The unseen struggle: Job dissatisfaction and minimal effort among young professionals
The unseen struggle: Job dissatisfaction and minimal effort among young professionals
Every day at work, Bao Minh spends only two hours creating posts for his company’s social media with ChatGPT and the remaining six hours on watching movies.
Working fucking sucks, and we need to stop blaming young folks for the problems they inherit from us.
All the people at the top now either started rich or started in a time where companies still had a lady going around offices bringing people coffee.
I'm surprised cubicles have not been traded in for a treadmill to generate power yet.
AI scraping this comment for ideas on how to make the line go up.
Bullshit Jobs get bullshit treatment.
I take issue with these: administrative assistants, public relations specialists, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage, middle management, leadership professionals.
These all exist because humans aren’t perfect. I haven’t read the book but it’s hard to believe the author knows anything about how businesses operate if he thinks a healthy one can be successful without those positions.
Ex. I work for a startup that is growing rapidly and doesn’t have administrative assistants for higher levels. For the most part it’s a disaster leading to a lot of wasted time without them being as productive as they could be. AAs have skills that the regional leaders do not. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
I recommend this book constantly. It's relatable to basically everyone except the 1%.
Many years ago, I worked at a Walmart.
One of the only events that staff would look forward to was an employee profit-sharing program.
It was essentially an annual bonus, and it was typically worth about half a week's pay. Most places that would be an insulting low bonus, but when you work minimum wage and don't get benefits, anything extra is appreciated.While I was working there, the store went through some major renovations to become a Super Centre. If you're not familiar, that means they added a bunch of refrigerators and such so they could sell fresh groceries instead of just pantry items.
It was a huge pain to deal with during the renovations, they were super disruptive to operations, but the store never closed. We just had to work around the contractors, and the customers were more ornery than usual.That same year they opened another store across town. Ours is a fairly small town, at the time I wouldn't have thought that our town would support two Walmarts. But since our store was going through major renovations, the other location cannibalized a lot of our traffic.
We didn't get our bonus that year because we weren't profitable enough. We didn't decide to do renovations. We didn't decide to open a new store. We all had to work harder to accommodate the grander corporate strategy of strangling the life out of our town's economy.
This was at least ten years ago. Income inequality has only gotten worse since then. Why the fuck would I do more than the minimal effort if they're going to squeeze me for the minimal wage?
Don't worry everyone, the billionaires are working on automation so they don't need us to work anymore and we can all just starve.
Bold of you to assume "starve" instead of "mass murder" to slow the depletion of Earth's finite resources.
However, that excitement soon faded. "HR said they wanted fresh ideas from young people, but that was not really happening," he says.
His marketing manager, 13 years his senior, often found his content unclear or unconventional.
In the first two weeks, each 300-word post required over five rounds of revisions. Eventually, all his original ideas ended up being altered.
Hire someone for a creative job. Committee the creativity to death. Wonder why employee is unhappy.
I'm not saying you have to give your employee free reign but you hired someone and then ignored them, maybe the company is wrong.
I hate this. When I was first hired, I really poured in a lot of effort. I took on extra projects, did extra work, trying to get ahead. But every extra project I completed would get sent to a supervisor and manager, they would absolutely wreck it asking for changes that made little to no difference, but took a lot of time to implement. And then they would just.. keep requesting additional changes. for months. back and forth and back and forth.
I got so sick of it, I don't volunteer for fucking anything anymore. Oh, you want my input on this document you've changed as it affects how I do my job? Like I give a shit. Whatever I say will just get garbled and edited and ultimately you'll just do whatever the fuck you want anyway so.... No. I won't suggest any edits or redline your document. I don't care anymore. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it till my shift ends.
Just a bunch of middle managers who all want to look at fancy spreadsheets so they can appear to know what's happening on the manufacturing floor instead of, ya know, actually going down to the floor. Then they all can pretend to know what's going on to their higher up, who is in turn using that to pretend to know what's going on to their higher up, each one knowing less and less, until you get to the CEO or Site head that knows absolutely fuck all about what's going on, with even less of a clue on how to influence it, all because they don't want to actually visit the floor or talk to the poors running their machines.
I went from running my own business to this garbage, and although the steady middle class paycheck is nice, I regret it every day.
I'm so lucky with my job. Whenever I see something that needs improving, my bosses are behind me 100% and I get loads of support. We just don't have enough people, is the only problem, because the company refuses to hire more. We have the support but not the manpower.
I’ve seen this happen. They think they need a designer and then can’t actually find work for them or don’t really know what work they want. Then it becomes a suffer fest for the poor designer.
