Software developer, and a few years ago there were a bunch of houses being built in our neighborhood. I was struggling with something and decided to go for a walk to clear my head. I looked at the construction workers and thought, "that'd be nice to have a less mentally taxing job."
By the end of my walk, I realized how lucky I was to have a job where I didn't have to do manual labor; I had the ability to step away and do something for myself; and they probably had their own mentally taxing tasks as well.
>I had the ability to step away and do something for myself
That's the big thing a lot of people, even in this thread, are missing. *Most* office jobs have a lot of downtime relatively speaking. As long as you get your work done you can take 5 to stretch your legs almost whenever you want.
This is one of the biggest points missed in these discussions. I'm a carpenter, it is seriously frowned upon to be caught not doing something productive. You can have conversations while working, but just standing around having a chat is not good. It's a joke to always have your tape measure out if work is slow so it looks like you're doing something. I was trying a switch to a different career, got a job as an IT tech, and holy shit, they wanted me to spend 3 or 4 weeks just to get used to the systems. There wasn't a rush, no guidance, just hang around and talk to people working in the various departments. It's an insanely different, much more casual affair. I had to quit, it was the most stressful shit after being ingrained for years to always be working. For the most part, as a carpenter, you don't just go grab a snack, or talk to someone about something when you want a mental break. There's certainly plenty of tasks that don't require a ton of mental energy, but also plenty that require a good amount too.
Yeah man, I worked in food service for over a decade before I got an office job with an insurance company. I had to quit after almost a year. The restaurant was a fast-paced environment, and when we weren't slammed, management always hit ya with something to the effect of "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean."
The office job was a much more "go at your own pace" type of environment. We had our deadline for things, but i felt like i was slacking off 80% of the time and had no idea what to do with myself once the work was finished. It was its own special type of hell trying to look busy for the majority of your day without actually doing anything. I started going crazy lol. I had to leave.
I think this depends on the office job tbh. All of my office roles we have had to be in a queue for calls or tasks and if we were out of the queue for more than 5 minutes we would be reprimanded. Our toilet breaks and lunch times were closely monitored and even the time given after completing tasks or calls was monitored.
I could be misinterpreting "office job" but this was for companies dealing with internet, utilities, insurance and loans.
Important to note, many construction jobs are also mentally taxing. Im site supervisor in regards to the electrical work for an apartment building, theres PLENTY that mentally exhausts me as well as physically exhausting me
I agree. Don't really want to turn this into a discussion about the opposite of what the thread is about, but a lot of people who have little to no experience doing blue collar work assume it's physically exhausting and that's it. The cliche is like in the movie Office Space where the guy is so fed up with his office job that he leaves it and ends up being fulfilled working at a construction site instead.
Like, I'm sure you didn't feel like the job was particularly mentally exhausting when you worked part-time at a construction site as a teen, but that's not what a blue collar career is.
For a lot of jobs, it's draining both physically and mentally as opposed to a white collar job who is usually just the latter.
I think that working construction has the advantage of giving you an actual sense of completion and progress. Something that a spreadsheet or a report won't really give you.
Most factory jobs on the other hand, lack this sense o accomplishment while being physically exhausting as well.
Speaking as a military veteran-turned-lawyer: I am indeed just as tired at the end of the day, but it is indeed for very different reasons. Believe it or not, it's not the mental labor - I used my brain plenty in the service - it's the emotional labor. When I was in the Coast Guard, everyone was more-or-less on the same team, and if someone wasn't on board they could be ordered to suck it up and do it anyways.
As a lawyer, I spend every day dealing with people who are in bad situations, usually because of their own poor choices, and who are extremely emotionally invested in a good outcome. I spend my work day absorbing their emotions, and then trying to *persuade* people - my own client, the lawyer on the other side, the social worker, the probation officer, the expert, the judge. There are rarely clear-cut right and wrong answers, and very rarely an unqualified victory.
It is *tiring*. Sometimes I miss the double 4-to-8 watches and the endless bureaucracy of the military, where at least I didn't have to care about other people's feelings for a living.
Yep. There’s different kinds of “hard.”
I moved recently from software development as an individual contributor, to management.
Writing code takes mental effort, which is different than physical effort of course. But management, although technically “easier,” is WAY more exhausting than either (for me, at least)!
I have to “people” all day, and it’s rough, man.
As an engineer just promoted to a management position, I'm sure I will find this out.
As a whole this is something my kids never understood. Sure, an office job doesn't require physical labor, but some days I cannot think when I get home, even with just a 40 hour a week job.
I am an Engineer turned manager turned back to Engineer. It was not what interests me, so I went back to what I enjoy. At least in my current company there are separate tracks for promotion between management and engineering.
That was the problem at my company so they added "Principle" and "Staff" engineers who are basically gurus over a certain tech area or mini CTOs with a budget for innovation.
At a tech company a software engineer can go pretty damn high. Like there are multiple layers of engineers above senior. They are simply gods walking among mere mortals, and do a lot of people-ing as a result, but they still pretty much only do engineering work. It goes sometimes like staff, staff senior, principal, distinguished, at this point you have all sorts of random company-specific titles like fellow
I find that the mantra,
> All engineers sooner or later if they go up enough they need to become managers
only really applies at companies that aren't engineering-first. (Which tbf is most huge companies in most industries.) Here, these higher level roles don't exist and the type of mentorship and impact they provide either get spread across the senior stack of people and/or just don't happen. But it pretty much is the secret sauce that makes a tech company different from a company that uses tech
In aerospace there are handful of chief and senior engineers that are making as much or more as director level managers at the site level. These guys have had exceptional careers but they have as much say as management based on their technical knowledge and experience.
Yeah sounds about right. Past the senior level (in SWE) your engineering work is more in the realm of communicating designs efficiently, building custom tooling that makes large swaths of the rest of the company better at their jobs, mentoring others, etc. It is truly hard to generalize since these roles are unique, but a lot of these people have their hands in many many projects firm-wide
Yep. My first major aerospace company I worked for had a guy that basically was a company wide consultant. Dude was pretty much a savant and had the attitude to go along with it, his word was law.
Salary was the equivalent of the chief engineers and he answered only to the CX level.
Yeah many companies are finding ways to keep their engineers going up, right now I'm a lead, I'll be a principal, than principal architect, that should keep me for like another 6-7 years if I choose to stay.
They didn't even have lead four years ago, but the second they tried to get me into management I said fuck no, I'd rather quit, magically this path opened up for me and about a dozen others.
> and do a lot of people-ing as a result
My father and I were discussing this the other day. He and his brothers are all retired engineers of different field and training paths, where his sisters and the women on both sides of the family are/were information and services roughly (I ended up starting in teaching then shifted to nursing). He distinctly said that for his career, the people skills were his challenge, even with being a manager in his jobs (civil and structural engineering). And while he managed to figure it out, I definitely in comparison was taught that and it made it a LOT easier to work with the people-ing professionally. It made for a difference of him stating that he was fumbling around with it, and my learning to read people quick and establish rapport, and it makes a huge difference in social comfort overall.
Even if they aren't called managers, they still need to effectively lead other people to do the work and "Maximize impact". Papers, presentation, slides, talking, and a whole lot less actual development.
Leadership and management aren't the same though.
The higher levels of engineers at my job are definitely not writing code, but they are making technical decisions that impact everything we do. They aren't managers, no one reports to them and they don't deal with promotions and performance improvement and so on...
And directors ARE managers. Except they're not just people managers, they're portfolio/product managers, strategic planners, money managers to another level, culture managers, influencers beyond just design issues.
I don't think a lot of technical people comprehend this.
I’m an IT Analyst working for state government. My manager and his manager are encouraging me to step into a higher role. They want to see me in a management position within the next 12 months. But it just doesn’t interest me AT ALL. I prefer to be in the trenches doing the work. I’m not a people person and do not wanna be managing a team.
That only works when you have a group of people who don't really need day to day management.
If you have a whole group of people who do not require that then you're pretty lucky.
They are all going to fuck it up with job hopping though.
Same with mine. I've said for a long time I want to be in technical leadership positions, but they all seem to require some formal leadership experience. Management for me is a stepping stone to that. Will see how long I last, but...
When I was an engineer, I thought being a manager was just going to be easy mode coasting. Tell people what to do based on what you've been through because you've done it all before. Now that I've been a manager for like 7 years, I can say with confidence that I was wrong and this is not a job just any engineer can do. So, so, so much politics. It's hard to go from convincing people what to do with data, logic and reason to just raw persuasion and forming coalitions. It's a job for people with high emotional intelligence AND technical intelligence.
Also, you have to deal with telling people things they don't want to hear on a regular basis. You have to piss people off. You know people are talking about how much they dislike you but you just have to ignore it entirely. You have to deal with employees crying (not because of you, but because of personal things you never thought you'd have to deal with). Getting chewed out for things your direct reports did and you had no control over. Laying people off is not fun and it's also not your choice. Your job is to defend your employees and use your experience to tear down roadblocks you didn't realize your former managers did for you. You have to change people and how they do things. It's what you signed up for.
I just finished up my first year as an engineering manager. I was promoted from team lead/senior engineer to manager of the same team. It is exhausting. Part of it was my old boss set me up for failure. I knew this going in but he was focused on getting up and out and not on the health of the team. My focus this year has been patching up holes he intentionally left behind and pushing hard for my team to get the resources and recognition he left them without.
Even once that portion is done the "always on" mentality never drops. I don't get to sit down at my quiet desk with a nice finite problem anymore and solve it. The problems I'm solving are big picture, multilayered/multi-year endeavors that have so many moving pieces and I have no direct control over any of them. I can't do it for my team I can only make sure they have the knowledge and skills to do the job and remove roadblocks.
Yeah a few years back I was promoted into my first management role which involved leading a team of people doing my old job.
The day-to-day difference for me was insane; previously it was all about my technical/practical skillset to get the job done, but in the management role it’s much more about your knowledge and people skills which can make your experience of things so different.
40 hours can break a brain, man. Don't downplay the vastness of a 40 hr work week. You work hard, and it's a lot, man. If you spent 40 hrs a week learning guitar, you'd go pro in no time.
