Office Space
1999 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Mike Judge
A depressed white-collar worker tries hypnotherapy, only to find himself in a perpetual state of devil-may-care bliss that prompts him to start living by his own rules, and hatch a hapless attempt to embezzle money from his soul-killing employers.
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372 comments on Hacker News
At a tech company, engineers mostly work on software that is the company’s product, and as such its functionality, reliability etc. are high company priorities, and the whole company is focused on producing and selling those products.
At a non-tech-company, that’s not the case. Which means you end up with something much closer to the movie “Office Space”, where software is just considered a necessary evil that’s worked on by what’s essentially the software development arm of an IT department, where any opportunity to cut costs or headcount is considered a good idea, where “best practices” take a back seat to “any practice that Bob can make work.”
A lot of companies these days are somewhere between the two: their main product is not software, but the company depends on a website to interact with a large number of customers: banks, insurance companies, web stores, etc. In that case, you tend to get the worst of both worlds, naturally.
Office Space[1], for those who somehow haven't seen it yet.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
I mean, the movie "Office space" could have taught you that lesson almost 30 years ago.
No, it's still an 8 hour workday. The workday is not based on how efficiently the work is done, labour laws decide how long the workday is.
I can imagine being a bicycle messenger because I was one. Even in the early 2000s it was an anachronistic profession, but my workday was more fun than any other job I've done. It was very satisfying work. The movie Office Space is about how staring at a screen all day is not the end-all-be-all of human existence.
> "PC LOAD LETTER? The fuck does that mean!?" — Michael Bolton, Office Space (1999)
The error message is mocked in the 1999 comedy film Office Space, when employee Michael Bolton becomes frustrated as he doesn't know what it means.Later in the film he and his coworkers are shown destroying the printer with a baseball bat.
I can recommend the documentary Office Space, it goes into great detail about this.
One of the great onscreen code moments was in Superman III¹ where Richard Pryors’ character has written some “impossible” program and when the listing is shown on screen it’s pretty much five screens of BASIC REM statements.
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1. A movie which exists primarily to set up a joke in Office Space.
Hi HN,
My friend Alex Repty and I made this story game about pull requests and collaborative software dev. It's meant to be a little absurd while playing on current trends. The theme was inspired by the TV show Scrubs, and the movies Office Space and Dogma.
You play a frontend developer trying to get a reasonable PR merged from your colleague who owns the codebase. There are seven possible endings, and a playthrough takes about 5–10 minutes. No signup required.
Alex came up with the original story idea and I built the game using a JS port of Ink https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ and a custom React frontend based on a template I'd previously created for another project, then added the UI. Writer/editor Erik Barnes then helped polish the story, and then I added multimedia to round it off.
We used a state variable called "tension" that built up with the choices made. In testing though, we recognized we should probably adjust the total tension calculation in the final scene so players would be judged overall on their later choices than earlier ones.
If you give it a try, I'd love to hear which ending you got. Cheers.
Reminds me of that guy with "people skills" from Office Space movie
"Why couldn't customers take the requirements to the software people?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkmuI5W694o
The guy who created SV actually WAS a software dev in SV back in the late 80s though (albeit briefly). And obviously had a career of fairly subversive, out there humor (Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, King of The Hill, Idiocracy).
BBT was created by someone who just did a bunch of other sitcoms.
I couldn't stand BBT either, but I knew by default that Silicon Valley was going to be good.
I think people underestimate the loss of physical media in general and video stores in particular.
Physical media use to account for half of a films eventual gross. Some films even did better. See every cult classic (Office Space comes to mind easily).
When you’re making films that have to be produced for second run distribution on physical media they had to fit on VHS cassette.
Studio VHS production ended in 2006. Netflix VOD began in 2007. At that point the length of your film stopped mattering. It took a few more years for studios and directors to realize it, but that was the actual end of economic constraints.
That line is so damn good i recommend everyone who doesn't get it to watch Office Space.
Crazy jeremiad here. This never existed as a norm across the industry outside pockets like Bell Labs. Office Space was not a film about Google's pioneering new management philosophy.
Yeah, that's it exactly. Films aren't reality, although they can be a reflection of what we might think how reality should go. Af the end of the day, films are made to capture an audience, not to paint a perfect portrait of the real world.
Also, there are counterexamples to that person's claim, such as the film Before Sunrise, which is an excellent romance film that doesn't involve an arc where the characters are indifferent or dislike each other at first. The films Sideways and even Office Space defy that trope as well.
I haven't used claude in a week (after being a heavy user) and if you have ever seen the movie office space where Peter enters his stage of ecstasy that's what life feels like right now.
The general population's standard of living HAS gone backwards too fast.
Just look at something like Office Space. Just twenty seven years ago, it was a satire of the indignities and disrespect of work life. Today, the movie's work environment would be incredibly cushy.
I mean, Office Space and Silicon Valley are legit funny. I doubt how I can be "frustratingly sad" after watching either of the two because in Office Space, (spoilers ahead) but the ending is actually quite happy and more about realizing life's about what you want and it might not be a desk job and Silicon Valley is hilarious in terms of how it parodies the 2010s tech culture but its more about "look what tech has become" rather than "oh my god everything sucks, all idiots everywhere, we're doomed" type energy.
Also a lot of Silicon Valley stuff is kindda bs esp the arc where one single dude figures out such a massive leap in tech so quickly and then solves P=NP using freaking AI and then doesn't sell out to Hooli. You gotta suspend a lot of disblief for that but people don't talk about how unrealistic the main plot is
Also the episode where Jared has to explain scrum to vet developers like Dinesh and Gilfoyle. Like you seriously think they didn't know what scum was before meeting Jared?
