Maybe the real secret is to embrace the fact you have a bullshit job. Allow me to tell you a story of my corporate hero.

I'm going to call this guy Jack to preserve his identity, because he continues this ruse to this day. To jump to the punchline, Jack has a bullshit job, but he embraces the bullshit.

So I've had a few run-ins with Jack over the years at my Corp. He's always the guy that is sort of three degrees removed from several projects, but not really leading any projects. So you see him in the background a lot, but never in the foreground. Anyway, I never thought much of Jack. Nothing positive, nor negative. I was merely acquainted with his existence.

One day, I am cleaning up some infrastructure and going through some of our cloud billing. I'm just cleaning up old infrastructure so I could make a mindless report and give it to someone who gives it to someone who eventually summarizes it for someone who then mentions it to another person, which I hope and assume turns into a bullet point on a presentation to someone "important" (you know, like we all do). Anyway, I stumble on some weird stuff that I don't recognize. Its been idle for years, never accessed, never used. This stuff is a great target for me to clean up and improve my metrics. I find this infrastructure and I don't recognize the project at all. I mention it to my team, no one's heard of it. So I go up the chain, no one's heard of it. I actually go up to the CTO and they had never heard of this project either.

So I'm curious, I dig deeper. This is clearly abandoned. It hadn't been logged into in years. But I notice that it was created by Jack. I didn't really know Jack, but I looked him up to see if he even still worked at the company. I looked up his version control access and he still had an active account. I looked at his commit history and in the past 365 days he only had 4 commits. So I assume he was laid off, we recently had a round of layoffs (about 15% of the workforce). But sure enough Jack still works here according to our HRM. Somehow dodging layoffs. Interesting, he must be working on something important. So I coordinate a meeting with Jack before I disassemble his infrastructure.

Jack was very elusive. Coordinating him was harder than scheduling time with my CTO. But I eventually get the meeting. So I start asking him about the project. He barely remembers the project in question (or was just playing dumb). He explained that the project was completed but never got integrated into the main application. So I asked him what he has been working on since then, and he gave me a list of projects, all of which had been cancelled and abandoned. I confirmed the existence and cancellation of 2 of those projects, the others I think he was either lying about or they never made it far enough off the ground to have any record of.

I finally asked who he reports to and he gave me the name of someone that is different than someone in the HRM. So I asked about his current project and he told me several things he was doing. I was familiar with one of those projects is all (and I am generally familiar with every project since I am in those meetings). He then mentioned a project that was actually managed by my team. That's when I realized this guy was just bullshitting. I decided not to call him out on it initially.

I ended up just laughing about the whole situation and sort of dropped it. I simply didn't care enough and I knew me bringing this up the chain would probably get him fired. So I just kept it in my back pocket for a little while.

A few months later I went out to a whiskey bar with some guys from work. We ended up meeting up with a few people that got laid off in the layoffs. We had a few drinks and I ended up asking if anyone knows how Jack avoided layoffs. People were shocked, everyone had the same question, "what is he even working on now?". I said basically nothing. He has only made 4 commits in the last year! He's floating along but he stays in the background just enough that no one questions it. That's when one of the guys told me that Jack was involved in several projects years ago and he got really upset when he had several large and prominent project cancellations. He had made an enemy with the previous head of cybersecurity and the rumor was that he was going to be fired, but then the Head of Cyber got throat cancer unexpectedly and dissapeared. He said ever since then, Jack has been extremely uncooperative at work and no one really likes working with him, so he always gets pushed into the background. He summed it up the best way possible:

> "Jack realized that all of his work was going unnoticed, so he stopped working and no one noticed".

Ever since then I find ways to cross paths with Jack. I haven't done anything I just ask him questions and hear what lies and excuses he comes up with. I laugh inside everytime. I eventually drop breadcrumbs around the office about Jack's existence just to see how people react. I find the whole thing very entertaining. Jack still works here. He is extremely active on the Slack #pets channel and I see daily updates of his Corgi each day.

Jack doesn't know that I know his secret. But Jack is in a weird way my hero. He realized he had a bullshit job, so instead of being bothered by it, he just embraced it. He treats his job like the bullshit that it treats him as.

Maybe we can all learn from Jack.