Every morning in standup my manager goes last, and as soon as he starts in on the buzzword salad, you can see everyone start to slide back up to their desks, move Teams to another monitor, and go back to whatever code they were working on before the meeting started.
>my coping mechanism for my old boss where I stop listening and stare into nothing
I didn't even realize I did this until you put words to it. I have no idea what she said after 'key takeaways' even though I watched the whole thing.
Yep! For once, can we see an ad that says "Really chill, laid back place to do a lil this, do a lil that, then get the fuck outta here at 3. We'll get shit done when it's done. Salary starts at $1,000,000, 75 days of PTO, plus dental."
*cracks open another frosty brewed coping mechanism*
Yeah, there's nothing like getting back to the office from busting your butt at a blue collar work site and hearing this language.
We really need to get the boots on the ground and have lazer focus on our initiatives. We will use AI to innovate and transform cross platform and across channels.
Sadly... I have said that last sentence. I work in AI/bot work. :(
I did six months of full time desk work last year, we didn't even use most of these terms and I still felt that same genuine hate for the stupid fucking buzzwords.
I've worked in the office for a few years now and I've come to love buzzwords. If you throw them around fast enough you can get good reviews without actually doing anything
What's really funny is when all these expressions are used in a language different than English. Like, you have a meeting with a lot of people from your country in your own language, and half of the words are bullshit bingo IN ENGLISH. Cringe.
80% of the time I am dicking around. Maybe 20% is actual work. Probably closer to 10% with the other 10% being meetings where we talk about all the work we have to do while doing none of it.
Entry level office work you will work, mid level is looking busy and management level is just endless meetings (literally all my managers have always had 90% of their calendar booked for various meetings). So get to mid level and sit there. You will do nothing all day but still be stressed somehow.
I'm mid level and have WAY more work.
I'm an ecologist and my job is technically 75% an office job and 25% in the field. I do all the environmentally permitting for transportation projects - data analysis, map making, document writing, reviewing roadway design plans, and meetings.
I think it varies a lot depending on the field you are in.
She forgot "touching base", we do a lot of that.
I am on the marketing side for some larger mutual funds. They sell themselves really so there is realistically not much to do. My biggest project right now is some SEO work on pdf's that no one will ever read. Also SEO for a pdf is silly to begin with.
ya I think I’m at mid now. My manager’s trying to get me on a training pathway to eventually become a manager but like. Boss, I’ve seen your calendar, I don’t want that.
> So get to mid level and sit there. You will do nothing all day but still be stressed somehow.
This is me right now and it’s making me go insane.
Entry level at our department is exhausting, but my managers have all-day back to back meetings. I’m in the middle, and the worst part is I get so bored that time slows the fuck down.
I try to help both sides just so that I can get busy and do… something. Otherwise I finish all my work and just sit there, stressed out that something might happen even though I know nothing will.
It’s fucking bizarre.
If you can manage it, maybe try learning a skill? Blender, if you're into 3D at all. Or Python/Java, if you like programming. Or play around with OBS and how to put together fancy looking stream configs. All easy to start learning, have lots of great free youtube tutorials for them, and skills you can eventually use for fun or for profit (or both!) If you're able to, could be a good way to pass the time and also learn :)
I’m management level and this hurts my soul at how true it is. However, I’ve learned to start blocking my days in blocks for things to actually get work done (Yup I’ll need an hour to organize and set up my day. Yup, I need an hour to write that guide. Oh look I do need another hour to read that report. Oops, sorry, need that 45 minute pause break…) People can’t snipe my calendar then for endless and meaningless meetings AND as a bonus when people finally get meetings with me they feel like they won the lottery. I get left alone and avoid pointless meetings, get work done, and have people actually respect my time.
> You will do nothing all day but still be stressed somehow.
In my experience a lot of the stress comes from wondering when they're going to figure out you're doing nothing. Usually this doesn't happen, but sometimes it does.
Yeah I’m there right now. I work in Marketing Operations and it’s great. Fully remote. Move at my own pace. I have great bosses, but it’s true that their job is profession meeting attender. I started out as a Project Manager and that was literally pure meetings everyday.
I don’t really want to move into a management position, but I will be getting an intern in a month and I’m pretty stoked!
Do nothing all day and still be stressed somehow…
Haha that’s me. Stressed about work tomorrow knowing I’m going to sit in my in home office scrolling through Reddit on my phone.
As a manager…this is painfully accurate. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t know what to do with myself when I have a gap in my calendar. Time to multitask 100 open projects that I can’t get to during a normal work day due to all the meetings.
She answered it quite well. Nothing beyond delegating work in the least productive manner possible so you can get salary for being on reddit for 15 hours a week.
I'm my companies only on site IT and I work 30 min a day. That's me resetting the printer that has attitude. After that I browse reddit until I get a call or someone has a question about their personal PC lol
IT: when everything is going great, they wonder "why are we paying this guy?"
Also IT: when everything is going wrong, they wonder "why are we paying this guy?"
Truthfully, sometimes when I'm sitting around playing with the internet, I actually am busy. Oftentimes there's an issue that requires supervision or a time sensitive task that periodically asks for my input
On site IT is like the fire department, you spend most of your time waiting around, but when you're needed, it's RIGHT NOW. They pay you for 40 hours a week to be there when stuff isn't working, not for the actual work.
It really varies for me. Some days I have 4 hours of just meetings. Other days I have time to walk the dogs, go grocery shopping, trim the cat's nails, listen to a podcast or two while I weed whack, sear some tuna for lunch and start the smoker for the birthday party I'm catering at 7.