I hear people make this comparison all the time, and while it is facially a bit funny I guess, I really don't think it holds up in any serious way.
What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.
* The primary plot point of idiocracy is that poor (and thus, stupid - the film never explains why this correlation exists in that universe, though) people are the only ones who reproduce. For this reason, there is evolutionary pressure toward decreased intelligence. It's an odious premise on its face IMO, and certainly not what is happening in the USA: our birth rates are declining _because_ people are not economically stable.
* President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn. And he seems to be sincere and transparent. Trump's illusion runs precisely counter to this: he has every resource he can possibly need, but chooses to enrich himself and his friends instead of advancing the public interest.
Virtually every plot point of Idiocracy can be broken down this way. I see very, very little of the film universe that is consistent with our sociopolitical trajectory.
If you want a Mike Judge film that shines light on uncomfortable truths about 21st-century America, the obvious choice is Office Space.
The late 90s were full of media that questioned reality and authority - like X-Files, The Matrix, Dark City, all sorts of websites about conspiracy theories and UFOs, etc. The zeitgeist was full of speculation about hidden truths. The cultural mood was defiant and sardonic. There was rap, rap-rock, Beavis and Butthead, Fight Club, Office Space... One of the most popular pro wrestlers in the world played a character who beat up his boss and gave him the middle finger. Then after 9/11 it kinda seemed like suddenly the TV shows were all about cops and soldiers. Admittedly, my memories might be somewhat deceiving me. But I do feel that the mood suddenly shifted, much more than the actual damage done to America by the attack should have justified.
Reminds me of the movie Office Space.
Or Office Space (warning, Rated R for some language and crude distractions / conversations.) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804
Still, it documents the typical work culture of the US in the late 1990s / early 2000s. It's sad and amazing how much of that remains the same.
I acknowledge being hung up on titles. I used to give titles too much attention as a very new person on my very first job...then over the decades, i learned not to get hung up on titles...but i guess my current $dayjob has sooooo many flaws (organizationally, they're very amateurish), that it seems i got re-sensitized to titles. Here, titles seem to give a person everything from significantly better pay, to better authority, to training offerings, etc., etc...even beyond the point of being rational and sound. Its almost to the point of something silly like in the Office Space movie. So yeah, i guess the dire state of my current employer has made me a bit more negative than i used to be, and now focusing on crap like titles. ;-) I guess they got me (for now)!
If your place is indeed the least sweatshop job, then congrats and enjoy the good parts! :-)
its a reference to the movie Office Space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2-1wcJYrWA
The day before the night I first saw Office Space, way after becoming an underground hit, I had my first encounter with the TPS communication barrage. It made the movie funnier and my work life sadder.
Similar thing happened with Idiocracy recently...
Someone told me early in my career that the longer you work in an office, the more Office Space transforms from a comedy to a documentary. They weren't wrong...
I watched Office Space with a bunch of coworkers at a previous job. It's a funny movie that most people in startups view as a parody of big company office life. Our company didn't function like the movie.
Office Space was released in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. So, of course office jobs (particularly software jobs) would decrease when that bubble popped.
But it's not as a result of that movie.
> I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics
Same! Or at least I got into them as a young kid I don’t remember the exact age, it was probably a few years older but definitely tweens max.
I’m also not sure why I liked them so much, other than that I loved computers and always knew I’d end up working in the industry, so maybe it was like a window into that world that I liked. I also loved the movie Office Space, so maybe I just had a thing for office satire.
> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.
To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.
> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.
> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.
>There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s.
As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void.
Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on.
I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up.
No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.
Have you never seen the documentary Office Space where penny rounding goes terribly wrong?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnPBSy5FsOc
Cue the scene from Office Space where Jennifer Anniston's waitress character is required to have a minimum of 7 pieces of flair on her uniform, per corporate franchise policy. And that movie is from the 90s!
She might be, but it might also be the case that there are so many actors, to be "well known", you need to be in the 0.001%
I probably have seen movies with her in it, but I have no recollection of her as an actor. I did recognize her husband as Samir from Office Space, though I couldn't tell you his name.
It’s a reference to the movie Office Space and the Milton character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space
I do get your point, but in this particular case, it's a quote from Office Space (1999) and while the movie is a comedy, I don't think it's fair to say that it was specifically a joke about or making light of sexual violence in prisons. The characters in the movie are also obviously scared about the possibility[1], so I'm not even sure I would characterise it as a simple joke (it is used as a callback in the form of a joke later but it is again something the character is having a nightmare about[2] and the joke is based on the absurdity of the phrase and the naivete of the main character, not what the phrase is referencing).
This is also not a uniquely US-specific thing, lots of UK dramas have made similar jokes (for just one example, see [3]). Obviously I expect you would find those objectionable too, my point was just that it's not a US-specific thing -- humans have a tendency to make light of things like that as humour and some people understandably don't see the humour in it. Such is the human condition...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBzvMLW0ii4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htCJTPu8GPE [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM8DfCgVWx8&t=19
It's a reference to Office Space, one of the all time best movies ever made.
"pounding in the ass" is a cultural reference to the 1999 movie Office Space.
This is a quote from “Office Space” by Mike Judge of “King of the Hill” and “Silicon Valley” fame. it is a great movie you should check it out!
> The movie showcases culture and human nature more than any particular era.
Most of my middle management experiences has been between Office Space and Better off Ted.
