How the 'lazy girl job' took over work TikTok
bbc.com
bbc.com
This influencer branded it “lazy girl job” but this concept is wildly popular among young people of all genders right now.
I was invited to be a mentor in a career-focused program for college students. The number of students who wanted advice about how to get easy remote jobs where they didn’t have to do any work was depressing.
The ideas they got from social media were wild. It was usually more Reddit than TikTok, but the concepts were the same: Overly confident internet posts had convinced them that most people don’t actually do much work at work and that it was all one big game. They thought remote work was the final piece of the puzzle that would turn these jobs into easy paychecks so they could have near total freedom without having to give up more than a couple hours per day to send some emails.
The weirdest part for me was how much they wanted to believe these internet influencers over the mentors in the group. It was hard to get some people to understand that the influencers were selling them a dream as a way to increase their follower count. I guess people will always have an appetite for hearing what they want to hear.
If a company has those jobs, it means their managers/leadership are doing the exact same lazy job, so you are in good company.
An alternative is simply to be good at your job and get your work done and have spare time. If you want behaviors to change in this situation, businesses need to give better direct incentives for finishing work early. Right now, the reward for getting your work done quickly is more work.
It's 2023 and text submission still doesn't auto-add the /s where it's needed. Is that ever going to be fixed?
3 hours of meetings and then killing time on Slashdot. Except I had to be in the office, in a button-up shirt, and had to commute.
I've done 50+ hour weeks at home, but when it's slow I'll take meetings while prepping a slow-cooker dinner. I had a boss that use to do the 1-on-1 meetings with his team (e.g. me) while running errands. I got used to hearing the sound of self-checkout machines while on that call, lol.
I thought he was being sarcastic. I could be wrong. Intent can be tough to suss out of text.
> I've been a consultant pulling well north of six figures and had weeks in the office doing frak-all.
I'm sure it has happened somewhere at sometime; I have heard an anecdote or two. Perhaps three now.
But based on what I've witnessed over 30 years of onsite calls (more fields than I can count) - the assertion that "Most office jobs outside of the software engineering ... People do very little actual work" - is false.
Massively, bizarrely false. Conspiracy-theory level false.
If it were true in the slightest, I'd of witnessed it repeatedly. I would have met people who could testify of it over and over. If not one in field, than another.
What I (along with most folks) witness are employees doing actual work, many working to the point of their own physical detriment.
Based on widespread reality, I rate the assertion as physics-grade false.
Maybe once a month or so a real software issue or feature request will come up, I'll spend 2-3 days implementing it, then another couple weeks will go by with it going through the (heavily manual) testing process.
Don't get me wrong, those handful of days of work a month are not uncommonly pivotal in sealing multi-million dollar deals, so I'm earning my keep. But it would be nice if my employer recognized that I have 90%+ slack in my schedule, and let my fuck off and do my own (easily interuptable) thing.
This is likely one of the reasons companies want people back in the office.
If you apply the Pareto Principle, they aren’t wrong. As you go up in the org, it all becomes mostly a political game. YMMV of course.
Where's the lie? Most people don't accomplish anything of actual value at work, and promotion and advancement is a big game.
Most businesses become bloated like this because the kind of people who become managers have been waiting their whole lives to build the biggest team possible.
I wish that were some sort of hyperbole or exaggeration, but it's reality.
That's an entirely different thing. You're moving the goalposts far away from how "lazy girl job" is defined above. People who aren't doing anything meaningful can also be working very hard at it.
The "send a couple quickie emails a day and make $100k" remote job is a fantasy. They may exist for a time, but unless the employer is printing money, the ride will usually stop as soon as someone bothers to look. Also I think it's very unlikely to get hired into one, especially as an inexperienced person.
The only area where I think one could be even remotely stable is in some critical area with lots of domain knowledge and experience is necessary. Once you've you've put in your time you can switch towards leaning on your experience to provide sufficient value to stay employed than your hard work.
That you don’t understand or can’t comprehend what someone is doing does not, at all, mean that they aren’t doing anything or that they have no value.
[1] https://www.penguin.com.au/books/bullshit-jobs-9780141983479
Maybe so. But those business models don't just grow on trees. And once you have one, they don't maintain themselves, either. Someone competent has to keep that business model spinning off that kind of money.
In other words, even in that kind of company, competence actually matters for at least a subset of the employees.
This much is true. Most people don't do much work at work. The difference between working in the office and working remote is that when you're at the office, your "pretend to work" time is spent discreetly browsing social media on your phone. When you're at home, you can spend it on things more conducive to your health like going to the gym or walking your dog.
