[yojo]

My former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.

Did she just not get it? Or did she get it, and it was some weird flex making us watch it with her? I still don’t know.

[Aurornis]

Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.

Even your CEO has a board to deal with.

I always think it's strange when people draw a mental dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on the other side are living in totally different experiences of the world.

[ekropotin]

I actually think managers struggle much more than ICs, because they have to deal with quirks of their multiple reports + their boss’s.

[yojo]

I get that we’re all part of the same system, but I consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the entirety of that system. It’s not just “my boss is dumb,” it’s “this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we’d all be happier working outside with our muscles.”

And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.

[terminalshort]

It seems to me that line managers straddle the line somewhat and above that is where it is a really different world. I have started a company and now back to being an IC so been on both sides of it. It's not totally different, but it is a lot.

[tonyedgecombe]

Middle management rarely has enough power to make any changes. They have to dish out whatever bullshit is handed down to them from above.

[johnvanommen]

> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.

Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.

I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.

Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.

[kcplate]

> Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency.

I always thought Lumberg gets a somewhat un-derserved bad rap in that flick. He is characterized as the villain and of course is—from Peter’s perspective which is where the story is told. But within that universe and at a 10,000 foot POV was he? He seems to be the only one within the corporation that is actually functional, capable, motivated and excelling in his role. No doubt he is a dick, but that’s just part of his role and he’s good at it. He’s a cog, knows he’s a cog, but realizes the machine still needs to run. He recognizes that Peter has hit that competence/incompetence point. He also realizes the Bob’s are incompetent, but powerful. He really is the only one that seems to realize everything that is going on.

[tsunamifury]

Did you not realize we’ve built a system where everyone is both oppressor and oppressed. Did you not think she too had an idiot boss?

[helterskelter]

Shit rolls downhill...and most people just try to keep an eye on where the next turd comes from without bothering to watch where it goes after it's past them.

[booleandilemma]

Not enough people realize this, unfortunately. If they did our system would be flatter than it currently is. You wouldn't have "peaks", so to speak.

[driverdan]

I watched Office Space with a bunch of coworkers at a previous job. It's a funny movie that most people in startups view as a parody of big company office life. Our company didn't function like the movie.

[themadturk]

You sound as though you worked for one of my managers, though he just gave everyone a copy of the DVD for Christmas one year. The thing is, he definitely got it, knew he was part of the system, and did his best to take care of the people working for him.

[muyuu]

I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.

[astura]

Office Space was released in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. So, of course office jobs (particularly software jobs) would decrease when that bubble popped.

But it's not as a result of that movie.

[ivanhoe]

Perhaps she just had a good sense of humor? It's a great movie after all..