(water is wet and fire is hot).
Don’t worry everyone, you 100% have the freedom to exploit the working class yourself. See? The system is fair. Oh, you’re not exploiting the working class for passive income? Maybe you’re just not smart like you think you are dummy!
/$
Nobody can convince me that passive income is real.
I get around $400/mo from the VA for being exposed to toxic chemicals that will lead to me having cancer in the next ten years.
Pretty good trade off, let me tell ya!
that reminds me I need to get the burn pit stuff going
Yes, you do. If you need help, message me. No dox, but I can help you out.
Google “intent to file VA”, and fill it out right meow. Whatever claim gets processed will be backdated to the date that form was submitted.
Lol well ok there’s one. I do surveys for money so I suppose that’s kind of passive?
I think you need a refresher on the definition of passive
I make about $7k a year from some books and T-shirt designs I did a few years ago. I literally do nothing to maintain them (I put in the hard work making them originally) and the money just goes in my bank each month. It’s certainly not enough to live on, I have a full time job, but it pays for our groceries.
What do you make them on? Good for you!
I publish through Amazon Print on Demand services (Amazon Merch and KDP), and I have a few other stores selling items too. Basically I design the manuscripts and graphics, upload the files to the service, they list it, and when it sells they print and fulfill it and send me a portion of the profit.
One Christmas I made $8k in a month and we went on a cruise with the profit. Those were good times! It’s settled down a bit now as more people have flooded the platforms and copied all the content.
This just puts a huge spotlight on the thing I hate the most about my line of work. I’m sure it’s not just my line of work with this problem, but there’s plenty of examples of workplaces that do not have this problem.
My career is in IT support. Whether doing systems administration or networking or something else related, it’s my lifeblood.
Almost every job I’ve ever had in this field works on the basis of tickets. A concept which, isn’t in and of itself a problem, nor is it unusual. Similar systems exist in many careers; they’re similar to a chit in the restaurant industry, which contains an order, which is passed to the kitchen for the cooks/chefs to complete. Same thing. And there’s examples of this same idea across many careers, called all kinds of things from a requisition, to a work order, they’re all variations on the same idea.
The trouble begins with how tickets are worked and completed. In other industries, you pick up a task, whether a chit or work order, you finish the task, and you mark it as complete, but in IT, it’s very different in one key way. We have to not only justify and report everything we do, but also mark down exactly how long it took. It’s this last point that’s the problem. I am under continual scrutiny, every minute of every day to justify what I’ve done, and when I did it. In every job I’ve had, my ability to fill every second of my day with records of what I’ve done and how long it took to do is praised, or the lack of that ability can create some significant issues with maintaining my employment status.
There are good reasons to keep these records, to have a record of changes, and coordinate with coworkers, in the event they need to continue work I’ve started, or vice versa, and to note when something changed so that if issues arise, those actions can be examined as a potential cause. But this requirement has become weaponized by every employer to keep a stranglehold on productivity. If you take too long on a task that they think should have taken less time, you’re suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient. If you excel and you’re able to complete your tasks quickly, that faster pace becomes the new standard, and anyone who isn’t capable of keeping up gets reprimanded for dragging their heels and wasting time.
The goal posts continually move. I can’t so much as take an extended shit without someone taking notice.
Meanwhile, so many jobs are simply focused on being present and looking busy. Before I went into IT, I worked at a grocery store, and short of clearly and obviously standing around doing literally nothing, no manager even took notice of you. If you were doing something, literally anything that looks even remotely productive, you were left alone. Which isn’t to mention all the down time, when there isn’t anything to do, and you just go and adjust the products on the shelf needlessly because it made you look busy. That same concept can be applied to a lot of different jobs, but with IT, it’s not sufficient to simply look busy. Your time must be put into a ticket.
It’s oppressive and the way of things in IT.
IT support
And the mentality you’ve described is extra bullshit in an IT or support role, as I’m sure you’re aware.
This is paraphrased in the “Doom talk” I had to have with my boss back when I was working in systems maintenance. As in, he’d come into my office and complain, “Every time I come in here you’re just playing Doom. You need to justify your salary or otherwise maybe we don’t need to pay you.”
What MBA’s and PHB’s don’t realize is that IT and systems maintenance is not a production-oriented operation. You’re not making widgets. The metric is not how many tickets do we generate and how fast are they solved. The metric is, how can we have as few tickets as possible? Because by and large what you’re doing in support and IT is fixing stuff that’s broken. The ideal state for the business to be in is not to have anything that’s broken at all, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Boss, you want to see me in my office playing Doom. Because that means none of your millions and millions of dollars of mission critical infrastructure which your engineers rely upon to generate billable hours is on fire. If any of it catches fire today, I am on site to put it out. If anyone has a problem or a question, I am on call to solve it. If there is maintenance to be performed or new equipment to be rolled out, I’ll be doing that. But otherwise I’m not going to invent busywork just to placate middle management which, as a whole, can’t reliably remember which of the two mouse buttons to click.
Yep. I’m in the midst of that. We’re in a “busy” season for my clients (mostly finance/accounting people), and I’ve reduced my output hours per day to a lower amount because I want to be more available for more time so that I can jump on critical issues as they arise. For the most part, you want to jump on critical things regardless of the situation, but right now it’s more critical because of the busy season, so minor gripes get sidelined, all of my maintenance and other duties, like projects, scripting, etc, are all on hold, favoring time to resolution over almost everything else. So if I can be free more than normal so that I have the bandwidth to take care of things when they arise, so much the better. I don’t want to be distracted writing a script when a critical ticket drops and I miss it by a few hours while the customers are unable to work because I was debugging a PowerShell function.
So my logged hours are down because I refuse to pick up dormant unimportant tasks while I’m idle. I use the time to review all tickets and just patrol the service tickets for critical issues. I have absolutely no reservations about doing it.