I have a hypothesis that the top 10% of performers (could really be as little as 1%) in society are usually very upset by the fact that 90% of people want to do as little work as possible, and those top 10% performers are holding the rest of us hostage via in-office requirements and constant electronic monitoring, but I think since 2020 these people are now losing that battle and the 90% no longer have to pretend to give a shit what the 10% think anymore
I mostly did nothing the last few months, but everything I did was correct. Not that it was perfect, there is always stuff to be improved, but the little I did was good enough, filled the requirements and was documented both outside (what it does, for the lead engineer and management) and inside the code (how it works, for the poor soul who would inherit the mission).
Maybe it's a tale I tell myself, but I like to think I wasn't a net negative overall.
mismatched priorities make it impossible to integrate and sure enough there are crashes.
i see similarities with work speeds and work demands. senior dev who goes hard generates friction with managers or team members who are not able or willing to do the same. this will lead to conflict.
The 10% that do all your work for you?
I guess that's seems pretty shortsighted. When I go to work, I expect the asshole (that just watches me get shit done) to be decent company, worth a laugh or really willing to grab things I need.
If you can't bother to 'pretend' then I'm going to stop pretending for you too. I guess we'll see who gets to keep getting paid.
You know, have some decency.
Why was it depressing for you? For me it's great to see how people are slowly managing to readjust their priorities and attach less importance to work in order to focus on things that matter more to them. And if they can do that - its' fantastic!
Well, the definition of addictive is quite literally "cannot stop doing once you have started" (Cambridge dictionary), so not really.
I do see your point, though, I grew up without social media nor internet so I have plenty of offline things I like doing. But you have to consider that most of these young kids grew up with social media and mobile games as their primary, and often only, source of entertainment. Their addictive nature makes it really hard for them to find other interests in life, especially considering that parents often leave their kids on the smartphone to keep them quiet.
another hot boomer take. how you feel about kids on your lawn?
i remember my grandparents saying similar things about nintendo in the 90s.
my dad told me stories about them complaining about his white water rafting hobby before that.
Calling someone a “boomer” for having a different opinion is only slightly less useless and childish than calling them a “Karen”, especially when the reasoning boils down to “you dislike things I like, and my only argument against your opinion is actually a personal attack.”
- there’s no need for most remote jobs to hire only from the USA, and that
- 60-80k is a huge salary in most of the world?
I've been anticipating being replaced by cheaper software developers working remotely, ever since I graduated college in the 90s. It never happened.
As far as I can tell there are a bunch of reasons: language, time zone, shared cultural conventions, plain-old-racism, the value in at least having the option of occasional meeting in meatspace. Some of that is finally changing due to the pandemic forcing it on people. But I still think people are having trouble finding reliable employees in a country they don't understand, even though there are many millions of them available.
and then there is the idea that you have no idea if i am who i really am, or if i'm the one doing the work. i could be a face on Teams Calls for what is essentially 5 Vietnamese kids, and we're all in different jurisdictions, so if we decide to rip off your IP, who would you sue? could you even get that lawsuit off the ground?
and for all that risk you're eating 4% to do currency conversions & wire transfers. or else i'm standing up an offshore subsidiary at a cost and then dealing with payroll tax, filing costs, local HR and accounting, etc, as well. there is, potentially, a lot of liability and headache in that.
and then there is the cultural, language, timezone, etc. difference.
You still need people in the same timezone as you, usually
this should be all jobs. companies look at you in much the same way, and will drop you like you're on fire if there is a need.
And you wonder why execs are pushing so hard for RTO!
Indeed. I don’t see the point of marketing this to women instead of men (or both!)… Is this some kind of low key, maybe interiorised, sexism?
Past even that: Given how vastly more complex the business of routine living is (compared to my parents' generation), I'm hesitant to throw shade on folks seeking less demands from employment.
The name is over the top, but the concept isn't: a low-stress job that earns you a living wage without pushing you to burnout.
The people doing these difficult and generally back breaking jobs won't be too happy spending 10 hours a day working while the lazy girl is drinking mojitos in the swimming pool.
Let me know where, please. I guess I'm trash, but I've never stood a chance/have the resume to make it past ATS...
Edit: Also, some of these are posted on Reddit every now and then and create a real hubbub, e.g., some email pusher for Uber recently - https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s9iviz/the_misogy...
Companies can't spin up new workers in an instant. So for some jobs, they'll need to keep people on staff but not really working. They're there for specific tasks, or when more effort is needed, or for intermittent operations.
A lot of office jobs aren't like factory lines, where output is constant and directly related to input. That doesn't make the job bullshit. It just means that "40 hours per week" is an arbitrary number, the result of centuries of conflict between labor and management, and there's nothing sacred about it.
The amount that the job is worth depends on the job and the company, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with hours served. They need an employee to be prepared to fill that job, and the pay is negotiated on that basis. There's no reason to be expect it to be a straightforward function of prevailing hourly wage and 40 hours per week.