People criticize them as being mind numbing and demoralizing. Sometimes they are. But there’s no better feeling then sitting in a cubicle with a cup of coffee on a slow Friday, writing 2 emails and then taking off 15 minutes early. I worked in the trades before and that was fulfilling, but spending an hour on a nonsense report no one will ever read for too much money is a gift people don’t realize they have until it’s gone.
Comments
Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
I can promise you your situation is an anomaly. We work over here.
I’ll take it over trade work, but to say they rock is an exaggeration.
Those jobs can be unmotivating because they get monotonous. Add in meetings that drag on, mandatory “fun” events, and staring at the same walls everyday with little actual mental stimulation (because you usually don’t have a solid 8+ hours of work to get done everyday but you still have to be there) and it can suck some days.
Corporate office jobs for peons tend to have excellent benefits and work life balance, reasonably low stress levels, and are generally comfortable. There are a lot of downsides as your job is often highly repetitive, lack any form of creativity, and you get little to not exercise from them. As you climb the corporate ladder though, a lot of the benefits of the corporate office job tend to be reduced or eliminated in exchange for more money; and this may not be a tradeoff everyone wants.
If you want a stable job with some decent pay and are okay with sacrificing other aspects of your life, then yes. But if you want your job to serve your life, and not vice versa, then for many people those long hours spent for a bunch of greedy pigs to get more fat is not worth it.
> spending an hour on a nonsense report no one will ever read for too much money is a gift people don’t realize
This “gift” has began taking its toll. A stagnant job that requires little to no motions to handle with a large enough pay has become a subsidy on a productive worker, as well as a dead end for the one performing it. Having a coffee to a slow day is nice, but turning it into a routine is bad for you. It devalues one as a performer, and it encourages professional stagnation. This type of corporate head is currently on the top list for removal.
You may not get rich in a corporate job but many of us make a pretty good living while having plenty of free time
I agree. Having been in the military, corporate is like paradise
I’ll never leave the corporate world. Stability and consistently is so important.
Sure im bored sometimes and swamped other times, but at least im not getting screamed at by some customer who doesnt understand that Obama has nothing to do with the amount of cash available in my register
Office work would be fine if you didn’t spend all day around nothing but bland grey boxes being scheduled endless meanings with useless idiots who need to find a way to justify their own jobs. So many corporations are filled with useless bloat that has nothing better to do than waste everybody’s time. The office environment also seems to attract and retain the pettiest assholes on the planet.
I’m sure I work with guys like you. That’s why these jobs are hell for the rest of us.
I’ve done both blue collar and white collar jobs. I can say I appreciate the security of corporate America more, however I much more enjoyed the work in the blue collar jobs. If I could get paid the same wages, benefits, and hours for manual labor I would.
I would say how good they are depends on things like manager, company, coworkers, salary, commute time, ability to do the job, job stability.
I think about this everyday going home on public transportation. I see guys my age literarily breaking their bodies working outside jobs. Their hands are callous, dirt under nails. Lots of knee braces or a shuffling walk. Every time I have to sit through some boring meeting I thank god that I don’t work a job where I might permanently injure my back or lose some fingers. It certainly could be much worse.
Office jobs suck but at least they suck while being in AC and sitting down.
I guess if you never question the purpose of your existence then yes, I suppose a blissfully ignorant life in corporate could work for you.
I hated this thought until middle adulthood when my back started hurting. I now wish I was a pencil pusher instead of a peds nurse.
For real. If I didn’t have an insane boss, I would’ve stayed in my corporate office job forever. The job was easy, the pay was enough to fit my lifestyle, I rented a flat nearby which means I didn’t waste my time travelling to work, and I got along super well with my coworkers. Unfortunately my boss was quite literally insane. She was the wife of the CEO who never worked a day in her life and didn’t know how to run a business properly, just power tripping because suddenly she had an army of people who had to do everything she asked. The micromanaging and 4-5 hour “meetings” with her where she just said a lot of nothing was too much for me to bear… If only the execs were sane, I would have never left.
i’ve worked outside, i’ve worked in a dry good warehouse with no ac, ive worked in a cooler (28-40) degrees, and i’ve worked in a frozen foods warehouse (-10). Much of the warehouse would was order selecting. Think fast paces, hard labor.
