There are four kinds of office jobs. They ones where you don't have enough work but they pay you for 8 hours, the kinds where you have too much work and they only pay you for 8 hours, overpaid executives, and the grunts who are only in the office when they apply and work their asses off for zero appreciation in the manual labor jobs.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Those who do best in office positions are the ones that are particularly skilled at making it seem like they are busy and productive. Ie staying late, or getting in early
Be the first at work,
either have your coffee and take care of something in peace, or have your coffee and read the news while sending one or two e-mails, until your colleagues arrive.
are CEOs really working ~~all day~~ at all? No. here's what they're doing instead.
fuck all.
What, you mean to imply Elon Musk couldn't possibly be simultaneous CEO and Chief Engineer of five separate companies with wildly different technical specialties, all while spending twelve hours a day on social media if CEOs actually had a job to do?
Commie.
twelve hours a day on social media? holy shit is he finally trying to cut back?
He spends 12 hours on main and the rest is spent pretending to be a toddler
I’m in a hybrid position with the office pretty close to where I live and I’ll just say it: slacking off is much more comfortable in the office than at home.
If it’s a really slow day I don’t have the same thoughts that I need to keep my work phone with me, or make sure I’m “available” in teams every hour or so (running Linux with Teams in a browser means I’m away or offline most of the time when actively using my PC). Being in the office gets you the “looks busy” effect almost for free, and it reinforces the fact that not being instantly available is not a bad sign for productivity.
My office environment is fortunately pretty decent though, so going in isn’t a nightmare compared to home other than the whole thing where I have to get moving and make myself presentable for venturing into public.
If you have a good office environment, I agree. Slacking off at work can be more comfortable than just brooding alone at home. Even if I'm just hanging out in my cubicle while my coworkers do the talking.
Found a link to the article here: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/18/remote-work-from-home-survey/75266226007/
Which references this survey with no access to the data or methodology used: https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/surveymonkey-research-workplace-culture-and-trends/
So it's an opinion piece with no real justification or factual foundation you'd expect from a journalist.
One quote that really stuck with me is from the YouTuber "Practical Engineering"
He was talking about how we often call road construction workers lazy for standing around, while one person is doing the work.
At one point he says something to the effect of "Next time you're working, pay attention to the actual amount of time you spend actively doing things, you might be surprised to realize it's not that much. It's just natural to need time to break and think to do your job properly - the only difference between them and you is your work activity isn't publicly visible"
Similarly I take the stance it's none of my business what people do at work as long as it doesn't interfere with me. Results are what matter, and even then that's between them and their boss.
I've lost count of the times I've watched apparent slackers achieve great accomplishments (and not because they got someone else to do their work). Conversely those who complain about the amount of work they are putting in often turn out to be unproductive (sometimes covering up their laziness with that narrative, or just doing their job really inefficiently).
Another thing I noticed in school is when you're in an exam, take a look around - you will notice nearly everyone is just sitting staring and doing nothing. You haven't entered the twilight zone, they're just thinking, you don't notice when you do it because you're too busy...thinking!!
There are also loads of safety regulations on work sites. If someone is going into a confined space like a sewer, someone is monitoring their air, someone is in direct communication with that person, someone is watching over any lines or cables that have to go with the worker, and a whole group is directing traffic to make sure no one drives into the work crew.
Yes good points. He also covered how work has to be done in sequence so there is inevitably lots of waiting as dependencies are completed.
Precisely. You don't pay an electician to dig a hole. You don't let a machine operator do electrical work, and so on.
How many breaks did Jessica Guynn have during the day she wrote that text?
No Shit! I wonder which corporate real estate consortium financed that article.
Middle management especially basically only exist in the numbers they do because of in office work culture, which is very often just distractions from actual work.
80% of their 'job' is either useless or counterproductive to what the organization is actually, or at least supposedly, designed and intended to do, and they know that a mass adoption of a paradigm that makes this obvious would lead to them not having jobs.
So we get masses of propaganda to disabuse us of the notion that their mostly useless 'work' needs to exist in the way that it can.
This is made all the more ironic (and horrifying) when you know that most of these people also profess to care about the poor, the climate, but that's less important than feeling like queen bees in their corpo hives, so fuck anything that might actually significantly reduce co2 emmissions and significantly increase the quality of life for a huge amount of workers.
Nah, a good manager would change your opinion. A good manager is a filter and barrier from corporate bullshit. They'll enforce on you what clearly needs to be done, and they'll handle menial paperwork shit on their own. It's more efficient for the manager to fill out the same form five times for five people than it is for each person to fill out that form individually. For an individual, it might take half an hour each. For the manager doing it five times, it'll take twenty minutes for the first one, and 5 minutes for each additional form.
A good manager will argue back until what whatever they want you to do with your timesheet makes sense before they have you do it. A good manager is a great asset and a huge benefit for everyone involved.
I have worked many different tech jobs precisely because all the managers were as I described, or, they outright told me I was being exploited and should work elsewhere, and showed me the documentation to prove it.
My last manager was a very, very wonderful person who I got along with great.
Someone who actually fostered employee's ability to work and grow and gain skills, as opposed to just issuing orders one moment, being unreachable without explanation most of the day, and then popping by with a new personality hours later to explain how to do something i already knew how to do.
