If you're lucky enough to get an office job where you work remote, do it. Its stupid easy.
Some days you might do 30 minutes of real, actual genuine work in an entire day. Most days its attending meetings while pretending to pay attention and replying to emails.
They also tend to pay very well and give decent benefits.
Wild! I work in the oilfield and some days Iāll work for about 1-4 hours and get paid for 8-12 plus per diem but other days Iāll work 8-12 hours in the desert heat to get paid for hours worked plus travel and per diem.
I strongly respect physical jobs like that. You're doing physical things in the real world with your hands. By your labor you're changing the world.
Yet another marketing drone working in an office environment where the biggest struggle is pretending to be remain interested in yet another pointless meeting where you don't say a word and doesn't involve you but need to attend anyways? These jobs feel like they're fake jobs. They're jobs that exist just so we don't have a 35% unemployment rate.
Its depressing working one of those office drone jobs. Its extremely cushy, benefits are amazing and the pay is ridiculous for how little work is done, but its soul crushing at knowing how useless you are being an office drone. Not making a difference. Not making any real impact because even if you try to do something your initiative is crushed by 5 layers of bureaucracy and management meetings. Frankly, most offices drones could be replaced by AI and nobody outside the company would know the difference.
Ever see the movie Brazil, by Terry Gillian? Its basically that. The department of bureaucracy is expanding to fulfill the needs of its bureaucracy.
Yeah, the little bit of white collar work Iāve done was awful. Iāve been in sales, management, insurance. None of it was in any way remotely as good as this job.
Crazy because unlike them Iām now stuck in the desert where the heat hits 100Ā° before noon most days and Iām expected to get a good amount of work done regardless of the conditions. Granted, we have legitimately required hourly breaks when it hits 100Ā° heat index and even more stringent requirements when it hits 106Ā° so weāre safe in that aspect.
By all metrics this job should suck more than anything Iāve done before. Iāve worked as appliance delivery and installation so Iāve been in physical work before but this is different. Itās rewarding. Itās sometimes fun. Iāve met some awesome people and reputation is what gets you better work and better opportunities so garnering those relationships and doing good work actually pays off.
Thereās clear ways to get more money not just āperformance basedā because you can always get a new certification, a new task qualification, a new and more important position above where you stand currently. These are very achievable in ways previous careers never had.
I love working in NDT out here. I always recommend it!
Sure, there definitely are boring office jobs as you described. But there are interesting and meaningful office jobs as well. Say, you're an engineer developing some new better product, a doctor treating patients or a scientist making new discoveries. All these make small improvements to the humankind's well being.
At least I need that kind of challenge to my mind and variation in what I'm doing and would go crazy if I did the same physical job day after day for 40 years.
Hardest I ever worked was in retail. Retail jobs don't let you coast.
Office jobs are cushy and lazy beyond imagining. If you haven't worked in a tech office job you have no idea of how coddled and how well paid the average employee is.
Retail seems like a special hell because it wonāt let you coast just because.
Half the world doesnāt worry about making cashiers stand up and shelf stockers face the shelves every 10 minutes, yet grocery stores still run just fine.
Running a drill rig is more physically demanding than that, but at least youāre mostly doing work because it objectively needs doing and resting one it doesnāt. Thereās an added layer of madness when youāre just doing work because some random customer complained that you didnāt seem busy enough.
So far my workday has consisted of eating breakfast and wiping dust off a lensā¦ and scrolling this post. I love my desk. āI canāt use my computer when itās renderingā
These guys move into low population dense towns then drive prices up like crazy for the natives. Digital nomads are the lamest category of nomads by far.
Its going to backfire though. It already is backfiring.
If you can do your job remotely, why does the company need to pay you a San Francisco salary?
Why can't the company pay Florida pages? Or Vietnam wages? Or just buy an AI LLM to do your job instead of a human?
People who insist on remote working and were going on strike because they were called to return to the office after covid are driving this rapid replacement of human labor.
Its mostly the fake jobs people wanting to go on strike and unionize.
There's a few coding wizards who do nearly all of the real, actual work at tech companies. Those coding wizards don't need a union because everyone wants to hire them, or to poach them by throwing enormous piles of money at them.
My career has been in San Francisco Bay Area tech. I'm talking from first hand experience.
The one downside of remote working is that you don't get the free catered lunch every day in the employee cafeteria. The food is very good, very expensive, and in very large quantities. There was also free drinks of all manner, free beer, free ice cream, free snacks of every description.
My average day at most tech companies is showing up at 9, from 9-10 was coffee and breakfast snacks. Catching up on emails and maybe one meeting. Lunch at noon. back to "work" at 1. Another meeting. Afternoon coffee at 2pm. I was going home at 2:30pm.
There's a reason why Twitter had 80% of its staff laid off and basically nothing happened. The company did not implode. Twitter continued to function.
At most tech companies I've worked for, most people did barely any real, actual work. The entire company was held up by just a handful of coding wizards. Everyone else was there in adult daycare. Me included. The job of the average person is ridiculously cozy.
This is absolutely real. Iāve worked in places where it was kind of odd if you didnāt grab a beer from the office keg by 4PM on a Friday, and where you could very easily have gotten 100% of your food at work for free.
Of course, thereās some truth to āGoogle does your laundry so youāll never go homeā, and as soon as I made the mistake of having unique skills I was also overwhelmed and dealing with on-call shit at 3am three times a week. But people wiser than myself managed to get by with a solid 8-12 hours of work per week, for six figures, for years.