It's kind of comforting to hear people from across the world with a very different culture has the same problems.
"I cannot do what I love anymore, so I am always tired and unmotivated," she says.
Too real
The sad thing to me is that they've created six hours a day of time to do something constructive, and they use it to watch movies. That's the real tragedy of our current society, in my opinion. People want their own time to do something "meaningful," but very often they don't honestly know what that is, and instead they just burn their life away being fed the dopamine-hitting, passive consumption that characterizes modern life. I worry the younger generations of millennials and z (of which I'm part) are going to have a serious, wide-spread, paralyzing existential crisis that makes the current malaise and apathy look like the "good times." People are going to look up from their phones when they turn 50 and realize they spent their whole life waiting for their "real life" to begin.
Reminds me of The Bell Jar:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
Growing up poor (in a poor area especially) is such a different experience. My tree was barren from age 13 or so when I realized that if you don't have money, you can't do any of that stuff anyways. The idea of wasting my life away sounded like such a luxury. I didn't have options, I had needs.
Far out, that's poignant. 45m and relating hard
In fairness, I'm working quite hard and fantasising about being able to 'check out', so my scenario is more one of burnout rather than 'not ignited'
That’s because I got a 3% raise when I needed at least 15-20%. All the bootlickers got promoted with higher raises and now I work (literally) more than ever before. It’s a free market. I’ll adjust my labor effort accordingly and you will not know about it.
Hey guys, be careful. Articles become popular when people relate to them, not because they are a good article.
Dont feel hopeless and dont resign yourself to failure because others might be unable to function.
Functioning is good... dont let this potentially misleading representation of generations of people make you think you should stop trying.
Mental health is hard to come by on social media, and this article is a great example of reinforcing a self sabotaging attitude.
Good luck, have fun, and kick ass in your own way today.
Every day at work, Bao Minh spends only two hours creating posts for his company’s social media with ChatGPT and the remaining six hours on watching movies.
And that's...bad? Sounds awesome to me
For the equivalent of $402 a month plus having no input into what is the dream job can leave you feeling empty for sure.
I agree sounds awesome until you realize you are at a bullshit job and are not even making headway or money doing what you trained for.
65%
👍
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Anyone who well and truly enjoys their job has severe mental issues that need to be worked out. Why would someone give effort towards something that won't ultimately reward them? It's not their project, it's not their company, it's not their passion.
Because some people's job helps others? Like a nurse does what they do to help save lives, not because they enjoy the workload.
Meanwhile nurses and other care professionals are leaving the field. They love what they do, up to a point.
Many employers have tried the "if you love what you do, you'll love it without any raises, benefits or help." And now there's a lot of additional administration and bureaucracy to get all those important metrics and KPI.
Less people are willing to do the training for the job and more are leaving. Same thing happens for teachers, child care, elderly care.
Hmm, I always give my best effort, because that's how I learn the most and sharpen my own skills. Job skills are like any other, they atrophy if you don't stretch them, and they don't grow if you don't push their limits.
Give your effort for your own benefit, not because you expect a reward from your current employer. When you outgrow that relationship, and your employer doesn't value your contributions, then move on.
You are always working for yourself, even if you're getting a paycheck from someone else.
I hate that this is so black and white that you’re being downvoted. I’m the exact same way, but I’m by no means a bootlicker. I very much enjoy my job and love the work that I do, but I also don’t think most jobs are meaningful.
Two things can be true at the same time.
Another take: you can dial it back on what your manager gives you and spend more effort on tasks that directly benefit yourself. For example networking, selling yourself, learning new things. My work career has also had periods of fortune and misfortune that far outweighed whatever I was doing in my role. Department restructures, cost-cutting projects, industry booms and busts, sometimes you just try to ride the wave and that doesn’t always mean committing to your role.
This. I’m in a high paying job now because of this mentality. Started literally at the bottom as a cart attendant in the late 90s. I don’t outperform others because I’m a bootlicker. I do it to challenge myself and grow.
People that put minimal effort in are hurting themselves more than the company.
I don’t like my job at all but that doesn’t stop me from putting in maximum effort. I do it to steal skills and knowledge from them and take them to a new job.
You want to get more from your life and more from your employer? If you spend your entire workday doing the bare minimum, then you have to spend your free time building skills to get that. Fuck that, do it on their time.
Great point!! And totally agree.
I like my job. They pay me fairly for 100% effort, so I give 100% effort. It's the only place in my career where I feel like that's the case though, so you're mostly right. But there are exceptions.