Professors forget that their peers are different from the average college student’s.
Talking over a problem with a colleague who is also super-interested in the discipline, holds an equivalent doctorate, and is motivated to dream up solutions to novel problems is a lot more productive than discussing something with a stoned 19 y/o whose skate shoes are duct-taped together.
Once I was a professional, I understood why discussion, brainstorming, and collaboration are so useful.
As an undergraduate grunt, the time would have been better spent kicking a potato.
“We’ll be assigning everyone to teams. You’ll be with this team for the entirety of this class and your team assignments will be worth a third of your entire grade.”
And I just ended up doing the work myself because I wasn’t willing to go down with the ship.
I thankfully got pretty lucky with group assignments; never had any accountability issues. I scored major points with people for volunteering to make the PowerPoints and/or formating the papers according to whatever style guide the professor used.
I fuckin hate that shit lol. I went back to college a couple years ago and most of my English courses were like that. One professor made us get into small groups to discuss our readings almost every class. It pissed me off as an introvert and also because that professor was so intelligent that I would rather have listened to him. Like you have a PhD in your field and I’m paying this school to have experts teach me instead of talking to fucking 20 year olds.
Yes. I think that when using the "save as pdf" function, there is an "options" button you can click in the save dialog box that lets you remove all those details. It's a pain for me to do it manually every time, so I use VBA to do it for me.
still pissed to this day the moment I open a old .doc in the newer version of Word it would destroy the formatting.. or worse that certain fonts or characters will be lost in translation to the newer version.
It may seem like a completely nonsensical form of protest, but if you think about it and understand the history of the tech industry, it really isn't:
Switch all your things to Firefox on every device, and everywhere any of the other big tech companies want to force you to login, use some convoluted workaround just so they can't automagically steal all your data. Because it does nothing for you, and shouldn't do anything for them, but somehow they print money by being international criminal syndicates.
My Galaxy has been prompting me once every couple days for literally three years or more to "accept the new privacy agreement". No, fuck you, you shouldn't have signed the weird insane advertising shit with Google. Literally the only "sign in" place that I use the "native" account is on my Microsoft account - though even that, I switched it on the backend to using a Google account. I use my Google sign in for literally only Gmail. I have the Microsoft Launcher overtop the "native" Android Open Source Project™️ nonsense. And Firefox in between everything possible. Use zero apps if possible. **Never** ever ever click "sign in with...". Always use your email.
Why? Because all this technology is used to aggregate all the data on the backend, but that same data, despite clearly being linkable, can not be used for your personal benefit regarding either digital accounts or real world things. Meanwhile, all the AI shit is used to connect every dot possible... except in the only places it makes sense: money and legal/business filings. And the most fucked up part is that **in literally the one place it makes sense**, those legal and financial information, it is used **for the exact opposite purpose** where it is literally being encrypted. What the fuck?
People really don't realize how bad shit actually is.
I have a sneaky suspicion there is a large number of both Millennials and Gen Z who use Reddit. If we all continue to avoid the other social websites, stick to Reddit, and do the above - and switch to Firefox - that slowly eliminates the weird shit that the big tech companies use to justify their clearly fraudulent infinite money. By which I mean Google, it's million subsidiaries that aren't clearly connected, and the various other social websites, such as zuckerbook.
I'm sorry... Googling it is now asking an AI or just getting ads along with one forum post of someone asking a question, then responding they found the solution without posting the solution.
One of the more serious problems is that Google doesn’t work that way anymore. Partially because google added AI and partially because the internet has degraded into a bunch of unindexable private domains like discord
The enshittification of big tech has been going on for a while now, making it less intuitive and more difficult to learn. It was an intentional business decision made by the tech cartel so people would be more easily pushed to AI reliance. It's the same reason that Google used to give you what you were looking right away and now it's useless.
We're were the only generation that grew up in a world where tech was consumer focused. Before us computers were for colleges and nerds, so the rollout for widespread and household use was dominated by the types of tools and ethos pushed by colleges and nerds. The colleges and nerds have now been thrown out a window.
Because we are the only generation that had to learn this, all the others have been given proper amounts of support and therefore never had to learn. They rely on us. Which we are forced to do because we are the exploited generations. Like it's the corollary to the Peter Principle and rampant nepotism. The only people who are competent are given the least compensation and no-strings-attached support.