One with "Don't care" as an answer and the other says "Care more" as its.
Those are the two extremes of the genre.
Ref: Office Space (Movie) Flare at the restaurant (I believe it's a spoof on TGI Fridays / Chillis etc)
If you have not seen Office Space ... It has a couple raunchy things and it's general political correctness calibration is circa ~2000 USA so go in with about that level of culture expectations.
Having said that, it's a GREAT movie which is practically a comedic documentary of US office politics and tropes. Though some of the standards have shifted a tiny bit, the general culture is still relevant today in many if not most offices. The movie showcases culture and human nature more than any particular era.
Relevant Office Space movie scene: https://youtu.be/to_e1N4xovQ?si=V6EVep8WqJ8zWisG
Ironically people at the time were not discounting Y2K going awry. Parents told me years later that new years was spent a bit more tense with the cellar stocked with cans and booze. We make fun of it now but people had concerns about the supply chain and what might result from that if everything borked at once. I guess the guys in Office Space managed to save the world in time (initech in that movie was patching fintech software for y2k).
This article asks various Navy men their thoughts. This one by Lieutenant Commander Jeff Vandenengel stuck out.
- Office Space is the best submarine movie. TPS reports, multiple bosses, a defective printer, coming in on Saturday, the oversight team of “the Bobs” that are “there to help,” and the engineers are not allowed to talk to normal people. Incredibly accurate!
The secret to German and French productivity is that when they are at work, they work. They don't spend a lot of time in worthless meetings, surfing the web, or otherwise procrastinating.
Remember the movie "Office Space" when Peter Givens tells the two Bobs that in a week he'd do about 15 minutes of actual work?
If you know you only have to work for 35 hours, its a lot easier to work intensely. If you are expected to work 60 hour a week, you haver to pace yourself. It's just too easy to put things off until the weekend--when you'll have "fewer interruptions" (!)
> It was thankless work that is still glossed over and waved away today, but it was all a very big deal throughout the late 90s.
Mike Judge even made a movie about it! Office Space might be the most recognition turn of the millennium programmers will receive.
> You may have missed that Idiocracy is a pro-eugenics film
I kinda see how you got there, but man.
This is the same guy behind Office Space and Bevis and Butthead. He's poking fun at out of touch intellectuals and consumption. Calling it pro-eugenics though...
I was getting a Terry Pratchett-like-modern-day-Discworld vibe while reading the post (and Office Space film/Douglas Adams-Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference when reading about the office location).
Oh no, it’s worse.
8.5 x 11” is US Letter, or 215.9 x 279.4 mm. We also have US Legal, which as the name implies, is frequently used by legal professions. I have no idea why. It is 8.5 x 14”, or 215.9 x 355.6 mm. Finally, we have US Tabloid (I guess used for small newspapers?), which is 11 x 17”, or 279.4 x 431.8 mm.
And yes, our printers default to US Letter. The line from the movie Office Space: “PC Load Letter? WTF does that mean?” is the printer’s cryptic way of saying “Load Letter-sized paper into the Paper Cassette.”
EDIT: there are are apparently more US-specific sizes I was unaware of, which you can view and compare with others on this site: https://papersizes.io/us/
@aequitas, Hi Johan, nice surpise! After wondering why I couldn't get enough of the movie Office Space, I quit the tech industry completely. Never felt better.
> It was three hours of nearly-continuous meetings, all with the same subject of how bad it was to email a higher-up without first emailing every single person in-between first.
There is a famous scene, in the movie Office Space (1999), where the low level coder is constantly harassed about an idiotic memo because he forgot a cover sheet on his TPS reports.. he is reminded of this 3 times and then some by other people..
It's unreal how the "modern" corporate environment, remains the same as it was in early 90s..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsLUidiYm0w
> continuing to pay checks after terminations and they would deserve the loss of every last cent that is literally a subplot in "office space"...
(if you haven't seen that movie i'd highly recommend it)
I feel like I'm currently experiencing failing upwards.
I had a kid recently and have been putting less into my work, mostly just pushing back on asks and delegating because I don't have time.
All of a sudden I have senior management potential haha.
Feels like I'm living in the movie office space
Exactly, it's the same thing with the Chat Control law in the EU and it reminds me of the scene in the movie Office Space where the consultants are trying to figure out who is doing what in the company.
Basically instead of doing their jobs, the cops expect Apple, Meta et al to intercept all the data, then feed it into some kind of AI black box (not done by them but contracted out to someone else at the taxpayer's expense) that will then decide if you get arrested within the next 48H (I am exaggerating but only slightly)
What are the cops doing instead of doing their jobs? That's my question. Aren't they paid to go out and catch the criminals or do they simply expect to get the identity of people each day that need to be investigated?
The title of that Office Space movie was so visionary.
Yeah it’s kind of wild because if you watch the movie office space today, in some ways, you are like, what is the problem here? Haha. Quite sad actually.
Again, that's generally fine and correct, but when you have 2 separate departments that do almost the identical job, it's time to question whether or not that 2nd department is needed.
My argument wasn't that most management wasn't necessary. Especially for something as complex as modern cars, there is a need for organizing and managing the whole process correctly. What companies like VW suffer from is too much management.
I've worked for one of their sub-brands. It was not a rare sight to see that there were individual contributors that had more than 1 manager while working on a single project. It made no sense from any conceivable standpoint. The movie Office Space comes to mind.
