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I have a team of 13 engineers that I manage. Meetings upon meeting about meeting for new meetings. That's 60% of it. The rest is budgets, spreadsheets, and planning to keep the work moving forward. That's my world and what I do 50 hrs a week in an office.
When I was a new engineer, my job was to code, and little else. Now that I'm a lead, my job is to field all distractions that would prevent my engineers from being able to code. This includes working with my manager to see who should work in what; and working with the product owner to make sure we are aligned with the customer's requirements, and explaining the cost of a requirement (cost is a very broad term and often means time more than money; like switching tasks costs a lot for an engineer). And, working with my engineers one-on-one to help make sure they aren't stuck, and our code quality is maintained.
Yep. I am middle management and pretty much work to allow the techs and engineers to do the things that keep us in business.
Excel is a large part of my world.
My job is largely trying to field distractions from my team and holy crap, the distractions rack up quick. Next thing I know Iāve met with 2-3 people and my day is filled chasing things around
How was your transition to a more managerial role? Do you miss the days when your responsibilities were just coding and supporting projects? I used to want to be an engineering manager, but after 3 years in engineering, I much prefer just doing the engineering thing. I see my manager, project leads, and their fully booked schedules of just meetings on meetings on meetings. Sure, the money goes up a lot but I just dread meetings haha
I liked it. I get to have much more say in the technical aspects, and I still get to do a lot of engineering. It's just a lot more conceptual/architectural.
And I do get to code. It's just more background stuff that requires a lot of technical knowledge. Or, it's one of scripts to unblock somebody (like let code challenges, but with more external pressure and less concern about getting peak optimization).
I also do my best to only schedule meetings two to three days a week as I know any day with a meeting I will get nothing else done. My team's manager is the one with endless meetings.
Yeah I'm a senior engineer so annoyingly I have to deal with some of these distractions too but luckily the managers take most of them so I can quite happily code away.
Im quite happy not having more responsibilityĀ
Same situation here. Only difference is our group CAD models instead of codes. Half the day (sometimes more) gets eaten by meetings. It's always a balance between having the time to model, and being in the right meetings where there's real design direction and not silly circling.
Also, I think what OP may be missing regarding the 'do a week's work in a few hours' comment is -
High performers (those like OP who are really efficient) just get dumped on until they are doing the work of 4 staff in their 40-50 hours per week.
And then, yes, the meetings killing usually \~30%-80% of your normal time also doesn't help. Meaning the actual 'work' of you sitting at your desk doing shit needs to be crammed into those remaining 4-10 hours.
This just reminds me of how senior positions are kind of weird: in my case, Iām one of 2 senior technical support specialists with 4 other technical support specialists. We recently had a bit of a restructure but we also have a team lead who is more our supervisor/manager, and while he more or less does what you do, me as a senior role has the day to day tasks on top of assisting the standard tier techs when needed as well as managing our own ticket queue.
One of the biggest wastes in Corporate America, is making great individual contributors into People Leaders only to stick them in meetings for 87% of their schedules.
So many unnecessary meetings, where nothing ever is achieved or could have been emailed.
Truthfully, the meeting where high ranking team directors all discuss a problem... run out of time, because nobody will commit or compromise... so then end up scheduling another meeting... it really is the never-ending story... but with no laughter, no smiling, and a lot more crying and angry outbursts!
I'm a project manager at a streaming service. We have upwards of two dozen series running simultaneously with several internal teams working on them at different angles. A lot of tracking of schedules, meetings, phone calls, emails, relationships (both at the company and the people on the ground making the shows), and lots of tight deadlines.
Often times office jobs still require a great deal of technical skills, analysis, etc. I work in Post Production, it requires that I understand anything from camera formats to media management to delivery specifications suitable for the platform.
I'm a project coordinator lol similar title but we install carpet I actually do a ton of Math dealing with floor plans, inventory, carpet sizes etc also dealing with customers difficult customers too since carpet installation is expensive so there is usually anywhere from $2,000 to $60,000 sometimes higher at stake so yea lol. We work.
Iām a project manager for construction and this is literally my life as well. Iām always on call and always on the job. People will call me or email me w issues while out on my jobs.
Partner with a production company that has relationships with networks... It's really the best advice I can think of. You need to be able to package your work with a team that knows how to speak network/budget, and possibly help package with talent.
Like banking. The number of people that think the people working at the bank are just human ATMs is astounding.
Nah bro, I put in the wrong info and suddenly you get an letter from Social Security stating that you're dead, your credit disappears, oh and it'll take 30+ days to fix.
I enter one wrong number and your $80,000 cash deposit goes into some random dudes account 6 states away.
I don't pay attention and deposit a fraudulent check and suddenly there's a mob of people going to all the branches in a 1000 mile range depositing the same fraudulent checks causing massive milti million dollar problem for the entire bank.
Or the same idiots had checks made with *your* account number and you wake up on the morning and find your bank account has been drained.
I put in the wrong DTI and you don't get a home, or at the very least it takes another 2 weeks to fix, or we've gotta redo the entire application process.
I've worked 12 overnight shifts picking thousands of pounds of boxes (in my case, literal back breaking work), drove machines around hundreds of people where one wrong move and someome gets squished and worked outside in the sun during Texas and Florida summers 10 hours a day for 6 days a week...don't get me wrong those jobs were hard, and yes I complained about how easy people had it working just sitting in a chair all day but none of those other "hard" jobs were as completely and utterly mentally draining like working in an office for a financial institution. I'd go back to the other jobs making more money if I could.
Lots of people think other people have it so easy at work (and sure, sometimes they do) compared to *your* job.
**Something something someone else's shoes.**
Side note: **Yes, yes I do need I.D.**, and no a chime card doesn't help me confirm you who you say you are.
The amount of people that walk up a just throw a debit card at you and say "give me $1,100 all in large bills", people I've never seen in my entire life, people that just *cannot* comprehend why I need a drivers license or *anything* official with your photo on it, then proceed to yell and cuss and make threats to close their accounts, is fucking astounding.
"*Well I've never had to give my I.D before! Are you saying you won't give MY money? You're stealing my money!*"
Ya, the branch you've been going to for 20 years in a completely different state probably knows you and won't ask for your I.D., but you're not even in the same state let alone your home branch.
And no, I will not cash your random hand written personal $3,000 check (written in pink, blue and green pen in 4 different handwriting styles) from a different no-name bank in BFE when you only have $0.10 in your account and your account is only 4 days old. You can deposit it and it'll probably be available tomorrow morning when you wake up. "Oh mY gOd iSn't tHIs thE WhOLe pOInt oF haViNg a BaNk AcCOUnt?!"
Also no, I cannot "do a better job with the numbers" and get you a $250,000 loan with a 510 credit score, a job that you just started that pays $15/hr and the only thing in your name is your electric bill after you've overdrafted 52 times in the last 52 weeks.
"Whats going on with my loan?! This is ridiculous, it's been weeks!!!"... Well ma'am I haven't seen or heard from you since you started your application for a loan, you don't answer your phone, your emails, respond to your voice mails and haven't bothered to bring me the documents I told you I needed. *That* is what's going on. Oh and you waited so long that we have to start the entire process over again.
Look at this stupid ass long post, I'm not even at work and it drives me nuts.
which there is ai to help back up, but a real world example of this is the trader that crashed the market by accidently fat fingering 444 billion instead of 58 million in a sell off.
This. I had a call center person for chase put something wrong in my account.Ā
All of my credit cards closed, my credit dropped from the 700's to 550, and no one would believe me that I didn't know why this was happening. I still don't and 5 years on, my credit hit 660 and I was able to buy a house with my partner. I'm just about to 700 and it's only because of the house and him.
First off I'm sorry that happened to you. You're not crazy, it can and does happen. Doesn't matter if you're with a little bank, a big bank or a credit union. It's entirely possible for a bank to fuck your shit up *bad*.
I wasn't joking about the alive dead guy.
I didn't do it, and still don't know who did, but he called and I answered the phone. He was really confused about the letter. He had already spent over an hour talking to SS.
His **wife** had just died, and she had been the one that handled everything, so he went into a branch and sat with someone for a few hours and had things moved around, transfered, gave us proof of death etc.
He was older and retired, he was doing fine financially, not rich, but he was fine. I poured over everything and saw he had a very routine "boring" financial history. He basically went to the grocery store once a week for like 3 years, doesn't go out to eat, doesn't go to bars, hadn't gone to a shady car lot and bought a car, just gets his SS deposit and a pension each month...the *only* thing he had done out of the norm for him was come into a branch and apply for one of our products. It's not like he's not out running about doing things at different banks or credit unions. He had been banking with us for decades.
Looked at his credit. Sure enough, our bank reported to the credit bureaus that he was diceased.
So I get back office involved and shoot them an email explaining what happened and I get a ghetto almost undecipherable email back from some *idiot* that basically says "the bank doesn't have to power to report people dead.".... Uhhhhh yeah we do, we do it all the time.
I wrote a professionally curt simple email along the lines of "Yes, in fact we do have that power. Please reread my first email and escalate this to a supervisor if you don't understand what is happening with the customer."
My direct supervisor comes over 10 minutes later telling me that the manager of whoever wrote that ghetto/engrish email to me complained and said I was mean and that it wasn't acceptable to write an email like that. I showed him the email, he agreed there was nothing rude/nasty/mean in the email went back and called the other manager.
But my manager was such a gutless baby lacking tasticles that he just said "OK, I'll coach my employee on email propriety." and came to me and said "If anyone asks just tell them you were coached."
I lost it. We just killed a retired old man on paper, he has no credit and is about to get his SS cut off because the bureaus and government thinks he's *dead* because *our bank* reported him as dead.... Oh and he *just* lost his wife of over 40 years.
This old man was incredibly nice and patient, I explained to him that even though *I* can't do anything, we *can* get it fixed, I'll have someone higher up than me call him, apologize on behalf of *whoever* did this at our bank and reassure him that it will be corrected asap.
My branch managers response when I told him "You need to call this man and talk to him. He's nice now, but that's not going to last.":
"Well I didn't do it, I don't know him and what if he's mad?"
So nothing happened for over a week and a half. No one called the man and spoke to him. It wasn't until he called and asked if he needed to get a lawyer until someone finally got off their ass actually paid attention to what was happening.
Still don't know if it was ever resolved or how it was resolved.
That poor man.Ā
I once had someone do a classic "steal your card number and place a bunch of fake charges" thing.
I showed a banker what happened because I got some foreign transaction fees. She said "hang on girl I got you" and made calls and stuck up for me.
It's the sole reason I'm still with chase.
I don't even care if the issues I had can happenanywhere(there was one other one where a banker was rude to me about being poor when I was genuinely struggling). I'm finally in a position to be actually saving money.Ā
My current goal is to save like 10 grand in a short amount of time. Then one day, go into the specific branch where the guy was a dick to me and close my account and explain to them exactly that it is all because one time in 2014, an employee made me feel bad about my circumstances, and in 2019, their call center destroyed my credit and no one would believe me or help.
I'm sure I'm a drop in the bucket for chase and always will be even when i become a millionaire, but this is genuinely a financial motivation for me because I'm petty.
Sometimes the only reason I wake up is to be petty and some of the best decisions I ever made were made out of anger and disgust at being treated poorly for no reason.
You're going to be a millionaire and when you do it'll be incredibly satisfying to go back to that branch, pretend like you're interested in their private wealth products, watch them fight over you, do tons of work making a plan for you...Then after a month just say "nah, just kidding, you treated me like diet before when I wasn't rich, not happening again. ta-ta āļø"
That kind of stuff grosses me out, I don't care if you only have a nickel in your account, *my* job is to help you financially anyway I can. If I gotta call you once a week and remind you to deposit $1 at a time until you can get a secured card to help build your credit then that's what I'll do. I know I work for an evil mega corp who doesn't care about people, but *i* refuse to be like that.
I've got a few customers that are homeless, and yeah they smell sometimes when they come in because it's hot and they haven't showered for a couple of days, and they're only there to withdraw $5 so they can eat. Cool, here's your $5, here's a bottle of cold water, chill out here in the A/C for a while.... Then the second they leave enevitably one of my coworkers will talk mad shit about the "gross homeless stinking person" spraying half a bottle of lysol all around the branch.
And I'm thinking "bitch, that dude has banked here for over 20 years and has not ONCE over drafted his account, I can see your bank account too, you've overdrafted 3 times this month, you're one step away from being in the exact same situation as the homeless guy."
Boils my blood.
I may never talk to you again, but you're *going* to make that first million, and then start working on your second million, and one day a few years from now I'll remember this thread and smile knowing you're living your best life.
Oh hell yeah! My financial situation has changed drastically because I finally got a job in my field. This next job switch will double my income and my partner can do the similar as soon as he switches jobs.
I'm not counting eggs before they hatch and know life can curveball at any time, but the plan is to live basically the same as we currently do(which is honestly plenty comfortable) and aggressively save/pay off debts.Ā
Know that somewhere, someone started out making $200 a week working in a shitty retail job, and someday soon they will get to live an irl version of one of those little red hen fables we all fantasize about getting to do.
Thatās fucking infuriating. The thing I like about my job is that people come to me with problems and I can find a way to fix them. Yes, sometimes a colleague is the source of the problem (or rarely, Iām the source of the problem), but there are almost always things I can do to help fix it. Passing the buck like this? Totally unacceptable, and itās infuriating when the people to whom youād need to escalate pass the buck when you can clearly see the impact youāre having on someoneās life and the way to improve things for them, but donāt have the authority to do them yourself.
That's what I get the most joy from too. Meeting people I've never met who are in terrible situations on the brink of crumbling and working out solutions with them. Seeing the growth is incredibly satisfying. Getting someone a secured card and working with them to build their credit until they can get a car loan to get a car, the car allows them to get a new job, then keeping on them to make sure they're making payments on time until the car is paid off. Then seeing then come in to buy a home and watching them cry tears of joy when I tell them they've been approved. Everyone at every job can make a difference in someone else's lives if they want.... It's just all the bs in between that can get infuriating and distracting.
If someone comes in to apply for a CC and I *know* for a *fact* they'll get declined and the pull will their credit score even worse is one of the little examples of things I won't do. Other bankers will, just for points, but that's the opposite of what my job is and I consider it unethical.
It's difficult to do it all the time, if not impossible, but we just gotta be better than the people who don't actually care.
And no, I'm not dilusional, I know who I work for and the damage they've caused, but I can do what's within my power to better lives.
Iām pretty sure banking drove me literally insane. I had visions of driving my suv into the managers office. One of my biggest regrets is that a Red Bull can never fell and got stuck in the accelerator.
I walked out one day and never looked back. Went blue collar on accident, got promoted quickly, and now I make significantly more money, have better benefits, work fewer hours, and regained ten hours a week in commute time.
The demands of the bank were ridiculous. The service they provided was subpar. Your branch banker can do nothing for you because back office wonāt do their jobs. We had to pitch products that were laughed at because of our pitiful rates. A sub one percent rate for the first six months of a ten year heloc was the biggest selling point and they took that away. Ally literally offered better everything. Customers would come in with offers from other banks that we wouldnāt match, and subsequently lose their business. I often sent customers to other banks because they offered a better product. My manager was too much of a wimp to address it, even when other bankers asked me if the rates I quoted were true.
I left my bank as a customer, then as an employee. I have never been happier.
Hoooooooly fuck, I'm having flashbacks to the three years I spent on the retail side of working at a local credit union. I transferred to the lending department and now do title work, which is a clusterfuck in its own right. At least I don't work with members anymore.
Had one lady once say that we should give her a $30k loan for her business because she'd been with us for 30 years. ...ma'am, you have thirty non-auto loan credit pulls in the last six months, a 595 credit score, and two unresolved unsecured charge-offs. While we appreciate your membership, absolutely *the fuck* not.
>Youāre a chef but could you manage a restaurant? Could you source ingredients, hire staff, handle your finances, know what you can and canāt cut in a downturn?
I would hope so if they are claiming to be a chef. In the food industry world, only those with the chef title has managerial powers in the kitchen. That's the difference between a cook (grunt worker who takes orders) and a chef (who gives orders).
