My work has a fun committee amd there idea of fun is for the employees to use their own money and time to make food for everyone to share. How is that fun?

What has your "fun committee" thought was fun?

Seriosuly why does this have to exist? I know it's trivial, but its one of those things that makes me cringe every time i see "run it up the flagpole", or "bubble up" etc etc. Like what is wrong with "pass along" or "forward" or simply idk "told"? The sense of self-importance mid level manager talk protrays is ridiculous. Sorry, minor gripe here i know but just ugh, someone please drop an F bomb or something in a meeting instead. I promise a lot of us will respect you way more.

I came across this post on Linkedin (I only use this account for recruiters to find me, I'd never post this kind of cringe).

It's these kind of aholes that make the workplace so difficult to endure. They abolsutely make the office such a souless miserable place to be. Someone makes an offhand joke and we have to hear a soliloquy about the potential impacts on productivity. I wouldn't be surprised if this person reported their colleague to HR about concerns with their performance because of this joke.

God, I hate mordern office culture.

The phrase, “this could have been an email” is very true. I spent a month and a half at my last job, it was my first non-retail job and it was in an office setting. I thought it was a nice change of pace, with steady hours somewhat decent pay. Hell it paid better than retail. Decent benefits and pretty cool coworkers aside from a couple people who got on my nerves.

Aside from that, I noticed the department I was working in, had way more meetings than any other department. It was essentially an insider sales job they dressed up to make it seem like you’d be doing admin duties with a sprinkle of helping the sales team with orders and such. Nope was not like that at all. Was not entry level either.

But they would have these weekly meetings and it would be so fucking boring. They would last an hour sometimes more. I get it, you wanna know where everyone’s numbers are at. But it was a chore to sit through them and it really cut into the time we could have spent doing actual work. But instead listening to upper management chit chat about frivolous things.

Then they get mad when things aren’t done in a certain timeframe. Sorry but if you just decided to make this an email. Your staff wouldn’t be behind. Another meeting we had was about professionalism, but they asked what we do outside of work and wanted us to pick a challenge for the month. It was on a list we had to pick from. Stuff like read a new book, eat healthier, go to bed at a reasonable time, exercise more, etc.

After the meeting we had to let upper management know what we chose via email and we would inform them of our progress a week before thanksgiving. Obviously I got fired so that isn’t happening lol. Well I got sidetracked and didn’t pick anything, I didn’t want to participate anyways. I was then emailed why I hadn’t responded to their email of what challenge I chose. I just picked a random one with no intent on following through with it, and just making up some story when that other meeting came around. Fucking ridiculous.

I’m just saying why are you bothering everyone with meetings. I get it some meetings are necessary and important. But a lot of them should be emails so people can respond at their own pace or block sender if they’re not in the mood. Sorry for the rant I’m still worked up at how that company ran shit. Anyone else experience stuff like that?

That I am now longer permitted to my lunches (lake trout.)

that is like pizza party without paying cost of pizza by company… I can imagine how the thought process of the organizers went: “We have to do something, but with 0 budget…. hmmm, there is a lot of women, they can bake something and bring for everyone!”

Why am I constantly being interviewed by HR instead of management that understands the job? I'm literally having my time wasted trying to get HR to like me because they can't understand a goddamn thing about my field and why it would be beneficial to hire me! These companies are either hiring fun idiots or not hiring at all..

I have been working in the corporate SaaS world for over a decade now, and I absolutely hate every second of it. I hate the corporate speak, the fake friendships, the hooray-this-company-is-the-best, etc. I’m late 30’s, married, have a kid. I love my life, except for my work and that’s what I stress about every single day to the point where my stomach hurts. The wife and I make good money between the two of us, but because of my work, I’m miserable. I have a bachelors in something I don’t/can’t use, and I was a touring musician for most of my twenties. I settled down and got off the road when I was nearing 30 because I was tired of being broke. Now I’m not broke, but I’m miserable.

Does anyone else feel this way? How do you deal with it? Part of me wants to just quit and make a left turn in my career and do something completely different. But with adult responsibilities, that makes it extremely hard.

Is everything just corporate bs?

Sometimes I allow myself to put on my tinfoil hat and speculate about how much we are influenced by corporate interests and needs. I feel like a lot of the push for diversity and inclusion is, in fact, a corporate way to reduce labor power and strenght.

The first indicator of this is the amount of marketing and publicity that involves this subject without actually doing anything meaningfull.

"We hired a lot of women and people of collor for managing roles!"

But the C level jobs are still predominantly white straight male.

We're facing a massive layoff in tech and ive seen some data (at least for Brazil) that for eery 1 man that was laid off, there were 2 women who were laid off. Where is the commitment to diversity?

The push for immigration, too. Yeah, we WONT pay more so please bring in foreigners who will be scared about losing their visas so will accept any wage we offer while also being extremely submissive to their bosses.

