One thing I've noticed in my career in IT - and I've spoken to others who have noticed the same - is that at some point, you transition from being paid to *do* lots of things to instead being paid for *knowing* lots of things.
I'm not always super busy, but my boss knows if they need an answer, or if something needs to be done ASAP, or if the proverbial hits the fan, that I can get it done. And that's why they pay me what they pay me.
YMMV of course.
As an employee for 15 years it feels weird bit like cheating. Then I look at the cost of living, I quickly adjusted my philosophy. But yes, it can take a bit of time adjusting from getting paid to know what to do as opposed to getting paid to do.
Sometimes I absolutely feel like I’m taking the piss getting paid vs what I do. Then I’ll get an escalation from the Service Desk where some muppet has completely misunderstood a request, taken the User and their Manager on a completely wild goose chase for 3 months, and when they finally realise they are out of their depth flick it over to our team and we resolve in a week or 2.
I don’t think I’m that smart, but if this is the competition, I think I’m worth every cent.
A bit off topic, but how do you keep the ego in check and not get frustrated at the muppets or develop an us vs other areas mentality?
I've found many areas I've worked in, the more experienced you become the more cynical you become about other areas. And I fall into it too. I don't want to, but when there's an 'obvious' and simple solution that would take a week vs the several months of buck-passing before it get to you...
In my 20’s I used to call the shit out all the time, but it ends up making you look like a wanker. I think my problem and a lot of IT people’s problem is being “the IT genius” is a big part of their identity, and we relish to show off how much we know. Unchecked righteousness might be the biggest human flaw.
I’ve learned that regardless of skill people will always seek to work with people who are good to work with, so when I come across the really badly fumbled cases I don’t make a big song and dance, I just help progress things and move on. Without the shame and the lecture, the hope is they just come and ask sooner the next time.
In the end, the biggest thing you can do to keep you ego in check is getting to 30 realising that everything you’ve ever done in IT was obsolete within 5 years, if it even worked in the first place, and it’s all pretty much meaningless. With that I focus more of my identity around being a dad, my dog, and being shit at tennis instead. It’s much healthier, and work is more fun.
I know what you mean, when it's on it's on. We had a situation last week where we'd lost a critical spare, 20 wk lead time, and it was impacting production, I said 'i think we have an old one over here somewhere '.. BAM bang on, saved $250k lost output.
I tell the young engineers sometimes you gotta wear your undies on the outside.
Can confirm, I work fifo as a fitter working 3 weeks on 1 week off and sometimes all I do is drink coffee and wounder what the point of life is for weeks on end and other times I'm working my ass off
Absolutely. But that also comes with a transition in how much work you do too. Just take a look at what Service Desk, Desktop, and Sys Admins go through. The work is endless. The user issues come in by the dozens, every hour. Everyone is angry and needs everything done yesterday. They're liable for the entire functionality of all IT services. And most are on 60-100k. The turnover of these roles is also high, so knowledge comes and goes, and it's common for your team to be running at 50-80% positions filled. But take a step up a little, and to the side, and you're getting paid 150k to review IT processes. Or getting paid that amount to do some reporting. Or getting paid that amount to look after the support of one application. The bottom line of most industries sees the hardest work, the highest pressure, and the lowest pay.
Problem with my job is that I am always asked about things, and to top it off I also get lots of work, so I have to have knowledge plus I have to do work.
In this case, it actually makes sense to pretend you know little so you get time to get the work done.
i am also in the same situation. I have worked 10+ years and i get paid cheap. The only reason I can't leave atm because I have unused annual leave and I will need to wait until mid year to spend a big chunk of it to go overseas. I also have a newborn too.
I am also finding it difficult to upskill and not really the brightest in the room. What to do....hmmm...
When i was single and living with parents, i was able to do this. I was able to save 80-90% of my wages. Nowdays, maybe 30 to rarely 60%. Still trying my best to save up but I have a really long way to go to achieve leanfire.
Huh. I'm going through this ATM, but I'm not in IT. I'm not crazy busy like I used to be, but I find myself in a lot of meetings working situations out with people. I wasn't sure if this was normal, but it helps to know this is something other people experience
Yep pretty par for the course, I still write code when its high end stuff but alot of the time i'm just showing others how to code effectively or solve certain problems or being pulled in to consult on decisions.