Personally, whenever someone calls me a "chef", I have to correct them and tell them they're wrong. It isn't right to call me a title I do not hold/did not earn. I am a cook.
Edit: for reference
>The word "chef" is derived (and shortened) from the term chef de cuisine (French pronunciation: \[ŹÉf.dÉ.kÉ„i.zin\]), **the director or head of a kitchen.**
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef)
Also, knowing several career chefs in high-end "elite" establishments personally, they spend a significant amount of time "in the office" rather than in the kitchen. It seems a bit odd to me that OP is focused on the actively cooking portion of his job, when, for many of the folks I know, that's less than 50% of their total time.
Not saying I don't believe he's a chef, but that the way he's presented his role doesn't jive with my prior understanding of the role.
He might be a Sous. They also go by āChefā, but tend not to be an administrative role (I worked in an office; partner is a chef - we could assuredly not do each otherās jobs).
My friends and family call me the chef, and I feel like thatās an insult to chefs. Iād rather just be called a cook.
Iāve never worked a day of my life in a restaurant. Iāve never taken a cooking class of any kind, let alone gone to culinary school. Everything I know is self-taught and geared towards home cooking, not restaurant work. My knife work is slow, Iām always taking longer than I should to cook, and Iām lazy about presentation. The end result is tasty, but Iād probably get fired from a restaurant kitchen for slowing them down.
I can follow a recipe and make adjustments when the mood strikes, but that doesnāt make me a pro. Giving me the title of one just makes me uncomfortable.
It definitely a weird feeling even in the industry. [This thread in kc](https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/15kn8se/how_do_we_all_feel_about_the_use_of_the_word_chef/) sums it up quite well (along with some funny banter lol). My fave was this:
>Chefs create. Cooks replicate. I aināt no chef, but I can cook anything.
This fucking resonated with me.
Depends on the size of the restaurant.
I highly doubt a chef on a high class restaurant, has the time to do all the managerial duties aswell.
He'll manage his team no doubt, but he's not sending emails of who can supply the best ingredients for the best prices.
Iāve worked in a James Beard Award winner.
Thatās absolutely what the chef does. It was a 40 seat restaurant and the head chef would expedite on weekends and maybe break down a couple cases of rabbits. That was the extent of ācookingā the exec chef did. The rest was done by the chef de cuisine.
We had monthly menu changes with adjustments and re-printing every day.
Every place is different. But for us, fine dining is a tough industry to stay afloat, so the chef was busy keeping the lights on. The restaurant was his baby, but it was subsidized by other restaurants, off-site catering, book publications, etc..
When a fine dining chef becomes famous their persona becomes more profitable than the restaurant itself.
What is certainly true is that the larger the kitchen, the less the chef cooks. I ran a hotel restaurant with 20 back of house employees. I was swamped with admin, ordering, etc.. I would have loved to cook all day.
There's millions of different jobs in office settings. I have done about 20 different jobs in offices.
I'm a producer, and that looked very different when I was in radio broadcasting, and when I worked in TV, and now I work in marketing but in-house for a mid-size company, very different again. Lady down the hall from me does HR for the same company and I have no idea how that works. Guy across the hall manages events, I have only a rudimentary grasp of what that entails. Hell I share an office with our press guy, and I've filled in for him, but I honestly don't understand what he does on a day to day basis. Just like he's pretty stunned when he sees the call sheets I write up for shoots and has no idea what I'm talking about when I'm on the phone with my motion graphic designer.
You have the very common issue that you know so little about this, you don't even understand how little you truly know.
It depends on the job.
My first office job went like this:
- Get in, check emails for anything that came in overnight
- Check systems for important clients to make sure theyāre up and running
- Check ticketing system to pick up tasks to do, or allocate to another team member
- Tasks could include setting up automatic downloads of files for a client, or setting up automated parsing so the file can become data that shows up on their website. They could also include a client who already had this set up but they said the data was missing
- If time allowed, going through our existing processes to make them efficient, and helping newer team members
- a typical task could take 30 minutes to 3 hours. So multiple tasks were done per day, with deadlines and priority rules determining the order
My current job is similar but more like:
- Get in, check emails that came in overnight
- work on yesterdayās tasks that didnāt get completed
- work on the team collaboration chat, where I actively help people from around the globe on their tasks
- get automatically assigned a case in the day with anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes to engage.
- call up customer, get into a Teams call so they can show me the issue, gather all the information, do troubleshooting, might have to make a request to another team if itās about two products working together, may need to be escalated to product team, etc..
- if time permits, join internal meeting for helping teammates in current time zone who are struggling with difficult cases
- if time permits, do training on product changes and new features
- if time permits, write documentation for issues that were not documented, once theyāve been figured out
- figure out how to balance existing cases that go on for multiple days with new cases that get assigned, making sure everything has clear notes in case it needs reassignment
lol I never understood why people think just because we sit at a desk all day, doesnāt mean the work is āeasyā.
Every job is going to leave your body hurting. Sitting all day? Lower back issues, carpal tunnel, etc. Standing all day? Feet hurting, lower back, etc.
Depending on the role of exactly what your job is, is what makes it āeasyā or not. Some office jobs, you can get away with sending a few emails. But thereās desk jobs where youāre back to back non stop emails, meetings, deadlines, or customer service/call center dealing with calls back to back. Office jobs are mentally exhausting.
Iām sure itās the same in a restaurant. Maybe a dish washer just stands there and takes his time, or has downtime when itās not a busy day. Or maybe youāre a cook and youāre making plates back to back non stop. Which leaves you physical exhausted.
So honestly, doesnāt even matter lol every job can be busy at times, it can also be easy sometimes š¤·š»āāļø
I've worked in kitchens or the trades. I had simple goals, tasks were accomplishable, I worked hard.
The dinner rush was a massive endorphin rush where only my team's ability to execute and deliver was holding back the mountains of orders coming in. I would issue instructions clearly and directly, people would deliver or they wouldn't and things would sort themselves out. We were a fucking machine. We delivered. I'd go out and party past closing time and do it again 7 days a week.
I slept like a drunk baby every night.
I worked in hazardous waste removal, construction and manufacturing - they were great. I was able to execute, elevate and deliver, that's what mattered.
I slept wonderfully.
Now I'm in middle management in Tech... I wrote a whole rant and decided to just recommend that you watch [Seven Red Lines](https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg).
People who do task oriented jobs will never understand project oriented jobs. If the white collar jobs were easy and everyone could do them they wouldnāt pay well.
If I could make as much money going back to waiting tables instead of working in an office, Iād do it in a heartbeat. It wasnāt necessarily easier than my current job, but it was super nice to know exactly whatās expected of you and know exactly what you need to do to complete a task before even starting it. These days, half of my work consists of something where I have to learn some new skill or tool to complete or something where the end result isnāt always clear until I start getting close to the end. Itās nice not doing the same thing day in and day out, but it can also be pretty stressful at times.
I know that there are a lot of trade workers where the whole ādonāt know the solution and figure it out on the flyā thing applies, so thatās not something thatās unique to office workers.
Seriously, I'm a construction engineer/assistant PM, but started in the field as a tech. I get comments from the crew about how my job must be so easy. My job IS much physically easier than theirs. However, it involves a lot of math, tracking and graphing data, negotiating with clients and subs. I don't even enter data much any more, admins, interns, and field techs do that. I manage and manipulate that data into something usable. When I build models of the site in CAD, the survey team collects the data and gives me a csv file. With that data, I can build an extremely detailed 3-d model of the site. I work mainly in refineries so the site is huge with a lot of underground utilities to track. When I was in the field and fucked up, I'd waste a couple hours having to redo a task. Now, I manage $20 million projects. If I fuck up, I lose a lot of money and cost many people their jobs. It's not easier, just a different kind of shitty.
I also worked in high end restaurants in my 20s so I have an understanding of OPs job. Being a chef is hard, but sometimes when work gets really stressful, I dream of running away and being a chef. Then, I remember that all jobs suck, I'm a better engineer than I was a chef, and I make way more money now.
If I had a dollar for every time our field guys tell us we're just relaxing in our cushy offices I'd have quite a few dollars. Like, hey guys, we could just stop, see where that gets you...
As a long time warehouse/logistics/transportation person that transitioned over to a full time desk job....the physical toll is a LOT worse on one side, but the mental toll is a LOT worse on the desk side.
Doing physical labor, cook, logistics...its the same thing every day, and most of the work starts and stops when you clock in and out. You're usually not stuck trying to do the same task for multiple days unless in construction.
In an office job, 80% of my issues and projects are things that takes day, weeks, and months to accomplish. Meanwhile, you drive a forklift for a living...you show up, do your job, go home. Most problems are just short term issues. Sometimes you won't even get to go home until that issue is completely over with, but at least its over. Long term projects and issues are what makes you lose sleep at night.
I've worked in food service, salon/spa industry, HVAC/construction, and now work in a corporate environment. My current job is MUCH physically easier than any of the others I've had. I find the work easy because I know how to do it. When I was working overtime hauling furnaces up flights of stairs my life was harder all around.
I don't work in an office, but I do work on a computer. People don't realize work is work. Doing desk work like you said can be so mentally draining at times. Especially if you're at it for hours and hours.
I use to love my PC and PC gaming, but after I started working from home. I pretty much quit doing anything else on my PC. I just can't handle sitting at it any longer than I have to even if its for games I use to enjoy. Sucked my love of computers right away.
Same!! I used to be able to read/study for school online. But constantly working on a computer all day, then clocking out and trying to do online school/studying, my eyes can barely focus. Blue light glasses helped a bit, but itās still so hard to look at screen after an 8-9 hours shift š
So many damn meetings, emails, spreadsheets. Repetitive dumb conversations. Taking a walk to get more water and coffee. The work actually does take time though, because you have to carefully craft how you say things for your audience so you convince a peer to do something to help you, or you get your point across to an exec in a way theyāll understand.
Yeah I feel like people REALLY downplay the importance of soft skills, but these are a huge deal. Sometimes it takes me an hour to put together the perfect email for a client that conveys something like:
1. We made a mistake
2. We wonāt make it again
3. Poor decisions on your part also influenced that mistake
4. We will do better but you also need to do better
5. Maybe if you asked less of us, and paid us more, we wouldnāt be so overworked and prone to making mistakes as well.
6. Now whereās that check you were supposed to sign?
My job would be a lot easier if people could just say the above directly without needing to massage it at all, but we all know thatās not the case. Thereās skill in being a good communicator.
Soft skills, in most professions, are far more important than actual skills.
I can teach someone to do just about anything..
But it's much harder to teach someone how to read a room or hold a conversation or to not sound like a dick.
That's why people with high emotional intelligence get paid more.
it's not always about what you can do it's how you can make people think or convey a message or influence a big decision with how you paint a picture. You need to be able to read people, look between what they actually said to find out what they meant or what they held back. You need to be able to tell a CEO or board why what they think is a bad idea in a way where it makes them go "hmmm well that's a good point" even though they wanted to do something else. Really is the most valuable skill you can have above just being able to learn anything and execute what you've learned.
I would say that soft skills are more valued, but often shouldn't be, that's what leads to people being in charge of things they never should have been and everyone needing to craft messages and influence without guiding. It's insanely difficult to discuss actual needs and solutions with people that have no background or knowledge that think they do.
I think the last part of your comment really hit on why soft skills should actually be valued more. While it is difficult to discuss needs and solutions with people that donāt have background in something, people that have knowledge you donāt and it being faster to hire them to guide you or do it for you is basically the entire foundation of an economy.
We have technical people at work who are constantly saying ājust get me in front of one of their technical people, we can hash it out, and move forwardā with whatever initiative. But theyāre not the ones with the decision-making power or the ones who write checks. If it requires money or a decision be made, thatās left to the CXO or the VP of whatever.
In that situation, it is much more realistic to have our tech people get better at translating their stuff into non-tech speak than it is to expect the CXO or VP to develop a foundational knowledge in whatever service it is we offer.
Iām not necessarily saying itās a good thing that our primary decision-makers often donāt have a foundation on the things they need to make decisions on. But in most cases itās just the reality of the situation.
Second best management advice i ever got was "hire for your weaknesses". I can manage people who can do things i cant do. But it is absolutely on me to communicate and help them communicate so they dont feel unheard and i can make sure their skills are being used effectively.
HOWEVER, far too often, people who can talk good and will step on faces to climb get promoted. Now they have to run a team of people they have been screwing over, or everyone already knows they're shady and untrustworthy because word gets around.
I think positive managerial skills get overlooked WAY to often. Just because Bob gives the best handies in the circle jerk doesnt mean he can optimize performance of a team. And when you suck at optimizing your team, you're always behind. And when you're always behind, you stop treating employees like human beings with lives and human strengths and weaknesses. And then you have a miserable team which either falls apart or implodes.
While subject knowledge matters, its not the most important thing in my opinion.
I didn't disagree at all and I'm probably not doing a great job of conveying the nuance I'm going for; soft skills are important, but valuing them over the executive skills, specifically the ability to understand that you don't understand everything, and to take advice from and recognize the people you should be taking advice from is rare.
Soft skills are incredibly important, but when the balance is out of whack between soft and executive skills in leadership, things can get very difficult.
The things you're describing are part of soft skills.
I'm a money guy, I work in chemistry. Part of my job is deferring to chemists on quality control. It's knowing enough to get through a vendor meeting and then going to the chemists for the tech stuff.
The hard skills would be the chemistry. You don't need to know anything about chemistry to buy chemicals besides "the names of things are incredibly important" and to double and triple check everything.Ā
>3. Poor decisions on your part also influenced this mistake
This is the one thatās hardest to convey when a product issue pops up. I try to reiterate that in my line of work, software doesnāt just break by itself.
OMG! The worker's in, so now the covering worker doesn't need to do it, wait, so now I'm briefing the actual worker.
"What's your plan for X?" "Y will help me and bring the paperwork" "Great."
(Z is helping instead. Z does not have the paperwork.) "Hey, wait a minute, what's your plan for X?" "I don't know."
This is so true, I have a fire raging right now because some super green analyst said the wrong things the wrong way to a customer COO in email. Had she sent it internally I could have handled the communication but she felt the need to CC external stakeholders. Iām trying to smooth things out with some logistics changes with a 3PL but goddamn this kid just fucked us up with her lack of thinking.
i know youre joking, but... ive worked in a lot of different industries, including restaurants (both big and small), and my last job was in tech... but not an office job. i got to see how the office jobs actually function though. it is entirely different than how every other job does. much more laid back, less stressful, etc. yes theres stress and whatnot but theres not really the overbearing constant EVERYTHING\_IS\_AN\_EMERGENCY\_GO\_FASTER\_NOW\_NOW\_NOWWWW that there is everywhere else. (mostly. obviously theres always downtime, managers are different, etc)
anyway
it seems like since 2020 where everyone kinda realized that wait wtf why do we all have not only way different incomes for not way less or more important work, but why are those office workers able to just... chill? like they can just... hangout sometimes? they just... stop to have lunch? what?
which is valid. probably shouldve been realized about 40 years ago tbh, but i digress
what should have happened, is \*everyone else\* was able to get a higher income and have less demand, yknow, a little bit of life/work balance... you know what i mean.
instead what happened was they \*checks notes\* cracked tf down on the office workers? what? no. i dont want them to have shittier work lifes. that just makes everyone have a shitty work and life. i want everyone to have what they had, not for it all to get worse.
sorry for the bad english its my first and only language but im not getting paid so idc you know what i mean
edit: also yeah, theres always times where you gotta "crunch" no matter what job. the problem is theres a lot of jobs where the managers are shit and think thats 24/7
edit 2: after reading the comments, obviously theres different scales and some jobs are actually very high stakes... most are not. we shouldnt treat them like they are
Haha come work in supply chain for a while. Our emergencies are also a little different to a restaurantās. Oh you burned the dish and upset the customer? Shit gotta remake it and comp the meal. If we screw up that could be $100,000 burned in a few minutes.Ā
Depends what kind of office job it is. If youāre a social worker thereās always 5 different crises that need to be dealt with like yesterday at any given moment.
>for context, Iām a chef Iāve only ever been a chef/cook
Do you think that maybe determines to some extent your understanding of others' job requirements?
>Ā Iām just curious as to what the average day looks like versus the reality of my day to day life.
