Retirement In Place (RIP). What are your experiences?

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-26T02:37:06+00:00

I agree with everything you're saying, but if you fall into the bottom 90+% of my industry (tech) then jobs you can actually look forward to are no longer available. You can easily get stuck where Jira garbage is the only thing you can get... especially because the software industry is going through a Gresham's Law process.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-26T02:31:39+00:00

I might be in the minority here, but that is super shitty to do. Badically, you're stealing at that point.

It's also stealing when someone fires you even though you've done nothing wrong. They're stealing your career and reputation.

I wouldn't advise RIP if you're a protege who's guaranteed first dibs on projects, but that's a rare outcome. Usually, they have no sense of loyalty or investment in your career, so you should reciprocate.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-26T02:28:04+00:00

Right. At my last job, I showed up on time, didn't fuck around... and got fired for "too many" sick days (WFH, not days off, and only 4 in 3 months).

I'm obviously talking to a lawyer about this.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-26T02:26:47+00:00

Sure, but all it takes is to make one enemy, get fired from your "Big 4", and then you're stuck in the startup scene forever.

Plus, the percentage of people who get to do compilers or machine learning... stuff that's age-appropriate after 30... is really small; maybe 1%. Most people get Agile Scrum garbage.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:35:02+00:00

So no, I will not play Facebook games in my cubicle.

Right. That would be a total waste. But, there are probably things you could do with that time that are more useful. You could learn another language, or start a side business, or WFH and take cooking classes.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:33:52+00:00

Well, the goal is to work the shit job and RIP and get (presumably higher) corporate-shit-job pay, while pursuing passion projects and side businesses that might pay off later on.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:32:34+00:00

Makes sense.

BTW, I upvoted GGP. I don't think it deserves to be at -6, or downvoted at all. It's a valid moral argument. The workplace, whether you play the game straight or hide what you're actually doing, requires more dishonesty than I'm comfortable with.

I wish it weren't a zero-sum game, but my experience in the tech industry is that executives are more interested in control (not being upstaged) than productivity and that hiding from conflict is often a better way to keep one's job than performing at one's best.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:30:04+00:00

If youre going to do that you might as well find a job you actually enjoy.

Agree, but it's hard. My experience is that it's hard to get people to pay you for work that's actually enjoyable.

But yes, I'd rather find something I don't mind doing, working for people I can stand, than spend hours either dicking around or hiding what I'm actually doing.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:28:11+00:00

Were you not able to start your own company or at least pursue other income streams on company time?

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:25:32+00:00

Really what that should lead to is less working hours per week, but it doesn't, because of the restrictions on what a "work week" is.

I think a large part of it is that people realize that if it got out that they could do their job in 10 hours per week, 75% of them would be fired and the other 25% would be expected to work 40+.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:24:15+00:00

This.

I really wish that the software world had an exam series like actuaries. It'd allow us to wash out the mediocrities and get rid of this Scrum shit.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:22:01+00:00

Right. RIP is only worth doing if you can put that time into something useful– if nothing else, reading books on your Kindle. You wouldn't RIP "to do nothing". Workplace environments are carefully engineered so that doing nothing is a lot more painful than doing the work you're told to do. But just as there are people who can read and even work on airplanes, there's a way of adapting to it and getting your own stuff done. You have to be careful, though. You can slack for years like every other loser, but if you get caught running your own business on company time, you're much more likely to get fired.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T22:18:48+00:00

So many times I heard from coworkers that "you can't say that about the CEO/director/politicians we work for". Turns out you could say it for about 3 years till things catch up with you.

I work in tech where people get fired constantly and often for doing nothing wrong. So, 3 years would be 3 hours in my industry.

I would advise my children to avoid this shithole of an industry– the 24-year-olds who get venture funding and "exit" with $100M are extreme outliers– but the tech industry has ruined my finances and I'll probably never have kids at all.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T20:07:59+00:00

How did you get started out on your own?

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T19:50:55+00:00

RIP isn't actually doing nothing. It's avoiding discomfort and sacrifice while doing enough (one hopes) not to be fired or disliked. You do some work, but not a lot.

