We’ve been over this. It’s how you use it that matters.

It has always bothered me that most (all?) companies promotion path eventually moves you into management.

It’s an entirely different job. It would be like promoting from janitor to accountant.

I know, I know, you would be managing people doing the thing you know how to do. So? Does it really matter? It’s an entirely different skill set and entirely different job for you.

I’ve avoided becoming a manager like the plague.

This guy Bibles.

This is a Wendy’s. I asked if you want fries.

That’s exactly my point though. It’s arbitrary and has nothing to do with “hard work” or “ability” as you claimed.

Having money AND taking it from all the people under them. Sorta like a pyramid. It’s sort of a scheme where the top guys get most of the profit while doing the least actual work. I wish we had a term for that. An upside down funnel, of sorts.

Underregulated Capitalism like we have now is just a

What job are you doing that isn’t having most of the value you made taken from you?

I’m a highly skilled person, I’ve been in corporate America for 2 decades and have a long list of skills and abilities and work hard.

I’ve literally generated multiple millions of profit for companies I’ve been at. Did I ever see an extra penny? A bonus? A % raise? Anything beyond the normal bare-bones standard “cost of living raise” (which never ACTUALLY goes up as much as CoL does BTW) ? Nope. And that’s part of the issue we are talking about. I could be a STELLAR employee and generate the lion’s share of profit OR I could be a lazy unproductive idiot that costs the company money and you know what? Neither of those things changes pay for me. What does? How well liked I am, how much I brownnose, who I shake hands with, who I know, what shady deals I may do in secret, etc. But I have integrity and I refuse to lie, cheat, grift and schmooze my way up like most execs do.

It is EXTREMELY common to work your ass off, earn some CEO and shareholders millions and billions, then they can lay you off or you die and no one cares. They milked every last drop of productivity from you and will happily discard you at any time.

We have that problem NOW.

Billionaires don’t work at all, they just siphon money away from us all, our labor, our hard work, our time, they get 99% of all that profit, we get crumbs.

It’s a great deal, for them, the rest of us get just enough to not die or start rioting.

Try again.

At least it has New Zealand.

Same. 5 full years WFH and honestly work was enjoyable AND I got so much more actual work done.

But we gotta RTO now because uhhhh… Reasons!

I get nothing done anymore and I’m just frustrated all day and all my time is utterly wasted. No time to get work done, no time to get home chores done, constantly exhausted from the pace of running back and forth to meetings and driving all over the place wasting time and gasoline.

So glad I burned a gallon of gasoline into the air and wasted an hour to move my ass from a comfy chair at home on a teams call to a less comfy chair in a different building with a worse desk to join a teams call. Productivity!!!

My big company just did a full RTO mandate after 5 years full WFH since COVID started. It quickly swung from a good enjoyable job with plenty of work able to be done during all the bullshit meetings to an open office cubicle farm nightmare with harsh bright lights, tons of noise and distractions, and having to physically move from home to office and from desk to meeting room on different floors all the time eating up every last second of available time to do my ACTUAL job. And we are doing a bastardized version of Scrum and it’s miserable.

I got reprimanded one day because in our daily standup I simply said that I had not made any progress on my tasks since yesterday because I was in meetings all day. Apparently that wasn’t being a team player.

Fair. That is one good thing.

Is there anything with a positive trend or hopeful outlook lately? My entire 42 years seems like everything is “oh, this used to be better, but it’s getting worse now”

No, not steal the source code. Steal Excel! We sneak in one night and grab it and bring the corporate world to a halt.

No, I mean STEAL it.

Downloading isn’t stealing. Reproducing isn’t stealing. Forking a repo isn’t stealing.

I mean. STEAL IT!

20 years with no change? Damn, I thought the Colorado River flowed faster than that. I’ve been lied to!

I downloaded every EA game ever made and I don’t even want to play any of them. I have the files imprisoned on my computer, forever. Bwahahaha!

That’s exactly my situation too.

Half my team is out of state and still remote.

So now half of us are in the office, walking around, away from our computers and “collaborating” like management wants, to the absolute exclusion of the other half of the team. And we miss messages, we don’t see reminders, we are just AWAY on Teams to them. And our job is literally done 100% on a computer so all that time NOT on a computer is just wasted. And then when we go to a meeting, we have to walk to a room just to join a teams call and yell at the ceiling so the remote people can hear us. It’s the worse of both worlds. Not remote, not all in office, but mixed.

I could understand it if 100% of employees could be in the office. Then we wouldn’t have to waste time joining a teams call in a meeting room. We could just meet and chat. Fine. But this… This is so bad.

OMG right!?

I didn’t even mention it in my main post, but half my team is out of state and exempt from RTO.

So half of us commute into an overcrowded office and walk to a meeting room just to join a damn teams call. I hate being in person without a headset and having to yell at a room microphone and look at a smaller screen than I have at home.

Everything about it is inferior than what we had at home. It is harder to hear, harder to see, harder to communicate, takes longer to commute, longer to have to walk to meetings vs click join.

All the RTO seems like execs playing “everyone else is doing it, don’t want to be left behind” or something.

What’s crazy is, so did mine.

Sold multiple office buildings.

Told us all, WFH is here to stay!

And then they blindsided us with a RTO mandate. And we do not all fit in the buildings. There isn’t enough room by some thousand people and they don’t seem to care.

The part that’s even more insulting is that half my team live so far away (several US states away) they are exempt. So now half of us are forces to commute into a crowded building TO JOIN A TEAMS CALL! Ahhhhhh!