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When I was a teenager, I thought Office Space was representative of real life. Yeah, you'd have to show up to a job you hate, but at least you could openly hate it and call out its bullshit brainwashing culture to your friends and coworkers. You could all be united in a "this is fucking stupid, no one actually enjoys this, and all the weird office mannerisms, politics, and minutia are only bought into by the tools who no one likes."
20 years later, that wasn't really true. People seem to buy into the BS, or at least keep plausible deniability about it, such that you never really know. You can't openly call this out to your acquaintances, because you need rely on them for job referrals.
I don't know if this is a real difference between the 90s and 2010s/2020s, or maybe it's just the way it's always been. But it would seem the honesty and rebellious "fuck the man" attitude of the 90s has given way to the "live the hustle" attitude of the 2010s.
Maybe our economic situation being such shit has enforced this, since people don't have the ability to stick it to the man by even pretending they can opt out anymore. Unemployment in the late 90s was around 4%. It's possible that major economic shocks like the 2008 crisis or recent inflation changed how people think about job security.
Maybe also social media caused this, the same way it (in my opinion) caused the major ramp up in politics in the past 15 years. LinkedIn has turned everyone into their own personal brand. In the 90s - or at least in the Office Space/Fight Club version of the 90s - you clocked in and clocked out. Now you're expected to be passionate about quarterly earnings, and if you want to be secure in getting that next job after you're laid off from your current one, you better make sure you have a passionate public image, too. Note also, globalization may have something to do with this as well, since you're competing in a global market now, so you need to be better than more than just the local competition.
I posit that maybe being in a world where everyone seems to believe and live the BS has similar negative effects as social media does for causing people depression due to the highlight reel effect. The plausible deniability of "everyone seems to buy into this crap" makes others pretend to buy in too. This has obvious political parallels as well.
Let me tell you, at least in my white-collar office, Office Space is considered by most people I talk to to in fact be completely true, and if anything an understatement. Of course, it helps when you have reports of your own with a 3-letter acronym that everyone knows for a fact nobody reads...
This. And their later show Silicon Valley, updated for the 2010s, also hit quite hard for somebody immersed in that reality.
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It seems rather logical to me. My parents had little choice in the jobs they did, and just stuck with them due to a mix of necessity and convenience. But they aren't "dream jobs" in any way, and nobody feels the need to portray it as such.
So they wanted something else for me. They supported me, they told me to do something I love. This has also been one of the core messages I grew up with in media: Explore your interests! Find the real you! Self-actualize! etc.
The thing is, work is generally work because it needs to be done, but nobody wants to do it. That's the reason you get paid. Otherwise it would be a hobby. Meanwhile, the few fields that at least sound appealing in theory all turn into such a fierce competition that they debase themselves into working for the absolute minimum survivable amount (see journalism). Sometimes below that, if there are enough nepo-babys who can coast on their trust fund anyway.
But wasn't this your dream job? You sacrificed so much just to get here! Your parents supported you so much! You told everyone that this is what you want to do! So there's two options: a) drop out (and often just rinse-repeat in a different field) or b) accept that yes, this is your dream, but you just have to FIGHT HARD and BE PASSIONATE until you prevail. Even if it wasn't your dream job specifically, people generally get much more choice in what they do, so if you end up hating it, it's your own fault for choosing stupid. That's much tougher to swallow than it was in the past; You didn't get a choice, so it wasn't your fault.
Yeah, I actually have my dream job, and it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with my choices and enjoy my job (because I have realistic expectations of how fun work generally is for most people). But I make half what I could be earning in a less interesting position, and the desirability means there was a lot of competition to get here, so everyone around me is extremely competent and extremely passionate. This is great in many ways, but means I live in a constant state of anxiety trying to keep up with coworkers who all seem better at their jobs than me.
Work is work. Most of the time, it's going to kinda suck, even for those of us lucky enough to be doing "meaningful" work that we love. Such is life.
My rule of thumb (coming from engineering, but probably applicable elsewhere) is "cool" (desirable), well-paying, and work-life balance, pick at most two. There is a reason trendy startups can expect 60 hour weeks, but if you don't want those I'd recommend something less sexy but still necessary.
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That has been my cynical view of the "make your passion your work" urgings. Get people who really want to do this job, are very good at this job, and love this job, to work for you for half nothing and not rock the boat because they love the work and think it is really important that it gets done.
