As a White-Collar Worker, I am Often Astounded at How Incompetent Most Office Workers Are

[FaceHugger]

Shared some stories here before being a go-for for a CTO at an old company and seeing how the sausage is made at others.

I think most people would be absolutely amazed at how little work executives and middle managers do at most corporate American companies. While they earn hundreds of thousands to millions. There's this really stupid myth in America that executives do a lot of work but it simply isn't true. Every company isn't Amazon or Microsoft.

I'm reluctant to share company names because it might make it easy to pinpoint my real name, but for real, I've seen CEO's and CTO's and everyne in between do literally next to nothing for years and get rich from it.

 

[Valcrist]

I'm dumb, but I'm good at pretending that I'm not.

I don't have a High School diploma or any education after that, so I can't even fake it until I make it in any higher level jobs.

 

[Xiao Hu]

I'm finishing my master at a top European business school and can confirm that the people who are cultivated here as the future elites are elites in academic degree terms only. I have much more respect for someone who has done a proper apprenticeship or studied in a technical/natural science field. Kinda makes me feel like a fraud because my future salary will be much, much higher than the one of workers enabling me to do my 'job' in the first place...

 

[SanTheSly]

I only ever worked retail after graduating in 2015, sometimes two jobs at once, until I landed a short-lived white collar job late last year.

The difference is unreal. I wouldn't say the people I worked with were incompetent (they were often lovely) but the fact I was earning so much for what felt like a quarter of my normal workload was such an alien experience to me.

Extended lunch breaks, being able to just get up and make a drink whenever you wanted... being able to SIT DOWN.

 

[LogicAirForce]

I work in production and the amount of disrespect we get from those in the office has led to a ton of resentment toward them. They make $80,000 a year barely able to put inventory reports together on time, all the while acting that they are so much smarter than us. Meanwhile, we barely crack $40,000 operating and maintaining machinery, and if we fuck up people will die.

 

[tecl0n]

The corporate world is crazy, man.
The company i work at prioritized low productivity, the more time you were at the office the better.
I am talking about manually filling an excel sheet from transactional data, printing the excel file and had it sign and send the signed physical copy to HQ.


COVID has finally pushed them over the edge i think.

 

[Dragonyeuw]

Been there. Had a physically demanding job making $42k in 2015, going home nights feeling completely spent, and in 2016 landed a $75k office job( was at $82k last year before I relocated to a new country) and half my day was spent on reddit/resetera/youtube. I was literally coasting and could do the work blind-folded. Very few times did I actually have more than maybe 4 hours of daily work that I had stretch to fill 9 hours. I kept a stack of papers right in front of me at all times just for appearance sake.

Frankly since I paid off my house a year and half ago I could really transition to a 25-30 hour work week and be fine.

 

[BassForever]

I've heard this a lot, and I've been kinda curious: how does one get a bullshit office job like these? 'Cause I've had some real trouble with doing actual work in software development jobs, and if it's half as easy as people say it is to just coast by in a cubical somewhere maybe that's what I should be doing with my life...

Programming was fun in college, but the real world sucks. Gimme dat easy money, pls. I can do Excel, no problem.

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This, having spent the past 3 years in public accounting my white collar job is always pretty intensive knowledge wise.

 

[Dervius]

I've definitely seen this in larger organisations. I just couldn't do it, just float along. I struggle with almost crippling impostorism at the best of times, the anxiety would destroy me if I were knowingly useless and taking the money anyay.

I've also had the good fortune to work among incredibly competent teams, despite some of them being terrible at self-promotion. They're almost the opposite of the OP's example, quietly doing gret work without doing a good job of shouting about it.

 

[Kain-Nosgoth]

i have no talent and am incompetent, no matter how hard i try i always make mistakes at some point

i always try my best, i'm always on time, but to other people i'm bad at my job and it hurts a lot... but i get why it can be frustrating to people working with people like me... I don't feel bad taking money though, cause i need a job and i need to live too, i don't have a choice

worked in offices, retrail, public service, and so on

 

[julia crawford]

Honestly can say i haven't found an example of this yet in my life, but i have only worked on small companies.

 

[PanickyFool]

I feel like this is a joke that went over my head maybe.

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It's ride or die dawg.

