Anyone else is tired of all the corporate bs?

I don't want to sound like the bad guy here who defends corporate, but I kind of feel like OP and a lot of comments are missing the point. Which is: large business organizations are complex social structures. You can't have a complex social structure without a lot of communication going on. Of course there are zounds of different ways to communicate with each other and if you (and your colleagues) feel like certain meetings are just a waste of time and have no benefit whatsoever, there is something wrong with the org's culture.

I happen to manage approx 20 people in a ~500 person org. Everyone gets a chance to decide if they want to focus on becoming a social animal and growing in the org (which results in more meetings, more emails, more chats, etc.) or just concentrate on the technical stuff. The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company. However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings... Once being able to put all that into perspective, most of them don't complain about it anymore.

So long story short - most of the time you can't have it both ways in a large(-ish) organization. You can either be the guy who digs a hole every day and someone tells him where. Or you can be the guy who decides where to dig the holes but only get to dig a more moderate amount of holes yourself.

I live in Belgium, didn't inherit millions from family and am in the middle working class. I'll stay in this working class, this is how it has been conceived, I'll never make millions. Once I understood and accepted this, I managed to work only 4 days a week and live more than finely with this salary. Work is only there to get my living wage, I detached completely from work life, I chat with colleague, I do what I'm supposed to do, nothing less, nothing more, I play cards and read a lot, then my 7h50 workday is over and I go on with my real life: my son, my car, my hobbies, my friends. THIS is what counts.

Yes, the BS drained the life out of me. Switched to a startup and it got much better, but once we grew to 100+ people, the endless meetings started piling up again

The worst part is the high degree of censorship. Everyone is so sensitive now that it's impossible to speak openly

You are experiencing alienation. Your work is driven by motivations that you can't relate to. You are being pulled around by decisions you don't agree with and you have meetings for reasons you can't even conceive of.

Naturally, it is easier to perform some work if you understand and agree with its intent and the way it's executed, or if it's indeed your own choice what to do and how to go about it. You will never fully experience this as a wage worker taking commands from a manager taking commands from a boss taking commands from another boss taking commands from a board of owners motivated by their own profit, but perhaps work will seem more meaningful in a smaller company where you have more influence on decision making.

Depending on culture you may also be able to take a bit more charge. Demand to know a clear agenda in advance of meetings, decline meetings that don't have an agenda that's relevant to your work and insist that the agenda is followed during meetings. Impart on your manager that your time is being wasted when it is.

Same. It makes me feel nihilistic and I stopped giving much of a shit about the work I do. It's just a paycheck, nothing else. I work 20 hours a week and more than half of that is meetings and I am not even in management.

To combat this feeling seeping into the other parts of my life, I have started to do some physical work, like cultivating gourmet mushrooms in my backyard. I asked for less hours some years ago, which means less income, but I am happier and I get to do physical work with my hands.

I wish i was always in front of customers. I wouldn’t have had the product or any managers acting as proxies and agreeing on things that don’t make any sense and don’t bring any value to them.

Most people think that customers have no idea, while in most cases if you put the right knowledgable people in front of them they would build amazing features together. I have seen it in an AI startup! Whenever us devs worked with the customers we built amazing data science products. Whenever it was managers, it was all these random non sensical requests and demands.

I went to a smaller company (<100 people) thinking that there would be less of this type of inefficiency. Then they hire a Scrum master and now it takes longer to gather specs, write documents, create tickets with points, bikeshed and divy up work (ignoring the 3-5 hours of associated weekly meetings) than actually completing the task. Even simple changes are now difficult.

The worst part is that perception and behaviors change, since the requesting party thinks "this should be a 2 hour change" and it takes 2+ weeks to due to process-- the fastest way to inhibit changes are making them riskier due to more effort/buy in from disparate parties, so you get more stagnation. Yea, rigid frameworks will help flush out loafers, but couldn't the same be done with a software type solution or even competent management?