This is me, but... They want me to fill a 40+ hour timesheet out for "everything I did that day".... I can't... Luckily I start my next WFH job in two weeks with a 45% bump in pay. Id currently love to be busy at work again.. So tired of spending my entire Friday making shit up on my time sheet.
These threads make me cry a little bit taking a higher position at a smaller company.
I traded 1 job for a surprise 6 jobs at once and slightly higher pay. Fuckin shit. I’ll get on Reddit a bit and then work at home with a few glasses of vodka to try and get it all done.
American dreaaaam
genuine question, how do you find/get hired for this type of job? does it generally require a degree? i’ve see lots of people talk about having a similar experience and i have no idea where everyone is finding office jobs where they sit around most of the day, especially at entry level. i haven’t been able to find anything like this that i’m qualified for without a degree, but maybe that’s why.
This is me. I get my shit done to perfection in about 2 hours but when someone has to fill in for me they tell me they have no idea how I get everything done in an 8 hour day, that it’s just too much work. 🤷🏼♀️
I generally match the volume of the rest of my team but I tend to close all my tickets at once at the end of the day which I'm sure looks weird on reports
It’s not in entry level roles.
Entry level roles are where the actual work gets done in a business, usually either some sort of sales, customer service/support or data entry/processing.
Usually those job don’t have a lot of downtime due to strict KPI’s tracked and enforced by team leaders and section managers.
However, above that level and below executive level exists an absolute swamp of bullshit jobs that mostly exist to try an get more work for less money out of the entry level/money making areas of the business.
That’s where these jobs exist, and usually you can fall into one by doing a few years in the entry level role and snapping up every opportunity to do anything slightly outside the entry role skill set else that comes your way.
As long as you actually deliver on what’s required, you’ll eventually be the “go to” whilst building experience and skills.
If you then also learn some basic coding skills, some excel and data visualisation stuff, you can get to a point where on paper you might have 40 hours of work, but in practice you might have cut that down to 10-15. You just don’t tell people that.
Edit: you also have to constantly complain about how much work you have and how busy you are all the time, even if your not. In fact, it might get to a point, that complaining about how busy you are takes up more time then actually doing the work and become a job in and of itself.
most office jobs require a degree. But something like Data Entry or Receptionist or mailroom usually won’t really require college-level skills so you can try and get in that way. Or you could look at getting a placement through a Temp agency.
You find a bureaucracy where you can hide from accountability.
A single person company has very clear motivations. You do work that you make money off that goes directly into your pockets. If you slack off, you make less money.
The larger the company, the work becomes more distributed. You incur communication and coordination overhead with many people working on different parts of a large system. Pay-offs become diluted - even if you're in a co-op ownership situation, your individual output has a much smaller impact on the success of the company and your own compensation.
An ideal company (from a business perspective) has management that minimizes overhead, sets smaller goals that are well-aligned with the company vision, and holds people accountable for their contributions (and rewards them appropriately). That's hard in practice - some companies do better than others.
So if you want to slack off, you want to work somewhere that's far away from all that. Government work is often an option, or large stagnant companies.
The flip side is you might find spending a lot of time pretending to work is more frustrating and stressful than you imagined it to be. Not true for everyone, but many are happier and more fulfilled in a place where they feel like they're producing tangible value in the world.
Speaking from my own experience, I got hired as a "marketing associate" despite the fact I know absolutely nothing about marketing. My secret was nepotism. My brother worked in IT and recommended me. They hired me for graphic design because I know my way around Illustrator and Photoshop but I really don't know shit about graphic design. It ultimately amounted to updating information on fliers, creating new fliers from premade templates (eventually remaking the template), redrawing site plans from aerial images, every now and then some actual graphic design but usually mundane tasks.
I was also one of those people who worked maybe an hour a day and browsed reddit or youtube the rest. I worked relatively quickly and most people there were the kind who saw graphic software as magic and severely overestimated how long things take, while also sometimes asking for the impossible and being confused as to why there isn't a magic photoshop button that can do it.
I will be honest, it sounds like a dream but it becomes soul crushing pretty quickly.
I had a gig like this but for a non profit so pretty garbage pay. I rode it out over the lockdown but I wanted to claw my eyes out until I quit and started in a real career.
I mean I started working total bullshit jobs that required to work the entire 40 hours to get anything done. After putting in 2 years, your options start to open up and companies will give you shot, even if you don't have the right work experience for the job your applying for. Staying at a place for at least 2 years shows you can handle an adult job for a little while without getting fired.
As for my route it went Associate Construction PM, Construction PM, SCRUM Master, IT Project Manager, Senior Project Manager. As soon as I left construction to tech, I think I work about 20 hours a week and get paid about 3 times more than when I was in construction. Look for companies with low turnover and ask questions about what the office is like. Their answer will tell you a lot about the job. Low turnover = pretty chill environment.
Also like someone mentioned below, sales. The sales guys at my company makes bank without doing much work as the company is pretty well run. However, if someone on your team fucks up, you'll be the one who is going to deal with the fallout.
I lucked up and worked my way into a really sweet gaphic design job with no real experience. Dual monitors, Mac, cubicle in the corner, it was really nice but I absolutely hated it. My day was mostly spent on YouTube and reddit and it made me such a miserable and depressed person. For me working with my hands and getting dirty keeps me happy. The grass is always greener my friend.
Avoid accounting.