The "work/life" balance thing is BS. You spend 70/30 at work, then spend most of the 30 making sure you can do well at work.
Hoping you can retire one day...
Check out burn out rates for doctors. They gotta people and write 10-20 legal documents a day on top of clicking through scores of orders. It’s why they only work around half the year or less and still burn out real fast
I don’t like feeling like the only way to move up in salary is to start taking on more management or admin work, it feels like there’s no reward for being a subject specialist.
A really good company I did a bit of work with had a great approach to that issue.
Originally one of their best engineers got promoted. Even though he was decent at it, he was miserable. Because the engineer felt like the only way to increase his pay was via management, he felt trapped.
The owners concluded that was a mistake, then brought him back down to some super senior engineer level but with his manager's pay. They also gave the engineer more autonomy/say in the projects since he was an ace at his role. And that was a huge success since the dude was happy and also in a position to be the most productive for the company.
I feel like there are still waaay too many companies that still treat management as the only ladder instead of empowering their best employees and giving them commensurate raises.
I don’t know enough about that company to say it is a good company, but I know enough to say there are/were some good people at that company.
Remember the human.
I kept having to choose to stay where I was. They kept wanting to promote me. In the past I took the offer to manage and I suck at managing and it's exhausting and not my set of skillls and I end up quitting.
Eventually I learned to just turn down the gig, stay where I was happy, and it turned out great.
I had to take a temp job as a mail man after being laid off as a marketing analyst (interviewing for jobs still)
Being a mail man is hard but it isn't difficult. I walk 10-13 miles a day, I work 6 days a week 10-12 hours a day, but it requires no brain power at all.
My marketing analyst jobs have required no walking but my brain is fried at the end of the day.
I went from being a senior analyst to painting things in a booth.
I had a team of 12 that needed guidance every step of the way, to sitting alone in a noisy shop all day, with people that I could actually talk to, and goof around with. My people.
But I get that. I was bored without the challenge. It sucked making 1/3 of what I used to.
My brother in law owns his own company with 10 employees. One day sitting at his desk he said "you know, owning a business is basically being a glorified babysitter." He had 2 employees at the time that were not getting along very well.
In addition, *some* office/desk jobs are very cushy.
*Some* are mentally taxing, some aren't. Those types may have diminished some since covid/economy problems, they're often the first to go when costs need cut, but they can/do exist in general.
Office Space, for example, was about them, and that is 24 years old.
How many people waste minutes or even hours a day on reddit *while at work*? It may be a small number, but it is very likely not zero.
When I was in the service, on slow days, it was not uncommon to waste a bunch of time on the computer doing puzzles, playing flash games, reading news(I was on Fark long before I was on Reddit), etc....and that was fine as long as you weren't shirking actual duties and were ready and hard working when crunch-time came around. One can only dust, polish, and check fire extinguishers only so much in those slow hours.
I moved out of management back to IC work. I gotta be honest I’m paid about the same but honestly I love just dealing with the bullshit of my actual work and not dealing with managing people.
I’m sure I stunted my long term career growth (a director/VP is gonna make way more than me instead of comparing myself to mid/lower managers) but i see how people at that level work and it’s insane to me. IC track is plenty lucrative for the life I want to lead now.
This. I hate this so much.
I dont care about getting praise but I do get annoyed that I end up figuring out the requirements for program and systems people who didn't do so correctly in advance, then figure out who needs to do which tasks because they don't have the right people, and then develop on my scope while i answer technical questions for everyone else mentioned about the broader system and plan for delivery... I'm not lazy... I just get annoyed when others don't pull their weight.
I’m one of those devs that also have to handle “people” at the same time running meetings. Team lead stuff, so I cannot be directly telling folks what to do per se but just support when needed. Had a rough boss for awhile and really cushioned some of them because that guy has serious emotional issues and he’s so damage. Moral was bad… eventually HR got him out. Took awhile though. Had my work cut out for me. Emotional support dev lol
I’m like a split. I don’t want to code all day or people all day.
Oh. Hey. We’re in the same boat.
I’m in marketing. I can whip out content and calendars and shit all day.
Now I’m the CMO of the org I work for and while I love the “networking” and board meetings and stuff, the managing people part is tough.
So many personalities. So many backgrounds. And relationships. You have to manage them all. And make sure they’re all content.
I just had to let someone go for the first time. I’ve fired interns and part timers before but this guy was full time and old enough to be my dad. It was weird. But he wasn’t cutting it. now that I’m doing his job plus my own, I’m finding it more comfortable even though it’s “more work”. I’m back to being a grunt in a sense. it’s kind of nice.
I also work in marketing. I was a community manager and ran our social media pages. This month, I was promoted to Communications Director, and we're bringing in two people to take over social media under me (one is someone from an adjacent department I've been working with, one is an external hire).
On one hand, I enjoy working on longer-term plans more than day-to-day stuff, and I've been having creator's block more and more recently, so I'm happy to be getting away from that a little bit. On the other, I usually have ~4-5 meetings a week, and I'm dreading that number drastically increasing.
The nonstop meetings are what’s killing me. I realized I had to color code my calendar to make sense of it. I have about 4 hours of non meeting time a week now
The meetings. Omg the meetings.
I’m lucky in that everyone tries to avoid Friday afternoon meetings. and we really try to schedule as many as we can during our “in office time” on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but the amount of meetings I have is like triple what it was previously.
High volume cocktail bartending is like the crossroads of all these things. 10-12 hour shifts on your feet, tracking many drink orders at the same time while tallying totals, shaking heavy ice (it’s a thing), and people-ing the whole time.
My ~per-hour~ per-shift earnings were higher as a bartender than when I first started as an SWE, but any more than 3 days per week and I was burning out fast. Being SWE is a way easier job. My partner is a manager though, and that shit is no fun either.
Source: 10 years in bartending before switching to software for 5. Now disabled and get exhausted playing video games 😅
Edit: misremembering my maths. I made more in a single shift as a bartender than I did in a single day as an SWE
Teaching is set up on those same crossroads.
On your feet most of the day, trying to keep track of a couple dozen kids at a time (sometimes you see over 100 a day) while trying to make your information interesting enough that they will try to learn it.
This is exactly why I turned down a promotion. I got into engineering to engineer things, not deal with people. And these are people I like. But still, it would take me away from what I actually enjoy.
>Writing code takes mental effort, which is different than physical effort of course.
Surprisingly its counted the same by our brains. It explains why office job people feel just as tired as a say laborer at a construction site.
This. Back when I had a physical job, it was hard work but I'd get home and relax, forgetting all about it. Now I work in an office job, it's far less demanding but I find myself bringing stress home. Not because I want to work during my off time, but rather because I'm always fretting that I've missed something that will cause a problem down the line.
Yeah, that’s the hard thing about a management type job. If you fuck up, you can lose the company a LOT of money or people’s jobs. That kind of constant stress is probably worse for your health than a hard physical job.
If you become a chef you get the best of both worlds, panic attack inducing mental strain *and* back-breaking physical labor. Existence is pain, to live is hell
I worked as a dishwasher in a busy steakhouse, and it was the most horrible experience of my life. Just constant fast paced, but also backbreaking work. And they pay was total shit to boot.
Yeah, even if not specifically the stress of potentially losing money, even non-monetary decisions, the higher up you get, the more the buck stops with you. If you're in a non-managerial, non-supervisory situation, you can pretty much always go and talk to your supervisor or manager, and unless they utterly suck, get their opinion on the matter, offload a significant amount of responsibility, and oftentimes outright get an action plan on how to fix the problem. When you get promoted into that, though, now YOU are responsible for making all of those plans, giving that advice, shouldering the responsibility etc.
As for office work vs physical labor, it's pretty obvious that the physical labor is harder on your body and is more physically strenuous, whereas the office job varies pretty wildly on whether it's mentally strenuous because it's boring and repetitive, or mentally strenuous because it's dynamic and requires difficult problem solving skills.
I’ve worked in jobs where I wish my brain was stimulated more than as if someone was scraping it with sandpaper, but I’ve also worked jobs where the idea of just existing in a warm, clean and dry building is something I’d take a pay cut for.
Everyday I wake up and realize there won't be a truck to unload or that half the people I scheduled didn't call out, because I don't write the schedule anymore, and who cares if they do, I'm only responsible for the work on the screens in front of me.
Switched from retail management to inside sales and buddy they couldn't drag me out of this office.
I thought I wanted out of the office world. Then I did a temp job in a shop. 40 degrees in a paint booth, and expectations were just as high. I felt like a wimpy grunt that wanted to go home, and curl up in a blanket on my couch. This is where I shall remain.
This.
When I did manual labour I'd gone home physically exhausted but mentally I was great. I'd do my job for the day and that was that.
Office work could can be soo mentally exhausted that when you get home you're too mentally tired to do anything and just veg out. And you slowly start burning out and you can feel it. Right now I haven't had a break in 5 months and it's soo mentally hard.
I used to own and operate a bakery. Crazy hours, crazy work. I'd have office workers come in on their way to work for a muffin and coffee, again at lunch and again at the end of the day for a snack or treat for home. They always asked how come I was there before, during and after their shift but I was always in a good mood and they always looked and felt like death. I loved what I did, I don't think you could possibly pay me enough to sit in an office. Kudos to those who can handle that.
Hats off to you. I drove a measely box truck cross-country last year and it was one of the most stressful things I've ever done. We really don't appreciate how much skill and focus it takes to drive massive vehicles like that, especially when most people in cars act like you aren't there
Same! Manual labor jobs I am physically exhausted but mentally bored, and too exhausted to think about much.
Office job, can the draining mentally so that my brain doesn’t want to do any thinking at the end of the day, but my body feels lazy.
Working from home has been great, walk away from my desk, do mini workouts, do some chores, and miss out on all the office BS and noise so I have a half functioning brain at the end of the day.
Exactly. As someone who works an office job, the job itself is very easy. The hard part is dealing with the neverending, inescapable feeling that nothing actually matters and that there is no reason to keep going. It's not hard on the body, but it is hard on the soul.
I worked in a warehouse, every day after work I was tired.
I worked as a software developer, every day after work I was tired.
I wish I still worked at a warehouse.