I agree, the goal should always be to play doom. Not because you ignore your work, but because there’s nothing to do since everything works. IT support isn’t here to justify their existence by staying busy. We’re here so that when you need help, we can help. If there’s nothing to do, then we’re standing ready, and if we play doom, or Halo, or literally any other game/distraction/whatever, while we wait, as long as it doesn’t impact our ability to respond when needed, then that’s fine. That’s what everyone should want. If the hardware is so unreliable that you’re constantly having to work on it to keep it running, then, as IT, you fucked up.
I’ll also mention that there’s a paradox in IT: we’re expected to do so much and if you just do all the work by hand, you’ll be busy all the time. If you leverage scripts and scheduled tasks, you can significantly cut down on your workload. The paradox is that when you don’t have those scripts and scheduled tasks, and you’re doing everything by hand, you don’t have enough time to create the scripts to reduce your workload.
I’ll give an example. At a previous workplace, the bossman was very much in favor of doing things by hand, the original business model was T&M. He later moved to a more MSP model, where people are paying regardless of how much time was spent, so my focus shifted to automate everything and drop the ticket load as much as possible. In one such case, we kept getting issues related to a service failing. I don’t recall what the issue was, nor what problem it created, but I remember that simply restarting the service fixed the problem. So instead of fielding dozens of tickets a year to restart the stupid service, I added a scheduled task to run a script that would restart the service automatically every week at (some godawful hour) AM, on a Sunday or something. Once that script was scheduled for weekly runs, we stopped getting those tickets.
I have dozens of other examples along the same lines. One of my most proud moments was a script to fix a service where, if another service was running before it, the service wouldn’t load properly. The program service just wouldn’t start if a system service was running. It was a non-critical system service, but both had to be running after boot time. I had already tried every combination of delayed start, and every time, the program service would fall because the system service ended up running too quickly. So I made a script to shut down the system service, start the program service, and then restart the system service, and scheduled it to run 15 minutes after boot, anytime the system restarted (usually overnight for patching). Once that was in place, complaints of (program) not working after patch day, went away.
I hate repeating process because nobody thought to actually fix the problem, they just patched it back together manually. When faced with a reoccurring problem, I look at how I can stop it from happening; of course I fix it in the short term but as soon as I’m done I’m working on a script that can do it for me, then figuring out the best way to trigger the script so that I don’t have to be involved.
No matter how busy you are, finding a way to get rid of problems like that, by any means necessary, is essential; otherwise, you’ll be drowning in tasks to fix stuff that shouldn’t be broken.
Yeah, firefighter mentalities are terrible.
That said, as someone in software development, wouldn’t there be some optimization work you could do? Keeping up with the technology? Preparing training material? Figuring out the next steps for the next improvements to be done to the system? Looking at solutions to better monitor what is going on? Scripts to automate tasks?
I find it hard to believe that things are so static.
Absolutely! Those things are known to management as, variously, “wasting time,” “spending all day surfing the internet,” “submitting frivolous RFQ’s,” and heaven forbid if you want to attend training or a trade show, “accruing unnecessary travel expenses.”
The perpetual problem in IT
BOSS to you “If everything is working fine, what do I pay you for?”
Also BOSS to you “Things are broken, what am I paying you for?”
That sounds like hell.
Then there’s the IT support team I have to design systems for in my org that are COMPLETELY useless. They can’t be bothered to do their job, and escalate tickets randomly to Tier 3 without any triage, documentation, or careI wish their management would put even a semblance of accountability on them.
I think a middle ground would be fantastic for everyone.
The IT cycle of violence.
Ain’t that the truth
They can’t be bothered to do their job, and escalate tickets randomly to Tier 3 without any triage
Level 1 support teams are universally useless. I think I’ve ever worked with one that’s actually effective.
Can you imagine that in a hospital? “Oh this guy came in with a broken finger, I’d better call the lead surgeon.” Now of course the lead surgeon can fix it, of course they can, everyone can fix it, but you can’t send the patient back down to accident and emergency because then you get complaints about why you’re passing this poor guy around.
you’re suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient.
probably an account of the being in meetings questioning me about my efficiency, which proceed to then lower my efficiency, which then proceeds to spawn more meetings, and then proceeds to lower my efficiency even more.
Seems rather obvious to me.
Mechanics at your local car dealer likely get paid on flat rate. That means they get paid a set amount of hours based on the time estimate for the job, regardless of how long it takes. Also, manufacturers set lower times for warranty repairs than you would get paid if the customer had to pay. Also, if there is no book time, you have to guess ahead of time. If the vehicle comes back, you have to work on it for free. You also get service writers and managers breathing down your neck while you’re trying to troubleshoot and not understanding how long things take and also pressuring you to upsell unnecessary services and repairs. Anyway, I don’t work on cars anymore.
I understand why. I have had a bit of insight into how all of that works and short of being a prodigy, you can’t really get ahead.
This is why I do a lot of my routine maintenance on my own car. If all I need is a wrench, some materials and a few hours, I’ll do it myself. I’ve become quite skilled with mechanics over the years; I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what an actual mechanic knows, but brakes, tire changes/rotations, battery replacements, even coolant changes and thermostat replacements, totally do-able. I could go on with minor repair crap I’ve learned but you get the picture.
I did a brake job on my SIL’s car and discovered that the last person in there didn’t lube anything up, I had to beat it with a hammer to get the damn brake pads out. I put the right lubrication in the right places and put everything back together better than I found it. I even did the slide bolts, which I had to break out the torch to get loose. New pads, rotors, slide bolts, slide bolt boots, the whole nine yards. Pretty much everything short of doing the calipers and brake fluid.
I suspect the last few techs that touched her vehicle were trying to move so fast that they didn’t bother doing anything to the side bolts even though they would have been obviously in need of maintenance/replacement.
