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Have you ever worked for or observed an organization where management and the staff seem to boast about how overwhelmed they are? They joke about how little time off they take, or how many hours they put in, or even poke at how stressed they are while seeming happy about it. It's like, "Haha, our work lives are stressful and overwhelming and we embrace this as opposed to doing anything to help fix it!".
It's almost like these people get off on how overworked they are. What are your thoughts about groups like this?
Is it sadistic? A sense of pride that certain personality types get? Is it a camaraderie thing, as in uniting over this common bond?
Last edited by Sir Quotes A Lot; 04-25-2019 at 08:27 AM..
Yes, I worked as a software developer for several IT organizations where management (and many of the employees) were like that. The last IT organization even had two slogans that they constantly used:
We are busy beyond belief!
We ask a lot from our employees!
Many drank the cool-aide and subscribed to that philosophy. Some left. I didn't drink the cool-aide, but stayed anyway at that dysfunctional and sadistic place. It was definitely sadistic since employees there had to "know their place" and could be gotten rid of in a heartbeat and other antics they subjected on the employees. At least that was what management thought. I learned not to pay attention to that s***, keep working and collect my paycheck. Some of my co-workers developed health issues and were quickly gotten rid of.
Yeah, made many memories that are worth forgetting. LOL! Actually, now that I am retired, it plays like a macabre comedy show in my mind.
I think that it is the upper management that decides how their corporate culture is going to be. In the organizations that I worked for, extreme value was placed on people working very many overtime hours. Since the positions were salaried, the overtime hours were not paid for. So it was free work for the companies. That's all there is to it. Money is everything and the only thing. Everything was geared to pulling out as much work as possible out of the employees and that is why those slogans were developed. A vast savings of money on labor costs. That's all it was. And the sadism was just part of the package and provided for free by the managers that enjoyed doing something like that.
Last edited by BusinessManIT; 04-25-2019 at 10:08 AM..
It's all a big sham anyway. People use looking overwhelmed and annoyed as a strategy for getting less work allocated to them. Think George Costanza:
Too funny, that always comes to mind when I hear people complain about being overworked. These are often the people who are the LEAST busy too! But it's actually a strategy that I have seen work time and time again. The most vocal people often get the least amount of work assigned to them as their boss(es) likely don't want to hear it.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Florida2014
Too funny, that always comes to mind when I hear people complain about being overworked. These are often the people who are the LEAST busy too! But it's actually a strategy that I have seen work time and time again. The most vocal people often get the least amount of work assigned to them as their boss(es) likely don't want to hear it.
I've seen it my entire career. It's crazy that management can be so clueless.
In the one I am familiar with, I don't think most people were happy. There are some sickos at the top who enjoy it, but most people hated it. They were just too afraid to leave and do something else, so they justified staying. It then becomes a "we're all in this miserable boat together" thing.
It's all a reflection of the (sick) live-work mindset, promoted by WeWork motivational posters everywhere. Whatever else can be said about millennials, that they fell for this schuck as a herd may be their blackest mark.
It's all a reflection of the (sick) live-work mindset, promoted by WeWork motivational posters everywhere. Whatever else can be said about millennials, that they fell for this schuck as a herd may be their blackest mark.
The places I've seen this most rampant in aren't run by Millennials. Millennials are generally also the first to put work-life balance as a priority in their lives, which is something else they get criticized for. So apparently they are at fault for all of these problems, even the ones that contradict each other. First they don't want to work, now they want to work too much.
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