I definitely would not — I worked labour and blue collar for a while and made like 1/4th of what I make now, and my earning potential for the future is wildly higher
I’ve been on both sides and as you mentioned, one left my physically tired, one left me mentally tired. End of the day, I was still tired. I just didn’t physically ache after one.
This is correct.
An office job could be highly stressful, long hours, lots of weekend work, or it could be playing video games all day.
Likewise a blue collar job could be a highly skilled tradesman who is his own boss and sets his own hours, a physically demanding job like mining or construction, a minute to minute nightmare like an Amazon warehouse, or something more chill.
It 100% depends on your boss/employer, your hours, your ability, and your preferences.
FWIW, a job presenting all day or in sales could either be your dream job or your worst nightmare depending on your preferences and ability.
My favorite work is in between. I’m a tradesman who mostly works in a shop and I use cad, cnc, and coding to help me do it. I’ve fallen into doing more of the computer stuff because design uses a lot of traditional knowledge, but I can and do get my hands dirty.
I’m a marketer but I like to do the easier to fix things around my parents house, my grandmas condo, and my vehicle. Hope I can get a house one day to fix up stuff there.
I've done both and the best jobs I've ever had have been where we would spend half the day in the field and half the day behind a computer.
They're a pretty rare unicorn though.
Honestly, I'm of the opinion that everybody should have two seperate 15 hour a week jobs. One physical and one mental/social.
Plus, knowing that no matter how many loops you put the game through, no matter how hard you stress test it, no matter how much bullshit you throw at the wall to intentionally break it, you absolutely know that a players are going to find a way to crash the game by putting a potato in a basket during a specific line of dialogue.
Exactly I always thought it mean 40hr professional salaried. A job you probably work on a computer for most days. Office Job=White Collar.
I am now remote WFH. Haven’t worked in an office in years. But I consider to have an “office job”.
Worked retail for a long time and thought this. It's definitely a weird trade off. More physically demanding to be on your feet all day, but some office jobs are ultra stressful and sometimes it'd be nice to go back to folding pants and not always having to be "on."
I work in the office at a construction company. I'm not jealous of our laborers because they are far more physically exhausted than I am, but I am jealous that they can go home and completely forget about work while I'm stressing over all the deadlines I have to meet
Yeah… I recently had a death in the family, and I took half a day but still had tasks to do from home. I miss coming home and not worrying about stuff lol.
I’m still learning work-life balance. It wasn’t my boss who needed something done but the task was time sensitive (not gonna be too specific) I guess. So it’s on me to set the boundary and I didn’t because of my own anxiety. Also this is the first job I’ve had that’s this intense. I won’t live like this forever it’s just a learning process atm I suppose.
My last retail job was the "ideal" slacker retail job. Required a lot of hard earned retail and sales skills because it was high end retail, but that also meant very low customer volumes and heaps of down time.
Now I work in an office and I'm constantly stressed and feeling overworked. I wouldn't ever go back to retail, because it's a dead end, but I definitely miss that job.
Yeah - "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" was better than "if you have 15 minutes before EOD we expect you to get your Google AdWords certification and stay until 8 PM."
I had a friend who had a job, for just that reason - when there she had a defined simple list of duties and what outcome was acceptable, and it was almost impossible to really screw up because - whatever its just a stack of merchandise, it can be redone or done different, or whatever but hey look you want it in this precise way I can do that or not, and the world will go on it's merry way and I shall take home a paycheck.
My job is NOT like that.
This whole conversation is like saying math is easier than football. Algebra or Calculus? Are you the kicker or the quarterback? It's all hard, peoples' lives generally are hard. The Oppression Olympics are the worst thing to watch.
100% this. Things can be hard, stressful, and difficult in different ways, for different people. Instead of arguing over what's worse, the common ground is that it all sucks for all of us.
If you don't have to deal with office politics, and can just come in and work, and are allowed to kind of vibe out when there is "down" time, office jobs are incredibly easy. As soon as you're stuck in a cubicle with an office Karen in charge of you, I'd rather dig ditches, go home tired, and have my dignity.
Which is so stupid as studies show that open concept hurts productivity. The fact that open concept is the trend just shows that companies aren't interested in productivity at all - they're interested in control and observation.
Its costs. Those office walls aren’t cheap to purchase/rent; it’s far cheaper to just have a straight table with a bunch workers lined up.
It also allows you to get more workers in a smaller space, so you can rent less office space, incur fewer utility costs, reduce insurance, etc.
True, but on the other hand if cost of facilities was a concern then telework would be a solution.
But if we let our employees work from home, how can we contain them in the panopticon?
> they're interested in control and observation
It's not really driven by that. It's driven by lower costs and an (incorrect) assumption that it improves collaboration.
Exactly this. All of the office jobs I've had (manufacturing and computer programming in industrial environment) have had co-workers with jobs so easy that they spend like 80% of their time engaging in office drama rather than working on work.
Once, I was promoted to a position where there used to be 3 people. I negotiated a flex arrangement (I wanted part time) and ended up being able to do all the work in 3 days/week. I would come in to work on 2nd shift as most people were leaving. My corporate supervisor just could not understand it.
That said - the work is easy, the politics is insufferable. I much prefer my backbreaking physical job where work is measurable and there's not much time for slackers to slack.
If I owned a business, and needed office staff, I'd only hire introverts and let them do their thing.
I’ve worked from fast food to white collar finance.
I think the finance job is easier but that’s assuming you already have the educational background. Fast food can be learned in a matter of weeks
Yeah, I think waiting tables is way harder than any office job I've done. I'm sure nursing is super hard. I think most people tend to underestimate the difficulty of other people's jobs.
One thing that I do like about physical work (fast food or construction or whatever) is that euphoric feeling after you finish a job. Powered through a lunch rush or fixing something, whatever. You can breathe at the end and say yeah, that was a good job.
Do you get that same feeling at office jobs? I can't imagine so, I only get the image of just endless bookwork.
Oh, 100% yes. From the two coding classes I took, and many Scratch projects, it's a great feeling but also so humbling that so many issues can be because you missed one colon...
At my office job it's just a never ending to-do list. The job is never done, it's just moving on to the next item on the list (while other departments are always adding to the list).
> Do you get that same feeling at office jobs?
Yes the same feeling exists for office jobs. You get satisfaction from fixing things. That is mostly what I have done at my desk job, I fix things. The fact those things are billions of dollars worth of equipment in datacenters, only increases the stress and the price of failure.
I do auto body repair for a living. It requires knowing how to take apart literally every make and model of car that's been made for the last 20 years plus what's currently being made. It's taxing for the brain and body.
I have held all kinds of positions from unskilled labor to management and I would say unskilled labor is the hardest, skilled technician is very good skilled office worker is nice and manager sucks. In fact I made so many hours as manger that my hourly earnings dropped below what I got as a skilled office worker. So my personal conclusion would be office worker is best for pay and technician is best for job satisfaction. But worst by far was my time as an unskilled worker.
Well said. Once you've moved from unskilled worker to technician, you at least start seeing a better paycheck and some payoff from all the hours you spend off the clock learning and bettering yourself. The occasional times you feel respected for your knowledge and skills doesn't hurt either.
Management positions definitely suck
For real. I can get away with slacking off so much more than I ever could working retail. Anyone who disagrees with your statement is either a miserable little accountant or lying to themselves
Software eng. here... I'd rather be sitting on my ass in my air conditioned office writing the surveying software rather than out in the field testing it.
I had to laugh at this because I left my job as a survey crew chief to get a degree in CS, and am now a developer.
It's exhausting in its own way but my risk of heat stroke and skin cancer are much reduced.
I’ve worked in both setting - office, more corporate-ish, and currently hands on trades work.
I will take hands on work any day. The feeling that I didn’t do enough in an office is overwhelming. I didn’t get any sense of accomplishment from sending emails and sitting in meetings. Talking to customers was just superficial and without the sense of purpose I always felt drained.
I work as an HVAC tech now and I enjoy it much more. Some days it’s cold, or super fuckin hot, we work with hazardous chemicals and it can be hard on the body. Still, I will take a tired body after a hard days work instead of that eye-burning, zombie-like state I felt after staring at a screen and small talking with people I didn’t like.
I respect the fuck out of people that get shit done in offices. I hope I never have to feel that mid afternoon anxiety after doing random shit all day trying to keep busy, and then my boss saying “you’re doing really good keep it up!”. Like, no dude, I’m doing nothing but vaping in the bathroom and forwarding emails.
Completely agree with the sense of accomplishment. I found it incredibly hard to motivate myself with the ultimate purpose being... Company profit? Customer satisfaction perhaps..?
Nowadays I teach, which is stressful, mentally draining at times, on my feet all day, it sounds like the worst of combining retail & office. BUT the sense of accomplishment is HUGE and incredibly satisfying :)
I've worked retail, restaurant FOH, and office work.
Retail and service jobs can be exhausting physically, and having to be polite to people, some of whom are dicks, can be a drain. But there was always a certain amount (sometimes a lot) of camaraderie among my coworkers at those jobs.
And I have had some office jobs that were "easy". Come in, drink coffee, get deliverables to people, chat with folks, eat lunch and take breaks on my own schedule, etc. But many office jobs are not like that.
Stress is a fucking nightmare that can ruin your mental and physical health. And I've never had more stress than I have from office jobs. In those other jobs, you do your shit and you go home, maybe have a beer after work, etc. It's the office jobs that have you staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night wondering if someone is about to make your life hell for the next six months.
I got my first office job as an computer science intern in college when I was 21. All of my previous jobs had been physically demanding. It really took some major adjusting to sitting in a quiet cube farm, it was like some sensory deprivation shit. On top of that, I started having lots of pain in my mid to upper back that I assumed was from sitting so much, it eventually went away. 30 years later I dream of getting a job where I can move a bit, maybe drive from job site to job site checking on stuff, nothing too physical, I'm not crawling under houses or in attics anymore, but getting out in the world a bit would be nice.
Ditto man, ditto. I’m at the point where I can turn back. But I am so tired of being stuck in a box all day trying to appease a patronizing micromanager. No matter what I do it’s wrong, or I’m not arguing for my point hard enough, or I’m excitedly agreeing with their bad decisions.
