“Sitting down to work isn’t real work. It’s unproffesional.”

On this site I’ve seen people mention the sunk cost of all of these huge office spaces on long term leases. If the workers aren’t herded back into the cubicle farms then there is biiiig mistake that someone has to take credit for. And that person would be the highest executives who would have the authority to throw around 10s of millions on a lease.

Bullshit jobs talks at length about how capitalists enjoy having their legions of workers. Graeber likens it to feudal courts where nobles measured their worth and status by how many useless sods they could patronize. Any manager who personally identifies as a manager more than a worker, middle management being the grey area that it is, enjoys exercising their authority. Not being able to do it in person really takes the kick out of the stuff. Getting the workers back into their little castles gets their dicks hard.

There are a lot of industries where the direct communication aspect of being in person is super helpful. In an industry like video games where every little thing effects everyone’s work being in person is legitimately helpful. This late in the pandemic though most industries should have been able to transition by now.

I know a few PMC that have said utterly brokenbrained stuff like “I don’t want anyone working in their underwear!” with the same kind of neurotic obsession with others’ behavior that have regarding other people’s lawns.

:same-picture:

Most of middle management is bullshit. We know it, the managers know it, and even the owners know it. The owners would love to remove the bullshit managers to cut costs, but they only have limited knowledge of which people and branches of their companies are bullshit, because figuring that out would be actual work, and owners don’t work.

Meanwhile, middle management is compensated based on how important they sound. How many layers of management there are under them, how many employees total, how big their budgets are. The manager with more under them than their peers gets promoted. So management is largely trying to maximize costs at all times.

But the owners know that middle management is bullshit, so some guy who’s obviously just maximizing costs will get fired. Every cost needs a justification related to profit, because that’s all the owners care about. And profit comes from exploiting maximizing the productivity of the workers, of course.

So renting office buildings is good for managers, because it makes their budgets bigger, but they need to justify the expense to the owners, so they need to claim that bringing you into the office is a vital part of how they exploit your labor your productivity.