The Drawbacks of Work

All jobs are crap, but some are more crap than others

Don't get me wrong - I like work. Otherwise why would I expend so much effort in creating a website? But unfortunately all too often corporate conformism and the oversized egos of senior managers suck the lifeblood out of it. The only management guru who has it right is Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. This is a list of rants and moans about the typical negative things people are likely to encounter in their working environment.

• Expedient half-baked solutions, even in supposedly rigorous, technical environments such as the aerospace industry
• Lack of intellectual thoroughness and rigour
• Dictatorial bosses
• All too often, the people appointed to senior management positions seem to be those who delight in ordering others around and controlling their lives
• Promotion dependent on crawling, not ability
• Bullshitters are rewarded
• Lack of control over working environment
• Flexibility is a one-way street
• Lack of respect for life outside work
• Commitment is measured in time spent at work
• In my entire working life I have never come across an office job that, barring rare emergencies, could not comfortably be accomplished within normal working hours, given proper planning. Virtually all out-of-hours working results from poor management, and the completely wrong-headed belief that effectiveness can be equated with length of time taken (when in fact the opposite is true)
• Complaining about anything at all will get you nowhere and is seen as a sign of lack of commitment
• To point out that any scheme is impractical, has problems or is unlikely to work is perceived as being negative and obstructive - so you keep your mouth shut and wait for it to fall flat on its face
• Lack of privacy and freedom from distraction
• Open plan offices
• These usually don’t even conform to the proper Bürolandschaft concept of open-planning (i.e. space, trees, nobody is overlooked or directly faces someone else etc)
• People who feel too cold tend to whinge more vociferously than those who are too hot, with the result that the ambient temperature in an open-plan office will generally be uncomfortably hot
• People who talk very loudly in open-plan offices, particularly those who hold impromptu stand-up meetings right in the middle
• Mobile phones ringing in the office, especially those with irritating ringtones
• The widely-held view that the best way to solve a problem is for at least five people to gather round a computer and stare intently at the screen
• Petty rules and restrictions - you can’t even change the appearance of your desktop!
• On the other hand, lack of systems and procedures for elementary things (stationery)
• Trivial penny-pinching measures that cost more in loss of staff morale than they save in financial outlay - often in my experience relating to the supply of stationery and tea and coffee
• Arbitrary dismissals and redundancies
• No tolerance for heterodox opinions - you have to sing the company song
• You can only think the unthinkable within a very narrow band laid down by management. How can we kill more foxes? Not should we be killing foxes at all?
• The command and control structure is supposed to have gone, but management now make you draw up your own orders - empowerment is a sick joke
• Control and denial of autonomy is disguised as something positive (e.g. hot desking)
• Whatever happened to straightforward, meaningful job titles like "Production Manager" and "Chief Accountant"? Instead we have ludicrous non-jobs like "Global Process Enabler" that seem to breed to a whole stratum of people who spend their time incurring huge travel budgets attending pointless meetings full of jargon and bullshit
• Salary awards based on subjective assessments of individual performance, which inevitably end up as rank favouritism
• Ability to do your job almost doesn’t matter so long as you’re not totally crap at it
• The concept of team work is a cloak for conformity and discrimination against non-conformists (blacks, gays, married women with children, single men etc.?)
• Any form of socialising which is compulsory or which is seen as bad form to avoid
• Socialising arranged around events which may inherently be unappealing to some groups represents a form of discrimination (e.g. those involving the consumption of alcohol will not appeal to those such as Muslims who do not drink for religious or cultural reasons, those which include partners exclude the single, divorced, gay, those which revolve around sport deter the non-sporty etc)
• Team-building exercises of any kind
• Particularly quasi-compulsory sporting events (One managing director at a company I worked for made his management team run a half-marathon, for God's sake)
• Dress-down Fridays - what a load of nonsense! Many people end up having to acquire a whole new wardrobe simply to comply. And when people are criticised for choosing not to take part it's totally missing the point
• Rampant age discrimination (imagine seeing rows of job ads saying Men Only or Blacks Need Not Apply)
• Your agenda in jobseeking is completely different from the employer’s and has to be kept secret. You want just sufficient interesting work to keep you from being bored, clarity of requirements, privacy, not to be hassled or shouted at, and the freedom to use the photocopier, telephone, PC, Internet etc. within reason for private purposes. And not to be too hot!
• How much would an employer really negotiate with a prospective employee about terms and conditions, e.g. basis of hours of work, office environment etc? The only things they will negotiate about are salary and possibly fringe benefits such as car and healthcare
• Cafeteria benefits don’t offer the things you really want, such as:
  • a proper flexitime system which allows 2-way flexibility but ring-fences the total amount of work time
  • an individual office where you can control the environment, or, at the very least, the ability to have independent control of heating, lighting and ventilation within your own work environment

(Last updated April 2005)

Return to Home Page