The main problem I saw while working there was that to be considered successful, and get corresponding salary adjustments and promotions, managers increased their head count by any means necessary. That included hiring and promoting more managers who's sole goal was to increase it even further. There came a point where my team had 3 managers at once, all on a different career level, but all responsible for only my team. Division Lead (responsible only for Team X) -> Sub-division Lead (responsible only for Team X) -> Team Lead (responsible only for Team X) -> Team X. That structure made no sense.
Without data about what previous generation said to exactly the same questions, at the same age, the conclusions comparing GenZ attitudes to those of prior generations are completely meaningless.
Maybe GenX youth and young Boomers before them also thought management was fuddy-duddy.
Hippies, hello?
It wasn't GenZ that produced the movie Office Space, The Office sitcom or Dilbert.
(Speaking of which, exposure to these kinds of cultural artifacts likely plays a role in the GenZ outlook.)
For as long as I can remember, corporate management has been ridiculed in popular culture. It's a set of common tropes.
A kindergarten kid saying they want to be a middle manager when they grow up can be predicted to be an instant howler.
Some that I've enjoyed recently (or rewatched):
Good One (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319516/
Strange Darling (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22375054/
The Creator (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/
The Night House (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9731534/
The Empty Man (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5867314/
Possessor (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5918982/
Booksmart (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489887/
Volition (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6385952/
Welcome the Stranger (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5716280/
Time Trap (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4815122/
Wind River (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/
A Dark Song (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4805316/
I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4303340/
Midnight Special (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2649554/
The Devil's Candy (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4935372/
Mr. Holmes (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3168230/
The Witch (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4263482/
A Most Wanted Man (2014) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1972571/
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465522/
Pandorum (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
The Fall (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
In a Savage Land (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151047/
Office Space (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101765/
Don't have Netflix so not sure what's available there, and several might not be wife-friendly. Also I enjoy weird, so YMMV.
Worth mentioning Office Space as well for 99. All three of those films comprise the Pre-Millennium paranoid, existential, system of control trilogy.
I think one reason this is so contentious is that it really depends on where you work.
I have worked at a bank and this is definitely true. I have also worked at Amazon and Meta, and it was significantly less true there. I don't think I knew a single ghost at Amazon.
But it was a common joke at the bank that 'that's Bob. No one knows what Bob's job is'. Straight out of the movie office space.
Everyone I knew who watched the old Office Space movie thought it was funny; I never liked it because it was too much like real life (at the time). Same with the TV show The Office.
I also lift, and I've written and published some fiction that's basically Hawkmoon on a Harley, but when I get as burned out as you seem to be, I can't do anything resembling intellectual or creative work.
Or, rather, I can, but just slowly and half-assed.
It sounds like you need at least a weekend where you do absolutely nothing, like post-hypnotic Peter Gibbons in Mike Judge's 1999 accidental documentary Office Space. Just sleep. It sounds like you're worn the hell out.
It also sounds like you're killing yourself to live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCehccEZzX4
Reminds me of the film Office Space, where Peter is hypnotised to (temporarily) have no cares in the world, but the hypnostist dies before snapping his fingers [0]. There's also a very similar trope in the first episode of the show Black Books, where Manny swallows the "Little Book of Calm", absorbs it into his body, and becomes a Jesus-like calm presence for a while.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfZpEe7KIJ8
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_dMEX_Lke0
JIRA is a form of Stockholm syndrome. Your life truly sucks if you think that makes it better. Some of the least agile places I've worked in used it (over-used it really). To be more agile, ironically.
If you aren't allowed to do anything if there's no Jira ticket, you just created a lot of process friction to get anything done. That's a great way to weed out things like independent thinking, initiative, and pro-active thinking. Jira is the perfect digital idea shredder.
Add approvals and nitpicking middle management and we're back to the good old days of people asking for TPS reports. Which is an Office Space reference, a satirical movie from the pre-agile era (25 years ago). Replace TPS reports with Jira ticket and you got most scrum sweat shops covered. It's uncanny how on point that movie still is. If you think things are different now, go (re-)watch that movie.
Organization wide agile is not a thing. That never really caught on. Processes like scrum are designed for small teams. Attempting to coordinate that with 100 teams is hard. And mostly futile. I've seen the results of companies that attempted this; not pretty. I once attended a sprint planning with 14 teams from all over the world. Because flying them in was expensive they only did that four times a year. So, to get anything on the agenda you needed to plan months ahead or you'd be too late. The agility of an oil tanker. I never saw so many postits in my life. All backed by Jira of course.
Most large companies have no such thing as company wide sprints for the simple reason that that's not a great way to run a company. Mostly they still operate the same way they always did: on quarterly and yearly reporting and targets. If products involve more than just software (like actual hardware of physical goods), that tends to dictate the planning.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
Sideways
Back To The Future
Cinema Paradiso
Spaceballs
Up In Smoke (Cheech & Chong)
The Incredibles
Indiana Jones 1-3
Indiana Jones: Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (Rifftrax only)
Falling Down
Office Space
Man Bites Dog
Nothing To Lose
Idiocracy
Space Mutiny (MST3k)
Goodfellas
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Groundhog Day
Barbie
Full Metal Jacket
Mallrats
Flight Of The Navigator
The Founder
One Hour Photo
---
I'm pretty certain I've rewatched Sideways more than any other film.
Movies I think I truly great I usually only watch once, sometimes twice. If a movie ends and I just sit there thinking to myself… “wow”… I will probably never watch it again.
Movies I watch over and over again are movies that I relate to in some way or find comforting. These are ones I’ve watched at least 5 times, and some I’d bet more than 30 times.