All a part of the employee management bullshit about 'avoid paying actual real money, which will cost you, to your stupid workers but instead incentivise the boobs by pats on the head like 'employee of the month' and crap like that which looks like you appreciate them but costs you nothing'.
Then again I started in the world of work during the 80s so cynicism galore there, not the day-glo happy 90s 😊
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I remember reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs a few years ago. It felt strange after I got all the way through it. A lot of what he describes as such would be considered a “dream job” to me and a lot of the people I know. Not because that’s what they wanted to do, but because they can fulfill some labor quota that earns them their daily keep, so they can then turn around and do what they actually wanted to do. That’s not a “bullshit” job. That’s a free lunch.
The idea that if people simply were allowed to pursue what they wanted and their livelihood itself wasn’t permanently in hock to an occupation you hated, that civilization would get along just fine is asinine. Graeber I don’t think made that point himself directly in any part of his complete body of work, but it’s essentially an implication of what he is saying.
The problem we have with labor in our economic system is that the economy doesn’t really serve the interests of the community itself. We work to serve the economy. And that’s our “relationship” to “work.” There can be better conditions under which you will still have to labor, but it takes a lot of the physical drudgery out of things. That question goes more to reimagining the whole social/economic order though. Ironically, it’s one of the things “NatSoc’s” (or AuthCenter, whatever they call themselves) love to debate about so much.
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This is nothing new at least for me, it is Havel's greengrocer problem all the way down. Majority of the CW stuff also comes down to this, especially related to corporate environment where people are softly pushed into wearing rainbow keychains or attend Women at X lectures etc.
But there is also something to be said for maintaining positive attitude toward your work in general. I dislike 24x7 grumpy whiners, who are just doom and gloom about everything, poisoning the well for everybody else. A company gives you a gift card as a present - oh my god, those stupid fuckers should have given cash instead. These people are sometimes pain in the ass to be around, in the end there is a time to stop whining, grit your teeth and just move forward.
Poisoning the well is now present quite explicitly with a new "trend" of so called quiet quitting - because of course everything is now a TikTok trend - which is basically just the idea of punching the card, doing what is necessary and come home to family or church or you garden or other hobbies where you self-actualize. You know, the thing most factory workers were doing for centuries. Except now, it is a life philosophy and some people see it as a mission in their life, it is their hobby they do when they come home from work. They expect to be hailed as a new Socrates or maybe even Karl Marx, awakening white collar class to their oppression and pointlessness of their work and achievements and everything. They think that Wally from Dilbert is a role model to be followed, where the goal is to become corporate ninja and sabotage the company as much as possible without getting caught, instead of a comical relief.
As with all things, everything in moderation.
For sure. The Negative Nancy/Debbie Downer types who are just constantly complaining can really poison a work environment. Even when their complaints are justified, chances are we all already know and don't need to be constantly reminded of it. As an adult I actually really appreciate the people who can put on a cheerful face and make the best of a bad situation.
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This attitude doesn’t end when these people punch out and leave. Some people are just miserable wretches to be around, whose first pleasure is in finding something to complain about with everything.
I haven’t just seen it with the old. I’ve seen it among the newcomers onto the labor force. These are the new lineup of complainers and whiners to yell, kicking and screaming as you drag them through the day. It wasn’t just inculcated in me as a kid that this is the wrong attitude to have. It’s an attitude that simply doesn’t work. After you stand around shouting that there’s so much work to do and you’ve tired yourself out; your work is still going to be sitting there, waiting for you.
Anyone that’s ever actually tried this knows it’s harder to be lazy at the extremes than it is being productive. Because at some point most of us have tried it. Go ahead. Let your dishes pile up in the sink until everything is overflowing. Don’t wash your clothes so you smell like a walking piece of shit to everyone. You’ll find it much harder to live life that way than staying on top of your own affairs.
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I've only seen the phrase "quiet quitting" being used by employers complaining about the employees doing this when they, as said, just punch the card and do what is necessary. If there's some trend of employees using this phrase, it seems like it's a recuperation of an earlier employer jargon term.
Oh, of course the usual battle of who used it first, like with the woke, and if it is endonym or exonym. Whatever the case, the term was a global trend with Chinese lying flat or Great Resignation during pandemic when people left their work for pandemic relief and other issues. It was also a time of huge popularity if /r/antiwork subreddit.