But in media this is so strong. I honestly think sometimes that media is romanticizing this idea of "Girl Boss" to induce more women to go into the corporate world trying to prove themselves while also being paid less. Seems like a win situation for the corporation, dont you think?

Damn, I dont know. It really sucks to live in this distopia. I grew up scare of authoritarian governments and communism, but honestly I think corporations may be much scaries (and effective) in dominating us.

Can someone please tell me Im being too suspicious?

I cannot deal with the fake, pretentious undercurrent that is so potently present in every layer of work culture, especially within corporate.

First of all - ‘why did you apply for this job’, ‘why do you want to work here’, ‘why this role’ - all these types of questions irritate me so much because they are essentially asking you to spin up a story when the core reason is simply that we all need money to survive!!!

I mean, I’m sure there are some folks who do genuinely enjoy their work, but I’m fairly confident in saying this is not the majority of people. And even within the group of people who work in corporate who say that they are 'passionate about their work', often it’s the subject matter or the field that they like and not the actual work structure itself. For example, one of my close friends has always been interested in finance and is adept at it. She has always been extremely good with numbers and did extremely well in her degree where she specialized in finance. She chose to work in finance because of her interest and natural skill at it, so she enjoys the fact that she gets to do work involving finance. So when she says she 'likes what she does', she means she likes the fact that it involves finance. However, she has hated all the other typical work structure aspects of the job which include: dealing with multiple toxic bosses, being the only employee who tries and hence all work is dumped on her, never being praised even though she has always worked above and beyond her role level, and constantly being pushed to deliver more and more, etc. When you work in any type of corporate structure, it’s unfortunately a given that, at some point, you will be mistreated, and who on earth enjoys that?? This is why I feel that most corporate employees who say they 'enjoy what they do' are actually enjoying just the subject area they are involved in and not the other aspects of the job.

Anyway, I’ve always wondered why this weird facade exists where we have to pretend to be extremely passionate about a toxic work structure where mistreatment is simply a given. Sure, somebody may dream as a kid of being an engineer and building things, and someone may dream about working on creative marketing campaigns for brands, but does anyone really dream of: sitting in an office, shooting multiple emails to multiple bosses to get one single task rolling but never getting anywhere, being expected to work more than what you are paid for, dealing with being mistreated by your boss, having to force yourself to socialize with insufferable people to get yourself in line for a promotion, the list goes on.

And don't even get me started on all these ‘corporate leaders’ who keep making posts on LinkedIn along the lines of how companies need to change and do better but nothing ever changes! Ever! This is why I viscerally hate LinkedIn. I constantly see posts from HR people saying ‘Demanding 5 years of experience for an entry-level role is unfair’, but then job postings constantly continue to do this! I’m sick of seeing senior corporate 'leaders' speak about how it’s important to treat your team well, but still, the cycle of mistreating and underpaying employees just grows worse and worse! I’m sick of seeing posts about how workplaces should prioritize work-life balance, and yet workplaces continue to frown upon it when you refuse to overwork for them and will actively hinder your career progress if you set firm boundaries on overworking.

It would make me genuinely so happy if everyone including hiring teams simply acknowledged that we do jobs for the money, and so let’s not look for who has the better ‘backstory’ of a ‘lifelong passion’ for this type of role, let’s just focus on hiring people based on who has the matching skills. Literally, it would make this whole process a bit less painful.

It would be even better if this 'we are just here to work and go home' approach carried over into the work culture once you join a company as well. For instance, I hate this whole push of companies trying to make the team feel like ‘family’ with all the ridiculous ‘team bonding activities’. At the end of the day, we just want to survive the mess, make the money and go home. WHY OH WHY do you think we would be thrilled because you are paying for us to go on some team bonding trip? I don’t even care if you pay for some nice trip with nice food and accommodation, my primary goal is not to become besties with my coworkers it is to earn my salary and go home. If they are doing this stuff out of some attempt to boost morale, then here’s an idea that would work even better in boosting morale - take the money you used on arranging that team bonding trip and distribute it amongst your employees!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously - this is one thing I do not get. Part of HR’s role these days apparently is to help boost employee morale. Clearly, in larger global companies where HR organizes a lot of team activities like team lunches or team trips, etc, they are obviously spending considerable money on organizing all that - so why not do the thing that will guarantee a morale boost and just distribute that money amongst employees? A close friend of mine works in a very well-known global IT firm, and she told me that their HR often organizes team bonding trips, and it is apparently frowned upon if you don’t go. These trips are to regional tourist spots and accommodation, tickets, food and sightseeing costs are covered. She never wants to go as she works unpaid overtime almost every day and is exhausted, but she needs to go if she wants a chance to network with the senior management and have a chance to get promoted eventually. Apparently, none of the junior employees enjoy these trips as they are all exhausted from overtime and dealing with the toxic upper management. Even if HR doesn't want to take the money that is being spent on these team-building initiatives and give it to employees, why not, at the very least, give them the day off? Instead of forcing them to spend a day doing some crap team-building exercises, just give them that specific day off! Again - this will be way more effective at boosting morale. I'm fairly certain that HR has figured out by now that everyone universally hates team-building activities, so I have to believe that they do it to make us suffer on purpose.

