nothing to do so ended up working on my stuff, learning things etc.