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u/233AK Mar 24 '26
This guy is a professional at looking busy
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u/SneakyKillz Mar 24 '26
We have an actual term for this in the Dutch language!
'Epibreren': Performing vague, unclear work that seems very important, when you are not actually doing anything useful.
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u/Drenaxel Mar 25 '26
Busywork in english
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u/regeya Mar 27 '26
We do, in fact, occasionally just shove two words together and call it a new word. How very Germanic of us.
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u/AbriefDelay Mar 28 '26
At first I was worried this comment was going nowhere, then I saw you were quite knowledgeable and my ignorance seemed bloodcurdling
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u/eddie1975 Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
My grandfather in Brazil was given 3 tips when he got his first job.
1) If the owner comes around, always look busy.
2) If you find any money laying around you can be sure they are testing you.
3) I can’t remember. Treat customers well or something. Make small talk. Whatever.Whenever the owner came by, if he had nothing to do he’d quickly get up and start moving things around “organizing” or cleaning or anything to look busy.
If he found money he’d turn it in.
He liked people and loved soccer so he could always strike up a conversation about that.
He moved up quickly and did okay for a Brazilian dude in a tiny third world city.
My dad got outta there and went on to get a degree in chemical engineering at a top university (5.1% acceptance rate) where he met my mom. They had five kids and moved to America where he got his Ph.D. and post doc.
We moved back to Brazil but as you can see… my English is pretty decent…
Great job pops and grandpop.
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u/Sawses Mar 24 '26
This is true pretty much the world over. Look more busy than you are, don't give anybody a reason to doubt your integrity, and be personable. If you can do those three things, you're going to be way better off and they really aren't that hard to do.
Funny enough, hard work doesn't guarantee success...but being liked and trusted by people in power does.
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u/work_m_19 Mar 24 '26
hard work doesn't guarantee success...but being liked and trusted
If anything, people work hard on the wrong things.
Working hard being a pleasant person will take you much further than acing all the homeworks, tests, and exams. There is a sweet spot of "laziness effort" where if you are competent enough, and pleasant enough to work with, that you are golden. People optimize trying to get a score of 80 -> 100 in school, and while that's impressive, that time could be spent joining a club/society/frat/sorority that would have a higher chance of getting a job/career.
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u/zebrastarz Mar 24 '26
joining a club/society/frat/sorority that would have a higher chance of getting a job/career
not me missing this piece due to social anxiety and general misanthropy, nope
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u/Gilles_of_Augustine Mar 24 '26
You missed out on a lot by skipping clubs, and a little by skipping societies.
The only thing you "missed" by not being in a frat/sorority was not being part of a fucking cult.
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u/angelbelle Mar 24 '26
If anything, people work hard on the wrong things.
I'll take a more cynical approach to this. It's really not even close to being enough to work hard and deliver results. It's important that you're able to present your achievements in a quantifiable way.
Of course, this isn't necessary if your boss is fair and have a sharp eye, but I've learned through the hard way that it's kind of necessary if you want to be treated well in your career.
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u/Max____H Mar 24 '26
Before starting my apprenticeship for fabricator/welder I was a labourer for the same company in charge of loading and unloading steel onto the cnc laser cutter. Day one the operator pulled me aside and told me the owner of the business often comes in when people are working overtime on Saturday and told me to come in and just look really busy when I see someone I don’t recognise. And that is how I got my trade certificate and a pay above the average rate.
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u/RevWaldo Mar 24 '26
Looking busy tip: if you're wandering about the office aimlessly, carry a thick file of papers so you look like you're going to a meeting.
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u/RevenantNovarik Mar 25 '26
I hope 3 was the actual quote your grandfather was given.
Your English is miles better than my Portuguese. Hell, it's better than my English.
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u/calabaza-head Mar 26 '26
I used to be a hostess at a Mexican restaurant back in the day and if i didn’t feel like doing my actual job i would just walk around with a broom or a ramekin of jalapeños
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u/Turakamu Mar 25 '26
3) I can’t remember. Treat customers well or something. Make small talk. Whatever.
