(2) if you're thinking "how can they be bored when everything is so busy and there's so much to do?" maybe you are one of those over-managing bosses that doesn't delegate enough and, surprise, ends up running around being busy while everyone else is bored and lacking responsibilities. [i considered posting this anon, but it's not aimed at my current employers and, if you know me, you'd know i'd have said it to their face if it were...]

You could download large binaries for only so long to cover your tracks, so I just ended up running a constant SSH session to a Lynx browser, so casual passersby would think I was working.

I quit about 6 months later for many other very good reasons, boredom being a huge one. A couple of months earlier I had asked if I could transfer to a new role (from developer to admin), which was flatly denied. When I announced I was leaving, one of the three senior management came up to me and said that in the last management meeting he had said I was bored and that they needed to find something more for me to do. Apparently he was shouted down (metaphorically).

The last I heard of the company was that as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades. They would look for B or C grades from now on. I can't imagine a worse lesson to learn, but there you go.

This reminds me of a Feynman story. After he had found and demonstrated a security hole in a particular type of lock used by the military they "fixed" the issue by ordering everyone not to let Feynman anywhere near the locks :-)

  as a result of my departure,
  they would no longer hire graduates with A grades.
  They would look for B or C grades from now on.

Speaking of your actual point (that the employee was overqualified), I think the company that considers A students overqualified for work for which it prefers to hire B and C students is going down a dangerous path. A,B,C here are not the qualification levels but performance levels.

More specifically: I was the only full-time developer on a database which processed welfare payments for a smallish country, to the tune of hundreds of USD a year. This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one that the government would want a B or C grade student as the only full-time member on.

The company wanted someone that would essentially keep the lights on, on a legacy system that was woefully inadequate. One particular clanger was a PL/SQL file which was 5000 lines long, and didn't have a single function in it. It had minimal comments, which were frequently wrong. No-one really knew how it worked. There was no automated testing at all (they'd never heard of unit tests).

What the job should have been was thinking of how to provide value to the customer, trying to improve the system and perform code health updates. What they wanted me to do was do as little as possible to satisfy a work order from the government. This thinking was endemic in the company. One job asked another team to add an email reporting service. It worked on their internal Exchange servers, but they weren't able to figure out why emails weren't arriving at the government offices. Finally someone figured out that the emails didn't conform to SMTP at all. The people implementing this didn't know what SMTP was. The team leader/middle-manager in charge responded "They asked us to write an email sending function. We did. They didn't specify that they wanted SMTP, so they'll have to file another work order."

I have many more like this.

While I sympathize with the rest of the story, I think you place too much weight on one's ability to jump through hoops to get grades.

(Disclaimer: My marks were pretty bad, but I was also busy writing games/AIs, and getting into trouble for improving my school's systems.)

There's an interesting gem here. No job is 100% excitement, all the time. More to the point, that kind of a job would burn you out.

The key is having a proper ratio.

What you're looking for isn't the absolute value of, e.g., HN participation, it's the first or second derivative.

According to rescuetime, I've been spending a LOT of time lately on HN and links to articles.

It kind of crept up on me and I didn't realize just how bored I've been at work lately. Definitely time to figure out why and how best to return to a happy-nonbored state. (Quitting isn't really a viable option right now)

  Quitting no, switching is always an option though. I.e put feelers out, silently pick up a second more interesting offer and give notice. If you have a large amount waiting to vest you may be able to get a match from another employer.

> Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work.

I disagree[1] with your second axiom. HN, in limited quantities[2], counts as professional development, I would say. That means that limited HN usage is necessary, which certainly helps it "compete".

If I were interviewing someone for a programming job, and I learned that they never read HN or SO or Proggit or /. or anything like that, then I would have some serious reservations about them.

-----------------

[1] Okay, being a mathematician, I know that an axiom simply is; one doesn't agree or disagree with it. But this does mean that your theorem has limited applications.

[2] HN in large quantities, on the other hand ....

I say this as someone who sat on the Internet and read websites about programming all through college. Yes, it was useful - but nowhere near as useful as the time I spent actually programming.

If work is boring then HN reading is the must to compensate in professional development.

I don't know if historical karma values are readily available, it would be interesting to plot the rate of change over time.

Part of the problem, though, is tools. A lot of things are built for resource use minimization. That made sense 20 years ago, but now I have 8 GB of RAM and 4 fast cores on my desktop, and most of that capacity just sits idle. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm typing and the compiler isn't already running then it's missing an opportunity.

This not a good use of my time, and I hate seeing that console, and I feel bad for being on HN when I could be productive.

  ./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-("

Unit tests would ensure stupidity was not a possibility, and regressions could be tracked. Too late for that, unfortunately.

So I watch.

  growlnotify -m "Success! "

  growlnotify -m "$(echo Great\! Success\!)"

    sub escape {
        my $arg = shift;
        $arg =~ s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_])/\\$1/g;
        return $arg;
    }

I'll be handing in my notice as soon as possible.

Thus, I should be looking for a job that has nothing but boring work. :)

Now my job title actually says "developer" and I'm kept busy. But I kind of miss all the sandbox time I had. I knocked out so many projecteuler.net problems.