Ask HN: Anyone else is tired of all the corporate bs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone else is tired of all the corporate bs?

145 pointsboredemployee140 comments

I'm working as a data analyst/scientist for two years and I'm already tired. In theory everything is amazing, the math, the algorithms, until u get a job. Useless and endless meetings, useless requests, arbitrary and weird decisions to make the boss and customers happy. We end working 40+ hours/week but the job could be easily done in 30 or less, that is another thing that kills me inside. We all could be living our lives in those hours that we pretend we're doing something. I know it sounds like I'm depressed and all that but I love life, my problem is with the state of things in the corporate environment, the faking and pretending that all is perfect in the way it is, and in the job but in the end everyone is unhappy and feeling like shit and waiting for friday. I just dont know what to do because it sounds to me that every company is the same. Does anyone else feels like that? What do you do to overcome this feeling?

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I don't want to sound like the bad guy here who defends corporate, but I kind of feel like OP and a lot of comments are missing the point. Which is: large business organizations are complex social structures. You can't have a complex social structure without a lot of communication going on. Of course there are zounds of different ways to communicate with each other and if you (and your colleagues) feel like certain meetings are just a waste of time and have no benefit whatsoever, there is something wrong with the org's culture.

I happen to manage approx 20 people in a ~500 person org. Everyone gets a chance to decide if they want to focus on becoming a social animal and growing in the org (which results in more meetings, more emails, more chats, etc.) or just concentrate on the technical stuff. The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company. However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings... Once being able to put all that into perspective, most of them don't complain about it anymore.

So long story short - most of the time you can't have it both ways in a large(-ish) organization. You can either be the guy who digs a hole every day and someone tells him where. Or you can be the guy who decides where to dig the holes but only get to dig a more moderate amount of holes yourself.

*hole

(Good comment, though ;)

thanks for noticing, fixed!

What you say is my experience as well, with one caveat: the large corporation is usually much less productive then the smallish team that actually able to "just do [thing]".

It's just that it's impossible to scale that approach, so the larger the enterprise gets, the less you'll actually be shipping... As pretty much all of them seem to think it's easy to scale development teams, increasing their headcount and running productivity against a wall.

A small team has barely any space for Juniors however, so I think it's very good that both approaches exist in the wild

Agree. My team is small, but everyone has 10+ years of experience. We can get a lot of research prototypes churned out quickly.

But then for the deployment and maintenance, they hired a large army of cheap inexperienced junior developers.

Your argument is that some meetings are necessary to make decisions. That is not what the OP is tired of. He is tired of 'corporate bs'. Productive meetings are not 'corporate bs' so your comment is not relevant.

How do you define corporate bs Vs productive meetings?

It's pretty easy to tell them apart. For example: a meeting where devs discuss and agree something and maybe make a principle going forward vs a meeting where nobody is empowered to make any decisions, there is dependency on people not in the meeting, nothing is decided, next action is to follow up with someone not in the meeting and to book in another meeting.

Not quite... my argument is that a lot of meetings are necessary to keep an organization ticking - decision making is just a part of it. If for anyone that feels like corporate bs (which is a perfectly valid standpoint!!!), well... these people aren't cut for a corporate life. What's the problem in that? If I don't like children I probably wouldn't try to become a kindergarten teacher, if I absolutely can't stand communication and politics, I shouldn't work in a corporate setting.

And it's also perfectly OK to find this out about yourself only later in life, when you have gathered some (more) professional experience.

What's not OK imho is labelling other people's version of work as "corporate bs".

> If for anyone that feels like corporate bs (which is a perfectly valid standpoint!!!), well... these people aren't cut for a corporate life.

If someone feels like a meeting is "corporate bs", that speaks to a failing of those hosting the meeting to properly communicate the intent of the meeting. If you are not able to effectively communicate with the people you work with, perhaps it is you who isn't cut out for corporate life? If you think you can treat a class of kindergarteners like it is a fourth year university course, teaching kindergarten likely isn't for you.

Peter principle applies, I suppose.

Agreed! It is of course not always the employee's fault for not "liking" meetings. Pretty often meetings are not well prepared (by the one who called for the meeting in the first place), not well moderated (if any kind of moderation is there at all) and there is little consideration if everyone on the invitee is really relevant or not. And some people are just not good at explaining stuff and communicating intent, as you said. These are all facts and I can't deny them. I am very often guilty of all of these mistakes myself. As is most probably everyone who has ever organised a meeting.

It takes effort to mitigate all that and it takes even more effort to try to work around it if it happens a lot. If you are ready and willing to improve the system - welcome to management ;) If this feels like a whole lot of crap to you - better stay away from big companies, do some consulting, find startups with like minded people... Staying on a job, being unmotivated or stressed out is not good for anyone involved.

