Ask HN: Anyone else is tired of all the corporate bs?
I'm working as a data analyst/scientist for two years and I'm already tired. In theory everything is amazing, the math, the algorithms, until u get a job. Useless and endless meetings, useless requests, arbitrary and weird decisions to make the boss and customers happy. We end working 40+ hours/week but the job could be easily done in 30 or less, that is another thing that kills me inside. We all could be living our lives in those hours that we pretend we're doing something. I know it sounds like I'm depressed and all that but I love life, my problem is with the state of things in the corporate environment, the faking and pretending that all is perfect in the way it is, and in the job but in the end everyone is unhappy and feeling like shit and waiting for friday. I just dont know what to do because it sounds to me that every company is the same. Does anyone else feels like that? What do you do to overcome this feeling?
144 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadThe work itself isn’t the issue, it’s the fluff around the work. Meetings, agile ceremonies, office politics/playing the game. There was a book on it, Bullshit jobs.
My current situation is I’m in the easiest job I’ve had, fantastic package, working the slowest I’ve ever worked with no manager pressure, no “what you doing, where’s the product”. With that it’s burning me out daily. Agile ceremonies, splitting hairs on non important details bike shedding, not delivering, no product in twelve months, everything needs a meeting, a design doc, and unanimous agreement from the team.
It’s killing me. I want to work hard and I want to build things and see things used. Essentially I’m sat twiddling thumbs knowing I am not working at my best because the culture/process is stopping me from actually doing the real work, the product features that customers pay for.
Without all of them being YOU and acting like YOU think they should act, how else can they get anything done?
Have you considered that everyone else there thinks the same, except about YOU?
All these meetings and unnecessary occurrences are in fact necessary to get the bare minimum in agreement between all these different people who think differently and are trying to get different things done.
How else would it be done?
I’ve been quite vocal to show my happiness and ask them to explain if that meeting ads value anywhere.
My solution is to try to move "down the stack" and retrain to work with C++ and math-heavy jobs (computer vision, simulation etc.). From what I'm hearing, developers in those area have much less contact with the business side of company.
If your talented in your field, u dont need a ladder to up your earning potential.
From what I’ve seen though, those domains don’t particularly have much interest in people without established careers in them already.
The worst part is the high degree of censorship. Everyone is so sensitive now that it's impossible to speak openly
What would you say if you weren't censored?
* The vast majority of executives are paranoid, risk averse know nothings. They don’t want to take any business risks lest it harm their comp.
* Because most execs don’t understand their business, their customers, their industry, and they distrust their staff — they can’t formulate clear and concise goals and objectives. This is how orgs end up with that blitzkrieg of murky, pointless, meaningless objectives.
* Quite a lot of people in leadership roles got to where there are by making very morally and ethically questionable decisions. It’s largely due to the stupidity of the investor class that these individuals were never caught. The horrible thing is because these individuals are loaded to the gills with malintent they assume the same of everyone else. They tend to structure their organizations around mistrust.
* This is why management practice, especially in the US, appears to be a bad case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. All of management’s bureaucratic nonsense and irrational separation of duties creates self-inflicted wounds. management salves wounds (they never get at the root cause). And then management rewards itself with big bonuses for fixing the problems they created.
* The US Federal Government functions way more effectively than most large companies. The reason is that in the govt policies, procedures, and controls are well documented and maintained. In most orgs all three are usually in flux at all times. This makes unity of effort pretty challenging on a good day.
* If orgs cut a lot of their senior leadership they could pay everyone a lot more -and- see a productivity improvement whilst preserving their margin
* Investors think they’re so clever.
And of course one last thing
* most people have no idea what they’re nattering on about
That said, it is a red flag that the company ok with spamming the employees to virtue signal. It is likely that it will be accompanied with other annoyances and has an incompatible culture.
Better to get out before you go crazy or get fired.
I’m transhumanist, pro changing your identity, can easily handle gender fluidity, am thrilled that both Haskell and Rust ecosystems are so welcoming of transgender. I used ‘they’ as gender-neutral singular pronoun by default for decades just to not reveal people’s gender arbitrarily. But no language policing, please.
"I think the demands you are making with regards to how fragile you are emotionally are not reasonable, and if this is how you must be treated in corporate life it is you that needs therapy". In general I think this response is correct and humane (provided you word it properly), because such fragility is not indicative of mental health. It is extremely not compatible with corporate culture to express this, as the prevailing notion is that everyone around such a person needs to conform 100% of the time to what they want.
Simple expressive language is also taboo. One Italian coworker used a analogy of the product as a beautiful woman in a meeting to get a point across.
Basically all my us colleagues were shocked, because they only use dry corporate speak.
I think it is a big part of imposter syndrome and exhausting to speak and listen to.
I recently worked for an all-remote team where almost everyone is Europe based, and there was no humour at all in their meetings, and very little personal anecdata of any kind. It was very dry and professional, week in week out. I once cracked a light joke (nothing that anyone could find offensive) and it fell very flat. Doing so was obviously out of place. Never made that mistake again.
Not just missing humour, but I couldn't discern any way that people formed work-social connections outside of those meetings, even though most of our interactions were over Discord. It was all about the work, and that was minimal as well. Even on Discord it was interesting to see much of the time, people talked past each other, not appearing to understand each other's point, or just saying what they'd worked on with no replies. Even DMs tended to be dry and would end when the question at hand was answered. My attempts to be friendly and curious led nowhere, metaphorically like the flatness of talking in an anechoic chamber.