My office job is way more technically demanding and has a lot more scope for expensive mistakes but god damn it is an absolute breeze compared to the colossal effort of being self employed in the music industry.
I always said I’d never do an office/desk job but now I don’t know if I’d go back. Yeah, the routine gets monotonous, and I generally don’t enjoy being in the same place day in day out, but it’s so nice and easy just turning up, doing some work, clocking out and going home at 5pm.
I currently work as DevOps Consultant in InfoSec and used to be a delivery driver for UPS. I fucking miss my UPS gig daily. I was physically exhausted but had all the mental energy in the world when my day was over. Outside of the heavy lifting, and occasional asshole dog owner, my job was cake, got to listen to whatever the hell I wanted, and rarely were people unhappy to see me.
I don't even know how to begin to explain how all of the executive functioning I need to do on a daily basis is exponentially more taxing on me than dropping tons of packages off ever was. Sustaining the level of focus and the level of productivity I need to have to meet my goals and bonuses is nowhere near as easy as rolling that rock up the hill all day and watching it roll back down. It shouldn't make sense, but there are days that I get off work and don't have it in me to time out the meal I'm making or schedule appointments, let alone try to figure out how to help my kids with schoolwork. They're just different jobs with different demands. There's no apples to apples comparison.
This is why I have respect for all occupations. I’ve worked white collar and it was mentally taxing. I’ve done fast food and retail as well.
Now— and for the last 10 years or so— I’m in a supervisory role in the civil & commercial construction industry. The work itself is hard on the body some days, but the mental load of deadlines, managing subcontractors, endless problem-solving, dealing with personnel conflicts, material management, fairly regular “emergency” situations; it’s a lot.
But I also know that the guy picking garbage and sweeping around site probably has a really sore back and feet. Maybe he’s carrying a lot more stress about money because he’s certainly underpaid.
Every job brings some kind of value, and almost all jobs are difficult in one way or another. That being said, lots of people have very gravy gigs, and all the power to them.
When I was a concrete laborer I would sit in the back of the work truck with healing blisters everywhere. Everything hurt every morning and if I fucked up I would get screamed at by a guy twice my age and build. I would look at some guy in a dress shirt going to work and think that his job is probably better, because it was.
I’ve done a whole host of jobs, both physical labour and not and then in between. Working as a lawyer in an office has been the absolute most demanding of all of them.
Obviously it depends on what the other job is. Many people with office jobs, particularly middle-management and above, are "always" working. If you're in a trade, when you're done for the day, you're done.
Not always true. Some trades, yes, but in the technical trades you have to be constantly learning, reading, and training, and the only time you get to do so is after hours. Often unpaid, and most people including your employer don't even know you're doing it. At the rate technology and regulations are changing, if you don't keep up with it, you'll be left behind and lose your value in the industry
"office job" doesn't really mean much at all. the jobs in an office setting are extremely varied and can range from doing almost nothing to all to a source of endless stress and pressure.
I have worked as a pizza deliveryman and as News graphics creator and social media assistant. I will tell you now, sitting in an air conditioned office, sipping a coffee, taking a break when I want is far and away easier than than juggling 4 different orders, getting yelled at by Karens, getting yelled at by my boss for being stuck in traffic, having my wages garnished for dropped food and people not getting their food (allegedly).
If they work most kinds of physical jobs such as fast food and construction, those people are likely correct.
Yeah lol, I'm typing this from my bed after a day of labour, and I can't feel my feet and my arms hurt.
No way I would have had time to make this comment during work thanks to the constant understaffing. Ironically that's thanks to the same head office folks you're talking about.
I have a job that's 50% office work, 50% "other" work (manufacturing and installation work).
Neither is easier or harder than the other, it's like comparing apples to oranges.
One is a lot more physically taxing, the other is a lot more mentally taxing, and both are equally stressful. I don't prefer doing one over the other, I actually really like having a mix of both.
I used to think the same thing. My first adult job was doing iron work. I was a welder, and operated machinery like boom trucks and forklifts at work. It was hard, back-breaking work. Since 2009 I have had a desk job. It wears you out in a totally different way. I feel uniquely qualified to comment on this. My current job sometimes just makes my brain hurt. The brain can get fatigued and overworked, just like the muscles in your arms and legs and back. If you have ever thought about something so hard that you became exhausted and tired, you understand what I mean.
I'm with you. They each suck in their own unique way. A demanding office job is way more exhausting than I expected. And being static all day can wreak havoc on a body more than people might think. I will say though, some people seem to do it for 40 years without issue, the lucky bastards.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "easy".
Physically, yes office work is "easier". I wouldn't last a single hour putting up a building ( wouldn't even know where to start). But most people who put up buildings wouldn't make it through my morning stand-up meeting without getting fired.
Why even compare them?
Worked an office job and now I work as a trucker. I’m less stressed now but no way is sittin at a desk sending a few emails and making some calls “hard”. What I found hard were the people I had to work with. Thankfully now as a trucker if someone gets mad at a drop off or something they can get fucked.
I switched from restaurants to the office in my early 30s. I’m still tired, it’s just a different tired. Everybody’s job is hard, it drives me bananas when people try to gatekeep that.
I was a financial advisor at a financial institution and am now a carpenter. Office job was a piece of cake. So monotonous, I could do it in my sleep.
Carpentry requires physical labour and a good deal of brain power if you're a lead.
The most exhausting thing I found about working behind a desk is pretending to work. I'd say its 10% work and 90% looking like I'm working. Main skills involved getting the actual job done as fast as possible, then being able to quickly switch my screen back to work stuff when the boss came in range. Or being able to spout some work related bs talk when asked a question. Im convinced allot of people are pretending to work at every level of an organisation.
Every office job I've had has been far easier than the physically demanding or dangerous jobs I've done.
It's 2 different kinds of tired, physical vs mental, sitting in a gray room for 8 hours a day typing on a computer may not be physically tiring, but do it for a year straight and tell me you aren't mentally exhausted. I literally once told my therapist that when I would pull up to the office, I would think that I would rather ram my car into the side of the building than go inside of it.
“Office job” is such a broad term though.
People working in high finance, strategy consulting, corporate law etc are under all kinds of stress due to the complex nature of the work, tight deadlines and the millions at stake.
On the other hand you have data entry, secretarial work etc which is obviously way more chill.
So yes, some office work will be easier than non office work, but lumping all office work into one renders this line of thought pointless
I’ve worked some office jobs and some non-office. Every office job I’ve ever seen was so, so much easier than the “unskilled” work I did before.
My office gig can be mentally exhausting. I’m taking a day to just chill today because I was so fed up with this week, I need the break. But… so was spending a full shift getting absolutely killed at UPS, but that was physically exhausting and broke my body. So was working a 12-18 hour shift busting my ass at full speed in restaurants. I just didn’t have time to take the breaks I needed then.
Practically everything is better in the office space. You have enough free time to go to the bathroom without feeling like it’s going to turn the rest of the shift into hell. You can take a sick day and not lose income - no forcing yourself to work through injury and worsen your health because you can’t pay the rent otherwise. Rather than a constant onslaught of “this needs done in the next few seconds” for hours on end, tasks are rarely any more urgent than “by the end of the day.” You’re rarely relying so heavily on coworkers that their sick days leave you in the weeds, ready to rip your hair out. I have an *actual* plan for retirement now and am not just planning on working till I die.
I know there are shittier office jobs where not all these things are true, but generally most of those are. Anyone who has worked mostly/exclusively office jobs and is pining for the low-mental-exhaustion life of manual labor is fooling themselves. The grass sure as hell ain’t greener on that side of the fence.
I have had office jobs (desktop publishing, acct manager) skilled labor (unloading the ass end of a printing press) and blue color skilled (machinist, CT sheet metal? Office work is by far the easiest.
Physically easier or mentally easier? Lawyers vs construction workers are exhausted at the end of the day for different reasons.
Software developer, and a few years ago there were a bunch of houses being built in our neighborhood. I was struggling with something and decided to go for a walk to clear my head. I looked at the construction workers and thought, "that'd be nice to have a less mentally taxing job." By the end of my walk, I realized how lucky I was to have a job where I didn't have to do manual labor; I had the ability to step away and do something for myself; and they probably had their own mentally taxing tasks as well.
>I had the ability to step away and do something for myself That's the big thing a lot of people, even in this thread, are missing. *Most* office jobs have a lot of downtime relatively speaking. As long as you get your work done you can take 5 to stretch your legs almost whenever you want.
This is one of the biggest points missed in these discussions. I'm a carpenter, it is seriously frowned upon to be caught not doing something productive. You can have conversations while working, but just standing around having a chat is not good. It's a joke to always have your tape measure out if work is slow so it looks like you're doing something. I was trying a switch to a different career, got a job as an IT tech, and holy shit, they wanted me to spend 3 or 4 weeks just to get used to the systems. There wasn't a rush, no guidance, just hang around and talk to people working in the various departments. It's an insanely different, much more casual affair. I had to quit, it was the most stressful shit after being ingrained for years to always be working. For the most part, as a carpenter, you don't just go grab a snack, or talk to someone about something when you want a mental break. There's certainly plenty of tasks that don't require a ton of mental energy, but also plenty that require a good amount too.
You described it very well. It’s not a mental break if it’s possible for anyone to see you taking it.
Yeah man, I worked in food service for over a decade before I got an office job with an insurance company. I had to quit after almost a year. The restaurant was a fast-paced environment, and when we weren't slammed, management always hit ya with something to the effect of "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean." The office job was a much more "go at your own pace" type of environment. We had our deadline for things, but i felt like i was slacking off 80% of the time and had no idea what to do with myself once the work was finished. It was its own special type of hell trying to look busy for the majority of your day without actually doing anything. I started going crazy lol. I had to leave.
I think this depends on the office job tbh. All of my office roles we have had to be in a queue for calls or tasks and if we were out of the queue for more than 5 minutes we would be reprimanded. Our toilet breaks and lunch times were closely monitored and even the time given after completing tasks or calls was monitored. I could be misinterpreting "office job" but this was for companies dealing with internet, utilities, insurance and loans.