Can you give an example of a meeting that keeps the org ticking and doesn't have any decision making?

To your second point.. corporate bs is not necessary and should be called out. Most of it falls into waste. Another large chunk falls into people trying to climb the corporate ladder.

> large business organizations are complex social structures. You can't have a complex social structure without a lot of communication going on.

The question is if this is required. Personally i can't wait for AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives

> AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives

All AIs that I've seen so far just optimize the reproduction of existing biases and/or serve to obfuscate policy decisions by ensuring that no person is left to blame. Are you stating a dream there, or did I miss a development towards practical AI systems that make decisions more transparent?

NNs dont need to be transparent as long as the objectives are transparent

And the training data right? How can you prevent exactly what the person you replied to is talking about. Situations where we ingrain the horrible nature of humankind because that's what we're training the AI on. Say you were building a credit score classifier NN. It's going to "learn" that African Americans have lower credit scores. Mostly because it's going to be trained on historic data, which is based on human input, and humans are inherently racist in some fashion or another. And societal constructs have prevented African Americans from economic advancement since... ever.

You can't just have "transparent objectives" and let AI take the wheel.

What you have now with organic matter AI is less transparent

Where's the "A" in that? Are you making an argument for a universal creator?

It says here the objective is "to serve man."

>However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings...

And if they decided to attend these meetings are they still expected to maintain the same "velocity/story points/etc."? Because if so then they will likely have to work outside of "office hours" to actually get the work done. Possibly why they decline and stop complaining... They realize they'll just get handed a bigger bag of BS.

And then they become disengaged. And then when they never get raises beyond 2-3% do you wonder why they jump ship and change companies too?

Thanks for the satire. It's very good. Sounds almost as if you believe it!

> The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company

This is the problem. Most managers are not aware of the real ground situation and rely on “visibility” presentations to judge worth.

never seen "zounds" used as a unit of measure like that but I can't pass up an opportunity to share the trivia that it's a contraction of "god's wounds"

You are right. It is what it is due to complex systems... The thing is that neither the holes diggger nor the holes manager find happiness doing this.

I live in Belgium, didn't inherit millions from family and am in the middle working class. I'll stay in this working class, this is how it has been conceived, I'll never make millions. Once I understood and accepted this, I managed to work only 4 days a week and live more than finely with this salary. Work is only there to get my living wage, I detached completely from work life, I chat with colleague, I do what I'm supposed to do, nothing less, nothing more, I play cards and read a lot, then my 7h50 workday is over and I go on with my real life: my son, my car, my hobbies, my friends. THIS is what counts.

At the same time, I am looking for a part-time freelance job out of Belgium, and find it surprisingly difficult to find.

I am omnivore, having successfully maintained both outdated Eclipse/OSGI-based codebases and large PHP websites, but everyone wants to buy me in entirety.

I think it might be because if you just want part-time it may looks like you are not going to take it seriously.

Being freelancer is more difficult for the not long term, but the best to achieve shorter working hours I would say is, work full time for 9-12 months, then you know how things work and also have some "power" to request part-time.

The problem of course is that after 2-3 years you will most likely change job again, so it does not last too long as long as you want higher salary

There are many self-made millionaires. Not sure if you are a dev or not...but you can always make an app or a game that takes off? Your life circumstances may lead you to the app and you could make it out of necessity for yourself.

Honestly, I'm content with being in middle class but I also think about future opportunities and work towards bigger goals.

> There are many self-made millionaires.

It's about 8.7% in North America according and 2.7% in Europe to Credit Suisse[1]. That is not _many_, that is _very few_ in my dictionary.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

Expressed differently, 1 in 37 people is a millionaire. Sounds achievable.

Not really. Plus, being a millionaire (e.g. net worth of 1,1m) in San Francisco might not mean exactly what you think it means.

Yes, the BS drained the life out of me. Switched to a startup and it got much better, but once we grew to 100+ people, the endless meetings started piling up again

The worst part is the high degree of censorship. Everyone is so sensitive now that it's impossible to speak openly

> The worst part is the high degree of censorship. Everyone is so sensitive now that it's impossible to speak openly

What would you say if you weren't censored?

where to begin. What would one say if one could speak openly?

* The vast majority of executives are paranoid, risk averse know nothings. They don’t want to take any business risks lest it harm their comp.

* Because most execs don’t understand their business, their customers, their industry, and they distrust their staff — they can’t formulate clear and concise goals and objectives. This is how orgs end up with that blitzkrieg of murky, pointless, meaningless objectives.