I still do a full days work, Just half of it is spent doing more soft work, might sound cushy but it took 20 years of hard work to be comfortable here.
Hey nice thread, I read the old post too.
I was in this exact same situation myself. I was working for a major organization in Sydney and earning a little bit more than you and working less. I was considered a top performer in my team and was well regarded in the company but the truth was my job would ultimately take me 1 to 2 hours a day. The reason this occurred for me, was I think because I am a very efficient worker and a lot of people in offices are not - they waste time chit chatting or don't know how to use basic features of office and excel which save them time. Something which would take a colleague 2 days to do, I could do in 30 minutes. Of course I shared my knowledge to improve processes but it didn't ultimately change much - big organizations are a machine and hard to influence.
I personally struggled a lot in this situation because while the pay was great - the work was unfulfilling. I hated the days of being in the office because I would go bored out of my mind, I tried of course asking for more work repeatedly and taking on as much as responsibilities available to me but it ultimately didn't take up 'more' work hours.
I ended up leaving the position last year. In the first two years I milked it a lot - during COVID and lockdowns I spent time focusing on my hobbies, later I ended up taking a second job and did both at the same time and finally could save for a house. After this I just couldn't do it anymore, I resigned because I could see that my professional and technical skills weren't improving I was stagnating so it was time to move on. I think it's important for personal growth that we keep challenging ourselves. So yes - I was a person who quit a high paying job because I was not doing enough, however I did enjoy it for the while it lasted.
The next role I took was very hard work and extremely stressful and long hours. Maybe I am a sucker for punishment, though I don't regret leaving at all.
This may be a little of topic, but when you talk about efficiency, what kind of things you exactly mean? What kind of tasks? Do you program macros? Or is it other Excel tools you benefit from?
I am always keen on improving my efficiency.
Ever been on a screenshare or watching someone use their computer and it would task you perhaps 5-10 seconds to achieve something that takes them minutes to do? Extrapolate that over days, weeks and months and you're streets ahead. It might just be using keyboard shortcuts to open a new tab or undo last tab you closed whereas they reopen the site again and log in, find where they were.. Etc. Even typing speed will make you hours ahead of others in the long run. Simple tricks can get you a long way.
Better methods of achieving the same outcome. One person might book a meeting with half a dozen people to find out the same information you could achieve with a slack message to the right person and knowing to ask the right questions.
Do you create or attend needless update meetings that serve little purpose? Can you decline them and spend the time on more effective work?
Are you organised and know how to search through internal docs to find answers quickly? Do you Google everything you don't know first and see if you can find out the answer quickly? Do you know how to use Google properly with the right keywords?
And finally have you started using chat gpt to assist in whatever you do at work? I'm not saying get it to write things for you or be you but utilise it properly. Get it to brainstorm ideas or ask it to critique something you've done.
Thanks for your reply! I pretty much do all that, but chatGPT, which is not very applicable to my job and also because I refuse to give them my phone nr to activate the account.
Thank you for the sharing mate, what were the considerations of picking your current job vs all the other available job opportunities? Were you looking for a step-up of roles in particular?
For me, I wanted more money and better quality work. Also the boredom during work hours was actually draining me of all my energy. I know some people would love to be paid to do 'nothing' but it does take a toll when your sitting at a desk inside an office every day with little mental stimulation - I saw it as a well dressed prison.
Posts like this are a healthy reminder of how much excess and loose fat that this economy has and needs to trim.
People complaining that they are getting paid too much to do nothing.
Bearish sign.
I can see the signs with how things have played out in my company for the last year. Redundancies are coming. I’m safe for a few quirks on how a little restructure went. But I know half the guys I work with aren’t.
Eh maybe. After working high up at a few banks and telcos I’m confident you could fire 80% of the employees at some of the biggest Australian companies and they’d run much the same
It could also be a sign of just how much busy work and meetings for meetings' sake we've been engaged in.
It's also a matter of the type of work. I don't think the people completing endless tasks (making stuff, processing paperwork, etc.) have much fat to trim. They're still flat out and if they aren't, yeah, their hours can be cut.
Fields like IT, operations, logistics, academia, creative work, etc. don't follow a usual workload. You're paying them to contribute knowledge or deliver an end product; they're more like infrastructure than traditional labour
Then again. As a Business Analyst you find people creating reports that no one reads as a previous manager thought it was a good idea and no one's checked if it's used or useful still.