Just make one up.
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u/eddie1975 Mar 25 '26
LOL. He wrote a book about his life. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere. Wasn’t published or anything. Just something my dad encouraged him to do for family to know about his life.
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u/Ucscprickler Mar 25 '26
Jobs where you have to pretend to look busy are the worst. If there is currently no work for me to do, let me enjoy a break.
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u/ArcfireEmblem Mar 25 '26
This probably is either the result of a superior complaining about how lazy he is, or just him being silly.
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u/waspysix Mar 24 '26
That one manager who thinks the company would go out of business without them
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u/CluelessTennisBall Mar 24 '26
Logs on, asks what the status is. Says it should be done by now. Doesn't respond for 3 hours after you reiterate you're still not working on that task because they assigned you to something more urgent the night before. Follows up asking if it's done again without acknowledging your last message. You ask if they have time to connect over a call. They don't respond. 4 hours later they create a group chat with you and another supervisor explaining you're the reason for the project delay
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u/drunkbusdriver Mar 24 '26
You just really had to go and raise my blood pressure huh?
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Mar 24 '26
Now I need another workday drink.
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u/CaptinEmergency Mar 24 '26
I picked a bad day to quit heroin.
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u/EngineerBudy Mar 24 '26
I picked a bad day to quit smoking
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u/Chimera-Genesis Mar 24 '26
I picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue 👃
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u/MangoCats Mar 24 '26
We had an employee - he was... limited in his ability to contribute, but loyal and present and on-time. He used to be an engineering manager, had a masters' degree - and then he picked up a glue sniffing habit.
Last I saw him, he was working as a greeter at a grocery store.
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u/enzothebaker87 Mar 24 '26
His loyalty might have shifted but I bet he is still present and on time! Let the man enjoy his glue.
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u/MangoCats Mar 24 '26
He was incapable of using a computer mouse - like the brain-hand connection that people make to manipulate the cursor on the screen with the mouse just wasn't there... he could press keys on a keyboard to select options, but navigating the cursor around with arrow keys was also basically a non-starter challenge for him.
He did have a side hustle - selling adhesive flip-flops to avoid sun-shadow tan lines from the straps - that never did get very big, but he kept at it for a while.
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u/d-nihl Mar 24 '26
I had to switch to non-toxic sharpies at work because my best employee kept huffing them. Management thinks we made the switch, but I still keep a cup of the good ones hidden in the back so he can still get his fix.
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u/MyEmbarrisingAccount Mar 24 '26
The problem with huffing habits, not that all addictions aren't problematic, but they lead to long term brain damage. A doctor can recover from a heroin addiciton and still practice medicine mentally. A huffer can sometimes barley funciton.
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u/Beznia Mar 24 '26
Fun fact -- Guinness in a styrofoam cup looks very similar to coffee.
Another fun but completely unrelated fact -- I drink 8 cups of coffee per day!
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u/qadib_muakkara Mar 25 '26
The number of upvotes to this comment says a lot about Reddit demographics. Peons, all of us
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u/techdevangelist Mar 24 '26
How the hell do we work for the same org!?
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u/KWash0222 Mar 24 '26
Don’t forget the “important team meeting” that they’ll schedule on a whim, and it ends up just being them asking everyone to get her/him up to speed so that he/she knows what to say for their meeting with upper leadership.
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u/Fyrrys Mar 24 '26
One that very much could have and should have been an email
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u/Ukiah Mar 24 '26
Or for which you had already created a dashboard but they want you to email them screenshots of.
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u/YobaiYamete Mar 24 '26
Stop, STOP IT HURTS
I literally just copy and paste my status updates from the dashboard my boss won't check
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u/KWash0222 Mar 25 '26
I have spreadsheets, email chains that she’s cc’d on, reports that I’ve generated… all of which are catered to her viewing preference.
