Most office people have their nose up their boss's ass
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Lots of back stabbing too
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Occasional affairs
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This is helpful. Thanks.

So you guys are generally coordinating the activities of the people who do actual work? Seems like there's more coordinators than actual workers out there now-a-days.

I can't speak for BigCo, since I've only worked in small places, but no, I would never run out of things to do. Bosses have no problems coming in and giving us more work, and in fact, there are things I was supposed to do months ago that I haven't started on yet. There is one project that I was supposed to get done over 9 months ago, but it still isn't finished, though this isn't really my fault.

Basically it works like this: there are "positions" and there are positions. Positions would be like customer service and answering emails all day, so when you come in on Tuesday, you can be pretty sure that you know everything you will do in Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday, and ....

I have a "position," which means that I have a nice tidy job description tied up in a pretty bow but I probably spend less than 5% of my work week doing it. Our department is interesting because we all have "positions," and really you should have grown out of it within 3 months or so, and if not, we generally boot you to a different department.

So, we sort of take up the slack of a phantom employee. We are all fairly autonomous, so there isn't much that we are told to do on a day to day basis, but we all work a lot, creating, and implementing.

Of course, I get pulled into no less than 10 5-minute meetings a day, which is irritating. I work in an "open office" environment, which means we have no cubicles or offices. I think this is the worse format for employees for myriad reasons. Basically, my job is to listen to people complain all day.

Do I work hard? I've been called masochistic on more than one occasion. I don't use social media and don't browse the internet. I have the ability to maintain a razor focus for 8 hours without crashing by the end of the day.

I work in an office but I'm pretty lucky in that I like what I do (computer programming) and genuinely like almost everyone I work with. It's a very social office and we all hang out once every week or two. I've been around enough places to know this is a rare situation and I'm just trying to enjoy it while it lasts. The only negative of this is pretty much everyone gets a DUI at some point leaving happy hour.

Also it can definitely be annoying to be around us when we go out due to non-stop office gossip. We run the website for a major entertainment company, so there's always some kind of drama. Corporations hate risk with a passion, but somehow still constantly create chaos for some reason. They just can't seem to help themselves. But I do like the pressure and the rush of releasing a new product that I helped create to millions of people. I've worked for smaller companies on smaller websites and found it boring as hell.

I've been in watch the clock situations and it's very soul-destroying. Hopefully never again.

I design then code control systems for a specific technology platform (most of the time), so that involves communicating with the client regarding what they want to be able to do, creating mock designs, back to the client, and then when it's all figured out I'll sit down and create it. This involves designing the UI of the system (usually it will run off a dedicated tablet), then programming it. This usually has to coincide with some kind of installation, so there's liaising with techies too. Work can get hectic or it can be very chill, when it's chill I read books, mess around with colleagues, work on personal projects etc.

I'm guessing that for your question you're curious about people who aren't in very specific roles (i.e an accountant, banking analyst, software engineer etc), since their job should be fairly self-explanatory and also their value - if an accountant quits, they have to hire another one or take less clients.

My observation is that there are a ton of people out there who have been trained to use a certain platform, for example to log jobs within an organisation. This will often be supplemented with a phone. The role of these people is just to keep the machine running basically - their job has been defined for them and they require minimal training to pick up the skills and their job can't be automated yet (or the company isn't forward-thinking enough to spend the $ to do that), so these people are basically the equivalent of people who used to work the phone exchanges when they weren't automated or something similar.

Using specific jargon is person-dependent, there are some useless people talking in riddles and some experts that just seem like normal people.

This pretty much nails it for me. I can get things done so much quicker than most of my colleagues it's insane. This mostly has to do with them being much older and not as familiar with how fantastic a tool google is figure out how to accomplish things quicker. Excel and Access or insanely powerful programs if you are smart enough to google **** and figure out how to use just some of its basic features. I can figure out how to get certain things done in a couple hours it would take some of my colleagues a couple weeks to do.

For me, I can either inform my boss I have no work, which I have done in the past and they panic because they then have to find work for me to do or I can just sit back and do whatever it is that comes my way, keeping them happy while also making myself look good when I get things done quickly

It's sad, but it's the way it works in my office. One summer I read books the entire summer that I copied into microsoft word to look busy because there was no work to do and as mentioned above it just causes problems for my boss when I actually ask for work.

I'm in the public sector though, so I assume it works much different in the private sector.

Yeah most of the time your boss judges you by how hard/easy you make his/her job. Constantly going to your boss and asking for more work is not going to win you any favors. They usually give you some crap job which sends a very clear message not to come bugging them again.

I do bust ass. I work as hard as I can until there is no work left in my functional group. Most days this means being done at 11am or so. During our end of month reconciliation and reporting cycle (1st-10th of each month), I may work my ass off all day.

People itt may mistake my tone to mean I am freeloading and lazy. It's the opposite. I am simply mocking my company (and all similar corporate structures) for organizing analysts in an inefficient way.