- Back to the Future
- Home Alone
- What About Bob?
- It Could Happen to You
- Matilda
- As Good as It Gets
- Office Space
- Cruel Intentions
- Boiler Room
- Finding Forrester
- Training Day
- Super Troopers
- 8 Mile
- The Transporter
- Elf
- Bad Santa
- Mean Girls
- Saved!
- Garden State
- V for Vendetta
- Thank You for Smoking
- Stick It
- Little Miss Sunshine
- Idiocracy
- Hot Rod
- Run Fatboy Run
- The Other Guys
- Wreck-It Ralph
To name a few.
hackers, office space, grandma’s boy, indiana jones are movies I’ll watch forever.
Office Space, Demolition Man, Fight Club, City of Ghosts (2004), The Big Short, Ghost Dog, Slacker, most Tarantinos, various 60s italo-westerns, BTTF 1 & 2.
But there's a lot more movies coming to mind that deserve a 2nd watching imo, just haven't done so yet. Eg. most Coen Bros ones come to mind.
HR asked us for a favorite movie around 2002 (Office Space came out in 1999 along with the Matrix funny enough) I divulged my love for Office Space which I’m sure led to me being labeled a rebel. So be it.
Yo Peter, just out Channel 9!
[It's the best exam, kind of looks like Anne]
—Office Space (1999), the movie which inspired me to drop out of graduate school and become an electrician
For those that are wondering what this "documentary" is, I'm going to assume the movie "Office Space".
Basing a company's culture on Blind comments is like basing it on the movie Office Space. Sure there's a subset of scenarios that mimic them, but they're both ultimately characitures of the actual job.
I watched Office Space for the first time when I was a teenager many years ago. It's funny how much my perception of the movie changed and how much it resonates with my work now, specially since the last years. One difference is that I have 10 different managers, which makes me dissociate enough from work without the need of any hypnotist.
Because Kelly's Heroes is the world's finest movie and revolves around an intra-preneurial enterprise that hacks the mechanism of war for personal profit.
Basically its like Office Space and Three Kings rolled into one.
Having not worked in a large corporate environment in a couple of years now, and thus having not seen every type of meeting and organizational process under the sun prefixed with "pre" in quite a while, this title gave me a bit of a flashback to that time.
I'd forgotten how emblematic "pre"-prefixed meetings are of larger organizations that have meetings to plan for other meetings, e.g. "Pre-planning", "Pre-OKR brainstorm".
Seeing pre-meetings always reminds me of a scene in Office Space where "The Bobs" are seen [1.] in front of a whiteboard that clearly reads "Planning to Plan". It's a subtle visual of the movie's central theme of poking fun at corporate culture.
It's been a real treat being in an environment where we don't plan to plan, or have such a vague concept of our meetings that they're best described as a "syncs".
[1.] https://i.imgur.com/4d0FE.jpeg
Office Space, The Matrix, Fight Club
Arguably all the same movie
"Office Space" was a 1999 movie based on Mike Judge's Silicon Valley experience from the 80's. "Silicon Valley" was his updated take on it I suppose.
i think the best way to describe it is to consider what an office in these types of buildings looks like.
consider a detective office in a movie from like the '50s. the office is small, primary illumination is from large, openable windows, maybe there's a front section for a secretary. that happens to be pretty more or less around the ideal size for an apartment as well, though for more bedrooms you probably need to merge adjacent offices.
now consider the office block from Office Space. it's extremely large and dark in the middle. it is so large that there is no way you could possibly get natural light into the middle easily. in Office Space that's kind of the point, the darkness and required artificial lighting makes it super depressing and a dystopian commentary on the modern economy. who would want to live in an interior like that?
> If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave.
Every big, old, stagnant company is full of lifers who won’t move on for any number of reasons. The pay is good enough, at least it’s stable, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, yada yada yada. There are people in my life who work in jobs like that. They will openly admit that it sucks, but they are risk averse due to a combination of personality and family circumstances, so they stick it out. Their situation sucks, and they assume everything else sucks too. And often, because they’ve only worked in one place so long, they have a hard time finding other opportunities due to a combination of overly narrow experience and ageism.
The movie Office Space is about exactly the sort of company that is filled with lifers who hate their jobs but stay on the path of least resistance.
(I know absolutely nothing about working at Red Hat, so I’m not trying to make a specific claim about them. But I’ve known people in this situation at IBM and other companies that are too big for their own good.)
These are just my favorites, and in the order of which the popped into my mind.
- Office Space, 1999 (especially for people who work at offices) - The Matrix, 1999 - Fight Club, 1999 :)
Umm, what else? - Spirited Away, 2001 (and many others from Miyazaki) - Requiem for a Dream, 2000 (Very Heavy addiction-related film! I actually got watery eyes just by typing this, I've seen it too many times.) - Joker, 2019 - Full Metal Jacket, 1987 (and many others from Kubrick, such as Dr. Strangelove and The Shining) - Django Unchained, 2012 (and many others from Tarantino, at least Pulp Fiction) - Alien, 1979 - The Silence of the Lambs, 1991 - Saw, 2004
I made a bit longer list, so that I can share the link to my friends.
Actually there are many quirky ones which came to my mind, such as Borat, the South Park movie, Team America, Airplane! (alternatively titled Flying High!), Idiocracy and Hangover, but I wouldn't say these are in the must-see category. Actually I wouldn't even recommend these to most people, if I didn't know what kind of humor they like.
Are "TPS Reports" a real thing?!
