- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/7597775
Alienation of labour, what’s that?
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I’d love to have a job where I get paid to work with excel the whole day. Not kidding.
It’s pretty dope, especially when you get to work from home. I’m usually in my pajamas snuggled under a blanket. Much comfier than dress pants in a cubicle.
WFH is my goal, already doing the excel, company I’m in is really relaxed, so can’t complain, but WFH would be nice
I never got why people love working from home so much. Home has so many distractions like my PC, my phone, my fridge, etc.
It also helps to just physically seperate my work from my free time. My home is my fortress where no work shall ever be done, a place for resting and wanking.
Also, work was like 90% of my social interaction and the pandemic really did a number on me.
In a cruel twist of fate, I now work almost exclusively from home, a dream for others, a dread for me.
I waste just as much time on my phone at work that I do at home, but at home I’m able to freely seek out a distraction when I need a break, and devote my attention to it until I’ve got some motivation again, then get back to work. In the office I have to try taking a break covertly when I need one, which doesn’t lower my stress very much, and leads to me taking even longer breaks trying to regain my motivation.
As for separating work and free time, I have no issue stepping away at the end of my shift; I only work for money - I don’t give a shit about the company itself - so, as soon as I’m no longer counting the time toward my paycheck, any and all motivation to continue working immediately evaporates.
A lot of people seem to really need social interaction, which definitely seems to be the biggest reason they might not enjoy long-term work from home. I seem to be the exception to that. During the height of the pandemic even my most extroverted friends eventually started craving social interactions, but I would stock up at Costco and go literal months without ever once leaving my house, and I loved it.
Have you tried walking to and from work every day? It can help you pretend they are different places.
You wake up and do your morning routine, then you walk around the block and start your working day when you reach your home office. Then at the end of the day walk around the block and home to mark the end of your work day.
It’s not even the dress pants in cubicle. For 8 years I was working in factories on the production floor. This included heavy industry, night shifts, dust, noise, blinding lights, near freezing temperatures and a real threat of loosing an appendage. Now I’m working from home, sterling at an Excell sheet in my pajamas, under a blanket.
I feel incredibly blessed to have a job that allows me to do my work on my own time, and to utilize company resources to educate myself while on the clock. I honestly get excited to go to work nowadays, and it’s great. :)
You have drawn a good lot it seems. Tho no matter how pleasant the job, you still create more value for your boss than you get paid back by them… (value extraction for profit lessss goooo)
Oh believe me, I’m well aware. Having a healthy work environment doesn’t change the fact that it gets harder and harder every year to pay rent.
That’s why it makes me livid when landbastards talk about “passive income”… it’s just extorting money from working ppl (who actually create value) for the “privilege” of having one’s basic needs met
did you start planning your communist revolution yet?
It’s pretty plain for me to see it. I still like my job as well, but I know my company charges clients 3x my hourly wage for an hour of my time.
If you and your co-workers cut out the middle man…
We get sued for breaching the non-compete clause in our contract?
Is there is job that isn’t value extraction for profit?
That is the entire point of hiring someone is to make more profit.
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Workers cooperatives typically focus on more than pure profit since the values of the workers and owner are aligned.
These can be broad and intangible goals compared to seeing the money numbers go up and down, like instead of getting laid off in economic hardship, the worker/owners receive a pay cut. Or you might hire more people than there’s work so that everyone can leave a bit earlier.
True, although this can be alliviated by working in a worker-owned cooperative business
not rly, market machinations force co-ops to behave like for-profit capitalist companies regardless. The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that it has a boss. Even if you have great conditions as a worker-owner, your privilege is just built on the backs of non-owner (aka. 2nd class) workers and outsourcing (see Mondragon in Spain for example)
Don’t get me wrong though: co-ops are still virtually always better than “standard” corporations imo. What I mean to say is that the systemic problem of capitalism is not solvable by just creating companies “of a new type”
You’re forgetting the fact that your work has zero value in a vacuum though. If you enjoy your employment and are well remunerated for it, then a cut for the enabler isn’t actually unreasonable. Having said that, the cut taken is usually way too high, but that’s another discussion…
The employers’ claim extend beyond a cut. They solely appropriate 100% of the whole positive and negative product of the firm while employees as employees have 0% claim on the whole product
Well that’s not really true… It’s very common for employees to be granted shares in some form or another, and of course your salary comes from some proportion of the firm’s profits. Don’t get me wrong, if I could just work on open source stuff all the time and have money magically appear in my account I’d be chuffed, but in the absence of a market, one arises - some people don’t want the hassle of figuring out what people actually want and are happy to lend their arms to the oars in exchange for someone else to figure out where to go, and of course some people feel like they have a good vision as to what will be productive but don’t have the ability to create the whole edifice themselves.
