I’ve never had an office job and I’ve always wondered what it is a typical cubicle worker actually does in their day-to-day. When your boss assigns you a “project”, what kind of stuff might it entail? Is it usually putting together some kind of report or presentation? I hear it’s a lot of responding to emails and attending meetings, but emails and meetings about what, finances?
I know it’ll probably be largely dependent on what department you work in and that there are specific office jobs like data-entry where you’re inputting information into a computer system all day long, HR handles internal affairs, and managers are supposed to delegate tasks and ensure they’re being completed on time. But if your job is basically what we see in Office Space, what does that actually look like hour-by-hour?
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side door, that way my boss can’t see me. Uh, and after that, I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I’d probably, say, in a given week, I probably do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.
The thing is, it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s just that I just don’t care. It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now, if I work my ass off and the company ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime. So where’s the motivation? And here’s another thing,I have eight different bosses right now!
So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my real motivation - is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job, but y’know, it will only make someone work hard enough not to get fired.
Now they are trying to offer me some kind of stock option and equity sharing program? I have a meeting tomorrow where I am probably going to be laid off.
Holy shit, it’s been forever since I’ve seen this and… that’s me now. When I don’t work from home, that’s exactly what I do. My office has a little room for privacy, so I’ll just go lay in there randomly for a while. I take 15-20 minute shits multiple times a day. I listen to podcasts all day, or watch videos. When I work from home, I’m usually in bed chilling for 7+ hours a day.
I do between “the most work of all of my coworkers in a day” and “as much as everyone else combined” and it’s completely fucking bonkers. I haven’t had a day in months where I didn’t do the most stuff out of anyone.
Decided to go back to school to go something more meaningful, but that was what my first job basically was. I was hybrid, though. So I was working from home pretty often too, and I lived 10 minutes from the office so I would come in late and leave early on those in person days too. Sometimes I’d spend an hour writing a script and pretend it took me like 2 weeks.
That’s like asking what a construction worker does. They build stuff, but like… what? The answer is whatever their specialty is. You can be an officer worker and do many, many, different things just like you can be in construction and do many, many things.
For some quick very general examples you could be in sales, or software development, or customer service, or data analysis, or graphic design, or so very many others.
This is a good concise answer
Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.
There’s a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and ask for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.
This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:
- agreeing to a price per unit of metal (+ applicable taxes) that can benefit both parties, and
- logistics of when and how to deliver or pickup that metal, and how much those logistics cost.
From there, it’s pretty much the same deal. The factory isn’t making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers for the factory contact other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour another office worker spent working for that factory’s product.
A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer’s designs and that mine’s metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.
A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the factory…
A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.
An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company’s database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.
An office worker in the government works for the court. They receive the lawsuit documents, they make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.
The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard…
And there, everywhere, in everything - you have the modern day office worker.
TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making data. Moving data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world’s wealth and all the world’s future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understands or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.
(Edit - oh, and don’t even get me started on websites, apps, and spreadsheets that they use to interface with the data. There are infinite monkeys at infinite computers making the most randomized bespoke solutions to every little business niche, and every office worker has to swap between 2-6 of them on the daily)
making the most randomized bespoke solutions to every little business niche
Hey that’s my cubicle job! Last week I made a program because one of the locations at my company wanted to be able to view tolls (were a trucking company) for their drivers only. So I threw that together.
This week I’m making a program which will replace a spreadsheet to track tablets (drivers get one for electronic logs). It won’t do anything crazy but it will be color coded! (Color coding was the single most important feature they requested)
But today I didn’t work on that because they wanted a little tool to convert various file types into TIFF files because they work the best with our management software.
So yeah, lots of random little automations and tools for like 1 or 2 people to do their niche little responsibilities.
You are seen! There are thousands of “you’s” out there building permanently-temporary fixes out of digital duct tape. Users think it’s black magic, IT thinks it’s a security risk, management thinks it replaces IT, and you know it just keeps things moving while everyone else talks about the big software overhaul that’s way overdue but always 6-36 months down the road.
