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A good strategy, if you work in software development, is to carve out a software fiefdom by writing a system so arcane that only you understand it and now you can’t be fired.

You can use management priorities against them.

Justify the arcane coding practices as prioritizing feature development over tech debt. Let that tech debt GROW.

Spaghetti other systems with integrations with your framework, like a worm. This makes it too expensive to replace your shitty code.

Use a mix of technologies in the name of being agile. A bit of python here. Some Go. You can easily fit 3 JavaScript web frameworks into this.

You can even increase your salary by implementing an “on-call” roster.

The best places to look are internal document management, assets management, invoicing, something process-heavy, compliance-heavy, some place they simply can’t cut costs on and which is far enough away from customers that your stakeholders are all internals who don’t really give a shit.

Ideally you’re attached to a non-tech department so they think you’re a wizard who is solving all their problems, and you always have a smile and helpful attitude. You’re always clocking in late nights to fix their problems (because you didn’t do anything during the day), and they don’t know what SCRUM is so you just have to answer their support tickets. Attitude is everything. You’re their best friend.

If you can fall between the cracks of corpo structures where every person thinks you are busy doing stuff, just not for their Department/Team, you can get by for years while doing very little. Just make sure to always look busy and that any work you do end up doing is good, so that people will think fondly of you for managing to bang out that great Server/Report/App/McGuffin in your limited time. They will be grateful that you did that so well in spire of the many chairs you are filling leaving you so busy and won't actually care that it took three times as long as it could have.

Think of it as getting your stolen wages back.

And never feel guilty. Most people employed by corporations do not do useful work for those corporations, nevermind for society. Capital has removed itself so far from these concerns that, somehow, a product made by minimum wage employees who do the actual assembly needs to have, at minimum, three separate departments and at least sixteen separate bosses managing those departments that all get paid way more then the people who do the work and that all raise the price of the product, which is okay because, well, the other corproations are just as bloated so it's normal to still make profits while tacking on all that graft. You didn't create this stupid system and you shouldn't let it consume you.

Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays.

Just need to mentally check out until i get fired i guess. Use my office hours to make a game the thing i actually want to do.

based. dont let them burn you out.

I've heard of people that use their bullshit job time to go to online school or otherwise learn new skills to get out of the hell that is office work. Maybe thats possible?

in the latter 3 years of my previous job i worked on development of 2 products that ended up being duds, one was canceled right after completion but before it hit the market and the other was released but there's no demand so they stopped further development immediately (which tmk is still the case).

nobody at the top really knows what to do anymore, even though that's their whole job

ceo sure loves posting about how great AI even though the guy barely knows what AI is, maybe grok can replace him

and for extra icing on the cake, this place is run by trump bois but in his second term trump passed a law that basically makes that second product pointless, so it's never breaking even lol

I thankfully have real work to do generally, but the corporate stuff on the side is completely infuriating to me.

Just pointless rituals one after the other, driven by people who serve as the middle men who keep the executives safe from harm and from having to talk to workers, while fully believing that their fake busy work is something of essense.

Most of it consists of logging our work to various company platforms every day, when it's completely possible for management to derive all of that data from a single source instead. One of the tasks is updating the task's story points (an effort estimation of sorts) after the task is complete according to the time it took, while the time is also separately logged by us and updating the estimations defeats the point of estimating in the first place.

It's complete insanity, and the only real purpose of it is so some corporate analyst/consultant/whatever who has not the slightest idea of what the real job consists of, gets to see some red and green lines on a chart, thinking that any of that data bears any relation to reality.

Lol, what do you do?

I'm a maintenance man and I spend most of my time on hearthstone or setting up gigs for my videography side hustle

Maybe its time to play some Helldivers 2 so you can relax a bit.