There is something called "kick-out rooms."

Gather them in one room and give them no work -- but keep paying them.

This room means that the company can avoid illegality, while at the same time psyching up the employee and forcing him or her into termination.

(Recently, there has been a judicial ruling that the actions of such companies are "illegal.")

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I had a similar experience when I was younger.

Although not quite as nuanced as "kick-out room," I have been on long-term assignment after getting caught up in a firestorm in a business unit.

A "flame room," so to speak.

But the site chief told me, 'Don't do anything'.

I understood well what this 'do nothing' means -- after all, it is 'politics'.

The field needs to produce a 'hard-working response' in the form of increased staffing.

However, it is also a tremendous risk to plunge an uninformed engineer into a project that is under fire.

This is because the cost (time, manpower) of training from scratch is ridiculously high, and in addition, amateurs on a flaming project can touch the system and plant fatal glitches.

Hence, what was needed in this case was "do-nothing personnel.

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So what I was doing was something I had wanted to do for a long time in the flame room.

"Linux Kernel Modification"

Not many people can afford this technology. (Let alone the ability to do so.) This is because it requires an enormous amount of time.

The serenity of being alone in that flame room was a very luxurious time, as I recall now.

It is not often that I get such an opportunity to get the coding I like from morning to night on a monthly basis.

And I am aware that the skills I developed here have kept me fed for the next 10 years.

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The strength of software engineers lies in the fact that "there are a lot of things we can do (or more precisely, things we want to do) without being ordered by the company, and we can do them 'alone'.

Such techniques can be your own know-how and, hopefully, benefit your company.

From the viewpoint of "enjoyable 'kick-out room' life," acquiring programming skills is also recommended.