The rise of the pointless job
I'm a programmer working at a big-tech company. I make ~$350k/year, even though my job could be done equally well by a college intern. I only do ~2 hours of productive work in an average day. My previous jobs were far more interesting and challenging, and I had apparently done extremely well in my interviews. Hence why I got an offer with an extremely good compensation package.However, the team that I go put into, is one of the slowest moving and least useful I've ever seen. I spent my first couple months trying to make things better, and be more productive - only to have my team-lead actively micromanage and stonewall me in order to bring my productivity down to a crawl. I tried talking to my manager about it, but they started blaming me personally every time I pointed out any ways of improving the way we do things.Eventually, I stopped trying at all, did the best I could (~2 hours/day of productivity), and just zoned out the rest of the time. Apparently this has pleased my manager/team-lead, and everything has been smooth (boring) sailing ever since. It still boggles my mind that I'm getting paid $350k/year to essentially browse HN and post stuff like this all day.