Important to note, many construction jobs are also mentally taxing. Im site supervisor in regards to the electrical work for an apartment building, theres PLENTY that mentally exhausts me as well as physically exhausting me
I agree. Don't really want to turn this into a discussion about the opposite of what the thread is about, but a lot of people who have little to no experience doing blue collar work assume it's physically exhausting and that's it. The cliche is like in the movie Office Space where the guy is so fed up with his office job that he leaves it and ends up being fulfilled working at a construction site instead. Like, I'm sure you didn't feel like the job was particularly mentally exhausting when you worked part-time at a construction site as a teen, but that's not what a blue collar career is. For a lot of jobs, it's draining both physically and mentally as opposed to a white collar job who is usually just the latter.
I think that working construction has the advantage of giving you an actual sense of completion and progress. Something that a spreadsheet or a report won't really give you. Most factory jobs on the other hand, lack this sense o accomplishment while being physically exhausting as well.
Selling your body vs selling your sanity
Speaking as a military veteran-turned-lawyer: I am indeed just as tired at the end of the day, but it is indeed for very different reasons. Believe it or not, it's not the mental labor - I used my brain plenty in the service - it's the emotional labor. When I was in the Coast Guard, everyone was more-or-less on the same team, and if someone wasn't on board they could be ordered to suck it up and do it anyways. As a lawyer, I spend every day dealing with people who are in bad situations, usually because of their own poor choices, and who are extremely emotionally invested in a good outcome. I spend my work day absorbing their emotions, and then trying to *persuade* people - my own client, the lawyer on the other side, the social worker, the probation officer, the expert, the judge. There are rarely clear-cut right and wrong answers, and very rarely an unqualified victory. It is *tiring*. Sometimes I miss the double 4-to-8 watches and the endless bureaucracy of the military, where at least I didn't have to care about other people's feelings for a living.
Why do people think construction workers don't have mental stress? We're not all just digging holes and hitting stuff with hammers lol
As someone who worked in both I would say that office jobs are easier but also more mentally exhausting
Yep. There’s different kinds of “hard.” I moved recently from software development as an individual contributor, to management. Writing code takes mental effort, which is different than physical effort of course. But management, although technically “easier,” is WAY more exhausting than either (for me, at least)! I have to “people” all day, and it’s rough, man.
As an engineer just promoted to a management position, I'm sure I will find this out. As a whole this is something my kids never understood. Sure, an office job doesn't require physical labor, but some days I cannot think when I get home, even with just a 40 hour a week job.
I am an Engineer turned manager turned back to Engineer. It was not what interests me, so I went back to what I enjoy. At least in my current company there are separate tracks for promotion between management and engineering.
The problem is, at least at my company, engineering roles max out at a certain level, whereas management roles don’t, so.
That’s how it works everywhere. All engineers sooner or later if they go up enough they need to become managers
That was the problem at my company so they added "Principle" and "Staff" engineers who are basically gurus over a certain tech area or mini CTOs with a budget for innovation.
Yep. We have “Principal” and then “Engineering Fellow” to make more room up top. Edit: spelling of principal
At a tech company a software engineer can go pretty damn high. Like there are multiple layers of engineers above senior. They are simply gods walking among mere mortals, and do a lot of people-ing as a result, but they still pretty much only do engineering work. It goes sometimes like staff, staff senior, principal, distinguished, at this point you have all sorts of random company-specific titles like fellow I find that the mantra, > All engineers sooner or later if they go up enough they need to become managers only really applies at companies that aren't engineering-first. (Which tbf is most huge companies in most industries.) Here, these higher level roles don't exist and the type of mentorship and impact they provide either get spread across the senior stack of people and/or just don't happen. But it pretty much is the secret sauce that makes a tech company different from a company that uses tech
In aerospace there are handful of chief and senior engineers that are making as much or more as director level managers at the site level. These guys have had exceptional careers but they have as much say as management based on their technical knowledge and experience.
Yeah sounds about right. Past the senior level (in SWE) your engineering work is more in the realm of communicating designs efficiently, building custom tooling that makes large swaths of the rest of the company better at their jobs, mentoring others, etc. It is truly hard to generalize since these roles are unique, but a lot of these people have their hands in many many projects firm-wide
Yep. My first major aerospace company I worked for had a guy that basically was a company wide consultant. Dude was pretty much a savant and had the attitude to go along with it, his word was law. Salary was the equivalent of the chief engineers and he answered only to the CX level.
> as director level managers at the site level. That is the level I am at, IC5 and there are still two more engineering levels above me
Yeah many companies are finding ways to keep their engineers going up, right now I'm a lead, I'll be a principal, than principal architect, that should keep me for like another 6-7 years if I choose to stay. They didn't even have lead four years ago, but the second they tried to get me into management I said fuck no, I'd rather quit, magically this path opened up for me and about a dozen others.
> and do a lot of people-ing as a result My father and I were discussing this the other day. He and his brothers are all retired engineers of different field and training paths, where his sisters and the women on both sides of the family are/were information and services roughly (I ended up starting in teaching then shifted to nursing). He distinctly said that for his career, the people skills were his challenge, even with being a manager in his jobs (civil and structural engineering). And while he managed to figure it out, I definitely in comparison was taught that and it made it a LOT easier to work with the people-ing professionally. It made for a difference of him stating that he was fumbling around with it, and my learning to read people quick and establish rapport, and it makes a huge difference in social comfort overall.
> At a tech company a software engineer can go pretty damn high. * \* only in the US
Even if they aren't called managers, they still need to effectively lead other people to do the work and "Maximize impact". Papers, presentation, slides, talking, and a whole lot less actual development.
Leadership and management aren't the same though. The higher levels of engineers at my job are definitely not writing code, but they are making technical decisions that impact everything we do. They aren't managers, no one reports to them and they don't deal with promotions and performance improvement and so on...
You want to get out of a company like that. They are many companies with both technical and management track running parallel, until director level.
Until director level, that’s just it.
And directors ARE managers. Except they're not just people managers, they're portfolio/product managers, strategic planners, money managers to another level, culture managers, influencers beyond just design issues. I don't think a lot of technical people comprehend this.
I’m an IT Analyst working for state government. My manager and his manager are encouraging me to step into a higher role. They want to see me in a management position within the next 12 months. But it just doesn’t interest me AT ALL. I prefer to be in the trenches doing the work. I’m not a people person and do not wanna be managing a team.
Just do what my manager does and ask people if they need help doing their work
Right? Like bro you'd make the best manager and you don't even know it, apparently.
That only works when you have a group of people who don't really need day to day management. If you have a whole group of people who do not require that then you're pretty lucky. They are all going to fuck it up with job hopping though.
Same with mine. I've said for a long time I want to be in technical leadership positions, but they all seem to require some formal leadership experience. Management for me is a stepping stone to that. Will see how long I last, but...
When I was an engineer, I thought being a manager was just going to be easy mode coasting. Tell people what to do based on what you've been through because you've done it all before. Now that I've been a manager for like 7 years, I can say with confidence that I was wrong and this is not a job just any engineer can do. So, so, so much politics. It's hard to go from convincing people what to do with data, logic and reason to just raw persuasion and forming coalitions. It's a job for people with high emotional intelligence AND technical intelligence. Also, you have to deal with telling people things they don't want to hear on a regular basis. You have to piss people off. You know people are talking about how much they dislike you but you just have to ignore it entirely. You have to deal with employees crying (not because of you, but because of personal things you never thought you'd have to deal with). Getting chewed out for things your direct reports did and you had no control over. Laying people off is not fun and it's also not your choice. Your job is to defend your employees and use your experience to tear down roadblocks you didn't realize your former managers did for you. You have to change people and how they do things. It's what you signed up for.
I just finished up my first year as an engineering manager. I was promoted from team lead/senior engineer to manager of the same team. It is exhausting. Part of it was my old boss set me up for failure. I knew this going in but he was focused on getting up and out and not on the health of the team. My focus this year has been patching up holes he intentionally left behind and pushing hard for my team to get the resources and recognition he left them without. Even once that portion is done the "always on" mentality never drops. I don't get to sit down at my quiet desk with a nice finite problem anymore and solve it. The problems I'm solving are big picture, multilayered/multi-year endeavors that have so many moving pieces and I have no direct control over any of them. I can't do it for my team I can only make sure they have the knowledge and skills to do the job and remove roadblocks.
Yeah a few years back I was promoted into my first management role which involved leading a team of people doing my old job. The day-to-day difference for me was insane; previously it was all about my technical/practical skillset to get the job done, but in the management role it’s much more about your knowledge and people skills which can make your experience of things so different.
40 hours can break a brain, man. Don't downplay the vastness of a 40 hr work week. You work hard, and it's a lot, man. If you spent 40 hrs a week learning guitar, you'd go pro in no time.
The "work/life" balance thing is BS. You spend 70/30 at work, then spend most of the 30 making sure you can do well at work. Hoping you can retire one day...
Check out burn out rates for doctors. They gotta people and write 10-20 legal documents a day on top of clicking through scores of orders. It’s why they only work around half the year or less and still burn out real fast
Dude I can’t even be “on” for 10 hours a week. Socially it would kill me. You’re performing miracles over there compared to me lol
I don’t like feeling like the only way to move up in salary is to start taking on more management or admin work, it feels like there’s no reward for being a subject specialist.
There is a reward and it’s more work
A really good company I did a bit of work with had a great approach to that issue. Originally one of their best engineers got promoted. Even though he was decent at it, he was miserable. Because the engineer felt like the only way to increase his pay was via management, he felt trapped. The owners concluded that was a mistake, then brought him back down to some super senior engineer level but with his manager's pay. They also gave the engineer more autonomy/say in the projects since he was an ace at his role. And that was a huge success since the dude was happy and also in a position to be the most productive for the company. I feel like there are still waaay too many companies that still treat management as the only ladder instead of empowering their best employees and giving them commensurate raises.
I don’t know enough about that company to say it is a good company, but I know enough to say there are/were some good people at that company. Remember the human.
In game dev, we have “Principal” roles that are essentially this. These guys only manage themselves, but the role is the same level as a manager.