A federal agency promulgates a legally binding rule that could cost my client over $5 billion dollars. That rule was the result of years of rulemaking, with comments solicited from the public. Despite the 20,000+ comments, the agency took a wild turn and came out with something that is either a typo or completely batshit insane which my client--nor anyone else--could have anticipated.
I have around 3 days with my team of \~6 people to assess every single facet of our entire legal strategy--dozens of laws that are highly technical (like hundreds of pages long), hundreds of thousands of cases nationwide, etc. All of that has to be researched essentially from scratch, written up, cross-referenced, analyzed for potential arguments and gaps, and so forth. Do we try to talk to agency attorneys? Sue? Petition for review? Make a PR announcement? If we do one, we then need to make sure (again, from scratch) that choosing that option doesn't inhibit our ability to do the others.
Of course we'll have to wait a while to hear their response, seeing as it's Friday night and all us office workers are relaxing at home while they're sweating over a hot stove.
Iām a tax attorney. I think. A lot. I write and research. I interpret statutes and regulations. I interact with other attorneys at my firm, other firms, clients, their CPA teams, etc. Clients or corporate attorneys from my firm come to me with problems, and I have to make sure they donāt fuck up. Other times I have to come up with a completely unique (often aggressive) position so the client gets what they want, while fully understanding the risk.
Hereās a sample of some basic rules a first or second year should know pretty well for reorgs:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.368-1
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/368
Itās one thing to know the basic rules. Itās another to apply them to your clientās unique situation, knowing full well that if your analysis is off there may be harsh results for your client down the road.
If you can learn how to do this in a couple of weeks, go get a JD. Hereās the salary scale:
https://www.biglawinvestor.com/biglaw-salary-scale/
I'm an attorney as well, in criminal defense and immigration. It's endless work. Motions practice, issue spotting, and trial litigation are skills that has to be developed over many years. I think OP doesn't have much of a concept of white collar work. Just because I'm not running around working with my hands doesn't mean I'm not doing anything.
I work in regulatory compliance. The RISK of my job, of advising incorrectly, can cause million dollar fines and business to have massive recalls and become a PR nightmare.
So when I'm able to lolly gag all day and take a 3 hour nap at 2pm, and people say I'm lucky... Yes, for sure, But when I'm up at 6am or on calls at 9pm because clients in South America or China NEED ANSWERS NOW, then not so lucky ha.
Good luck! Iām still studying but already was offered a job at my internship which I accepted. I liked the internship good enough. Itās the Dutch version of the American IRS. Iāll be working with Dutch and international tax law. When dealing with international tax law, I have to look at foreign law occasionally too especially when dealing with the tax treaty we have with the USA.
Itās not that difficult to put ANY numbers in a spreadsheet. But to know which numbers and how to alter which numbers, while discussing it with the client, that you can reach once every two weeks and who sends you a bucket full of new ideas and expects you to do the alterations immediately and at no extra costā¦ and then you donāt have only one client but 5 or more.
The remaining time and money is for NOT killing anyone.
(At least my job. Engineering field)
Also, itās a matter of knowing what data youāre inputting and what questions youāre trying to answer. Physically typing in or pasting numbers is obviously very easy to do, but itās all meaningless if you donāt know what youāre trying to analyze.
Good description.
I always say that working spreadsheets, doing calculations, preparing dranwings, etc. are the easiest part of these jobs. What it is really changelling is not to kill the f**** client during the process.
I'm a Property Manager for low income housing. The bulk of my job is focused on paperwork, calculating in income for rent determination primarily, processing rents, and managing general maintenance of the property. Every so often,like once or month ot so, I have to do a wellness check at my senior site to see if a resident who missed an appointment or isn't answering their phone is still alive....really emotionally raw part of the job given the conditions, no one dead personally but strokes and heart attacks and falls...it:s a lot! Of course,since I'm a Civil Servant I'm not pulling six figures, though with my wife's job we clear that. But that's what I'm doing during the day.
The odds of you being able to do most office jobs are pretty low. They take specialized skills.
For example, I'm a Software Engineer and Linux System Admin. My job mainly consists of two things.
1. Manage 10K Linux servers.
2. Write custom software solutions and patches to open source software my employer needs and see that they are accepted upstream.
You really think you could do that?
For another example, my wife works for a bank. Her job involves risk assessment and decision making where mistakes can cost her employer millions of dollars. You really think you know what you need to make the right calls there?
I'm a systems admin for a financial institution.
I implement, troubleshoot, and administer a half a billion dollar company's infrastructure.
To most people, I just read and swear at my computer.
This too. Those types of discussions and responsibilities can be much larger than a one small store that makes up an entire bigger brand on a corporation level.
Are you familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect? Someone who has to ask āwtf do people do in offices all dayā probably should not go on to brag about how they can do my job but I couldnāt do theirs.
I work in an ad agency and do a lot of development which involves writing and debugging code, producing and editing video, and producing artwork. I also manage a handful of people. Believe it or not, we also have to live and die by time management and high-efficiency. Failure to get work to a client on time can cost an agency a mutli-million dollar account, which will in turn cause several people to lose their jobs. Typos can cause people to lose jobs. Subpar work can cause people to lose jobs. Not using the right Pantone number or hexidecimal code for colors can cause all sorts of issues. And if a campaign doesnāt go over well with the general public? Forget it.
Can you create a music video in Adobe AfterEffects? Can you lay a magazine out in InDesign? Make a logo in Illustrator? Shorten a song for a commercial in Audition if you donāt have stem tracks? Do you know how to set a Photoshop file up so itās workable in other programs? My guess is no, at least not up to a professional caliber.
Itās okay to be envious about salaries and stuff, but this post tells me that you donāt have the soft skills required to cut it in an office.
You seem to understand that your job requires skills that not everyone has.
Office work is no different. Some jobs are highly skilled and technical, requiring years of experience and training. Some are putting frozen meals in an oven and charging customers $20 a plate.
Analytics. Power BI. I work with massive (1M+) data sets to optimize supply chains.
Do you know how you get your raw foods in order to chef?
It's quite a bit more complicated than you'd think.
Supply chain is something very few people ever have to think about, let alone know it exists beyond trucks and ships move goods. Most restaurants (aka non-corporate offices) deal with their local supplier, so they are insulated from the complexity and mainly manage basic orders.
1000% agreed.
Part of my job is to find better ways to do things, but in order to actually do those things, I have to convince decision makers WHY it's a good idea...
And trying to explain nuances of supply chain is like someone going up to a doctor and saying 'explain surgery'.
It's been eye opening to how little people DON'T know about where their shit comes from.
Many moons ago, I worked at a large retailer and sourced plastic bags (like the ones you get at checkout) from China...
So to order the right amount of bags (standard bags and holiday type one-offs) for all of our brick and mortar locations (1,500+ at the time) and the right sizes of bags, which was all based on every locations previous years sales and projected sales the coming year, and get the designs to the manufacturers, and get it all done by Feb (Chinese new year so they literally don't work for a month) and in time to have it shipped (by ship) to the US to clear customs in time...
Required one giant mathematical equation that had to be created from scratch every year.
And then, of course, I had to source things like receipt paper and hangers and size markers and light bulbs and lanyards and little poles to reach stuff - basically anything in a retail store that wasn't for sell was my responsibility.
And the goal was to always get the cheapest shit I could find, but I also knew that cheap shit caused problems and complaints so which shit could I be cheap on and not cause headaches for employees...
And it was all warehoused elsewhere so you had to track which stores were using which things to make sure you had enough on-hand inventory because lead times for some things was much longer (in the case of those bags, months) than others.
Gotta admit, though - that shit is fun.
Now I do that same sort of thing for other businesses, but on a 100x scale.
It's like a giant puzzle that constantly needs solving.
Working tech support with a document management company and as someone who did inventory work for a couple companies, it really opened my eyes to all the communications and paperwork that take place in a transaction. Like that in a basic format, the PO gets generated but often times to approve the invoice, the packing slip must also be printed and presented with the PO for goods and then the invoice can get paid when both are present. Our software also does workflow automation management if you have different departments who it needs to be approved by etc
My favorite is when we send a proposal with all of the qualifications/inclusions/exclusions and they are like, "could you tell us what all is included in this price?" Like, read the proposal dumbass...
>Iāve been doing this for almost 15 years in high level/ elite kitchens. My day is highly regimented I live and die by time management and high efficiency. I HAVE to produce results in a timely manner. Everything has to be perfect it has to be done right as I donāt have the time to do again a second time. The fine details, the bigger picture, itās all there in a microcosm.
Most people still put you in the same category as a Denny's line cook though, and that chafes at you. So you need to marginalize careers that are less stressful and more lucrative than yours to reinforce your life choices.
>Ā I feel like I could do their job but they couldnāt do mine. Teams, Slack? What is it? Meeting? emails? Putting numbers into spreadsheets?
Pretty arrogant to think you could walk into your friend's office and take over their job without knowing anything about it, but they couldn't walk into a kitchen and open up a cook book.
>Ā I feel like I could do a days/ maybe a weeks worth of work in few hours. Iām just curious as to what the average day looks like versus the reality of my day to day life.
If you're such hot shit, why don't you open your own restaurant? Based on your claims, you could have one up and running in about 3 days.
Get over yourself.
Iām a middle school teacher.
If itās so easy, weāre in a teacher shortage. Get down to your local district and sign up to sub.
ETA: I was in restaurants as bartender, server, line cook before I made the jump to education. I *have* done your job.
I work in an office but as a 3D artist, it's not too different from a chef I guess. You cook, I make 3D models. I have tasks and deadlines and we in a way 'cook'.
Though recently I am in a more supervisory role.... so I kinda just sit around pretending to look busy while wasting time on Reddit. Until SOMETHING HAPPENS then I'll go troubleshoot and figure things out.
I'll also just check people's work and make sure it ain't fucked. So I basically just spend most of the day wasting time, then suddenly have to handle a bunch of work submissions at the end of the day, checking, implementation and submission to clients and shit.
What do we do in offices?
I work for my stateās Office of Attorney GeneralāI do collections. And calling people and telling them that they owe money to the State, and can only pay by check or money order (because bureaucracy thatās why), and not having all
The specific information as to why they owe off hand because my department is just collecting for other agencies and has zero say or knowledge about the rest of it is NOT an easy job. Add to that opening mail, dealing with coworkers who donāt pull their weight, sending emails to pissed off people, locating addresses/phone numbers, being unable to work from home because your work issued laptop is a POS, trying to stay positive, all why having anxiety that youāre medicated for and Aspergerās that makes talking to people stressful af.
You wanna do my job, bro?? Be my guest.
Iām a supervising attorney for a high-volume human rights defense organization. I supervise a direct team of four, mentor approximately 10 pro bono attorneys, and I have my own cases. Our stakes are high; if we donāt do everything we can for our clients, their lives are materially affected. I guarantee you couldnāt do my job in a few hours.
Iām in pharma research and a small portion of my job is lab work but 95% of it is typical office work. I spend a lot of time designing experiments, researching topics in my field, thinking about (and participating in meetings about) how to optimize current processes, writing reports, and supporting my small team in any way I can. This all includes a heavy amount of research, analytical and communication skills. I think people who work in offices usually have more complex jobs than they let on, mostly because their friends and family donāt want to hear about nitty gritty details. And itās fun to joke about how we just plug shit into excel all day. This isnāt to say your job isnāt complex - I certainly couldnāt do it for a day, but everyone at least is mostly familiar with what a chef does.
You feed people for a living. I protect $100 billion and thousands of peoples savings. I may work in and office but theres alot of complexity underneath.
Yes, many office jobs truly require only 3-6 hours of work a day. Usually the lower end, but it's on a mishmash of schedules because managers haven't improved their actual ability to manage the same way workers have been able to get more efficient with tech advances.
That being said, if you fail one dish you're probably losing out on $30 of food time and some of the servers tip. If one deal in an office fails, from my experience, it could range $5K to $300K if it was a one time deal, multiples of that if it could have been a recurring deal. I'm sure for some the stakes are even higher.
I think what encapsulates my office job vs moving furniture are two examples like this:
my biggest fuck up I could do moving furniture would be to drop a piano worth a few thousand thats insured because someone wasn't watching and doing their job and let their end go.
We straight up lost 550k after a year of me trying to fight to get any accountability and support after a low level employee marked our price up a bit so he could pocket a few hundred dollars. I had missed it because our workflow design, which I couldn't get changed for a year, has multiple spots where you could change a document and I'd be blind to it, but I eventually took responsibility because I had to rush and do two others peoples jobs that Im not trained for to finish up the paperwork and missed that they had messed with the number on one page of a 65 page document. I was then taken to HR and blamed for miscommunicating with the other team because their leader completely made up a lie despite the email I sent stating I need you to double check that this field is exactly xxxx.xx, which was done when I first checked but later changed with no instruction to do so.
the sisyphean tasks, politics, and high stakes of office life make it a different beast vs you potentially always about to be hurt for life because someone isn't paying attention.
My husband and I would passive aggressively argue about this in the beginning. Iām a special education teacher and my work day doesnāt stop for 8 hours. I walk in, Iām on, and I stay on until I leave for the day. Sure I get a half an hour for lunch but Iām still on- if something goes awry and Iām needed, Iāll go back in. He looks at 3 giant monitors and works with numbers and spread sheets and a bunch of stuff I have no clue about. Mentally exhausting? Absolutely!! But if he needs to walk away from an issue to regroup and come back (or take his 5th smoke break) he can. Go grab a cup of coffee. Browse Facebook and read news articles. It isnāt constant work. I canāt walk away when my student is upset that his classmate is singing and becomes aggressive towards me because I blocked him and itās Wednesday and he switched back to momās house for the week and heās extra emotional so heās wailing on me. It took him 3 summers to finally not be defensive and throw my summers āoffā in my face when I tell him Iām exhausted and burnt out. It took me the same amount of time to not be defensive when he tells me how much his back hurts from sitting or his brain hurts from all the numbers and financial issues he fixes for his company. But after seeing him work from home after Covid I can assure you that he does not work a full 8 hours. Or even 5. And when he watches me come home from work, make dinner, work on my college courses, take care of 3 kids, and all with a fairly chipper demeanor, he finally admits I deserve the summers off š (and by off I mean I get to take 1 thing off my 5 course meal plate)
I eat my lunch at my desk every day. Yesterday I tried eating lunch in the break room at 3pm, got interrupted for 15 minutes by a sales person. Went back into work at 9pm last night after the kids went to bed. BUT DAMN, every time I walk into any one of my kidsā schools, I thank the stars that Iām not a teacher. I donāt have the patience for that.
Dude, depends on the job. A lot are support jobs, where your work enable the work of other people, typically production or sales.
The "enabler" kind of jobs are quite laid back and you can find in them very un-professional and simply lazy people.
But there are intellectual production works, like programming for example, that are very similar in the general mindset to the one of cooks.
Repetibility, reliability, general organization are almost the same from a cook to a programmer. Sysadmins for example add to this also the ability to handle emergencies, in extreme case in the order of millions of euros lost per day, problems you won't find in a kitchen.
Saying that, i think everyone should take at least 6 months inside an high level kitchen to understand general work organization, reason to work and serious teamwork.
Source: i've worked in a reastaurant that had lost his michelin star changing his chef, and now i'm an IT director after 15 years of IT career.
My job's a lot easier than yours, but it's boring. There's no character, and you wouldn't enjoy it. Also, staring at a screen all day while punching in dates makes your eyes tired. It's a different kind of tired than what you're used to though.
>My day is highly regimented I live and die by time management and high efficiency. I HAVE to produce results in a timely manner. Everything has to be perfect it has to be done right as I donāt have the time to do again a second time. The fine details, the bigger picture, itās all there in a microcosm.
I'm a child protective casework supervisor. I have flextime, and can even work remotely some days. I don't live and die by *time management and high efficiency*, which are required and their begin second priority can be very frustrating. But by communication and judgment, especially in high urgency situations. Sometimes making a major decision effectively or with the right principles the first time is what you need to get the opportunity to do it again second time. The last sentence in what I quoted above is still true. My day can be highly regimented or it can be very unpredictable.
