- take professional development on my employer’s budget
- bring a book
- don’t be afraid to take slightly longer than usual lunches for errands or for exercise or whatevs
- if monitoring is lax enough, and there’s unmonitored guest wifi, bring your personal laptop and play some vidya
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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what is professional development?
money given to you to obtain certifications, for example
Courses or other training to develop your professional skills, preferably provided or funded by your employer.
Platform like LinkedIn learning, on books no matter whether it's about programming or management (or any other field, may be you want to learn material science or Korean). Usually, these ones are pretty tolerated by HR, especially if you can find even a remote link to your work. I would add fun side projects on work data/material, that you can use to get promoted (not only I am doing my job but I am experimenting with XYZ, meaning I should be at the next puygrude)
Bring a whole laptop to play games? Get a Steam Deck! Or if you want a smaller form.factor then get a Retroid Pocket 6.
Other than this:
- Learn something (language, art, etc)
- Read something
- Listen to podcasts
- If it's a private office then do a Costanza and sleep under your desk
- Watch TV shows or movies
- Take up knitting or crochet
You guys work 40 hours per week?!
Is this your way of saying you work more or less than 40? lol
My job requires 45.
You fill out your own timesheet. Mine varies from 39 to 50 hours. They dont care what it says. But if you turn in a lot of timesheets under 45 hrs and dont get your work done and people complain that youre bad to work with, you may get asked whats up. If however you always get shit done, it doesn't matter what it says for hours.
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Crazy. As someone whose job it is to automate, automating my job means getting more work. That’s kind of the definition of being more productive: by focusing on automation one person could do work that formerly took multiple people
I'm somewhat confused by your comment. I automated my tasks because I got tired of typos and having to remember the processes of things. if I just fully script the process, I don't have to remember or do anything XD
Make video games so I can leave the job I automated and do what I want to do. Which would probably also give me shit loads more time for activism.
This is me.
I do 30 minutes of checks in the morning, check email, and attend the standup. After that i got hours to kill.
I teach myself things.
Learned how to mine crypto.
Learned advanced bash.
Learned boto3 and started automating aws shit
Wrote 2 books on automating aws shit.
Played alot of online dungeon crawlers.
Learned how to code a dungeon crawler.
Leaned how to code a 2d scoller game
Inked alot of comic sketched from (then) deviant art.
Just to name a few
Getting paid to make personal advancement is a pretty good deal.
Depends on the privacy but
Read, draw, learn a language, sleep, gameboy/psp
ahh, I should get back into learning german/japanese. Thank you for this reminder
Look for another job; I despise being in the office to begin with, and being bored in the office is an insufferable hell. Reading and listening to music is ok, but I prefer to do that at home.
I did apply to jobs for a good while, but I'm overly invested with my current employer since I've already been here for 10+ years. Not to mention AI has wreaked serious havoc on the hiring sector of things
Mix and master my music. Music production takes a lot of time and eats up my weekends. 40 hours during weekdays would free up my weekends and I can actually rest.
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I suggest building your skills in your career by taking classes. You can also learn a new language with all that time. If you’re feeling creative writing a book is also a great hobby.
This is the best answer. Obviously, relax when you need it, but if you’re bored, start learning. It’s interesting (if by choice), it’s good for your brain, and you can use this lull in your career to build skills that you can use to progress later when opportunities come up.
Plus, if you are learning related skills, your “slacking off” might even still look like working to passers by.
There are a lot of recommendations to work on other SW projects. Be careful with this if there is a clause in your employment agreement (if you have one) regarding any work you do during work hours being owned by them. Especially don't do it on your work PC.
Gooning
Never
In the past I would write Wikipedia or translate libre software. Now I would work on developing Wikimedia and longevity organizations. Especially the engineered longevity have a huge future societal impact.
I've actually been in this situation when I was working as a sys admin at a webhosting company. First I played a lot of games. Once that started to get boring I taught myself how to code which set me up to transition from sys admin to development work.
I already know how to code, but sysadmin stuff does sound fun, thx
I very annoyingly have yet to see this suggestion - go talk to your fucking coworkers!! If everyone is showing up every day, then you have a whole office full of work friends to make! Make a habit of hanging out at the coffee maker or water cooler or whatever and shoot the shit. Ask people how their weekend was. Introduce yourself to people you haven't met before. Just chat with people for 15 min or so at a time, and then go back to your desk and do something fun/for personal development/for professional development. Then you have things to talk about - and then just always have some job related task on the backburner that you can keep working on, so when people ask about what you are doing at work, you can say "oh yeah, I'm working on X, which will have Y benefit."
THIS IS HOW YOU PROGRESS IN YOUR CAREER. Yeah, working on your skills is super valuable. But the people who go far, the people who are never short on job offers or pay raises, are the people who have lots of friends.
Unfortunately, this will not help when working with people who are only interested in sports. I was asked which team i followed for the World Championship in football, to which i responded "I don't watch football".
Response: "Then what sports do you watch?"
"I don't watch sports."
His eyes widened while he stood there thinking for a second. "Then what do you do in your spare time?" He asked, flabbergasted. I told him there are other things in life than watching sports.
It's like this for everyone I work with. They're all hillbillies. I need to get out.
I think the thing that would be the most productive would be to start a project you've been waiting to work on or something that might make you money. Either studying something you've always wanted to do or programming/writing something you've always wanted to write.
With 40hrs of paid time you could write whatever you'd like and it doesn't really matter if it pays off or not so you're not pressured to compromise on it. But if it does pay off then you're that much closer to an early retirement or the ability to take more control of your time by working on the thing you want to do.
If you're happy where you are then yeah. Read a book, play some games etc.
Don't use work resources (company network, computer system, tools, etc.) for this. If the project happens to make money the company will have a good basis for owning the IP.
Well put. This was exactly the answer I was needing to get going after a few ideas I have for a blog-like thing.
I know there's already too much content on the Web, but it's still something I'd like to try and hopefully begin failing better at. Gracias!
This actually happened to me. I still had to look busy so I mostly just studied more or worked on a second job I had grading papers. I also spent a bit of time writing stories and designing things. Adding in something creative can help your brain balance things out.
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.
Where can I find a job like this?
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.
Start planning my new off-grid life. I do industrial automation, and if those robots start being able to program themselves, I'm leaving.
Welk I’m here aren’t I?
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.
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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.
well, it runs and accounts for every erroneous potential I can think of...but I see there is clearly much more work to be done. Thank you for the new set of challenges
Fanfiction.
Does this job have a claim on IP you create on company time? If not, I'm making videogames and contributing to FOSS projects.
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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."
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.
I agree. Transcription of audio is pretty good these days and this is definitely being done now. The charting workload of nurses and doctors is ridiculous and a huge time sink. Anything that gives them more time to be actually interacting with patients is a good thing in my book.
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