this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia

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[–] EatYouWell 80 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can't invest in your human resources when you're only looking at maximizing quarterly profits.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

human resources (department) is for punishing the human resources (employees).

[–] rockSlayer 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's because hr was invented to be the company "alternative" to a union

[–] DrCake 26 points 1 year ago

HR are just a department for complaints to disappear into. Just there so people can log a problem to someone and to repeat the companies “propaganda”

[–] youCanCallMeDragon 70 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reminds me of Better Off Ted, don’t know why that show was ever cancelled.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

The network didn't promote it that much, and the show creator also gave an interview saying he also believes they didn't get the best time slot to build viewers over time.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I swear, if I could afford just a good 2 or so years long break to stabilize my life, I would actually be able to do good and effective work. Instead I feel like I am always just barely scraping by at the edge of my ability, due to being overworked and burnt out.

[–] Arkaelus 14 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Forget 2 years, I'd be happy with 2 months lol it's always a race to the bottom :(

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thought theft affects thousands of employers every day. They're not paying you to figure out who's going to find your body after you kill yourself. They're paying you to work!

[–] mriormro 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They're not paying you to figure out who's going to find your body after you kill yourself.

I just recently reorganized my apartment and I hadn't realized in the midst of it that a lot of the stuff I was doing was with the mentality of removing any inconveniences or potentially confusing situations in case someone enters my apartment if I decided to commit suicide.

That was a very sobering moment...

[–] AnarchistArtificer 5 points 1 year ago

As someone who has been in that exact same position, be cautious about organisation choices that seem like they'd be beneficial regardless of whether you live, but actually make it easier to die than live.

For me, it was the way that I stored my craft and hobby stuff - I made them tidier and more but in practice, harder to access. I did it this way because I wasn't actually using my hobby stuff, so they were just in the way. However, part of why I was so passively suicidal was because of the gradual atrophy of all the things that used made me happy, so by tidying away my tools, I was just digging myself deeper.

What I'm saying is that living, and life, is messy. Having a clear out can be good and productive, especially if you're not in a great place, because it can reveal things that aren't working for you now, but try not to make the same mistake I did. With the new space freed up by your organisation efforts, look over your stuff again and consider whether there's anything you could put in a more accessible place to reduce the activation energy of starting. I put some of my crochet stuff near my computer so I can do it while I'm in meetings, for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh dear 😥

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They made a similar office chair in Better Off Ted. I think the called it "The Focus Master".

Better Off Ted was a brilliant show.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lmaooo, the impossible to get comfortable chair!

The automated lights that didn't work for black people episode. So they made all black people get shadowed by a white coworker, was my favorite one!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So many great shticks were in that show. The little commercials trying to make their company look good for PR were great.

[–] CoolMatt 7 points 1 year ago

Diversity makes these white people happy

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Such a shame it had only two seasons

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah. Got cut way short right there. It deserved more.

[–] linuxgator 3 points 1 year ago

Came here to post a comment about it, but saw that you beat me to it. Glad I'm not the only one who appreciates that show!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Are most white-collar work environments unpleasant? I'm a software developer and I have never worked somewhere that didn't make a reasonable effort to keep me happy, properly rested, and in good health in order to improve my productivity.

[–] AllonzeeLV 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In my experience as a sysadmin, corporate structure almost always sees workers as liabilities that must be micromanaged, prodded, and scrutinized in regards to productivity, regardless of profits.

A good manager who wants happy, productive workers that don't quietly work against their employer knows when NOT to enforce the standard corporate HR patronizing infantilizing bullshit.

It sounds like you've either worked for small organizations or had good managers that recognize the reality that skillled workers like you are more competent and important to keeping the paychecks flowing than the connected narcissistic idiots on the top floor that get off on flexing power and barking irrational dictates just to hear themselves bark.

Remember, the workers make and do everything that keeps the world running. The scientists and engineers do the inventing and discovering. The capitalist owners just take all the money and the social credit, they don't actually do or know anything that benefits anyone but themselves. Even their supposed "charity" is usually used as an excuse to get praise while robbing the commons of owed tax revenue by writing it off, which makes it a transaction, not charity at all. Charity is giving and expecting nothing in return, save a warm fuzzy feeling inside. And they often "donate" to arts and political causes, while the victims of the society they bleed dry and leave to crumble die of exposure to the elements in tent cities.

Steve Jobs, who made like he was prometheus bringing the iPhone down from Olympus, couldn't have repaired a broken iPhone with access to every lab, component, and schematic in Silicon valley, a month, and a gun to his head. He wasn't even smart enough to go to real doctors and take real medicine when he was dying.