Sometimes. I work really, really hard. But if I did that all the time I'd burn out. The reason I don't need to work hard all the time is that I do a lot of work to make sure things that get done regularly are easy. That way I have time to work on the non-standard stuff that pops up. There are no promotions left because I don't want to be CEO [/brag] but I got to where I am not by working hard but by doing things right. I've found that a little competence goes a long way.

work smarter not harder?

today I sat at my desk and opened linkedin. there was a cute girl in the "people also viewed" section of my profile so i clicked on her. then on her profile I see



so apparently there are lots of people like me who spend time going profile to profile of cute blonde girls

Occasional closed door nap is prob the best part. People that just barge in close the door and start talking are the worst.

Based on the people I know -- anyone who is salaried basically does very little work. They just fill the majority of their time ****ing around on the internet -- message boards, chat apps, online shopping, online dating, doing personal interest things. One guy I know literally spends all day working on his fantasy sports teams. My experience is probably worse than typical because the government represents such a large percentage of the office jobs. I doubt any public servant does more than 3-4 hours of work a day -- most don't produce an hour's worth of work a day.

IME (My Dad worked for the gov and I worked with gov employees a lot)

Not true

true, or at least close

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A small percentage of people do almost all the work. It's that way in a lot of non-gov jobs too.

Is anyone here old enough to explain what it was like before the internet? I imagine there was a lot of organizing of papers.

The most annoying parts is when you randomly get invited to meetings, have no clue what the point even is, and people just ramble. You can't just decline going until you know why you were invited. But meeting-inviter yambags tend to have this problem where they can't be bothered to do much other than invite people to meetings and hope things solve themselves. You should be able to very clearly define the purpose of the meeting and what value each person invited provides, otherwise it's a waste.

On the other hand, you get serial meeting attenders, who basically will just find ways to get invited to meetings all day that may only vaguely involve them. "Oh, make sure I get added to that". Generally they will just sit in the back and screw around on their laptops and waste everyones time when they aren't paying attention and make you repeat everything. Meetings are the devil, with few exceptions.

Absolutely. I'm trying to work up the courage to pull a George Costanza and nap under my desk but so far all I've done is shut door and nap at desk. Prob fall asleep in afternoon 3 days a week

All,

Sounds like a bunch of you work 2-3x faster than your peers. If that's really the case and you want to make a lot of money, you should look into consulting and do fixed fee projects. You can easily triple your salary and have delighted clients.

I worked in a small office for a while in an industrial business.

Doing all the invoicing/purchasing was a decent part of my job. We had a 'month end' process where we would invoice all customers for work performed etc.. We would generate the invoice, and scan them to the head office who would send out an offical invoice on company letter head etc... and then input into their accounting software.

The girl I took over for used to take about ~4-5 days to complete this process.

We had a crappy software progam that generated our invoices, but some of the data inputted wasn't correct so she would have to go back and manually adjust etc.

This software wasn't tied into the accounting software our head office used.

When I took over, i realized that most of our customers (a lot of storage agreements), had the same invoices every month (but for 30 days or 31 days etc...) so I created a spreadsheet with a bunch of tabs, and just changed the dates. I could do month end in like 4hrs. I probably could have done it faster but some things had to be written out by hand and then everything needed to be scanned.

I always waited until like the 4th or 5th day to hand it all in.

I was always 100% accurate too, and she typically was not and they'd find errors months later and have to go back to customers so they loved me and thought I was amazing at it.

When my boss left, I took his position and trained someone to do my position and showed him my way to do month end. I made him give it to me on day 1 though.

I've been working in an office for a few years now moving through several positions and am about to turn 28.

I work for a company that builds and upgrades cell phone towers for AT&T. I started off ordering the equipment we use like antennas and other parts. Basically just data entry from a spreadsheet into our system and then tracking the updates the vendor sends until it arrived and then letting someone know.

I started working with 3 women over 40 and it took a few weeks before I was doing everything much quicker than them. They moved me to a job where I did materials and also cut purchase orders for the labor our contractors did as well. Same thing, just transfer from a quote to our system. Real drone work that I could crush at twice the speed of older coworkers.

I have now been in a project manager role for 2 years where I manage our contractors doin the actual construction. This involves scoping the amount of work, the costs, scheduling and fixing all problems we run across. I work with ATT every day to do anything they need in relation to the projects. I have a number of people that work with me and indirect but no people reporting to me.

I have a conference call with contractors every morning at 830 and one with ATT at 10 just to go over progress and other issues.

It can be really busy with a lot of problems and scoping at the start of the year but end of the year and various other times I can get extremely bored for lots of the day if everything is running smooth. I watch a lot of league of legends on twitch and read books on my phone.

A hot Romanian girl moved onto a computer near mine last week. I'd say I've spent 85% of my time since then just trying to chat her up.

You're trying too hard and coming off as desperate. Just do some deep knee bends next to her. She'll melt like butter.

"get a real job" phrase indeed just got a whole new dimension.....

wp hardworkers, carry on

All the poker pros feeling very jealous and/or validated in their career decisions as they read this thread.

I work at home and it's just like this without all the office douchenozzles. And I can work naked.

Oh i spend a lot of time on the phone and receive about 500 work emails a week and send about 100.

Also someone was talking about taking it home with you. My business and personal phone is the same so I have people calling me at all hours because our contractors work 7 days a week and we do a fair amount of work that has to be done at night because that's the only time we can turn off the cell tower.