Sometimes at least in my field of IT, there might not be much going on day to day but if shit hits the fan (e.g get hit by cyber attack or corruption where data goes missing) I have the expertise to fix things and get out of the hole. Some staff are an insurance policy.
What you’re missing is that ppl who are top performers are complaining because they’re not being challenged.
Cutting the fat would not include any of us because we are at the top, they’d cut the ones who are incompetent/inefficient and think showing up in the office everyday will save their job.
It's also possible for somebody to actually be worth their paystub whilst having a lack of hourly tasks to do. A major issue with the current economy is that it tends to still be rooted in the industrial norms of 'oh Bob needs to spend 50 hours a week making widgets'.
Plenty of people in thinking jobs will be performing adequately to justify their paycheck even if they haven't got 40 hours of actual tasks.
Been there before and was also considered a high performer, spent the time in side gigs that now supplement income very handsomely, hoping to grow that a lot further. Ultimately after setting that up I left my main gig to travel whilst still getting income from the side gig, and will return to a new job soon. It’s important to see life and jobs as phases in my view, as primary purpose of a job is income. Coolant do nothing forever, but if it pays the bills and sets you up for the future it enables you to do other things
One thing I've noticed in my career in IT - and I've spoken to others who have noticed the same - is that at some point, you transition from being paid to *do* lots of things to instead being paid for *knowing* lots of things. I'm not always super busy, but my boss knows if they need an answer, or if something needs to be done ASAP, or if the proverbial hits the fan, that I can get it done. And that's why they pay me what they pay me. YMMV of course.
Yes you become an insurance policy, paid for what you know not what you do
As an employee for 15 years it feels weird bit like cheating. Then I look at the cost of living, I quickly adjusted my philosophy. But yes, it can take a bit of time adjusting from getting paid to know what to do as opposed to getting paid to do.
Sometimes I absolutely feel like I’m taking the piss getting paid vs what I do. Then I’ll get an escalation from the Service Desk where some muppet has completely misunderstood a request, taken the User and their Manager on a completely wild goose chase for 3 months, and when they finally realise they are out of their depth flick it over to our team and we resolve in a week or 2. I don’t think I’m that smart, but if this is the competition, I think I’m worth every cent.
A bit off topic, but how do you keep the ego in check and not get frustrated at the muppets or develop an us vs other areas mentality? I've found many areas I've worked in, the more experienced you become the more cynical you become about other areas. And I fall into it too. I don't want to, but when there's an 'obvious' and simple solution that would take a week vs the several months of buck-passing before it get to you...
In my 20’s I used to call the shit out all the time, but it ends up making you look like a wanker. I think my problem and a lot of IT people’s problem is being “the IT genius” is a big part of their identity, and we relish to show off how much we know. Unchecked righteousness might be the biggest human flaw. I’ve learned that regardless of skill people will always seek to work with people who are good to work with, so when I come across the really badly fumbled cases I don’t make a big song and dance, I just help progress things and move on. Without the shame and the lecture, the hope is they just come and ask sooner the next time. In the end, the biggest thing you can do to keep you ego in check is getting to 30 realising that everything you’ve ever done in IT was obsolete within 5 years, if it even worked in the first place, and it’s all pretty much meaningless. With that I focus more of my identity around being a dad, my dog, and being shit at tennis instead. It’s much healthier, and work is more fun.
Definitely true… I just make it my personal OKR - the less I’m doing the more I’m doing right. I’m busiest when shit hits the fan.
I know what you mean, when it's on it's on. We had a situation last week where we'd lost a critical spare, 20 wk lead time, and it was impacting production, I said 'i think we have an old one over here somewhere '.. BAM bang on, saved $250k lost output. I tell the young engineers sometimes you gotta wear your undies on the outside.