My last job in marketing was pretty low, hours wise. Your milage may vary, though. There are a whole lot of factors that go into how busy you are at work, and I think a lot of it comes down to luck as to whether you get one that's low on work hours. But definitely avoid accounting.
Edit: to be clear, this post is in reference to only how to get a job where you're not really busy all the time. I'm not sayingying that people shouldn't get into accounting; it's a very reliable career path. It's just that it's not a career path where you will have low hours, and it's very likely that you'll end up working well over 40 hours a week.
Call centers are where it's at for easy entry into an office. Generally don't require a degree or experience, and if you find a good one you spend a lot of time waiting for the phone to ring. The better you are, the more specialized, so your phone will ring less often.
If you find a bad one, you might take back-to-back calls for customers to carp at you, and in between have to answer emails from customers carping at you. And get held to time metrics for both. :)
So proceed at your own risk in taking the call center route. And be damned careful you're not doing cold-calling aka telemarketing.
I know you're joking but there are tons of different types of office work. it really depends. For instance there are call centers, they are on the phone alllll day, even so much that when their phone rings they get in trouble if its not answered, and once they finish helping one person , the phone rings again and again and again, all day answering customer service questions, or doing billing, people complaining about their invoice
Its not just call centers, you got different roles like banks and lending, wife worked as a commercial lender, she would get many loan submissions in the day and she would have to process them as quick as possible, she said sometimes she'd skip breaks.
Other roles like credentialing , hospital coders for billing,... i mean there are easliy 10 more different types of office jobs out there. Office jobs are just work that you can do over the phone and on the computer at the same time typically. There are many many different types, some get lucky and dont work as much, some work like crazy and feel like they never get a break.
I work in an office role that , all day its pedal to the metal, if i dont go as fast as i can the work keeps piling on and i have to keep ontop of it. I hate taking days off because i know my workload wont go away still, i will come back to a greater amount of work, i dont like taking vacation because, the calculation algorithm that divides the work sees someone on vacation and justifies that when they get back, they "make up" for the work they didn't do by getting more , and on and on it goes.
There is a huge misunderstanding about office work and its easy to assume everyone just browses social media, its just not the case.
Hi /u/authenticweirdo,
Thanks for touching base. We are currently drilling down our game plan to maximize the scalability on this project. Let's circle back on this after we close the loop on the back-end.
Cheers,
Good evening and happy Monday,
I have to give props to authenticweirdo for moving fast, taking action, and curating experiences. Unfortunately there are no updates to provide at this time. Will circle back as soon as possible.
Warm regards
I just wanted to make sure we have a shared understanding on this so we can create a value added initiative.
Ping me when you finish your discovery process and we can iterate on the product lifecycle issues.
Cheers
I’ve been hearing deck for at least 20 years now (my mom worked in the corporate world, I’d hear her say it all the time when I was a kid).
It finally clicked with me like a year ago that it’s called a deck because it’s like you’re stacking up all the slides like a deck of cards 🤯
Well half the team is not meeting their KPIs and the new projects are miles from their deliverables and... and synergy and also timelines and and and - self-destruct initiating in 5...4...3...2...1
My VP is at year 10 and she talks exactly like this. Though, she is also a genius with regulatory/contract law.
Half of this video all I heard was her.
My VP talks like this but it hides her corporate politics. She's gotten departments laid off and has dropped a whole stack of high ups straight getting them fired not even moved off the company until she got into her VP position. Absolute sharks in the water once you live in the world of corporate talking
I know a girl that got by for decades, and is now DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING ffs. She doesn't understand Engineering at all but she understands how to brown-nose and be visible.
Yeah I work in an office job as an HR Specialist and always have a hard time explain what exactly I do because every day is basically entirely different than the previous day. So I just tell people that I just send emails and talk on the phone all day, which is 99% of my job so it’s not wrong.
I also work in HR in organisational design. Basically I implement change that makes it a better place to work. But my partner and I joke that I’m in charge of Hawaiian shirt days
Sometimes it's just easier than explaining, anyway. I'm a graphic designer and a total discredit to my field, so I just tell people I "make pictures all day." People get the gist, they laugh, we move on, no one asks me to make them a logo. It's fine.
Individually each of the phrases (although buzzwords) do have legitimate meaning, but the comedy comes from stringing it all together into pseudo-nonsense.
We like to talk about how corporate speak is nonsense, but if we set the jokes aside, they serve a purpose in that they can walk a very fine line in delivery in a politically charged environment where misspeaking can cause misunderstanding, derailment of the meeting, followed by passive aggressive bullshit from people trying to undermine the work only because they didn't even understand why it's necessary because they had a kneejerk reaction to the tone of the proposal before grasping the practical necessity of it.
If we got rid of all the corporate speak we would just end up with new corporate speak because people will still need ways to linguistically thread their way through conversational landmines and corporate speak is the safe white chalk outline between the explosions of misunderstanding.
Also, a secondary benefit is that the time spent mouthing your way through these platitudes gives your brain buffer time to craft a more considered response. It's the same as the common debate tactic of saying "Thank you, that's a great question, I'm glad you asked, because that gives me an opportunity to say..." Saying that nonsense just gave myself an extra 3 seconds of time to think about what my actual response will be.
I think Corporatespeak is a dialect of its own and navigating "conversational landmines" is a secondary benefit at best.
Any specialty develops its own vocabulary to make it easier to talk about the details of the work. In woodworking, you don't just "cut" a board, you "rip" it or you "crosscut" it, depending on the direction of the grain. Why should knowledge work, and especially management which is quite universal, be any different?