 

[Bora Horza]

You should try working in British manufacturing (mainly the associated operations/office side of things), I have never met so many incompetent lifers and grifters, it is infuriating.

 

[entremet]

Japan is probably the worst here I heard. Literally saying late at the office for show, no deliverables lol.

 

[Seirith]

At my last office job, my boss actually have to send out an email to my side of the building which said we should NEVER email our clients in using "text speak", incomplete sentences and with no punctuation. We all managed multi million dollar 403B accounts from schools and people sent emails with "text speak"?

Shortly after he sent one of my coworkers to an online writing skills class, she was older than I was and a mother of 2 teenage boys and if she did not pass the class she would be fired. I was embarrassed for her, not only because she was a grown adult who could not write a complete professional coherent sentence but also because everyone knew she was taking the class because we all had to pick up her work while she was completing it.

It also astounded me that people in the 30's+ knew nothing about basic computer functions like how to make the text bigger on the screen,open a printer if the paper got stuck, etc etc.

 

[thewilddeadhero]

I work in production and the amount of disrespect we get from those in the office has led to a ton of resentment toward them. They make $80,000 a year barely able to put inventory reports together on time, all the while acting that they are so much smarter than us. Meanwhile, we barely crack $40,000 operating and maintaining machinery, and if we fuck up people will die.

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Was in the same position before I went back to school a few years ago. Our process "engineers" literally made process changes that either didn't change efficiency in any positive way or negatively impacted our ability to do our jobs, just to make it seem like they were actually working. And on top of that, the sales team had an efficiency/productivity rate of 43% that management as a whole really tried to hide.

 

[nitewulf]

Bureaucratic companies also have limited scope of work and responsibility. I was a blue collar worker out of school, I designed electrical substations, but that was really small amount of work. I used autocad to modify 70 year old electrical schematics, basically redrew electrical connections for crew to follow in the actual substation. Then I got promoted to management, in strategic planning as my first white collar job. A lot of peak electricity usage data was downloaded every summer and manually messaged and then 10 and 15 year projections were calculated. Very old school web interface (Crsytal reports) and data warehousing, data was captured from SCADA devices installed on each transformer. Data took days to download, weeks to organize, more weeks to massage and aggregate the data and then more weeks to calculate and project.

I wrote a VBA macro to automate all that, which took 2 hours.

Now what should I have done? If I showed this skillset to the group, they'd have given me thick folders from the 50's and asked me to organize and catalog transformers, poles and cables by location manually or have given me other grunt work. And perhaps they'd have even layed off the senior engineers that kept on doing all that manually.

Because the scope of work in that department was not going to increase. I got shut down when I tried to propose a new model for projecting demand.

So I just let the macro run in the background and browsed the web or learned coding on the side.

 

[Lobster Roll]

The larger the company is and the more regulated it is, the more layers of segregation of duties need to exist. Couple that with the fact that technology (and learning that technology) makes work increasingly efficient, many people would run out of a quarter's worth of work in a week if they grinded it out for 8 hours a day.

 

[PanickyFool]

from SCADA devices

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It's amazing how admin, password can take down the USA electrical system.

 

[Dekuman]

You see this a lot in union shops. some people are just lucky and land a well paid job where they do very little. But infighting among the working class is what the bosses want. CEO making 100x that of the avg worker is the real issue

 

[Imperfected]

I'll let you in on a secret: plenty of blue-collar workers are just shammin' it up and counting down to closing, too.

Turns out most people don't really want to work, they want to get paid and the work part is the boss they have to defeat to do that. They're perfectly fine with the Work Boss pulling a Taurus Demon and jumping his ass right off the bridge.

 

[Cats]

Sounds like a company/personal problem, not a overall job type problem. I'm an auditor and I make a bit above state min. wage, and my job gets very hectic/stressful at times, where for months we were skipping breaks and lunches to keep the work from overwhelming us. I figure stuff out on my own and help others do it as well. I take pride in knowing what to do in weird niche scenarios and not burdening others.

But there are also people here that make more and complain they have nothing to do and always ask for help or what to do. It goes both ways.

Thanks to covid it's been slower for everyone here so I've been complaining myself here on the forum a few times. Mostly because I'm annoyed we have no wfh when it would be totally possible.