The thing that bothered me is that she sold the car a few months after I spent 10+ hours fixing the stupid brakes. So next time I have to go look at her vehicle, it’ll be a surprise for what things were not done, or were not done right.
grumbles
In order to avoid that kind of situation many shops will simply quote a “loaded caliper” for each side. It includes the caliper, hardware, brake pads, and bracket. You simply disconnect the brake hose and take out two bolts that hold the caliper bracket on. Give the rotor a couple of slams from the hammer, clean up the hub, reassemble everything and bleed the brakes. It might cost $600, but it saved a ton of time for the shop and prevents a comeback when the old caliper decides to get stuck anyway.
Yeah, she needed it on all four. I think I needed to torch out at least three of the slide bolts around the car. We saved a bunch of money by having me do it, but I broke my cheap torque wrench in the process, snapped the socket connector right off the end of it trying to loosen the lug nuts. I only used the torque wrench for loosening things because I didn’t have another tool long enough to pull them off (aka a breaker bar, I think it’s called). So, RIP. I told her that if she wants me to do another wheel/brake service, she’ll have to buy me an impact wrench, and I’ll send her the link to one I found that will fill the purpose (which is both compatible with the stuff I already use and was tested and recommended by the torque test YouTube channel). Because I’m not dealing with getting, and breaking, any tools to get her tires off because some crackpot at the shop decided to torque her lug nuts with an impact.
I only want to reduce my workload and not sit there standing on a breaker bar, unable to get the damn lug nuts off… I’m not light, over 200lbs, so if I need to stand on a bar to get the lug nuts to loosen, someone probably did something wrong.
Never again.
I have one of those “compatible with” Milwaukee impacts and it works great for most things. I also have a couple of really cheap 1/2" breaker bars that I bought years ago that just won’t break. I have a 3’ cheater bar that fits over them and I’ve had to put some weight into that a time or two.
This is the way.
The impact wrench I’m looking at is one of the newer lineup from DeWalt. I have DeWalt everything already (impact driver, hammer drill, circular saw, reciprocating saw… Even my hedge trimmer, string trimmer, lawnmower and snowblower), all using the 20v MAX or compatible batteries, except the snowblower, which uses the power flex 60v (which can be used in 20v tools, but 20v MAX batteries cannot be used in it). The impact wrench uses the same 20v batteries. So I just need the tool. It’s still something like $200 for it, but I don’t think I’ll need anything more for power tools for a long assed time after that.
We picked most of this stuff up over the past year starting with a kit (impact driver, hammer drill, circular/reciprocating saws, even a small light, with some batteries and a few extras) about a year and a half ago, and we’ve been steadily adding to it. I chose DeWalt because I have an old, 12v drill I used for like 10 years and it still works. The original battery has left us but the second battery I bought when it was new (it came with one and I bought an extra so I could have one in the drill while one was charging) is still kicking. I got a replacement for the original battery that shipped with it, so I still have two for that unit. It still works, and it’s fine, but there were a few times I really needed a hammer drill and the puny 12v was all that I had… But that was literally my only real gripe about it. Given that history, I wanted to keep with DeWalt because they clearly make tools that can last.
I wanted to go with one brand so I didn’t require several different battery chargers for different tools. DeWalt was only missing a snowblower, but they released one late last year and we obtained it shortly after it hit the market, which completed our large tools. There’s only a small number of handheld tools in the DeWalt lineup that I still want to get. The impact wrench is one. Another is a brad nailer (IIRC), because I have to install some baseboards/trim, but it’s hard to justify buying a $500+ tool for the job.
My entire automotive kit probably needs to be replaced. I have a complete socket set with ratcheting wrenches, and not a whole lot besides that at the moment. I will need to get a new torque wrench, breaker bar… Probably a lot more that I’m not thinking about right now. I have access to my brother’s Jack and Jack stands, so I’m ok there. For the impact wrench, I’ll need to add a small set of impact ready sockets for it, otherwise I’m going to rip my sockets to shreds.
I have a ton of electrical testing stuff for my other hobbies, so I’m good on that front, but I notably don’t have a CCA tester, which I would like to get. Among my more electronic things I have a fairly crappy, and old, OBD2 reader, which has come in handy plenty of times.
As you can imagine, I’m the “handy” guy in the family. I just find it all fascinating, but I wouldn’t want to make it my job. After working on a vehicle for a few days, I don’t even want to look at a wrench for several weeks.
By day, I work in IT, so I’m generally sat at a computer pushing buttons until the screen dots show up in the right order.
I have several socket sets and wrenches from harbor freight that are perfectly fine. The 1/4" set, the open ended ratchet set, the short impact set, and the long metric wrenches, these cover 99% of everything. If you don’t abuse your tools, then they won’t break. I even have a second 1/4" set from Aldi of all places and never had an issue with it. I’m not using them all day every day, so I’m not that worried about buying expensive stuff.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I think the issues that you mentioned are becoming increasingly prevalent in other lines of work as well. I do not work in IT, but really resonated with what you mentioned about documentation/reporting requirements being weaponized by upper management to increase “productivity” regardless of the cost (namely, quality of the work performed). I wholeheartedly agree that this environment is toxic, oppressive, and unsustainable.
There are times I’ve worried about not having kids, but comments like this help me feel good about my decision. Why would I want to put someone I love through this? (Or anyone, for that matter)
This is exactly why I’m opposed to bringing kids into the world… I mean, have you looked at the world? It sucks. Why would I want to condemn another individual, whom I’m sure I will love wholeheartedly, to suffer through all of this for their entire life?
I didn’t have any say in being born and if I had even an impression of what I was in for, I probably would have said no thanks.
The only thing I’m thankful for from my parents is that they took care of me for so long. I’m not thankful that I’m alive and I’m not thankful for being born. That said, I’m also doing my damnedest to be a force for good in the world. I’m not making a significant impact, because I’m just one guy working a menial job, but I’m going my best. If I must continue to be alive, I might as well try to make everything suck a little less.