* Quite a lot of people in leadership roles got to where there are by making very morally and ethically questionable decisions. It’s largely due to the stupidity of the investor class that these individuals were never caught. The horrible thing is because these individuals are loaded to the gills with malintent they assume the same of everyone else. They tend to structure their organizations around mistrust.

* This is why management practice, especially in the US, appears to be a bad case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. All of management’s bureaucratic nonsense and irrational separation of duties creates self-inflicted wounds. management salves wounds (they never get at the root cause). And then management rewards itself with big bonuses for fixing the problems they created.

* The US Federal Government functions way more effectively than most large companies. The reason is that in the govt policies, procedures, and controls are well documented and maintained. In most orgs all three are usually in flux at all times. This makes unity of effort pretty challenging on a good day.

* If orgs cut a lot of their senior leadership they could pay everyone a lot more -and- see a productivity improvement whilst preserving their margin

* Investors think they’re so clever.

And of course one last thing

* most people have no idea what they’re nattering on about

Agree with most of what you say except the bizarre point of government being more effective than most companies. That one simply makes no sense. The U.S. government is one of the most ineffective organizations on the planet!

Example: Pronouns. I’ve been subjected to Slack bots that chastise us for using gendered pronouns. Like, someone says “could you guys take a look at this?” And the bot calls the person out publicly, saying we don’t use that pronoun around here.

GP specified that it was "the worst part". Was a Slack bot that shunned people from writing "guys" the worst part of the "censorship" you were subjected to?

To be honest, a slack bot like that would make me quit on the spot.

Yeah, I'm getting kind of enraged just thinking about it.

The Elm language community has exactly such a Slack bot. I do find it a little patronizing, and in my observation it makes newcomers feel worse rather than better, but the community overall is really very nice and helpful, so I just put up with it.

Why? Are you that sensitive?

Not OP, and I wouldn't quit over a single message, or single bot.

That said, it is a red flag that the company ok with spamming the employees to virtue signal. It is likely that it will be accompanied with other annoyances and has an incompatible culture.

Better to get out before you go crazy or get fired.

Conversely, an employee reacting so strongly to attempts at introducing gender-inclusive language might be a red flag too. If the employee can't tolerate that, they may have similar hangups about indentation, brace placement, choice of technology, office environment, etc.

Gotta have a little more fun. First, I would leave and go get a drink while contemplating how the fuck I ended up in an org like this. Then I would spend the next two weeks browsing job boards, trolling the company chat, taking long lunches, then hit on that one cute girl and also the kinda fatter one that you think is probably dtf as a backup.

I experienced the “hey guys” Slack chat bot in one organisation, had the org leader confirm that it’s a policy, and subsequently quit.

I’m transhumanist, pro changing your identity, can easily handle gender fluidity, am thrilled that both Haskell and Rust ecosystems are so welcoming of transgender. I used ‘they’ as gender-neutral singular pronoun by default for decades just to not reveal people’s gender arbitrarily. But no language policing, please.

Does your email system do the same thing?

> What would you say if you weren't censored?

"I think the demands you are making with regards to how fragile you are emotionally are not reasonable, and if this is how you must be treated in corporate life it is you that needs therapy". In general I think this response is correct and humane (provided you word it properly), because such fragility is not indicative of mental health. It is extremely not compatible with corporate culture to express this, as the prevailing notion is that everyone around such a person needs to conform 100% of the time to what they want.

What I miss is humor. I work in a multinational and the cultural difference is striking. My European colleagues will make harmless jokes and laugh in most meetings. It makes a really pleasant environment. In comparison, my us colleagues don't laugh or joke at all, too risky as someone could be offended.

Simple expressive language is also taboo. One Italian coworker used a analogy of the product as a beautiful woman in a meeting to get a point across.

Basically all my us colleagues were shocked, because they only use dry corporate speak.

I think it is a big part of imposter syndrome and exhausting to speak and listen to.

Counterpoint to the European thing:

I recently worked for an all-remote team where almost everyone is Europe based, and there was no humour at all in their meetings, and very little personal anecdata of any kind. It was very dry and professional, week in week out. I once cracked a light joke (nothing that anyone could find offensive) and it fell very flat. Doing so was obviously out of place. Never made that mistake again.

Not just missing humour, but I couldn't discern any way that people formed work-social connections outside of those meetings, even though most of our interactions were over Discord. It was all about the work, and that was minimal as well. Even on Discord it was interesting to see much of the time, people talked past each other, not appearing to understand each other's point, or just saying what they'd worked on with no replies. Even DMs tended to be dry and would end when the question at hand was answered. My attempts to be friendly and curious led nowhere, metaphorically like the flatness of talking in an anechoic chamber.