I think it really depends on the company. Some people in this thread suggest moving to a smaller company or a startup but in my experience this doesn't matter. It's all about the culture of your work environment. Sometimes this is even different per department.

I was in a similar position like you a couple of times. Some things I did:

* If less income isn't a problem ask to work less. Why not work 32 hours instead of 40+?

* Find another company. And know that an interview works both ways: the company wants to know you but you can also ask a lot about the company's culture.

* Find a job doing something different but is related to what your experience is.

That's why I never got a data science job. They all seem too close to the business (much closer than typical web app development), and that's a bad thing in my book.

My solution is to try to move "down the stack" and retrain to work with C++ and math-heavy jobs (computer vision, simulation etc.). From what I'm hearing, developers in those area have much less contact with the business side of company.

> We end working 40+ hours/week but the job could be easily done in 30 or less, that is another thing that kills me inside.

75% efficiency kills you inside? Most companies would kill for 75% efficiency. The hyperbolic horror stories are usually 40-hour weeks for 5 hours of work.

You're not wrong. While nobody should have to do it, some of us just aren't cut out for it. A lot of people can take the bullshit, some of us can't.

I had a boss one time that wanted me to work 50 hours a week. "There's no such thing as a 40 hour a week job anymore" he said. I could get all of my work done in under 20 usually, so doing 40 was bad enough, you want me to put in more time here just so you can prove who's in charge? I didn't work for him very long. There were guys in there that worked for him for years and years, they all looked like husks of men.

If you're not cut out for it don't do it. There are jobs out there that aren't like that, but they're not around every corner. Go try to find one, and don't live a life you don't want because you think you have to.

You are tired because you spend energy projecting a better way for things to be, not bad in itself, but then you physically tense your body to try to make the projection closer to true. It's unclear why people do this but life gets a lot easier if you learn to notice and stop.

Left IT, make couch change wage selling car parts now. Forced to get out of the house but also zero traffic, its a 2 minute walk. First job in 10+ years I didn't hate after 2 weeks.

I am at a FAANG and feel exactly the same: constant meetings (20+ hours a week), insane bike shedding, code reviews cycles that take a huge amount of time, …

I don’t know what my next move will be, but I likely won’t last too long here.

I dream of running my own saas where I completely run the show by myself (support, development, marketing) and make decent middle class income from it but I don’t think I’m good enough.

I think you're failing to think outside the box.

Have you considered hitting the ground running, leveraging synergies and lateral blockchain avenues along the way?

In a proactive manner, preferably, for a full paradigm shift.

Carbon nanotubes.

Yes. My answer was to walk away from the tech industry and culture and do part time IT work for my buddy's law firm whilst writing code in my spare time for fun and recovering from my stress-induced triple heart bypass.

I make about as much as a Starbucks assistant manager, though, so your mileage may vary. :-D

You are free to move jobs and find a company that values you, not just what money you can make for them. Ive been RemoteOnly for 5yrs, i escaped to a company who is still corperate but pays less and gives you back more. i can easily alt-tab during meetings and i know alot of others do to. Ive got a fishing line off my back deck, i live in a rural/coastal area. i literly never ever have to make small chat. I dont goto really any company functions except christmas parties. i have great, real, honest conversations with all my collegauges, espeically about work-life balance. My previous jobs where in DoD/LawTech; DoD was the was easy, plentyiful money, with the tradeoff being a bureaucratic nightmare and the ownership of your soul.

I agree to some extent with what you are saying but I challenge you to think the opposite way: the way your company works is the most effective way they can work.

Without all of them being YOU and acting like YOU think they should act, how else can they get anything done?

Have you considered that everyone else there thinks the same, except about YOU?

All these meetings and unnecessary occurrences are in fact necessary to get the bare minimum in agreement between all these different people who think differently and are trying to get different things done.

How else would it be done?

