Ask Lemmy

I've been there. I worked on learning a language some, read so many books, began documenting an organizing large data sets I had for personal projects. I also spent so much time watching speed runs.

Most days I doomscroll fediverse

Yep. Same. When I worked at an office, my coworkers and I would play ping pong a lot.

Also, I would work on my own software projects. This has the advantage that it looks like you're doing work work.

Or... go off into a corner of the office and play some games on Steam.

Take long walks. I used to be able to kill about half an hour walking around my old office park. Do more laps...

Drive somewhere kinda far for lunch.

Grind leetcode. Doesn't hurt to stay sharp.

I'm making a browser based game about losing your job and then picking up cans to deposit them at 10c a piece for a living. Like the existential paperclips game.

Does this job have a claim on IP you create on company time? If not, I'm making videogames and contributing to FOSS projects.

When I was in this position I would either be working out, gaming, Or studying for a class. Rotate your task because it will get boring.

Start planning my new off-grid life. I do industrial automation, and if those robots start being able to program themselves, I'm leaving.

If I was still young and ambitious: work on certs and resume building.

Now that I'm old, burned out, and planning to retire (financially ready or not) I primarily work on game prep for my tabletop RPGs hobby.

You can never hit a wall with programming. You can always keep improving your scripts. You could add observability or logging. Try different languages. Create a DSL for it.

Check out Language Oriented Programming with Racket.

Create a full test suite. Unit tests. Integration tests.

Where are you running your scripts? Do you have a deployment pipeline?

Workflow tools like Apache Airflow make for nice observability.

Fanfiction.

You just need to find a hobby that you can do at work. Can be reading books, making music, playing video games, watching TV shows, chess etc.

Working on some hobby coding project could also be fun. When work is slow I work on an HTTP client that's terminal based.

Also check if you can go out for a haircut or do misc errands and with enough excuses you could put a gym workout while at work. Maybe you say you have a dentist or a doctors appointment but go to the gym instead. Kids are also a great excuse like "my kid is sick today so I'm going to pick him up and leave early" and you just go to the gym and do groceries.

If I had that type of situation I'd play tons of video, right now I'd play factorio and go to the gym. I might also see if there are some nice people at work that I can schedule a meeting with to just banter.

Make an pseudo-CEO AI agent for the company you work for ... and track its decisions versus the actual CEO's performance.

Let their own data destroy C level careers and their money hoarding. Publish book. Retire.

Welk I’m here aren’t I?

If you are young, maybe ask your boss for more work or take additional work from a related position. If you let your skills rot it will end up costing you in the long run.

Automate the undesirable tasks of my life. Probably means learning to write mobile apps. But maybe some AI tools for like making a meal plan every week. Or contribute to existing open source projects that accomplish the same.

Contribute to or make my own open source project. I dabble right now, but I just don't have the time to polish up my projects for public release or to learn an unknown codebase...

Work on the backlog! Of what? Anything! My back log of books, video games, hobby projects sitting half finished in my workshop! My boss would stop by and I'd have my soldering iron and extractor fans set up and I'd be like "Yeah, I'm waiting on the phones right now."

Waste it doing random shit. If I was in your position I'd start getting through my watch and read list. Oh and learn a new language, that never hurts.

Be careful on the work desktop. You could go to prison for being on the fediverse if they find out (if in america).

I'd find other stuff to improve on. If the employer provides access to an online-based training platform (ex: Coursera, Udemy) I'd enroll in some trainings I may find useful for either my current position or another I'd like to have.

There's no better time to learn than while being paid at work, without having to deal with the daily grind.

Learn something like gdscript so I can start making my income less dependent on the company that currently employs me.

I read books on algorithms and data structures and typed out the examples. The work computer was locked down for installers but I could download open source programs and compile Java. One of the more interesting chapters I remember was parsing basic math operations for a calculator into a tree structure, evaluating it, and converting it between infix and postfix notation.

My boss probably noticed I had automated things because sometimes they would send new data requiring an urgent redo of everything, and I would send results back in a minute instead of the 8 hours it used to take. He didn't seem upset, more like pleasantly surprised that a temp-to-hire pulled it off. I even got a compliment at one point, which never happened before.

One day I applied for another job that was a lot of what I already did and some of what I wanted to do more of. I called in sick to do the interview and got the position. It was good timing because the place I was at got acquired, and that never goes well if you're in a group that overlaps what the parent company already has.

It's a tale as old as time

Honestly an AI use I'm kinda OK with is that it's making audio transcription services good enough that nurses can start using them and they auto generate a flowsheet for the qualitative data from spoken word (you'd review before submitting) and tbh if I could get back to providing actual patient care instead of filling in spreadsheets that would be cool.