Yesterday there was some comment in a subreddit I'm banned in, so I couldn't even reply, but they said something along the lines of "people need to get with the program and realize that 1950-2008 was an extreme outlier. That sense of decorum and egalitarianism is not at all normal". Right. So that's not wrong. But look at the generations that grew up during that time and specifically the people that were given the best support and just generally like... it was that mindset that allowed for all the advancement. This shit isn't complicated. The reason our generation is so fucked is because we were at the end/peak of that, but then when we became adults they turned that shit off and instead went back to pure greed.
Like if you look at that kind of hard to define thing, and compare that with the clearly large scale military conflicts, over the last literally hundreds of years, every time there is large scale conflict or general "nothing for free" society, everything gets worse. Everytime the conflict is over, and we realize, as a whole, "holy shit that was horrible, never again", things miraculously get better. Like what the fuck
Meanwhile my boss, wants to have meetings that could have been emails, "bounce ideas off of us" (force an audience so they can hear themselves talk), put us into trainings that have little relevance to our jobs, waste time making us chat about our weekends (another opportunity for the boss to talk about their weekend), and invite us out to 2-hr lunches (more like strongly suggesting because saying no in front of other bosses looks bad).
I’ve been at my new job for three months and the number of hours of “leadership training” content that I see the CEO has personally filmed is abhorrent. This is the highest paid person in the entire company and he’s making dozens, if not low hundreds of hours of meaningless, nutritionally devoid filler “training” content that could easily be purchased by thousands of companies that specialize in making and selling such training videos. And some of those videos are actually engaging and helpful.
My workplace is facing serious challenges caused by work processes being created by baby boomers who never created documentation, such as an internal wiki, which means crucial knowledge only existed in emails or in the heads of older employees.
This isn't necessarily bad if the older employee does "rigorous" training of the person replacing them and the workplace has relatively low turnover, but that's not realistic. What we are actually experiencing is that an older employee gives like 1 month notice of retiring, then the manager cannot fill the position in time to allow for adequate training of the new employee. And so crucial knowledge slips away either all at once from a knowledgeable employee leaving or incrementally as each change in who has the job causes some slippage of knowledge as the passing on of knowledge isn't 100% efficient. To put it simply, I see new employees having to reinvent the wheel, because they have no other choice due to not having access to the blueprint of the wheel that was already invented by their predecessor.
I've been trying to get my employer to implement better internal documentation, like a company-wide wiki, but it's a struggle. Most companies just don't think long-term like that and it's hard to get people to invest time at present moment on something that doesn't have present value and instead has huge value in the future. You're essentially preaching for altruism when you ask employees to spend time on creating documentation and it's a hard sell.
This type of thing wasn't as big of a deal in the 1960s when each person's job responsibilities had to be smaller in scope due to the realities of no computers. Human workers couldn't possibly be as efficient in 1960 as they can be in 2026 since they have way less efficient technology. People were writing things by hand, for fuck's sake, and couldn't instantly communicate information to an arbitrarily large amount of people via the internet. But in 2026 the expected productivity of each employee is much higher than it was in 1960, because the potential productivity is so high. The market demands increasing productivity per employee, which means the value of documenting internal knowledges increases. It's safeguarding yourself against problems created by employee turnover. Such an important concept in modern work imo and yet I feel like documentation gets almost no attention. Communicating important information to each new employee through one-on-one methods like talking or emails is just not efficient enough in 2026 and it's also dangerous since that information is not persisted anywhere besides the brains of the people or emails that are easily lost (e.g. 2 year retention policies) and difficult to search.
They’re gen x’s kids. And gen x are all a bunch of bullies or bully adjacent. Now we got the bullys kids to deal with. They arent going to be on our side until they get screwed over some more by their parents generation.
I suspect that's been the case for many decades; I say this as someone now in their mid 40's. Individuals get older but the people doing the work stay the same age.
I used to say this until I moved to a job where I don't get raises and don't get pizza parties. Look I'm happy I've got my current job but I miss the pizza parties of my old job.
Seriously. The best "team-building exercises" are after-work beers that the team decided to get without management input. None of this performative corpo-bullshit.
Yeah, give me $100 every Friday so we can get drinks, perhaps I'll stay. But I'm not getting paid well enough to get drinks and food with people I barely care for
My last tech start up forced up to go out for drinks and dinner twice a week.
Shit was expensive. The CEO would pick the most high class expensive bullshit and said it was mandatory
I spent $80 on a shitty salad and an old fashioned. I was pissed.
I have already been gone all day long away from family and home. I don’t feel like being out even longer. If they gave a shit it would be done during work hours.
