I work in a consulting environment for an engineering company and everything is based on billable hours at my job. Every day I have to fill out a time sheet of how many hours I worked on a project and each project has specific project and task numbers to bill to. The problem I have run into at this job is that I don't always have 40 hours worth of billable hours to work every week. It is the exception to be light on work, but it happens way more often than I would like. So what am I supposed to put on my timesheet for the gaps in billable work? Early on I had a manager tell me to charge that time as overhead, but now that is frowned upon or just not allowed, so I am told now to use PTO or take unpaid time off. Idk about anyone else, but I personally like to save up and use my PTO for actual vacation, not to fill in gaps of time where there wasn't enough work to do which is completely out of my control. This leaves me always scrambling to try and find work to pick up and having to bug co-workers to see if they have anything to share which really makes me uncomfortable. And most of the time no one has anything to share, or if they do it's enough to cover like an hour or two of work when I am trying to fill a whole day. Needless to say this has left me completely frustrated and when I talk to people outside of my work about this they never get it because they have never heard of anything like this before. I was hired with the idea that I was a full-time salary employee, but apparently salary doesn't mean anything to these people. Meanwhile I am just slowly watching my PTO bank be depleted and hoping I will still have enough time off for my actual planned vacation in a few months.