I thought they were just a jokey gag name that they created in the Office Space movie to represent pointless busy work. This is like all the times as an adult I finally understood a joke I heard in The Simpsons back when I was a kid!
I think you completely missed the point of the post you replied to (a reference to the plot of the movie Office Space).
I was thinking Mike Judge's TV show Silicon Valley as well as Office Space
I think the reference is to Office Space the movie not a television show?
For that reason, Office Space is widely considered the most disturbing movie ever filmed: https://youtu.be/N9wsjroVlu8
it was the dumbest question ever, too! that might have made it worse. "What happens to the virus plot line in the movie Office Space?" something along those lines.
Lawrence said it best in the movie Office Space.
Feels like watching the film "Office Space".
I once talked to a guy who worked at the CIA who said "when people ask me what movie most accurately reflects working at the CIA, I say Office Space".
The 90s with its apolitical cinema like Saving private Ryan or Forrest gump that certainly are not pro american propaganda or other great movies like the Matrix that do not denounce late stage capitalism as soul crushing and has no themes that could be interpreted about taking red pills and feeling more like yourself.
The 90s had a different context sure, capitalism was peaking, we didn't have the crushing reality of the post 2008 world, or the crazy chest bumping Murica militarism of the post 9/11 era. But the 2000s scare, the internet fear, the office jobs being boring/grey and soulless. The slight fear of science and progress (see Jurassic park, gattaca, fifth element), the work culture being inhumane and dehumanising (matrix, office space, clerks, american beauty), the same happened in music with grunge being one of the main genres of the decades.
All of this art was made in the backdrop of probably the most optimistic period of time, Disney had a renaissance, america absolute cleared the floor in the first gulf war, the stock market had an impossible never ending rise, pop music was happier than ever and fashion was in the most sexy, thin, in your face hotness ever.
If you only want to enjoy the 90s happiness without seeing the fact tons of counter art was being made and that our current cyniscim isn't only a product of the post 2008 economic stagnation but also comes from the seeds that were planted at the height of the cultural hedonism of the 90s then you are just straight ignoring some of the biggest hits of that decade.
Reminds me of the salami slicing technique in the movie Office Space.
And in any sane company, the minute a product person says "oh this egregious error is a problem for some other department" they'd be fired immediately, so it still sounds like a useful exercise.
I'll be the first admit I don't have a ton of respect for the "product owner" role which has morphed largely into Tom Smykowski from Office Space[0] but the places I've seen them be actually effective and net positives for an organization are where they have the reach and authority to demand things like this be fixed, regardless of what department is "in charge." IMO a product owner who doesn't do this is refusing to do one of the few useful product owner roles.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223
Office Space was more of a documentary than a satire.
I am curious that nobody has not mentioned a great movie "Office Space". A brilliant sarcastic comedy about office culture in the late nineties. I think the time is ripe for a sequel.
This is what popped into my mind instantly when reading the parent comment as well!
For anyone who has not seen the movie Office Space, you need to see it. While you are at it, also watch the series Silicon Valley.
I don't understand your second sentence but you might want to look at Office Space - it's a movie about software developers made by the same creator as Silicon Valley (Mike Judge).
> Office Space turns 20: How the film changed the way we work (2019)
It really did not changed anything. This movie is a documentary.
You are definitely reinventing something that already exists: Consulting. I worked as a consultant on projects in a model similar to the one you describe in the early 2000's.
This does work. It just requires a sales staff. And usually a 'bench' (the ability to pay developers in-between jobs).
And to be clear: it's only one way of approaching the current set of problems caused by well-intentioned management consultants.
FYI: The cult-classic movie "Office space" actually dealt with what the fallout from management consultants looks like (specifically with software development)
When I talk to people about my love for the movie Office Space (and Mike Judge), they always tell me about Idiocracy. I still haven't seen it, but I feel like this kind of thing would have a place in that movie (or perhaps even Beavis and Butthead).
> programmers weren't a well paid or well regarded job...and programming was considered "for nerds"
It was similar in the US in the 90s. The pay was OK but nothing compared to the past 15 years or so, and socially it was not well regarded at all. The movie "Office Space" depicts what it was like pretty accurately.
one of my best friends going back to college (we're over 40), has never seen any Star Wars movies and it makes my wonder why we're even friends
years ago, I had a coworker from Pakistan; he liked to watch movies, but it took several Office Space references before he got around to it
I recommend the 1999 American film “Office Space” or the 2003 British television series “The Office” if you somehow think this is a novel sentiment. Or “Bartelby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville from 1856.
I hope this made it into an episode of Office Space or something.
haha I have thought about this. I saw office Space right before I got my first coding job. So I expected the lifestyle of the typical engineer to be in line with the 'drive an old car, live in a small apartment' representation in the movie.
Twenty something years later never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd have insane compensation and perks and yet an even shittier desk situation than depicted in that movie lol.
As a young teenager learning to code in the mid/late 90s I distinctly remember two influential movies: Office Space and Hackers. It wasn’t until the dot com boom that I realized you could have a lot of fun and stay out of prison.
I don't know if Office Space is the cultural touchstone it was 20 years ago, but I think this can be neatly summarized by the observation that: "But real gangsta-ass [gangstas][0] don't flex nuts 'Cause real gangsta-ass [gangstas] know they got 'em"
[0] A shockingly large amount of the dialogue in the movie has to be censored for broadcast television, including this song.
Have you ever seen the movie Office Space? There’s a bit about “TPS reports” where multiple managers individually correct the main character on a new cover sheet. I’ve experienced that myself. The movie portrays it comedically but IRL it’s kind of a demoralizing experience. A bit soul crushing actually.