I found it quite depressing and difficult, not because I especially needed work friends, but because I couldn't find a way to get to the "informal real talk mode" about work either. It was difficult to forge the kinds of informal links that make work easier and more effective, and I think everyone's work quality suffered for it because everyone was kind of working on little atomised areas. I saw very little evidence that anyone cared about anyone else's wellbeing either.

You bring up the really good point that this type of dry conversation to obtain answers only is a terrible environment for curiosity and learning. Relating interest, abstract Concepts and gasp opinions not necessarily specific to the problem at hand is an important Avenue towards growth.

You thought the Europeans were the dry ones?

> You thought the Europeans were the dry ones?

Actually yes.

Although the teams I worked with were almost all people in Europe, one was from USA, and another was in Canada (though guessing from their name, perhaps their family came from eastern Europe). Those two were people I enjoyed listening to more, and felt if I reached out it would be feasible to have a bit more depth to the conversation. They managed to sound more interesting and emotionally present than the others, both in writing and verbally, and if I had a choice I'd choose them to work with in future.

It may not be a coincidence that they were among the most technically skilled people as well. I noticed a correlation between high technical skill and pleasant and thoughtful people, though by no means was that universal.

EDIT: After thinking over the above reply, I realised that "dry" isn't the right word for the distinction I'm using. "Humourless" and "entirely work oriented", perhaps. There were some Europeans that weren't dry, they had strongly expressed (but dubious) technical opinions and weren't afraid to say them. But that wasn't humour, and tended to imply someone else was wrong/stupid/incompetent, which imho was unhelpful for fostering prosocial work relationships.

You are experiencing alienation. Your work is driven by motivations that you can't relate to. You are being pulled around by decisions you don't agree with and you have meetings for reasons you can't even conceive of.

Naturally, it is easier to perform some work if you understand and agree with its intent and the way it's executed, or if it's indeed your own choice what to do and how to go about it. You will never fully experience this as a wage worker taking commands from a manager taking commands from a boss taking commands from another boss taking commands from a board of owners motivated by their own profit, but perhaps work will seem more meaningful in a smaller company where you have more influence on decision making.

Depending on culture you may also be able to take a bit more charge. Demand to know a clear agenda in advance of meetings, decline meetings that don't have an agenda that's relevant to your work and insist that the agenda is followed during meetings. Impart on your manager that your time is being wasted when it is.

Same. It makes me feel nihilistic and I stopped giving much of a shit about the work I do. It's just a paycheck, nothing else. I work 20 hours a week and more than half of that is meetings and I am not even in management.

To combat this feeling seeping into the other parts of my life, I have started to do some physical work, like cultivating gourmet mushrooms in my backyard. I asked for less hours some years ago, which means less income, but I am happier and I get to do physical work with my hands.

I have so many hobbies, programming is definately one of my longest but as a creative person its not my only one. If you are a career person, be that person. If you arnt, dont pretend. I never felt like a career was for me, my parents being immegrants who spent everyday of the lives working in search of enough money -- which never came!

Everyday for me is a mix of Gardening, nature, building 4wds, eletrical devices, welding, really anything i wish. Plus my job which i get payed for. I do what i want, everyday. I never get up unless i want to (i can set my own hours and no one questions it) All my shirts/ties/suites are in the bin, replaced with crocs, tank tops, and tracksuites.

I wish i was always in front of customers. I wouldn’t have had the product or any managers acting as proxies and agreeing on things that don’t make any sense and don’t bring any value to them.

Most people think that customers have no idea, while in most cases if you put the right knowledgable people in front of them they would build amazing features together. I have seen it in an AI startup! Whenever us devs worked with the customers we built amazing data science products. Whenever it was managers, it was all these random non sensical requests and demands.

Techy folks with people skills are in high demand nowadays.

Someone who can sell a project directly to the customer while also knowing exactly what is possible and in what timeframe without having to consult someone else is worth their weight in gold.

We still have a few too many "hype-men" type salespeople who are in the Always Be Closing mindset without any sense of what's actually deliverable or even sensible.

I agree, although even devs with no people skills could even do better than those sales people or managers. They could hear customers pain points, clear goals on what to optimize for (revenue, clickthrough, etc) and then build some nice data science product within a reasonable timeframe.

But you usually have these proxy people, who then have to do countless internal meetings to figure out what to actually do, imposing extra ordinary requirements and work hours and that’s why we have all these posts with people hating meetings, burning out and switching fields. If only the middle management and product was tech educated and oriented..

This pretty much!

I’m very much like that. What’s that role/position called? Sales engineer? Or is it more than that?