Those are the days where you go “I earnt my paycheck today” 😂
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Can confirm, I work fifo as a fitter working 3 weeks on 1 week off and sometimes all I do is drink coffee and wounder what the point of life is for weeks on end and other times I'm working my ass off
Absolutely. But that also comes with a transition in how much work you do too. Just take a look at what Service Desk, Desktop, and Sys Admins go through. The work is endless. The user issues come in by the dozens, every hour. Everyone is angry and needs everything done yesterday. They're liable for the entire functionality of all IT services. And most are on 60-100k. The turnover of these roles is also high, so knowledge comes and goes, and it's common for your team to be running at 50-80% positions filled. But take a step up a little, and to the side, and you're getting paid 150k to review IT processes. Or getting paid that amount to do some reporting. Or getting paid that amount to look after the support of one application. The bottom line of most industries sees the hardest work, the highest pressure, and the lowest pay.
Good managers come through the trenches so that they can support and defend their team Some people just aren’t cut out to ever leave the trenches
Yeah, definitely this.
Problem with my job is that I am always asked about things, and to top it off I also get lots of work, so I have to have knowledge plus I have to do work. In this case, it actually makes sense to pretend you know little so you get time to get the work done.
i am also in the same situation. I have worked 10+ years and i get paid cheap. The only reason I can't leave atm because I have unused annual leave and I will need to wait until mid year to spend a big chunk of it to go overseas. I also have a newborn too. I am also finding it difficult to upskill and not really the brightest in the room. What to do....hmmm...
Try to leanfire.
When i was single and living with parents, i was able to do this. I was able to save 80-90% of my wages. Nowdays, maybe 30 to rarely 60%. Still trying my best to save up but I have a really long way to go to achieve leanfire.
Huh. I'm going through this ATM, but I'm not in IT. I'm not crazy busy like I used to be, but I find myself in a lot of meetings working situations out with people. I wasn't sure if this was normal, but it helps to know this is something other people experience
Yep pretty par for the course, I still write code when its high end stuff but alot of the time i'm just showing others how to code effectively or solve certain problems or being pulled in to consult on decisions. I still do a full days work, Just half of it is spent doing more soft work, might sound cushy but it took 20 years of hard work to be comfortable here.
Hey nice thread, I read the old post too. I was in this exact same situation myself. I was working for a major organization in Sydney and earning a little bit more than you and working less. I was considered a top performer in my team and was well regarded in the company but the truth was my job would ultimately take me 1 to 2 hours a day. The reason this occurred for me, was I think because I am a very efficient worker and a lot of people in offices are not - they waste time chit chatting or don't know how to use basic features of office and excel which save them time. Something which would take a colleague 2 days to do, I could do in 30 minutes. Of course I shared my knowledge to improve processes but it didn't ultimately change much - big organizations are a machine and hard to influence. I personally struggled a lot in this situation because while the pay was great - the work was unfulfilling. I hated the days of being in the office because I would go bored out of my mind, I tried of course asking for more work repeatedly and taking on as much as responsibilities available to me but it ultimately didn't take up 'more' work hours. I ended up leaving the position last year. In the first two years I milked it a lot - during COVID and lockdowns I spent time focusing on my hobbies, later I ended up taking a second job and did both at the same time and finally could save for a house. After this I just couldn't do it anymore, I resigned because I could see that my professional and technical skills weren't improving I was stagnating so it was time to move on. I think it's important for personal growth that we keep challenging ourselves. So yes - I was a person who quit a high paying job because I was not doing enough, however I did enjoy it for the while it lasted. The next role I took was very hard work and extremely stressful and long hours. Maybe I am a sucker for punishment, though I don't regret leaving at all.
This may be a little of topic, but when you talk about efficiency, what kind of things you exactly mean? What kind of tasks? Do you program macros? Or is it other Excel tools you benefit from? I am always keen on improving my efficiency.
Ever been on a screenshare or watching someone use their computer and it would task you perhaps 5-10 seconds to achieve something that takes them minutes to do? Extrapolate that over days, weeks and months and you're streets ahead. It might just be using keyboard shortcuts to open a new tab or undo last tab you closed whereas they reopen the site again and log in, find where they were.. Etc. Even typing speed will make you hours ahead of others in the long run. Simple tricks can get you a long way. Better methods of achieving the same outcome. One person might book a meeting with half a dozen people to find out the same information you could achieve with a slack message to the right person and knowing to ask the right questions. Do you create or attend needless update meetings that serve little purpose? Can you decline them and spend the time on more effective work? Are you organised and know how to search through internal docs to find answers quickly? Do you Google everything you don't know first and see if you can find out the answer quickly? Do you know how to use Google properly with the right keywords? And finally have you started using chat gpt to assist in whatever you do at work? I'm not saying get it to write things for you or be you but utilise it properly. Get it to brainstorm ideas or ask it to critique something you've done.