But yeah, it's not as easy as it always looks. But many jobs are not either.

 

[Zen]

It's not surprising. White collar jobs exist to be the carrot on a stick that most people want - an easy trip through life.

 

[Bacon]

I worked at a defense contractor for a year and... yeah. It was actually impressive how little work people did day to day at that job. A quick stroll around the office showed that around 80% of people were scrolling on their phone at any point in the day.

 

[johancruijff]

run a few macros

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already putting the bar too high

 

[NadaSpecialist]

I wonder if the people who tell teachers to get a real job and these white-collar workers are one in the same...

 

[Perfect Chaos]

Oh yea, definitely. Most people spend at least half their day watching YouTube videos. But we get away with it because SO many people do it and no one wants to fuck up the game by calling it out.

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Shhh, keep it down.

 

[RandomExpletive]

It's amazing how admin, password can take down the USA electrical system.

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If we changed those credentials, they'd just get written down on a post-it note next to the maintenance PC

 

[Deleted member 4346]

I think he means small businesses run leaner and require everyone pulling their weight or it quickly falls apart. There is a hint of truth to that, under ideal conditions where they're engaged in legitimate production (say, a pizzeria). On the other hand, if it's a grift like Theranos, or any venture backed by investors with deep pockets, it stops being true.

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Just making a blanket statement that there's a lack of non-productions jobs due to people starting their own businesses is a little silly, though. Like, both a small HVAC company and a venture capital-backed software startup fall under entrepreneurship, to me.

 

[Kill3r7]

In most white collar jobs you are compensated for the perceived value you bring to the corporation not the actual work you do. Being a workhorse is good for job security but makes little difference in upward mobility or more importantly compensation (assuming there isn't a bonus structure around billables or sales).

Luck is the most important thing in life.

You can find shit like that all over the place if you keep looking.

If shit is good all you can do is appreciate that you were lucky enough to get in that situation.

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.

 

[Prophet Five]

I work in a great office with great people who really do their best to serve the people we cater to. It's not customer service but it is in the service of a group of people.

there's going to be shitty people in any job but it's really disheartening to see that people here would a) see that I'm an office employee and shit at my job b) got my job because it was just dropped in my lap - completely ignoring the 8 months I worked my ass off to get it through multiple interviews and tight competition and/or C) just assume I'm an idiot because they've had bad experiences with others.

Do better and stop using blanket generalizations to discount entire groups of people.

 

[Deleted member 18400]

I mean I'm at work right now. So I feel called out.

Although I'd say my job isn't really white collar.

 

[Deleted member 2317]

Both offices I worked full-time in (two over six years) were a fucking total joke after 25 hours of work a week maybe. The incompetency was fucking incredible to witness but I was getting paid, so whatever.

But yes, it is known. Those motherfuckers work half days every day.

Perhaps that's the tradeoff for living in a cubicle and offices everyday, ignoring everything that happens outside of the prison you clock in and clock out of everyday.

 

[Deleted member 20471]

Why are you calling me out, dude!?

 

[Gaf Zombie]

I wonder if the people who tell teachers to get a real job and these white-collar workers are one in the same...

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I don't know. But I will say teachers are grossly underappreciated, at least here in the US.

 

[NekoFever]

We've got a company-wide Teams meeting later, and my department's turning how often someone can't mute/unmute themselves, accidentally shares their screen, or sends a private message to everyone into a drinking game.

We frequently have to show people on three times our salaries how to use Save As, and we're not even the IT guys – we just know how to use a computer.

 

[nitewulf]

It's amazing how admin, password can take down the USA electrical system.

Click to shrink...

You have no idea. In the mid 2000's this was a legit concern for us. We also got threats, my co-worker got a person calling that he was coming in the building and he will start shooting everyone. The original "mad bomber" was a disgruntled ex worker of the company.

By the time I left, the SCADA network was enhanced and started using higher bitrate encryption from what I recall, but I wasn't in the SCADA team.

I moved to finance, and JP Morgan (yeah I'll mention them) was.....err. Work was brutal, personalities, more so. You think white collar means no work, you have no idea. My manager used to slam his desk and his keyboard would be flying around. The depiction in TV and movies aren't that exaggerated. People don't say shit like "douchenozzle" but they aren't far off.

