What is HTML All The Things?
HTML All The Things is a web development podcast and discord community which was started by Matt and Mike, developers based in Ontario, Canada.
The podcast speaks to web development topics as well as running a small business, self-employment and time management. You can join them for both their successes and their struggles as they try to manage expanding their Web Development business without stretching themselves too thin.
What's This One About?
Modern office work is a dystopian nightmare, but did you know a WWII sabotage manual describes it perfectly? In this episode, Matt and Mike explore the eerie similarities between workplace inefficiency and deliberate sabotage, diving into burnout, corporate jargon, and the illusion of productivity. From pointless meetings to overcomplicated approval processes, we break down the hidden forces making work feel meaningless. Inspired by the Burnout - When does work start feeling pointless? documentary, we also discuss the origins of corporate buzzwords, ineffective management, and the promises of career success that no longer hold true. If you've ever felt drained by work, this one's for you!
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Show Notes
Introduction
- Back in WWII a manual was written by the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA) for citizens and resistance fighters of Nazi-occupied territory. This manual was titled the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” and it offered instructions on how to grind the German war machine to a halt by sabotaging their workplaces.
- It’s strange then that many of the points brought up in this manual describe perfectly what the average day at the office entails
- “Interrupt work as often as possible”
- Do you find it difficult to focus at the office?
- “Arrange meetings when there is more important work to be done”
- Endless meetings anyone?
- “Multiply paperwork”
- How many forms do you have to fill out that nobody will read?
- How much bureaucracy?
- “All decisions should be taken to a committee”
- Despite the endless meetings, real decisions need to be made by a bigger meeting down the road
- “Hold ‘speeches’, bring up irrelevant issues”
- Let’s do a town hall to bring up people’s spirits
- “3 people have to approve anything when one would be enough”
- Remember when you had one boss, and now you have many?
- “Interrupt work as often as possible”
- A few nights ago, I decided that I wanted to watch a documentary, so I typed that into the YouTube search and two results came up on top
- “How to Be a Billionaire” (documentary link)
- An uplifting look at a handful of billionaires, how they made their fortunes, their differences, and then commonalities
- It ultimately boiled down to people that have a dream and execute it no matter what people around them say. Failure is an option, but is only temporary - just keep going.
- “Burnout - When does work start feeling pointless?” (documentary link) via DW Documentary
- A less uplifting look at the workplaces many of us experience, but an interesting deep dive into what makes people and corporations tick
- This documentary is where many of the facts and information in this episodes come from, including the information about correlation between the sabotage manual and modern offices
- “How to Be a Billionaire” (documentary link)
Office Work Is Dystopian
- 100 years ago, modern office work was portrayed only in imagined dystopian futures
- Back in 1930 an economist named John Keynes predicted that we would be working a 15 hour work week by 2030 - largely our jobs could be done in less than 8 hours a day, but instead we created millions of administrative jobs.
- Back in Keynes time ~25% of jobs were administrative, now we’re looking at ~75% today)
- We created: supervisory jobs, managerial jobs, clerical jobs
- You can kind of think of the office like a big play, where nobody is able to be honest - the employee can’t be honest about their manager fi they think they’re an idiot, the manager can’t treat the director poorly if they don’t like them
- I’m going to throw some stats at you:
- 20% of workers worldwide are engaged (engaged as in engaged in their work)
- 61% are not engaged
- 19% are so unhappy that they’re working against their employer
The Causes of Burnout
The documentary broke down the areas that they investigated into 6 topics:
- The CEO
- Jargon
- The Human Machine
- The Manager
- Education
- Empty Promises
The CEO
- The star of the show
- Give the main monologue of the company
- Speeches are typically rooted in fiction and are not even close to what will actually happen
- Salaries keep increasing, but they aren’t getting any better
- Since 1978 CEO salaries grew 1322% | Worker’s grew 18%
- Under Elop’s leadership Nokia lost 4.9 billion euro, he had an exit bonus of 19 million euro
- Monetary failures are measured, but what isn’t measured is the human cost of these failures
- Disruptive company reorganizations and unhappiness among employees goes largely unspoken
Jargon
- Back in the late 1980s Pacific Bell became interested in a new program for their employees
- They spent about 30 million dollars on a consciousness-raising program based in part on the teachings of a Russian mystic/philosopher who roamed the Middle East and Asia searching for the meaning of life
- The program was officially called “Leadership Development”
- Nicknamed “Krone” after Carmel Krone, the consultant that developed much of the training material
- It was designed to broaden the perception and increase sensory input of the employees
- The language used in this program has become the backbone of a lot of corporate jargon today including terms like: touch base, close the loop, thought leader, going forward, low hanging fruit
- People need to have substance to their work, even if they’re doing empty tasks, so this is a way to cover up the emptiness of tasks
The Human Machine
- Just as machines are made to be more efficient over time, corporations look at people as machines - looking at people like cogs in a machine, each cog can be made more efficient
- By the 1970s a corporation was no longer treated as a corporation with people in it, it’s a way to maximize shareholder value
- Corps would start using phrases like “How much human capital have we got” instead of addressing the “human capital” as people
The Manager
- Many managers are promoted into their position because they’ve been around the company for a while, or have been a great individual contributor
- This is why so many managers are not good at managing their teams
- Companies are taking people out of jobs they’re good at, raising their pay, and then moving them into jobs that they aren’t necessarily good at
- Many managers don’t even look at their team as people, as good individual contributors, it’s likely that they’re totally focussed on the work and not the managing angle
Education
- Our education system is designed to destroy the natural curiosity we had as children
- Many structures of primary education are designed to prepare people for factory labour (bells ringing, going room to room)
- Since many people aren’t doing manufacturing jobs anymore, they’re preparing us for a life that doesn’t make much sense
- Teaching us to not ask questions about things that intelligent people would ask (ie why write this report if nobody is going to read it)
- Play along if someone is an authority or acting as if they have authority
Empty Promises
- Do well at school, go to post-secondary, get a job, get a house, and live a prosperous life
- Millennials are 40% poorer than their parents or grandparents at the same page
- CEOs that do things that are supposed to benefit the company but don’t
- 60% of reorganization programs improve nothing
- These programs impress analysts which report on it and cause the stock to go up for shareholders
- Being given a massive workload with not enough resources to handle it
- Being told exactly how to do a task and not being able to stray from that (no autonomy, no control)
- Little to no reward
- Do you get any social recognition for a job well done? Do you feel appreciated?
- Is your salary as high as you want/need it to be?
- “Robots are going to take your jobs away”
- Oh this is so horrible because then people won’t know what to do with themselves!
- Trying to achieve societal norms (ie buying a house) which requires a lot of money - so therefore a lot of work. If you don’t work hard and for very long hours then you won’t be able to afford these societal norms… then what!?! But also consider that if you’re working all the time that you won’t be able to use what you’ve bought
What is Burnout?
- Burnout and burnout symptoms are very common
- Many people describe it as a wave of exhaustion at a level they’ve never experienced before
- It can happen to you because of one or several different issues that arise at work or in your personal life, many of which we’ve already described
- Blind questions for Mike
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