Thanks for your reply! I pretty much do all that, but chatGPT, which is not very applicable to my job and also because I refuse to give them my phone nr to activate the account.
Thank you for the sharing mate, what were the considerations of picking your current job vs all the other available job opportunities? Were you looking for a step-up of roles in particular?
For me, I wanted more money and better quality work. Also the boredom during work hours was actually draining me of all my energy. I know some people would love to be paid to do 'nothing' but it does take a toll when your sitting at a desk inside an office every day with little mental stimulation - I saw it as a well dressed prison.
Have you seen r/overemployed
Posts like this are a healthy reminder of how much excess and loose fat that this economy has and needs to trim. People complaining that they are getting paid too much to do nothing. Bearish sign.
[This comment has been removed to protest Reddit's hostile treatment of their users and developers concerning third party apps.]
I can see the signs with how things have played out in my company for the last year. Redundancies are coming. I’m safe for a few quirks on how a little restructure went. But I know half the guys I work with aren’t.
Oh man you think this is just a recent phenomenon?
Not a recent phenomenon but a much more pervasive one now with tech. Just look how much fat musk trimmed at Twitter with no impact.
Eh maybe. After working high up at a few banks and telcos I’m confident you could fire 80% of the employees at some of the biggest Australian companies and they’d run much the same
Ye that general rule that 80% of work is done by 20% of the people applies to most places
It could also be a sign of just how much busy work and meetings for meetings' sake we've been engaged in. It's also a matter of the type of work. I don't think the people completing endless tasks (making stuff, processing paperwork, etc.) have much fat to trim. They're still flat out and if they aren't, yeah, their hours can be cut. Fields like IT, operations, logistics, academia, creative work, etc. don't follow a usual workload. You're paying them to contribute knowledge or deliver an end product; they're more like infrastructure than traditional labour
Then again. As a Business Analyst you find people creating reports that no one reads as a previous manager thought it was a good idea and no one's checked if it's used or useful still.
Sometimes at least in my field of IT, there might not be much going on day to day but if shit hits the fan (e.g get hit by cyber attack or corruption where data goes missing) I have the expertise to fix things and get out of the hole. Some staff are an insurance policy.
What you’re missing is that ppl who are top performers are complaining because they’re not being challenged. Cutting the fat would not include any of us because we are at the top, they’d cut the ones who are incompetent/inefficient and think showing up in the office everyday will save their job.
Everyone on Ausfinance thinks they are the top performer. Until they are made redundant.
It's also possible for somebody to actually be worth their paystub whilst having a lack of hourly tasks to do. A major issue with the current economy is that it tends to still be rooted in the industrial norms of 'oh Bob needs to spend 50 hours a week making widgets'. Plenty of people in thinking jobs will be performing adequately to justify their paycheck even if they haven't got 40 hours of actual tasks.
Especially if Bob’s job is to find a way for widgets to be produced by a machine 24/7
Been there before and was also considered a high performer, spent the time in side gigs that now supplement income very handsomely, hoping to grow that a lot further. Ultimately after setting that up I left my main gig to travel whilst still getting income from the side gig, and will return to a new job soon. It’s important to see life and jobs as phases in my view, as primary purpose of a job is income. Coolant do nothing forever, but if it pays the bills and sets you up for the future it enables you to do other things
Interesting update. Sounds like you're level headed and making the most of things.
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I mean you could always work your ass of for $60k if you would prefer?
Pls message me the job advertisement for the position that you previously held? Asking for a friend LOL
I’m in this position now, so thank you for sharing. Knowing I’m not the only one in the golden shackles helps.
Yes. Have done it before I can't be bored. Hence why I don't do maintenance roles
Honestly this seems like a great arrangement to me! Especially given what you’ve been able to do with it
I quit a 300k job more than 10 years ago because I was doing nothing
No, but I'd quit because it's not paying me enough.
You should quit and recommend me as your replacement.
yikes, i wish i could get paid 100k+ for doing nothing
How come you never considered a second full remote job where you actually get to keep your skills/learn/etc?