(Oct. 23, 2022 ● Oslin Pierrette)
I had a hard time understanding why companies were so incompetent. Why wouldn’t you get competent people for certain roles? Why are incompetent people in a lot of these positions? Why do companies make bad unreasonable decisions? Then I realized, I was too zoomed out, from a macro perspective. Looking from the company’s perspective. But realized, there really isn’t a company perspective. Company is run and functioned by individuals. Individuals are making the decisions. And once you look at it from that perspective, a lot of it makes sense. Everyone is doing what’s best for their interest and agenda. Of course some people have positions, where they get benefited when the company does, but still most actions are an act of self preservation.
There was a blatant system of incompetence I just couldn’t understand. From the company perspective, it seems crazy that they would enforce and compensate incompetence. Then when looking at it as individuals within a system, but they are mostly for their self agenda, instead of being on a team and company, the incompetence made a lot of sense.
One thing that I’ve noticed is if you finish your job, there is no more job to do, which means you’re no longer needed, no job, no pay. So instead of finishing your job, space it out, don’t do your job so efficiently, make it look like there is still a need for you. Stop solving solutions or at least don’t do it quickly, and leave the problem, constantly act like you’re working, and keep getting paid.
Managers also like to give workers BS jobs because it makes the manager look good when their workers seem occupied. And making it seem like the manager is managing his sector well.
Another dilemma is intimidation. Say you have a managerial or executive position, one that you like and want to keep. Some feel incentivized to promote incompetent workers. Ones that wouldn’t challenge their position at work. A competent and motivated worker intimidates them. Especially if the person in the managerial or executive seat is incompetent themselves, and understands that they are intimidated by someone who can outperform them, so eliminate the competition. Someone who is competent and motivated probably could understand their worth, and want to grow their position, so don’t put people like that in a position to empower themselves. This could be a good reason as to why someone who feels worthy just is completely confused in their job search, when people in those positions are very incompetent. Many people just have a hard time trying to gauge how to obtain those positions. How to maneuver those spaces. And there’s gonna be times, where there isn’t going to be a reasonable way to go about it. Some in charge of picking a candidate can have their own personal interest they are trying to satisfy. That isn’t based on reasonable attributes, that some candidates have worked hard to gain.
Some people might have put in hard work and given a lot of loyalty to a company. They may think they should be rewarded for their loyalty and quality of work. They bring a lot of value to the team and feel they deserve to earn what they are worth. Then a person or people of the company may understand that, and let them go and replace them with entry-level talent, with way less experience. Sometimes people of the company don’t want to pay someone their worth, especially when they can save and get someone else for cheaper. Also there’s been times where someone with less experience and quality work can get chosen over you based on politics. The people with power in the company favored the less experienced worker not because of work, but the relationship was better.
There’s no linear way of going about things to climb the ladder at a company. In a fantasy world of work, the better and more work you do, the more you’re rewarded, which is far from the truth. It’s all situational and based on whatever agenda the people in power have, it can be a selfish agenda or not, but it’s their agenda to choose.
There are situations where some can fall victim to the incompetent system. Some workers are in jobs within their realm of comfort, and they have a good thing going for them. They are rewarded and promoted into a position out of their skillset. Where before they had a good thing going, now they have a lack of production in their work, but they’re going to stick out, even if it affects others in a negative way. Some people wouldn’t want to come off incompetent. So they’ll stay at an essential job that affects others, and do it poorly, just because they are trying not to come off incompetent.
What’s even worse is the workers that don’t even see their a victim to incompentent hiring. You’ll see this a lot in recruiter and hiring teams. It’s worse because some of these people I even encountered are so big headed. They have this superiority complex to them. Think they are bigger than the candidate. Go on linkedin and see how recruiters speak, it’s absurd how important they think they are. It’s like the referee who thinks they’re so important. Like a ref may not like a player or their attitude, and may penalize for it. And it’s like ref and officiate the basketball game accordingly, instead of including your self importance into it, this game is bigger than you, not about you. And it’s like recruiter/hirer, just vet the people whose skills and talents will best fit the role. Stop inserting yourself so much. I’ve literally seen recruiters and hirers say they liked a candidate’s talent, but since the candidate didn’t thank them, they denied them. Or if they didn’t know the person, they weren’t going to recommend them. Why can’t you do your job and judge people off their skills and talents?
Where this gets more frustrating, there’s a pattern of recruiters/hirers who don’t have knowledge of the position they’re hiring for, which is absurd. Like I saw frustrations in the IT field because the hirers didn’t have a basic understanding of tech at all. So without understanding that, how can you vet who can do the best job, and the answer is simply, you probably can’t. But there are so many examples in different fields of work with this.
There’s a lot more incompetency, especially within white collar working system. All this compounded together creates this absolute absurdity. I’m not saying this is all companies and corporations, but once you start to understand how many people hate their jobs and work environments, who are demoralized in their work life. You’ll see a lot of it is connected to the absurdity of work in society. It’s a large bulk of people in the world dealing with problems related to these.
This is a perfect representation of someone trying to justifiably explain how corporate companies work. It would be an insane amount of unease trying to justifiably make sense of something that is impossible to make sense of. Someone who is honest and understands would say they understand that it doesn’t make sense. It’s an absurd system, and you just have to get in where you fit, and make the best of the situation you have.