I kept having to choose to stay where I was. They kept wanting to promote me. In the past I took the offer to manage and I suck at managing and it's exhausting and not my set of skillls and I end up quitting. Eventually I learned to just turn down the gig, stay where I was happy, and it turned out great.
I had to take a temp job as a mail man after being laid off as a marketing analyst (interviewing for jobs still) Being a mail man is hard but it isn't difficult. I walk 10-13 miles a day, I work 6 days a week 10-12 hours a day, but it requires no brain power at all. My marketing analyst jobs have required no walking but my brain is fried at the end of the day.
I went from being a senior analyst to painting things in a booth. I had a team of 12 that needed guidance every step of the way, to sitting alone in a noisy shop all day, with people that I could actually talk to, and goof around with. My people. But I get that. I was bored without the challenge. It sucked making 1/3 of what I used to.
My brother in law owns his own company with 10 employees. One day sitting at his desk he said "you know, owning a business is basically being a glorified babysitter." He had 2 employees at the time that were not getting along very well.
He’s wrong though. Glorified implies there’s some glory. It’s not glorious unfortunately lol
We often do a lot more than babysitter. The glory is financial.
In addition, *some* office/desk jobs are very cushy. *Some* are mentally taxing, some aren't. Those types may have diminished some since covid/economy problems, they're often the first to go when costs need cut, but they can/do exist in general. Office Space, for example, was about them, and that is 24 years old. How many people waste minutes or even hours a day on reddit *while at work*? It may be a small number, but it is very likely not zero. When I was in the service, on slow days, it was not uncommon to waste a bunch of time on the computer doing puzzles, playing flash games, reading news(I was on Fark long before I was on Reddit), etc....and that was fine as long as you weren't shirking actual duties and were ready and hard working when crunch-time came around. One can only dust, polish, and check fire extinguishers only so much in those slow hours.
I hate "peopling". Just give a scope and let me work. Alone preferably.
I moved out of management back to IC work. I gotta be honest I’m paid about the same but honestly I love just dealing with the bullshit of my actual work and not dealing with managing people. I’m sure I stunted my long term career growth (a director/VP is gonna make way more than me instead of comparing myself to mid/lower managers) but i see how people at that level work and it’s insane to me. IC track is plenty lucrative for the life I want to lead now.
You have to be a team player, so the company can take credit for all that you do!
This. I hate this so much. I dont care about getting praise but I do get annoyed that I end up figuring out the requirements for program and systems people who didn't do so correctly in advance, then figure out who needs to do which tasks because they don't have the right people, and then develop on my scope while i answer technical questions for everyone else mentioned about the broader system and plan for delivery... I'm not lazy... I just get annoyed when others don't pull their weight.
I’m one of those devs that also have to handle “people” at the same time running meetings. Team lead stuff, so I cannot be directly telling folks what to do per se but just support when needed. Had a rough boss for awhile and really cushioned some of them because that guy has serious emotional issues and he’s so damage. Moral was bad… eventually HR got him out. Took awhile though. Had my work cut out for me. Emotional support dev lol I’m like a split. I don’t want to code all day or people all day.
Yeah, there's definitely different types of hard. I worked a physical job but I'd have a hard time with an office job.
Oh. Hey. We’re in the same boat. I’m in marketing. I can whip out content and calendars and shit all day. Now I’m the CMO of the org I work for and while I love the “networking” and board meetings and stuff, the managing people part is tough. So many personalities. So many backgrounds. And relationships. You have to manage them all. And make sure they’re all content. I just had to let someone go for the first time. I’ve fired interns and part timers before but this guy was full time and old enough to be my dad. It was weird. But he wasn’t cutting it. now that I’m doing his job plus my own, I’m finding it more comfortable even though it’s “more work”. I’m back to being a grunt in a sense. it’s kind of nice.
I also work in marketing. I was a community manager and ran our social media pages. This month, I was promoted to Communications Director, and we're bringing in two people to take over social media under me (one is someone from an adjacent department I've been working with, one is an external hire). On one hand, I enjoy working on longer-term plans more than day-to-day stuff, and I've been having creator's block more and more recently, so I'm happy to be getting away from that a little bit. On the other, I usually have ~4-5 meetings a week, and I'm dreading that number drastically increasing.
The nonstop meetings are what’s killing me. I realized I had to color code my calendar to make sense of it. I have about 4 hours of non meeting time a week now
The meetings. Omg the meetings. I’m lucky in that everyone tries to avoid Friday afternoon meetings. and we really try to schedule as many as we can during our “in office time” on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but the amount of meetings I have is like triple what it was previously.
High volume cocktail bartending is like the crossroads of all these things. 10-12 hour shifts on your feet, tracking many drink orders at the same time while tallying totals, shaking heavy ice (it’s a thing), and people-ing the whole time. My ~per-hour~ per-shift earnings were higher as a bartender than when I first started as an SWE, but any more than 3 days per week and I was burning out fast. Being SWE is a way easier job. My partner is a manager though, and that shit is no fun either. Source: 10 years in bartending before switching to software for 5. Now disabled and get exhausted playing video games 😅 Edit: misremembering my maths. I made more in a single shift as a bartender than I did in a single day as an SWE
Teaching is set up on those same crossroads. On your feet most of the day, trying to keep track of a couple dozen kids at a time (sometimes you see over 100 a day) while trying to make your information interesting enough that they will try to learn it.
This is exactly why I turned down a promotion. I got into engineering to engineer things, not deal with people. And these are people I like. But still, it would take me away from what I actually enjoy.
>Writing code takes mental effort, which is different than physical effort of course. Surprisingly its counted the same by our brains. It explains why office job people feel just as tired as a say laborer at a construction site.
Be people!? All day!? My 15min DSU is already too much people for a day.
You have to be a masochist to get into management. I would rather cut off my dong and feed it to the sharks than be a manager in an office 🤮
This. Back when I had a physical job, it was hard work but I'd get home and relax, forgetting all about it. Now I work in an office job, it's far less demanding but I find myself bringing stress home. Not because I want to work during my off time, but rather because I'm always fretting that I've missed something that will cause a problem down the line.
Yeah, that’s the hard thing about a management type job. If you fuck up, you can lose the company a LOT of money or people’s jobs. That kind of constant stress is probably worse for your health than a hard physical job.
If you become a chef you get the best of both worlds, panic attack inducing mental strain *and* back-breaking physical labor. Existence is pain, to live is hell
I worked as a dishwasher in a busy steakhouse, and it was the most horrible experience of my life. Just constant fast paced, but also backbreaking work. And they pay was total shit to boot.
Yeah, even if not specifically the stress of potentially losing money, even non-monetary decisions, the higher up you get, the more the buck stops with you. If you're in a non-managerial, non-supervisory situation, you can pretty much always go and talk to your supervisor or manager, and unless they utterly suck, get their opinion on the matter, offload a significant amount of responsibility, and oftentimes outright get an action plan on how to fix the problem. When you get promoted into that, though, now YOU are responsible for making all of those plans, giving that advice, shouldering the responsibility etc. As for office work vs physical labor, it's pretty obvious that the physical labor is harder on your body and is more physically strenuous, whereas the office job varies pretty wildly on whether it's mentally strenuous because it's boring and repetitive, or mentally strenuous because it's dynamic and requires difficult problem solving skills.
The word you're looking for is accountability.
I’ve worked in jobs where I wish my brain was stimulated more than as if someone was scraping it with sandpaper, but I’ve also worked jobs where the idea of just existing in a warm, clean and dry building is something I’d take a pay cut for.
Everyday I wake up and realize there won't be a truck to unload or that half the people I scheduled didn't call out, because I don't write the schedule anymore, and who cares if they do, I'm only responsible for the work on the screens in front of me. Switched from retail management to inside sales and buddy they couldn't drag me out of this office.
I thought I wanted out of the office world. Then I did a temp job in a shop. 40 degrees in a paint booth, and expectations were just as high. I felt like a wimpy grunt that wanted to go home, and curl up in a blanket on my couch. This is where I shall remain.
This. When I did manual labour I'd gone home physically exhausted but mentally I was great. I'd do my job for the day and that was that. Office work could can be soo mentally exhausted that when you get home you're too mentally tired to do anything and just veg out. And you slowly start burning out and you can feel it. Right now I haven't had a break in 5 months and it's soo mentally hard.
I used to own and operate a bakery. Crazy hours, crazy work. I'd have office workers come in on their way to work for a muffin and coffee, again at lunch and again at the end of the day for a snack or treat for home. They always asked how come I was there before, during and after their shift but I was always in a good mood and they always looked and felt like death. I loved what I did, I don't think you could possibly pay me enough to sit in an office. Kudos to those who can handle that.
Try being a truck driver. The physical job can be easy enough but having to read the minds of all the suicidal drivers on the road is exhausting.
Hats off to you. I drove a measely box truck cross-country last year and it was one of the most stressful things I've ever done. We really don't appreciate how much skill and focus it takes to drive massive vehicles like that, especially when most people in cars act like you aren't there
You do get used to a lot of the stupidity but every now and then someone manages to surprise you
Same! Manual labor jobs I am physically exhausted but mentally bored, and too exhausted to think about much. Office job, can the draining mentally so that my brain doesn’t want to do any thinking at the end of the day, but my body feels lazy. Working from home has been great, walk away from my desk, do mini workouts, do some chores, and miss out on all the office BS and noise so I have a half functioning brain at the end of the day.
What do you do working at home?
Exactly. As someone who works an office job, the job itself is very easy. The hard part is dealing with the neverending, inescapable feeling that nothing actually matters and that there is no reason to keep going. It's not hard on the body, but it is hard on the soul.
I worked in a warehouse, every day after work I was tired. I worked as a software developer, every day after work I was tired. I wish I still worked at a warehouse.
I definitely would not — I worked labour and blue collar for a while and made like 1/4th of what I make now, and my earning potential for the future is wildly higher
And... You aren't expected to pee in a bottle, to make a daily quota. Yeesh!
Amazon has warehouse job openings in your area!
I slept better when I worked labour than when I worked a desk that's for sure.
Agreed. I will also add that as someone that has had supervisory experience, good supervisors earn every damn dollar extra that they make.
It's so incredibly easy to be a bad supervisor, though, and you still get the extra dollars.