The problem is your boss. I work with tickets and just have a maximum for the average amount of time to be under for the quarter. It’s very relaxing.
You need to explain to your boss that different tasks take different amounts of time. Explain that you may be able to do things faster at the risk of larger issues taking up more time later. Then when they tell you to work faster, reiterate that it will cause bigger issues.
Literally give them what they want: fast solutions at the expense of quality. Then don’t worry about it when things eventually break.
Literally every boss I’ve had has been like this. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of IT jobs that aren’t at this point. I’ve worked several and if they’re not call centers (a few have been - where call time is factored in), this has been the primary time system, required by all employees.
I am still in my first job as a B2B tech and thought this was something only my workplace did, was scrutinise ticket time.
I continue to find it hard there because I legitimately don’t slack but gaps end up between my time records (its hard to continuously work 4 hours at a time with zero downtime) and the boss comes down saying his KPI of ticket time / worked time teamwide keeps going down, and like you say the goalposts keep shifting.
I even went to the trouble of making my own time tracker that gave me even more information about my time entries and what was left for the day and how much I was out, way more info than what PSA gives you, but then got scared of continuing to work on it as the goalposts shifted again to billable time entries / worked time, and doing a time tracker isn’t billable to a client.
My advice: fib.
Not really, but yes. Fib. Lie. Put down what you think is appropriate. Don’t exaggerate, don’t over bill, just adjust for what fits.
For me, I refuse to track my time down to the minute. I realized that if I put in 5 minutes for sending an email, I would get credit for 0.08 of an hour, but, 5 minutes is actually 0.083333… of an hour. So I started putting in 6 minutes instead (0.10 of an hour). Rather than be irrationally docked the 20 seconds or so, I’m getting a whole ass extra 0.02h (or rather 0.1666… of an hour).
I’ll do 6 minutes, or anything in 15 minute increments. If it took 7 minutes, that’s 15m. If it took 20, that’s 30m on the record. If I’m looking for a ticket, or closing a ticket (after my time is entered), or even if I go to take a shit while working on a ticket, that goes in the time entry. I might be in the bathroom, but my brain is working on the problem. I’m not exactly taking a break from working the issue, I’m just trying to brain storm while I’m away from my keyboard.
Every second from the time I start looking for a ticket to work, to the time I’ve closed it, should be on the books. I didn’t work from 9:35 to 9:56 on anything, I spent 9:30 to 9:35 finding, and opening the ticket prior to my time entry being started. I spent 9:56 to 10:00 closing the ticket and mentally preparing myself for the next task. Minute by minute tracking is unreasonable, and bluntly, you shouldn’t do it. You’ll lose more time from what I call “grey time” (doing all the things you need to do in order to account for your time), than you account for actually doing your job. Reading email, looking at documents and keeping up to date on technology issues… All of that is grey time.
I’ve put in time for internal meetings, "ticket review"s, even “reading email”. None of which has every been questioned. You need that time to simply keep yourself organized. Don’t hesitate to mark it down and bill it to your own employer. I know they don’t want you to do that, it “artificially inflates” your worked time, but bluntly, if they’re going to require that you account for so much of your day that you can’t have grey time anywhere in there, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not adding some kind of entry to account for it.
The only thing I strictly do not do, is mark down my time for lunch and breaks. That’s not acceptable to me. Everything else, sure. But I’m going to pad it to account for my grey time. When I spend too much time doing stuff that I consider grey time, I’ll put in an internal entry for it, and bill my employer. I try to keep these to a minimum, but it’s an easy entry when you get called into a meeting or something.
Once you start seeing all the losses from grey time adding up, you’ll be able to account for 6-7 hours of your day easily. Plus 30 minutes for lunch, and 2x15 minute breaks, and you’re missing an hour of your day at most.
Grey time. Log it.
I feel you fellow IT brother/sister!
The IT world is chock-full of this garbage, and all it really forces people to do is A. Provide lesser service so that it “takes longer”, inflating their time metrics, and B. Causes people to make shit up, or submit their own BS tickets to make it look like they’re doing stuff to justify their existence.
Ultimately holding people to a metric-based system like this leads to worse service, and make people hate their jobs.
The job I had before my current one, I was site lead for Field Services. Luckily we were sort of a start up/experimental program, so the technician metrics weren’t tracked at all. MAN it was nice. Nobody felt stressed out needing to justify every second of their day, they wound up doing the work in an appropriate amount of time because it didn’t matter how long an individual took (be that long, or short). We only had an SLA to meet for the customer, which was easily hit.
I even took it a step further and didn’t really pay much heed to the corporate timekeeping rules… If someone needed to run an errand or “telework” for a day; fine by me. The company didn’t give anyone sick time, or enough time in general, OR a big enough salary, so they can eat my whole ass. Lo and behold, our section had the lowest MTTR, and highest amount of tickets closed, all with 100% SLA met. Crazy what you can achieve when you treat people like adults and actual human beings instead of soulless automatons.
Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when I’m too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesn’t happen. I’m moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.
Compounding this, when it’s that busy, I’m often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, I’m off trying to chip away at something else. When it’s slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so it’s easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when it’s busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05… Yeah, I’m not entering all that time… At best I’m going to guess, at worst I’m just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: “fixed problem” done.
The task of entering time takes more time to do. If I’m too busy trying to put out fires, I don’t care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.
This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldn’t just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now I’m not putting out a fire instead I’m taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.
I dunno Sally, why don’t you fucking Google it? I’m not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit that’s not broken. I’m currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me? But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and I’ll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my “attitude” towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corp’s file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sally’s feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldn’t meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because I’m lead technician on that account.
Fuck.