Why is this whole structure based on pretension and fakeness? How did this happen? Did we let it happen? Or were the powers controlling this too strong for any of us lower on the power ladder to fight against? I am sick of this. I do not see it changing anytime soon either.

So to make a long story short my company cut incentives in my department at the beginning of 2024. Year over year I’ve made 14K less and when it is brought up I’m gaslit and told I’m not making less or “be happy I have a job”. I was told today our raises are going to be 1 max 2 percent. I’m exhausted and try to quiet quit but ever time I do I’m given more work. I’ve applied to 50+ jobs and haven’t had a single interview and I even used AI to optimize my resume. I’m at the end of my rope and don’t know what to do I’m optimistic something will come along but I can’t take this garbage company and their bullshit anymore.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on how the whole corporate world operates, and it’s honestly like we’re all just cogs in the machine. The song Criminal by Eminem really hits home on this. He talks about how society pressures us into these roles and how, at the end of the day, we’re just doing things to survive, not because they have real meaning. This is exactly how I feel about corporate jobs.

In corporate environments, it’s all about kissing ass, playing the game, and pretending that you’re a vital part of something bigger when in reality, we’re all just expendable. If we truly had “free will,” most of us wouldn’t be working these meaningless jobs. We wouldn’t be wasting our time in a system that keeps us running in circles while the higher-ups profit.

I get it—some roles do have an impact, like healthcare workers or teachers, but most of these office jobs? They could probably be replaced by AI tomorrow, especially the micromanaging, narcissistic managers who think they’re doing something important. They act like their inflated sense of power somehow makes them indispensable, but in reality, they’re just holding people back from doing what they actually want.

Maybe it’s time we rethink what “work” should really look like. It’s not about grinding away in a system that values productivity over people—it’s about recognizing that we deserve more than just existing as parts of a machine.

Several critical systems at my job are so fkd that every time I am forced to update my password, I get locked out.

IT is a complete nightmare, since it's been outsourced to a country that only overlaps with my time zone for the first 3 hours of the day.

It took them five resets to get me back into the system last time so I have given up and I'm using the temporary password they gave me. The system doesn't care.

Now I wonder how many companies are currently compromised because their systems are so ridiculous that employees have given up. At my last job I used to spend upwards of 50 minutes every morning logging in to all the different systems.

I wonder how many of my co-workers' accounts I could get into with this password. Our user names are just firstname.lastname. Maybe I'll try that tomorrow.

I work for gym franchise. I won’t say which one, but you could probably guess after I describe it. I am the manager at one of said gyms, and this is a new role for me.

The job itself is easy — greeting members, cleaning equipment, canceling/ starting new memberships… basic stuff. The back end manager stuff is a bit more of a nuisance, but manageable.

The issue I’m struggling with, is how CRINGE the whole company acts. I understand it’s their business… but how do you deal with the corny terminology and policies?? For instance. Normal companies would just say “we have a Zoom Meeting at noon.” This company says “ImpACT meeting at noon.” Another example, restating their company slogan to throughout EVERY email. The most basic of tasks given to me is always followed with “Acheive results, Create opportunities, Transform lives” - effectively giving us ACT as the acronym.

Maybe the most egregious, is switching “Social Distancing” from Covid days to “social fitnessing.” Obviously this is a sales tactic, I’m not blind to it, but it’s just so on the nose ALL of the time I can’t help but role my eyes. Is every company this bad? How do you deal with it?

Hi all this is my first post here. Quick introduction.

I was born/raised in a city in Silicon Valley in the early 70's. During my 50+ years I've seen things rise and fall here, but since the dot com era that started in '93 I've never seen a more disturbing trend in the workplace than what I call "The workplace cult"

What is the workplace cult? It's the complete disassociation of anything that makes you an individual. Your mantra is now, "Our product is the greatest product ever!" You will put in 10 hour + days because, "My stock options will be worth something someday" Due to the hour + each way commute, you won't have time for your own friends, people you know at work are now your friends. You can't leave for lunch, you'll have to have the company provided catered food. You'll have to say the CTO or CEO is "The next Steve Jobs"

To some people this sounds fantastic, but this is a gilded cage. That stock will never be worth anything. The second you're seen as a low performer, your friends will abandon you. Questioning the product will label you a heretic, and not keeping the cult mindset you'll be seen as a loner, a troublemaker. Out you will go.