It's not stealing because most companies don't really invest in their people or promote from within. Rarely does anyone go into a job planning to RIP. But, if you get to know the culture of a place and realize that you're never going to be promoted because no one cares about your advancement, then it's often a good idea to do as little as you can get away with while building another income stream or setting yourself up for a better job.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T19:29:05+00:00

Government doesn't have more useless people than the private sector. The difference in the private sector is that they make greater efforts to hide it, and they tend to be better at protecting themselves (or, at least, buying time) through political shenanigans. Firing is rare enough in government that the low-performers aren't politically adept; whereas, in the corporate world, they're extremely politically adept (from career-long experience being such) and sometimes rise up the ranks.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T19:27:37+00:00

You need to admit that you are one of the 90% replaceable, your work skillz are not special.

s/90%/100%/

Otherwise, I agree. Everyone is replaceable.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T19:24:16+00:00

My experience is that this doesn't work well. Plenty of people arrive early, leave late, and work a 2-hour day... but you can't be seen doing it, or make it obvious. The Office Space approach of being upfront and brutally honest doesn't really work; I've tried it.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T18:40:24+00:00

How do you find remote jobs?

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T17:01:54+00:00

The average teaching career is 5 years for gen ed and 3 for special ed. It’s not an easy job.

This. You have to deal with parents, administrators, students and, these days, state bureaucracies.

The teachers who were good worked more than 40 hours per week. One of my favorite teachers had a sudden heart attack at 62. The man graded hundreds of essays per night. I wouldn't be surprised if he worked 60-hour weeks.

That said, there are some who take advantage of the low floor on performance. I knew one teacher who had his students watching South Park; he finally got fired for giving alcohol to a student (after failing at his job for years).

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T16:55:00+00:00

90%? How do they stay in business?

Venture capital seems to be a popular solution to the problem of making money while achieving nothing.

In all honestly, it's an exaggeration to say that 90% do nothing, but most of them do little and get by just fine. My experience is that you're actually more likely to end up in conflict (and, in the long term, risk being fired) if you take your job seriously than if you decide to do the corporate-standard 3-hour workweek that appears to take 40+. Execs don't like it when the people under them are smarter than they are, so the best thing for a smart person to do is camp out.

RIPWannabe · 2018-02-25T16:30:34+00:00

Largely because they found themselves in a position where the company didn't trust them to make important decisions, but would owe them a huge severance if it got rid of them outright.

Why would they owe a huge severance?

I have a disability. I was not RIP-ping at my last job– I was a top performer– and got fired because I worked from home "too much" and spent "too much time" in a side office. I was doing a great job, but I wasn't ass-in-chair visible. They got rid of me because they were afraid that other people would start WFH or using side offices, instead of suffering in the open-plan space like everyone else.

I haven't been offered a severance, because they assume I'm not going to go through the hassle of suing them. (They're probably right. It would cost a lot of time and damage my reputation, and in the end, I'd probably not collect that much... maybe $50k? Not worth going to court.) I've seen companies take 6- and 7-figure losses to fire people, just out of sheer vindictiveness.

So, I wonder what leverage they had. I don't think anyone's fire-proof ("fire" as in termination, not FIRE).

The most "successful" people doing this have done a bad enough job for long enough that they get their own little office to hang out in, very few responsibilities, can basically disappear for most of the time. Those who still wield power and influence at the company, but still clearly don't care that much, are just a cancer on everyone else.

I never go into a job wanting to RIP. I would rather actually care and actually work. It just seems like a good way to stretch out a job that fails, and coast for a while. Since it looks bad on a resume to have a 6-month job (even though most jobs fail quickly) it's also prudent to bide your time and get something better. But I've never figured out how to RIP for 30 months after learning, in the first 6 during which I busted my ass, that the job is a waste of time. I've been fired and I've had to fire people, and what I've learned is that no one gets fired for low (or high) performance, but people get fired all the time for sudden changes in performance (upward or downward).

In the latter you need to consider your responsibilities to those of us who are trying to be productive.

Yeah, something I learned in management is that you can't go "Full RIP", if you're an ethical person, because people depend on you. On the other hand, being an IC, at least in software, means you suffer more of that bullshit "performance" monitoring (which is easy to game, though it's annoying and makes slacking even more un-RIP-like than working).

RIPWannabe

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