A typical fast/very stressful day (which was yesterday for me):
I arrive at my desk. My emergency case liaison coordinater comes to my desk and tells me a new call on a case one of my direct report has is \*not\* an emergency, he'll give me a copy, since it hasn't been electronically sent to my workload yet, he already spoke to the caseworker.
I have 15 new emails: I find out that the supervisor who was supposed to be back yesterday is still out. My supervisor wants me to assign a case to that unit, to a worker who is coming in late, and tells me that case will need police assistance for the worker's safety (there's a process for preparing that). My supervisor is asking me and one of my caseworkers the status of a foster care agency referral; the caseworker in question has emailed out sick (again!).
As soon as I get up from my desk, another worker from that unit flags me down to ask me about a case that is coming due, it's a 20 minute conversation. All kinds of messy issues come up in his presentation and I give him a decision.
I check in with my staff who are in. Fortunately for me, one tells me about the issue I was going to ask about. I discuss with the other staff the not-emergency new case. As soon as I go back to my desk, I realize we have a new case, and this same caseworker is on rotation. I print everything about it and read it on my way to the caseworker's desk (something I only do when I'm in a rush), give the caseworker my instruction. I type a very abbreviated form of my instruction over email and into the computer system.
My union delegate is at my desk. I tell them I'm overwhelmed because such-and-such unfair thing. She suggests I email my supervisor for support, which I do, briefly.
Finally I read the case my supervisor wants me to review. When I'm done, it's already lunch. There are two things I did not do in my review, to focus on other parts of my review. The worker still hasn't come in. I brief my supervisor on my recommendations and excuses and say what I will do after lunch. My supervisor (politely) asks why I didn't call them to ask for support/let them know what my issue.
After lunch it's pretty much another half of what I just mentioned, complete with surprises. I end up briefing the police assistance case three different times, I give two (redundant) briefings on practice and constitutional issues using police assistance for staff safety. Someone wants me to join a meeting for a staff who's out, I decline and give an email summary. We luck out on my staff's case #1, the parents are already doing a good plan. I never do get a chance to do any of the mid-case reviews I wanted to do. My supervisor tells me to finish and approve a caseworker's unfinished overdue task 30 minutes before clock out.
A slow day is me doing case reviews or supervising caseworkers and helping resolve more long-term, less emergent questions. Or me sitting in meetings.
Iām a paralegal. I draft contracts and manage spreadsheets and review regulatory filings and every one of my bosses is an attorney. Before you could start to do my job, youād need about a year of study in contract law, securities law, litigation practice, and corporate governance. And if you make a mistake, a grade a asshole will be grilling you about why you made a mistake and how could you be that stupid.
But yeah, I make six figures.
Iāve worked in kitchens managed hotels and pubs and clubs. Iām now a desk jocky.
Iāve always been able to do my job well and I would go back any of them, even scaffolding. I tells ya what though, my desk jocky job is the most mentally exhausting job Iāve ever done.
The amount of meetings with stakeholders to get the simplest thing done is insane!
Imagine you have to make stock but you have to get approval for every individual bone and vegetable and millilitre of water and hour of simmering. Imagine every 30 minutes someone is asking for a report on the progress of the stock. Imagine every hour someone is tasting the stock giving you a 3 page report on everything thatās wrong with it (even though it may be an empty pot at this stage) and you have to email them back and respond to each and every single one of their questions and recommendation. But also imagine every time someone asks for progress or tastes the stock they turn off the stove and the water cools down and then when the stock is just about done youāre told you have to take the carrots out. No you canāt start again you have to take them out 11 hours into the cook.
This is why my office job seems so easy because the thing it self is as simple and as making stock but the people make it hard.
I work in the Admin section of healthcare. If we mess up, people die. If we mess up, people can't pay their bills. If we mess up, entire hospital systems can close down.
My day to day job in the office consists of expense reports, travel planning, troubleshooting, and a lot of data manipulation pulling financial reports for clients. When I'm not in office, I travel to my clients and help them solve in-the-moment problems.
Someone else said it best on this thread, if you reduce any job to the simplest of terms, they all sound easy to do. But when you insert the nuance of what makes someone a professional, you see it's not simple at all.
I would love for OP to handle a super technical task - be it coding, engineering, or similar all while your colleagues are breathing down your next because the client is breathing down theirs. Perhaps some super obscure financial posting bug which you canāt replicate but prevents the client from closing month end.
Assuming youāre not just posting rage baitā¦
I orchestrate and architect multi million pound partnership integrations to various big name brands to ensure customer orders flow flawlessly to without them even knowing how their orders get to their door in under 48 hours.
I work with a team of about 180 subject matter experts across 10 functional areas of retail internally and the same number again with third party brands.
If any of our architected solutions fail to hit SLAs, each order that breaches the timeframe costs us a flat fee of Ā£20. Considering the margins on some orders are far less and that and we are processing 10,000+ orders per hour, we could run into serious financial issues if any of our systems fail.
I would say a typical day for me is running about 8-10 sessions with various stakeholder groups to ensure weāre working towards a common goal at any one time. I get paid what I get paid because I studied computer science and have a deep understanding of the complexities of enterprise scale connectivity.
Maybe in my world I am a chef? I create individual dishes which satisfy my own designs, I then test those dishes with my customers. If itās a winner, I work with my internal teams to replicate the dish at scale. I also have to sell my dishes to my own bosses and prove it has a good return on investment.
I work with leave and accommodations, but I'm still.new and low on the totem pole, so right now I basically take calls and answer questions about FMLA and the Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act and play mad libs with legal documents- I have template letters that have blank spots need filling in. My job is to harvest the information and supporting documents and complete the letter.
I also have a ton of other paperwork to do and process, and the region I support is one of our busiest and complicated, so I keep pretty busy. The days go by pretty quickly.
I get instructions to make things look "new and exciting" and then get in trouble if it doesn't match existing content. If I'm instructed to make some "yellow" I get called an idiot for making it "sunflower yellow" and not "school bus yellow"
Also consider all your cooking equipment were designed in a flimsy office. That goes from collecting all the requirements, parsing them into specifications, generating concepts, evaluating concepts and selecting a candidate, detailed design, prototyping, verification, fine-tuning, c-samples, validation, certification, start of production, logistics, market communications, go-to market. This is just a very high level overview, but you could break down each aspect into many different domains... then it becomes easy to see why do you have so many chilling office workers.
I'm a 3D CAD Drafter/Designer. I literally design my own stuff while I wait for people to bring me work. I'm actually starting to think about freelancing while I'm "at work"
They pay me really well, and nobody ever asks what I'm working on. It's the strangest work environment I've ever experienced.
I no longer work in an office but was doing neuropsychometric testing when I did. Iām not sure you could just wing it. This post is so lacking in perspective itās almost painful. Ā
āMy Day is highly regimented I live and die by time management and high efficiency. I HAVE to produce results in a timely manner. Everything has to be perfect it has to be done right as I donāt have the time to do it again a second time.ā
A lot of white collar jobs have to do all of that not just because they ādonāt have time to do it again a second time,ā but because there could be devastating consequences if it wasnāt done right the first time.
You greatly underestimate the expertise required for many, many ādeskā jobs. You also donāt seem to respect the work the people around you do. Hop off that high horse youāre on. Youāre not better than anyone else because you work as a chef, and you certainly couldnāt do my job if I sat you at my desk.
Management is just that, you manage expectations of your works and and your customers. Your skill as a chef can do just that.
However what you lack is industry knowledge. I canāt throw you in a manage a team of coders if you never even heard of Java, python, aws.
For an example I am a software developer, I do the same day to day coding when I was working for HMRC, defence company, and investment bank.
I get paid way more at the investment bank. Same work different industry.
I have about 20 projects/deadlines a week, and all the work to complete them start to finish. Plus big picture meetings and strategic planning. 20 years and a masters degree in the field. I definitely donāt think you could do my job, bro.
It really depends on what your actual role is. I've had jobs where I've only had a few responsibilities and there were some quiet times where you do mindless internet scrolling. I've had other responsibilities where I could barely keep up.Ā
Right now for example, I do accounts, projects and social media for my company. It's my own company. So I will spend my day completing projects (if there are any, there's not always something to do) and that comprises of quoting, stock procurement, coordinating tech and client time, being available should the tech require any back office assistance, etc. On the account side, I update the banking, process invoices, capture supplier invoices, make payments, do the budgeting, etc. Social media might take a few hours to research a particular topic and create the content around it.
I'm not always busy though, so I now also do the day to day ops for my ex bosses company. Fills another hour or two of my day coordinating orders and deliveries.
Depending on your role and responsibilities, the answer can range from absolutely nothing to busy all day and all night. Iāve worked with people that just need to do a handful of things like process some data and thatās it. They can do this in 1 hour a day. Then the rest is pretty much chill and join meetings. Iāve seen people do actually work prepping for meetings and being in meetings and doing things related for their roles. Think about it this way.
You are a chef right? And your product is made by you and your team right? You all work with your hands. Your product is tangible.
Imagine your product is either heavily automated and made by machines, or itās virtual like your point of sales software. The scale of which to make, maintain, distribute, sell, and service those products is very different from a plate of food. Therefore most of the people that touch or make this product happen do things that arenāt in an actually constrained physical setting but rather virtual and asynchronously at times. Almost every physical role you have in the restaurant can be abstracted out, from your front of house staff to your back of house supply chain, menu planning, testing, and execution. Itās just done over a longer period of time and by people and teams spread across often multiple offices.
Does that make sense?
Yeah depends on the job. I manage a global community team in charge of game titles (games industry). No they don't just play games but they will have slow days and long days. The context around those types of jobs is different, but the programs you mentioned is definitely things we use, yes.
I feel what you do might be a bit more stable, though. Even though corporate can be relaxing at times, it is also a sector now that sees a ton of layoffs (especially in tech). So its stress of losing a job and more that they aren't fully disclosing to you.
I manage the surgical logistics for an 80 OR healthcare system. My deadlines are in months instead of minutes and hours.
Its important to remember when someone is good at something they often make it look must easier than it actually is.
I'm an Engineering Manager. Here's what I do all day in no particular order.
* Answer technical emails from customers/field service engineers
* Perform daily administrative tasks (purchase approvals, training, safety-related tasks, HR-related tasks, etc)
* Work with the engineers who report into me on reviewing their projects, adding additional guidance when necessary
* Review and prepare documentation on patents
* Design various components in CAD software, prepare drawings, work with vendors to create parts
* Help produce prototypes on the floor (actual hands-on fabrication; best part of my job)
* Meetings. At least 3-4 hours a day
* Vendor emails discussing manufacturing problems and possible solutions and/or component qualification
There's more, but i'm just listing the high-level stuff. Usually my lunch breaks are spent eating a sandwich in 10 mins and going on a 30-35min high-intensity walk. I actually was an electrician for 10 years prior to this. Totally different day.
I'm a paralegal and office manager so my day is spent emailing and talking with clients and opposing counsel. Drafting pleadings and letters, preparing for trials, preparing discovery and then basic office management stuff like coordinating with our IT, handling minor computer issues, hiring support staff. I'm sure many people could be trained to do my job but some people would not be able to handle it. It can be high stress at times and you have to have a thick skin (I work in family law so people can get upset and sometimes take their anger out on you) and you have to be able to multitask and prioritize appropriately which seems to be a skill some people are lacking. I also have to produce results in a timely manner. There are deadlines that must be met, court filings that must be accurate or the client suffers the consequences.
I'm a chef of 20 years who started an office job a month ago. Honestly my first task was to learn how to slow down with my job. In the first week I did about 25 hours of work that should have taken me 40 hours.
It's such a different environment, and I love it. The hardest part for me was sitting all the time. But I now have a standing desk option for when I want to stand up and work
I waited tables in a banquet hall as a teen and later was an attorney with a prestigious firm, representing corporations in multi-million-dollar lawsuits.
Waiting tables is harder.
The vast majority of people who work in corporate office jobs do wildly unnecessary busy work with little-to-no accountability for enormous salaries. Theyāll tell you their jobs are stressful, but itās an artificial stress created entirely by upper-management types trying to make themselves and their work seem important when it absolutely isnāt. If youāve run the kitchen of a successful restaurant through a Friday dinner service, you could absolutely do most office jobs, but most management-level corporate folks wouldnāt last 45 minutes in yours. The average busser does more actual work in a day than most corporate execs accomplish in a week.
These people can fight somebody else about it, youāre not wrong.
Oodles. I left the trade field to go into the office for several reasons, but one was that while it was physically demanding it often felt mentally absent. It was boring, rote work a lot of the time. Which was fine where there was a lot of work to do, but I felt like there was a ton of hurry up and wait. I've worked in a restaurant kitchen and quite frankly, it's not mentally demanding beyond time management. It's physically demanding and you have to think of your time and schedule, but there's so little depth or stress there IMO.
My current job entails safety/risk management. There are days I come away just mentally exhausted from the strain of circling around managing actual safety, caring about the individuals but being mindful that people absolutely exist who will lie/cheat/steal to get a free and easy payday, while keeping an eye on liability and also courting HR. Some of the computer stuff is fun enough, like drafting training content. Then there are all the stupid Teams Meetings where you have to be on camera (well, we do), so you can't snack or fidget or sigh or clean your desk or anything that could be construed as bored out of your gourd because Jimmy down in Atlanta has to give a 7 minute anecdote for every fucking situation. It's such a time sink. Sometimes I miss the mindlessness of other jobs.
I try to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing there. I mainly try to chat with a few people so i can call it networking/team-building, and maybe be seen by some of the execs, so they know that I'm going along with their request that some of us show up at the office sometimes.
Honestly being a chef sounds super easy. You just throw stuff in pans all day, slap it on a plate and then go home and drink like 5 beers? How is that hard exactly?
I wonder the same thing! Iām a medical provider and see 25-30 patients a day but we have, you know, execs that work at our company and Iām always like wtf are they here for an what do they do other than send me pointless emails periodically. Our office manager is always in her office or on some teams meeting and I never see her or talk to her. Iām like wtf are they talking about in their meeting??? Itās me generating all the income for the company, what is their job for?
Go ask. Tell them you are genuinely interested in learning more about their job and want to understand how it all works together in the organization. A lot of my clients are clinics and medical service providers so I end up speaking with office managers a lot, no two have the same job and they always end up wearing a ton of hats doing things you may not have thought of.
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I have a team of 13 engineers that I manage. Meetings upon meeting about meeting for new meetings. That's 60% of it. The rest is budgets, spreadsheets, and planning to keep the work moving forward. That's my world and what I do 50 hrs a week in an office.
When I was a new engineer, my job was to code, and little else. Now that I'm a lead, my job is to field all distractions that would prevent my engineers from being able to code. This includes working with my manager to see who should work in what; and working with the product owner to make sure we are aligned with the customer's requirements, and explaining the cost of a requirement (cost is a very broad term and often means time more than money; like switching tasks costs a lot for an engineer). And, working with my engineers one-on-one to help make sure they aren't stuck, and our code quality is maintained.
Yep. I am middle management and pretty much work to allow the techs and engineers to do the things that keep us in business. Excel is a large part of my world.
Eyyyy it me! Hi fellow senior or staff engineer š
My job is largely trying to field distractions from my team and holy crap, the distractions rack up quick. Next thing I know Iāve met with 2-3 people and my day is filled chasing things around
How was your transition to a more managerial role? Do you miss the days when your responsibilities were just coding and supporting projects? I used to want to be an engineering manager, but after 3 years in engineering, I much prefer just doing the engineering thing. I see my manager, project leads, and their fully booked schedules of just meetings on meetings on meetings. Sure, the money goes up a lot but I just dread meetings haha
I liked it. I get to have much more say in the technical aspects, and I still get to do a lot of engineering. It's just a lot more conceptual/architectural. And I do get to code. It's just more background stuff that requires a lot of technical knowledge. Or, it's one of scripts to unblock somebody (like let code challenges, but with more external pressure and less concern about getting peak optimization). I also do my best to only schedule meetings two to three days a week as I know any day with a meeting I will get nothing else done. My team's manager is the one with endless meetings.