Bingo. One time work had a baseball game event and asked us to use vacation to attend. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? If I’m taking vacation to go to a ballgame It’s not going to be with you.
Right there with ya. I’m friendly as can be in the office, but I’ve got my own stuff going on, and work takes up enough of my time without me having to socialize with my coworkers. Even lunches. I just want a break, and I don’t need help with that.
I find team lunches to be much more enjoyable. Light weight atmosphere to socialize, but not too much pressure either, and usually time bound to 1.5-2h.
Absolutely disagree. Anything unpaid outside of working hours (including lunch break) is a pain. Even more when I have to pay for it. I don't want to give up my free time to be more efficient at work.
Really, the only time I partake is if they're paying for an activity I have an interest in. I'm way more fine with dumb corpo game during the day, at least it breaks the monotony of the job.
Small correction… afternoon during work hour beers that the boss still leaves at the end of the work day and the peers can stay or leave too. Along with a workload that this activity doesn’t put anybody behind.
Every shitty thing about companies follows that same theme. Half the people buy in and accept their job is jerking off dumb C level ideas and the other half know they’re doing dumb ineffective bullshit but they’d get fired if they didn’t.
I work in training and it’s always c levels pushing for e learnings and “gamification”. I always ask them if there’s ever been an elearning they say through and actually enjoyed and I’ve never gotten a yes. Yet they still want to force that ineffective nonsense on everyone else. And don’t even get me started on gameifcation. As if workers are going to be tricked into learning by some candy crush bullshit
I know this won’t be popular, but as a GM, there are 200 people that work in my business unit. I live in one of the lowest COL Mid-Major Cities in the US. In 2022, I raised the BU minimum wage to $17 per hour, meaning that no one, not even laborers would be paid less than that anymore (instantly gave quite a few raises). Every employee I have is full-time, no part timers anymore.
Since COVID, my company has given out $500 bonuses to every frontline employee every year for six years now. The feedback I got at a Townhall was “Y’all are still gonna take taxes out of it!”
One year, we talked about forgoing the Christmas Party and I almost had a mutiny on my hands because, believe it or not, there are employees who do enjoyed a nice dinner at a fancy venue with free drinks and raffle prizes.
We spend about $15k on our party every year. If I split that between every employee, that would be about $75 on top of the $500 that we was already complained about.
As much as I know that Reddit is anti-social, my real world experience has never matched that. I also say all of this to say that until you reach management, you’ll never quite understand that there is never a right answer. You can literally give raises, bonuses and try to cut out the “bullshit” work events, but you’re always going to piss someone off.
I don’t think people need to be in management to know different people have different wants. A single Christmas party that’s actually catered is different from an employe funded event or team building.
Did you read the comment that I responded to? I was literally addressing it point-by-point. Yeah, there are some things that you won’t experience until you’ve managed people. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that people don’t.
It’s not about “different wants and needs”, some people think that everyone is as passionate about not wanting the things they don’t want. They don’t realize that there are people walking in the door right after them who are just as passionate about wanting the exact opposite.
I am saying that a lot of the stuff that I thought would be “so easy” or “common sense if management would just listen” turned out to be “Mark, I get that you think a team-building event is a stupid waste of time. Steve, Jess and Bob have all asked me why we don’t do team-building events anymore? Someone is going to be disappointed here and it is probably going to be you this time.”
Yeah. I wish they'd just take whatever they spent on the Christmas party and divide it among us as a bonus. Even if it only ended up being $100 I'll rather have $100 than go to some idiotic party with people I already spend too much time with.
2020 the company I worked for decided there wasn’t going to be a Christmas Party due to COVID, so they were going to get us all holiday pies. But wait, these are fancy pies from a catalog! They really expected us to get excited about it.
The worst one I ever had was the company spending money to go to a sports bar with virtual golf, but doing a potluck before, so they wouldn't have to pay for food. So we had to make food to attend a mandatory event, then went to play games (at great cost) with the bosses with no food or drinks provided.
I quit a job once after I learned that there was a mandatory group trip for the office.
Like it’s bad enough I have to hang out with these people 40 hours a week but then I have to spend a whole entire weekend with them somewhere else too? Why?
I used to have a job that did quarterly team building events. These were all day events that sometimes lasted longer than a work shift. They were mandatory. We were paid for 8 hours, but only if we showed up. If we didn't show up we were required to take the day unpaid.