But in the end I do agree with you, there is nothing new here. Since the time memorial, there were regular punch the card people, there were always passively aggressive and dissatisfied employees with some sort of vengeance against their employer and of course there were "go above and beyond" workaholic employees. There were always conflicts between these groups where quiet quitters despised workaholic udarniks for raising quotas of production for the rest of them and all of that. Which is kind of the point I wanted to convey to the OP - his Dilbert fantasy of how everybody hates their job is not something that is to be expected.
Just my experience, but I've found if you go "above and beyond", you're not going to be recognised or even thanked. Hey, you want to do extra free labour for me? Great, go right ahead, dummy!
So there's a point between "punch the clock, leave on the dot" and "be first in and last out doing unpaid work". Do what needs to be done, if more needs to be done then do it, but don't make a habit of working for nothing for extra, because nobody will thank you for the hours you turned up and put in unasked.
EDIT: As I said, I started working during 80s recession Ireland so that was perhaps a peculiarly bad time, but one piece of advice we used to get about jobseeking was "offer to work for nothing!" The idea was "employer gives you a chance, you demonstrate how good you are, employer is impressed and hires you on full time".
Need I say it didn't work out like that? One job in particular I remember, I was young and dumb enough to try this out. They were quite happy for me to work there two months dong the job for free, but the minute I asked about "so, any chance of paid employment?" it was "uh, no, sorry, you don't have the qualifications for this work, bye!" That, despite the fact that I had been doing that exact job with no complaints about "you're untrained, you're unqualified" up till then.
I suppose nowadays this goes under internships: be happy to work for the exposure and to get experience in the industry. Paid? For doing the work we'd have to hire someone to do? Don't be silly! (and again, as in the 80s, 'if you don't want this, there's plenty more waiting to take the offer').
I have seen this argument from people in real life and also on the internet and to be frank, there seems to be some misunderstanding regarding the employee-employer relation, especially lack of knowledge of being put in shoes of your direct manager. The main counterargument is this: what is the alterntive? Just doing your job?
I lead people and if there is a time for promotion discussion, what is supposed to be an argument for promotion?
Hell no. You can be promoted only if you show that you have skills worthy of that position, otherwise it creates a load of issues inside the team. I have had people with this kind of mercenary attitude inside my team and in my experience it is always one-sided. They ask for extra money for extra work, but they are often not prepared for salary cut if they are subpar for whatever reason - health, personal issues or maybe even because it was just calm month or anything like that. Of course there are mercenary positions like that such as sales, various contractors or workers in legal field who literally bill manhours or who have large variable part of their salary and who have to work for every single cent they can provably earn.
But this is not the case for regular positions such as IT admin or accountant etc. There are some unspoken rules: if you are accountant, it is implicitly understood, that there will be more work around quarterly earning reports or when taxes are due. If you are in IT, it is understood that you need to put more when a new system is being implemented or when some security crisis happens. This is compensated by less work on regular workday in summer let's say.
It is also common sense. A manager has other things to do than babysit everybody who bitches that he had to stay at work because customer call took 10 minutes longer after their shift ended and who asks for extra overtime and who bitches over that injustice for next week to everybody around him or some such - while of course not mentioning when the manager let him leave earlier to pick up his kid last week because his wife was stuck with something. It is just stupid busywork, I don't have time for such powergames. There should be some basic relationship that smooths over these kind of fluctuations without having constant excel sheet tally of who owes what to whom. It is also likely that such a person will show the same behavior toward his colleagues, not providing necessary support unless specially motivated. It is just not worth it.
In my experience, there is no such thing as promotions. The boomers in management remain there forever, and even the one time there was an opening they just gave one of the managers two hats to wear at once instead of promoting one of the grunts who had been with the company for years.
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What I'm saying is "work hard and get promoted" is not happening, because they don't want to promote you, because that would mean they have to pay you more. Get the work and responsibility without paying the salary is the goal.
I think there's a wide range of job experiences amongst the commenters here, and what kind of jobs you have/had and how you got them vary greatly. Middle-class kids of middle-class parents who always worked middle-class jobs are going to have different experience of "this is how you get a job, this is how you negotiate conditions", etc. from people whose experience, and the experience of their family, has always been "there's no 'negotiating', there's 'take it or leave it'".
Funnily enough, I was thinking about this in the context of a family member. Worked for someone who was the first millionaire in our area (and this was back when a million was Real Money). Started off with after-school job as a kid, worked there for years. Hard-working, responsible, reliable. Employer (and employer's family) depended on him for a lot. When employer eventually retired and sold off the business, my family member was made redundant. After years of "hey, guy, can you collect my daughter from the airport/drive me to the city/other tasks outside the job", what did he get? The bare legal minimum of statutory redundancy, which was not a whole heap, and not a penny extra. And they would have avoided paying even that if possible. Because they were miserly, miserable, pennypinchers who took advantage of his good nature and willingness to "go above and beyond".