Sales engineer or a sales-side Solution Architect - lots of fun if you have a good team (and product) behind you, frustrating if not.

Hm, PayScale salaries for Sales Engineers are rather low.

Sales people tend to be on commission a lot.

So if you hook a big client, you can go and order that Tesla :)

I went to a smaller company (<100 people) thinking that there would be less of this type of inefficiency. Then they hire a Scrum master and now it takes longer to gather specs, write documents, create tickets with points, bikeshed and divy up work (ignoring the 3-5 hours of associated weekly meetings) than actually completing the task. Even simple changes are now difficult.

The worst part is that perception and behaviors change, since the requesting party thinks "this should be a 2 hour change" and it takes 2+ weeks to due to process-- the fastest way to inhibit changes are making them riskier due to more effort/buy in from disparate parties, so you get more stagnation. Yea, rigid frameworks will help flush out loafers, but couldn't the same be done with a software type solution or even competent management?

I'm sad to report even around 100 you start running into this. Think Instagram, keep it under 12. Start your own if you have to.

I think it really depends on the company. Some people in this thread suggest moving to a smaller company or a startup but in my experience this doesn't matter. It's all about the culture of your work environment. Sometimes this is even different per department.

I was in a similar position like you a couple of times. Some things I did:

* If less income isn't a problem ask to work less. Why not work 32 hours instead of 40+?

* Find another company. And know that an interview works both ways: the company wants to know you but you can also ask a lot about the company's culture.

* Find a job doing something different but is related to what your experience is.

> Sometimes this is even different per department.

Indeed very true, I've had managers and CTO's who made a point on shielding the engineering teams from any rando meetings, but other departments in the same company where living an experience similar to OPs with death by video-conference.

Even had a manager who would cap meetings to max 3h per week. This really added pressure for ppl to justify townhall type meetings for passive listeners.

In the end it really depends on who your boss is.

We had a unit-wide policy of meeting-free days every week. Everyone knew when they were and knew in advance that could just focus on working full-time.

And I, as a team leader/project manager of sorts, just said to my team not to come into meetings that had no pre-defined agenda. I went in and relayed any questions to the team via the company chat if I didn't know the answer outright. Saved the team from hours of useless meetings.

That's why I never got a data science job. They all seem too close to the business (much closer than typical web app development), and that's a bad thing in my book.

My solution is to try to move "down the stack" and retrain to work with C++ and math-heavy jobs (computer vision, simulation etc.). From what I'm hearing, developers in those area have much less contact with the business side of company.

Funny to see how bad this is. All stuff we do actually should be tightly coupled (be part of) with the so-called business - that brings the value outside the company’s doors

As a dev its not valuable to spend time dealing business. The skills are not transferable and is only value to the current organization. This is where managers shine.

If you're working in say automotive industry on a simulator of car tire deformation, you're so far away from the business side that they leave you alone. Whereas in a SaaS business (or, worse yet, unprofitable SaaS Business), the business types have dozens of ideas on how to improve the app, they bombard you with them, often don't care about engineering culture or long-term code viability but only about speed of delivery etc. Then there are large boring corporations which are profitable, but have so much business and manangerial overhead and those people see generating lots of meetings and ideas (don't have to be good) as a part of their job description.

Down the stack + down the corperate ladder. The higher you are, sure you get more money, but you get MUCH the less time MUCH more pressure.

If your talented in your field, u dont need a ladder to up your earning potential.

> From what I'm hearing, developers in those area have much less contact with the business side of company.

From what I’ve seen though, those domains don’t particularly have much interest in people without established careers in them already.

> We end working 40+ hours/week but the job could be easily done in 30 or less, that is another thing that kills me inside.

75% efficiency kills you inside? Most companies would kill for 75% efficiency. The hyperbolic horror stories are usually 40-hour weeks for 5 hours of work.

I think there is a big difference between the perspective of a business and that of a company.

I'm willing to believe that 75% isn't bad business-wise, but 10 h/week are a bit less than a tenth of your waking hours, over one and a half hours per day, several hundreds per year, a few ten thousands over the course of your life.

Imagine what you could do with that time. Imagine you could spend 1½h per day more with your kids, with the people you love, with friends. Or maybe learning new skills, working on personal projects, going hiking, whatever you enjoy.

I believe that it's perfectly understandable to feel (at the very least) a bit bitter about that when you feel like that time is taken away from you for no clear purpose.

You're not wrong. While nobody should have to do it, some of us just aren't cut out for it. A lot of people can take the bullshit, some of us can't.

I had a boss one time that wanted me to work 50 hours a week. "There's no such thing as a 40 hour a week job anymore" he said. I could get all of my work done in under 20 usually, so doing 40 was bad enough, you want me to put in more time here just so you can prove who's in charge? I didn't work for him very long. There were guys in there that worked for him for years and years, they all looked like husks of men.

