With Nothing to Do

I was in a similar situation when our megacorp employer axed pur project, but without making it official or reassigning us to something else.

The problem isn't that we had nothing to do, but that we had to pretend to do something. We couldn't just stay home. We had to show up every day and waste 8 hours at our desk before going home.

I remember the feeling of numbness when I left the office. I had scrolled through the entire internet, and it took an hour or two for my brain to reconnect to my body.

Nowadays I often have nothing (urgent) to do, but being self-employed, I can just hop on my bike and go do fun things without any pretense of productivity. That's actually quite enjoyable. I could do it all day long.

I have been in a position where all I needed to do was show up everyday and get paid regardless of whether I did anything or not, I found it demoralizing and eventually quit. The surprising thing was the number of other employees doing the same and simply counting their days until retirement.

Went through a similar situation nearly a decade ago when a startup I worked for was acquired. My manager pretty much told me there was nothing to do and to enjoy it since it might be a rare opportunity.

I spent all my free time basically prepping for interviews knowing I didn’t want to work for the company acquiring us.

Got a higher paying job afterwards, made enough money to buy a house in the Bay, and quit working for startups after this.

I ended up in a similar situation that lasted years and pretty much broke me.

I started out as the sole IT guy at a small consulting company with about 50 users, half on site back in 1997. There was plenty of work to make it a full time job.

As time went by, things got more and more reliable, and my workload dropped. There was an in house database that I tried to upgrade, but couldn't get buy-in to switch over... I tried 3 times, and eventually gave up.

In the end, system admins weren't a job anymore, and I was stuck... Showing up, trying to be super helpful when things broke, otherwise surfing the net and waiting for the end of the day. I knew it was unsustainable, but didn't want to self destruct the one job I knew and paid well.

It was hell, I was well liked, but it was still hell. The axe fell in 2012, and I was relieved in a way.

I took a job after that making gears... Some of the gears I worked on will still be in service a century from now. It was very fulfilling, but the pay and commute sucked.

Then I got Covid, and now Long Covid.. so I find myself at home back in the same place... Nothing to do, unable to sustain thought long enough to be useful in a job, and without the endurance to make gears.

So first of all, thanks for writing the books. I'm a happy customer :)

Second, I felt a lot of empathy for this, having gone through a similar situation, ultimately the company getting acquired during the pandemic.

I've learned many things, but I think I can share one takeaway that might resonate in this conversation:

Know thy users.

Keep the people that are directly using the software in mind. In times of corporate strife: remember the users. Let their happiness be your guiding light.

There are real people that depend on the software we write. Regardless of how any corporate decision turns out, those people will always be thankful that you made their day to day lives a bit easier.

Find the disproportionate pain points. That one preference that were it defaulted differently would save 90% of users a one time frustration when on boarding. That one janky error message that no one understands. Fix that sort of stuff, the stuff that users are interacting with regularly.

At the end of the day, unless you're contractually entrenched at oracle levels, if the users aren't happy, then whatever corporate structure that puts food on your table probably wont do well. They may not do well if users are happy, but very likely wont if users are angry.

Any given change might not matter to your executives, but they matter to your users, keep them in mind and heart and you'll know what to do. And periods of corporate strife like in the article are a great time to actually get that sort of stuff prioritized, because no one can say anything else is more important.

I have programmed nearly every day at many different companies for 54 years. Nothing, NOTHING, I've written is useful anymore. My work at Worldcom, for example, simply vanished when the company collapsed.

this is why you have a Trello board of ideas (your own personal coding projects)

even if the situation is dreadful, you finally have time to choose one from the list and start doing it

I've been in this exact situation, 1999 as the first wave of dot-coms were going under.

If your company is on the verge of bankruptcy, you are not going to be acquired. Anyone talking to you about an aquisition is just stringing you along until you run out of cash. Then they can pick up your IP and any other assets for pennies on the dollar in a liquidation.