So yeah: slack off, Gen Z, slack off!
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There's only one real argument, and in most parts of corporate culture, it's verboten to state it outright: "If you don't promote me, I can do better somewhere else, and this company will be better off paying me more than losing me." Nobody likes that argument (except salespeople, who will come right out and say it), so there's layers of corporate BS coming up with proxies for various reasons. For instance, corporations will often have a policy there's a certain number of promotion slots available, at which point the argument becomes "I'm better than all those other candidates for this slot". But the policy is generally more a guideline than a rule; slots will be left open if the company thinks it can get away with it, and slots will be pulled out of the air if needed to retain an employee.
This is true, but there are plenty of companies and managers who will make this one-sided as well, demanding you put in the extra time when it's needed but bitching if you show up late or leave early during the slow times.
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I imagine the main driver of this was the mass entry of middle-class single white women to office jobs.
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Plenty of people are out there hate all their bullshit at the job. It's just that there are less, especially with professional jobs as corporations have realized that morale boosting is quite important, as well as embraced automation to move dumb red tape out of the physical realm and into computers. TPS reports are mostly a thing of the past, and tons of bureaucracy is now just chasing down and hassling people on slack.
I don't give a crap about quarterly earnings beyond how it affects the stock price. But work just doesn't suck bad enough for me to want to fuck the man.
P.S. I heard from someone I know that Google is absolutely pozzed and they have mandatory reeducation struggle sessions and the like at work. But none of my corporate jobes had anything like it.
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I don't think it's unemployment; unemployment in the late '90s was low, in the early '90s it was high and people were no less cynical. In fact, Office Space was a bit unrealistic when it came out (as I recall noting at the time) because of that; it was a boom time and if you could spell computer (or at least get close) you could get a programming job; nobody at Initech would need to worry about being laid off.
Both Office Space and Dilbert were about tech, and speaking specifically about tech, I think what changed is the rise of the profession. In the early to mid '90s, software was just another white collar job. Then came first the dot-com boom, when people realized you could get stupid rich in software. Then following the dot-com crash, the rise of Google, stock options and much higher salaries in established companies, and a new wave of startups getting people rich. Now software was a prestige job, up there with doctor or lawyer or at least stockbroker. Not the kind of thing associated with the grind. Google, earlier on, made some attempt not to feel like Dilbert's company. And the startups... well, you might be doing a death march, but probably not a steady endless grind. But all things come to an end; the big software companies have become fully corporate and the final startup wave seems to have completed. Salaries are still high, and full cynicism hasn't yet returned, but it probably will. The only thing permanently gone is the cubicles; cost-cutting, you know, it's all open desks now.
Agreed. Something odd is going on as well, where under Trump financial analysts are talking about "rising unemployment" when unemployment is lower than it literally ever was under Obama. Unemployment has only very rarely been lower than it currently is.
I think this is a big part of this dynamic, and also the dynamic of the American Left as a whole from the Clinton third way era to today. 1990s Gen X anti-establishment thinking was built around rejecting boring mainstream corporate jobs and the evil corporate bosses they served. Enter Google, with its "Don't be Evil" corporate catch phrase, and a thousand start-ups followed the same logic. Infinite PTO, beer carts on Friday, ping pong tables and nap rooms! The tech companies were just as against the soul-sucking corporate bullshit of Halliburton or GE as you were! Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, et al were understood as left-wing Obama-voting humanistic champions against the traditional corporate world.
The development of those tech companies into new kinds of corporate villains, and the failure of the Obama administration to deliver on much of anything beyond reasonably competent middle-of-the-road governance, lead significant portions of the young to turn a lot more radical. Whether it's pseudo-marxist anti corporatism or hard-right tradcath fascist anti-capitalism, the common factor is the disillusionment of realizing that new hip tech companies weren't going to fix everything. No capitalist corporation is going to fix everything.
As someone who had the misfortune to graduate during the Obama years and currently in the line to try and find a new job right now, you will have to excuse me if I so politely reply with bullshit.
Trying to find a job under Obama that wasn't some sort of high-turnover high-pressure sales job was a complete nightmare that I barely managed to stumble into through a series of unusual circumstance. (And, checking back what the average for my degree was at the time, I was getting severely underpaid for it).
