To think most office jobs exist to waste time and make people feel important?

[SharpGreyOwl]

So much of office life seems like shuffling paper, booking pointless meetings and creating reports no one reads. AIBU to think half of these roles don’t need to exist?

Have lots of meetings where they draw up plans to give work to others, have more meetings while eat all the nice food. Then come down hard on everyone else for not doing enough.

I'll assume the OP didn't get any of the jobs they applied for then.

We don’t have any pieces of paper int his office and haven’t for some time 🤷🏻‍♀️

I worked in an office meeting people face to face sorting their council tax and housing benefits, amongst other things- there never wasn’t a queue. I don’t the people queuing thought they were wasting their time talking to me - some may have if they didn’t get the answer they wanted

Same, “office job” but very little in the way of paper for me…in fact on a whole our aim is to be paperless.

It’s also worth noting that I work in the pharmaceutical industry which has A LOT of red tape! These office jobs are actually scientists, engineers and quality control/assurance specialists etc doing very necessary jobs. I find the term “office job” to be a bit insulting! Do people want their medications made to standard or not?

@SharpGreyOwl have you seen the film Office Space?
Absolute CLASSIC !
A bit dated in places as it's late 90s but is hilarious.

I think a lot of places end up inefficient because they don't evolve. I work somewhere where our legacy IT systems are 20 or 30 years old and can't talk to each other, there are people who've been in role the entire time, and they're still dependent on literal paper processes. It takes hours a week to gather the information from all these systems to make sure essential decisions are correct.

The problem is, moving from these old system to quick shiny systems require 30 people, rather than the 5 currently working in the department so its just been put off for decades. Now they're all heading to retirement in the next 5 years the company have realised they need to do something and suddenly a load of new people (me included) have been hired to fix things and move us to the 21st century.

My older colleagues haven't been lazy this entire time, they've actually worked long hours and been pretty clever about solving issues in the face of the IT problems, but they've been hampered by technology. When the government talks about underinvestment causing low productivity, it is offices exactly like this one they mean.

Let's all get our feet up then. Fuck taxes, fuck schools, fuck public transport, fuck hospitals (time wasting wankers), fuck the bars and the restaurants and shops in central London. Let's close everything? Where do you live OP? It somewhere super grim and boring?

I'm in the private sector. I'm a software engineer. In my experience, middle managers can be a bit pointless. The number of times a middle manager has gone off on holiday and things have run a bit more smoothly is quite funny. It must be good money, though, otherwise said middle managers would have buggered off by now.

Lots of roadmap meetings that go nowhere, lots of silly goal-oriented one to ones that end up being therapy sessions. None of it is helpful in the long term, but it keeps people in jobs and thus keeps the unemployment figures down.

Pointless job or not, it pays the bills.