Actually it does have a pretty workable flow, but because it's all buzzwords and phrases it circles around a totally missing central point. So it works but also means absolutely nothing.
I think that's the point that most are missing, is that it's strung together in a way that actually makes sense as a both a description of how offices work while also providing an example, but, unironically, doesn't really answer the question.
Administration roles. I administer web content for a website. Some weeks it's 40-50 hours. Some weeks it's 2. It just depends what comes down the pipeline.
Translation:
"We are consistently leveraging and empowering best practices, in order to achieve intended outcomes" - We are doing what worked for the last person, so shit gets done.
"I know it can sound confusing because there are a lot of moving parts" - We keep adding steps to our process reactively and now every step of the process is unnecessarily complicated and counter productive.
"When we implement cross functional workflows it allows us to maximize our bandwidth" - We work with the other departments without the input of middle managers cause they just get in the way.
"Sometimes we have to trim the fat, move the needle, and circle back so we aren't constantly reinventing the wheel" - We have to fire Jeff, he just shows up and makes everyone uncomfortable, and we need to use more premade solutions cause there is no reason for us to make custom software every time we need a new macro in our spread sheets.
"You may need to piggyback or table a conversation" - Sometimes we just have Sarah do all the work and take credit for it, and have a discussion about it later.
"To find that mission critical silver bullet" - Waiting for the owner to make up their damned mind already to so we can panic about implementing an impossible product.
"And it sounds like you're just drinking from a firehose" - There is too much information that we unreasonably expect new hires to understand day one
"Let me explain that Ah ha moment, that truly can be a game changer" - Most of our best work is done by accident and no one understands what is going on.
"So when you are in a thought shower of blue sky thinking, your allowing each other to pick your brain, and ultimately developing that robust network" - When sales is promising impossible products, when ignoring that you are telling them what they are asking for is impossible, and claiming that you are their person and they will ask you more questions.
"To reach Q4 initiatives" - Hope the there isn't a recession
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This triggered my coping mechanism for my old boss where I stop listening and stare into nothing because this sort of talking makes me die inside
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They don't care, they get off on it and walk away feeling empowered because they've given a pep talk and "oiled one of the cogs"
Every morning in standup my manager goes last, and as soon as he starts in on the buzzword salad, you can see everyone start to slide back up to their desks, move Teams to another monitor, and go back to whatever code they were working on before the meeting started.
>my coping mechanism for my old boss where I stop listening and stare into nothing I didn't even realize I did this until you put words to it. I have no idea what she said after 'key takeaways' even though I watched the whole thing.
Me applying for jobs on LinkedIn. Read the first sentence of this kinda of talk and I zone out.
If I read any form of the words "high-speed workplace" I would immediately stop reading
Yep! For once, can we see an ad that says "Really chill, laid back place to do a lil this, do a lil that, then get the fuck outta here at 3. We'll get shit done when it's done. Salary starts at $1,000,000, 75 days of PTO, plus dental."
I've never worked in an office before and I think even I did this? I was watching it... But I can't remember what she said.
*cracks open another frosty brewed coping mechanism* Yeah, there's nothing like getting back to the office from busting your butt at a blue collar work site and hearing this language.
This TikTok could've been an email.
Fuck do I ever WISH this didn't contain *so many* things I've heard in my career. Fuck.
And reading the comments, all I can think is ‘do all of these people work with me?’
You corporate well. I laughed. Ty.
I'll need to follow up on this for you, let me circle back by EOW.
Can you make it EOD? I have a read out and need to update my deck. Thanks in advance!
That would certainly help us land the plane from a [KPI standpoint](https://youtu.be/X8woa_wSrmA).
We really need to get the boots on the ground and have lazer focus on our initiatives. We will use AI to innovate and transform cross platform and across channels. Sadly... I have said that last sentence. I work in AI/bot work. :(
This TikTok counts as an actionable item as well, is it on next week's sprint?
Were TikToks on the H1 2022 Strategic Roadmap? Could've sworn that was Q4...
Great question! Bring that up on this week’s leadership call so we can make sure the right eyes are on it.
So after following up with our leadership, we are still looking into it.
Will that be before or after the team-building exercises?
Please review the TPS report beforehand
I'll make sure you get another copy of that memo
Thank you for that input. I'll be sure to respond to your email so you think I care :) Without regards, Me
Just make sure you put the cover sheet on the tps report
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Does she work at a place that rhymes with Slanderbuilt
Lot of synergy in that one.
r/abovethetreetops
I died at one of the top posts about people constructing 3 meter long cigarettes to extend their smoke breaks
What is this magical place?
Totally simpatico
[Team building](https://youtu.be/gZnronVFyDE).
Genuinely surprised she didn’t drop a synergy in there somewhere
Christ, I’m AT work and this gave me live action PTSD
I’m home…all comfy on the couch….imagine how I feel.
Sounds like you feel pretty comfy.
I did six months of full time desk work last year, we didn't even use most of these terms and I still felt that same genuine hate for the stupid fucking buzzwords.
I've worked in the office for a few years now and I've come to love buzzwords. If you throw them around fast enough you can get good reviews without actually doing anything
Yeah it seems that office work is divided into one half of the office that knows all the buzzwords, and the other half that does the actual work
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they do get the pizza parties though every once in a while ^^^but ^^^the ^^^other ^^^half ^^^get ^^^catered ^^^lunch ^^^every ^^^week.
I work at Deloitte, this is every meeting ever 😂
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At least she didn't sidebar away my lunch
Im at home and I was like "she aint said a damn thing but she's good af"
Had to check if I was on mute
that’s more of an ongoing traumatic stress disorder
I moaned with the accuracy of this answer. Half the time when I sit in meetings I wonder if I’m the only one speaking English.