Right now, it's arguably even worse; throwing out applications for even slightly sketchy jobs, and I'm not even getting replies back for an interview.
Back during Obama, I couldn't even count the times I'd get slotted in for an interview only to get in and find they were interviewing me for something completely different, or had just straight up lied about what I was applying for. Good times.
If anything, those financial analysts sound like the only people who know a goddamn inkling of what they're talking about. I'd listen to them, if I were you.
Sorry but what in tarnation are you talking about? What point are you trying to make here? I'm totally lost.
You statement: 'under Trump financial analysts are talking about "rising unemployment" when unemployment is lower than it literally ever was under Obama. unemployment is lower than it literally ever was under Obama'
Job searching during the Obama years was a nightmare.
Job searching right now is even worse.
Maybe I misread your statement - I've been doing alot of cooking and am slightly buzzed right now, I won't discount it - but I took your statement to imply that employment wasn't that bad during the Obama years.
It doesn't help that isn't the first time I've heard that, admittedly.
So, if I'm mistaken on that part, I do apologize. However, this part;
Again, trying to find a job right now is a fairly horrible process. So if Trump financial analysts are talking about rising unemployment, I'd start listening to them. Cause they might be on to something.
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True. It is, however, rising. And as far as I can tell, every other slight rise of unemployment has been followed by a sharp rise (and recession) -- 2007, 2001, 1979, 1974, maybe 1960. That's technical analysis and technical analysis is BS, but it's tempting. I also suspect some of the doom and gloom talk has been attempts at stock market manipulation; e.g. talk of AI bubble and how we were in a recession if you didn't count AI was reaching a crescendo and then NVidia reported great earnings (entirely predictable since even if there is a bubble it manifestly hasn't popped yet).
I feel like we've worked through several technical explanations for why a recession is due since 2021 and each has come and gone, and what it comes down to is that it's due and everyone knows it. The biblical theory of economics that there are seven fat years and seven lean years is in most cases as good as any. The identity of Mrs O Leary's cow or the Austrian crown prince that sets it off is ultimately unimportant, the line can't go up forever without going down.
We've had two quarters of negative GDP growth since then. We've gone about 10 years without a recession in the past (1991-2001 and 2009-2019) and we're only 5 years into the current growth period. The doom-and-gloom seems unshakable though. As I said, some of it might be manipulation, either market or political. Holiday travel is way up this year, which seems to me to be an indicator of positive sentiment. Holiday shopping has been predicted to be below-trend this year. If that plays out we probably are headed for recession. If it doesn't, I smell a rat.
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As Zhou Enlai (didn't) say, it's too early to tell.
There's three startups founded in the past five years in the first ten entries of this list of biggest unicorns (and this is a little unfair because there's two subsidiaries of established companies and one vape manufacturer in the top ten).
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There's a really interesting post from
/r/TheMottethat you might enjoy: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/c7bkqh/examining_1999s_culture_through_its_best_movies/It seems like culture around 1999 was different on this point in a really important way, which I think led us to the ennui of the middle-aged office worker asking, "is this it?" This isn't as much of a thing on the more recent years. I think it's been replaced by a view that even the "soulless middle-class existence" would be a significant step up from what the younger millenials, zoomers, and alphas actually got: the economic engine hiccupping as it lurched from crisis to crisis, houses accelerating to many multiples of median annual income, immigration changing hometowns and countries beyond recognition, dating being so messed up that finding a partner is tough enough, let alone someone seriously keen on starting a family, ...
I remember watching an old interview with Ayn Rand on Donahue, when he had a talk show, circa 1980, and there was this bit where Ayn Rand said she felt good about skyscrapers and cities and Donahue responded with dismay at all of the people working these soulless office jobs in big concrete buildings.
As someone that came of age around Flight Club I was surprised at how much older the office drone disgust sentiment was.
I wonder if I recall that correctly?
It was a thing in the fifties too. The Organization Man, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
For about 15-20 years after the war there was this feeling in the US zeitgeist that the individual was being, I don't know, deprecated? Pushed out? and replaced with the conformist "mass-man."
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Tech jobs all went to open concept offices so the 90s cubicles people were complaining about look ridiculously nice.
Find a picture of an engineering office in the 1950s. Replace drafting tables with desks with monitors on them, voila, 2020s software company office.
At least they are front to back. 2020s offices like to put people face to face which is horrible when you are trying to concentrate on something.