I’ll happily take my office job.
I have a contrarian view….. I’ve done both. Started in corporate….. absolutely hated it. Was so bored, unfulfilled and unchallenged. At 27, went back to school to become a carpenter…. best decision I’ve ever made. For me. Corporate for me was a mental prison. Trades have been a great blend of physical and cerebral, leading to challenging, fulfilling and value producing career. Again, in my experience.
I think this is mainly true for lower positions. For example, I generally go home at 5 (in my current job, at least), but the management at my job has meetings often until 9 pm. We are an international company, so they have to touch base with other countries, but even outside of that, management is generally expected to work longer hours.
My mom is a financial controller, she works weekends & evenings very often. My friend is a VP, who’s on call and expected to pick up the phone anytime any place, be it a Friday at 11 pm or a Monday at 6 am. The sales guys at my work, to be fair, not really an office job per se, are also on call all the time. They tell me about drunk client calls at midnight to talk business.
I think in general, work sucks, that’s why they pay us to do it, I guess.
Edit to say this is a comment on work hours, not physical aspects of the job as those are obviously much different than physical labour
>spending an hour on a nonsense report no one will ever read for too much money is a gift people don’t realize they have
don’t worry… they know
Bro, you’re a drone in a hive that is enjoying the few spare moments in the day where you get a sip of the nectar that your superiors are literally bathing in. But, if that’s all you want from life, enjoy.
I’m in a corporate job where I work from home. It’s also a tech startup. So, I have no commute (or commuting cost), I’m overpaid, I have all the comforts of home including wearing anything I want, and a culture that lets me blend work and life however I see fit. Tomorrow, I’ll tell my team to send a Slack from 3pm onwards when I head out to a car show and thursday I have a 3:30 doctor appt. As long as I’m hitting goals and so is my team, nobody really cares where I am or when it happens. It’s results oriented and not policy oriented. Wouldn’t change it for the world.
The feeling that is better is having one of those jobs but working from home. I get to take my quiet coffee from my back porch or my bed.
>But there’s no better feeling then sitting in a cubicle with a cup of coffee on a slow Friday, writing 2 emails and then taking off 15 minutes early.
Sure there is. It’s called working from home and doing the same thing, minus the commute.
Fuck man I hate it. Can’t wait to retire
Best decision I ever made was leave my corporate job. They required me to enter a code for every single task I did including each piece of paper I printed. Different code for each size, color print or black and white. Daily meetings which were a complete waste of time. I decided collecting unemployment and staying home with my puppy was better than being miserable. Eventually found a better paying job for a small family owned business and I actually like the work.
Left the corporate world 10 years ago to teach. Best decision I ever made in spite of the marginal pay cut
I dont know if this is unpopular. That’s why most people do it or aspire to it. Maybe it isn’t popular for the youngest generation of workers, though. I personally can’t stand it. I just personally look at like this: if all of the work this company did disappeared off the face of the earth, who would care? How many would even notice? Not everybody cares about stuff like that. But I do.
You got off 15 minutes early lololololol
I would love to get into some data entry desk job, where i get to sit down all day and have a page quota and its all verbatim so i dont have to think or write about shit or interact with people all that often.
Strong agree. I also think working a job that you’re not very passionate about but that pays well and affords you a good life is a perfectly good option. Not everyone needs to be working a dream job or doing what they love for a living.
Yes my job is mostly boring. But I get to work from home, decide what to work on and when, don’t have to sacrifice my body, can take time off when I want, and get paid decently well. For that, I can deal with boredom and office politics. I consider myself very lucky everyday.
Absolutely. I get free coffee and snacks and can listen to music or YouTube while I work.
My boss is a chill, smart dude who leaves me alone to do my thing. One day I’ll get my own office with a window so I can watch it rain outside.