Imagine, that your work can be done in 10 hours, but you must sit 40 hours in the office and look busy. Well that’s hard. Pandemic opened me a ton of different opportunities, home office was forbidden for developers before. I hope, that I don’t need to go to the office for more than 2 days a week for a while. I also don’t think I need another job, there is no perfect one. Or if if it is I will not make through the 3 days of interviews.

You need to change teams to a project that interests you or find another job working on something that actually excites you imo

Learn how to work to live, instead of live to work. Automate as much as possible and use the free time in your own projects.

If I worked in a company that was as described, I'd be sick of it, too. But that description is a caricature of the worst of companies. So if it is accurate, you can find a better place to be and you should. Not all companies are like that.

Even so, all companies have their own flaws. You have to be able to communicate those flaws to leadership and feel comfortable with that process. Sometimes when you do so, change will occur, sometimes it will not. Sometimes you are told why not, sometimes it just seems to get dropped. This isn't ideal but it is the corporate world.

The key is to figure out what flaws you can live with. To find some joy in the good side of the work. Or at the very least, just to accept that this is the price you pay to get the paycheck. If you do not feel that the paycheck makes it worth the trouble, you are in the wrong job.

* Does anyone else feels like that? Yes. 2 multinationals. From bad to (much) worse. Highly pathological orgs in the Westrum scale. I was annoyed by it all in the first one but it hit the bottom with the current one. I hate every second I spend there now.

* What do you do to overcome this feeling? I'm aggressively interviewing aiming to smaller companies. Hope I'll get out and into a healthier env before I get sick.

PS: Most of these companies are a dead empty shell already. It's just that due to inertia it will take years or decades for them to actually die, if we assume they operate in a mildly healthy market -and that's a big IF. There's loads of them out there. Actually the majority is like that. Bands that made a few good albums and are capitalising on past glory.

Yes. I have no solution for you, but all I can say is that I feel you. My coping mechanism was to work freelance; less hours and more "fun" projects, but freelance work also comes with its own flavor of bs, so I think it's just a flaw with the human condition at this point.

I started working at startups in the early 00's right out of school, and arrived at roughly the same conclusion you did.

I switched to working in higher ed at a research institution (making much less, of course). I won't pretend that I'm out there saving lives or anything, and I won't pretend that there's not still a massive amount of BS and red tape, but at the end of the day I do go home and think I might be contributing something actually useful to the researchers and educators who are using my software.

It's important to not define yourself by your work, but it's also important to feel like your work has some meaning. I just couldn't find that at startups (even one I had high hopes for, in the energy sector working on smart grid tech).

Work for a small company: 5 to 30 people.

It seems you like your work, but not your working environment. Big companies always have this kind bullshit. Small companies however, care about the work and results. You can really make a noticeable difference when you represent 10% of a company.

Most days feel like a constant struggle between having to do my work and people getting in the way.

After 2 years I still don't know what's the functionality of my PO, basically he just pass the task from the top to poorly written tickets that constantly miss information or does not take into account or business logic, this causes a back and forth between me redefining the tickets and having to explain to him, causing him to re-explain those changes up with constant delays and blockers.

My manager is part of another team and barely interacts with my work or me in any meaningful way, we have bi-weekly 1 on 1 that are constantly cancelled for lack of topics.

I overcame this feeling by looking at it as more of an "engineering problem". The "bs" happens naturally when there are a lot of people.. You can act actively to mitigate this.. say that you think something is useless, propose something better.. and we have many biases, it is difficult to understand the value of something and quickly label it as "bs".

I understand that you feel frustrated; your role does not match your expectations. So maybe you should find out the meaning and the purpose of your role. In the end, you are paid for adding value in the corporate environment; your contribution can happen in many ways, e.g. by hosting more effective meetings or by improving decision frequency and speed etc. Adding value in a corporation is not always about technical achievements, but also about improving the team and the game (as a social process). If this is not your cup of tea, you might be better served by a technical role in some specialized consulting company.

Smaller companies have less of this corporate bs. In my last company I could request them to take my part first in meetings so I can leave first.

I’ve been quite vocal to show my happiness and ask them to explain if that meeting ads value anywhere.