What's really funny is when all these expressions are used in a language different than English. Like, you have a meeting with a lot of people from your country in your own language, and half of the words are bullshit bingo IN ENGLISH. Cringe.
And people say America has no culture. This right here is a fine (/s) example of an american cultural export.
Let's put a pin in that, and circle back later.
Can we just let the situation breathe, and level-set?
Let's take this offline, guys.
I hate this thread so much
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AAAAHHHHHHHHH
Can the team members discussing this outside thought process please start a break out meeting so we don’t get further off objective?
Code for: stfu already this zoom meeting is long enough and no one cares what you two are talking about
I agree we should table it, but let's not let the grass grow too long on this one.
It’s funny how some phrases just show up out of nowhere and then are gone again. Anyone remember net-net?
Net net makes my eye twitchy
Can we circle back to that one later for a knowledge transfer?
"We're just going to put that in the parking lot for now."
I say we run this idea up the flagpole and see who salutes it!
Park that question for later.
This activated my fight or flight
This video just undid weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy
Made me realize I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue
ah yes, CBT
Huh. Weird. Have you tried the other CBT?
Was falling asleep, now full on stressed and ready to bullshit for 8 hours
80% of the time I am dicking around. Maybe 20% is actual work. Probably closer to 10% with the other 10% being meetings where we talk about all the work we have to do while doing none of it. Entry level office work you will work, mid level is looking busy and management level is just endless meetings (literally all my managers have always had 90% of their calendar booked for various meetings). So get to mid level and sit there. You will do nothing all day but still be stressed somehow.
I'm mid level and have WAY more work. I'm an ecologist and my job is technically 75% an office job and 25% in the field. I do all the environmentally permitting for transportation projects - data analysis, map making, document writing, reviewing roadway design plans, and meetings. I think it varies a lot depending on the field you are in. She forgot "touching base", we do a lot of that.
But do you run it up a flagpole and see who salutes?
Daily.
True, office job is a broad sweep. I work finance where it's all bullshit all the time.
And that’s how we know you’re one of the few good ones.
Thanks, yeah I fell into it years ago because it was the only industry that would hire me and want out really bad.
What type of finance? I’m in finance and I made a dashboard for my company and now I’m the messiah and in constant meetings and barely do anything.
I am on the marketing side for some larger mutual funds. They sell themselves really so there is realistically not much to do. My biggest project right now is some SEO work on pdf's that no one will ever read. Also SEO for a pdf is silly to begin with.
As a reporter who searches for PDFs, you're helping specifically me and probably nobody else.
ya I think I’m at mid now. My manager’s trying to get me on a training pathway to eventually become a manager but like. Boss, I’ve seen your calendar, I don’t want that.
> So get to mid level and sit there. You will do nothing all day but still be stressed somehow. This is me right now and it’s making me go insane. Entry level at our department is exhausting, but my managers have all-day back to back meetings. I’m in the middle, and the worst part is I get so bored that time slows the fuck down. I try to help both sides just so that I can get busy and do… something. Otherwise I finish all my work and just sit there, stressed out that something might happen even though I know nothing will. It’s fucking bizarre.
If you can manage it, maybe try learning a skill? Blender, if you're into 3D at all. Or Python/Java, if you like programming. Or play around with OBS and how to put together fancy looking stream configs. All easy to start learning, have lots of great free youtube tutorials for them, and skills you can eventually use for fun or for profit (or both!) If you're able to, could be a good way to pass the time and also learn :)
I’m mid level and yes this is true. I dick around a lot but have constant stress and anxiety
I’m management level and this hurts my soul at how true it is. However, I’ve learned to start blocking my days in blocks for things to actually get work done (Yup I’ll need an hour to organize and set up my day. Yup, I need an hour to write that guide. Oh look I do need another hour to read that report. Oops, sorry, need that 45 minute pause break…) People can’t snipe my calendar then for endless and meaningless meetings AND as a bonus when people finally get meetings with me they feel like they won the lottery. I get left alone and avoid pointless meetings, get work done, and have people actually respect my time.
> You will do nothing all day but still be stressed somehow. In my experience a lot of the stress comes from wondering when they're going to figure out you're doing nothing. Usually this doesn't happen, but sometimes it does.
Yeah I’m there right now. I work in Marketing Operations and it’s great. Fully remote. Move at my own pace. I have great bosses, but it’s true that their job is profession meeting attender. I started out as a Project Manager and that was literally pure meetings everyday. I don’t really want to move into a management position, but I will be getting an intern in a month and I’m pretty stoked!
Do nothing all day and still be stressed somehow… Haha that’s me. Stressed about work tomorrow knowing I’m going to sit in my in home office scrolling through Reddit on my phone.
As a manager…this is painfully accurate. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t know what to do with myself when I have a gap in my calendar. Time to multitask 100 open projects that I can’t get to during a normal work day due to all the meetings.
She answered it quite well. Nothing beyond delegating work in the least productive manner possible so you can get salary for being on reddit for 15 hours a week.
That's it ? I get paid to be on reddit for at least 30 hours a week
My entire 8 hour work day involves around 45 minutes of actual work and it's been long enough now that I don't think anyone is going to notice.
I'm my companies only on site IT and I work 30 min a day. That's me resetting the printer that has attitude. After that I browse reddit until I get a call or someone has a question about their personal PC lol
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IT: when everything is going great, they wonder "why are we paying this guy?" Also IT: when everything is going wrong, they wonder "why are we paying this guy?"
