this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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This must be a generation gap thing.
Most millennials and basically all gen z use discord or phones to gossip all the time, about work or the rest of their lives.
Theres not much functional difference between discord and Teams or Slack or Zoom, in terms of their capacity to facilitate basic communication, all the differences are UI, under the hood administration and security stuff, integration with other workplace software, etc.
There is 0 barrier preventing a remote worker from participating work gossip.
In fact, in many top tech firms this is highly encouraged if not functionally mandated.
MSFT, Amazon etc all have their own internal software that is very intentionally aimed at being a kind of internal facebook/linkedin while also facilitating work related communications, and its fairly difficult to advance if you don't have a hyper amicable, politically correct (office politics and otherwise) social presence internally.
Am millennial, but I would never use work provided tools to gossip that leaves a paper trail. Gossiping in an office environment is different because it doesn't leave hard evidence. All it would take is gossip that crossed the line or gossiping about the wrong person and BOOM HR is hitting you up
Oh, same, I personally agree and do likewise.
The 'OpSec' thing to do would be to have a signal chat, or discord or something disconnected from work software/hardware to do the gossip so said paper trail is harder to establish.
Cleverer tech savvy folks will do this, but many don't.
I basically hate all work related gossip of any kind, but my point was that gossip is completely normalized and common and widespread whether you are working remote or not...
... its just that in a largely remote work environment, it becomes exceedingly obvious that many middle manager types both don't really do many actually useful things, and they need in person social stimulation to maintain their egos in a way they can't when someone can just not join a gossip group chat, when they can't randomly barge in to your workspace for a check in.
These are the MBA, team building types that basically have the skillset of a failed motivational speaker and also typically know so little about the specifics of any given employee's work that you have to spend an hour explaining what your precise, technical block is at this exact moment, when you probably could have fixed it in 15 minutes were they not wasting your time and interpreting their own actions as somehow beneficial.
Turns out that for a great majority of remote capable work, socially awkward people can be astoundingly more productive when they're not constantly distracted, and that if you just say hey, if you need help with something, schedule a quick video chat with me and I'll see if I, or someone with relevant experience can help.
They can't accept the flipped power dynamic of themselves being on call (within schedule constraints) to provide assistance, they need to be the ones that police, monitor and 'morale boost' others whenever they feel like it.
This kind of dynamic is part of why mouse jigglers are a thing. If middle management can be a social butterfly and only do one or two hours of actually productive work a day but get paid for 8, why shouldn't a less socially inclined person be able to do the same?