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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.
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.
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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