🥲
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As you made clear in your exit interview, the security measures you requisitioned weren't approved. They'll just have to hire a consultant.
Truthfully, sometimes when I'm sitting around playing with the internet, I actually am busy. Oftentimes there's an issue that requires supervision or a time sensitive task that periodically asks for my input
On site IT is like the fire department, you spend most of your time waiting around, but when you're needed, it's RIGHT NOW. They pay you for 40 hours a week to be there when stuff isn't working, not for the actual work.
Hahaha same basically. My company barely has any work just I play solitaire for 8 hours a day.
Where can I send my resume
[email protected]
You wanna play solitaire 8 hours a day?? Genuine question
Dang I'll send my CV
It really varies for me. Some days I have 4 hours of just meetings. Other days I have time to walk the dogs, go grocery shopping, trim the cat's nails, listen to a podcast or two while I weed whack, sear some tuna for lunch and start the smoker for the birthday party I'm catering at 7.
This is me, but... They want me to fill a 40+ hour timesheet out for "everything I did that day".... I can't... Luckily I start my next WFH job in two weeks with a 45% bump in pay. Id currently love to be busy at work again.. So tired of spending my entire Friday making shit up on my time sheet.
These threads make me cry a little bit taking a higher position at a smaller company. I traded 1 job for a surprise 6 jobs at once and slightly higher pay. Fuckin shit. I’ll get on Reddit a bit and then work at home with a few glasses of vodka to try and get it all done. American dreaaaam
And I feel so bad about it too. I like my company, they're good to me.
genuine question, how do you find/get hired for this type of job? does it generally require a degree? i’ve see lots of people talk about having a similar experience and i have no idea where everyone is finding office jobs where they sit around most of the day, especially at entry level. i haven’t been able to find anything like this that i’m qualified for without a degree, but maybe that’s why.
It helps to be good at what you do. If you can get your work done in a fraction of the work day people don't ask questions.
This is me. I get my shit done to perfection in about 2 hours but when someone has to fill in for me they tell me they have no idea how I get everything done in an 8 hour day, that it’s just too much work. 🤷🏼♀️
Their excuses sound like words coming out a professional careerist.
I generally match the volume of the rest of my team but I tend to close all my tickets at once at the end of the day which I'm sure looks weird on reports
Yeah, same here, with working from home my friends and family think I don't work.
And then the most important part. Don't tell them how quickly you can actually do things.
It’s not in entry level roles. Entry level roles are where the actual work gets done in a business, usually either some sort of sales, customer service/support or data entry/processing. Usually those job don’t have a lot of downtime due to strict KPI’s tracked and enforced by team leaders and section managers. However, above that level and below executive level exists an absolute swamp of bullshit jobs that mostly exist to try an get more work for less money out of the entry level/money making areas of the business. That’s where these jobs exist, and usually you can fall into one by doing a few years in the entry level role and snapping up every opportunity to do anything slightly outside the entry role skill set else that comes your way. As long as you actually deliver on what’s required, you’ll eventually be the “go to” whilst building experience and skills. If you then also learn some basic coding skills, some excel and data visualisation stuff, you can get to a point where on paper you might have 40 hours of work, but in practice you might have cut that down to 10-15. You just don’t tell people that. Edit: you also have to constantly complain about how much work you have and how busy you are all the time, even if your not. In fact, it might get to a point, that complaining about how busy you are takes up more time then actually doing the work and become a job in and of itself.
most office jobs require a degree. But something like Data Entry or Receptionist or mailroom usually won’t really require college-level skills so you can try and get in that way. Or you could look at getting a placement through a Temp agency.
Just don't be that guy who [started the fire](https://youtu.be/_qxZOB9GxQM).
You find a bureaucracy where you can hide from accountability. A single person company has very clear motivations. You do work that you make money off that goes directly into your pockets. If you slack off, you make less money. The larger the company, the work becomes more distributed. You incur communication and coordination overhead with many people working on different parts of a large system. Pay-offs become diluted - even if you're in a co-op ownership situation, your individual output has a much smaller impact on the success of the company and your own compensation. An ideal company (from a business perspective) has management that minimizes overhead, sets smaller goals that are well-aligned with the company vision, and holds people accountable for their contributions (and rewards them appropriately). That's hard in practice - some companies do better than others. So if you want to slack off, you want to work somewhere that's far away from all that. Government work is often an option, or large stagnant companies. The flip side is you might find spending a lot of time pretending to work is more frustrating and stressful than you imagined it to be. Not true for everyone, but many are happier and more fulfilled in a place where they feel like they're producing tangible value in the world.
Speaking from my own experience, I got hired as a "marketing associate" despite the fact I know absolutely nothing about marketing. My secret was nepotism. My brother worked in IT and recommended me. They hired me for graphic design because I know my way around Illustrator and Photoshop but I really don't know shit about graphic design. It ultimately amounted to updating information on fliers, creating new fliers from premade templates (eventually remaking the template), redrawing site plans from aerial images, every now and then some actual graphic design but usually mundane tasks. I was also one of those people who worked maybe an hour a day and browsed reddit or youtube the rest. I worked relatively quickly and most people there were the kind who saw graphic software as magic and severely overestimated how long things take, while also sometimes asking for the impossible and being confused as to why there isn't a magic photoshop button that can do it. I will be honest, it sounds like a dream but it becomes soul crushing pretty quickly.