There are companies out there with decent and maybe good cultures at work. That’s typically when there is good leadership. Like a leader that is mainly about coming up with good innovative ideas. And is open to taking risks. So you want a team that is good and competent at creating. So work-life may be stimulating and lively then. There’s a purpose there. And sometimes when that creator head who was about ideas and innovation, that helped expand the company, when that person decides to leave, or the company wants new leadership. That can result in a whole culture change. A company can go from ideas & innovation, which takes risk taking on new ideas. To a company that becomes all about getting higher numbers. Taking less risk and spending less, and trying to obtain more money. That’s typically when venture capitalists take the lead. Typically people who think they’re valuable, but have no means of creating value. It’s like when Steve Jobs led a company(and I’m not saying he was the easiest to work with) to create the Mac, iPod, iPhone,& iPad. Also cool applications within them. All innovative ideas expanding the company. Then the people who supersede him stop being innovative and just remix his ideas from years ago. Starts a ticking time bomb of that company’s stock crashing because at some point they will not have an interesting idea to keep the interests of the pubic. You can also look at Nike/Jordan and Tinker Hatfield, who had monumental sneaker designs. That’s what led his creations, being innovative in design. And now, Nike & Jordan are just remixing those sneaker designs with “cooler” colorways. There’s a finite amount of times you can fool the public. Being about numbers when it comes to those designs is starting a ticking time bomb for your company’s stock to crash, because at some point they will not have an interesting idea to keep the interests of the public.
This is just a guess, but that could be the issue, bad leadership. You need company heads that are about great ideas, innovations, and willing to take risks to have the best chance for a flourishing company. Also who understand in great detail the industry they take part of. Once you remove that, and pick a head that is all about more money. They typically don’t have the ability to understand value, or the ability to create ideas. When your leadership role doesn’t make sense, what trickles down under is also nonsense. They are incompetent in their field, so they’re making bad hires, because they don’t understand what a good hire is. Also due to their incompetency they could be making intentional bad hires to protect their top position. And they are about self interest instead of growing the company. Then from that snowballs into this incompetent absurd mayhem of a system. That could answer the compensation of meaningless jobs. If a leader doesn’t understand their industry, there could be jobs that they wouldn’t know has no meaning.
You’ll see this incompetency when execs and managers of companies hire 3rd party companies to vet their own company. Why would you need that if you’re managing the company or sector? Maybe you don’t understand the job that you do. There are a lot of examples of people having jobs based on the sole foundation of companies and workers’ incompetence.
How does this get fixed, push for better leadership, innovative competent leaders. But it seems insanely hard from the position we’re in as a society. The answer for many companies is letting go of a lot of the people they have in their company, including the leadership. And how many leaders that are in a good position would step down. It’s gonna be a tough fix.
Also I think this isn’t a more talked about phenomenon or epidemic because it sounds like 1st world problems. Like what large groups of people started protesting about the meaningless life of getting paid $50k-$200k salary to do nothing. So a lot of people probably just stay quiet about their pains. And just live a luxuriously empty life.
_______
Office Space Film Review
Loved this film. This is exactly what I was looking for. Answered the question I needed to get answered. I’ve been researching bullsh*t jobs and corporations lately. After getting rejected by corporations for creative positions by corporate people. I wanted to know what was going on in those places. And as suspected, it’s complete randomness. No one really knows what they’re doing. Lot of unqualified people in wrong undeserving positions. Also overqualified people in valueless positions. Nothing makes sense. So how do you operate in a world like that, where it’s based on nothingness.
These white collar jobs, usually holding the highest status and average pay. You can go home and parade those titles like being an administrative director. But all you do is manage emails, arrange files, and set up meetings. Something a simple software or operating system can do. Meaningless truly.
But people like that typically get into a good position and a decent living. Probably a decent to good house, car, and situation. Not something you would want to mess up. Especially if you have a family. So you have to stick it out. You’re already so used to your good situation. You don’t want to mess that up. Especially when you don’t have an ambition elsewhere. Just stick it out there.
And that’s what I like about the film. That was a strong first half. It was a psychological subtle luminal horror. You’re just trapped in this world of nothingness. You’re a cog on the wheel of incompetence. And that’s basically the rest of your life.
Just act like your job has some significance. You go to work, and find a way to stretch 15-30 mins of work into a week amount. If anyone asks what your work is. You don’t have a true answer of what that is. Can’t come up with a justification for why your job exists. If that job was erased from the earth. Everything would still move smoothly, maybe even more efficient for a cheaper cost.
You never get any true gratification for the work you do, which is meaningless anyways. And for mistakes, you get heavily hassled.
Just putting this unease and constant discomforting association with work. Just making sure you’re properly doing everything out of fear and anxiety. People of no merit will get promoted ahead of you, while you are overly certified. And you could get replaced by some entry level talent. It makes no sense.
Then the person who may run the floor does nothing really, but “supervise”. There’s all these random jobs that mean nothing within a corporation. And it’s like why? This system of incompetence is starting to seem intentional. Who does this benefit, and how?
Lifestyles like this create zombies. Empty lifeless humans. Just doing meaningless work and hopefully you have a life at home, unless you’re living a life with no connection to any sort of meaning. You’re just a cog on the wheel doing your part of meaninglessness, that can get removed at any moment.
After a while you have to understand that perks and comfortability isn’t worth it. You just have to let it go and be very intentional about finding meaning within your life another way.
But that’s what I loved about this film. They drilled that feeling of psychological nothingness. A corporate zombie land. Where you get no respect. There’s no way to hold a sense of dignity.