Ask Lemmy

1. the dreadful commute
2. the corporate policies that are profoundly arbitrary
3. the business processes that add needless amounts of overhead, all to justify people's jobs
4. the needless meetings and back and forth for things that should be solvable in five minutes
5. spineless leadership
6. entitled clients

5/6 go hand in hand. For my current project, because we have leadership unwilling to push back on the client, the client feels entitled to demand things above the contract terms. This of course trickles down to everyone else to accommodate.

Overall my work is fine but these things stick out. I am incredibly indifferent to the success of any given project. My investment beyond my daily contributions is low to nonexistent. At the end of the day, if they're going to pay me to be inefficient what do I really care.

Companies that tell you to treat the building as your "second home", but then frown when you want to bring your laundry to work, do yoga or workouts at your desk, or bring your kids or Grandma into the office so you can keep a eye on them.

I am very commute sensitive, won't take a job too far away.

Other than that, I hate, hate, hate the unequal compensation the most. Too much money to the people at the top, and raises by % just make it worse.

I've had countless shitty jobs and shitty bosses. Now I'm in charge of a team and, as a product of who I am and my own lived experiences, I treat them fairly and with a degree of kindness and sympathy that I've never really had from my former bosses.

I overlook a lot of the petty paperwork and have various on-going deals with staff whereby I'm extremely flexible and they reciprocate by often going the extra mile for me. Our team mostly runs well and my own manager is pleased.

However, I occasionally feel unappreciated by 1 or 2 staff who have been there so long that they've forgotten how things could be if I was inflexible, stuck strictly to the rules and came down on them a lot harder - which an other boss could easily do.

I suspect that some mistake my kindness for weakness, even though I've always spoken with authority and plainly, albeit in private to those that have needed it.

Truth is we're local gov, the perks are good, as is the job security, but there's an element of complacency and an awareness that you have to do a lot wrong to get fired - and it's a long process.

So yeah, I mostly don't mind my job, but I resent staff who haven't had it as bad as I have in the past and don't seem to understand that their decent conditions are because of who I am, and are not really the norm in other departments.

The coercion and the exploitation without proportionate compensation

The notion that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, we are productive.

I do real work for a few hours each day and I still get told I work too much or am "the fastest" on the computer.

depending on it for survival

Daily commute. Fuck cars and fuck city planning around cars. I stay in a box for 1 hour so I can work in a box, so I can stay in a box for another hour until I can finally get back to my box

Productivity goes up, all tools are used to achieve it, but pay and hours stay the same.

Employer.

People who have neither worked direct patient care in over two decades nor ever worked in my specialty—trying to tell me what's best for my patients. I work night shift so that my interactions with such people are minimal, but they do still happen occasionally.

I don't hate the hours, but I hate the constant process of it all. That we are expected to be at the computer about 8 hours every day, even if it's clear that our efficiency has dwindled.

And I'm in a lucky enough situation, that I wouldn't even really have to do this. I could easily take a few days off sometimes, but I just ... won't until it's actual vacation time. So after the vacation ends, I end up working efficiently for a month, so-and-so for 3 months, then absolutely shitty for a month and then it's vacation again. Because I choose to.

It would be easier to list what I like about it: nothing.

I honestly hate work itself, I'm not doing what I want if I'm working. There is no job I want.

When management/HR treats the employees like children in kindergarten with condescening words and tone of voice, playing stupid games to force getting to know co-workers, and generally having an "I am better than all of you" attitude.

Being forced to stand on jobs where you're just doing a repetitive task that doesn't require moving around. Guarding a single door, cashier in a shop, QA inspector on a assembly line, etc. No god damn reason these should require being on your feet 8-12+ hours.

Physical labor in general. Shit hurts.

Many times the people who would make the best decisions are not authorized to make decisions.

Should we go into the office every day? Well the workers say no, objective productivity measurements say no, the environment says no, but some insipid sack of shit feels like it's better.

Should we spend twenty minutes improving this process? No, some higher up who doesn't understand software development decided that we don't do it that way. Keep doing it manually.

Should we compensate people well enough so they don't leave after a year or two? No, pay the absolute minimum and keep hiring entry level people. Saving so much on labor costs!

That we are contributing to a dehumanizing system with no purpose other than propping up inequality and injustice and constantly generating more power for psychopaths to misuse to spread war and terror and destroy the planet and every living thing on it.

I really struggle with work that doesn't feel meaningful. It'd be nice to feel like I was contributing something meaningful to my community. My favorite jobs were working for school districts. Not teaching, but just being a part of that overall system felt so satisfying.

The well paying jobs that don't have massive amounts of overtime are 8-5.

I am not a morning person. Ever since starting an office job where I have to get up at 6 a.m. to get the kiddo to school so I can make it to work by 8:00 has been a continuously escalating level of exhaustion because it doesn't matter how much sleep I get, it is when.

It is less bad during the summer on the days I get to work from home as I can at least sleep till 7:30 or so. If I could just work 10-6 with no lunch I would never be tired again, but too many people in leadership positions see rising early as a virtue because that is what they were always told or they happen to be morning people.

No, don't tell me I have a sleeping disorder or I just need to work on going to bed early unless you tell people who wake up early that they should just sleep in. Different people have different sleep schedules and it only looks like a disorder because of social expectations.

I could be a professional gamer, but doing it for 40 hours a week every week, would get tiring.

It's the monotony that kills me in ANYTHING I do. I don't know if it's the ADHD in me or what, but I love variety. My job is painfully easy, but my god, it is such a drain to do the same thing day in and day out.

I just hate the shitty adults and their pointless gossip. Who does it help if you shit on someone’s haircut? No one, Michael. You ass.