What you're claiming is in direct contradiction to main plotline of Office Space.
Granted, it's a movie, but given its following, I reckon its existence is sufficient to undermine your guarantee.
They made a documentary about it years ago titled 'Office Space'.
I was expecting to see a link to that scene from the Office Space movie!
FWIW I've still got several HP LaserJet 4M+ printers and I did configure one of them to show that message when there's no paper ; )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER
I worked at a place where they had an entire division of people basically filled the role of Tom Smykowski from Office Space.
It was both pitiful and amazing. They didn’t really produce any valuable output, but by scheduling meetings and debriefings and briefings, etc they were able to engage at high levels. The dude in charge somehow took over project managers, and they literally started building these colored briefing binders inspired by some History channel documentary the featured the President’s daily briefing by the CIA.
At the end, I started losing talented engineers to folks getting significant promotions to attend meetings with bigshots. The rationale was that in order to deliver the “CIA briefing” to the VP of Custodial Services, you had to be a Director or something.
It's not humor in general that's disliked, it's seeing the same few dozen tired references that it's seen as normal to repeat ad nauseum on more social media type sites like reddit.
That said, Office Space is my favorite movie so don't take it personally, mmkay? Yeahh, that'd be great.
> I highly suggest watching this lovely movie before making this move.
I love Office Space to death, but that ending paints a very rosy picture. How Peter might feel about his choice two years down the line is a different story.
Have you seen the ending to the movie office space? If not - I highly suggest watching this lovely movie before making this move.
But yes, your future job could give you a more happy life balance. Or it could be worse. Or the same.
The English language adds yet another adjectival phrase (e.g., "federal pound me in the ass prison" from the movie "Office Space"):
"Shoot-me-in-the-ass Hot Pockets!"
You can't buy advertising like this! Were I a store owner I would immediately markup my Hot Pocket prices.
The movie Office Space is about this exact problem. Why go above and beyond the bare minimum when management doesn't care? (And then is so oblivious that they fire some of the hardest workers?)
I'm personally the sort who gets frustrated when there isn't enough to do or when it's clear other people on the team aren't carrying their weight, but I can't say I blame the "why try harder than I have to" crowd, but I try to avoid companies with that culture. I've seen some companies avoid it by trying to punish and fire people to ensure a 'minimum quality bar'. That works better than letting obvious negligence slide, probably, but still isn't particularly motivating to go above and beyond. The "pay well but make it understood that you're paying for quality" method is way better as long as you still keep a close eye on that quality and it doesn't just turn into "pay well and screw around" (it's not hard to find stories of this in FAANGs in the past decade).
Your point about this reminds me of this scene in Office Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_1lIFRdnhA
This movie really spoke to me during the pandemic and I'm guessing it has for many others as well.
That being said... I do think it's more about who you work with that makes work more enjoyable. I find extra motivation at work for mundane things like working on tech debt if it means making my colleague's job easier and such.
I've found nothing more frustrating in jobs than when I can't help but care about things the company doesn't care about.
If your company doesn't care about 50K I don't think there's a need for me to convince you to care about it. If they have no mechanism for either raising those savings opportunities to leadership and prioritizing fixes, or rewarding someone for saving them 50k on their own, they pretty clearly don't care.
So if you're in a company where nothing that you could do from your own initiative would matter to the company (maybe you can save them 50k but they are spending 400 million a year so it's a drop in the bucket), you can still care about success for job security, any sort of bonus or stock compensation, etc. But how much you should care maybe should be proportional to how much you can influence.
Maybe the company is being irrational to not care, maybe they aren't, but you also choosing not to care about the things they don't care about seems healthy to me.
(It's good to remember that while "Quiet Quitting" is the buzzword of the day, this is also literally the premise of a 25 year old movie, Office Space. Literally down to the level of "it's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I don't care" and "Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ")
Conflict with neighbors is a common theme. But also friendship with neighbors. Wilson Wilson Jr in Home Improvement. Lawrence in Office Space. All the guys in King of the Hill. Even in some which start off with frustrations about neighbors sometimes shows strong bonds between them later like Grand Torino or Family Matters or even The Simpsons.
I think a lot of TV shows and movies show a lot of different perspectives of neighbors, and I'm not convinced it's mostly negative. Lots show some amount of strife with neighbors, but even a romance movie will often show some amount of conflict between the protagonists.
> the cost structure of your job
You've seen Office Space, right?
GPT will do the CRUD and you will do the standup and go to the meetings.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223
(Yes, you will have to use some deviously clever prompt engineering to get GPT to accept this arrangement. I suggest language games .. show some "initiative")
My first thought when I saw this story was Milton in the movie Office Space. Google is coming for your stapler!
This is straight out of the movie Office Space! They have cake.
> Mike Judge did Silicon Valley already.
I've seen Silicon Valley episodes, it is not at all in the same spirit as Office Space. Office Space spoke to the absurdity playing out in offices throughout the nation. Silicon Valley speaks to the VC-fueled privileged absurdity playing out in ... SV.
> Mike Judge's current work is a soon-to-be reboot of King of the Hill.
That's really unfortunate, King of the Hill was such a mediocre/milquetoast message, at least from what little I saw.
It was also done (incorrectly) in Office Space, noting the inspiration from Superman in the text of the film.
There are a lot of places like this. If you've never seen office space, it's a great movie about this. And that was before the agilists took over our industry. They are not to blame for this. But you could say that kind of thing thrives in environments like that.