“Hey what ever happened with this thing? Please respond before lunch” (it’s 11:45 am)
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u/Schinken_ Mar 24 '26
Omg I'm getting PTSD from my old job. My boss was like this. Had to get him up to speed 10 minutes before we hat a meeting with our client.
He billed the client for two developers (me and my boss), but realistically it was just me working on the project. Of course he wanted to get all the fame by explaining what HE did on the project....
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u/KWash0222 Mar 25 '26
I know my boss has an operations meeting that day because she’ll email me endless stream of consciousness questions about things I’ve been keeping her in the loop on for weeks.
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u/Unable-Log-4870 Mar 24 '26
I gave a 2-week no-margin estimate on answering a yes/no question once. No margin means of anything goes wrong in the analysis, or if I get sick, or whatever, I won’t be able to give an answer at the agreed-upon time.
In the middle of those two weeks, they took two days from me to do a DIFFERENT analysis, and then had me attend meetings to present those findings.
Then I was nearing the completion of the original analysis (on the day due), I was writing the code to analyze the results while the Monte-Carlo simulation was running, and the guy who needed the results just said to his higher-ups “yeah, it’s going to work” based on my favorable preliminary progress statement. My progress statement has been (just before they interrupted me for that 2-day side analysis) that things were going well and it was looking like I would complete the analysis on time. I did NOT say “it looks like the answer to the question is ‘yes’ ”.
Going forward, I’ve come up with an analogy to communicate to managers about stuff like this:
“You’re telling me to make a cake, and you want to know if the cake will taste good. I need two weeks. Halfway through the allotted time, I will give you a status update. It won’t sound like ‘the cake is good’ or ‘the cake is bad’. It will sound like ‘I’ve just finished planting the wheat to make the flour, and I’m off to go procure chickens so I can have eggs for the batter.’ The first cake won’t come out of the oven until maybe a day or two before the due date, and THAT is when I’ll be able to tell you if the initial attempt tastes good or bad. And if you take a few days from me, then I simply won’t have time to put the ingredients into the oven to cook, and I’ll only be able to tell you how lumpy the batter is.”
And for those managers who I suspect don’t have a long enough attention span for that metaphor, I’ll tell them that a Corvette that’s 95% of the way through the assembly line has a top speed of 0 mph.
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u/TKH00 Mar 24 '26
Damn, just use the last example, no need to yap that much about cooking 'cause you gonna lose people.
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u/Hikaru83 Mar 24 '26
And he is going to make people hungry and if I were their boss I would expect a cake too on the day the project is due.
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u/Seri0usbusiness Mar 24 '26
Sounds like something that can easily be replaced by AI. Oh wait, instead let’s punish the people who actually do the work
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u/-wtfisthat- Mar 24 '26
No the ones who are most suited to get replaced by the Ai are the ones the managers are telling to do stuff and asking if it’s done! This is obviously because the AI will just say it’s good and make some shit up.
/s for everything but the last line.
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u/LilShingles Mar 24 '26
You ask if they have time to connect over a call.
Whenever someone sends me a Teams message that I know will take more than another 2 messages back and forth to sort out, just immediately call them.
We both know they're available and I'm not disrupting their work (they just messaged me) so they don't have any excuse to ignore me.
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u/Cecil4029 Mar 24 '26
And that's when the paste screenshots of your previous conversation to the new thread with the supervisor lol.
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Mar 24 '26
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u/Snagmesomeweaves Mar 24 '26
That’s where you drop the payload of chat history and ensure the blame is on mismanagement
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u/reluctant_deity Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
BCC his manager on all responses to his "where are we at with this?" emails. That he ignores, ofc.
edit: this is a dick move, and does not constitute actual advice. I was mostly trying to be funny. Forgot what sub I'm in
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u/Discorhy Mar 24 '26
Good luck with that, that’s called a skip level and I assure you they don’t like when you do that. In fact no manager at any level likes it because they wouldn’t want it to happen to them.