Opposite scenario in my dept. The boss wants to improve our time tracking so he can justify asking for more staff.
“Yes the rest of the org needs 500 new starters a week but you guys can manage, right?”
Yeah, they say that.
When you’re too busy to actually get your time in and you look like a damn slacker, they’ll use it as evidence to say that you don’t need any additional help. I’ve been through this song and dance several times.
Sounds like they’re just lazy
/s
You joke, but that has been pounded into our heads our entire life, and even me (a gen x’er) feels like it’s my own fault because the world has been beating me down for not reaching whatever arbitrary standard it’s set for us.
Don’t worry, the oligarchy commends your lifelong efforts with a pizza party … :/
I know. I’m right there too.
We should get all of us together, pool what little money we have, and buy us a huge compound somewhere and have our own community. I mean, what could go wrong, right? 👀
Sounds good to me. Kool aid?
Hands you a cup
It’s Ecto Cooler flavor.
People do this already, check Foundation for Intentional Community. You can find communities near you that are open to visitors or new residents and check them out.
Make sure you’re well acquainted with the traits of cults to keep yourself safe. There are groups out there that are fundraising and building infrastructure for new communities, as well, so there are many ways to get involved.
“Just be careful, you might accidentally join a cult” lol I totally get your point but that just made me laugh.
Don’t want to end up like waco
Speak for yourself
man this sounded so cool until I realized they were all going to be weird sex cults.
I’m an older millennial and I look at the younger generarions with horror. We still had some good years. They only had worst and worst times. Disasters, wars, economic craches, pandemics, more wars… fuck! Guys you need to change the world!
YAY WORKING 6 DAY WEEKS AT 2ND SHIFT I LOVE NEVER BEING ABLE TO GO OUT AND DO SHIT LIKE KEEP MY FRIENDS AND BEING ABLE TO VISIT MY MOM AND DAD BUT THE COMPANY REEEEEEEEAAAAALLLLLLLY NEEDS ME TO BE THERE SO TGE CEO OF ONE OF THE KARGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD CAN BUY THEIR 23RD BEACH MANSION THEYLL NEVER USE I FUCKING HATE THIS WORLD
Everything is measured now. That has to add to the pressure.
It’s okay. Soon AI will take over our jobs and we won’t have to work anymore. But we won’t have wages either. So no food. No shelter. No clothes. No future.
Win-win.
Definitely me. I just went several months interviewing and when they asked what my financial requirements were, I started saying I’d just like to be able to buy a house with my masters degree and 15 years experience.
Usually got a genuine laugh
They laughed not because your expectations were laughable, but because they expected you to state a dollar range, therefore when you made a blunt relatable reply, it had a comedic effect. Their laughter was a compliment of your wit.
This doesn’t seem like c/nottheonion material
Not sure how this is millennial-specific. Everyone has been doing this for a long time. One of the few good things to come out of Covid was work from home being integrated into scheduling. Of course big business is trying to rob people of that again.
Sorry but for those of us not in industries where WFH is even an option, it ruined things for us.
I have to quit my job eventually and move to a completely different state because once WFH took off and everyone that could move out of the areas their jobs were in did so the housing market exploded.
I had just reached a point where I was financially healthy enough to consider buying a house and then pretty much immediately had the rug pulled out from under me… Now between greedflation and everything else, the raises I had been fighting for are equal in purchasing power as my income was like 4 years ago…
Shift your blame to the housing market for jacking prices up for well over 40 years. Yes they used wfh as another excuse but seriously housing market has been fucked looooong before wfh
Yeah screw those people being able to be happy and move to an area that doesn’t bend them over almost definitely worse than you. What assholes! They should have to stay in the downtown centers and pay $15 million to live in an old phone booth with a sink.
This has the same energy of people being pissed off with student loan forgiveness or something. “If I had to deal with it, so should you! I can’t be happy so you can’t either blah blah”
Yeah like. I’m sympathetic to this arguement, but anyone thinking the average American today works “harder” and more strenuously to the average American in like 1920 is off their gourd.
All this stuff is really hard to measure, and ultimately we just need a system where people can live decent lives and not be miserable. There’s a difference between working hard and having a happy & fruitful life out of it and working little while remaining miserable
Edit:
Only in Lemmy could you get downvoted for suggesting that maybe doing enjoyable productive work is an okay thing. Day by day I’m more convinced the average user here just wants to live in the space ship from Wall-E getting force fed milkshakes all day
Most of the news subs on Lemmy are just cynical pity parties for first world problems. Idk what to make of people here. Wealthy educated countries with historically low unemployment and yet no one can seem to find a decent job.
I will give you my two pennies on this.
I had to go back to college after the army. My BA degrees in business and criminal justice were worthless then, and still are worthless now. I got them to go through OCS. I was going to go into computer science, but got a C in C++, so went into mechanical engineering instead. Was jealous of all my coding friends, except now they are all laid off. Every single one of them.
These were the good jobs, the guys making 100-350k/yr for their programming knowledge. Now they have nothing, and no job prospects in their field. Companies are laying off workers in expensive areas and hiring unqualified people in much cheaper areas like Vietnam, China, and India to use ChatGPT to spit out code. MBA folks think they cracked the code and are out producing other firms who don’t use AI, but in reality the AI code is mostly shit. It looks good on KPIs, which are helping to fuel a massive bubble. It allows those who do nothing to act like they are more useful than those who do work.
Why don’t people work a good job like the one I have? Because not everyone can get a masters in engineering. The “good jobs” are disappearing.
I hope things get better for your friends. Tech is taking a hit right now.
I had trouble finding work after college, had to work some shit jobs and move around a lot, but I was never out of options, never at risk of going hungry or not sleeping in a bed. It takes a hell of a lot to go hungry or homeless in the US. There’s an insane amount of industry, wealth, and opportunity here.
