As a manual labourer for the last 10+ years - C2 social grade I have often wondered about white collared jobs in this new technological age. I am having a cheeky brunch in a chi-chi cafe in a long up-and-come area of town while the car is having an MOT. It’s full of zoom calling professionals, mainlining single origin Aribica. if only I tried harder at school I could spend my days doing emails and doing analytics instead of getting RSI and being cold. Anyway the good news is one of the jobs I had to do before XMAS just said they have COVID so scratch that off the list. Merry COVID everyone. .
Looking back, when I was doing telecoms, before the first smart phones, one of my smaller customers said "Steve - apps - we're abandoning everything we do and writing apps - do this, really - apps, apps apps - nobody knows what's coming, you'll get rich, the language is simple - get the kit and write apps". Needless to say ... I didn't and I'm not rich.
White collar, sitting in an office, in front of a computer all day, you can keep it. I’ll take the cold wet fresh air any day! (Please remind me of this next time I am moaning about being out in the cold wet fresh air!)
I am office based, it's not really IT, but that's a good enough description. At first, the pandemic made a nice change, no commute and no office politics. I did 16k miles a year in the car and it's now down to 4k miles, great for the environment. My company has worked from home throughout! Trust me, it was ok in the two summers, lots of chances to catch up on outside jobs in the garden etc, two hours a day back in my life by not driving to and from work and a chance to sneak off early on a Friday to go camping and spend time around people. Now....I never thought I would miss dealing with the clowns in the office, but after two years, mostly spent without other human company, and we're well into the second winter, I can safely say. IT SUCKS!!
I didn’t do well at school. I wasn’t naughty. I didn’t skip it much. But I found it boring and I hated being told what to do. I left at 16. I love my job. No fixed hours. No boss. Meet loads of nice people. You can keep ya office jobs. Checking emails at the poolside whilst on holiday. Going in two hours early and leaving two hours late just to be seen. Having to pretend you like the people in your office when at least 50% of them you’d happily murder if you knew 100% you’d never get caught. No thanks. Who wants to be cash rich but time poor.
You now need a Linkedin account (Linkedin = Facebook for job snobs) and you can then post pointless $hite about how inspired you have been by your line manager and how humble and honoured you feel to be moving on to your next job and thanking the awesome colleagues you are leaving behind. And don't forget to tell everyone about the voluntary book reading you do at the local school, because your company says you have to do some CSR activity to make them look like they care about corporate social responsibility............pffft.
I’ve always felt quite nauseous looking at LinkedIn. Think you’ve nailed it there. It’s a little like when a new boss or colleague joins and you instantly know that most likely they will be a pita lickspittle if they are on there! It’s almost expected that professionals will be on there ( by those that already are)
It is obligatory to 'lean-in' and 'reach-out'. I thought that's what you do when dancing to Oops Up Side Your Head...................
I work as a software release / software engineer in aerospace, and tbh I think its made me a bit soft. The rest of my family are in the trades, they can build anything, in all weathers. They actually are quite proud of me for 'getting ahead' but if only they knew the truth. What's worrying is that our corporate Outlook has just had a Linked-in plugin installed by I.T, so when you hover over a colleague their linked-in details come up. At the moment its voluntary to link your accounts, but we all know where that's going... Once it's mandatory I will be looking for new work. Probably on Linked-in
I think HR frown upon such things these days. But tbh I stopped listening to them once they banned alcohol in the office...
Dont start…. Another embarrassing opportunity for the sycophants to ask stupid “on message” questions and the bull to flow.
Perhaps I've just been lucky but not all office jobs are quite the raw deal described above. We're not expected to do any of this arriving/leaving 2 hours outside of core hours malarkey, or checking emails during annual leave. I currently work from home 2 days a week, with the remaining time in the office which is proving to be a nice balance (I'm a mentor to our graduate developers so having 2 days at home works well as I can catchup on their code reviews).
I think averaging 3 days in the office would indeed be a nice balance and lessen the environmental impact of commuting.
I’m pretty sure that murder is actually ok. It’s the getting caught bit that poses the majority of the issues. it’s one of the many reasons that the universe hasn’t deemed it a good idea to give me the power of invisibility. Or a gun license.
