What workplace absurdity are you forced to live with?

A big inefficiency in my organization is probably the proliferation of AI-slop generated developer infrastructure. I got moved to a new org back in June and this org was only formed back in March. From day one, the infrastructure that developers in this org use has been hacked together in the name of moving fast. However, they have moved so fast that quite literally every single day, there is a large enough incident that blocks developers from doing the work they're told to do for multiple hours at a time. Someone built a little dashboard tracking reliability and out of the last 90 work days, only 20 have been incident free. It's absurd.

A previous company I worked at had the classic "IT runs the entire company but is given a shoe string budget" that many people have heard over and over.

Our company was spending out the nose on the shipping cost of me needing to send people a different laptop and having them send me their current laptops. Limping along 5-7 year old laptops for field work when every thing that is done by our employees is in the field is logged in our internal ERP system is nuts. Not only the shipping cost, but also the time spent that they were just waiting for things to load/process.

I ended up getting approval for a stop gap measure when I showed just how much we were spending to replace the disk drives with SSDs when old laptops came in, which helped immensely as a lot of the issues were HDD related due to our guys using the laptops in the field/in their trucks.
After 2 years I finally was able to get the policy adjusted to get automatic approval to replace any laptop over 5 years old once they started having issues, with a plan to eventually get down to a 3-4 year refresh cycle depending on the specs of the laptop issued.

I actually would get calls from guys in the field when they would get their new laptop thanking me because it saved them so much time having a system they didn't need to wait, which was nice.

The last few days I am the only thing preventing the older students from steamrolling the younger ones during the recess transition. I don't like this because:

A) it's entirely avoidable

B) there's no communication

C) I'm that asshole teacher telling the kids to sit and wait

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH

The dart to a calendar method of planning major feature releases. If I have to rally myself and my team to hit some bullshit deadline that has a 50/50 chance of slipping, one more time, I'm going to lose it. Holy shit.

This one isn't mine but I love it. My friend is an accountant for a large business. The size of business that has upwards of 1000 employees, had turn overs into the millions, multiple business units. He wasn't the only accountant but he was one of the guys who made sure the numbers at the end of the year all looked good across the whole business.
So he was regularly seeing thousands, if not tens of thousands disappearing into holes he needed to plug. Money wasted, or simply completely unaccounted for at huge scale he'd have to move or get creative to balance from another business unit.

And yet... For some reason he was also responsible for expenses for a particular business unit. And his manager (like, the CFO or something) had asked him to chase up a bunch of these expenses that were incorrectly filed.
None were that significant, but the one that made him piss himself laughing was an expense for one guy who claimed a £0.07 biscuit for his lunch, but didn't put it through correctly so he had to reject it and charge the guy through his pay slip instead.
Oh yeah, fuck you for your 7p biscuit, that's costing the company! Glad I took my time to find that inefficiency... Now back to filling that 10k money pit that no-one cares about!

The company spends an ungodly amount of money bringing in catered lunches, but we have to fly economy. I'm not looking for first class, but premium economy is much more civilized.

Just a few years ago, we used to have project managers, release managers, and non-fully-automated QA. It wasn't a perfect arrangement, by any means, but having a separation of concerns was nice because it meant devs could focus on writing code without having to get sidetracked by nonsense. And I at least felt a lot better about my code knowing it was checked by human being before release.

But all of those titles have been eliminated and all of the responsibilities have shifted to devs without any decrease in expected output or increase in compensation.

There was also this mad dash to get everyone to use AI for everything as much as possible. Very minimal training was provided, and what was provided was very much oriented toward people who spend their days in spreadsheets and word docs. So devs just kind of figured it out collectively and solo. This went on for a year or so and I got dinged on my bi-annual review for not using AI efficiently. But no standards for appropriate AI use for established. No check-ins to make sure you're following the non-existent standards. Just 3 competing AI-centric slack channels (I threw them in a folder called "slop") where people just dump random AI articles they found online.

Another one I just thought of. Our president is heavily involved in the day-to-day operations of things. On one hand it's great that leadership is at least aware of what's going on "on the ground". On the other...dude fuck off. Higher ups being involved at that level means anything they say gets treated as top priority, whether it is or isn't. It's disruptive and they're often lacking context/skills required to participate in some of these discussions they shoehorn themselves into. And it attracts brown-nosing devs who like overload themselves with good boy brownie point projects and crash out a few times a year because they chose to be that busy.