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Rather than Office Space, which I’ve never felt strongly about one way or another (might be a case of Seinfeld is Unfunny), there’s another film that comes to mind: The Matrix.
To me in ${Current Day}, the cosmic and comical horror of films such as The Matrix is not the thought of being stuck in a simulation—nor is the fascinating part the action sequences (the hand-to-hand sequences look like dances rather than attempts at causing harm)—but the depiction of the dreariness and mundanity of life as a white-collar worker.
There’s aspects of this that resonate from The Office to Glengarry Glen Ross.
I don't have time to post a longer thought here, but these comments have me wondering if the '90s office drudgery (TPS reports and such) is really the last gasp of jobs that have mostly been replaced by the spreadsheet and friends. We finally became aware that those jobs weren't really necessary --- they started getting replaced in some areas, probably the most important first, and by the end it really did seem pretty useless.
At least the guy in the '50s operating the adding machine all day in the accounting department didn't immediately (or even indirectly) think about how a computer (heh, possibly his job title) could do the hard work instead, and the value of finishing the quarterly report is at least somewhat tangible.
The TPS report is alive and well. Corporations love to institute procedure, and procedure that generates paperwork. The TPS report is electronic and doesn't have a cover any more, so instead they'll get on your case for not properly handling the irrelevant questions on the report template.
I’ve had managers like this in the modern day. These people “love” bureaucracy and attaching “properly” “formatted” “documents” and paperwork to absolutely everything, not knowing it creates unnecessary (<- key word) friction in a very fast paced environment where you need as little of that as possible.
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Social media made it easy to pierce the social veil. Your boring nonwork life is no longer hidden by default, it is assumed to be public. Thats the blurring between personal and work, which means your boss can know if you're a true believer outside of work. I don't think you can even put Dilbert comics on your cube anymore, mainly because cubes are now dead thanks to 'collaborative spaces' that were the rage precovid.
Thats the big difference, not just COVID and remote work. Social media is the arms race for 'authenticity' and so you have to fake authenticity to fit in with the culture. Are you secretly a heretic? You can't be private, you have to declare your adherence openly, because other people are more enthusiastic than you.
But therein lies a question: why the arms race for authenticity, instead of just, you know, being good at your job. We need to realize that it is entirely possible that being Good At Job is simply becoming less and less important these days. Opportunity to not fuck up is more important than grindmaxxing. So many bullshit tasks in office are busywork to pretend one is productive, when most of it is not actually accretive to task fulfilment. Meanwhile many actual work deliverables that need bullshit microchanges as it is being worked on - coding, writing, drafting, anything manual - were made efficient by productivity tools and then it became representative of our own executive microfailures to use the tool rather than the difficulty of using the task itself. Random fuckwits can do a due diligence of a company financials for fundamental analysis just by ratiomaxxing, you don't need a genius to do it, just grind the formulae out diligently. Good is less important than discipline, and since discipline is only visible by outcomes that are beyond ones control, performative performance is a visible proxy.
This is the world we live in, outcomes divorced from inputs or at least sufficiently muddled by layers that our own roles as cogs are known to be unimportant. To not be swapped out we gotta pretend we believe the mission of the machine, and the incentive to publicly deepthroat the corporate mission is so high precisely because it is easier than actually trying to do great work. Who knows, we might end up liking the sensation of being choked out by slogans. Enjoy your corpospeak ASMR, piggies.
Apologies but if you have the time, what do you mean by "Good is less important than discipline, and since discipline is only visible by outcomes that are beyond ones control, performative performance is a visible proxy." What is performative performance a proxy for, and why is discipline only visible by outcomes that are beyond ones control? I thought discipline in this context would be doing the cog work diligently, which is in ones control? Not disagreeing or agreeing with you, just trying to understand better. And I agree that if we're all cogs then a cog that buys into the corpospeak is going to be preferred over a cog that doesn't, if I understand you, you are basically competing for who has most allegience to the mission? Incentivizing allegiance to the mission?
It's because the outcomes are divorced from inputs.
The role of a corporation and bureaucracy is to avoid risk, or more simply put, to build infrastructure to the extent that a single human cannot damage it all. The inverse of that is that humans become so unimportant that doing good doesn't affect the outcome either. Naturally, the system no longer optimizes for doing good, but for avoiding risk.
So what's left to differentiate one cog from the other cog, aside from metrics and KPIs that can be efficiently gamed (since the difference between performing well and performing badly can be negligible on the actual business value and bottom line)? Signaling allegiance. So that then becomes competitive, and people fall all over themselves in attempts to signal their allegiance harder than the others.