If you're not cut out for it don't do it. There are jobs out there that aren't like that, but they're not around every corner. Go try to find one, and don't live a life you don't want because you think you have to.

You are tired because you spend energy projecting a better way for things to be, not bad in itself, but then you physically tense your body to try to make the projection closer to true. It's unclear why people do this but life gets a lot easier if you learn to notice and stop.

Left IT, make couch change wage selling car parts now. Forced to get out of the house but also zero traffic, its a 2 minute walk. First job in 10+ years I didn't hate after 2 weeks.

I'd leave IT if I could find a place to rent that's not sky-high. Even much of the country-side is quite expensive and hard to afford with a regular paying job, assuming you could find a job in those kind of places in the first place. IT is the only thing I can do and still make rent, but I'm so tired of it.

I’d leave IT if everything else that interested me didn’t require me to basically give up the rest of my youth and tens of thousands of dollars.

I am at a FAANG and feel exactly the same: constant meetings (20+ hours a week), insane bike shedding, code reviews cycles that take a huge amount of time, …

I don’t know what my next move will be, but I likely won’t last too long here.

I dream of running my own saas where I completely run the show by myself (support, development, marketing) and make decent middle class income from it but I don’t think I’m good enough.

I think you can do it! As a good hedge, bring in a partner that has different traits that you click with so you can cover each other's weaknesses.

what do you do there? data science as well?

I think you're failing to think outside the box.

Have you considered hitting the ground running, leveraging synergies and lateral blockchain avenues along the way?

In a proactive manner, preferably, for a full paradigm shift.

Carbon nanotubes.

Yes. My answer was to walk away from the tech industry and culture and do part time IT work for my buddy's law firm whilst writing code in my spare time for fun and recovering from my stress-induced triple heart bypass.

I make about as much as a Starbucks assistant manager, though, so your mileage may vary. :-D

How old were you when you needed the bypass?

You are free to move jobs and find a company that values you, not just what money you can make for them. Ive been RemoteOnly for 5yrs, i escaped to a company who is still corperate but pays less and gives you back more. i can easily alt-tab during meetings and i know alot of others do to. Ive got a fishing line off my back deck, i live in a rural/coastal area. i literly never ever have to make small chat. I dont goto really any company functions except christmas parties. i have great, real, honest conversations with all my collegauges, espeically about work-life balance. My previous jobs where in DoD/LawTech; DoD was the was easy, plentyiful money, with the tradeoff being a bureaucratic nightmare and the ownership of your soul.

I agree to some extent with what you are saying but I challenge you to think the opposite way: the way your company works is the most effective way they can work.

Without all of them being YOU and acting like YOU think they should act, how else can they get anything done?

Have you considered that everyone else there thinks the same, except about YOU?

All these meetings and unnecessary occurrences are in fact necessary to get the bare minimum in agreement between all these different people who think differently and are trying to get different things done.

How else would it be done?

How else would it be done, is the question.

Imagine, that your work can be done in 10 hours, but you must sit 40 hours in the office and look busy. Well that’s hard. Pandemic opened me a ton of different opportunities, home office was forbidden for developers before. I hope, that I don’t need to go to the office for more than 2 days a week for a while. I also don’t think I need another job, there is no perfect one. Or if if it is I will not make through the 3 days of interviews.

You need to change teams to a project that interests you or find another job working on something that actually excites you imo

Learn how to work to live, instead of live to work. Automate as much as possible and use the free time in your own projects.

You can't automate meetings. Nor can you make PHBs become logical nor reasonable. Dilbert comic strip is actually a documentary.

If the meeting is big enough, and you are remote, you can do whatever while "listening in" (and out of the other ear, if it doesn't concern you).

Some companies have a "law of two feet" regarding meetings. If it isn't a productive use of your time, you can leave. This is obviously very dependent on culture, and you're being trusted to make the judgement call.

I don’t think this is the problem. As OP says they are working a 40hr+ week but the work can be done in much less.

The work itself isn’t the issue, it’s the fluff around the work. Meetings, agile ceremonies, office politics/playing the game. There was a book on it, Bullshit jobs.

My current situation is I’m in the easiest job I’ve had, fantastic package, working the slowest I’ve ever worked with no manager pressure, no “what you doing, where’s the product”. With that it’s burning me out daily. Agile ceremonies, splitting hairs on non important details bike shedding, not delivering, no product in twelve months, everything needs a meeting, a design doc, and unanimous agreement from the team.

