Sure. But there's journalism and journalism. How does a by-the-yard bit of entertainment or some syndicate crap hold anyone to account? It's like the corporate magazine world.
The managerial obsession with 'busywork'
- Thread starter paulfromcamden
- Start date
Paul L
coffee lounge for me
I’m about half way through a book I wish I had read 30 years ago - Maverick by Ricardo Semmler - and this thread is amusing and poignant more so as a result. Interesting chap and a far cry from the corprorates I have worked for and the games I have played like others to appear as valuable as possible, surrounded by dilbert style management and office life all too often.
When in doubt, walk briskly from one department to the next carrying 2 or 3 sheets of A4 paper.
paulfromcamden
Baffled
Well, its not War and Peace but I thought it was interesting and well written. I googled her and she was shortlisted for The Guardian’s Hugo Young Award for “fresh voices, new perspectives and good writing” in political journalism so I guess maybe she does a bit of defending democracy as well.
I think the point is that in the context of Drood's quote, her role - creating content - is essential to the organisation. No content, no website. The Senior Digital Platform Engagement Metrics Analyst on the next desk may or may not be essential to the organisation - it's less certain.
thing is that the pandemic just gave us stasis. Anything linked to progress, forget it. In my industry, food, all the retailer quality and hygiene inspection s stopped. The retailers effectively said "listen, we'll give you an easy ride. Just STFU and keep the lorries coming in, and we'll STFU and keep our heads down. We just need the food on the shelves" . All the new products, new markets, shelflife improvement, work on quality / value / hygiene / yield went out of the window. We are regularly, and rightly, criticised for poor productivity in the UK. You don't fix that simply by keeping your head down and churning out the same stuff every day, same as yesterday, last week, last year. You may not be aware of the leaps and bounds made in productivity but trust me, they are there. How do you think that we can still retail a £3 chicken, when they were that much 30 years ago? 4 pints of milk, £1.25. It was that much 25 years ago, I remember because I was making the stuff. 15 day fresh life on milk. Suggest that in 1995 they would have laughed you out of the office. Normal now, on filtered stuff. The list goes on.
I absolutely dread it when a job on the list is at some government/public sector building, they have absolutely zero sense of time or that their job isn't my only job of the day and I have six or seven other places to get to. It's like everyone is on a go slow and whoever you speak to knows nothing about anything, phone calls are made, other people are summoned, emails are sent quite often to no avail.
NHS sites are the worst- I quite regularly just walk off, bill them for the time wasted and tell them to call us back when they can find someone who knows WTF it is I'm actually there to do.
NHS sites are the worst- I quite regularly just walk off, bill them for the time wasted and tell them to call us back when they can find someone who knows WTF it is I'm actually there to do.
Agreed, but that's like saying that brand managers are not BS jobs because once in a while they come up with a new product idea that actually works, people want to buy it and so others are employed making it. Happy days. What about all the rest of it, such as the marketing exec I met who had spent thousands proving that people buying 500g family packs of peanuts didn't eat them in one go but (who knew?) decanted them into another container. I'm serious. I am not making this one up. So as ever, it's a continuum. Even my job, which ought to be very much about hard science in high volume manufacturing, and often is, has its periods of massaging egos at the retailers. I still think that a journo at an online magazine is in a bloody big glass house when talking about BS jobs and they should be very careful if they start tbrowing stones.
droodzilla
pfm Member
Nice straw man you've got there.
Also, there's a debate to be had about what counts as progress.
No straw man at all. You said the pandemic showed us what was necessary. Sure, if you want to be the 1960s motorcycle industry and stand still while the Japanese come along with better and better machines for less and less money. I've got first hand experience of what it meant to UK manufacturing, as described. As for definition of progress, in a world where people are choosing heating or eating, do you want lower cost ingredients that keep longer, or not?
Chops54
pfm Member
We do work for a big institution and it’s the same there. One of the bosses always works from home on a Friday and a Monday ( wonder why that is
)so I know that if we turn up on a Friday we’ll get bugger all done because no one else wants to know or gives a toss.
Bob McC
Living the life of Riley
Poerful is missing an’o’.
Hazelberry
sister
I've been caught in this kind of crap. I hate it. It burns the soul & fosters resentment towards work.
Standard working hours are a stupid arbitrary practice. In a job I had long ago both the boss's and my ethos was to get the job done & get the hell out so we could each enjoy the rest of the day. My boss was a surfer & I was an artist of sorts. I wasn't paid so well for years.
Standard working hours are a stupid arbitrary practice. In a job I had long ago both the boss's and my ethos was to get the job done & get the hell out so we could each enjoy the rest of the day. My boss was a surfer & I was an artist of sorts. I wasn't paid so well for years.
Bob McC
Living the life of Riley
I don’t.
Hazelberry
sister
Commiserations
mykel
Perpetual Hack.
Maybe it depends?
When I was in IT working with Wide Area Networks for the government, if I had someone scheduled to be coming in I was there to meet them at the front counter or on remote site, always a bit early. If someone was coming in it was because something was broken in some fashion and needed to be fixed before it failed.
Busywork I understand on many levels, one of which comes at things from a bit of a different angle - self imposed.
There was nothing more uncomfortable way way back than sitting there getting paid bank for swapping floppy disks when installing software at some customer. Even if it was your job, it just looked bad to flip the dik, hit Enter then wait for several minutes staring off into space until the next disk was needed. Boring as hell to boot, so you always found something to keep you occupied between disk flips and pushing Enter.
Good for you. Well, enjoy your drive in a car that does 0-60 in 15 seconds and 30 mpg, your chicken costing £7 that has Campylobacter, and your milk that only lasts 5 days so you have to buy it twice a week. In smaller packs, it doesn't keep after all, and it's 60p a pint, not 30.
Big Tabs
looking backwards, going forwards
I have never worked in an environment were there wasn’t essential work piled up.
If the management is allocating unnecessary work, then it sounds like there isn’t enough work to do, or too many employees.
Tony L
Administrator
I vastly preferred contracting to permanent roles as not only was the pay likely multiples more, there was also absolutely no need to care about office politics etc in the slightest. Corporate IT is an unusual service as the better you do it the less those who pay for it notice as the thing you are really delivering is reliability and fitness for basic function. I tried my hardest to dissuade anyone above installing any new gimmicks or frippery onto otherwise reliable systems or to upgrade anything until a couple of service packs etc had been released. Never lead the pack, never trust anything with a zero in the version number etc! Judge an IT department on downtime. That’s the most important thing and almost always what I was brought in to fix. The art was to stick around getting paid as long as possible once it was reliable.