Have I gone insane, or is it normal to barely work in corporate jobs?
About 8 months ago, I was hired as a business intelligence analyst at a large fintech company right after finishing graduate school. The interview was not easy at all; there was an SQL challenge, they asked me to create a dashboard from a sample dataset, and several rounds of interviews to assess culture fit. The process was so serious that I expected the job to be difficult and need a lot of effort.
Now, I'm earning a six-figure salary and my job is hybrid, 3 days in the office and two from home, and honestly, I don't have much work to do. The first big task I got was to gather some sales data and create new performance trackers. I finished it way ahead of schedule, and my manager was genuinely impressed with the work I did.
But since I finished that project four months ago, work has been trickling in. Every now and then, I get a request to do a data pull or a quick chart, which takes an hour at most. I use very standard tools and methods that I consider to be common sense.
I created a few templates on the dashboarding software that I can modify for most new requests. The head of marketing called me a 'data wizard' in a team meeting just because I used a different chart type than the usual bar graphs they seem to have been using since 1999.
The finance team thinks I'm swamped with work because I schedule their monthly report emails to be sent at 7 AM. In reality, I'm done with them by 3 PM the day before and spend the rest of the day learning guitar from YouTube videos.
I use ChatGPT for a large part of my SQL queries. My 60-year-old manager looked over my screen a few days ago, saw some nested queries and told me, 'It's amazing how you young people understand this stuff so easily.' Sir, an AI wrote that for me in ten seconds.
I wrote a simple script to help the finance team automate part of their monthly reports (honestly, I just described the process to an AI and tweaked its code). They treated it as if I had reinvented the wheel. The director wanted to know my 'secret,' and I didn't have the heart to tell him the secret is just not using VLOOKUPs for everything as if we're still in the 1990s.
In any large, department-wide meeting, I use an AI meeting assistant to zone out and not focus. Last week, someone asked for a specific number from a call two weeks ago, and I simply pulled it from the AI transcript while everyone else was still trying to remember. I feel like I have a superpower that no one else knows about.
I genuinely work about 12-15 hours a week. The rest of the time, I'm just sitting around looking for something to do. I read old threads on Reddit. I watch videos on how to fix my car. I've even tried ridiculously complex recipes. Last week, I alphabetized the spices in my kitchen cabinet out of sheer boredom.
Is this really the corporate world? In university, they always warned us about 'fast-paced environments' and 'killer deadlines.' My biggest source of stress right now is making sure I look focused in Zoom meetings.
My manager pulled me into a surprise meeting a few days ago, and I was sure the gig was up. I thought they had found me out. Instead, he asked if I could help 'skill-up' or 'upskill' some of the other analysts on the team. I don't even know what I'm supposed to teach them - how to google better? How to formulate prompts for an AI?
So, is this normal? Did I accidentally find the cheat code to corporate life? I feel like I'm in a strange world where appearing productive is far more important than doing anything.