Imagine you are Amazon, with their stupid policy about how a minimum number of people need to be fired from your department every year. Would you eliminate the bottom 15% performers? Does it matter if they perform? You're in corporate communications, does it matter to Amazon's bottom line at all if they're better or worse at releasing internal emails? How else would you decide who to fire?
Oh okay, this makes sense thanks.
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This is definitely true. But sometimes it’s out of necessity, sometimes it also happens for other reasons. Larger institutions that are sensitive to certain changes have to minimize risk as much as they can, just due to the inherent nature of the industry they’re in. If you’re in health care, you need to avoid silly mistakes that can have catastrophic consequences, or you’re always having to dodge serious regulatory penalties even though skirting them could empower you to perform much better.
It’s also one of the reasons why smaller companies and start-up's are generally faster and better at innovating wholly new ideas, but aren’t necessarily the best for developing a long-term strategic vision for them. When you’re a quick, move fast and break things type of company it’s easy to be a pioneer with that kind of risk assuming attitude.
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I think you're spot on here. I've long believed that one of the reasons behind a lot of current employment isn't any actual requirement for productive work to be done, but to satisfy primitive primate desires to have flunkies and exert authority over other people. I'd be surprised if anyone who has worked in an office environment for more than a few months hasn't encountered a time when a decision was made that was bad for the business and reduced profits but satisfied the psychological needs of the managers in question.
Yeah. Had managers like that before. High performers get attacked and criticized for daring to have a different opinion. Kiss asses who don’t rock the boat are “safe” in the sense that they don’t notice the incompetency of their boss and see that it gets pointed out. Despite the fact that sharing different opinions, you know, helps to improve the job the managers are tasked with.
I read a book once about the hiring practices of large tech companies. I came across I think it was Sundar Pichai’s interview with Google. Or some major exec for Google now. During his interview process for a low level position he was asked what he thought about Gmail at that time, when it was still new. Instead of flattering the hiring manager, he took a critical line against it and started talking about the things he didn’t like and how he would improve the software for the public. It so blindsided the hiring team that they knew right then and there that they wanted him for important projects.
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If you haven't read Parkinson's Law, you should. The more common law is "Work expands to fill all available time". Less pithy but relevant to your point is
"The number of workers within public administration, bureaucracy or officialdom tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want subordinates, not rivals, and that officials make work for each other."
The book itself is filled with stuff like this.
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While I'm sure most work being bullshit was the cause of capability requirements withering, I also think that our favourite bugbear here of DEI or rather its predecessor of Affirmative Action plays a role. Reducing the need for someone to actually know the broad based technicals of their job in exchange for being capable of doing something specific makes jobs lottery tickets for the incapable. As long as someone is not an active fuckup or active liability they can be held on payroll forever since their actual outcomes are materially unimportant. Annual KPI exercises are so easily gamed that you have to be an actual retard to fail in a firm that is able to plod along, and so if KPI isn't a way to get rid of someone then its just Team Spirit. And on soft metrics like that then theres no way they're getting rid of someone in the Protected Classes.
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Indeed. You see if very clearly if you work in big corporate.
This is why I'm extremely skeptical AI will be "deleting all jobs" anytime soon.
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Several of my college educated, intelligent friends who don't fit in with corporate culture have instead ended up in the trades, just like the ending of Office Space, so that part checks out.
I mean in the trades you definitely don't have to pretend you'd keep working if you won the lottery, so that part checks out.
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Uh, you can in my experience roll your eyes at the up the chain authorities when they're being unreasonable or making bad choices. I think some people take the office space metaphor too literally, in reality your boss himself can be in the same circle of people rolling their eyes at people up the chain. There is a balance of contempt you should have for the "When I wake up in the morning, I first think of how I can best generate shareholder value" mindset but there is also an understanding you have to have to have that, whatever dumb stuff they want you to do, they are paying you and you need to give like at least a 60% effort. People who get this balance wrong mostly make their coworkers miserable more than any "the man" that they rage against then their coworkers don't really want to share in their laughing at the higher ups circles. Also the 90s era boss hatred bred a generation of "cool bosses who are on your side" that were lame but then found synthesis in a "we're all in this together" attitude that is usually actually pretty decent. Of course this depends a lot on where exactly you end up.