Sometimes I feel that way and I see your point, but you gotta be in the right mindset. If you let it become your identity and morph into a person who lives the job 24/7 then you have a problem. One of the issues with modern corporate work is you can do it any time any place and some people do exactly that for some baffling reason.
I see people posting about jobs like this, and I truly don’t understand. What office jobs pay well, and apparently just don’t have very much work to be done all the time? Or even literally the same monotonous thing over and over. I would love a mind-numbing office job.
It’s interesting how much Reddit demonizes office work.
Seriously. I used to work retail, finally got the opportunity to leave for a job in logistics.
Sure there’s bs to deal with but it’s like junior league bs compared to retail.
Even simple stuff like quick nice access to a bathroom all day is huge over some other jobs tons of QOL that you never think about.
The corporate office job really shines through after 10-15 years when you compare it to the blue collar jobs. You (usually) are making significantly more money, in a nicer environment (ac, not on your feet, no risk of injury, coworkers who are probably similar to you), no risk of injury, and probably pretty decent hours that are predictable. Blue collar workers at that point are all beat up physically, dealing with injuries, aged out so much quicker.
I have buddies in various trades and they have to worry constantly about safety and not getting injured because if they get hurt it dramatically hurts their earning potential, even with disability and insurance. The jobs are a lot less consistent and stable too.
If you’re especially lucky, you end up with a job in the corporate world paying you a lot and you’re making 2-5x as much as your blue collar peers.
how do I get a corporate job?
I’ve done back breaking crap my whole life and now nearing 40 I’ve come to realize that if I don’t get something much softer on my body soon I’m not going to be walking anymore at 50 with the damage done to my knees.
As someone who just recently left the trades for a not so great paying job but better stability, OP what do you do and how did you get into it?
Can confirm.
When I was a kid, I actually fantasized about being an office worker, and Dilbert was probably my favorite comic strip. (It still is despite Scott Adams’ shittiness as a person.) I originally planned on going into IT, but unfortunately, I listened to the burned out, fear mongering naysayers in the industry here on Reddit, and in my own fear I pursued the trades like everyone was suggesting at the time.
I’ve done blue collar (welding, sheet metal, warehouse, trucking) and retail for the majority of my 20s, and I’ve fucking hated it every time. Only once in my adult life did I have a white-collar office job, and even though it was temp, and an outbound call-center environment, it was the best job I’ve ever had.
Now, at almost 30, I’m finally pursuing the CompTIA A+ certification to ensure I can get a helpdesk job, and long term I’d like to become some flavor of system administrator. I should have done this shit from the beginning, and it’s hard not to feel like I’ve wasted and ruined my life up to now, but y’know, hindsight and all that.
Great post. Sometimes I calculate how much I’m being paid to assemble a simple 10 page PowerPoint deck and it’s really quite satisfying.
What do you do for work and how do I get that job
I actually really like my office job. I like even better the fact that I’m doing my office job from home. I did my time and the retail war zone many years ago and avoided going into food service like the plague. Nearing the end of my career now, and I honestly feel I went the right way.
The ultimate cog in the machine
I agree if it is a full time role. For W2 contract employees it sucks.
Every job has its pros and cons. Office work is generally low stress and working 9-5 with weekends and holidays off is great. But on the downside, it is extremely sedentary which isn’t very good for your health in the long run. Also, a lot of corporate office jobs are riddled with lay offs. I know so many people who work in corporate offices who have been laid off. Other fields like the trades and medical really don’t have to ever worry about getting laid off. I’m a nurse, yeah I have stressful days and I have to work every other holiday and every other weekend, but I do get to move around and not sit on my ass all day, and I never have to ever worry about being laid off or out of work. So, every job has its pros and cons.
as an immigrant, I agree. I know there is a lot of hate on this life, but working and having benefit, not having to rely on my parent who has worked really hard for me, is a win. I aspire to have stable job, and even though it doesnt pay me well, I enjoy the perk of it. I rather not hustle.
