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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.
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.
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, ...
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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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