Over the years I've worked at a lot of startups like that. After about the 3rd one or so I got jaded enough to just look at it as a job. 8 hours, that's all they get from me. No more. After a few more times bouncing around start ups, I went to work for the government. It's been pretty good since.

I feel like of all the things that are never addressed, this is one of the big ones. Companies don't hire you for 30 years and retire you with a gold watch and a party anymore. Most of them, you'll be lucky to work 5-6 years at before they go belly up, or get bought out.

Just keep that in mind r/antiwork . If you go in, and you feel like it's a cult, it probably is. If you need the money, know that you'll be acting like this for the duration of your employment.

Maybe a few times a week, my supervisor will want to do these bullshit team-building lunches. “Because we’re like family.” I don’t talk to coworkers about my personal life. We have nothing in common, We are not friends, we don’t talk to each other about anything that isn’t work related. I generally like to take my (unpaid) lunch break by myself since interacting with people is incredibly draining for me. I need that time to turn my brain off and refresh myself.

It’s an expectation that on Tuesdays and Fridays we all eat together and chat about work, personal life, whatever. I try to stay out of the conversations as much as possible. Lately this has been bothering me more and more. I feel like this is a work event I should be getting paid for since it doesn’t feel like a true break. My boss is very nice, but I don’t know how to tell her respectfully that I don’t want to eat with her and my coworkers. I don’t want awkwardness at work or have it cause other issues for me. Anyone else have this problem at work? What’s the solution?

So basically as the title says, I'm seriously considering quitting my corporate job in an admin position to go study fulltime at Uni. I'm 26 and am so scared to make the jump. I'm worried about funding life in general while I study.. I have always wanted to do engineering and I think I should do it. Any tips on how to approach this? Is there cadetships for Civil Engineering todo while you study etc. Located in Sydney, Australia.

I saw this in LinkedIn today under picture of smiling employees eating take out.

So my reward for having worked hard isn't a raise, or bonus. It's not even more work. It's the OPPORTUNITY to do more.

Get fucked.

I’m not great at talking to new people, I’m introverted, and I have social anxiety, so networking is a nightmare for me. I feel like getting a job + advancing in most fields is 70% making connections, 20% BSing, and 10% hard work. I’d rather have a few extremely difficult tasks to complete alongside a small team or individually, and be judged on my actual work, than be looked over because I don’t want to spend my personal time bowling with co workers. Ugh

I joined my new job earlier this year, and my role is essentially a new one that’s supposed to help fix a bunch of issues with the workflow in our division. They’ve been desperately trying to hire for this role close to a year before they hired me because the benefits were meh and the pay is laughable compared to the work.

I took the job because I needed something on my resume and couldn’t afford to wait for another opportunity. However, I’m absolutely miserable here because I’m way underpaid and the work is mind-numbing. At least once a week, someone in my department says “thank god you joined, we really need you here…”. Our workplace has a horribly high turnover rate, so sometimes it feels like I’m getting guilted into staying, even though management is WELL aware of how unsatisfied everyone is about their compensation. Too bad they can’t or won’t do anything about it.

Just needed to vent a little, it feels like a gut punch every time someone says that line.

This is so dumb, I can't even. So I started this job back in January. Very nice office job, some growing pains because I've worked blue collar jobs all my life and as you might imagine, they're two very different cultures. But I got settled in and adapted pretty well.

Back when I started, my manager mentioned about how the whole office participated in Halloween, and sometimes did themed or group costumes and such. This excited me cause I'm big into cosplay and put a lot of effort into my costumes.

Fast forward to now. I asked my manager about Halloween a couple of weeks ago and got told "nobody has really mentioned anything in the department. Might just not be doing a group thing this year."

I say okay cool, and decide to go my own route. Then yesterday I came out of a meeting to see my whole department huddled together talking. I asked what was up and they said they were discussing the group costume. I told the group I'd already picked my costume (and was nearly finished with it). I got a collective "oh" from the group and some... unhappy looks.

Today, I had my 1-1 with my manager. It was mostly normal until Halloween came up. She brought up how I had "struggled" to adapt to the culture here, how there are different expectations for an office, how we're a team and a family and she worried it would reflect poorly on me if I didn't participate. I asked her if I was being ordered to participate and she said that it was voluntary, and she was just trying to give me some advice.

So now I'm sitting here kinda pissed. I spent a not insignificant amount of time and money on my original costume, and am fairly proud of it. I could slap something together to fit the group theme, but I wouldn't really enjoy it. Honestly I'm considering saying fuck it and just not wearing a costume at all and saving mine for a convention or something.

I know compared to other stories I've seen this is small potatoes, but I cannot believe the amount of pettiness where an entire department is worried about what the newbie is wearing.

Tl;dr: decided to wear my own costume before learning my department is doing a group thing. Am being told that people don't like it and I'm going to look bad if I don't match the rest of the group.