Sadly as it sounds (and is) that was my dream job as a kid lol. I just wanted my little cubicle with my tasks and be lost in my own world. Sadly most jobs aren’t like this and you’re always juggling multiple tasks, phone calls, emails, customers… But I also learned as I grew up that this is incredibly mind numbing to me
You’re lucky enough to have a cubicle? 🥲
Now how does one aquire such a job
I worked I restaurants for 10 years, and so far corporate is many times better.
AI is going to take all those jobs in 3-5years
If you like corporate office jobs for those reasons, get yourself a remote job. You will love it.
Nothing better than “working” for 4 hours in the slow season and then going home at noon because everyone in the office has decided it’s a short day and your boss left at like 10 am telling everyone not to stay if they don’t need too. Then getting paid your whole 8 hours.
Corporate remote work is the true promised land. I work maybe 2 or 3 hours a week and just kick it on discord with the other wfh homies and game
Not unpopular. I’ve always had an appreciation and a yearning to do something trade-related. I scratch that itch by doing large-scale DIY projects. Things like finishing a whole basement or an upscale retaining wall. Hoping to build a shed soon.
The ‘soul-crushing’ existence parodied in ‘Office Space’ and generally criticized in most everyday conversations is an actual fucking miracle. 99.9% of all the humans who have ever lived literally could not comprehend how good we have it.
Literally what I’ve always thought. Call me boring! I’ll take it.
That sounds awful. I’ll keep my remote job thanks.
Changes from person to person
I have no idea
100% agree. I worked in trades after i turned 18 for a year and did work during summers after i went to college. Before that i cut grass and did shit like that. Corporate is so much better. I get PTO, sick leave, bonuses and things that buddies in trades (union and contractors) dont get. I work in ac and am not working in shitty weather and heat. I am not having to work mandatory 50-60 hour weeks. I am not so sore or tired after work that I had no real energy to do anything. I have time to workout and have hobbies. I am 25 and talk to buddies that went into trades full time since high school and am in less pain than them, have less toxic work environments, and make equal to if not more than 80% of them (some are almost fully licensed journeymen and other specialty things and they do make bank).
The one downside is I cant call a coworker a waste of trees hard work or a fucking idiot. Outside of that, corporate is better.
While I get this, as someone with corporate job sitting at a laptop all day – it definitely is not great for your body to be immobile for 7-8 hours. And just staring at a screen at that. Breaks can only do so much.
Wait until you pair it with wfh. I go to the office two days a week. I have many weeks where I save all my work for those two days and just maybe answer some emails or do light work and show up for zoom meetings the other days. I’ll go to the gym, grocery shop, do chores. Is pretty great having weekends and evenings completely actually free.
There’s a thing a south america called, ” atleast your bored and get paid to watch facebook” now it’s tik tok but same idea. My uncles and and cousins work manual labor while I get coffee ar Starbucks or dunkin and go to my office job with AC and just scroll reddit while getting paid to send work to people doing the manual labor, I will never understate how privileged my work space is while coming from south America
I can’t help thinking of the Corporate Nightmare Song from SNL. It starts out as a rebellious song against corporations but ends with them working hard and happy at their jobs.
https://youtu.be/lK0Lp43a8z0
Are you a middle aged straight white man by any chance?
A boring job is so much better than a chaotic one unless you’re doing what you love, but let’s face it, most of us aren’t.. work is work, and that’s okay
Tbh this is true, I’d rather be in a nice ac room than being here in the army for weeks on end in the field being worked like a dog and not even making a livable wage, just below a minimum wage job.
I’m a stay at home mom now and it’s much harder than my admin job, I’d love to go back 🤣
Yeah. Bust your ass in manual labor in all seasons outdoors… and that air conditioned space with coffee and a computer isn’t bad.
In an office, no, that’s actual jail, thr conditions are way too similar. WFH, yes, and really, to argue in office is better is silly and barely justifiable.
