1y ago

Workplace dictatorship.

38 comments

Can't invest in your human resources when you're only looking at maximizing quarterly profits.
- human resources (department) is for punishing the human resources (employees).
  
  That's because hr was invented to be the company "alternative" to a union

Reminds me of Better Off Ted, don’t know why that show was ever cancelled.
- The network didn't promote it that much, and the show creator also gave an interview saying he also believes they didn't get the best time slot to build viewers over time.

I swear, if I could afford just a good 2 or so years long break to stabilize my life, I would actually be able to do good and effective work. Instead I feel like I am always just barely scraping by at the edge of my ability, due to being overworked and burnt out.
- Amen.
- Forget 2 years, I'd be happy with 2 months lol it's always a race to the bottom :(

Thought theft affects thousands of employers every day. They're not paying you to figure out who's going to find your body after you kill yourself. They're paying you to work!
- They're not paying you to figure out who's going to find your body after you kill yourself.
  I just recently reorganized my apartment and I hadn't realized in the midst of it that a lot of the stuff I was doing was with the mentality of removing any inconveniences or potentially confusing situations in case someone enters my apartment if I decided to commit suicide.
  That was a very sobering moment...
  
  As someone who has been in that exact same position, be cautious about organisation choices that seem like they'd be beneficial regardless of whether you live, but actually make it easier to die than live.
  For me, it was the way that I stored my craft and hobby stuff - I made them tidier and more but in practice, harder to access. I did it this way because I wasn't actually using my hobby stuff, so they were just in the way. However, part of why I was so passively suicidal was because of the gradual atrophy of all the things that used made me happy, so by tidying away my tools, I was just digging myself deeper.
  What I'm saying is that living, and life, is messy. Having a clear out can be good and productive, especially if you're not in a great place, because it can reveal things that aren't working for you now, but try not to make the same mistake I did. With the new space freed up by your organisation efforts, look over your stuff again and consider whether there's anything you could put in a more accessible place to reduce the activation energy of starting. I put some of my crochet stuff near my computer so I can do it while I'm in meetings, for example.
  
  Oh dear 😥

They made a similar office chair in Better Off Ted. I think the called it "The Focus Master".
Better Off Ted was a brilliant show.
- Lmaooo, the impossible to get comfortable chair!
  The automated lights that didn't work for black people episode. So they made all black people get shadowed by a white coworker, was my favorite one!
  
  So many great shticks were in that show. The little commercials trying to make their company look good for PR were great.
- Such a shame it had only two seasons
  
  Yeah. Got cut way short right there. It deserved more.
- Came here to post a comment about it, but saw that you beat me to it. Glad I'm not the only one who appreciates that show!

Are most white-collar work environments unpleasant? I'm a software developer and I have never worked somewhere that didn't make a reasonable effort to keep me happy, properly rested, and in good health in order to improve my productivity.
- In my experience as a sysadmin, corporate structure almost always sees workers as liabilities that must be micromanaged, prodded, and scrutinized in regards to productivity, regardless of profits.
  A good manager who wants happy, productive workers that don't quietly work against their employer knows when NOT to enforce the standard corporate HR patronizing infantilizing bullshit.
  It sounds like you've either worked for small organizations or had good managers that recognize the reality that skillled workers like you are more competent and important to keeping the paychecks flowing than the connected narcissistic idiots on the top floor that get off on flexing power and barking irrational dictates just to hear themselves bark.
  Remember, the workers make and do everything that keeps the world running. The scientists and engineers do the inventing and discovering. The capitalist owners just take all the money and the social credit, they don't actually do or know anything that benefits anyone but themselves. Even their supposed "charity" is usually used as an excuse to get praise while robbing the commons of owed tax revenue by writing it off, which makes it a transaction, not charity at all. Charity is giving and expecting nothing in return, save a warm fuzzy feeling inside. And they often "donate" to arts and political causes, while the victims of the society they bleed dry and leave to crumble die of exposure to the elements in tent cities.
  Steve Jobs, who made like he was prometheus bringing the iPhone down from Olympus, couldn't have repaired a broken iPhone with access to every lab, component, and schematic in Silicon valley, a month, and a gun to his head. He wasn't even smart enough to go to real doctors and take real medicine when he was dying.
  
  Pulling together all the resources and ideas to make something happen is itself a valid skill. They're way overpaid for it, but it is real work.
  Steve Jobs, in particular, created with help the original Mac and was screwed over by other powerful people in the business. He created the Mach kernel and the NeXT workstation before Apple crawled back to him for help salvaging the business.
  He might have been an arrogant prick, but he did have the ability to bring vision into reality, and he helped make a lot of people other than himself wealthy.
  We have this thing called specialization in modern society. Do you think an electrician can design and produce a microchip or a math teacher can manage a large corporate entity? We all make choices. Some of us have more options or more help.
- I’m a software dev aswell and I think they do try to look after us because our wages are a pretty big investment. For the other people on minimum wage, they do not give a fuck.
- Sometimes the management is clever enough to realise it's much more cost effective to keep your knowledgeable employees happy than to have to go through the process of hiring replacements. Sadly there are plenty of ladder-climbers and egotists who don't get this, and that's even when they consider the workers they're fucking around to be highly skilled. When the powers that be consider their employees to be easily replaceable then they lose all motivation to treat them like anything other than human resource.

The capitalism chair sounds kinda bdsm-y lol.
- Nah its just killing you. Electrocution means you die. If the chair shocked you thats bdsm-y

Chairs? What luxury.

Another good idea to motivate workers is, if possible, rotate responsibilities each day.

Or: Give the workers all they could ever want, so they just continue to work and never want to go home.

When you need to make shit up to have a point- it’s best to leave the argument to those that know enough about reality that they can use that instead.

38 comments