[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.

[Aurornis]

> but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be there any more than you did. They were forced to do corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity of it all.

So they tried to come up with something entertaining that they could claim was passably work-related. They were trying to do their best by you within the constraints of what was mandated by their job.

This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when they were trying to bond and do something nice for the team within the constraints of their job.

You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a little league coach and who thought leading his team was the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us a psychology test of his own creation and trying to lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and weaknesses were based on all the different self-help books he read.

[yojo]

Totally valid that my boss probably didn’t want to be there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google where “offsite” meant “go spend company money to do something fun.”

Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?

[nvader]

Don't worry, your use of its not X, it's Y did not trigger the LLM pattern match for me. I think the main reason is that your two clauses are of very disparate lengths. LLMs use its X not Y as a rhetorical device that relies on brevity and punchiness, while your longer quote has the authentic ring of clumsy, human phrasing.

[coldtea]

>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.

That just means they valued their actual sentiments more than keeping appearances. Doesn't sound weird: it sounds humane.

>Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?

To point at the elephant in the room, as opposed to just go on with the program and have another forced fun session.

I mean, your questions amount to "why couldn't she just be a good cog and pretend like the rest of us?"

It's like being surprised a coworker is a human on the inside.

[nuancebydefault]

To add some meta to your edit: I would swear you are not an LLM... or maybe an LLM trained on a lot of comments on HN.

[watwut]

You have seen a human side of that manager. She acted like a human.

[eru]

> 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.

LLMs didn't come up with their quirks in a vacuum. Humans always influenced each other in their language use.

It used to be over sound waves mostly but they don't travel far, then came the printing press, later radio and TV. LLMs are just another language blender.

[marssaxman]

> I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe

...they learned it by watching us?