How to get a promotion you're supposed to first go out of your way to do extra work they should hire for for no additional pay. I tried it at 2 jobs, both times I ended up doing the extra work for no pay for years before I left.

Meanwhile, every year, the yearly raise is less than inflation.

Sounds like it's time to go "below & within" for your employer

I have less days off than a peasant from feudal times…

I remember an electrician lecturing me about how a desk job is not real work. I have nothing but respect for blue collar jobs. But fuck that particular guy. If he knew how intensely boring, complicated, and time sensitive some knowledge work is, he'd STFU. I never hired him again, found a much better electrician.

I love what i do and the kids and people that i work with. Administration is incompetent and has become more and more micromanaging because they don't understand that they're the problem. I've been out since October, going back in Feb, will probably quit in may at the end of the school year and do something different.

None of the things you mention has anything to do with the job itself. How you show up and when is what matters.

There's a lot of mythology around work that is just no longer true and hasn't been true since the 1990s, if not the 1980s.

The only time your boss cares about you going "above and beyond" is in situations where it will make them look good to their boss. Don't waste your energy going above and beyond just randomly. It won't get noticed and it'll only burn you out.

Providing quality customer service is never wasted effort, but it doesn't mean putting up with entitled customers. If people aren't interacting with you at least calmly, don't waste the energy engaging. Don't engage with adults having tantrums.

Most importantly - don't dilute your wage. If you're hourly, be meticulous about clock-in and clock-out times. Don't do work unless you're on the clock. If you're salary, that means you give what you have; it doesn't mean you kill yourself for the job. If I'm sick, my salary pays for the ~30% effort that I've got to give. Trying to give 100% when you don't have it is a great way to burn yourself out and gain nothing in return. If you're good at something other people value, never ever do it for free. All people will do is take advantage.

Most household chores that actually need to be done boil down to a handful of things that need daily attention and can be done in 15 minutes or less, the weekly crap that takes 30 minutes or less once a week, and then monthly and quarterly maintenance cycles. If you're spending more than ~30 min. a day, plus ~1 hour on the weekends doing choring, you're probably wasting your energy on things that don't truly matter. You can scale back and not worry so much about keeping your space ready for a Martha Stewart catalog. Focus on what's truly essential and let the rest slide.

I don't hate work itself. I hate companies and the system that forces me to work a job I don't give a fuck about.

I don't have the resources nor opportunities to just work on something I love until it can maybe make some money. Unfortunately, that's reserved to the wealthy or the lucky. I've been working in private on many things that don't earn money. Maybe what I'm working on is shit. Maybe what I'm working on doesn't matter. Maybe it never can be profitable. But I can't throw everything away and just dedicate hundreds or thousands of hours to it like some lucky few can.

This is why UBI will always have my support. It's my firm belief that anti-UBI people are actually afraid of the competition is would cause. Imagine if instead of 100 people having the time and resources to compete with you, there'd be thousands, maybe even millions. Imagine suddenly thousands of people actually digging into politics and deciding they want to give it a shot. Imagine thousands deciding they wanted to do their hobby fulltime and give it a shot at becoming something. Woodworking, climbing, athletics, journalism, gaming, content creation, mechanics...
There'd be a flurry of activity.

It's the feeling that ultimately what I do is meaningless.

Thing is, I work in quality management and health and safety. From a manufacturing perspective what I do is about as meaningful as it gets. I'm one of the people who makes sure that no one gets hurt! Trouble is, most people in the company seem to have offloaded their responsibility to our office, regardless of how often we tell them that isn't true.

It should be trivial to roll out a new measure that will ensure a reduction in incidents and accidents, but that measure is only useful while the folks on the shop floor actually pay attention. And they don't. Not until someone gets hurt, at which point we get asked why we aren't doing more to ensure things like that don't happen.

It's demoralising

I love the work I do helping children with o learn and grow, but I hate the shift length.

Oh and the lack of planning time, I need more than 2 hours a week to meaningfully analyse and implement curriculum.

In the winter especially, you go to work in the dark. Spend all day indoors with no windows while the sun is out. And then drive home in the dark to a dark house.

You get so depressed and lose motivation. And what did you gain? Less money than last year.

•When you have your way that works for you to accomplish something that somebody else does differently, and they insist on you doing things their way even though the end result would be the same regardless of which way you did it.

There are definitely times when there is a legit right way to do something vs a wrong way, but there are also definitely times when people insist on just adding unnecessary time and work to what you're already doing for absolutely no reason.

Like, if you're doing something kind of hectic, and you have tools or equipment you temporarily placed a certain way for a good reason, but it bothers somebody else to see them placed that way, and they insist on you adding additional steps to your own task instead of just leaving shit alone and letting you finish what you're already doing. If it's related to a safety or contamination issue, I get it, but if not, it seems pretty unnecessary. This is especially infuriating when the situation is reversed and the same people break their own unnecessary rules (like it's somehow different because it's them having to deal with something stressful and hectic?).

•When people act petty for absolutely no reason. Sometimes I intentionally set stuff out so I can have it all ready to use the next day. I try to avoid doing this if there is a good chance somebody else might actually need it, but, it saves me time and trips back and forth between PPE and non PPE areas when I can just grab everything and don't have to go back and grab something I forgot. There have been a few times where I'll have everything laid out and ready to use (on my own work area), and I'll come in ready to just grab what I need and get started, only to find every item I had ready to go has been moved. What are the chances I neatly laid multiple items out on my own desk or work space before leaving, simply because I just forgot them or wasn't bothering to clean up after myself?

•Having to sit in one uncomfortable spot, surrounded by other people and distractions to work on something that can 100% done on a laptop at home (or anywhere else).