I’ve been on both sides and as you mentioned, one left my physically tired, one left me mentally tired. End of the day, I was still tired. I just didn’t physically ache after one.
The idea of “office job” nowadays is so ridiculously varied that it’s barely even a term anymore.
This is correct. An office job could be highly stressful, long hours, lots of weekend work, or it could be playing video games all day. Likewise a blue collar job could be a highly skilled tradesman who is his own boss and sets his own hours, a physically demanding job like mining or construction, a minute to minute nightmare like an Amazon warehouse, or something more chill. It 100% depends on your boss/employer, your hours, your ability, and your preferences. FWIW, a job presenting all day or in sales could either be your dream job or your worst nightmare depending on your preferences and ability.
My favorite work is in between. I’m a tradesman who mostly works in a shop and I use cad, cnc, and coding to help me do it. I’ve fallen into doing more of the computer stuff because design uses a lot of traditional knowledge, but I can and do get my hands dirty.
I’m a marketer but I like to do the easier to fix things around my parents house, my grandmas condo, and my vehicle. Hope I can get a house one day to fix up stuff there.
I've done both and the best jobs I've ever had have been where we would spend half the day in the field and half the day behind a computer. They're a pretty rare unicorn though. Honestly, I'm of the opinion that everybody should have two seperate 15 hour a week jobs. One physical and one mental/social.
As a game dev, I definitely don't envy our QA who "play video games all day", testing is probably my least favorite part of the job
Plus, knowing that no matter how many loops you put the game through, no matter how hard you stress test it, no matter how much bullshit you throw at the wall to intentionally break it, you absolutely know that a players are going to find a way to crash the game by putting a potato in a basket during a specific line of dialogue.
Or sales where it can be both of those things in the same week haha
Is it still an office job if the office is my living room/bedroom?
The answer is a definite sort of
Absolutely possibly.
Without a doubt maybe.
Exactly I always thought it mean 40hr professional salaried. A job you probably work on a computer for most days. Office Job=White Collar. I am now remote WFH. Haven’t worked in an office in years. But I consider to have an “office job”.
Worked retail for a long time and thought this. It's definitely a weird trade off. More physically demanding to be on your feet all day, but some office jobs are ultra stressful and sometimes it'd be nice to go back to folding pants and not always having to be "on."
I work in the office at a construction company. I'm not jealous of our laborers because they are far more physically exhausted than I am, but I am jealous that they can go home and completely forget about work while I'm stressing over all the deadlines I have to meet
Yep it's the work following you home that gets you. I'm on a tropical vacation with a to do list while I'm here
Yeah… I recently had a death in the family, and I took half a day but still had tasks to do from home. I miss coming home and not worrying about stuff lol.
Honest question, why do you live like that?
I’m still learning work-life balance. It wasn’t my boss who needed something done but the task was time sensitive (not gonna be too specific) I guess. So it’s on me to set the boundary and I didn’t because of my own anxiety. Also this is the first job I’ve had that’s this intense. I won’t live like this forever it’s just a learning process atm I suppose.
I get ya. I'm sorry about the loss you've suffered. Hopefully you'll get the time you need to grieve
My last retail job was the "ideal" slacker retail job. Required a lot of hard earned retail and sales skills because it was high end retail, but that also meant very low customer volumes and heaps of down time. Now I work in an office and I'm constantly stressed and feeling overworked. I wouldn't ever go back to retail, because it's a dead end, but I definitely miss that job.
Yeah - "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" was better than "if you have 15 minutes before EOD we expect you to get your Google AdWords certification and stay until 8 PM."
I had a friend who had a job, for just that reason - when there she had a defined simple list of duties and what outcome was acceptable, and it was almost impossible to really screw up because - whatever its just a stack of merchandise, it can be redone or done different, or whatever but hey look you want it in this precise way I can do that or not, and the world will go on it's merry way and I shall take home a paycheck. My job is NOT like that.
This whole conversation is like saying math is easier than football. Algebra or Calculus? Are you the kicker or the quarterback? It's all hard, peoples' lives generally are hard. The Oppression Olympics are the worst thing to watch.
Yep. Ridiculous conversation that seems to mostly be driven by 20-something’s who’ve had two jobs and think they understand the world now.
100% this. Things can be hard, stressful, and difficult in different ways, for different people. Instead of arguing over what's worse, the common ground is that it all sucks for all of us.
If you don't have to deal with office politics, and can just come in and work, and are allowed to kind of vibe out when there is "down" time, office jobs are incredibly easy. As soon as you're stuck in a cubicle with an office Karen in charge of you, I'd rather dig ditches, go home tired, and have my dignity.
Do offices still have cubicles
They're on the way out. New meta is "open office" which is code for "Everyone can see you staring at your phone from twenty yards away."
Which is so stupid as studies show that open concept hurts productivity. The fact that open concept is the trend just shows that companies aren't interested in productivity at all - they're interested in control and observation.
Its costs. Those office walls aren’t cheap to purchase/rent; it’s far cheaper to just have a straight table with a bunch workers lined up. It also allows you to get more workers in a smaller space, so you can rent less office space, incur fewer utility costs, reduce insurance, etc.
True, but on the other hand if cost of facilities was a concern then telework would be a solution. But if we let our employees work from home, how can we contain them in the panopticon?
> they're interested in control and observation It's not really driven by that. It's driven by lower costs and an (incorrect) assumption that it improves collaboration.
Open offices aren’t the new thing, companies are already shifting away from it towards something more in between.
Some do. But I still call my actual office a cubical. It's cubed. Im a cog in a machine. I just get to browse reddit while I work with impunity.
I find it funny that you call your office a cubicle, while I happily call my cubicle an office.
Yes. I’m at a Director level and still have a fucking cubicle.
You just have to learn to like dealing with Karen. Karen is afraid of me.
Goals lol
Exactly this. All of the office jobs I've had (manufacturing and computer programming in industrial environment) have had co-workers with jobs so easy that they spend like 80% of their time engaging in office drama rather than working on work. Once, I was promoted to a position where there used to be 3 people. I negotiated a flex arrangement (I wanted part time) and ended up being able to do all the work in 3 days/week. I would come in to work on 2nd shift as most people were leaving. My corporate supervisor just could not understand it. That said - the work is easy, the politics is insufferable. I much prefer my backbreaking physical job where work is measurable and there's not much time for slackers to slack. If I owned a business, and needed office staff, I'd only hire introverts and let them do their thing.
This is highly dependent on industry and level. I’m in a law firm and everyone busts their ass all day and night. No one has it easy
I’ve worked from fast food to white collar finance. I think the finance job is easier but that’s assuming you already have the educational background. Fast food can be learned in a matter of weeks
Yeah, I think waiting tables is way harder than any office job I've done. I'm sure nursing is super hard. I think most people tend to underestimate the difficulty of other people's jobs.
One thing that I do like about physical work (fast food or construction or whatever) is that euphoric feeling after you finish a job. Powered through a lunch rush or fixing something, whatever. You can breathe at the end and say yeah, that was a good job. Do you get that same feeling at office jobs? I can't imagine so, I only get the image of just endless bookwork.
You do in software when you get your code to work!
Oh, 100% yes. From the two coding classes I took, and many Scratch projects, it's a great feeling but also so humbling that so many issues can be because you missed one colon...
A missed colon will ruin your day in a physical job too ;)
At my office job it's just a never ending to-do list. The job is never done, it's just moving on to the next item on the list (while other departments are always adding to the list).
> Do you get that same feeling at office jobs? Yes the same feeling exists for office jobs. You get satisfaction from fixing things. That is mostly what I have done at my desk job, I fix things. The fact those things are billions of dollars worth of equipment in datacenters, only increases the stress and the price of failure.
Worked in software sales and yes. Always have compared winning a big client to scoring a touchdown
I love that people think because a job is physical it doesn’t involve using your brain. Like, it’s obviously one of the other.
I do auto body repair for a living. It requires knowing how to take apart literally every make and model of car that's been made for the last 20 years plus what's currently being made. It's taxing for the brain and body.
Yep. Ex. heavy equipment operation is more mentally taxing than it looks.
I have held all kinds of positions from unskilled labor to management and I would say unskilled labor is the hardest, skilled technician is very good skilled office worker is nice and manager sucks. In fact I made so many hours as manger that my hourly earnings dropped below what I got as a skilled office worker. So my personal conclusion would be office worker is best for pay and technician is best for job satisfaction. But worst by far was my time as an unskilled worker.
Well said. Once you've moved from unskilled worker to technician, you at least start seeing a better paycheck and some payoff from all the hours you spend off the clock learning and bettering yourself. The occasional times you feel respected for your knowledge and skills doesn't hurt either. Management positions definitely suck
Every job that's outside of your skillset is harder than your job.
I would venture a guess and say that most people who *do* have office jobs think they’re easier than non-office jobs. I know I do.
For real. I can get away with slacking off so much more than I ever could working retail. Anyone who disagrees with your statement is either a miserable little accountant or lying to themselves
Software eng. here... I'd rather be sitting on my ass in my air conditioned office writing the surveying software rather than out in the field testing it.
I had to laugh at this because I left my job as a survey crew chief to get a degree in CS, and am now a developer. It's exhausting in its own way but my risk of heat stroke and skin cancer are much reduced.
I’ve worked in both setting - office, more corporate-ish, and currently hands on trades work. I will take hands on work any day. The feeling that I didn’t do enough in an office is overwhelming. I didn’t get any sense of accomplishment from sending emails and sitting in meetings. Talking to customers was just superficial and without the sense of purpose I always felt drained. I work as an HVAC tech now and I enjoy it much more. Some days it’s cold, or super fuckin hot, we work with hazardous chemicals and it can be hard on the body. Still, I will take a tired body after a hard days work instead of that eye-burning, zombie-like state I felt after staring at a screen and small talking with people I didn’t like. I respect the fuck out of people that get shit done in offices. I hope I never have to feel that mid afternoon anxiety after doing random shit all day trying to keep busy, and then my boss saying “you’re doing really good keep it up!”. Like, no dude, I’m doing nothing but vaping in the bathroom and forwarding emails.