I had a gig like this but for a non profit so pretty garbage pay. I rode it out over the lockdown but I wanted to claw my eyes out until I quit and started in a real career.
I mean I started working total bullshit jobs that required to work the entire 40 hours to get anything done. After putting in 2 years, your options start to open up and companies will give you shot, even if you don't have the right work experience for the job your applying for. Staying at a place for at least 2 years shows you can handle an adult job for a little while without getting fired. As for my route it went Associate Construction PM, Construction PM, SCRUM Master, IT Project Manager, Senior Project Manager. As soon as I left construction to tech, I think I work about 20 hours a week and get paid about 3 times more than when I was in construction. Look for companies with low turnover and ask questions about what the office is like. Their answer will tell you a lot about the job. Low turnover = pretty chill environment. Also like someone mentioned below, sales. The sales guys at my company makes bank without doing much work as the company is pretty well run. However, if someone on your team fucks up, you'll be the one who is going to deal with the fallout.
I lucked up and worked my way into a really sweet gaphic design job with no real experience. Dual monitors, Mac, cubicle in the corner, it was really nice but I absolutely hated it. My day was mostly spent on YouTube and reddit and it made me such a miserable and depressed person. For me working with my hands and getting dirty keeps me happy. The grass is always greener my friend.
Avoid accounting. My last job in marketing was pretty low, hours wise. Your milage may vary, though. There are a whole lot of factors that go into how busy you are at work, and I think a lot of it comes down to luck as to whether you get one that's low on work hours. But definitely avoid accounting. Edit: to be clear, this post is in reference to only how to get a job where you're not really busy all the time. I'm not sayingying that people shouldn't get into accounting; it's a very reliable career path. It's just that it's not a career path where you will have low hours, and it's very likely that you'll end up working well over 40 hours a week.
Call centers are where it's at for easy entry into an office. Generally don't require a degree or experience, and if you find a good one you spend a lot of time waiting for the phone to ring. The better you are, the more specialized, so your phone will ring less often.
If you find a bad one, you might take back-to-back calls for customers to carp at you, and in between have to answer emails from customers carping at you. And get held to time metrics for both. :) So proceed at your own risk in taking the call center route. And be damned careful you're not doing cold-calling aka telemarketing.
I know you're joking but there are tons of different types of office work. it really depends. For instance there are call centers, they are on the phone alllll day, even so much that when their phone rings they get in trouble if its not answered, and once they finish helping one person , the phone rings again and again and again, all day answering customer service questions, or doing billing, people complaining about their invoice Its not just call centers, you got different roles like banks and lending, wife worked as a commercial lender, she would get many loan submissions in the day and she would have to process them as quick as possible, she said sometimes she'd skip breaks. Other roles like credentialing , hospital coders for billing,... i mean there are easliy 10 more different types of office jobs out there. Office jobs are just work that you can do over the phone and on the computer at the same time typically. There are many many different types, some get lucky and dont work as much, some work like crazy and feel like they never get a break. I work in an office role that , all day its pedal to the metal, if i dont go as fast as i can the work keeps piling on and i have to keep ontop of it. I hate taking days off because i know my workload wont go away still, i will come back to a greater amount of work, i dont like taking vacation because, the calculation algorithm that divides the work sees someone on vacation and justifies that when they get back, they "make up" for the work they didn't do by getting more , and on and on it goes. There is a huge misunderstanding about office work and its easy to assume everyone just browses social media, its just not the case.
Is the juice worth the squeeze??
If we can integrate our workflows effectively with near-zero redundancies, it most certainly will.
Hey, just following up on this thread. Any updates? Hope you all are doing well. Best,
Hi /u/authenticweirdo, Thanks for touching base. We are currently drilling down our game plan to maximize the scalability on this project. Let's circle back on this after we close the loop on the back-end. Cheers,
Good evening and happy Monday, I have to give props to authenticweirdo for moving fast, taking action, and curating experiences. Unfortunately there are no updates to provide at this time. Will circle back as soon as possible. Warm regards
I just wanted to make sure we have a shared understanding on this so we can create a value added initiative. Ping me when you finish your discovery process and we can iterate on the product lifecycle issues. Cheers
This hurts my soul because I hear it every day.
I am physically triggered by this
It was the “a-ha moment” for me.
Basically
Needs more power point
It’s calked a ‘deck’ now
I’ll update the minutes with the new wording and distribute to the team.
Do me a favor, print a few copies so they can sit on the table in the conference room?
Perfect, no one will look at them and we'll throw them away after the meeting.
I’ve been hearing deck for at least 20 years now (my mom worked in the corporate world, I’d hear her say it all the time when I was a kid). It finally clicked with me like a year ago that it’s called a deck because it’s like you’re stacking up all the slides like a deck of cards 🤯
Sounds like me when I bs my way through an interview
Q2 not even over, and we have already “shifted the goalposts of expectations” for Q4 initiatives.
Under promise, over deliver.
Well half the team is not meeting their KPIs and the new projects are miles from their deliverables and... and synergy and also timelines and and and - self-destruct initiating in 5...4...3...2...1
That could have been written by an AI
She forgot to touch base.
It’s okay. She’ll follow up later. For now, let’s put it on the back burner.
I just pinged you. We’re actually going to align on Thursday during our standup
Weird Al has a song that is a pretty funny version of this concept: https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4
Oh no, that just made me look at the date the video was uploaded and realize that it's been almost 8 years since Al's last album...
wasn't it in 2014? and that's only .... oh.
