When people talk about “doing the bare minimum” instead of quitting, what does that actually look like at a high-pressure job as a senior engineer with a micromanaging boss?

Block off your entire calendar with random length place holder "meetings".

Open some tickets with vendors about things you already know the answer to. Only reply to vendor tickets when they threaten closure. Make slow progress on this at all times.

Complete your development work ASAP. (Of course you will not report it as complete, see below)

During team meetings reference the vendor tickets, give updates accordingly. For any stories you have just say you're 80% complete. On your 80% stories next day you should have a challenge, some code conflict you're working through. This can easily bleed over the next week before you have an "epiphany" and need to change your solution approach. In Friday's meeting share this should now be complete by next Wednesday. If anyone applies a lot of pressure you can always just say you figured it out and got it done (since it was already complete anyway).

In your 1x1 meetings share concern that most of your time is allocated towards ad-hoc meetings and helping junior developers. You have little consistent focus time for development work.

You can also introduce bugs in your development work, just make sure they get caught in UAT/QA so you can go back and redevelop.

Maintenance tasks could start taking up a large portion of your time. Are there any automated processes that you could accidentally turn off? The result would be a large pile of shit you need to fix with multiple scripts and some manual labor. That could be a side project for weeks as you take a very very very slow approach toward fixing it.

The list goes on. There's so many things you can do to do nothing or close to nothing.

/r/cscareerquestions Thread