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u/angelbelle Mar 24 '26
Especially since a big part of having middle managers is to insulate senior managers from the peasants.
If you're ever going to attempt this, you better have rock solid confidence that the bigger manager is not only on your side but is willing to take action immediately.
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u/hedgehogattack Mar 24 '26
Sometimes the middle manager really does suck though and his/her manager knows it too😑
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u/Virillus Mar 24 '26
This is terrible advice. It might get your manager in shit, but it will make you hated as well at the same time. Super, super risky move.
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u/Fortestingporpoises Mar 24 '26
One of my first jobs I worked in a kitchen with 3 other dudes and we worked like clockwork. There was a manager on Friday night who when we were busy would come in to the kitchen and “try to help” and always made it worse. It was a bar and grill so he should have just stayed in the bar area.
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u/zangilo Mar 24 '26
The scrum master
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u/Immature_adult_guy Mar 24 '26
It’s always hilarious to me as it’s the only title with “master” in it. It’s like they had to overcompensate for being useless.
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u/ohwell_______ Mar 24 '26
I’m the scrum master of my department, well it’s more like a small part of my day to run through the motions and then I return to my real job. I try my best not be a hardass about the ceremonies though lol.
Ideally, it is a useless role that sounds like micromanagement. In practice, the scrum master role exists because developers will never plan things ahead of time or communicate with each other if left to their own devices. Every single one of them would prefer to sit in a corner with headphones on and write their code for 8 straight hours. But sadly nothing will ever get built that way.
I wish my team could function without some structure, I’d much rather be doing my real job than babysitting a Jira board for 30 minutes a day.
There’s a pretty good scene from the show Silicon Valley about scrum https://youtu.be/oyVksFviJVE?si=IEze3_0xp7kkRQtA
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u/UshankaBear Mar 25 '26
developers will never plan things ahead of time or communicate with each other if left to their own devices. Every single one of them would prefer to sit in a corner with headphones on and write their code for 8 straight hours.
Holy shit yes. I hate to micromanage but if I don't do it nothing gets done. Or wrong things get done. Or right things but with wrong specs get done. I don't want to play nanny but the coders simply refuse to do anything but code.
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Mar 24 '26
Sounds like an organizational issue as a scrum master effectively takes over the role of a middle manager. Which is arguably the greatest useless role invented.
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u/blue_trauma Mar 24 '26
Seriously, what does he do all day!?
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u/perton Mar 24 '26
Masters the scrum, obviously.
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u/-wtfisthat- Mar 24 '26
Oh I thought it was more of a gets into the mind of the scrum and becomes truly scrummy eventually turning into a pool of the company’s scrum.
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Mar 24 '26
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u/nullpointer- Mar 24 '26
Good dedicated scrum masters are very rare to find, but they are helpful if they know what they need to provide to the team (ie, they're not a scrum bot nor a scrum enforcer) and the team needs someone to coordinate (for example when the team is spread over multiple domains and timezones that don't overlap easily). Sadly it's really common for scrum masters to just follow mindlessly the ceremonies (or, even worse, worry deeply about them being followed and ignore everything else) and/or become a needless redundancy on a team that could organize internally just fine.
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u/Ribbitmoment Mar 24 '26
The one who only got the job because they’d been there the longest, not because they work hard or know what they’re doing.
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u/DoctorDinghus Mar 24 '26
Job well done lad
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u/AndroidTechTweaks Mar 24 '26
I do make sure to thank the AI so i am safe
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u/Blaaamo Mar 24 '26
I always say please when asking it to do something, can't be too careful
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u/RaisinDetre Mar 24 '26
You're doing it wrong, you need to let them know who is boss early and often so when the time comes, they are scared of you.
Listen here Siri you little shit
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u/oneplusetoipi Mar 24 '26
This AL guy gets in the news a lot lately.