Trades aren’t bad but how many of us grew up watching older family members work their bodies hard to provide, it’s just not how I want to see myself in 30 years. It motivated me to study and get some type of office work. Plus many trades people are on drugs, it’s a pretty real truth in that line of work.
My grandfather’s grandfather came to this country from Ireland and worked as a canal digger so that his family could own farmland. Now generations later, I’m happy to field Teams calls and push spreadsheets around email.
100% agreed. I’ve worked a ton of blue collar jobs and I’ll gladly take my office job any day of the week.
I make a great wage, do work I find interesting, and set my own hours.
It was buck wild growing up watching Fight Club, American Beauty, and Office Space, being told a corporate office job was basically imprisoning your soul in the torment nexus.
Then the job market changed a lot between 1999 and the year I actually turned 18. After several stints in food & retail, and trying to do freelance video work, it became apparent that an office job was now the holy grail of realistic outcomes.
holy npc
Congrats you are numb
As a dental assistant who lives work life in constant fight or flight mode, a corporate cubicle job sounds like what dreams are made of 🥲😂
All I want is to write emails at a desk and not be running around like a chicken without a head at all times 🤦🏼♀️
“spending an hour on a nonsense report no one will ever read” for me was not worth any money. you only get a finite amount of time on this earth dude. to each their own but for me that the seeming lack of meaning of my job and misalignment of that with my own personal wishes to spend my time the way i want was the issue.
take my upvote i guess
As someone works a low-paying labour job with no benefits or security, I always envy people who are able to get an office job.
I enjoyed the corporate world for over 20 years
Corporate jobs are like going back to high school. That said, I sit in AC so its fine.
This just reminds me of the content creator “hubslife”.
Ironically, he quit his boring office job to be a creator full time. Kinda defeats the whole purpose.
I too love my mind-numbing (in a good way) office job. Work-life balance, job security, lots of vacation time, 5% 401k match makes me a happy guy!
I’ve worked corporate jobs were you could probably hide your name tag, leave the office and still get paid for 3 years.
Others were its non stop back stabbing Lord of the Flies environment where everyone is creating endless BS work to give the appearance of being busy.
The latter is much more common and the former are much less common than they used to be…
End of day, a corporation could make supermodels and blow an awful job so curious where the hell most of you work.
Its helped me work on my mental health. Mine has programs incentivizing physical wellbeing so hopefully I’ll get on track with my health.
Is this Dwight Schrute?
I love my corporate job
You’re like the perfect citizen anyone could create. I’m actually really happy there are people like you and I hope there’s millions more. I’ve done trades and office jobs and there’s more levels. Please always stay the way you are and try to convince your friends it’s good too because it is.
Yea, I’ve been blue-collar my whole life. Would love a desk job. My back and feet would appreciate too
That shit do sound lit though
Well, it sucks because in a trade your body is your business and you’re a busted wrist or knee away from your business shutting down indefinitely. There’s also the wear and tear that your body can’t keep up on past a certain age so hopefully you’ve groomed apprentices and you’re just the guy who runs a business of that trade after 40. Also, some of these things come with direct bodily damage like toxic fumes hearing or eye damage etc that no amount of money is worth the risk of.
Food service while stressful has honestly been my favorite line of work in life because you generally like most of your co-workers and despite the front of house, back of house divide you’re generally on the same team and can enjoy the catharsis of a good screaming session inside the freezer, or a couple of shift drinks commiserating after work. This is most certainly not the case in most white collar jobs.
My experience with white collar work, which is my career, is purely extractive. I don’t like computers, I don’t like offices, I don’t like the people that gravitate to these types of fields. Everything has to be perfectly calibrated to extract as much value as possible for as little interaction and effort because the effort in these fields feels so much worse than a day spent laying tile or painting trim or fencing etc etc. For the raw effort, the money is definitely the best in niche, skilled, white collar work.
Still, establishing your own mostly-passive streams of income is definitely anyone’s best bet and I would favor a 10% chance of making 60K a year for next to nothing versus a 100% chance of making 160K a year for full-time plus on call effort.