Haha I’m actually from an IT background! I started doing it because I was tired of paying like $1000/month for 7361618 little programs.
Wow, what a thorough answer, thank you! The summation was almost poetic, in a beautiful and somewhat horrifying way. The whole system laid out like that almost seems a bit dark and dystopian in kind of an indescribable way. It sounds like a sentient, Lovecraftian rat’s-nest of wires running the whole world.
Thanks! Try not to let it get you down. It’s less a Lovecraftian horror and more like a giant Rube Goldberg-Plinko machine that got way out of hand.
Engineer here. You’re salaried but treated like an hourly employee. You get paid to work 40 hours a week but get “told” that working less than 45-50 hours a week makes you a slacker. Your exempt which means you don’t get a mandatory 30 minute unpaid lunch or a paid 15 minute break every 4 hours. Vacation time is normally unlimited but requires manager approval so if you get the old “boomer” type that drank the corporate cool aid, good luck getting any more than 2 weeks worth approved regardless of years at company.
Sorry I digress, My job starts at 8:00 but I slide in to the daily standup at around 8:10. No one notices or cares. Afterwards, I get a cup of coffee, catch up on vital correspondence and questions from overseas coworkers. It’s sometime between 8:30 and 9:45 That I realize the Bangalore Software team sent out an emergency meeting at 11PM last night for 5AM This morning. “Oh well” I think to myself and sip on my coffee catching up on what I missed. Turns out one of them forgot to plug in a machine. They crack me up.
From 9:45 to 10:00, I have conditioned my body to take a shit. I time it for exactly 10 minutes. My second one is precisely times for between 4:00PM and 4:15PM. I figure those two times are freebies to my 9.5 hour forced work schedule. Upon returning, from my “break” I begin to actually work.
I design things using CAD software cool stuff. I am content by 10:10AM I have my headphones on, I am doing what I actually went to school for. I begin to think this is entirely worth all the other stuff I put up with. I get in the zone and time flies.
Its, 10:25AM. There was an emergency on the production floor. They tell me its a problem they have never seen before. They assure me they have taken all the proper diagnostic steps have been taken and I need to look at whats wrong to prevent a line stop.
I think, “its go time” I follow the techs down to the line and start diagnosing the problem. In no time at all, I find that they never checked the test wiring despite that being like in the first 5 steps of diagnosing a problem. I head back to my desk. Its 2PM by now, I microwave my lunch and work through it. Distractions happen maybe I get an accumulated total of an hour or two of design work done before its 6PM and I head home.
Yup…… You could tell me to switch jobs but every company I work for in my line of work is just like this.
Be engineer, draw pictures with numbers next to it that mean that your picture is important. Give picture to someone who agrees that your picture is important and presses on your picture with a stamp. Then give your picture to people that don’t work at desks to make a thing that looks like your important picture.
I mostly played video games in between intense bursts of productivity to get work done.
Yes, I was doing this before remote work was a thing. You just have to be slick. I once set up a “lab” of three PCs to “test some new software” in a back room and then played Birth of the Federation on one of them while the other two ran perf counter output, for 3 months straight. This was an act of desperation to keep my mind busy. They had laid almost everyone off in the company so I didn’t have much to do, but it started a tradition that carried me all the way to retirement!
Insurance:
For this “industry,” it varies wildly by department and position. The lower your are (entry level, etc.) the worse it’s going to be. People are always in accidents, so you’ll be working customer service on nightmare mode. No real meetings, maybe a “huddle,” and then back to work.
I’ve moved up slightly and it is night and day. I get work/claims, but I’m usually done by noon, and that’s with me fucking around (on my phone, messing with the cat, chores, etc.). The projects are PowerPoints and excel sheets in my area, which are simple. Since I’m at home, when I’m done, I usually just keep myself online and work on crafts. If I’m extra bold, I’ll take the laptop downstairs and play a game. The more specialized you get, the less work you have.