Meanwhile, in my home country, there is 70% inflation in the past year. There is war everywhere on the borders (and conscription). There is no opportunity for young people. Inflation has destroyed most people’s ability to emigrate or get an American/European education. They’re just stuck there with a crumbling economy, a refugee crisis (about 10% of the population), an increasingly religious and oppressive government, and the constant threat of war.
It’s hard to see so many posts like these complaining about how hard everything is for people living in US, UK, Canada, France etc. from people with the most disposable income in the world, the highest carbon footprints, the biggest cars, the most meat consumption, good labor laws.
Yes, we should still strive to improve things. There are tons of problems in this system that result in conflict and inequality. But this kind of article is the epitome of first world problems from privileged people.
This whole site is filled with these cynical, self-pitying posts so we can all read them and think “yeah, everything is so unfair for me, everyone else had it so much easier” like everything is happening to us, and we have no control or agency in our own happiness and satisfaction. We bear no responsibility for our own situation. We live in the best part of the world in the best time of human history, yet we’re all miserable because everything is so terrible and hard.
In power grids (where I currently work) we have a very hard time finding field techs.
It pays around 90k your first year, 150k+/yr after depending on how many jobs you take. It’s tough work, but it’s not hard since everything is so heavy. Not a lot of manual lifting, but you are out in the elements.
All hotel and meals are paid out on sight. Hardly anyone wants the jobs. You don’t even need a trade school anymore, all training is on the job.
There are jobs out there.
Are they willing to hire people who don’t already have 10 years experience? Are they willing to train people who are fresh out of high school? If not then those companies can only blame themselves for not having workers. After the Great Recession companies got entitled because they could hire whoever they wanted with whatever experience and degrees they wanted for rock bottom prices and that entitlement never left.
You need zero experience.
Have to 21 due to state laws in high danger areas and nuclear power.
You say it takes a hell of a lot to go homeless but there’s literally homeless people everywhere in this country. I literally can’t ride my bike to the thrift store (can’t afford a car) without passing a half dozen tents on the sidewalk, and then you get to the thrift store and it’s so deeply picked over there’s nothing worth buying. None of that is a sign that things are good. America is a great place if you’re rich not if you’re poor
If you want, say, a boat; its probably less work to build it from scratch than to ‘earn’ it for the overwhelming majority.
Which is wild: Even with modern tools, economies of scale, and specialized master craftspeople (or more likely; enslaved teenagers halfway across the world chained to a shop bench, similar effect here) its easier to DIY than go through ‘society’, unless the thing has been made deliberately difficult to DIY-which more and more things, especially repairs and retrofits, are.
It takes more work, more coordination, and orders of magnitude more time to get the government to raise your taxes to half assedly feed the hungry with food that was gonna get thrown away than it does to just find a patch of land nobody’s watching and do it yourself from Fucking scratch. Every Fucking time.
All the big decisions, decisions about Commons, and decisions about the future, including habitability of the planet, are being made in what we can all agree is the dumbest fucking way possible, and regardless of our disagreements, 999/1000 random people off the street would find it difficult to make worse ones.
So, communist or individualist, insurrectionist or moderate, what kind of brain dead fucking moron would participate in this on purpose? Would follow the rules of this on purpose?
So, what the fuck is to be done?
P.S. If you say “vote” I swear I’ll fucking scream.
Vote with your dollars and strike at the root.
Slightly less obnoxious, but equally ineffective; vote with your hands, your eyes, your feet. Don’t let them steal your labor your attention your time your anything. You can be passive and hold a strike. You van be active and strike back. I think a mix of both would be a lot more effective than just one.
But whatever you do, if its not just useless theatrical bullshit (which isn’t to say all theatrical bullshit is useless; just the useless kinds) its going to be illegal, and will face state retribution, even if its explicitly legal and protected in your local constitution.
Slightly less obnoxious, but equally ineffective; vote with your hands, your eyes, your feet. Don’t let them steal your labor your attention your time your anything. You can be passive and hold a strike. You van be active and strike back. I think a mix of both would be a lot more effective than just one.
You can also strike without striking. There’s a huge fuss over “quiet quitting”/“work to rule”, where people are striking by only doing exactly what they’re paid for, rather than adding in the extra that has become the norm. They’re not adding extra hours or pulling extra duties.
When I say ‘strike back’ the labor actions that come to mind all involve machine guns.
Further, this is one case where decidedly not voting (to borrow the analogy) would have an impact.
Reminds me of the short story Enough, by William Ledbetter that I just read.
See also https://bdsmovement.net/ for a practical, targeted example.
For whoever thinks not voting will be any form of good decision. Ask yourself this question.
How can someone distinguish a not vote because your fine with how things are from a not vote out of protest?
Definitely not what I meant. My example would be more like refusing to pay taxes in protest.
Except thankfully it’s not illegal to refuse to give money to corporations, just very difficult.
While I did misunderstood the goal of your comment, sry for that, it still holds some truth and might be applied concept wise to what you meant.
Refusing to pay taxes is, as much as refusing to vote politically, a refuse to participate. Why should someone get a say in something that they refuse to be a part of?
We are on the same side, even if it’s not directly obvious. You showed that with you second point. By voting with you wallet for corporations that fulfill your values, you choose to give them more power over other corporations that don’t.
The same concept applies to voting politically. You give your vote to a party that fulfills your values over a party that doesn’t.
I the real world not paying taxes is not an option, as much as it’s not an option to not spend any money on any corporation, if your part of the society. We are able to choose in a given context, that for sure has its limitations.
Let’s say your not happy with the possible options that you can vote for, be it a financial or a political vote, you are free to fill the niche you think is missing. Start being active politically or economically and if there are more people that think like you and act according to this, things can change.
But if nobody does this, things will definitely move in the direction of the values from people that do the things above.
There is the famous phrase. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Vote and be engaged. Nothing else you do alone will be effective, including being upset about it.