He did almost everything you mention and more, it was the shock of my life up to that point to find someone like that.
We hit it off so well that I was basically his double within 6 months and began taking on many of his tasks so he could catch up on things he was behind on.
That is when I began much, much more interactions with managers and team leads of other departments, and found that most of them were so totally incompetent that I had to interview most of them team members to figure out what the process I was supposed to be documenting even were.
Team after team, each manager and each of their underlings described entirely different and contradictory work processes which we were attempting to just understand, before attempting to evaluate how or if to streamline and standardize many disparate digital and physical paper procedures.
I unfortunately lost that job due to a series of crimes happening to me that ruined my life, but I absolutely would have loved to stay at that job despite being surrounded by incompetent morons, because I had at least finally found my own really good manager and team.
I am not saying all managers are as awful as my previous post, that everything they do is useless.
I am saying that a vast majority of them are incompetent and a vast majority of them would be obviously seen as basically just chit chatting as 80% of their job, which is at best a waste of time, and at worst, actively harmful to the work of others, when you remove the physical office environment.
Of course there are exceptions to this, good managers do exist, but they are by far the exception.
100% this. My first manager at my current job was in middle management at the time and is far and away the best manager I've ever had and one key reason I've stayed at my current job for nearly 10 years. He kept the typical corporate bullshit away and allowed his team to thrive. He's a director now but thankfully the managers under him have maintained a similar philosophy.
One thing I learned over the years is that there is zero training in being a good manager. Promotions to management are based upon two things: technical expertise or relationships (brown-nosing/nepotism etc.) Having managerial skills is completely unnecessary for the job.
Very few "managers" take the time to observe, study, and gain the skill set needed when they are in the job. Most end up regurgitating the most recent MBA bullshit fad.
Time to get your Seven Sigma black belt so you can synergize silo'd teams into efficient fusion collaborators via Lean Agile development paradigms and maximize productivity!
Did I make up or misuse some of those terms?
Maybe! I don't care!
In my experience its all just 'I learned some new lingo which makes me very cool and also very serious and important', but its only function is to create social etiquette hierarchies and obfuscate and overcomplicate meetings and directives to the point they don't mean or accomplish anything.
I find it interesting that "attend meetings" is said in the same breath as "walk around" and "take lunch or bathroom breaks".
Meetings are way worse for productivity than breaks and water cooler bullshitting, at least in my experience. There's more of them, they take longer, and they tend to leave me with a vague sense that nothing's really getting done and everybody's sort of okay with that. AND they're treated as an obligation in a way that taking breaks is not.
At least when I get back to my desk after walking around, I feel a bit more refreshed and ready to get back to work. In fact, it's usually meeting burnout that prompts the walk-around in the first place.
Useful meetings do exist. A lot of stuff can be lost in communication and one meeting can save a lot of time in getting everyone aligned in a short time. But figuring out when a meeting would be useful and when it's unnecessary is a skill in itself and a lot of times the people calling for meetings are not the ones who have the necessary information to make that call.
The useful meetings usually happen organically. A group of people are trying to accomplish something and at one point they decide ok, let's all get in a room / on a call together and iron this out.
That's fair. I won't dispute that sometimes they're helpful. If I spend more time typing the message than it'd take to just talk it out, then meeting up is a viable option.
But gosh, the number of meetings I've had where I send the email, we meet anyway, and I simply read the email to them and they go "Ohhhh"... Sigh.
It kinda reminds me of Snow Crash, where one character works in an office where everything is monitored, so she slowly reads a stupid note about toilet paper with backtracking and making superfluous lists to game the tracking algorithms. Working is not about productivity, but gaming the KPI.
I was so annoyed the other day because on my walk to the bathroom I caw 4 people watching Netflix with a teams meeting on closed caption.
And then I saw 2 people in one cube playing a multiplayer phone game next to their manager wearing headphones in a teams meeting.
So that's the reason we got called RTO...
Thank Atlassian for continuing to do unbiased research on the subject.
Huh. I don't despise atlassian anymore. Nice.
I bet that won't last for more than one interaction with JIRA.
Having used it before and given I will use it again... You are correct. It will be short lived.
I mean, it's not really a "in office" v "remote working" debate - people will slack off and make themselves look busy regardless of where they are. That's caused by a case-specific mix of motivation, discipline, or other factors. That's a line management issue rather than a work location issue - WfH just gets scapegoated for that.
Ultimately it will be the money starting to talk - if the accountants start complaining about expensive office space not being used to its maximum, then they'll start instructing folk back to the office. It's a shit reason but unless your contract specifically says remote, it'll be the balance sheet making the decision for you (edit: unless it really doesn't work for you and you go nuclear with the "resign" button of course)
The thing is that with WfH you can't just "look busy" as easily as you can in the office. You actually have to produce some results.
I have to be in office one day a week. Mondays. Just get it over with. Sometimes, I have nothing to do. I piddle. I listen to music on my phone. I check the weather 47 times. I read the news.
Those days suck.
I've read that the "resign button" is one of the biggest motivators for back to office bullshit. If you resign, it cheaper than them laying you off. Saves a shitload of money, to my understanding.
Here are some sources.
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4800828-office-mandates-cause-attrition/
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