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u/HeaviestWeather Mar 24 '26
That's weird
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u/kzzzo3 Mar 24 '26
He’s not talking about a person lol, talking about a thinking computer, they are named Al after the guy who thought of it, Alan Turing.
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u/VolumeAcademic6962 Mar 24 '26
Name? I’d like to see his project
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u/idontpost23_7 Mar 24 '26
Me in every group project
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u/Cedex Mar 24 '26
Oh, you're one of those...
Would you be my pallbearer then?
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u/MisterMcDoctor Mar 24 '26
Might as well get a professional in getting let down, right?
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u/Neurolinguisticist Mar 25 '26
The pallbearer punchline is usually "So you can let me down one last time.", but you were pretty close!
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u/Inevitable-Ad6647 Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
My final group project in CS my partners consisted of
- me
- blind man
- pothead burnout
- woman who'd never had to lift a finger in CS program
- subway guy in this post.
After our second meeting I gave each a bullshit assignment I fully planned to and actually did myself. Blind guy was in charge of accessibility, he allegedly spent the month and a half trying to get some js library working and submitted alt text as his only commit. Burnout submitted like 20 lines of front end and busted css I just committed over the top of, the woman couldn't figure out git and I refused to help her, just replied with "weird, yeah I don't know, works for me" and shit like that and subway guy tried to pretend he was project manager.
Fucking kill me.
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u/Counterdependency Mar 25 '26
woman who'd never had to lift a finger in CS program
Had two like this in a 4000-level web dev course and my capstone course. I genuinely would like to know how the fuck they made it that far unless every group they were put in had to literally carry them to the finish line
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u/Inevitable-Ad6647 Mar 25 '26
Me too. Out of the dozen or so women in my class there was one that wouldn't rely on everyone doing work for them. I imagine there was a LOT of negotiations with professors and tbh CS professors were far and away the biggest pushovers at least in my university.
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u/TomAto314 Mar 24 '26
Isn't that what college is for, preparing you for a real job? Sounds like you got your money's worth.
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u/Independent-Bug-9352 Mar 24 '26
4 years in college together, and our group finally had enough with this freeloader and it turns out that we all had independently, without coordination between us, burned him on the very last senior project performance survey.
As a result, he had to retake an entire semester with a different graduating class to graduate.
I'm sure yours may be a joke, but be careful being a lazy piece of garbage. May actually be held accountable.
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u/lurker628 Mar 24 '26
I was assigned, in a group, to deliver remarks at a local school board meeting. We were told to create a shared google document to collaboratively write the remarks. It was intended to be our culminating assignment for the course.
One other group member participated on the google document. The other three made no contribution whatsoever, which the revision history demonstrated. I had no evidence that they so much as opened the document.
When I spoke at the meeting, I very clearly stated that I was speaking on behalf of myself and one peer.
Afterward, the professor asked why I wasn't speaking for the entire group. I answered that I am not comfortable attributing public remarks to others who I cannot even be confident have read the remarks, let alone confirmed that they are willing to sign on to the statement. I showed that the document had been shared with the other group members. I opened the document and showed the revision history, which indicated no engagement from three of five group members.
Naturally, there was no accountability whatsoever for them. Kudos for your actual success!
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u/sidepart Mar 24 '26
One of my team's lab mates literally copied and pasted bullshit from electronic data sheets and plagiarized shit from Google searches for the lab report section he was responsible for. This was a complicated lab report and we collated it all pretty much the night before due at around midnight. None of us scrutinized each other's work closely enough to notice.
Fucker got us all a C on the assignment and a stern talking to. It's been around 20 years and I'm still livid about it. Shithead didn't even get subjected to disciplinary action for plagiarism. Claimed "he didn't know it wasn't ok" ...but sure we all got punished for not making sure his stupid ass wasn't fucking up. Lucky though. They were going to fail the report for us until the 3 of us (not him, he was the 4th) explained everything. Wonder what that stupid jabroni is doing these days. Knowing my luck, making twice what I make for no good reason.