It’s killing me. I want to work hard and I want to build things and see things used. Essentially I’m sat twiddling thumbs knowing I am not working at my best because the culture/process is stopping me from actually doing the real work, the product features that customers pay for.

Sometimes this is related to team workflow. On my last job I landed at a team with easy and interesting work, but it had lots of meetings, 2-4 daily from 1/2hr up to 2hrs, with some high pitch voices that drilled my ears, and ofcourse the soul-sucking boredom and repetitive polite fights. The team was dissolved and I moved to other teams with sane workflows, then I realized I had some bad luck at the beginning, but if that happened again I'd try to get transfered.

If I worked in a company that was as described, I'd be sick of it, too. But that description is a caricature of the worst of companies. So if it is accurate, you can find a better place to be and you should. Not all companies are like that.

Even so, all companies have their own flaws. You have to be able to communicate those flaws to leadership and feel comfortable with that process. Sometimes when you do so, change will occur, sometimes it will not. Sometimes you are told why not, sometimes it just seems to get dropped. This isn't ideal but it is the corporate world.

The key is to figure out what flaws you can live with. To find some joy in the good side of the work. Or at the very least, just to accept that this is the price you pay to get the paycheck. If you do not feel that the paycheck makes it worth the trouble, you are in the wrong job.

* Does anyone else feels like that? Yes. 2 multinationals. From bad to (much) worse. Highly pathological orgs in the Westrum scale. I was annoyed by it all in the first one but it hit the bottom with the current one. I hate every second I spend there now.

* What do you do to overcome this feeling? I'm aggressively interviewing aiming to smaller companies. Hope I'll get out and into a healthier env before I get sick.

PS: Most of these companies are a dead empty shell already. It's just that due to inertia it will take years or decades for them to actually die, if we assume they operate in a mildly healthy market -and that's a big IF. There's loads of them out there. Actually the majority is like that. Bands that made a few good albums and are capitalising on past glory.

Yes. I have no solution for you, but all I can say is that I feel you. My coping mechanism was to work freelance; less hours and more "fun" projects, but freelance work also comes with its own flavor of bs, so I think it's just a flaw with the human condition at this point.

Agreed. So far we cannot change the human condition, we can only influence the environment, but I am not sure how much, given the complexity.

What flavor of bs would that be? I have no experience with, but aside from the usual "pay your own everything" and taxes, it seems like an alright place to be. I could also be very, or conditionally, wrong.

I started working at startups in the early 00's right out of school, and arrived at roughly the same conclusion you did.

I switched to working in higher ed at a research institution (making much less, of course). I won't pretend that I'm out there saving lives or anything, and I won't pretend that there's not still a massive amount of BS and red tape, but at the end of the day I do go home and think I might be contributing something actually useful to the researchers and educators who are using my software.

It's important to not define yourself by your work, but it's also important to feel like your work has some meaning. I just couldn't find that at startups (even one I had high hopes for, in the energy sector working on smart grid tech).

Work for a small company: 5 to 30 people.

It seems you like your work, but not your working environment. Big companies always have this kind bullshit. Small companies however, care about the work and results. You can really make a noticeable difference when you represent 10% of a company.

Most days feel like a constant struggle between having to do my work and people getting in the way.

After 2 years I still don't know what's the functionality of my PO, basically he just pass the task from the top to poorly written tickets that constantly miss information or does not take into account or business logic, this causes a back and forth between me redefining the tickets and having to explain to him, causing him to re-explain those changes up with constant delays and blockers.

My manager is part of another team and barely interacts with my work or me in any meaningful way, we have bi-weekly 1 on 1 that are constantly cancelled for lack of topics.

I still dont know whats the role of my PO neither. He basically understand everything wrong lol

I overcame this feeling by looking at it as more of an "engineering problem". The "bs" happens naturally when there are a lot of people.. You can act actively to mitigate this.. say that you think something is useless, propose something better.. and we have many biases, it is difficult to understand the value of something and quickly label it as "bs".

I understand that you feel frustrated; your role does not match your expectations. So maybe you should find out the meaning and the purpose of your role. In the end, you are paid for adding value in the corporate environment; your contribution can happen in many ways, e.g. by hosting more effective meetings or by improving decision frequency and speed etc. Adding value in a corporation is not always about technical achievements, but also about improving the team and the game (as a social process). If this is not your cup of tea, you might be better served by a technical role in some specialized consulting company.

Smaller companies have less of this corporate bs. In my last company I could request them to take my part first in meetings so I can leave first.

I’ve been quite vocal to show my happiness and ask them to explain if that meeting ads value anywhere.

> I'm working as a data analyst/scientist for two years and I'm already tired.