I’m a chemical engineer at a plastics company. When I’m in the office I’m looking at data and making decisions based on that, like whether to stop or increase production rates, whether to shut something down for maintenance, or finding what piece of equipment is broken and causing a problem. I also design improvements to the process like finding better ways to run the machinery, new equipment that gets us more capacity, or new ways to control the equipment. I would say about 80% of my time is in the office and 20% is in the manufacturing area.
I was until a few years ago, a machine operator in plastic extrusion. All but one of our engineers were useless. Did they do work? Sure. Was it productive to the line? Occasionally…
We paid $20,000 for a new mil thickness tester, made by young engineers at the local university.
They held a whole “class” to show us how it worked, presented not by the ones who built it, but by our engineers.
It failed during presentation. So we all learned how to measure manually instead. It never worked. They ended up installing the old one back, which hardly worked.
Then for the next year it sat broken, and unless the old thickness tester was in a good mood, we had to do it manually, which was so utterly time consuming and difficult.
While I think engineers are important- so many just fuck around, least where I worked.
I’ll just give some examples.
We know that construction workers build things, but many office workers are behind them. When you hear “office worker,” think “information worker” as that will help.
What information?
Someone has to pay the construction workers. This involves accounting and payroll tasks best done at a computer.
Architects design the project being constructed and this is done in an office.
There are permits, inspections, regulations, taxes, real estate licensing etc to clear the project and this is done through computers and telephones.
Coordination of the different work crews must be planned - we don’t just ask concrete, civil engineers, plumbers, electrical, and landscaping to all show up on the same day and just figure things out. These things are scheduled out and arranged with many different companies / subcontractors and this is mapped out on a computer and agreed to over the phone.
The new apartments being constructed will need tenants to rent them. Billboard space is going to be rented near the building. A graphic designer is designing the billboard on a computer in an office. Someone else is calling the billboard company to arrange the large scale printing of it and to purchase the time it will be displayed.
I’ll stop. This is off the top of my head. If construction workers, with their obviously valuable and easy to understand work have this many office workers behind them, you can imagine how it’s even more complex for things like tech companies.
I rapid-fire solve technical problems all day.
I also place orders. But that’s the easy stuff.
Recently finished university and got my first job in basic accounting. All I do is well, watch videos on phone, messages people and a bit of accounting here and there. Boring, relaxing and that’s about it. Going to stick with it for a year and then prolly find new work.
Hour by hour, my job evolved from taking calls from clients who owed us money, to then answering questions from agents who weren’t as skilled at it as I was.
In the process of being promoted, I was asked to join a daily meeting of over 100 people talking about the issues affecting our department.
Once in a great while, something came up in that meeting that gave me the heads up to prevent chaos in our department and stress to members.
There’s a whole shitload of cogs turning in modern corporations. There’s also a huge danger of people leaving and nobody understanding why the cogs are there.
I’m a translator. I translate everything you can possibly think of. HSE documents, emails to illicit lovers, websites, I’m your person.
I work as a programmer, we get a feature request from a customer that passes through a lot of stages (billing, scheduling, architecture, etc). When it gets to me it’s a simple “it’s now x, it should be y, this is done when a, b and c”. I then go through and change or add code until everything is achieved, it’s then tested and out it goes. Rinse and repeat.
I’m a pet product specialist for a pet food manufacturer. I respond to customer emails, calls, and chats about our products. This could mean assisting pet owners in selecting products based on their pets’ unique medical or physiological needs, answering nutritional questions, handling complaints, and more. In my downtime I work on reference materials for the rest of the team, continuing education on animal nutrition (my last class was on avian flu in pet foods), and prepare promotional materials for expos and trade shows.
On light days we do a lot of sharing memes, shit talking in group chat, dicking around on the Internet, and finding other creative ways to fuck off.