My employer has been licking its wounds ever since its very public failed merger with its largest competitor, and has apparently decided to take out its frustrations on its workforce, as if it's an abusive parent.

They wasted tons of money rolling out a new uniform standard-- I'm fine with uniforms, but this has been a clusterfuck. The supplier they chose seems to have everything sized down one size from what people actually wear, so even my small-wearing clerks have to get mediums to not look like they're being cinched. In addition, they went to horrible cross back aprons from the standard neck hole ones we used to have before, and the only other option is a half apron that makes people either look like waitstaff at a restaurant (this is a grocery store, and I'm sure many of you have figured out exactly which chain), or, as one of our night crew guys put it, a damn loincloth.

They also rolled this out after years of giving out these "good boy/girl points" that could be used on branded merch, which we were all encouraged to buy and use as work clothing. Guess what? Everything branded from that site is now noncompliant, despite being branded in such a way that it makes it clear that someone wearing it works for us. When people complained, the answer was "well, you all can just wear it in your free time not at work!" As if any of us want to be free advertising for these clowns.

We're supposed to tell people to clock out and go home if they're not fully compliant (and full compliance means every piece of it. For example, as a produce department manager I'm expected to wear the company polo, with the company vest, AND the stupid apron all at once.

This segues into my other issue, the aggressive off-books cutting of available hours in departments. My department is supposed to be alloted around 400 hours a week for scheduling. Every time I make a schedule to that level, I come back the next day to find my store manager has slashed and burned it and cut up to 120 hours out of my schedule. It's not as if they're using these hours in other departments either; talking to all the other department heads, we're all in the same boat. Hell, right now I'm down one of my two assistants (40 hours), have one person on vacation and another out on parental leave (another 80 hours), and had one of my part-timers transfer departments (yet another 20 hours). I'm already out 140 hours a week, and they still see fit to keep cutting my hours. And before you ask, nope, I can't even use less than half those hours to give overtime to the people that want it either. There's no plans to replace my part-timer that left, and I keep getting the run around on getting a second assistant since my store manager wants to be a choosy prick, but won't even entertain interviewing external candidates, while everyone internal is steering well clear of my shitshow store.

But, while they're slashing our hours to schedule, corporate is ramping up enforcement of standards and salesfloor conditions on top of it all. I spent over an hour today taking melon bins to our backroom to forklift them up and put a second pallet underneath them, because now they want the bins to be level with the bottom of the pallet guards we place around them for customer safety. All well and good in a lot of stores, since there's single pallet high guards out there. But no, of course when my boss tried to order more of them, we got nothing but a ton of double height pallet guards, with the company rejecting any orders for the right ones since "we have pallet guards already".

All this just because they want price signage at the BOTTOM of bins for some godforsaken reason instead of near the top where people actually look for it. I got reamed by a corporate guy the other day because apparently we think we're too good for standards, not that we're so short staffed that I'd rather get product out on the salesfloor in the way we've done for years so that we can, you know, do what a business is supposed to do and make money, instead of letting it rot in the backroom because "sTaNdArDs" and no hours or staff to actually meet them.

I swear it's amazing this company is as large as it is. FFS the division I work for earns just under a third of the parent company's nine figure revenues alone, but nope, it's skeleton crews as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately they are the definition of too big to fail, are close to having a monopoly on the normal grocery market in my area, and (for myself personally) pay enough for me to live, but has snared me in the trap of not being able to afford a career change and the couple years of entry level wages doing anything else.

Maybe it is because I don't speak finance to understand this properly, but the whole schism around "We grew 10% last year, so that is great, but our target was 20%, so we have to do layoffs". Of course it is something do to with betting to be a bit forward on the growth, so you can actually absorb it with investing before it actually happens, but it is still weird and sucks to be in the middle of it, seeing both several hires and layoffs within a single year.

May I kvetch about the majestic efflorescence of bullshit which compromises the employee self-evaluation process?

It's annual review time, and this year we were actively encouraged to use LLMs to write up our personal growth goals, achievements, contribution to KPIs (another rant target), etc. Like a good little worker bee, I gave that my best effort, and was so nauseated by the result that I wasted more time rewriting. I abide in the suspicion that the results will just be reviewed and scored by another LLM, thus feeding the algorithmic Ouroboros of model collapse, or is it Scolopendra waking up, or some other metaphor for Eschaton.

I've been through this too many times to feel anything but sorrow for the managers who have to give the "you're doing great, but..." in-person sandwich reviews while their souls shrivel like grapes forgotten on the vine. When was a n00b manager, I got the advice from an HR head to "always include something that can be used to offboard if necessary".