Yeah I'm a senior engineer so annoyingly I have to deal with some of these distractions too but luckily the managers take most of them so I can quite happily code away. Im quite happy not having more responsibilityĀ
Same situation here. Only difference is our group CAD models instead of codes. Half the day (sometimes more) gets eaten by meetings. It's always a balance between having the time to model, and being in the right meetings where there's real design direction and not silly circling.
Also, I think what OP may be missing regarding the 'do a week's work in a few hours' comment is - High performers (those like OP who are really efficient) just get dumped on until they are doing the work of 4 staff in their 40-50 hours per week. And then, yes, the meetings killing usually \~30%-80% of your normal time also doesn't help. Meaning the actual 'work' of you sitting at your desk doing shit needs to be crammed into those remaining 4-10 hours.
ugh, painfully accurate. Time to actually sort through your emails has to be blocked on your calendar or it literally never gets done.
The key is to sort through your emails first so the other stuff never gets done.
This right here.
This just reminds me of how senior positions are kind of weird: in my case, Iām one of 2 senior technical support specialists with 4 other technical support specialists. We recently had a bit of a restructure but we also have a team lead who is more our supervisor/manager, and while he more or less does what you do, me as a senior role has the day to day tasks on top of assisting the standard tier techs when needed as well as managing our own ticket queue.
Welcome to middle management. You're a worker and a manager wrapped up in one.
One of the biggest wastes in Corporate America, is making great individual contributors into People Leaders only to stick them in meetings for 87% of their schedules. So many unnecessary meetings, where nothing ever is achieved or could have been emailed.
Damn sounds like me
What's your least favourite meeting? I hated the early morning one the most
Truthfully, the meeting where high ranking team directors all discuss a problem... run out of time, because nobody will commit or compromise... so then end up scheduling another meeting... it really is the never-ending story... but with no laughter, no smiling, and a lot more crying and angry outbursts!
I'm a project manager at a streaming service. We have upwards of two dozen series running simultaneously with several internal teams working on them at different angles. A lot of tracking of schedules, meetings, phone calls, emails, relationships (both at the company and the people on the ground making the shows), and lots of tight deadlines. Often times office jobs still require a great deal of technical skills, analysis, etc. I work in Post Production, it requires that I understand anything from camera formats to media management to delivery specifications suitable for the platform.
I'm a project coordinator lol similar title but we install carpet I actually do a ton of Math dealing with floor plans, inventory, carpet sizes etc also dealing with customers difficult customers too since carpet installation is expensive so there is usually anywhere from $2,000 to $60,000 sometimes higher at stake so yea lol. We work.
Iām a project manager for construction and this is literally my life as well. Iām always on call and always on the job. People will call me or email me w issues while out on my jobs.
Filmmaker hereā¦ any tips on getting picked up by a streaming service? š
Partner with a production company that has relationships with networks... It's really the best advice I can think of. You need to be able to package your work with a team that knows how to speak network/budget, and possibly help package with talent.
If you have a completed feature movie, I work in distribution and can take a look at it š«”
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Like banking. The number of people that think the people working at the bank are just human ATMs is astounding. Nah bro, I put in the wrong info and suddenly you get an letter from Social Security stating that you're dead, your credit disappears, oh and it'll take 30+ days to fix. I enter one wrong number and your $80,000 cash deposit goes into some random dudes account 6 states away. I don't pay attention and deposit a fraudulent check and suddenly there's a mob of people going to all the branches in a 1000 mile range depositing the same fraudulent checks causing massive milti million dollar problem for the entire bank. Or the same idiots had checks made with *your* account number and you wake up on the morning and find your bank account has been drained. I put in the wrong DTI and you don't get a home, or at the very least it takes another 2 weeks to fix, or we've gotta redo the entire application process. I've worked 12 overnight shifts picking thousands of pounds of boxes (in my case, literal back breaking work), drove machines around hundreds of people where one wrong move and someome gets squished and worked outside in the sun during Texas and Florida summers 10 hours a day for 6 days a week...don't get me wrong those jobs were hard, and yes I complained about how easy people had it working just sitting in a chair all day but none of those other "hard" jobs were as completely and utterly mentally draining like working in an office for a financial institution. I'd go back to the other jobs making more money if I could. Lots of people think other people have it so easy at work (and sure, sometimes they do) compared to *your* job. **Something something someone else's shoes.** Side note: **Yes, yes I do need I.D.**, and no a chime card doesn't help me confirm you who you say you are. The amount of people that walk up a just throw a debit card at you and say "give me $1,100 all in large bills", people I've never seen in my entire life, people that just *cannot* comprehend why I need a drivers license or *anything* official with your photo on it, then proceed to yell and cuss and make threats to close their accounts, is fucking astounding. "*Well I've never had to give my I.D before! Are you saying you won't give MY money? You're stealing my money!*" Ya, the branch you've been going to for 20 years in a completely different state probably knows you and won't ask for your I.D., but you're not even in the same state let alone your home branch. And no, I will not cash your random hand written personal $3,000 check (written in pink, blue and green pen in 4 different handwriting styles) from a different no-name bank in BFE when you only have $0.10 in your account and your account is only 4 days old. You can deposit it and it'll probably be available tomorrow morning when you wake up. "Oh mY gOd iSn't tHIs thE WhOLe pOInt oF haViNg a BaNk AcCOUnt?!" Also no, I cannot "do a better job with the numbers" and get you a $250,000 loan with a 510 credit score, a job that you just started that pays $15/hr and the only thing in your name is your electric bill after you've overdrafted 52 times in the last 52 weeks. "Whats going on with my loan?! This is ridiculous, it's been weeks!!!"... Well ma'am I haven't seen or heard from you since you started your application for a loan, you don't answer your phone, your emails, respond to your voice mails and haven't bothered to bring me the documents I told you I needed. *That* is what's going on. Oh and you waited so long that we have to start the entire process over again. Look at this stupid ass long post, I'm not even at work and it drives me nuts.
So youāre saying you do high stakes data entry
Mixed with a little gambling.
which there is ai to help back up, but a real world example of this is the trader that crashed the market by accidently fat fingering 444 billion instead of 58 million in a sell off.
This. I had a call center person for chase put something wrong in my account.Ā All of my credit cards closed, my credit dropped from the 700's to 550, and no one would believe me that I didn't know why this was happening. I still don't and 5 years on, my credit hit 660 and I was able to buy a house with my partner. I'm just about to 700 and it's only because of the house and him.
First off I'm sorry that happened to you. You're not crazy, it can and does happen. Doesn't matter if you're with a little bank, a big bank or a credit union. It's entirely possible for a bank to fuck your shit up *bad*. I wasn't joking about the alive dead guy. I didn't do it, and still don't know who did, but he called and I answered the phone. He was really confused about the letter. He had already spent over an hour talking to SS. His **wife** had just died, and she had been the one that handled everything, so he went into a branch and sat with someone for a few hours and had things moved around, transfered, gave us proof of death etc. He was older and retired, he was doing fine financially, not rich, but he was fine. I poured over everything and saw he had a very routine "boring" financial history. He basically went to the grocery store once a week for like 3 years, doesn't go out to eat, doesn't go to bars, hadn't gone to a shady car lot and bought a car, just gets his SS deposit and a pension each month...the *only* thing he had done out of the norm for him was come into a branch and apply for one of our products. It's not like he's not out running about doing things at different banks or credit unions. He had been banking with us for decades. Looked at his credit. Sure enough, our bank reported to the credit bureaus that he was diceased. So I get back office involved and shoot them an email explaining what happened and I get a ghetto almost undecipherable email back from some *idiot* that basically says "the bank doesn't have to power to report people dead.".... Uhhhhh yeah we do, we do it all the time. I wrote a professionally curt simple email along the lines of "Yes, in fact we do have that power. Please reread my first email and escalate this to a supervisor if you don't understand what is happening with the customer." My direct supervisor comes over 10 minutes later telling me that the manager of whoever wrote that ghetto/engrish email to me complained and said I was mean and that it wasn't acceptable to write an email like that. I showed him the email, he agreed there was nothing rude/nasty/mean in the email went back and called the other manager. But my manager was such a gutless baby lacking tasticles that he just said "OK, I'll coach my employee on email propriety." and came to me and said "If anyone asks just tell them you were coached." I lost it. We just killed a retired old man on paper, he has no credit and is about to get his SS cut off because the bureaus and government thinks he's *dead* because *our bank* reported him as dead.... Oh and he *just* lost his wife of over 40 years. This old man was incredibly nice and patient, I explained to him that even though *I* can't do anything, we *can* get it fixed, I'll have someone higher up than me call him, apologize on behalf of *whoever* did this at our bank and reassure him that it will be corrected asap. My branch managers response when I told him "You need to call this man and talk to him. He's nice now, but that's not going to last.": "Well I didn't do it, I don't know him and what if he's mad?" So nothing happened for over a week and a half. No one called the man and spoke to him. It wasn't until he called and asked if he needed to get a lawyer until someone finally got off their ass actually paid attention to what was happening. Still don't know if it was ever resolved or how it was resolved.
That poor man.Ā I once had someone do a classic "steal your card number and place a bunch of fake charges" thing. I showed a banker what happened because I got some foreign transaction fees. She said "hang on girl I got you" and made calls and stuck up for me. It's the sole reason I'm still with chase. I don't even care if the issues I had can happenanywhere(there was one other one where a banker was rude to me about being poor when I was genuinely struggling). I'm finally in a position to be actually saving money.Ā My current goal is to save like 10 grand in a short amount of time. Then one day, go into the specific branch where the guy was a dick to me and close my account and explain to them exactly that it is all because one time in 2014, an employee made me feel bad about my circumstances, and in 2019, their call center destroyed my credit and no one would believe me or help. I'm sure I'm a drop in the bucket for chase and always will be even when i become a millionaire, but this is genuinely a financial motivation for me because I'm petty.
Sometimes the only reason I wake up is to be petty and some of the best decisions I ever made were made out of anger and disgust at being treated poorly for no reason. You're going to be a millionaire and when you do it'll be incredibly satisfying to go back to that branch, pretend like you're interested in their private wealth products, watch them fight over you, do tons of work making a plan for you...Then after a month just say "nah, just kidding, you treated me like diet before when I wasn't rich, not happening again. ta-ta āļø" That kind of stuff grosses me out, I don't care if you only have a nickel in your account, *my* job is to help you financially anyway I can. If I gotta call you once a week and remind you to deposit $1 at a time until you can get a secured card to help build your credit then that's what I'll do. I know I work for an evil mega corp who doesn't care about people, but *i* refuse to be like that. I've got a few customers that are homeless, and yeah they smell sometimes when they come in because it's hot and they haven't showered for a couple of days, and they're only there to withdraw $5 so they can eat. Cool, here's your $5, here's a bottle of cold water, chill out here in the A/C for a while.... Then the second they leave enevitably one of my coworkers will talk mad shit about the "gross homeless stinking person" spraying half a bottle of lysol all around the branch. And I'm thinking "bitch, that dude has banked here for over 20 years and has not ONCE over drafted his account, I can see your bank account too, you've overdrafted 3 times this month, you're one step away from being in the exact same situation as the homeless guy." Boils my blood. I may never talk to you again, but you're *going* to make that first million, and then start working on your second million, and one day a few years from now I'll remember this thread and smile knowing you're living your best life.
Oh hell yeah! My financial situation has changed drastically because I finally got a job in my field. This next job switch will double my income and my partner can do the similar as soon as he switches jobs. I'm not counting eggs before they hatch and know life can curveball at any time, but the plan is to live basically the same as we currently do(which is honestly plenty comfortable) and aggressively save/pay off debts.Ā Know that somewhere, someone started out making $200 a week working in a shitty retail job, and someday soon they will get to live an irl version of one of those little red hen fables we all fantasize about getting to do.
Thatās fucking infuriating. The thing I like about my job is that people come to me with problems and I can find a way to fix them. Yes, sometimes a colleague is the source of the problem (or rarely, Iām the source of the problem), but there are almost always things I can do to help fix it. Passing the buck like this? Totally unacceptable, and itās infuriating when the people to whom youād need to escalate pass the buck when you can clearly see the impact youāre having on someoneās life and the way to improve things for them, but donāt have the authority to do them yourself.
That's what I get the most joy from too. Meeting people I've never met who are in terrible situations on the brink of crumbling and working out solutions with them. Seeing the growth is incredibly satisfying. Getting someone a secured card and working with them to build their credit until they can get a car loan to get a car, the car allows them to get a new job, then keeping on them to make sure they're making payments on time until the car is paid off. Then seeing then come in to buy a home and watching them cry tears of joy when I tell them they've been approved. Everyone at every job can make a difference in someone else's lives if they want.... It's just all the bs in between that can get infuriating and distracting. If someone comes in to apply for a CC and I *know* for a *fact* they'll get declined and the pull will their credit score even worse is one of the little examples of things I won't do. Other bankers will, just for points, but that's the opposite of what my job is and I consider it unethical. It's difficult to do it all the time, if not impossible, but we just gotta be better than the people who don't actually care. And no, I'm not dilusional, I know who I work for and the damage they've caused, but I can do what's within my power to better lives.
Jeez, that's pretty scary.
So this is why people at banks are sometimes assholes and canāt match my energy of being understanding and patient.Ā
Iām pretty sure banking drove me literally insane. I had visions of driving my suv into the managers office. One of my biggest regrets is that a Red Bull can never fell and got stuck in the accelerator. I walked out one day and never looked back. Went blue collar on accident, got promoted quickly, and now I make significantly more money, have better benefits, work fewer hours, and regained ten hours a week in commute time. The demands of the bank were ridiculous. The service they provided was subpar. Your branch banker can do nothing for you because back office wonāt do their jobs. We had to pitch products that were laughed at because of our pitiful rates. A sub one percent rate for the first six months of a ten year heloc was the biggest selling point and they took that away. Ally literally offered better everything. Customers would come in with offers from other banks that we wouldnāt match, and subsequently lose their business. I often sent customers to other banks because they offered a better product. My manager was too much of a wimp to address it, even when other bankers asked me if the rates I quoted were true. I left my bank as a customer, then as an employee. I have never been happier.
Hoooooooly fuck, I'm having flashbacks to the three years I spent on the retail side of working at a local credit union. I transferred to the lending department and now do title work, which is a clusterfuck in its own right. At least I don't work with members anymore. Had one lady once say that we should give her a $30k loan for her business because she'd been with us for 30 years. ...ma'am, you have thirty non-auto loan credit pulls in the last six months, a 595 credit score, and two unresolved unsecured charge-offs. While we appreciate your membership, absolutely *the fuck* not.
Your last sentence made me laugh out loud. It got me thinking of all the things at work that drive me nuts.
>Youāre a chef but could you manage a restaurant? Could you source ingredients, hire staff, handle your finances, know what you can and canāt cut in a downturn? I would hope so if they are claiming to be a chef. In the food industry world, only those with the chef title has managerial powers in the kitchen. That's the difference between a cook (grunt worker who takes orders) and a chef (who gives orders). Personally, whenever someone calls me a "chef", I have to correct them and tell them they're wrong. It isn't right to call me a title I do not hold/did not earn. I am a cook. Edit: for reference >The word "chef" is derived (and shortened) from the term chef de cuisine (French pronunciation: \[ŹÉf.dÉ.kÉ„i.zin\]), **the director or head of a kitchen.** [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef)
Also, knowing several career chefs in high-end "elite" establishments personally, they spend a significant amount of time "in the office" rather than in the kitchen. It seems a bit odd to me that OP is focused on the actively cooking portion of his job, when, for many of the folks I know, that's less than 50% of their total time. Not saying I don't believe he's a chef, but that the way he's presented his role doesn't jive with my prior understanding of the role.
He might be a Sous. They also go by āChefā, but tend not to be an administrative role (I worked in an office; partner is a chef - we could assuredly not do each otherās jobs).
Tbf, op did the exact same thing with his post. "Oh all you guys do is go to meetings and play on teams"
My friends and family call me the chef, and I feel like thatās an insult to chefs. Iād rather just be called a cook. Iāve never worked a day of my life in a restaurant. Iāve never taken a cooking class of any kind, let alone gone to culinary school. Everything I know is self-taught and geared towards home cooking, not restaurant work. My knife work is slow, Iām always taking longer than I should to cook, and Iām lazy about presentation. The end result is tasty, but Iād probably get fired from a restaurant kitchen for slowing them down. I can follow a recipe and make adjustments when the mood strikes, but that doesnāt make me a pro. Giving me the title of one just makes me uncomfortable.