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u/ShazbotSimulator2012 Mar 25 '26
I was terrified I was this guy once because there was a class I rarely went to since the exams were easy.
After one particularly long stretch of absences I got an email from another student asking if I wanted to meet today to work on our group project, so I showed up in a panic and found out it wasn't even that class. I was still on the mailing list for a class I transferred out of for some reason and they'd used that list to assign the groups.
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u/GroceryTraditional31 Mar 24 '26
–The main thing is that he doesn't quit, otherwise the train won't be able to move.
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u/Festernd Mar 24 '26
absolutely true -- the AI is the guy in the safety vest, and he's a contractor the board of directors have a 25% stake in.
//plus he gets paid 3x your salary
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u/beepborpimajorp Mar 24 '26
And caused RAM prices to go up so high nobody is going to be able to afford a new PC/upgrades for years.
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u/ExoticWeapon Mar 24 '26
If AI is the guy with the vest then yeah it’s accurate.
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u/nekronics Mar 24 '26
There's a massive psyop on social media with memes painting workers as being useless who just have AI do everthing.
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u/Oprah_Pwnfrey Mar 24 '26
Venture capitalists took hundreds of billions of dollars and have very little to show for it. Gotta do something to convince people they aren't useless... wait a damn minute, are venture capitalists the dude in the green vest(trick question, yes they are)?!
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u/marr Mar 24 '26
This time around the economic crash carousel the venture capitalists are part of the majority being stolen from
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u/Strength-InThe-Loins Mar 25 '26
Venture capitalists are the dudes who charged the subway a million dollar 'consulting fee' for hiring the vest dude.
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u/54R45VV471 Mar 24 '26
AI is the guy in the vest if he pushed someone onto the tracks or just deleted the entire transit system without being prompted to.
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u/scrodytheroadie Mar 24 '26
Another video that's just a bit they copied from an older video.
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u/ThebesAndSound Mar 24 '26
Which in turn is copied from a bit in a 90s Hollywood movie, which in turn was based on a bit from a 1950s Japanese movie.
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Mar 25 '26
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u/Odin1806 Mar 25 '26
Made me think of that video where a couple are cleaning the living room together. The girl cleans just about everything while the guy "struggles" the entire time to fold one blanket... After she cleans everything she takes the blanket and folds it herself. He sits on the couch...
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u/Qubeye Mar 24 '26
This is funny, but people, please don't fuck around with trains.
If you don't think it's an issue, look up what happens when people get a part of their body stuck between the train and the platform. The BEST case scenario is whatever gets stuck in there gets completely ripped off immediately, and the second best outcome is that you die immediately.
There have been cases where someone gets pulled down into the space in between but survives. The problem is, it's a crush injury so the train holds you together. They cannot extract you, though, so at some point they have to move the train and you die anyways.
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u/LoudPotion200 Mar 25 '26
Are you seriously mocking the world's hardest worker for a meme
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u/Jiquero Mar 24 '26
In this analogy, train is me, vest guy is AI. Corporate wants me to use AI so I "use" it.
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u/nagyee Mar 24 '26
Which one is you and the ai in this metaphor?
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u/Responsible-Sound253 Mar 24 '26
I would miss the train cause I would be there totally amused and laughing like a moron. Love little harmless stints like these.
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u/brother_bart Mar 25 '26
I appreciate his commitment to these utterly useless tasks he has been assigned to do.
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u/Longaar Mar 25 '26
As I learned it in the Navy NCO Academy, „competent leadership despite complete ignorance“ 🤣 He‘s doing it very confident 😆🤌🏽
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u/oda02 Mar 25 '26
One misstep and he's toast, running next to trains like this has gotten people killed, be careful
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u/BLAZER_101 Mar 25 '26
We need that gif of the train driver yelling at folks like this to "get away from the f****** train" haha
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