A friend of mine has told me many stories of their medium sized wholesaling product supplier:
It sounds like a hellscape. I've worked in thankless jobs and understand doing the bare minimum, but her stories reminds me of my time in government where I would lose respect for myself if I forced myself to work at the level of some of my coworkers. In places like this you can be a 'rising star' by coasting.
And funnily enough I can imagine almost any of the antagonists in that story thinking they're the Peter Gibbons of the office story.
We recently had a guy come through that we had to terminate. It started off with him pushing back in a way that we actually mostly appreciated. We got flagged because one of our functional accounts that manages our ssrs data source used a non rotating password and we needed to vault it. Turns out there is no firm approved way to integrate ssrs directly with our password vaults. The solution that came down and he was asked to implement was to write a program that would run in the server, pilfer the key and cycle them manually. He rightly pointed out that this violated the whole purpose of a password vault, and we were on his side pushing for an exception. But when the powers that be declined to give us that exception he couldn't just shrug with us and do what needed to be done. He started getting into arguments with higher ups and in general bad mouthing our department. I don't know the exact thing that pushed it over the line but I heard actual threats might have been involved and eventually his credentials were apprupted deactivated.
He too probably identified with Peter Gibbons and thought those of us who just went along were hapless automatons because we were willing to degrade ourselves by implementing bad practices to get off a corporate naughty list.
In real life your office is full of real people living real lives. They're not one dimensional characters from a 90s movie about atomization. Some of them probably do suck to work with, some even in the ways lampooned in office space or the office. If you get too caught up in role playing Peter Gibbons you probably can succeed but it's not likely to make you any happier than he was in the movie.
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Maybe it's because I'm an autist working in tech with fellow autists, but we absolutely complain about this crap to each other all the time (just not to the bosses directly). In fact one of my work buddies specifically makes TPS report jokes every time management gets after us about not tracking enough information in our ticketing system. The only thing we don't openly say (but all of us obviously imply/hint about) is the incompetence of our Indian coworkers.
I made a TPS report joke in a status meeting recently and my (Millennial) first line manager pointed out nobody got that reference any more. I told him it must be time for a remake.
We still fire off the ol' "What would you say...ya do here?" line pretty frequently around my office.
Actually, last time it happened, our zoomer new hire immediately got the reference and continued on with a "So you physically..." riff. So all is not lost.
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Sounds pretty neurotypical to me.
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Same. I've never worked with someone who actually liked all the corporate crap, and most people were openly skeptical of it. Nobody really pretends to care about quarterly earnings and the like, either.
Everyone I ever met who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton acted like "wake up and maximize value" true believers. Curiously enough, I recall they also had some sort of gamified employee leveling system not unlike the Federal Goverment's GS. People would gape and gossip about meeting or having lunch with a Level 5 or whatever it was BAH had going on. It drove me nuts.
The ones I know seem pretty normal. But they spend the vast majority of their time on site with clients, so that likely insulates them from the corporate culture.
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Booz Allen definitely feels like the consultant who would exclusively recruit the people who wore 30 pieces of flair when the requirement was 10 in my limited interactions with them.
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It wasn't true then either. The entire premise of the movie was that the main character had to be hypnotized into not giving a fuck. Everyone else was trapped in the rat race, disingenuously sucking up to the powers that be for fear of their jobs. It's a large part of why the movie was so cathartic for so many people.
But you also aren't wrong, things have gotten worse by a significant degree. There is less and less space to compartmentalize who you are at work from the rest of you, and so it just becomes you entirely.
And having less to do with the OP, I think COVID killed the cultural relevancy of Office Space. Zoom meetings, email jobs and remote work fundamentally changed office dynamics in a way that finally made the workplace of Office Space feel alien after 20 years in stasis. In some ways I think nature is healing. Remote work is getting less common, more people are being called back into the office. We'll see if the transformative effects of COVID ever wash away. But I'm doubtful.
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'Stick it to the man' has always been to a large degree performative. Many of the people proclaiming it were literally performers, many of whom notably 'sold out' to the people paying them.
Social media has changed the social technology, but it's not particularly hard to find older equivalents. Modern social media is your personal brand? Back in the day, your reputation preceded you. You need the your acquaintances for job referrals? Back in the day, you wanted to leave your boss on good terms as a prior supervisor on your resume. You feel you need a passionate public image? Nepotism is having people willing to feign passion about you, specifically, behind closed doors.
The expression 'don't burn bridges,' by its nature, isn't typically talking modern metal bridges. It's talking about even older sorts. The message behind the metaphor is even older.
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