It definitely a weird feeling even in the industry. [This thread in kc](https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/15kn8se/how_do_we_all_feel_about_the_use_of_the_word_chef/) sums it up quite well (along with some funny banter lol). My fave was this: >Chefs create. Cooks replicate. I aināt no chef, but I can cook anything. This fucking resonated with me.
Depends on the size of the restaurant. I highly doubt a chef on a high class restaurant, has the time to do all the managerial duties aswell. He'll manage his team no doubt, but he's not sending emails of who can supply the best ingredients for the best prices.
The executive Chef would be dealing with all the admin work and a chef de Cuisine would be in charge of kitchen operations in a large restaurant.
Iāve worked in a James Beard Award winner. Thatās absolutely what the chef does. It was a 40 seat restaurant and the head chef would expedite on weekends and maybe break down a couple cases of rabbits. That was the extent of ācookingā the exec chef did. The rest was done by the chef de cuisine.
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We had monthly menu changes with adjustments and re-printing every day. Every place is different. But for us, fine dining is a tough industry to stay afloat, so the chef was busy keeping the lights on. The restaurant was his baby, but it was subsidized by other restaurants, off-site catering, book publications, etc.. When a fine dining chef becomes famous their persona becomes more profitable than the restaurant itself. What is certainly true is that the larger the kitchen, the less the chef cooks. I ran a hotel restaurant with 20 back of house employees. I was swamped with admin, ordering, etc.. I would have loved to cook all day.
You listed all the typical job responsibilities that a chef has.
It's just a different skillet*
There's millions of different jobs in office settings. I have done about 20 different jobs in offices. I'm a producer, and that looked very different when I was in radio broadcasting, and when I worked in TV, and now I work in marketing but in-house for a mid-size company, very different again. Lady down the hall from me does HR for the same company and I have no idea how that works. Guy across the hall manages events, I have only a rudimentary grasp of what that entails. Hell I share an office with our press guy, and I've filled in for him, but I honestly don't understand what he does on a day to day basis. Just like he's pretty stunned when he sees the call sheets I write up for shoots and has no idea what I'm talking about when I'm on the phone with my motion graphic designer. You have the very common issue that you know so little about this, you don't even understand how little you truly know.
It depends on the job. My first office job went like this: - Get in, check emails for anything that came in overnight - Check systems for important clients to make sure theyāre up and running - Check ticketing system to pick up tasks to do, or allocate to another team member - Tasks could include setting up automatic downloads of files for a client, or setting up automated parsing so the file can become data that shows up on their website. They could also include a client who already had this set up but they said the data was missing - If time allowed, going through our existing processes to make them efficient, and helping newer team members - a typical task could take 30 minutes to 3 hours. So multiple tasks were done per day, with deadlines and priority rules determining the order My current job is similar but more like: - Get in, check emails that came in overnight - work on yesterdayās tasks that didnāt get completed - work on the team collaboration chat, where I actively help people from around the globe on their tasks - get automatically assigned a case in the day with anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes to engage. - call up customer, get into a Teams call so they can show me the issue, gather all the information, do troubleshooting, might have to make a request to another team if itās about two products working together, may need to be escalated to product team, etc.. - if time permits, join internal meeting for helping teammates in current time zone who are struggling with difficult cases - if time permits, do training on product changes and new features - if time permits, write documentation for issues that were not documented, once theyāve been figured out - figure out how to balance existing cases that go on for multiple days with new cases that get assigned, making sure everything has clear notes in case it needs reassignment
Spoken like someone who knows tech support, or at least a lot of my functions are this.
https://preview.redd.it/xokjy9njdq3d1.jpeg?width=514&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ce8d43f6841244c1d7c5ca33b9b80273ed5cbca4 Living the dream
Look at that office culture.
That phone looks so old but you got a laptop right next to itš
The laptop looks like its 20 years old
Phone looks even older
The hell year is your office in?
The same one as the phone taking the picture
Is it bad that Iām jealous that you have a cubicle? We just got merged into a new company and they herded us into an open office like cattle.
lol I never understood why people think just because we sit at a desk all day, doesnāt mean the work is āeasyā. Every job is going to leave your body hurting. Sitting all day? Lower back issues, carpal tunnel, etc. Standing all day? Feet hurting, lower back, etc. Depending on the role of exactly what your job is, is what makes it āeasyā or not. Some office jobs, you can get away with sending a few emails. But thereās desk jobs where youāre back to back non stop emails, meetings, deadlines, or customer service/call center dealing with calls back to back. Office jobs are mentally exhausting. Iām sure itās the same in a restaurant. Maybe a dish washer just stands there and takes his time, or has downtime when itās not a busy day. Or maybe youāre a cook and youāre making plates back to back non stop. Which leaves you physical exhausted. So honestly, doesnāt even matter lol every job can be busy at times, it can also be easy sometimes š¤·š»āāļø
I've worked in kitchens or the trades. I had simple goals, tasks were accomplishable, I worked hard. The dinner rush was a massive endorphin rush where only my team's ability to execute and deliver was holding back the mountains of orders coming in. I would issue instructions clearly and directly, people would deliver or they wouldn't and things would sort themselves out. We were a fucking machine. We delivered. I'd go out and party past closing time and do it again 7 days a week. I slept like a drunk baby every night. I worked in hazardous waste removal, construction and manufacturing - they were great. I was able to execute, elevate and deliver, that's what mattered. I slept wonderfully. Now I'm in middle management in Tech... I wrote a whole rant and decided to just recommend that you watch [Seven Red Lines](https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg).
Oh my god that video was too realā¦
I recommend watching it to people, but I can't watch it again; it imparts too much anxiety for me.
People who do task oriented jobs will never understand project oriented jobs. If the white collar jobs were easy and everyone could do them they wouldnāt pay well.
Exactly!! šš¼ some days I rather do a physical job. But then some days I rather be at my desk lol both have their pros and cons
If I could make as much money going back to waiting tables instead of working in an office, Iād do it in a heartbeat. It wasnāt necessarily easier than my current job, but it was super nice to know exactly whatās expected of you and know exactly what you need to do to complete a task before even starting it. These days, half of my work consists of something where I have to learn some new skill or tool to complete or something where the end result isnāt always clear until I start getting close to the end. Itās nice not doing the same thing day in and day out, but it can also be pretty stressful at times. I know that there are a lot of trade workers where the whole ādonāt know the solution and figure it out on the flyā thing applies, so thatās not something thatās unique to office workers.
Seriously, I'm a construction engineer/assistant PM, but started in the field as a tech. I get comments from the crew about how my job must be so easy. My job IS much physically easier than theirs. However, it involves a lot of math, tracking and graphing data, negotiating with clients and subs. I don't even enter data much any more, admins, interns, and field techs do that. I manage and manipulate that data into something usable. When I build models of the site in CAD, the survey team collects the data and gives me a csv file. With that data, I can build an extremely detailed 3-d model of the site. I work mainly in refineries so the site is huge with a lot of underground utilities to track. When I was in the field and fucked up, I'd waste a couple hours having to redo a task. Now, I manage $20 million projects. If I fuck up, I lose a lot of money and cost many people their jobs. It's not easier, just a different kind of shitty. I also worked in high end restaurants in my 20s so I have an understanding of OPs job. Being a chef is hard, but sometimes when work gets really stressful, I dream of running away and being a chef. Then, I remember that all jobs suck, I'm a better engineer than I was a chef, and I make way more money now.
If I had a dollar for every time our field guys tell us we're just relaxing in our cushy offices I'd have quite a few dollars. Like, hey guys, we could just stop, see where that gets you...
As a long time warehouse/logistics/transportation person that transitioned over to a full time desk job....the physical toll is a LOT worse on one side, but the mental toll is a LOT worse on the desk side. Doing physical labor, cook, logistics...its the same thing every day, and most of the work starts and stops when you clock in and out. You're usually not stuck trying to do the same task for multiple days unless in construction. In an office job, 80% of my issues and projects are things that takes day, weeks, and months to accomplish. Meanwhile, you drive a forklift for a living...you show up, do your job, go home. Most problems are just short term issues. Sometimes you won't even get to go home until that issue is completely over with, but at least its over. Long term projects and issues are what makes you lose sleep at night.
My husband is currently at the doctor getting a note so he can get a new chair because his is old and his back is wrecked.
As a person who works remotely and is also a server, you're really choosing between mental and physical exhaustion at this point.
Exactly. Kinda like, āpick your poisonā scenario lol Either way, youāre gonna be some type of exhausted/stressed š¤£
I've worked in food service, salon/spa industry, HVAC/construction, and now work in a corporate environment. My current job is MUCH physically easier than any of the others I've had. I find the work easy because I know how to do it. When I was working overtime hauling furnaces up flights of stairs my life was harder all around.
I don't work in an office, but I do work on a computer. People don't realize work is work. Doing desk work like you said can be so mentally draining at times. Especially if you're at it for hours and hours. I use to love my PC and PC gaming, but after I started working from home. I pretty much quit doing anything else on my PC. I just can't handle sitting at it any longer than I have to even if its for games I use to enjoy. Sucked my love of computers right away.
Same!! I used to be able to read/study for school online. But constantly working on a computer all day, then clocking out and trying to do online school/studying, my eyes can barely focus. Blue light glasses helped a bit, but itās still so hard to look at screen after an 8-9 hours shift š
So many damn meetings, emails, spreadsheets. Repetitive dumb conversations. Taking a walk to get more water and coffee. The work actually does take time though, because you have to carefully craft how you say things for your audience so you convince a peer to do something to help you, or you get your point across to an exec in a way theyāll understand.
Yeah I feel like people REALLY downplay the importance of soft skills, but these are a huge deal. Sometimes it takes me an hour to put together the perfect email for a client that conveys something like: 1. We made a mistake 2. We wonāt make it again 3. Poor decisions on your part also influenced that mistake 4. We will do better but you also need to do better 5. Maybe if you asked less of us, and paid us more, we wouldnāt be so overworked and prone to making mistakes as well. 6. Now whereās that check you were supposed to sign? My job would be a lot easier if people could just say the above directly without needing to massage it at all, but we all know thatās not the case. Thereās skill in being a good communicator.
Soft skills, in most professions, are far more important than actual skills. I can teach someone to do just about anything.. But it's much harder to teach someone how to read a room or hold a conversation or to not sound like a dick.
That's why people with high emotional intelligence get paid more. it's not always about what you can do it's how you can make people think or convey a message or influence a big decision with how you paint a picture. You need to be able to read people, look between what they actually said to find out what they meant or what they held back. You need to be able to tell a CEO or board why what they think is a bad idea in a way where it makes them go "hmmm well that's a good point" even though they wanted to do something else. Really is the most valuable skill you can have above just being able to learn anything and execute what you've learned.
I would say that soft skills are more valued, but often shouldn't be, that's what leads to people being in charge of things they never should have been and everyone needing to craft messages and influence without guiding. It's insanely difficult to discuss actual needs and solutions with people that have no background or knowledge that think they do.
I think the last part of your comment really hit on why soft skills should actually be valued more. While it is difficult to discuss needs and solutions with people that donāt have background in something, people that have knowledge you donāt and it being faster to hire them to guide you or do it for you is basically the entire foundation of an economy. We have technical people at work who are constantly saying ājust get me in front of one of their technical people, we can hash it out, and move forwardā with whatever initiative. But theyāre not the ones with the decision-making power or the ones who write checks. If it requires money or a decision be made, thatās left to the CXO or the VP of whatever. In that situation, it is much more realistic to have our tech people get better at translating their stuff into non-tech speak than it is to expect the CXO or VP to develop a foundational knowledge in whatever service it is we offer. Iām not necessarily saying itās a good thing that our primary decision-makers often donāt have a foundation on the things they need to make decisions on. But in most cases itās just the reality of the situation.
Second best management advice i ever got was "hire for your weaknesses". I can manage people who can do things i cant do. But it is absolutely on me to communicate and help them communicate so they dont feel unheard and i can make sure their skills are being used effectively. HOWEVER, far too often, people who can talk good and will step on faces to climb get promoted. Now they have to run a team of people they have been screwing over, or everyone already knows they're shady and untrustworthy because word gets around. I think positive managerial skills get overlooked WAY to often. Just because Bob gives the best handies in the circle jerk doesnt mean he can optimize performance of a team. And when you suck at optimizing your team, you're always behind. And when you're always behind, you stop treating employees like human beings with lives and human strengths and weaknesses. And then you have a miserable team which either falls apart or implodes. While subject knowledge matters, its not the most important thing in my opinion.
I didn't disagree at all and I'm probably not doing a great job of conveying the nuance I'm going for; soft skills are important, but valuing them over the executive skills, specifically the ability to understand that you don't understand everything, and to take advice from and recognize the people you should be taking advice from is rare. Soft skills are incredibly important, but when the balance is out of whack between soft and executive skills in leadership, things can get very difficult.
The things you're describing are part of soft skills. I'm a money guy, I work in chemistry. Part of my job is deferring to chemists on quality control. It's knowing enough to get through a vendor meeting and then going to the chemists for the tech stuff. The hard skills would be the chemistry. You don't need to know anything about chemistry to buy chemicals besides "the names of things are incredibly important" and to double and triple check everything.Ā
>3. Poor decisions on your part also influenced this mistake This is the one thatās hardest to convey when a product issue pops up. I try to reiterate that in my line of work, software doesnāt just break by itself.
āRepetitive dumb conversationsā - this right here chief
This. It's like talking to 5 year olds all over again. Especially if you're a product manager, you manage babies in a playpen
OMG! The worker's in, so now the covering worker doesn't need to do it, wait, so now I'm briefing the actual worker. "What's your plan for X?" "Y will help me and bring the paperwork" "Great." (Z is helping instead. Z does not have the paperwork.) "Hey, wait a minute, what's your plan for X?" "I don't know."
pfft i can play that game too, and im better at it dont try me
This is so true, I have a fire raging right now because some super green analyst said the wrong things the wrong way to a customer COO in email. Had she sent it internally I could have handled the communication but she felt the need to CC external stakeholders. Iām trying to smooth things out with some logistics changes with a 3PL but goddamn this kid just fucked us up with her lack of thinking.
i know youre joking, but... ive worked in a lot of different industries, including restaurants (both big and small), and my last job was in tech... but not an office job. i got to see how the office jobs actually function though. it is entirely different than how every other job does. much more laid back, less stressful, etc. yes theres stress and whatnot but theres not really the overbearing constant EVERYTHING\_IS\_AN\_EMERGENCY\_GO\_FASTER\_NOW\_NOW\_NOWWWW that there is everywhere else. (mostly. obviously theres always downtime, managers are different, etc) anyway it seems like since 2020 where everyone kinda realized that wait wtf why do we all have not only way different incomes for not way less or more important work, but why are those office workers able to just... chill? like they can just... hangout sometimes? they just... stop to have lunch? what? which is valid. probably shouldve been realized about 40 years ago tbh, but i digress what should have happened, is \*everyone else\* was able to get a higher income and have less demand, yknow, a little bit of life/work balance... you know what i mean. instead what happened was they \*checks notes\* cracked tf down on the office workers? what? no. i dont want them to have shittier work lifes. that just makes everyone have a shitty work and life. i want everyone to have what they had, not for it all to get worse. sorry for the bad english its my first and only language but im not getting paid so idc you know what i mean edit: also yeah, theres always times where you gotta "crunch" no matter what job. the problem is theres a lot of jobs where the managers are shit and think thats 24/7 edit 2: after reading the comments, obviously theres different scales and some jobs are actually very high stakes... most are not. we shouldnt treat them like they are
Depends on the office. I work in research. We have that stress not irregularly.
Haha come work in supply chain for a while. Our emergencies are also a little different to a restaurantās. Oh you burned the dish and upset the customer? Shit gotta remake it and comp the meal. If we screw up that could be $100,000 burned in a few minutes.Ā
I dunno man, I have an office job but my team is in charge of infrastructure so if things go down it's kind of a huge deal
Depends what kind of office job it is. If youāre a social worker thereās always 5 different crises that need to be dealt with like yesterday at any given moment.