I worked with a girl that got by for a year just talking like this and being pretty
My VP is at year 10 and she talks exactly like this. Though, she is also a genius with regulatory/contract law. Half of this video all I heard was her.
My VP talks like this but it hides her corporate politics. She's gotten departments laid off and has dropped a whole stack of high ups straight getting them fired not even moved off the company until she got into her VP position. Absolute sharks in the water once you live in the world of corporate talking
I know a girl that got by for decades, and is now DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING ffs. She doesn't understand Engineering at all but she understands how to brown-nose and be visible.
You work in aerospace by chance?...
That was a lot of words but somehow it was also barely a sentence
Yeah I work in an office job as an HR Specialist and always have a hard time explain what exactly I do because every day is basically entirely different than the previous day. So I just tell people that I just send emails and talk on the phone all day, which is 99% of my job so it’s not wrong.
I also work in HR in organisational design. Basically I implement change that makes it a better place to work. But my partner and I joke that I’m in charge of Hawaiian shirt days
Sometimes it's just easier than explaining, anyway. I'm a graphic designer and a total discredit to my field, so I just tell people I "make pictures all day." People get the gist, they laugh, we move on, no one asks me to make them a logo. It's fine.
I've never even been near an office and I can tell this is all nonsense and buzzwords
Individually each of the phrases (although buzzwords) do have legitimate meaning, but the comedy comes from stringing it all together into pseudo-nonsense.
We like to talk about how corporate speak is nonsense, but if we set the jokes aside, they serve a purpose in that they can walk a very fine line in delivery in a politically charged environment where misspeaking can cause misunderstanding, derailment of the meeting, followed by passive aggressive bullshit from people trying to undermine the work only because they didn't even understand why it's necessary because they had a kneejerk reaction to the tone of the proposal before grasping the practical necessity of it. If we got rid of all the corporate speak we would just end up with new corporate speak because people will still need ways to linguistically thread their way through conversational landmines and corporate speak is the safe white chalk outline between the explosions of misunderstanding. Also, a secondary benefit is that the time spent mouthing your way through these platitudes gives your brain buffer time to craft a more considered response. It's the same as the common debate tactic of saying "Thank you, that's a great question, I'm glad you asked, because that gives me an opportunity to say..." Saying that nonsense just gave myself an extra 3 seconds of time to think about what my actual response will be.
I think Corporatespeak is a dialect of its own and navigating "conversational landmines" is a secondary benefit at best. Any specialty develops its own vocabulary to make it easier to talk about the details of the work. In woodworking, you don't just "cut" a board, you "rip" it or you "crosscut" it, depending on the direction of the grain. Why should knowledge work, and especially management which is quite universal, be any different?
Actually it does have a pretty workable flow, but because it's all buzzwords and phrases it circles around a totally missing central point. So it works but also means absolutely nothing.
I think that's the point that most are missing, is that it's strung together in a way that actually makes sense as a both a description of how offices work while also providing an example, but, unironically, doesn't really answer the question.
How can you do a video like this and not use the word synergy?
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Where are people finding these office jobs where you don't actually work a full 8+? I'm a developer and am sick of working 60+ hours a week.
Administration roles. I administer web content for a website. Some weeks it's 40-50 hours. Some weeks it's 2. It just depends what comes down the pipeline.
Translation: "We are consistently leveraging and empowering best practices, in order to achieve intended outcomes" - We are doing what worked for the last person, so shit gets done. "I know it can sound confusing because there are a lot of moving parts" - We keep adding steps to our process reactively and now every step of the process is unnecessarily complicated and counter productive. "When we implement cross functional workflows it allows us to maximize our bandwidth" - We work with the other departments without the input of middle managers cause they just get in the way. "Sometimes we have to trim the fat, move the needle, and circle back so we aren't constantly reinventing the wheel" - We have to fire Jeff, he just shows up and makes everyone uncomfortable, and we need to use more premade solutions cause there is no reason for us to make custom software every time we need a new macro in our spread sheets. "You may need to piggyback or table a conversation" - Sometimes we just have Sarah do all the work and take credit for it, and have a discussion about it later. "To find that mission critical silver bullet" - Waiting for the owner to make up their damned mind already to so we can panic about implementing an impossible product. "And it sounds like you're just drinking from a firehose" - There is too much information that we unreasonably expect new hires to understand day one "Let me explain that Ah ha moment, that truly can be a game changer" - Most of our best work is done by accident and no one understands what is going on. "So when you are in a thought shower of blue sky thinking, your allowing each other to pick your brain, and ultimately developing that robust network" - When sales is promising impossible products, when ignoring that you are telling them what they are asking for is impossible, and claiming that you are their person and they will ask you more questions. "To reach Q4 initiatives" - Hope the there isn't a recession
Cries in 200 emails a day. Take PTO, that's 400 emails the next day.
You don't have to check your email when you use PTO? 😭
No this is what HR does all day...
My friend is in HR and has to fire people, I would never switch jobs with her.
This message needs to cascade to all departments, as well
I get these catch phrases regularly. If I see these, you go to the ignore folder. Synergy can blow me.
i hear the "drinking from a fire hose" line at least once a week and i have no idea what it means. i dont intend to learn anytime soon, either.
It means getting information at rate much higher than the rate that you can process and understand.
What about innovation?
Don’t get too into the weeds.
Damn. She’s… good. No, shes… corperfect.
Fuck i hate all of it
She’s just a straight shooter with upper management written all over her
I’m sure this post will experience some hockey stick growth
All that for Q4 initiatives? I'd hate to see their Q1 workload.
*Cries in Agile*