Regulation is, of course, important - in a democracy, the theory is that everyone has a right to vote for a government who will in turn protect their interests in what can otherwise become a very leveraged position for the employer - but the notion that every CEO is inherently a leech on society simply by virtue of being an employer seems a little too lacking in nuance for me to get onboard here.
In the context of the real world, I think it’s unquestionably the case that director-level positions are over-rewarded and insufficiently taxed and regulated, but I see that more as a failure of implementation; I’m not sure how people could ever cooperate on the diversity of projects that currently exist if the employer/employee relationship we’re forbidden. A lot of people are simply unable or unwilling to play the role of general; not everyone falls into that category of course, and it would be an interesting world if one could just join a collective effort and from the get-go be as highly rewarded and as listened to as the project’s progenitors, but it can often take a long time to build up context…
Anyway what I’m saying here is that dictating a global framework for the structure of collective effort is genuinely really hard, and that’s before you even get into the issues of what mandate is required for a body to be able to stipulate such a framework to begin with
The whole product is the legal rights to the produced outputs and the liabilities for the used-up inputs not value. The employer legally owns the outputs and is legally liable for the used-up inputs.
FOSS can use quadratic funding. Not arguing for complete market abolition.
The workers are de facto responsible for production. By the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match, the workers should jointly receive the whole product of the firm. The workers can delegate in a coop
The thing is: just owning the means for someone elses work is not a service you provide to others (ie. employment). That whole position (the private ownership of the means of others work) is redundant and leeches off of society
The latter problem could be solved by banning having non-member workers at the legal level and requiring giving workers voting rights in the firm they work in.
Worker coops don’t behave exactly like for-profit companies. Anti-capitalism is more than just worker democracy. For example, another aspect is common ownership of land and natural resources with fees for use. This would ensure that worker coops factor in environmental costs
Doing excel for 9 hours straight is far better than breathing toxic gases inside a damp,badly lit coal mines tho. Juste saying…
Yes of course and eating trash is better than eating shit
What I mean is that work conditions have vastly improved compared to the last century (thanks to unions). It may be miserable yes but it’s a far cry from the horrible work that our ancestors were forced to endure starting from a young age.
I get what you mean. Ofc class struggle has brought us many concessions, technology progresses over time and the industrialized countries add more and more abstraction layers to manual work.
My point would be that we do have to view the working conditions relative to what’s possible at the given time. Given the resources humanity has today, fully automated luxury (queer) space communism is within realistic reach!
It’s a similar answer as to world hunger: it’s a systematic distribution - not resource - problem. That being artificially created scarcity thanks to a profit and greed driven economic base (capitalism) and inequitable/inefficient allocation of resources (markets)
I can only agree
Is it tho?
Depends on the trash. Depends on the shit.
Doing excel for 9 hours straight is far better than breathing toxic gases inside a damp,badly lit coal mines tho. Juste saying…
Give it time. Those work conditions are getting gradually worse all over again as the internal contradictions intensify.
I suppose that is the 3 largest domino.
It would be nice to have that kind of job security
Well it’s either that or you design something like a “Jump To Conclusions” mat
Why not automate stuff? Do enough janky shit with excel functions and macros so you get everything you need from copying data into a worksheet.
Then you’re only getting more work, not more free time, for the same wage
See that’s where a lot of people go wrong
Automate what you can but don’t tell anyone and don’t turn it in any faster
Make your deadlines and be one with the chill
Then you have to play the look busy game if you’re in an office
Some people excel at that.
With the new free time you’ll be getting you’ll have plenty of time to practice
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Then you’re doing it wrong. If you’re good at automation you can get promoted readily.
But hey if you hate Excel that much why not find another type of work. Be a carpenter. Be a tour guide. No one is forcing you to work an Excel-only office job.