> I'm working as a data analyst/scientist for two years and I'm already tired.

One of the things that I dislike in data science specifically is the initial stages where you have to prove that there's a use case, or (in some companies) to convince people that they need your work in some way. It's very frustrating and demotivating and I just don't care enough.

Once you get to the building stage (if that's even part of your job), then it's much more satisfying. That's one of the reasons why I want to switch to software development at some point.

You work for money, labor in exchange for cash. There is no perfect company and you have to take in the good with the bad. Working with people you get along with goes a long way.

It is an essential requirement of working with other humans that you put up with some of their bullshit. Getting to do work you enjoy and getting paid good money for it is amazing. Every company is there to turn a profit, that will never change. Personally having things to look forward to outside of work and trying to see bullshit from the perspective of the bullshitters helps a lot.

Why not find the person who makes those "arbitrary and weird decisions to make the boss and customers happy"? (i) tell them that the decisions look arbitrary and weird from where you are standing, (ii) ask them why they make them.

At worst, you will discover that they are an *hole (which you probably thought already), and at best they'll listen, and talk with you and you'll make a small step on fixing your corner of the world.

Your job isn't there to provide you with employment, it's there to meet the business needs and that is your role. If you are deemed to not be a functional part of the apparatus then you will quickly be terminated. The corporate structure is there is facilitate this and that means doing the corporate asks. Daft as they might seem. After all, you are just a cog in the machine.

The key reason behind it is that you don’t care about the company.

It means that either you’re not high enough in hierarchy to feel the ownership, to get noticeable stocks etc.

You’re just being used as an expensive cog in the wheel.

Or/and you don’t care about the company mission.

Why are you still there I wonder?

In my experience as soon as I achieve my own goals with an employer - I leave the next day.

My company only has roughly 20min per day of meetings per employee. We also are looking for data science. Fully remote.

Maybe you just got unlucky with your company. My startup CEO allows everyone to work remotely and we even got LTE USB sticks so that we can bring our laptop and work from nature. I'm currently surrounded by goats. The only mandatory event is an all-hands meeting once per week.

You always have a choice to reframe things. Look at it as an opportunity to learn something new every day. Learn to improve your communication skills. Learn to lead the meetings. There are endless opportunities if you look at the flip side of your situation.

Join the 4-day work week campaign.

There's some interesting research around this. I've summed some of it up in a blog post: https://niklasblog.com/?p=25924

In my experience, the only way to avoid this is to work at a very small company, one with no more than ten people. This usually means a consultancy or a niche product (like a WordPress plugin, for example.)

Sounds like you want to be in a startup where you'll work 60+ hours! I'd honestly like a start-up break and am jealous of your 'boring' job.

If your boss making suboptimal decisions and your peers being not-so-smart are the worst things about your job, then you have an amazing job.

You should be looking for another job. The market is hot for data scientists, you can look around and find something meaningful.

The easiest, bullshittiest jobs I've had are the ones that burned me out the most.

Go make something for yourself. Or do some consulting work.

Why are you going to useless meetings?

Same here.

I've thought about it a lot, I feel like everything the industry touches magically turns to shit.

Maybe I'm being a little negative, I know. But I think about things I really like, things I do for free in my spare time and when I put (imaginatively) on top of that a business layer, a management layer, a stakeholder layer, etc. I can see it being destroyed in front of my eyes (I'm not talking about computer stuff, but cooking, sports, writing...).

It's capitalism my friends. Alternatives?

Definitely yes. Thanks to WFH. It still exists, but with WFH bs is considerably less.

One of reasons why I'm freelancer. I don't have to bother with corpo bs.

Seek financial independence and don’t give away the best hours of your life.

It keeps upper management busy and out of your hair micromanaging you.

If 30 of your 40 hours are productive, you are winning.

Find another job in a company that fits you culturally.

there is a small minority of self-employed people who would agree with you, but they are too few to be heard.

Sounds like you need a new job mate!