I found it quite depressing and difficult, not because I especially needed work friends, but because I couldn't find a way to get to the "informal real talk mode" about work either. It was difficult to forge the kinds of informal links that make work easier and more effective, and I think everyone's work quality suffered for it because everyone was kind of working on little atomised areas. I saw very little evidence that anyone cared about anyone else's wellbeing either.
You thought the Europeans were the dry ones?
Actually yes.
Although the teams I worked with were almost all people in Europe, one was from USA, and another was in Canada (though guessing from their name, perhaps their family came from eastern Europe). Those two were people I enjoyed listening to more, and felt if I reached out it would be feasible to have a bit more depth to the conversation. They managed to sound more interesting and emotionally present than the others, both in writing and verbally, and if I had a choice I'd choose them to work with in future.
It may not be a coincidence that they were among the most technically skilled people as well. I noticed a correlation between high technical skill and pleasant and thoughtful people, though by no means was that universal.
EDIT: After thinking over the above reply, I realised that "dry" isn't the right word for the distinction I'm using. "Humourless" and "entirely work oriented", perhaps. There were some Europeans that weren't dry, they had strongly expressed (but dubious) technical opinions and weren't afraid to say them. But that wasn't humour, and tended to imply someone else was wrong/stupid/incompetent, which imho was unhelpful for fostering prosocial work relationships.
I've thought about it a lot, I feel like everything the industry touches magically turns to shit.
Maybe I'm being a little negative, I know. But I think about things I really like, things I do for free in my spare time and when I put (imaginatively) on top of that a business layer, a management layer, a stakeholder layer, etc. I can see it being destroyed in front of my eyes (I'm not talking about computer stuff, but cooking, sports, writing...).
It's capitalism my friends. Alternatives?
To combat this feeling seeping into the other parts of my life, I have started to do some physical work, like cultivating gourmet mushrooms in my backyard. I asked for less hours some years ago, which means less income, but I am happier and I get to do physical work with my hands.
Everyday for me is a mix of Gardening, nature, building 4wds, eletrical devices, welding, really anything i wish. Plus my job which i get payed for. I do what i want, everyday. I never get up unless i want to (i can set my own hours and no one questions it) All my shirts/ties/suites are in the bin, replaced with crocs, tank tops, and tracksuites.
75% efficiency kills you inside? Most companies would kill for 75% efficiency. The hyperbolic horror stories are usually 40-hour weeks for 5 hours of work.
I'm willing to believe that 75% isn't bad business-wise, but 10 h/week are a bit less than a tenth of your waking hours, over one and a half hours per day, several hundreds per year, a few ten thousands over the course of your life.
Imagine what you could do with that time. Imagine you could spend 1½h per day more with your kids, with the people you love, with friends. Or maybe learning new skills, working on personal projects, going hiking, whatever you enjoy.
I believe that it's perfectly understandable to feel (at the very least) a bit bitter about that when you feel like that time is taken away from you for no clear purpose.
I was in a similar position like you a couple of times. Some things I did:
* If less income isn't a problem ask to work less. Why not work 32 hours instead of 40+?
* Find another company. And know that an interview works both ways: the company wants to know you but you can also ask a lot about the company's culture.
* Find a job doing something different but is related to what your experience is.
Indeed very true, I've had managers and CTO's who made a point on shielding the engineering teams from any rando meetings, but other departments in the same company where living an experience similar to OPs with death by video-conference.
Even had a manager who would cap meetings to max 3h per week. This really added pressure for ppl to justify townhall type meetings for passive listeners.
In the end it really depends on who your boss is.
And I, as a team leader/project manager of sorts, just said to my team not to come into meetings that had no pre-defined agenda. I went in and relayed any questions to the team via the company chat if I didn't know the answer outright. Saved the team from hours of useless meetings.
Useless/overlong meetings seem to be a consequence of poor middle management and/or just the general structure of large corporations where lines of communication and hierarchies of responsibilities are complex.
What I do personally is to always ask for an agenda before accepting a meeting request. It's not rude to request one and can help focus discussion or see where you can add value.
Most people think that customers have no idea, while in most cases if you put the right knowledgable people in front of them they would build amazing features together. I have seen it in an AI startup! Whenever us devs worked with the customers we built amazing data science products. Whenever it was managers, it was all these random non sensical requests and demands.
Someone who can sell a project directly to the customer while also knowing exactly what is possible and in what timeframe without having to consult someone else is worth their weight in gold.
We still have a few too many "hype-men" type salespeople who are in the Always Be Closing mindset without any sense of what's actually deliverable or even sensible.
But you usually have these proxy people, who then have to do countless internal meetings to figure out what to actually do, imposing extra ordinary requirements and work hours and that’s why we have all these posts with people hating meetings, burning out and switching fields. If only the middle management and product was tech educated and oriented..
So if you hook a big client, you can go and order that Tesla :)
Naturally, it is easier to perform some work if you understand and agree with its intent and the way it's executed, or if it's indeed your own choice what to do and how to go about it. You will never fully experience this as a wage worker taking commands from a manager taking commands from a boss taking commands from another boss taking commands from a board of owners motivated by their own profit, but perhaps work will seem more meaningful in a smaller company where you have more influence on decision making.
Depending on culture you may also be able to take a bit more charge. Demand to know a clear agenda in advance of meetings, decline meetings that don't have an agenda that's relevant to your work and insist that the agenda is followed during meetings. Impart on your manager that your time is being wasted when it is.
I make about as much as a Starbucks assistant manager, though, so your mileage may vary. :-D
Go make something for yourself. Or do some consulting work.