 

[Kenstar]

We've got a company-wide Teams meeting later, and my department's turning how often someone can't mute/unmute themselves, accidentally shares their screen, or sends a private message to everyone into a drinking game.

We frequently have to show people on three times our salaries how to use Save As, and we're not even the IT guys – we just know how to use a computer.

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hey they were hired to make DECISIONS not remember the 'save as' button, unchanged from literally decades ago

I remember having to walk across capus on a hot summer day just to connect a vp's ipad to wifi
couldn't walk them thru it over the phone since they're too important to not send a lackey in person

 

[watham]

I want whatever white collar job y'all have if it's that easy, I'm worked to the max.

 

[Parch]

Like the guy who admitted he cheated his way through university to barely pass, and proudly bragging about how much he partied. Not only was he incompetent and unproductive, but he felt he was entitled to the job, and raises, simply because he had a degree.

 

[koolaroo]

I want whatever white collar job y'all have if it's that easy, I'm worked to the max.

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Yeah this. I work tech and I'm always stressed

 

[Forkball]

I keep searching for paper pusher on job boards but no luck. Maybe I should try pencil pusher?

 

[Azraes]

I'm glad that there are some white collar types who have time. I've been clocking anywhere between 9-15 hour days over the past year. I miss the travel because at least with flights no one would try to set up a meeting with you even if you will be bombarded with emails by the time you land. There are months on end when the minute someone sees a free spot on my calendar they'd book a meeting. So much so that I have to block time to get some of the work and deliverables done.

I get that yes there are people who do fuck all and coast and this happens in larger corporations where people hired someone for something and the role is progressively taken away or someone didn't think it through entirely. And of course there will always be people who lied their way to get a job and don't have the necessary skills. But if you have skills, they notice you and you work in some industries or functions you're not really going to have time. I'm just glad my crisis management days are long gone as I like to have my weekends to myself to some degree.

 

[Kivvi]

I dont really fully agree with that.

You might have Linda doing that and then you have Lucas doing all the work Linda should be doing.
And then you have maybe Lucas being fast with his work and can do the same work that Max is doing in half the time.

I just see it in my job but people really dont know how to use PCs. But if you show that you can use PCs, know Pivot tables in Excel etc. you are expected to do that in that time while Max is still doing the same work but needs double the time.

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And since Lukas has already finished his work he can now go to the printer and get it fixed. It's only a paper jam but Linda doesn't know how to open the printer.
And since Lukas doesn't have kids and family yet he can run some errands late at work because Max needs to get the kids from the kindergarten at 3:30 pm. Linda doesn't answer the phone since she turn on "straight to voicemail" by accident again. Good thing Lukas knows how to read a manual. And Max forgot his keys at Lukas' desk so Lukas brings them to Max before he puts everything and everyone on hold what could be annoying to other co-workers, but Max doesn't see and/or understand it. Lukas never gets sick and that's good because Linda gets colds a lot and Max needs to stay home when the kids are sick. But at least Lukas gets some free coffee from Linda and Max once or twice a week. They both have higher pays and can afford it easier.

I could go on and on and on.lol

 

[Fridaynightcatlady]

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Lol what film is this from?

 

[LoadingErrorMTL]

Lol what film is this from?

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Office Space

 

[Mauricio_Magus]

don't tell anyone

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pretty much this, shhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

 

[samoyed]

entrepreneurship

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I personally dislike the "e-word" as much as some people dislike the "s-word".

 

[Funkybee]

X - hi (email to the responsible worker for the job) please see attached the x transaction to be mailed thanks

Y- sorry why am i getting this email for?

Y: apologies, seems like i'm responsible to do that. Thanks. (Literally this response).

I crack up on an almost daily basis at emails I get to read.

 

[Tapiozona]

OP isn't completely wrong but I'm way more exhausted at the end of the day in my white collar job than I ever was in my blue collar ones. I'm also stressed beyond belief while stress never even entered my mind in blue collar world.

Middle management and executives are compensated better because they carry the weight of accountability when failure happens. If my employees make a mistake I pay the price. Also leaders are hard to come by and a good one is easily worth their pay