One of the things that I dislike in data science specifically is the initial stages where you have to prove that there's a use case, or (in some companies) to convince people that they need your work in some way. It's very frustrating and demotivating and I just don't care enough.

Once you get to the building stage (if that's even part of your job), then it's much more satisfying. That's one of the reasons why I want to switch to software development at some point.

You work for money, labor in exchange for cash. There is no perfect company and you have to take in the good with the bad. Working with people you get along with goes a long way.

It is an essential requirement of working with other humans that you put up with some of their bullshit. Getting to do work you enjoy and getting paid good money for it is amazing. Every company is there to turn a profit, that will never change. Personally having things to look forward to outside of work and trying to see bullshit from the perspective of the bullshitters helps a lot.

Why not find the person who makes those "arbitrary and weird decisions to make the boss and customers happy"? (i) tell them that the decisions look arbitrary and weird from where you are standing, (ii) ask them why they make them.

At worst, you will discover that they are an *hole (which you probably thought already), and at best they'll listen, and talk with you and you'll make a small step on fixing your corner of the world.

And of course you might discover that the decisions were not weird or arbitrary, and were in fact guided by a genuine need, or some context you are unaware of.

While it can definitely backfire if your product people never push back and agree to things that are impractical/impossible, ultimately "keeping the customer happy" is how the business stays in business and paying people.

Your job isn't there to provide you with employment, it's there to meet the business needs and that is your role. If you are deemed to not be a functional part of the apparatus then you will quickly be terminated. The corporate structure is there is facilitate this and that means doing the corporate asks. Daft as they might seem. After all, you are just a cog in the machine.

Capitalism, put in another words.

The key reason behind it is that you don’t care about the company.

It means that either you’re not high enough in hierarchy to feel the ownership, to get noticeable stocks etc.

You’re just being used as an expensive cog in the wheel.

Or/and you don’t care about the company mission.

Why are you still there I wonder?

In my experience as soon as I achieve my own goals with an employer - I leave the next day.

My company only has roughly 20min per day of meetings per employee. We also are looking for data science. Fully remote.

Maybe you just got unlucky with your company. My startup CEO allows everyone to work remotely and we even got LTE USB sticks so that we can bring our laptop and work from nature. I'm currently surrounded by goats. The only mandatory event is an all-hands meeting once per week.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say OP is the typical one while you’re the lucky one.

You always have a choice to reframe things. Look at it as an opportunity to learn something new every day. Learn to improve your communication skills. Learn to lead the meetings. There are endless opportunities if you look at the flip side of your situation.

Join the 4-day work week campaign.

There's some interesting research around this. I've summed some of it up in a blog post: https://niklasblog.com/?p=25924

In my experience, the only way to avoid this is to work at a very small company, one with no more than ten people. This usually means a consultancy or a niche product (like a WordPress plugin, for example.)

Sounds like you want to be in a startup where you'll work 60+ hours! I'd honestly like a start-up break and am jealous of your 'boring' job.

I think u didn't understand what I wrote. Read again.

If your boss making suboptimal decisions and your peers being not-so-smart are the worst things about your job, then you have an amazing job.

You should be looking for another job. The market is hot for data scientists, you can look around and find something meaningful.

The easiest, bullshittiest jobs I've had are the ones that burned me out the most.

Go make something for yourself. Or do some consulting work.

Why are you going to useless meetings?

In many companies, it is frowned upon to decline meetings to which you are invited as a 'required' attendee. Likewise, it can be seen as rude if you repeatedly leave meetings which you don't think are a valuable use of your time.

Useless/overlong meetings seem to be a consequence of poor middle management and/or just the general structure of large corporations where lines of communication and hierarchies of responsibilities are complex.

What I do personally is to always ask for an agenda before accepting a meeting request. It's not rude to request one and can help focus discussion or see where you can add value.

Same here.

I've thought about it a lot, I feel like everything the industry touches magically turns to shit.

Maybe I'm being a little negative, I know. But I think about things I really like, things I do for free in my spare time and when I put (imaginatively) on top of that a business layer, a management layer, a stakeholder layer, etc. I can see it being destroyed in front of my eyes (I'm not talking about computer stuff, but cooking, sports, writing...).

It's capitalism my friends. Alternatives?

Definitely yes. Thanks to WFH. It still exists, but with WFH bs is considerably less.

One of reasons why I'm freelancer. I don't have to bother with corpo bs.

Seek financial independence and don’t give away the best hours of your life.

It keeps upper management busy and out of your hair micromanaging you.

If 30 of your 40 hours are productive, you are winning.

Find another job in a company that fits you culturally.

there is a small minority of self-employed people who would agree with you, but they are too few to be heard.

Sounds like you need a new job mate!

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