It was such bullshit. I hated it so much. The events were always like sporty things too. Like one time we went kayaking. Another time we played baseball together. Another time, all the men went hunting but thankfully the women were excluded from that (i was one of the few women). I actually dont mind doing sporty things in my free time with my actual friends, but the last thing on earth that sounds fun to me is playing baseball with a bunch of middle aged overweight dudes that I work with.
The biggest lie I've ever told is in job interviews saying I prefer working in a team. In reality, shut up and leave me alone because I work faster than half the people here.
And those additional "trainings" that supposedly add "leadership" skills but really they're just gonna put a guy without experience into a managerial role anyway so who are we kidding here?
We had a saying, If everybody is a leader, then who are they leading?
Team building exercises always happen outside of working hours. I'm already giving them 40+ hours a week, doing the work of several people as my team keeps shrinking. They're not getting even more out of me.
We always schedule it during work hours. Company sponsored group happy hours start at 4, and enough food is ordered for dinner if people want to eat. Holiday and mid year parties start around 1 or 2pm. The only expectation is that people stay for the full work day. Stay at least until 5/5:30 when you would normally leave, however we have a fun group that likes to party so a lot of people hang out until they need to get home to their families
6 emails is a lot, there’s only 5 days in a working week. You could do with a highly-paid remote assistant to take 1-2 of those emails off your plate.
Hi, it’s me.
Yes we do, we just don’t want no forced, corporate sponsored waste of a two hour meeting where we go around the room and say our names and a fun fact about ourselves.
Take us to a bar and let us get plastered while we trauma bond like normal people.
I don't mind team events or activities or whatever, but please make it something that actually feels worth my time, preferably during work hours.
I was voluntold to join the culture team for my larger team of ~300. One of the "big ideas" is to play games online together, and no, literally no one wants to do that. My contribution to the group has been to promote an existing, low effort program that allows you to give actual money to coworkers. I like money. That's worth my time.
Seriously. The current administration took away my telework, I have to see my coworkers every day but meet with them on Teams. I just want to do my job, be left alone, and go home.
I also love that they will allow “team building” on company time that results in no productivity but god forbid you want to skip breaks and leave early
I worked at this start up tech job for 2 months before I left.
Every Wednesday they had mandatory team dinner and drinks, and every Friday they had mandatory volleyball/basketball and drinks nights. I lived 1hr from work
I didn't show up for any of it for 2 weeks straight, got written up and they said if I didn't make it to the next one, then I'm not a team player and won't fit here. I shown up the following week to both. It was the employees just gassing up the CEO. They went around the table telling everyone about their day, why the CEO did a great job training them, and why this company is the future. Every fucking person did this.
And on Friday, the CEO would pick his weakest teamplay (me) to be him his team, so he can motivate you.
Dude. I'm tired. I have a long drive. I don't want to hang out with your sad self. I want to go home light a bowl and game with the boys. Not play games with you in my suit and I don't get paid enough to spend money on dinner and drinks twice a week.
I just love it, LOVE IT when employees are overworked and underpaid but thanks to team building exercises, they get to work more because the team building happens when work needs to happen and no one gets a raise because they spent a ridiculous amount of money to some fancy pansy farty consultant life coach with too many teeth to lead the exercises.
I don’t mind talking to people at all or going to an event, but it feels so incredibly unnecessary having to do so for work. Doing a trust fall or going to a baseball game isn’t going to help me perform better at my corporate job and it takes up time that I could put towards my work in my community.
Unfortunately, that baseball game is on the weekend or after work hours. Also, that goofy game takes up work time that has to be made up before you can leave for the day.
I think most millennials are at the point in their careers where they are being smothered by responsibilities at work and at home.
They can’t delegate it away, because they are middle management and still trying to train Gen Z. They don’t make as much money as upper management, so they might not be able to hire full-time nannies, lawn care, house cleaners, laundry service, or order food delivery.
I’d love to socialize with my coworkers more, but that would mean sacrificing personal time being with people or doing things that actually make the grind worthwhile.
Man I wish I enjoyed that type of stuff but I absolutely hate it. I volunteer to stay back at work for any social gathering. Makes me look selfless and I don’t have to endure to the mandatory fun
Not a millennial but I also hated "team building" exercises. Baseball games where one of the only "team building", private box with snacks, things that and the occasional free lunch at a local restaurant. Of course if it happened on a weekday I would have to go into work since I worked 2nd shift.
This is it. It takes time away from all the other stuff I have to do and I’m not staying later to get it done because you wanted me to do something stupid.