[–] MasterBlaster 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pulling together all the resources and ideas to make something happen is itself a valid skill. They're way overpaid for it, but it is real work.

Steve Jobs, in particular, created with help the original Mac and was screwed over by other powerful people in the business. He created the Mach kernel and the NeXT workstation before Apple crawled back to him for help salvaging the business.

He might have been an arrogant prick, but he did have the ability to bring vision into reality, and he helped make a lot of people other than himself wealthy.

We have this thing called specialization in modern society. Do you think an electrician can design and produce a microchip or a math teacher can manage a large corporate entity? We all make choices. Some of us have more options or more help.

[–] AllonzeeLV 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Pulling together all the resources and ideas to make something happen is itself a valid skill.

The accountants and lawyers pull together resources to make something happen, and are the ones that do all of the math and all the legal research to see if something can happen, the one that barked the order didn't. And as for ideas, the world would be a better place if that was left to the scientists, developers, craftspeople, and engineers that have the beneficial ones that might actually create or improve something of worth.

"Turn a product you could buy into a subscription you have to rent" has been the most widely implemented "idea" the modern CEO has been inspired to have, aside from laying off the people that made them their money the same week they report record profits. If you call that a skill of any positive use to society, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

And Steve jobs wasn't just a shitty marketing grifter who pretended he was some titan of invention, he was also a notoriously shitty person off the clock. It's sad people look up to a wealthy man who let his child subsist on welfare simply because he could.

[–] MasterBlaster -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And yet, he's the one who got those products to the public, and many love them. I'm not fond of Apple, but I have to acknowledge success. I'm not claiming he's a good person. Heck I agree with much you said, but being a business leader is a legitimate role and requires real skills.

[–] AllonzeeLV 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

And yet, he's the one who got those products to the public

Factory workers, retail workers, delivery people got those products to the public. Steve jobs didn't.

[–] MasterBlaster 0 points 1 year ago

Who hired them? Who gave them direction?

[–] MasterBlaster 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep, and they were just about to do it when that scumbag stole their thunder, right? They had the entire design all set and came together as a collective to make it happen, and Jobs stepped in and stole all the money and credit!

[–] AllonzeeLV 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes, he and the little owner's club did indeed steal the workers thunder, as our intentionally rigged economy is designed to maintain in perpetuity. The iphone was just the latest cycle of keeping the workers separated from the means of production, aka meaningful capital required for R&D and manufacturing.

Steve Jobs' "skill" was being receptive to repeating the vicious cycle of giving almost all the profits of products his engineers developed to the people who already exploited/coerced/stole the worker's money last time and the time before that in exchange for his class traitor cut (I guess he saw his daughter as an externality he didn't need to worry about) for selling out the other people like him that didn't come from wealth, which just propagates the little owner's club having more while ensuring the non-owners continue to not benefit from what they invent, discover, build, transport. They have the ideas and do the work, and then the small population with enough ill gotten capital to commission the machines get the vast majority of the capital profit... yet again, ad infinitum.

I'm sorry that impresses you, but of course the major media the oligarchs own and the K-Colleges of Economics curriculum they dictate indoctrinates most Americans to find their grift very impressive. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps!

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html

[–] MasterBlaster 0 points 1 year ago

I don't have to click the link because I know about that already. I'm not justifying the greed, just acknowledging the reality. There are people with these skills who are not self-serving. We likely agree on many things, but I work with reason, not ideology. I also try to avoid insulting people for telling me things I don't like unless they are insulting, of course.

Here's something you won't like - Marxism does not work, for the same reason the 1% collect all the wealth. Greed is a human condition.

[–] DrCake 4 points 1 year ago

I’m a software dev aswell and I think they do try to look after us because our wages are a pretty big investment. For the other people on minimum wage, they do not give a fuck.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sometimes the management is clever enough to realise it's much more cost effective to keep your knowledgeable employees happy than to have to go through the process of hiring replacements. Sadly there are plenty of ladder-climbers and egotists who don't get this, and that's even when they consider the workers they're fucking around to be highly skilled. When the powers that be consider their employees to be easily replaceable then they lose all motivation to treat them like anything other than human resource.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The capitalism chair sounds kinda bdsm-y lol.

[–] Thranduil 5 points 1 year ago

Nah its just killing you. Electrocution means you die. If the chair shocked you thats bdsm-y

[–] Ensign_Crab 18 points 1 year ago

Chairs? What luxury.

[–] RIP_Cheems 9 points 1 year ago

Another good idea to motivate workers is, if possible, rotate responsibilities each day.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Or: Give the workers all they could ever want, so they just continue to work and never want to go home.