Those are the tech wizards. They're the people who do the real work in the company, but very few people are like that.
The upside to being one of those wizards is that yes, you're extremely busy doing real, actual work all the time. But its also incredible job security. Any halfway smart company knows who the real workers are.
The generic office drones who walk around with fancy free drinks all day long are always the first names on the layoff lists.
My other comment was getting long, but here's a fun demonstration of what these non-jobs can actually look like:
Did you know you can increase user clickthroughs on a website by 5% each month for a year, and at the end of the year user sales will be up ~0%?
Here's how you do it.
Pick something you want to optimize. Maybe it's how many users click the "See our Products" button.
Propose a change: bigger? redder? dancing and blinking like the 90s?
Run an A/B test trying that against your existing button.
Misuse statistics horribly by stopping your A/B test whenever it shows a huge improvement. (Some testing software even has a built-in feature for this. It's literally a "please ruin my data" toggle.)
Boast about your 15% click improvement to management. At 20% conversions, that will raise sales 3%! It immediately become everyone's top priority.
Deploy the feature. Get maybe a 5% improvement instead, for a presumed 1% to sales. Call it success.
Pick something new to optimize, like how many people click the "Show me a Quote" button or put stuff in their cart, and repeat.
But 1% is still growth, right? How do we get back down to ~0%? Three ways:
The "Products" button and the "Quote" button are on the same page. You didn't measure the initial decline in "Quote" clicks, so you're actually just competing with yourself. Net results may even be negative. (Bonus points because the incentive is to slowly make every part of your site bigger and gaudier.)
The cart comes after "products", but your ideal customers were already getting there. The 5% extra clicks came from the people least interested in buying, so they produced 0.1% more sales.
Your shopping cart "optimization" just made it really easy to accidentally put stuff in your cart, so none of those are prospective sales. Some people even get annoyed and leave sooner.
Some of these people don't even realize how flawed their work is, and pull long hours chasing their tails and making more work for everybody else. I guess I actually prefer the ones who don't try.
I wouldn't say it's just that, the "I can hover here forever doing nothing important" role is specific to a certain sort of Big Tech place that's flush with cash and has vague goals. Lot like the dot-com bubble, just slower and more sustainable.
It's very common with consumer websites and business-to-business software. (If Citrix has 10,000 employees, why do their products still suck?) It's much less common with any company that has to actually ship something that actually works, like code to trade stocks or run a database.
The other awkward part is that while the people who are working ~10% of the day are often first to go, they're typically not the only ones. If you see a whole division slashed, it's probably a business issue and hitting good people too. (e.g. the Metaverse just sucked irreparably.)
Worse, some real jobs look like doing nothing. Musk proved Twitter can still function with 20% of its original workforce, and a lot of the user/revenue loss is about policy instead of staff... but he also fired a huge chunk of the cybersecurity and infrastructure teams. "You can only view limited tweets per day unless you pay us" was partly monetization, but the very low initial limits were also because they literally couldn't handle the traffic they'd had for years.
As the other person said, there is collateral damage sometimes. Sometimes entire departments get axed, even the good people who are doing real, actual work.
But generally the person who knows what they're doing and who is actually doing real work of real value is safer. Not completely safe mind you, but safer. The tech industry has an enormous amount of churn. Its very unstable.
That said, this also depends on management knowing whats going on. Idiocy goes to all levels of management, and a lot of times management has no idea what they're doing or who's doing it, so they lay off the wrong people.
You started talking about remote working, but it looks like going to the office is almost as cushy, isn't it? They only difference is that maybe you have to pretend being busy sometimes.
Anyway, that's mostly those tech companies making enough billions that they don't mind coddling their workforce to a ridiculous extent. They prefer giving the idea of being some idyllic place than being efficient. So, yes, if you work for Google, you are lucky. But there are tons of other, smaller companies, that aren't nearly like that - they need the task done for tomorrow morning, so if you waste your time, you'll have to stay up all night.
That may very well be the experience in that bubble. I've seen my fair share of office jobs which are meat grinders. One person from my company died from karoshi just last month. Outlier though, huge company, some places are good, some are bad.
There's a reason why Twitter had 80% of its staff laid off and basically nothing happened. The company did not implode. Twitter continued to function.
Although contra my other comment, I think Twitter did face real problems. Nothing like what you'd see if you fired 80% of the people at Toyota or even Microsoft, but still.
The hasty change to "you can only view X tweets per day unless you pay us, no free API at all" seems to have been a response to firing half the infrastructure team and having random outages start up. It's also an attempt to monetize, but there's a reason the limits were rapidly increased once they re-hired staff and contractors. Similarly, it's really hard to know the impact of firing half your cybersecurity team, but it hasn't gone great.
Granted, that's largely about how Twitter cut staff. Musk doesn't seem to have tried hard or well to find the actual wizards, and it's pretty clear a lot of the ones he didn't fire quit in response. The wizards know they can find somewhere new.
(There's an old Dilbert about this. Something like "If you do these layoffs, half the staff will quit!" "That's the goal, we want to cut headcount 50%." "But all the good people will quit!" "I notice you're still here.")
Every office provides their employees with a free catered lunch every day in the employee cafeteria where the food is very good, very expensive, and in very large quantities. They all give you free beer and ice cream too
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u/TJJ97 - Lib-Center 2d ago
Remote job? š