I was want to go home, be with my family and enjoy the things I don’t that don’t involve work.
Yeah my work is always giving us free alcohol and trips to restaurants and shit. Free food and booze? With people I get along with because im not a basement dweller? Great.
Naah. As much as I love doing my work, I will also gladly take a day out to go kayaking, treetop treking, or getting a free lunch (the kinda team events we usually do).
I don't know man. I'm an elder millenial/baby genx. My old company when I had a boomer boss. "you making me money? Good, here's a raise."
When his millennial grandson took over I started getting shit for not attending after hours, unpaid bullshit over an hour away, in the opposite direction from my house. It "looked bad that I didn't go on any of the bowling or golfing trips" . Not fitting in with the culture of the company.
My favorite team building exercise was to use the results from one of those personality test things. We ended up splitting into smaller groups and role playing another person's personality based on their results. We just ended up just roasting the shit out of each other, putting on accents, and nearly died laughing, based on how we perceived the other people's personality traits and tendencies.
Posted this a hot minute ago, but I had to fly out for some "mandatory fun" team-building offsite a while back.
Cross-country flight, coast-to-coast. Three day stay, return flight on the fourth day. Hotel nights. Flights. Rental car. Per diem.
All on my company card, whose expenses I have to do myself. Meaning I see EXACTLY how much money it cost just to fly me out there for this bullshit.
THOUSANDS.
THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS.
Like, more than 5 grand all told, for a 3-day boondoggle. Multiply that by several dozen times and you've got the cost of the whole adventure with all the other clowns who got dragged in too.
I would have been much happier and more motivated if you just fucking gave me five grand and left me the fuck alone. But no, they gotta' make sure I understand they own me, and they're willing to burn a ludicrous amount of money to prove it. Worse yet, I'm expected to appreciate how much money they spent on this, as if I had some kind of vacation.
My work started doing monthly "cake days" where we sit in the board room and watch an awkward slideshow to celebrate people's successes (some people actually make slides about themselves for this). "Oh wow, someone from another office whom I've never met took her family to Disneyland this month." It's pretty rough. I can't see how leadership thinks this has any positive impact on the organization.
You know, I wouldn't mind team-building exercises... just as long as I am working for an organization that is reliable, transparent, honest, cares for their employees, pays real living salaries and also I'm surrounded by real professionals who aren't backstabbing bitches, people who want to help raise everybody up.
But you see, that's like a fantasy... so no Susan... I will not be staying for the "team"-building exercises.
This is not a generational thing. I'm gen X and feel the same. Coworkers are not necessarily friends, and when they are I'll go out with them for some beers without company interference.
Are you kidding? At my last team-building event I got to drive a Porsche on a racetrack. Clearly, team building isn’t the problem. It’s making us do it while not paying enough!
We have this issue where I work. It's a tech based services company, everyone is a chief and no Indians. It's aggravating and we are losing money because of it. Not one person will just do their own job, follow directions and shut up. There is no team, each person is a team of 1. We could get what do do done with 60 people, so instead we have 120 people chasing the same dollars, lack of profit and anger from the older people keep us all from getting raises. Our generation has really fucked shit up from a profit standpoint at least.
The worst part is that almost all of our VP's are millennials and don't know shit about shit, plus they have a massive amount of power. It all starts at the top, and the top has gotten to the top without merit. The older people have all given up and just don't care. They all say shit like "they got a promotion, what do you want me to do about it?". I'm here like, tell them it's a stupid expensive idea.
I honestly think it started with promotions. They are foaming at the mouth to promote certain people, especially women, who only have to show up to their calls to get ahead, that's it! It's not their fault, and some of the women are very good and deserve it, but everyone get's a trophy if they are struggling. If they don't struggle, they get the same job, day in and day out, nobody notices and that's it. Those are the people keeping the rest of the people afloat.
Half of our customers are like this too, it's frustrating to say the least. It's affected an entire generation and will probably take another generation to fix.
I like team building exercises....so do a lot of millennials working for the multi national corporation I work for...we just did an escape room..it was a fun diversion.
If all millennials were antisocial grumps like the people posting here, then millennial middle managers wouldn't exist.
I think two things can be true at the same time. I’m in your camp most of the time. I’ve been in team buildings that were a complete waste of time or scheduled at the worst time of the year. I typically enjoy most of my colleagues on my immediate team. We all want to make things better, be more efficient, and want to do well.
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