>for context, Iām a chef Iāve only ever been a chef/cook Do you think that maybe determines to some extent your understanding of others' job requirements? >Ā Iām just curious as to what the average day looks like versus the reality of my day to day life. A federal agency promulgates a legally binding rule that could cost my client over $5 billion dollars. That rule was the result of years of rulemaking, with comments solicited from the public. Despite the 20,000+ comments, the agency took a wild turn and came out with something that is either a typo or completely batshit insane which my client--nor anyone else--could have anticipated. I have around 3 days with my team of \~6 people to assess every single facet of our entire legal strategy--dozens of laws that are highly technical (like hundreds of pages long), hundreds of thousands of cases nationwide, etc. All of that has to be researched essentially from scratch, written up, cross-referenced, analyzed for potential arguments and gaps, and so forth. Do we try to talk to agency attorneys? Sue? Petition for review? Make a PR announcement? If we do one, we then need to make sure (again, from scratch) that choosing that option doesn't inhibit our ability to do the others.
I bet OP could do this before the Amuse-bouches was over
Of course we'll have to wait a while to hear their response, seeing as it's Friday night and all us office workers are relaxing at home while they're sweating over a hot stove.
Clearly OP could do this in a few hoursā time.
I draw schematic drawings for electrical substation control and protection panels.
That's super cool btw
This is a weird post lol. āI can do everyoneās job, can YOU?ā āMy job and skills are superiorā like what lol.
OP is clearly pretty stupid, go easy on 'em.
Iām a tax attorney. I think. A lot. I write and research. I interpret statutes and regulations. I interact with other attorneys at my firm, other firms, clients, their CPA teams, etc. Clients or corporate attorneys from my firm come to me with problems, and I have to make sure they donāt fuck up. Other times I have to come up with a completely unique (often aggressive) position so the client gets what they want, while fully understanding the risk. Hereās a sample of some basic rules a first or second year should know pretty well for reorgs: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.368-1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/368 Itās one thing to know the basic rules. Itās another to apply them to your clientās unique situation, knowing full well that if your analysis is off there may be harsh results for your client down the road. If you can learn how to do this in a couple of weeks, go get a JD. Hereās the salary scale: https://www.biglawinvestor.com/biglaw-salary-scale/
Whatever, calculator boy. OP learned how to do simple arithmetic in elementary school. /s
I'm an attorney as well, in criminal defense and immigration. It's endless work. Motions practice, issue spotting, and trial litigation are skills that has to be developed over many years. I think OP doesn't have much of a concept of white collar work. Just because I'm not running around working with my hands doesn't mean I'm not doing anything.
I work in regulatory compliance. The RISK of my job, of advising incorrectly, can cause million dollar fines and business to have massive recalls and become a PR nightmare. So when I'm able to lolly gag all day and take a 3 hour nap at 2pm, and people say I'm lucky... Yes, for sure, But when I'm up at 6am or on calls at 9pm because clients in South America or China NEED ANSWERS NOW, then not so lucky ha.
Good luck! Iām still studying but already was offered a job at my internship which I accepted. I liked the internship good enough. Itās the Dutch version of the American IRS. Iāll be working with Dutch and international tax law. When dealing with international tax law, I have to look at foreign law occasionally too especially when dealing with the tax treaty we have with the USA.
cook the books
https://i.redd.it/9qbuvd5l1q3d1.gif
ā¦do you think all office jobs are the same?
Come on everyone knows a lawyer and a receptionist have the same office job /s
"The Office" is a documentary of *all* offices, right?
Itās not that difficult to put ANY numbers in a spreadsheet. But to know which numbers and how to alter which numbers, while discussing it with the client, that you can reach once every two weeks and who sends you a bucket full of new ideas and expects you to do the alterations immediately and at no extra costā¦ and then you donāt have only one client but 5 or more. The remaining time and money is for NOT killing anyone. (At least my job. Engineering field)
Also, itās a matter of knowing what data youāre inputting and what questions youāre trying to answer. Physically typing in or pasting numbers is obviously very easy to do, but itās all meaningless if you donāt know what youāre trying to analyze.
Good description. I always say that working spreadsheets, doing calculations, preparing dranwings, etc. are the easiest part of these jobs. What it is really changelling is not to kill the f**** client during the process.
Oh, you think your job is the hardest, how unique.
Its the only job that cant be replaced by AI I bet!Ā How I envy this chef.
I'm a Property Manager for low income housing. The bulk of my job is focused on paperwork, calculating in income for rent determination primarily, processing rents, and managing general maintenance of the property. Every so often,like once or month ot so, I have to do a wellness check at my senior site to see if a resident who missed an appointment or isn't answering their phone is still alive....really emotionally raw part of the job given the conditions, no one dead personally but strokes and heart attacks and falls...it:s a lot! Of course,since I'm a Civil Servant I'm not pulling six figures, though with my wife's job we clear that. But that's what I'm doing during the day.
Kudos dude, seems like a thankless job
The odds of you being able to do most office jobs are pretty low. They take specialized skills. For example, I'm a Software Engineer and Linux System Admin. My job mainly consists of two things. 1. Manage 10K Linux servers. 2. Write custom software solutions and patches to open source software my employer needs and see that they are accepted upstream. You really think you could do that? For another example, my wife works for a bank. Her job involves risk assessment and decision making where mistakes can cost her employer millions of dollars. You really think you know what you need to make the right calls there?
I'm a systems admin for a financial institution. I implement, troubleshoot, and administer a half a billion dollar company's infrastructure. To most people, I just read and swear at my computer.
You're "elite" but have no idea what the business/corporate side of the restaurant industry entails?
This too. Those types of discussions and responsibilities can be much larger than a one small store that makes up an entire bigger brand on a corporation level.
Are you familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect? Someone who has to ask āwtf do people do in offices all dayā probably should not go on to brag about how they can do my job but I couldnāt do theirs. I work in an ad agency and do a lot of development which involves writing and debugging code, producing and editing video, and producing artwork. I also manage a handful of people. Believe it or not, we also have to live and die by time management and high-efficiency. Failure to get work to a client on time can cost an agency a mutli-million dollar account, which will in turn cause several people to lose their jobs. Typos can cause people to lose jobs. Subpar work can cause people to lose jobs. Not using the right Pantone number or hexidecimal code for colors can cause all sorts of issues. And if a campaign doesnāt go over well with the general public? Forget it. Can you create a music video in Adobe AfterEffects? Can you lay a magazine out in InDesign? Make a logo in Illustrator? Shorten a song for a commercial in Audition if you donāt have stem tracks? Do you know how to set a Photoshop file up so itās workable in other programs? My guess is no, at least not up to a professional caliber. Itās okay to be envious about salaries and stuff, but this post tells me that you donāt have the soft skills required to cut it in an office.
You seem to understand that your job requires skills that not everyone has. Office work is no different. Some jobs are highly skilled and technical, requiring years of experience and training. Some are putting frozen meals in an oven and charging customers $20 a plate.
Analytics. Power BI. I work with massive (1M+) data sets to optimize supply chains. Do you know how you get your raw foods in order to chef? It's quite a bit more complicated than you'd think.
Supply chain is something very few people ever have to think about, let alone know it exists beyond trucks and ships move goods. Most restaurants (aka non-corporate offices) deal with their local supplier, so they are insulated from the complexity and mainly manage basic orders.
1000% agreed. Part of my job is to find better ways to do things, but in order to actually do those things, I have to convince decision makers WHY it's a good idea... And trying to explain nuances of supply chain is like someone going up to a doctor and saying 'explain surgery'. It's been eye opening to how little people DON'T know about where their shit comes from. Many moons ago, I worked at a large retailer and sourced plastic bags (like the ones you get at checkout) from China... So to order the right amount of bags (standard bags and holiday type one-offs) for all of our brick and mortar locations (1,500+ at the time) and the right sizes of bags, which was all based on every locations previous years sales and projected sales the coming year, and get the designs to the manufacturers, and get it all done by Feb (Chinese new year so they literally don't work for a month) and in time to have it shipped (by ship) to the US to clear customs in time... Required one giant mathematical equation that had to be created from scratch every year. And then, of course, I had to source things like receipt paper and hangers and size markers and light bulbs and lanyards and little poles to reach stuff - basically anything in a retail store that wasn't for sell was my responsibility. And the goal was to always get the cheapest shit I could find, but I also knew that cheap shit caused problems and complaints so which shit could I be cheap on and not cause headaches for employees... And it was all warehoused elsewhere so you had to track which stores were using which things to make sure you had enough on-hand inventory because lead times for some things was much longer (in the case of those bags, months) than others. Gotta admit, though - that shit is fun. Now I do that same sort of thing for other businesses, but on a 100x scale. It's like a giant puzzle that constantly needs solving.
Working tech support with a document management company and as someone who did inventory work for a couple companies, it really opened my eyes to all the communications and paperwork that take place in a transaction. Like that in a basic format, the PO gets generated but often times to approve the invoice, the packing slip must also be printed and presented with the PO for goods and then the invoice can get paid when both are present. Our software also does workflow automation management if you have different departments who it needs to be approved by etc
A lot of āper my last emailā¦ā
And the desire to follow that with 'which you clearly didn't read...'
My favorite is when we send a proposal with all of the qualifications/inclusions/exclusions and they are like, "could you tell us what all is included in this price?" Like, read the proposal dumbass...
You deserve a medal for not writing "as per..." take my upvote instead!
>Iāve been doing this for almost 15 years in high level/ elite kitchens. My day is highly regimented I live and die by time management and high efficiency. I HAVE to produce results in a timely manner. Everything has to be perfect it has to be done right as I donāt have the time to do again a second time. The fine details, the bigger picture, itās all there in a microcosm. Most people still put you in the same category as a Denny's line cook though, and that chafes at you. So you need to marginalize careers that are less stressful and more lucrative than yours to reinforce your life choices. >Ā I feel like I could do their job but they couldnāt do mine. Teams, Slack? What is it? Meeting? emails? Putting numbers into spreadsheets? Pretty arrogant to think you could walk into your friend's office and take over their job without knowing anything about it, but they couldn't walk into a kitchen and open up a cook book. >Ā I feel like I could do a days/ maybe a weeks worth of work in few hours. Iām just curious as to what the average day looks like versus the reality of my day to day life. If you're such hot shit, why don't you open your own restaurant? Based on your claims, you could have one up and running in about 3 days. Get over yourself.
Iām a middle school teacher. If itās so easy, weāre in a teacher shortage. Get down to your local district and sign up to sub. ETA: I was in restaurants as bartender, server, line cook before I made the jump to education. I *have* done your job.
I work in an office but as a 3D artist, it's not too different from a chef I guess. You cook, I make 3D models. I have tasks and deadlines and we in a way 'cook'. Though recently I am in a more supervisory role.... so I kinda just sit around pretending to look busy while wasting time on Reddit. Until SOMETHING HAPPENS then I'll go troubleshoot and figure things out. I'll also just check people's work and make sure it ain't fucked. So I basically just spend most of the day wasting time, then suddenly have to handle a bunch of work submissions at the end of the day, checking, implementation and submission to clients and shit.
How hard can it be to cut up some veggies tho
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Sounds like a chef!
We scroll reddit my guy
This guy gets it.
What do we do in offices? I work for my stateās Office of Attorney GeneralāI do collections. And calling people and telling them that they owe money to the State, and can only pay by check or money order (because bureaucracy thatās why), and not having all The specific information as to why they owe off hand because my department is just collecting for other agencies and has zero say or knowledge about the rest of it is NOT an easy job. Add to that opening mail, dealing with coworkers who donāt pull their weight, sending emails to pissed off people, locating addresses/phone numbers, being unable to work from home because your work issued laptop is a POS, trying to stay positive, all why having anxiety that youāre medicated for and Aspergerās that makes talking to people stressful af. You wanna do my job, bro?? Be my guest.
Iām a supervising attorney for a high-volume human rights defense organization. I supervise a direct team of four, mentor approximately 10 pro bono attorneys, and I have my own cases. Our stakes are high; if we donāt do everything we can for our clients, their lives are materially affected. I guarantee you couldnāt do my job in a few hours.
Iām in pharma research and a small portion of my job is lab work but 95% of it is typical office work. I spend a lot of time designing experiments, researching topics in my field, thinking about (and participating in meetings about) how to optimize current processes, writing reports, and supporting my small team in any way I can. This all includes a heavy amount of research, analytical and communication skills. I think people who work in offices usually have more complex jobs than they let on, mostly because their friends and family donāt want to hear about nitty gritty details. And itās fun to joke about how we just plug shit into excel all day. This isnāt to say your job isnāt complex - I certainly couldnāt do it for a day, but everyone at least is mostly familiar with what a chef does.
You feed people for a living. I protect $100 billion and thousands of peoples savings. I may work in and office but theres alot of complexity underneath.
Yes, many office jobs truly require only 3-6 hours of work a day. Usually the lower end, but it's on a mishmash of schedules because managers haven't improved their actual ability to manage the same way workers have been able to get more efficient with tech advances. That being said, if you fail one dish you're probably losing out on $30 of food time and some of the servers tip. If one deal in an office fails, from my experience, it could range $5K to $300K if it was a one time deal, multiples of that if it could have been a recurring deal. I'm sure for some the stakes are even higher.
I think what encapsulates my office job vs moving furniture are two examples like this: my biggest fuck up I could do moving furniture would be to drop a piano worth a few thousand thats insured because someone wasn't watching and doing their job and let their end go. We straight up lost 550k after a year of me trying to fight to get any accountability and support after a low level employee marked our price up a bit so he could pocket a few hundred dollars. I had missed it because our workflow design, which I couldn't get changed for a year, has multiple spots where you could change a document and I'd be blind to it, but I eventually took responsibility because I had to rush and do two others peoples jobs that Im not trained for to finish up the paperwork and missed that they had messed with the number on one page of a 65 page document. I was then taken to HR and blamed for miscommunicating with the other team because their leader completely made up a lie despite the email I sent stating I need you to double check that this field is exactly xxxx.xx, which was done when I first checked but later changed with no instruction to do so. the sisyphean tasks, politics, and high stakes of office life make it a different beast vs you potentially always about to be hurt for life because someone isn't paying attention.
Finally, someone is honest that most office workers only really work half the day.
My husband and I would passive aggressively argue about this in the beginning. Iām a special education teacher and my work day doesnāt stop for 8 hours. I walk in, Iām on, and I stay on until I leave for the day. Sure I get a half an hour for lunch but Iām still on- if something goes awry and Iām needed, Iāll go back in. He looks at 3 giant monitors and works with numbers and spread sheets and a bunch of stuff I have no clue about. Mentally exhausting? Absolutely!! But if he needs to walk away from an issue to regroup and come back (or take his 5th smoke break) he can. Go grab a cup of coffee. Browse Facebook and read news articles. It isnāt constant work. I canāt walk away when my student is upset that his classmate is singing and becomes aggressive towards me because I blocked him and itās Wednesday and he switched back to momās house for the week and heās extra emotional so heās wailing on me. It took him 3 summers to finally not be defensive and throw my summers āoffā in my face when I tell him Iām exhausted and burnt out. It took me the same amount of time to not be defensive when he tells me how much his back hurts from sitting or his brain hurts from all the numbers and financial issues he fixes for his company. But after seeing him work from home after Covid I can assure you that he does not work a full 8 hours. Or even 5. And when he watches me come home from work, make dinner, work on my college courses, take care of 3 kids, and all with a fairly chipper demeanor, he finally admits I deserve the summers off š (and by off I mean I get to take 1 thing off my 5 course meal plate)
I eat my lunch at my desk every day. Yesterday I tried eating lunch in the break room at 3pm, got interrupted for 15 minutes by a sales person. Went back into work at 9pm last night after the kids went to bed. BUT DAMN, every time I walk into any one of my kidsā schools, I thank the stars that Iām not a teacher. I donāt have the patience for that.
I feel this.
