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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

My former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.

Did she just not get it? Or did she get it, and it was some weird flex making us watch it with her? I still don’t know.

Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.

Even your CEO has a board to deal with.

I always think it's strange when people draw a mental dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on the other side are living in totally different experiences of the world.

Middle management rarely has enough power to make any changes. They have to dish out whatever bullshit is handed down to them from above.

Can confirm, as an EM this is very true. The best you can hope for is that we're transparent with you about the BS and don't BS you. That's what I try to do.

I get that we’re all part of the same system, but I consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the entirety of that system. It’s not just “my boss is dumb,” it’s “this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we’d all be happier working outside with our muscles.”

And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.

> but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be there any more than you did. They were forced to do corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity of it all.

So they tried to come up with something entertaining that they could claim was passably work-related. They were trying to do their best by you within the constraints of what was mandated by their job.

This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when they were trying to bond and do something nice for the team within the constraints of their job.

You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a little league coach and who thought leading his team was the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us a psychology test of his own creation and trying to lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and weaknesses were based on all the different self-help books he read.

Totally valid that my boss probably didn’t want to be there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google where “offsite” meant “go spend company money to do something fun.”

Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?

Because your manager might have been dealing with something privately, and didn't feel like doing something fun, but had to because the Gods Of Corporate decreed it so.

And so, an act of rebellion against a shared reality that forces you to have fun on schedule when it's time for the quarterly offsite.

I dunno watching office space with my team doesn't seem like the worst way to spend some time together. Maybe just reading too much into it?

Office Space has become a part of the corporate culture's shared language. You are out of the loop if you haven't seen it, and it wouldn't surprise me that a lot of people are introduced to it in a work-related environment (as I was).

> I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe

...they learned it by watching us?

To add some meta to your edit: I would swear you are not an LLM... or maybe an LLM trained on a lot of comments on HN.

Don't worry, your use of its not X, it's Y did not trigger the LLM pattern match for me. I think the main reason is that your two clauses are of very disparate lengths. LLMs use its X not Y as a rhetorical device that relies on brevity and punchiness, while your longer quote has the authentic ring of clumsy, human phrasing.

You have seen a human side of that manager. She acted like a human.

>And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

That just means they valued their actual sentiments more than keeping appearances. Doesn't sound weird: it sounds humane.

>Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?

To point at the elephant in the room, as opposed to just go on with the program and have another forced fun session.

I mean, your questions amount to "why couldn't she just be a good cog and pretend like the rest of us?"

It's like being surprised a coworker is a human on the inside.

> Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.

LLMs didn't come up with their quirks in a vacuum. Humans always influenced each other in their language use.

It used to be over sound waves mostly but they don't travel far, then came the printing press, later radio and TV. LLMs are just another language blender.

It seems to me that line managers straddle the line somewhat and above that is where it is a really different world. I have started a company and now back to being an IC so been on both sides of it. It's not totally different, but it is a lot.

I've been back and forth between manager and IC, too.

It is different. I won't deny that.

However, politics and corporate absurdist formalities aren't exclusive to management. A lot of the corporate politics and face-palm worthy office games I've dealt with came from ICs, either as my peers, reports, or as some other manager's reports.

We just tend to give a pass to ICs when they do it because they're not viewed as having as much power in the office.

I actually think managers struggle much more than ICs, because they have to deal with quirks of their multiple reports + their boss’s.

Yeah, I sometimes miss the more simple IC life. Office politics is a more of a problem in management, but also dealing with humans all the time is just more messy.

A decent manager, especially a low level manager of ICs, will work hard to shield her charges from the full impact of the company's bureaucracy. And even a mediocre manager can't help but do some of that: they usually still have to approve time off requests and deal with the paperwork for performance evaluations etc.

> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.

Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.

I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.

Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.

> Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency.

I always thought Lumberg gets a somewhat un-derserved bad rap in that flick. He is characterized as the villain and of course is—from Peter’s perspective which is where the story is told. But within that universe and at a 10,000 foot POV was he? He seems to be the only one within the corporation that is actually functional, capable, motivated and excelling in his role. No doubt he is a dick, but that’s just part of his role and he’s good at it. He’s a cog, knows he’s a cog, but realizes the machine still needs to run. He recognizes that Peter has hit that competence/incompetence point. He also realizes the Bob’s are incompetent, but powerful. He really is the only one that seems to realize everything that is going on.

His communication deficit was too big to actually be a good manager, no?

(Well, maybe not. Maybe being soul-crushingly efficient is optimal if you know most people will fluctuate out soon anyway, so your lack of ability to actually build a rapport with them is not a material impediment to deliver results sustainably.)

Did you not realize we’ve built a system where everyone is both oppressor and oppressed. Did you not think she too had an idiot boss?

Shit rolls downhill...and most people just try to keep an eye on where the next turd comes from without bothering to watch where it goes after it's past them.

That's... So wise... Where is that from

from how to be a plumber --

  Shit flows downhill, payday is on Friday.

You forgot the most important rule of plumbing: Don’t bite your fingernails.

Not enough people realize this, unfortunately. If they did our system would be flatter than it currently is. You wouldn't have "peaks", so to speak.

Well, driving an Uber is pretty flat.

I watched Office Space with a bunch of coworkers at a previous job. It's a funny movie that most people in startups view as a parody of big company office life. Our company didn't function like the movie.

You sound as though you worked for one of my managers, though he just gave everyone a copy of the DVD for Christmas one year. The thing is, he definitely got it, knew he was part of the system, and did his best to take care of the people working for him.

I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.

Office Space was released in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. So, of course office jobs (particularly software jobs) would decrease when that bubble popped.

But it's not as a result of that movie.

The specific claim made was a spike in voluntary resignations, which should be distinguishable from any bubble popping effect.

I specifically avoided making the claim because you really cannot prove either way

I remember when it was released, I graduated that year, and I remember the reactions at the time

it would still be anecdotal and it's hard to know how many people did in fact resign as a result of the impact from this film, and if it's something that would make any difference in the grand scheme of things

Perhaps she just had a good sense of humor? It's a great movie after all..

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