Copy pasting:
So I’m in the united states. The second (or third) major step towards fascism… Well here’s how I remember it:
It was the year 2000, first election I was remotely politically conscious for. I, uh, didn’t vote. Had opinions tho.
So there was this fascist piece of shit-his dad was a former CIA director, his grandpa was point man for a failed fascist coup (thank you smedley butler. Not that I knew about this at the time, being a literal child), and the guy running against him was kind of a bland milquetoast wonk-but his credentials and rep were, in retrospect, pretty perfect. Conscious and cautious about global warming, knew about the internet, kind of all the right shit for the moment.
So when the fascist piece of shit took office, everyone gave my mom shit, because she voted for a third party and allowed it to happen. Nevermind that we live(d) in CA, where votes in federal elections are between like 1/5th and 1/500th of a full citizen, and the electoral votes for CA still went to the bullshit wonk. She caught shit for years. And it kind of confused me.
Because here’s the thing; the bland milquetoast wonk won the election. I don’t mean “he won the popular vote; the electoral college is bullshit” (although he did and it is) but he won in college votes too. He won by every metric.
Nobody cared. Because elections don’t count. They’re not real, and you will never win begging. It was entirely a wasted effort. The aristocracy just appointed the guy they wanted. Don’t get me started on 2008, the first one I did vote in, and how that bastard betrayed every single fucking thing he promised.
You tell me to get off my ass and do something, have you ever actually done anything in your life? I don’t mean sucking some aristocrat’s dick, so you can beg them for scraps later, that aren’t worth 1/10 of the effort you spent doing the lobbying, much less getting them their throne, but actually fixing building solving something with your own fucking hands abd organizational capacity?
Ever? Or are you so obsessesed with being in a fucked up machine you can’t even see what it’s for, what its doing, and what purpose you serve within it?
When you see someone dying on the street between five buildings, all of them with ‘(residential) for rent’ signs on them so old they’re barely legible, what’s your first thought? Do you think every politician doesn’t fucking know? Is your first thought to beg all the people who are profiting off this poor fuckers death? This isnt a hypothetical BTW, I saw this enough times this week that I straight up stopped fucking counting. So what should I have done, according to you?
Yes, don’t try to fix it all alone. Organize. Change. But the systems that allowed these Fucking oligarch shit stains to ruin it so bad? The ‘good’ people when they do take the reins in a system where their only levers are ‘taxes’ and (ratcheted)‘cops’? What century are we on of prison reform? 2? 10? I know it’s been nonstop since before the steam engine. Still seems pretty bad.
Direct action doesn’t mean ‘go it alone’. Bring your friends. Collab with strangers. Make new friends. Actual democracy can actually be pretty fucking fun, but it gets a lot sweatier.
I am building a wooden boat right now, and this isn’t true. I’m about $1500 in on a Bolger Cartopper, which is 10’6" with 4’ beam.
Okay maybe boats were a bad example. I probably should have used something I know about, but that’s all shit everyone thinks they can’t do.
Still, compare the effort you put in, keep in mind you’re being gouged on materials (because you’re being gouged on everything), and figure out how many hours at minimum wage to buy the sameish quality.
Boats are weird. I’ve looked at buying kit from CLC to build a 15’ Pocketship: about $12,000 US. Buying a used one, a couple years old? $15k.
Meanwhile, my local yacht club had a 26’ 1969 Westerly Centaur one step away from being crushed. Prior owner stopped paying storage fees and refused further contact, so the club put a lien on it. I picked it up cheap, $500. Nobody bothered cutting the lock off the companionway; it was chock full of tools and supplies the prior owner was using to refit it.
I’ve dropped some cash into finishing the refit, but nowhere near what I would have spent on a 15’ Pocketship, and I’ve got a much more capable boat. There are deals out there.
Not really the point. Glad you got a cool boat+project tho!
Very much the point. Building a boat is labor intensive. The materials are relatively inexpensive, compared to the time invested in building. The person selling that used Pocketship was likely the builder, and sees value in their time spent building it.
That ~50 year old Westerly? That labor is long gone. The previous owner did invest his time in a partial refit, but relinquished his interest when he stopped paying storage fees and let a lien be placed on it. The club has no time invested, just the lost storage fees, but would rather minimize future loss; an abandoned boat takes up space that would otherwise be generating revenue for them. The club members (nearly all power boaters) see little value in the boat itself. Any revenue gained from scrapping it would likely exceed the cost to scrap the fiberglass hull (again, a labor intensive process).
She really is a cool boat, though. I’m having a great time completing the refit, and I don’t see my labor invested as lost when I’m enjoying the process as much as I am.
But generally things are made to not be durable, excess commodities are destroyed(at a cost, they pay to destroy them), and vintage goods are at a premium.
Yes exceptions exist, but this is a known exploit, mostly patched.
So I’m extra glad you found this. And I meant it when I said ‘fun project’. I do love me one of those.
this is genuinely my plan. Work in trades to pick up a skill (and hopefully make a decent bit of coin) buy some land, and build it out. Spend as little as possible, and enjoy it as much as possible.
I feel like it’s viable. Maybe i’m hopeful, idk. We’ll see.
I don’t want to criticize that, it soubds pretty nice, but that’s nowhere near as radical as I was thinking.
Plus, remember; there is no outside, walled gardens do not endure, thermodynamics apply, and you cannot lifeboat the coming catastrophes.
it’s certainly not radical, i agree with that. Personally i just don’t really care about others. So it’s not like it would really bother me one way or the other.
I do have foundational beliefs on a lot of this shit, but if i don’t have to think about it, then i won’t, and i see no other reason others couldn’t follow in suit.
reason others couldn’t follow suit
It can look like there’s an outside, but that’s a lie our masters tell, so people who’re fed up walk away instead of fighting back, violently or otherwise.
i don’t consider it outside, i consider it to be the corner of a large room with a lot of people in it. But that corner just so happens to have very few people in it.
