cross-posted from: https://linux.community/post/1144192

you might be an introvert, passionate about your job, or simply old enough to disregard friendships at work because you already have enough friends and a family.

The coworkers I like the most are the ones that come to work, don’t like drama, do their job and go home. That’s what I try to do.

However, there are always some established cliques who know how to play the unit / supervisor and get away doing much less, even feeling entitled to order you around, even though they are not your supervisor.

To people who experience this. How do you tolerate it? Even after changing jobs, this can happen at your new workplace, maybe it happens in every workplace?

36 points

I used to be more sensitive to feeling like other people were getting more recognition for less work.

Over time though I’ve grown to realize that usually they are just doing something that I don’t fully understand yet, and I’ve gotten far greater rewards from trying to learn from them.

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11 points

That’s a very well adjusted point of view.

Don’t be like me, that bottles up resentment that comes out in unexpected ways, which then leads to you being the first one laid off because you’re the least enjoyable to work with.

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35 points

In as much as it pertains to me, I don’t tolerate it. Otherwise, if people want to bullshit their way through their career, I don’t really care. This happens in every company that has more than one employee (almost).

If someone else starts ordering me around when they don’t have the authority to do so, assuming it would change my course of action, I’ll tell them politely that I might be able to get to that when I have time. If they escalate it, I tell them to talk to my boss about rearranging my priorities. And if they do that and succeed, that’s fine. Once you establish that you don’t report to them, I’ve found they typically leave me alone. If not, I talk to my boss about it in private.

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27 points

I like to encourage a culture of laziness at my work.

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15 points

If the whole world agreed to do 20% less work I think we’d all be fine and slightly more relaxed. Progress is overrated.

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7 points

Especially in business, it’s like, who are we competing against - hostile aliens?? Nah, it’s just us humans, trying to get by. We could be tossing eachother softballs, everyone winning, but instead there’s this self-fulfilling fear of an existential threat from “rivals.”

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2 points

Omg you knocked it out of the park with this one. Everything is such a race to the bottom in this system.

It’s always about competitive undercutting, and what’s the most ruthless cold-blooded calculations one can get away with, and this Type A disease of being obsessed with zero-sum conflict to reveal who’s the absolute best of everything.


“Why can’t we just chill and it’ll get there when it gets there?”

“What?! Look at (for example) China! Do you see them chilling? No! They normalized 12 hour shift burnout before us, this will increase their production 3%, and then undercut us by 12% and steal all our business and we’re screwed! So we need to squeeze our people harder to beat them!”

“…And then they’ll squeeze their people harder…so…?”

“…”

“…”

“This might be a good time to inform you we expect you to train the new overseas team before we’ll surprise ambush-fire your entire department.”


…Repeat the above but for undocumented immigrant labor…then maybe child labor…then probably right back around to slavery again…

“Oh no we all agreed this would be so bad for humanity, but gee, the competition did it and we wanna stay competitive so…”

Man seriously why can’t we all just be doing our own thing lol…

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3 points

So true. “Progress” seems to be defined as an arbitrary jagged line that can never ever seem to be high enough. What’s the point then? 🤔

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6 points

Yes. “numbers go up” is a sickness.

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24 points

My work stands on it’s own two legs. Their work doesn’t affect my paycheck. If their laziness impacts me, I will not stay silent about it at all. Other than that, I’m punching my clock and focusing on what I need to.

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23 points

It depends on what you define as lazy and popular.

I’ve had staff that were visibly not working harder than other staff, but their work was of significantly higher quality than others. Since the “lazy” worker produced more and could be counted on to do the work with less supervision, I gave them more flexibility in the office. I was playing favorites, but the favorite was more valuable as an employee.

And I’ve had other staff that would be considered more popular, but that was in part because they would help others at work doing coordination and mentoring tasks. I would also offload some of my managerial tasks to them if I was overwhelmed even though they didn’t have the title. If I offload the management of a task to someone else, I expect people to treat them with the same respect they treat me. I’ve seen that expectation not get followed and I’ve had to step in to remind staff that they need to coordinate with others, not just me.

I find that a lot of people who “do their job and go home” don’t end up doing any of the coordination or communication required for their job, even though their job is technical design. They end up being worse than they think at their job because it is so hard to work with them and won’t chime in on cases where there is shared responsibility.

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