We're working our asses off and making more mistakes due to understaffing from previous layoffs, revenues and bookings are down because of a variety of factors out of our control (e.g. widespread cuts in healthcare funding), and I smell an acquisition or more layoffs coming. The company continues to preach the productivity benefits of LLM use (not visible to the naked, non-C-suite eye) while drastically limiting available tokens. It continues to blindly follow conventional MBA practices for boosting short-term shareholder value even though it's privately held. It continues to exhort us to invest in our "personal career growth" while contributing nothing and making no accommodations toward that end.

To its credit, the company does annual employee satisfaction surveys. To its detriment, the company does nothing about the results, including the steady downward trend in its already negative Net Promoter Score. The basis for action is comparison with other companies, and in the vicinity of the average is good enough. If I was giving the company its annual review, "needs improvement" would be all over it.

Postman: Bureaucratic nonsense is my lifeblood. We have so many instances of nonsense, it's hard for me to conjure and isolate exactly one thing, but not impossible as I can at least bring up the current nonsense we'll be dealing with in the near future.

Call offs and holidays.

Management, in their infinite wisdom, have made it a mission to penalize mail carriers who call off the day before a holiday. On the surface it makes sense, workers need to quit trying to cheat the system to eke out a free midweek-weekend, or an extended weekend, etc. All it serves to do is to shunt more work onto the letter carriers, who in turn have to stay out later to cover all the holes in geographic coverage made by those absent, the day before a holiday.

Thing is, the mail never stops. Most federal holidays land on a Monday, leaving Tuesdays with a massive backlog. Sure, skipping out on Saturday does add to the problem, but that Sunday/Monday mail is still coming. The smarter ones (the fewer of the call offs) tend to call off the day after a holiday, when there's the unreasonable amount of work to be done, and avoid a penalty.

Frankly, (ignoring the multitude of other reasonable scenarios that might have someone call off) penalties should be awarded to whoever calls off before and/or after a holiday, but if only one had to be chosen, it should be the day after a holiday. But management's sticking with their choice, because management cannot be wrong.

My company refuses to admit mistakes. They expanded too fast a few years ago, laid off a bunch to pay for the new acquisitions, realized they had overexpanded and then tried to hire cheap labour to help with the load.

To make matters worse, once AI was available to us, this team started using AI to basically make all their decisions. After a 200% increase in infrastructure related major incidents over a 6 month period, they finally fired over half the team. Apparently, they were just ticking check boxes and not actually reading what changes were being done, resulting in major outages.

But still, leadership refuses to admit that letting good talent go in the name of saving a few bucks was worth it. We have multiple single points of failure in numerous places now and are a wolf's breath from falling over.

The best part is that because these incidents caused a major loss of revenue, leadership said no raises and no new hires this year. Which has also resulted in a huge turn over and they're basically just banking on a sink or swim strategy at this point, as far as I can tell.

Nothing I can do about it internally - I've made many recommendations that go ignored or are deemed unimportant. We're losing customers constantly and they want to keep adding AI to crap that doesn't need it instead of investing in the human resources that build the applications and support customers.

At this point I'm not entirely sure our private equity overlords even want us to succeed. Wouldn't be surprised if the plan is to drive us into the ground and somehow make themselves richer and hand out a few golden parachutes for leadership.

I work at a school, the two biggest frustrations I have that aren't like structural with education broadly, for some reason we don't like plan things out in advance. So even though we did something last year, we wait till like a week before to start planning it again. When I suggest we just give up some days in summer to get everything set so we never have to worry about it again they look at me like im insane. The other one, if it will surprise you, is that many of my coworkers act like actual children, its a problem especially with the high school teachers (im primarily middle school). They act very cliquey, they're bullies, and overall they just don't do a lot of critical thinking. It is insane to see in person.

Lol. So this is at almost every job I've ever been hired at for the last 10 years. So this has been multiple hells.

I get hired because of my skills with automation and process improvement. I have a knack for understanding systemic pain points and providing and implementing solutions to make processes more efficient. I'd like to say I am VERY good at this.

However, at every job I've been hired to, somehow it's expected that I'll just magically fix all the problems in the company just by existing.

When I've gotten hired I've repeatedly said that I either need to be given the authority to enforce processes, or someone with the authority needs to buy into the enforcement. There will always be a bit of a transition period to new processes.

But every. Single. Fucking. Job. Has ended up the same. They either neuter my authority, they refuse to enforce process improvements, they take any suggested process improvement as offensive to their ego.