Til it doesn’t. Good luck, I guess. Could stand your help to really fix shit though.
i’ll be around, it’s not that i won’t, it just depends on how important it is to me really. If we’re talking fundamental individual freedoms, i’ll be there.
Stand for election. Voting doesn’t work unless people who aren’t benefiting from the system stand for election. Join a party. Fake loyalty to that party. Fake moderate beliefs. Fake everything until you get selected to stand. Keep faking until you’re elected. Once elected, wield whatever power you have for the good of all mankind. Prioritise the future, not the present.
Oh my god do you think nobody’s Fucking tried this? It doesn’t work. The elections are fake, my dude. Remember 2000? Remember 2016 dem primary? Remember 194…4(?)? 2020 dem primary?
And I live in California. My vote literally does not count.
Fuck your bullshit elections, I can’t respect that shit
Gotta respect your choice of home Lemmy tho. I feel ashamed for not thinking to do the same.
The issue isn’t lack of effort, it’s lack of scope. If everyone whinging online signed up to a party today, started attending every single local meeting from tomorrow onwards, put themselves forward for roles within that party, actually put in time and effort to get selected, get elected, move up, keep moving up, keep aiming higher, we’d have a completely overhauled political system in 5 years.
Granted it might be harder in the States (UK here), but for us, we have 650 members of parliament. That means we only need 326 individuals, members of any party, out of nearly 70 million people, who will vote in favour of any policy that will benefit future generations, be it climate related, electoral reform, workers rights reform, anything beneficial, and the country and world would start to get better. Instead hopelessness is pervasive, very few people try and as you point out, if they do try, they find themselves alone. Well now, how about we all just agree to do it? There are thousands, possibly millions of people who are under 30 and sick of all of this crap and follow pages on reddit, Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, any of the random new social media that I stopped keeping up with once I turned 25, pages dedicated to ‘antiwork’, political reform, climate issues, the general decline of western society under late stage capitalism.
If even 10% got off their asses and actually did something about it, everything would be fine. If YOU get off your ass and do something, it will help. I’m literally an elected politician at the local level in the UK. I tell anyone who asks that I’m only involved because I hated the idea that the climate crisis was raging and nobody was doing anything, so I may as well do something myself. I have seen that things can change at the local level because I’m there, changing them. I’m one person. In this mid-sized town, there are probably hundreds or thousands of others who are also scared that nobody is doing anything, but they’re lazy, or apathetic, or just not aware of the possibilities, so I’m alone for the moment.
You asked what anyone can do, but you’re complaining that you don’t like the answer. Live in California? Move. It’s expensive as hell anyway, so move to Arkansas or Missouri. Pretend you’re a republican. Infiltrate. Change that party from the inside. Or move to a smaller town. Join the town council. Then run for mayor. Then for governor. Just do something. That is the only answer. There is no quick fix, no easy path. The solution is simple - make sure every decision you make for at least the next 5 years will get you closer to your goal of attaining political power so you can change things. That is the only way anything will ever change. Left to the hands of the ‘default’ political classes, they won’t do anything. They won’t change anything. They have it easier than you. They have connections at prestigious universities, they have more money, they have better access to internships and people of influence. Tough luck, but that isn’t an excuse for you not to try. You will be alone at the start. Be the example. Bring people with you. Constantly encourage anyone you know who feels the same as you to get involved. Things can be changed for the better, but the first step is on you. Stop waiting for other people to make things better.
stop waiting for other people yo make things better
But also
beg the fuckers who ruined everything and the system designed to turn your horrified screams into complicit babble to make it better
I’m gonna try the first, which is what I said, rather than the second, which you seem to favor.
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Fuck off.
Conspiracies about Greta Thunberg and pretending Boomers aren’t the ones who voted in and continue to uphold these capitalistic systems.
Millennials and Zoomers openly critic capitalism and the 1%, yet you’re pretending no one does.
Honestly your post is sus as fuck.
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Twice as exhausting for us boomers. You think you’re tired. 60 and 2 jobs is bullshit.
60? Doesn’t that put you closer to GenX? Was there a “cusp” generation like Xennials?
This points out why the idea that boomers (as a whole) caused many of our modern problems upsets me
I sincerely doubt you voted for the situation you’re in now
This in-fighting and blaming does nothing but detract from the real issue of who’s doing this to us (spoiler alert: it’s the politicians and it always has been)
Yeah some dude has a failed acting career, and now I have to hope my for profit insurance will cover a doctor or I’ll be eating ramen for the rest of my life
“failed acting career” is apparently ending up the chair of the Screen Actors Guild, parlaying that into Governor of California and then the presidency, after being a known talent in the 50s.
Failed acting career applies to most of the current online right wing pundits spewing nonsense.
Yeah let’s just pretend he wasn’t talking about Reagan
At least he didn’t fail art school in Austria
Though he likely killed nearly as many.
I cannot buy healthy, tasty, food. I can work less hours, buy ingredients in the marker and make that food.
I will never be able to buy a house, never. Even saving over half my income by living in shit neighborhoods. The cost of houses goes up too fast. Even after investing, and getting good returns, on the little I managed to save, it is not enough.
So working a little less, and having healthy food it is.
After understanding the ongoing ecological collapse, I don’t care much about a house anymore, rich or poor, we are all dead in less than 10 years anyway.
If you can, work less, play more. And I actually love what I do at work, but fuck that scam.
Ha less than 10 years? You wish
More like 100 years of slow burn
Move
Move where? I can move to a cheaper country, buy a house and push a local down the economical ladder. Or stay and stay in contact with people I love.
Give it a generation, it’ll be perfectly normal.
Seriously, how quickly humans adapt. 10 generations ago wouldn’t put up with 1/2 the shit we are just OK with