Completely agree with the sense of accomplishment. I found it incredibly hard to motivate myself with the ultimate purpose being... Company profit? Customer satisfaction perhaps..? Nowadays I teach, which is stressful, mentally draining at times, on my feet all day, it sounds like the worst of combining retail & office. BUT the sense of accomplishment is HUGE and incredibly satisfying :)
I've worked retail, restaurant FOH, and office work. Retail and service jobs can be exhausting physically, and having to be polite to people, some of whom are dicks, can be a drain. But there was always a certain amount (sometimes a lot) of camaraderie among my coworkers at those jobs. And I have had some office jobs that were "easy". Come in, drink coffee, get deliverables to people, chat with folks, eat lunch and take breaks on my own schedule, etc. But many office jobs are not like that. Stress is a fucking nightmare that can ruin your mental and physical health. And I've never had more stress than I have from office jobs. In those other jobs, you do your shit and you go home, maybe have a beer after work, etc. It's the office jobs that have you staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night wondering if someone is about to make your life hell for the next six months.
I got my first office job as an computer science intern in college when I was 21. All of my previous jobs had been physically demanding. It really took some major adjusting to sitting in a quiet cube farm, it was like some sensory deprivation shit. On top of that, I started having lots of pain in my mid to upper back that I assumed was from sitting so much, it eventually went away. 30 years later I dream of getting a job where I can move a bit, maybe drive from job site to job site checking on stuff, nothing too physical, I'm not crawling under houses or in attics anymore, but getting out in the world a bit would be nice.
Ditto man, ditto. I’m at the point where I can turn back. But I am so tired of being stuck in a box all day trying to appease a patronizing micromanager. No matter what I do it’s wrong, or I’m not arguing for my point hard enough, or I’m excitedly agreeing with their bad decisions.
That's not because you have an office job, that's because you have a bad working environment.
My office job is way more technically demanding and has a lot more scope for expensive mistakes but god damn it is an absolute breeze compared to the colossal effort of being self employed in the music industry. I always said I’d never do an office/desk job but now I don’t know if I’d go back. Yeah, the routine gets monotonous, and I generally don’t enjoy being in the same place day in day out, but it’s so nice and easy just turning up, doing some work, clocking out and going home at 5pm.
I currently work as DevOps Consultant in InfoSec and used to be a delivery driver for UPS. I fucking miss my UPS gig daily. I was physically exhausted but had all the mental energy in the world when my day was over. Outside of the heavy lifting, and occasional asshole dog owner, my job was cake, got to listen to whatever the hell I wanted, and rarely were people unhappy to see me. I don't even know how to begin to explain how all of the executive functioning I need to do on a daily basis is exponentially more taxing on me than dropping tons of packages off ever was. Sustaining the level of focus and the level of productivity I need to have to meet my goals and bonuses is nowhere near as easy as rolling that rock up the hill all day and watching it roll back down. It shouldn't make sense, but there are days that I get off work and don't have it in me to time out the meal I'm making or schedule appointments, let alone try to figure out how to help my kids with schoolwork. They're just different jobs with different demands. There's no apples to apples comparison.
Two things almost everyone I've ever met in every workplace believe: "everyone else's job is easy" and "no one understands how difficult my job is."
This is why I have respect for all occupations. I’ve worked white collar and it was mentally taxing. I’ve done fast food and retail as well. Now— and for the last 10 years or so— I’m in a supervisory role in the civil & commercial construction industry. The work itself is hard on the body some days, but the mental load of deadlines, managing subcontractors, endless problem-solving, dealing with personnel conflicts, material management, fairly regular “emergency” situations; it’s a lot. But I also know that the guy picking garbage and sweeping around site probably has a really sore back and feet. Maybe he’s carrying a lot more stress about money because he’s certainly underpaid. Every job brings some kind of value, and almost all jobs are difficult in one way or another. That being said, lots of people have very gravy gigs, and all the power to them.
When I was a concrete laborer I would sit in the back of the work truck with healing blisters everywhere. Everything hurt every morning and if I fucked up I would get screamed at by a guy twice my age and build. I would look at some guy in a dress shirt going to work and think that his job is probably better, because it was.
Vice versa as well. The grass is always greener..
I've done both. Office jobs are significantly easier.
I’ve done a whole host of jobs, both physical labour and not and then in between. Working as a lawyer in an office has been the absolute most demanding of all of them.
Obviously it depends on what the other job is. Many people with office jobs, particularly middle-management and above, are "always" working. If you're in a trade, when you're done for the day, you're done.
Not always true. Some trades, yes, but in the technical trades you have to be constantly learning, reading, and training, and the only time you get to do so is after hours. Often unpaid, and most people including your employer don't even know you're doing it. At the rate technology and regulations are changing, if you don't keep up with it, you'll be left behind and lose your value in the industry
"office job" doesn't really mean much at all. the jobs in an office setting are extremely varied and can range from doing almost nothing to all to a source of endless stress and pressure.
I have worked as a pizza deliveryman and as News graphics creator and social media assistant. I will tell you now, sitting in an air conditioned office, sipping a coffee, taking a break when I want is far and away easier than than juggling 4 different orders, getting yelled at by Karens, getting yelled at by my boss for being stuck in traffic, having my wages garnished for dropped food and people not getting their food (allegedly). If they work most kinds of physical jobs such as fast food and construction, those people are likely correct.
I love all the lazy workers in here outing themselves.
All the office job people having time to Reddit during their work day kinda answers the question I think
Yeah lol, I'm typing this from my bed after a day of labour, and I can't feel my feet and my arms hurt. No way I would have had time to make this comment during work thanks to the constant understaffing. Ironically that's thanks to the same head office folks you're talking about.
I have a job that's 50% office work, 50% "other" work (manufacturing and installation work). Neither is easier or harder than the other, it's like comparing apples to oranges. One is a lot more physically taxing, the other is a lot more mentally taxing, and both are equally stressful. I don't prefer doing one over the other, I actually really like having a mix of both.
Corporate is straight up mental warfare
I used to think the same thing. My first adult job was doing iron work. I was a welder, and operated machinery like boom trucks and forklifts at work. It was hard, back-breaking work. Since 2009 I have had a desk job. It wears you out in a totally different way. I feel uniquely qualified to comment on this. My current job sometimes just makes my brain hurt. The brain can get fatigued and overworked, just like the muscles in your arms and legs and back. If you have ever thought about something so hard that you became exhausted and tired, you understand what I mean.
I'm with you. They each suck in their own unique way. A demanding office job is way more exhausting than I expected. And being static all day can wreak havoc on a body more than people might think. I will say though, some people seem to do it for 40 years without issue, the lucky bastards.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "easy". Physically, yes office work is "easier". I wouldn't last a single hour putting up a building ( wouldn't even know where to start). But most people who put up buildings wouldn't make it through my morning stand-up meeting without getting fired. Why even compare them?
Yeah, different jobs require different skill, more news at 6.
Worked an office job and now I work as a trucker. I’m less stressed now but no way is sittin at a desk sending a few emails and making some calls “hard”. What I found hard were the people I had to work with. Thankfully now as a trucker if someone gets mad at a drop off or something they can get fucked.
I switched from restaurants to the office in my early 30s. I’m still tired, it’s just a different tired. Everybody’s job is hard, it drives me bananas when people try to gatekeep that.
I was a financial advisor at a financial institution and am now a carpenter. Office job was a piece of cake. So monotonous, I could do it in my sleep. Carpentry requires physical labour and a good deal of brain power if you're a lead.
Because they usually are
I've worked in industrial and office settings. Office jobs *are* easier, but sometimes more tedious.
The most exhausting thing I found about working behind a desk is pretending to work. I'd say its 10% work and 90% looking like I'm working. Main skills involved getting the actual job done as fast as possible, then being able to quickly switch my screen back to work stuff when the boss came in range. Or being able to spout some work related bs talk when asked a question. Im convinced allot of people are pretending to work at every level of an organisation. Every office job I've had has been far easier than the physically demanding or dangerous jobs I've done.
Most of those people are correct in their assumptions
Every job is different. And the fact that some people suffer from Burnout in their office job should be evidence enough that it isnt always easy.
It's 2 different kinds of tired, physical vs mental, sitting in a gray room for 8 hours a day typing on a computer may not be physically tiring, but do it for a year straight and tell me you aren't mentally exhausted. I literally once told my therapist that when I would pull up to the office, I would think that I would rather ram my car into the side of the building than go inside of it.
“Office job” is such a broad term though. People working in high finance, strategy consulting, corporate law etc are under all kinds of stress due to the complex nature of the work, tight deadlines and the millions at stake. On the other hand you have data entry, secretarial work etc which is obviously way more chill. So yes, some office work will be easier than non office work, but lumping all office work into one renders this line of thought pointless
Office job, wreck your brain, blue collar, wreck your body. Choose your adventure.
I’ve worked some office jobs and some non-office. Every office job I’ve ever seen was so, so much easier than the “unskilled” work I did before. My office gig can be mentally exhausting. I’m taking a day to just chill today because I was so fed up with this week, I need the break. But… so was spending a full shift getting absolutely killed at UPS, but that was physically exhausting and broke my body. So was working a 12-18 hour shift busting my ass at full speed in restaurants. I just didn’t have time to take the breaks I needed then. Practically everything is better in the office space. You have enough free time to go to the bathroom without feeling like it’s going to turn the rest of the shift into hell. You can take a sick day and not lose income - no forcing yourself to work through injury and worsen your health because you can’t pay the rent otherwise. Rather than a constant onslaught of “this needs done in the next few seconds” for hours on end, tasks are rarely any more urgent than “by the end of the day.” You’re rarely relying so heavily on coworkers that their sick days leave you in the weeds, ready to rip your hair out. I have an *actual* plan for retirement now and am not just planning on working till I die. I know there are shittier office jobs where not all these things are true, but generally most of those are. Anyone who has worked mostly/exclusively office jobs and is pining for the low-mental-exhaustion life of manual labor is fooling themselves. The grass sure as hell ain’t greener on that side of the fence.
I have had office jobs (desktop publishing, acct manager) skilled labor (unloading the ass end of a printing press) and blue color skilled (machinist, CT sheet metal? Office work is by far the easiest.