You need to be lucky and have a good boss to get promoted.
With the jobmarket the way it is? If they don’t promote you, move on. I’m not saying it’s easy and of course there are people in tough spots for different reasons. But it’s more in your hands than many people think.
With the jobmarket the way it is?
Historically awful? Don’t get me wrong, the advice is still solid, but this was a weird way to preface it - it’s the hardest time in my 10-year career to “just find a new job”.
Automate by hiring others.
Today I received a meeting invitation from the CTO (this doesn’t usually happen, I am getting dragged into a mud trap), the agenda for the meeting is “Plan to prepare for the preparation…” and my contribution to that meeting is to come prepared with a timeline of the plan. I am not even kidding.
I used to work for a 2 billion dollar company and when we meet with the CEO, we have a week’s worth of planning meetings. Such a waste of time.
I hope you did some work in preparation of this meeting
I somehow managed to avoid excel my entire life, and I’ll be so lost whenever using it is actually going to be required of me
Get on Google sheets or something to stay organized… Learn how to use index match and how to nest formulas (e.g. countifs, sumifs).
It’s incredibly frustrating when someone at work can’t navigate an excel file or a spreadsheet.
It’s incredibly frustrating when someone at work can’t navigate an excel file or a spreadsheet.
Oh, I know the feeling, be it in other areas.
I love google sheets. I made some nifty little functions in it. Then I discovered appscript and things got a little weird. I made an automated CRM system. An automailer. An animated dancing badger made by changing the colours of the cells. It gets a bit hazy after that.
😬 I moved from a restaurant job to an office and live on Excel now. I have probably not used it for 10 years before this. I’m beginner level for sure. Any suggestions on how to improve quickly?
At the pearly gates… what did you accomplish in life?
Uh I excelled 9 hours a day for 40 years.
Great, come on in!
The last block will be “Prompt Writing/Engineering”
I personally feel attacked.
Yeah. What about those of use who are in Google Sheets 9 hours a day? Fuck OP.
I’m sorry, how could I forget? smh 😔
Hey, This is lemmy! You gotta include the open source ones too like OpenOffice and LibraOffice That might fly in other platforms but not lemmy
Lmao, I don’t think they enjoy whidespread corporate usage tho. Also Excel is pretty much a synonym for spreadsheets in general at this point
Sorry to hear that… Maybe join a union and/or socialist party/org in your area to bring about change?
It’s ok if you don’t have the energy/motivation for that though… maybe just spread the word that a better world, where the economy is democratically controlled and owned by the public, is possible?
Trades are always hiring. My phone says I walk like 5 miles a day just working in our factory. I use my brain, body, problem-solving skills, and have real conversations with my coworkers daily about how to go about the work and solve problems, or just pass the time when we’re not as busy. I learn new things constantly and enjoy working with my hands and making my work look beautiful, which can be surprisingly deep in the field of industrial electrical work.
Just know that if anyone’s interested in this kinda thing, make sure you have some thick skin and maybe leave a terminally online brain at home
making my work look beautiful
The plumber who did work in my kitchen made a fantastic job of the under-sink pipework. Everything curved and lined up just so, little screw valves instead of clunky taps, it’s lovely. It’s hidden away behind cleaning products, but I know it’s there and it makes me smile. Thank you to tradespeople who enjoy their work!
Which trade are you in?
I’m gonna guess industrial electrical work
Yes. Specifically industrial control and automation, which is apples to oranges to commercial and industrial building power distribution for example.
I worked for GE as a grunt first building inverters for solar fields and power plants. Then I did field service for them in the American southwest when they shut down the factory and sent all the work to GE Germany and Japan.
Then when all of the re-work we were doing was done, I passed on traveling indefinitely and came back home to Pittsburgh. I got hired opening a new factory for a company that makes machinery used for plastics recycling and worked there for close to a decade as their only electrical technician. That shop holds a deep place in my heart for the connections and friendships I made there. But I saw us getting slow as fuck and everyone quitting and decided to switch jobs this year for a better paycheck and closer commute. Now I work solely in testing and do a bit of design work and drafting.
I love me some excel formulas! Makes me hot and bothered!
9 hours? Every day? Where? I work 8 hours and obviously only 5 days a week. I thought that’s the norm.