My processes actually improving things doesn't seem to matter apparently. I had a job where I literally "saved the day" meaning I was the sole reason a project got done on time, and apparently that wasn't enough to put trust into it.

I've come to the conclusion that some people can't see the entire system in completeness and don't think in terms of cause and effect. They can't comprehend the impact of certain process improvements, and then when I explain it to them they think I'm "over-thinking it" simply because they can't wrap their head around it and can't even comprehend that it's possible for someone like me to wrap my head around it.

Every job I've been at I have functionally improved their workflow and processes, integrated custom built tools, but have been either gotten burnt out or let go from every single one of them it seems.

I'm circling the drain on my most recent job, and after this I'm going to be trying to go freelance and transition my process improvement skills into a freelance consulting thing, and focus my skills on Print Brokerage. That way if a shop wants my process improvement skills as so many think they want, I can offer it to them as a consultant so whether or not they integrate my suggestions is up to them but won't matter to me because I got paid.

Working Genius - the latest (and possibly cheapest?) of the work personality assessments.

Seriously, I think these are useful tools sometimes but we're obsessed currently. And it's the third such assessment we have pivoted to in ten years. (But only $25 a person!)

No napping at work. The Canadian rail operating rules (CROR) do not allow sleeping unless your company has a policy on it and that policy is followed.

Sometimes we spend a lot of time stopped in sidings waiting for other trains. There is literally nothing to do: we are strictly forbidden from using cell phones or any entertainment devices, we are not allowed any reading material that's not related to the job, and of course no napping. Also there are now inward facing cameras on all trains.

Several American railways have napping policies, airlines have napping strategies, and transport canada even tried to get us to have a napping policy by requiring our fatigue management plan to include a section on napping strategies. That section simply said something like "we don't allow napping at [railway] we do other things instead like having our employees walk the train". There are different requirements for the FMP now but there is a similar game, they have napping as a fatigue mitigation measure in the FMP but there is no actual policy on napping so it's still prohibited.

I should also add, the entire job is on-call, it's a 24/7/365 operation, and there is only some ability to tell when I will go to work. This industry is insane, fatigue has been highlighted as an issue by regulators for decades now, policies are ignorant of realities, and the railways act like fatigue is never a factor in any incident.

Some time ago, I used to work for my city's government. I was a "page", working in a library setting for around a decade. I knew a majority of system processes and the inner workings of circulation procedures, yet, there was a hard stop one day to "cross-training" and our entire ILS was switched over the course of several months. When the dust finally settled, I found that there had been changes to how Pages could access the ILS, and we could no longer do anything regarding circulation. The only things we could do was only check in items, do item look-ups, collect "Count As Used" items, couldn't do anything regarding checking out books to customers, placing holds, or even make new library card entries. We, Pages, were collectively asked to stop answering phone calls due to some information leaks from other libraries' Pages.

Still, sometimes, staff have to leave the desk for whatever reasons they have and it just so happens that a Page is called to "hold the desk" until they come back. When a customer comes up to us, we can only help them out with very limited questions, but I was so jaded at that point that I usually ended up saying stuff along the lines of "I can check in stuff for you, tell you where things are, but other than that, I'm just a figurehead. Between you and I, admin doesn't want us pages to do anything outside the job description for some reason, sorry." One guy, I recall, said in response "well, why are you even here if you can't do anything"?. My response was "I'm fiscally trapped here until I finish community college. I'm not even studying to be a librarian.". He took it in good humor, thankfully. A minor thing I also remember was "15 minute breaks if you work less than six hours." I constantly tested that one routinely. My best time was around thirty minutes.

Edit: changed [the] -> [to] in Paragraph 2.

My boss. He's constantly expecting me to do more work for no extra money, always worried about deadlines and performance and whether the business is sustainable or whether it should go in another direction. But yet he's constantly slacking off, distracted by other projects, putting stuff off until tomorrow and so on. Sometimes he'll wander off for hours at a time fiddling with some personal project or crazy unworkable idea that he thinks somehow might just be the next big thing. Meanwhile I'm expected to drop everything should something unexpected come up - be that production, marketing, customer service or whatever else happens.

It's exhausting and, frankly, at times downright unprofessional. I don't really know what to do about it because I mostly love my job and there are a lot of perks - I can take time off whenever I want, the commute is crazy fast, it's very easy for me to work around childcare requirements and so on. I can even take a few hours off just because it's a nice day, which is great. But that guy!