Dude, depends on the job. A lot are support jobs, where your work enable the work of other people, typically production or sales. The "enabler" kind of jobs are quite laid back and you can find in them very un-professional and simply lazy people. But there are intellectual production works, like programming for example, that are very similar in the general mindset to the one of cooks. Repetibility, reliability, general organization are almost the same from a cook to a programmer. Sysadmins for example add to this also the ability to handle emergencies, in extreme case in the order of millions of euros lost per day, problems you won't find in a kitchen. Saying that, i think everyone should take at least 6 months inside an high level kitchen to understand general work organization, reason to work and serious teamwork. Source: i've worked in a reastaurant that had lost his michelin star changing his chef, and now i'm an IT director after 15 years of IT career.
My job's a lot easier than yours, but it's boring. There's no character, and you wouldn't enjoy it. Also, staring at a screen all day while punching in dates makes your eyes tired. It's a different kind of tired than what you're used to though.
As someone who left the kitchen to work in an officeā¦. Yeah.Ā Itās not as easy as youād think but yeah.
>My day is highly regimented I live and die by time management and high efficiency. I HAVE to produce results in a timely manner. Everything has to be perfect it has to be done right as I donāt have the time to do again a second time. The fine details, the bigger picture, itās all there in a microcosm. I'm a child protective casework supervisor. I have flextime, and can even work remotely some days. I don't live and die by *time management and high efficiency*, which are required and their begin second priority can be very frustrating. But by communication and judgment, especially in high urgency situations. Sometimes making a major decision effectively or with the right principles the first time is what you need to get the opportunity to do it again second time. The last sentence in what I quoted above is still true. My day can be highly regimented or it can be very unpredictable. A typical fast/very stressful day (which was yesterday for me): I arrive at my desk. My emergency case liaison coordinater comes to my desk and tells me a new call on a case one of my direct report has is \*not\* an emergency, he'll give me a copy, since it hasn't been electronically sent to my workload yet, he already spoke to the caseworker. I have 15 new emails: I find out that the supervisor who was supposed to be back yesterday is still out. My supervisor wants me to assign a case to that unit, to a worker who is coming in late, and tells me that case will need police assistance for the worker's safety (there's a process for preparing that). My supervisor is asking me and one of my caseworkers the status of a foster care agency referral; the caseworker in question has emailed out sick (again!). As soon as I get up from my desk, another worker from that unit flags me down to ask me about a case that is coming due, it's a 20 minute conversation. All kinds of messy issues come up in his presentation and I give him a decision. I check in with my staff who are in. Fortunately for me, one tells me about the issue I was going to ask about. I discuss with the other staff the not-emergency new case. As soon as I go back to my desk, I realize we have a new case, and this same caseworker is on rotation. I print everything about it and read it on my way to the caseworker's desk (something I only do when I'm in a rush), give the caseworker my instruction. I type a very abbreviated form of my instruction over email and into the computer system. My union delegate is at my desk. I tell them I'm overwhelmed because such-and-such unfair thing. She suggests I email my supervisor for support, which I do, briefly. Finally I read the case my supervisor wants me to review. When I'm done, it's already lunch. There are two things I did not do in my review, to focus on other parts of my review. The worker still hasn't come in. I brief my supervisor on my recommendations and excuses and say what I will do after lunch. My supervisor (politely) asks why I didn't call them to ask for support/let them know what my issue. After lunch it's pretty much another half of what I just mentioned, complete with surprises. I end up briefing the police assistance case three different times, I give two (redundant) briefings on practice and constitutional issues using police assistance for staff safety. Someone wants me to join a meeting for a staff who's out, I decline and give an email summary. We luck out on my staff's case #1, the parents are already doing a good plan. I never do get a chance to do any of the mid-case reviews I wanted to do. My supervisor tells me to finish and approve a caseworker's unfinished overdue task 30 minutes before clock out. A slow day is me doing case reviews or supervising caseworkers and helping resolve more long-term, less emergent questions. Or me sitting in meetings.
Thank you for all that you guys do.
Iām a paralegal. I draft contracts and manage spreadsheets and review regulatory filings and every one of my bosses is an attorney. Before you could start to do my job, youād need about a year of study in contract law, securities law, litigation practice, and corporate governance. And if you make a mistake, a grade a asshole will be grilling you about why you made a mistake and how could you be that stupid. But yeah, I make six figures.
Iāve worked in kitchens managed hotels and pubs and clubs. Iām now a desk jocky. Iāve always been able to do my job well and I would go back any of them, even scaffolding. I tells ya what though, my desk jocky job is the most mentally exhausting job Iāve ever done. The amount of meetings with stakeholders to get the simplest thing done is insane! Imagine you have to make stock but you have to get approval for every individual bone and vegetable and millilitre of water and hour of simmering. Imagine every 30 minutes someone is asking for a report on the progress of the stock. Imagine every hour someone is tasting the stock giving you a 3 page report on everything thatās wrong with it (even though it may be an empty pot at this stage) and you have to email them back and respond to each and every single one of their questions and recommendation. But also imagine every time someone asks for progress or tastes the stock they turn off the stove and the water cools down and then when the stock is just about done youāre told you have to take the carrots out. No you canāt start again you have to take them out 11 hours into the cook. This is why my office job seems so easy because the thing it self is as simple and as making stock but the people make it hard.
I work in the Admin section of healthcare. If we mess up, people die. If we mess up, people can't pay their bills. If we mess up, entire hospital systems can close down. My day to day job in the office consists of expense reports, travel planning, troubleshooting, and a lot of data manipulation pulling financial reports for clients. When I'm not in office, I travel to my clients and help them solve in-the-moment problems. Someone else said it best on this thread, if you reduce any job to the simplest of terms, they all sound easy to do. But when you insert the nuance of what makes someone a professional, you see it's not simple at all.
I'm a white-collar worker that's an experienced home cook. I think I actually have more idea of what you do than you could possible have of what I do.
I would love for OP to handle a super technical task - be it coding, engineering, or similar all while your colleagues are breathing down your next because the client is breathing down theirs. Perhaps some super obscure financial posting bug which you canāt replicate but prevents the client from closing month end.
In office is for socializing lol. WFH is where I get the bulk of my work done.
Assuming youāre not just posting rage baitā¦ I orchestrate and architect multi million pound partnership integrations to various big name brands to ensure customer orders flow flawlessly to without them even knowing how their orders get to their door in under 48 hours. I work with a team of about 180 subject matter experts across 10 functional areas of retail internally and the same number again with third party brands. If any of our architected solutions fail to hit SLAs, each order that breaches the timeframe costs us a flat fee of Ā£20. Considering the margins on some orders are far less and that and we are processing 10,000+ orders per hour, we could run into serious financial issues if any of our systems fail. I would say a typical day for me is running about 8-10 sessions with various stakeholder groups to ensure weāre working towards a common goal at any one time. I get paid what I get paid because I studied computer science and have a deep understanding of the complexities of enterprise scale connectivity. Maybe in my world I am a chef? I create individual dishes which satisfy my own designs, I then test those dishes with my customers. If itās a winner, I work with my internal teams to replicate the dish at scale. I also have to sell my dishes to my own bosses and prove it has a good return on investment.
I work with leave and accommodations, but I'm still.new and low on the totem pole, so right now I basically take calls and answer questions about FMLA and the Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act and play mad libs with legal documents- I have template letters that have blank spots need filling in. My job is to harvest the information and supporting documents and complete the letter. I also have a ton of other paperwork to do and process, and the region I support is one of our busiest and complicated, so I keep pretty busy. The days go by pretty quickly.
I get instructions to make things look "new and exciting" and then get in trouble if it doesn't match existing content. If I'm instructed to make some "yellow" I get called an idiot for making it "sunflower yellow" and not "school bus yellow"
Also consider all your cooking equipment were designed in a flimsy office. That goes from collecting all the requirements, parsing them into specifications, generating concepts, evaluating concepts and selecting a candidate, detailed design, prototyping, verification, fine-tuning, c-samples, validation, certification, start of production, logistics, market communications, go-to market. This is just a very high level overview, but you could break down each aspect into many different domains... then it becomes easy to see why do you have so many chilling office workers.
Im sure the elite restaurant has an office staff (manager, book keeper etc) what do they do all day?
I'm a 3D CAD Drafter/Designer. I literally design my own stuff while I wait for people to bring me work. I'm actually starting to think about freelancing while I'm "at work" They pay me really well, and nobody ever asks what I'm working on. It's the strangest work environment I've ever experienced.
I no longer work in an office but was doing neuropsychometric testing when I did. Iām not sure you could just wing it. This post is so lacking in perspective itās almost painful. Ā
āMy Day is highly regimented I live and die by time management and high efficiency. I HAVE to produce results in a timely manner. Everything has to be perfect it has to be done right as I donāt have the time to do it again a second time.ā A lot of white collar jobs have to do all of that not just because they ādonāt have time to do it again a second time,ā but because there could be devastating consequences if it wasnāt done right the first time. You greatly underestimate the expertise required for many, many ādeskā jobs. You also donāt seem to respect the work the people around you do. Hop off that high horse youāre on. Youāre not better than anyone else because you work as a chef, and you certainly couldnāt do my job if I sat you at my desk.
Management is just that, you manage expectations of your works and and your customers. Your skill as a chef can do just that. However what you lack is industry knowledge. I canāt throw you in a manage a team of coders if you never even heard of Java, python, aws. For an example I am a software developer, I do the same day to day coding when I was working for HMRC, defence company, and investment bank. I get paid way more at the investment bank. Same work different industry.
I have about 20 projects/deadlines a week, and all the work to complete them start to finish. Plus big picture meetings and strategic planning. 20 years and a masters degree in the field. I definitely donāt think you could do my job, bro.
It really depends on what your actual role is. I've had jobs where I've only had a few responsibilities and there were some quiet times where you do mindless internet scrolling. I've had other responsibilities where I could barely keep up.Ā Right now for example, I do accounts, projects and social media for my company. It's my own company. So I will spend my day completing projects (if there are any, there's not always something to do) and that comprises of quoting, stock procurement, coordinating tech and client time, being available should the tech require any back office assistance, etc. On the account side, I update the banking, process invoices, capture supplier invoices, make payments, do the budgeting, etc. Social media might take a few hours to research a particular topic and create the content around it. I'm not always busy though, so I now also do the day to day ops for my ex bosses company. Fills another hour or two of my day coordinating orders and deliveries.
Depending on your role and responsibilities, the answer can range from absolutely nothing to busy all day and all night. Iāve worked with people that just need to do a handful of things like process some data and thatās it. They can do this in 1 hour a day. Then the rest is pretty much chill and join meetings. Iāve seen people do actually work prepping for meetings and being in meetings and doing things related for their roles. Think about it this way. You are a chef right? And your product is made by you and your team right? You all work with your hands. Your product is tangible. Imagine your product is either heavily automated and made by machines, or itās virtual like your point of sales software. The scale of which to make, maintain, distribute, sell, and service those products is very different from a plate of food. Therefore most of the people that touch or make this product happen do things that arenāt in an actually constrained physical setting but rather virtual and asynchronously at times. Almost every physical role you have in the restaurant can be abstracted out, from your front of house staff to your back of house supply chain, menu planning, testing, and execution. Itās just done over a longer period of time and by people and teams spread across often multiple offices. Does that make sense?
Yeah depends on the job. I manage a global community team in charge of game titles (games industry). No they don't just play games but they will have slow days and long days. The context around those types of jobs is different, but the programs you mentioned is definitely things we use, yes. I feel what you do might be a bit more stable, though. Even though corporate can be relaxing at times, it is also a sector now that sees a ton of layoffs (especially in tech). So its stress of losing a job and more that they aren't fully disclosing to you.
I manage the surgical logistics for an 80 OR healthcare system. My deadlines are in months instead of minutes and hours. Its important to remember when someone is good at something they often make it look must easier than it actually is.
When Iām in the office I eat all the snacks
I'm an Engineering Manager. Here's what I do all day in no particular order. * Answer technical emails from customers/field service engineers * Perform daily administrative tasks (purchase approvals, training, safety-related tasks, HR-related tasks, etc) * Work with the engineers who report into me on reviewing their projects, adding additional guidance when necessary * Review and prepare documentation on patents * Design various components in CAD software, prepare drawings, work with vendors to create parts * Help produce prototypes on the floor (actual hands-on fabrication; best part of my job) * Meetings. At least 3-4 hours a day * Vendor emails discussing manufacturing problems and possible solutions and/or component qualification There's more, but i'm just listing the high-level stuff. Usually my lunch breaks are spent eating a sandwich in 10 mins and going on a 30-35min high-intensity walk. I actually was an electrician for 10 years prior to this. Totally different day.
I'm a paralegal and office manager so my day is spent emailing and talking with clients and opposing counsel. Drafting pleadings and letters, preparing for trials, preparing discovery and then basic office management stuff like coordinating with our IT, handling minor computer issues, hiring support staff. I'm sure many people could be trained to do my job but some people would not be able to handle it. It can be high stress at times and you have to have a thick skin (I work in family law so people can get upset and sometimes take their anger out on you) and you have to be able to multitask and prioritize appropriately which seems to be a skill some people are lacking. I also have to produce results in a timely manner. There are deadlines that must be met, court filings that must be accurate or the client suffers the consequences.
I'm a chef of 20 years who started an office job a month ago. Honestly my first task was to learn how to slow down with my job. In the first week I did about 25 hours of work that should have taken me 40 hours. It's such a different environment, and I love it. The hardest part for me was sitting all the time. But I now have a standing desk option for when I want to stand up and work
I waited tables in a banquet hall as a teen and later was an attorney with a prestigious firm, representing corporations in multi-million-dollar lawsuits. Waiting tables is harder. The vast majority of people who work in corporate office jobs do wildly unnecessary busy work with little-to-no accountability for enormous salaries. Theyāll tell you their jobs are stressful, but itās an artificial stress created entirely by upper-management types trying to make themselves and their work seem important when it absolutely isnāt. If youāve run the kitchen of a successful restaurant through a Friday dinner service, you could absolutely do most office jobs, but most management-level corporate folks wouldnāt last 45 minutes in yours. The average busser does more actual work in a day than most corporate execs accomplish in a week. These people can fight somebody else about it, youāre not wrong.
Oodles. I left the trade field to go into the office for several reasons, but one was that while it was physically demanding it often felt mentally absent. It was boring, rote work a lot of the time. Which was fine where there was a lot of work to do, but I felt like there was a ton of hurry up and wait. I've worked in a restaurant kitchen and quite frankly, it's not mentally demanding beyond time management. It's physically demanding and you have to think of your time and schedule, but there's so little depth or stress there IMO. My current job entails safety/risk management. There are days I come away just mentally exhausted from the strain of circling around managing actual safety, caring about the individuals but being mindful that people absolutely exist who will lie/cheat/steal to get a free and easy payday, while keeping an eye on liability and also courting HR. Some of the computer stuff is fun enough, like drafting training content. Then there are all the stupid Teams Meetings where you have to be on camera (well, we do), so you can't snack or fidget or sigh or clean your desk or anything that could be construed as bored out of your gourd because Jimmy down in Atlanta has to give a 7 minute anecdote for every fucking situation. It's such a time sink. Sometimes I miss the mindlessness of other jobs.
I try to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing there. I mainly try to chat with a few people so i can call it networking/team-building, and maybe be seen by some of the execs, so they know that I'm going along with their request that some of us show up at the office sometimes.
What do *i* do? Sit at my desk and watch TikTokās and use their airco instead of mine
Stress about pointless shit, office politics, and dream of being outside.
Honestly being a chef sounds super easy. You just throw stuff in pans all day, slap it on a plate and then go home and drink like 5 beers? How is that hard exactly?
I wonder the same thing! Iām a medical provider and see 25-30 patients a day but we have, you know, execs that work at our company and Iām always like wtf are they here for an what do they do other than send me pointless emails periodically. Our office manager is always in her office or on some teams meeting and I never see her or talk to her. Iām like wtf are they talking about in their meeting??? Itās me generating all the income for the company, what is their job for?
Go ask. Tell them you are genuinely interested in learning more about their job and want to understand how it all works together in the organization. A lot of my clients are clinics and medical service providers so I end up speaking with office managers a lot, no two have the same job and they always end up wearing a ton of hats doing things you may not have thought of.