Of course not all places are like this. People self select to the type of jobs best suited to them. People with ambition don't tend to want to be hired in soulless environments that are obviously not getting much done. I kind of work my ass off because I like being engaged in doing something technically challenging. It's a way of life. And since technical skills are in demand, finding places to apply them is not an issue.
But there are a lot of people employed in what I would label vanity projects where the whole purpose of the project is to make those that initiated it look good. It's not about the outcome but about being associated with some grand initiative that obviously requires big budgets, a lot of smart looking people, expensive consultants. Big organizations are especially vulnerable to this. Part of the corporate rat race is making yourself look good. And a well proven strategy for that is hoarding a lot of resources for some ambitious sounding project. The bigger the better.
The more soul crushing the environment, the bigger the need for the powers that be in such organizations to assert themselves like this. That's why fintech projects are so boring and lucrative at the same time. Lots of money and thus lots of incentive for people to get some of that. Most of those projects are complete and utter bullshit. Very few banks manage to innovate anything and limit their creativity to how they do accounting. Which obviously went terribly wrong for SVB recently.
Otherwise it's just team after team going through the moves of reinventing wheels endlessly. And usually quite poorly. Most bank software is kind of awful. Government projects are even worse. And since they are so tedious to deal with, consultancies that deal with them, tend to squeeze hard.
I remember in the 90s, when I was a teenager, my Dad's work at Allergan (in Irvine, Orange County, California, not far from Blizzard's office) had a cubicle layout. Sometimes he took me inside, and it was just terrible. This was also one of the themes of Office Space, an excellent movie making fun of workplace culture (starring Jennifer Aniston and Ron Livingston). In one memorable scene of the movie, after Livingston's character has had enough of the toxic workplace culture and stops giving a fuck, he unscrews the cubicle walls so he can see out the window from his desk.
I would definitely prefer to work in an open-office environment vs cubicles. I also don't want an office, because I don't even want to go to work regularly anymore.
The best option for me would be: (i) go to work 2-3 times a week to get out of the house (ii) hot desk open office layout with (iii) lots of meeting rooms.
> It's a meme asking what exactly he did
The meme listed is specifically referencing a car-crash of a downsizing interview a manager of software engineer has in the film Office Space which he ends by screaming that he has "people skills". Its not a valid question, its an immature means of discrediting whatever someone else says next via an inside joke that it seems neither Haraldur or yourself know.
> when it's very clear he wasn't.
Its not at all clear if he was or wasn't. There is extremely limited information in any of these sources that give us a reliable read on this. None of us know how hard Haraldur works or what metric people are using to judge that. That Haraldur is both a director-level acqui-hire as well as very open about his disability, suggests a very broad grey area that I feel you might not be respecting.
I found personal offence in them putting me on a PIP after a hip break (Being on morphine makes you bad at your job?? Give me more than 10 sick days and I'll not be trying to work high as balls, lol).
Picture the film Office Space. There were 3 managers for like 14 people. It was insanity. One day I'll write a mashup of The Office and Office Space based on working there.
We agreed via my solicitor that that was a dumb move to have made and they settled so I'd go away.
Freelance now. Y'all solve your own office problems, I'm not getting involved.
> What's most interesting is that the beginning of that movie, Neo's life is portrayed as being horrific drudgery.
Gen-X cynicism was a running theme in the 1990s — Office Space, the Dilbert comic strip and TV series, etc.
Office Space is a documentary.
Along the same line: a good stapler. Just like Milton from Office Space, a proper metal Swingline stapler has been the best in my experience. Unlike that movie, I never found a red one that was as good as a black one.
I still have it over 30 years later, although my need to staple these days is exceedingly rare.
I know for a fact that this is true. Office Space was not a comedy - it was a documentary.
Without a definition of what the author means by “polished”, this reads like a student who got a C on an assignment and isn’t happy about it.
To be a better submission, the author needs concrete examples that set the context for the reader and helps clue us in on what “good” and “polished” means.
Side note: In my experience, very often one person’s “polished” is another one’s “good”. This is often a key to detecting the quality of the author. For example, if you think of films or books, exceptional creators have made amazing works out of the most mundane topics (eg Office Space). Another way to put it: “Anything worth doing is worth doing well”.
"Please ensure Javascript is enabled for website accessibility."
One can access the website without Javascript via the Internet Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221230003154/https://komonews.com/amp/news/local/seattle-tech-worker-charged-for-theft-inspired-by-the-movie-office-space
As bonus, web.archive.org does not use AWS. Hence no need to use TLS1.2 nor send unencrypted domain name over the wire.
In the Office Space movie, a bug in the the software they uploaded caused it to steal much faster than it was supposed to. Which led to everyone involved panicking about getting caught.
The stuff he ordered was part of a different thing than the 'Office Space' scam they also found. It was either an actual screw-up on his part, that he tried to cover up by reversing the charges, or a scam closer to the one a Microsoft employee tried to pull off a while back.
https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-employee-steals-xbox-gift-cards-10-million
From the charging documents, at https://www.geekwire.com/2022/office-space-movie-plot-gave-zulily-engineer-a-blueprint-for-financial-fraud-prosecutors-allege/
Specifically, and at different times, he inserted three types of malicious code in the checkout process at Zulily: (1) an original code that diverted some customer shipping costs from Zulily’s account to Castro’s personal account beginning on February 28, 2022, through which Castro unlawfully obtained $110,240.71 from Zulily; (2) after Zulily began investigating that first issue, a replacement code that double-charged a small percentage of Zulily customers for shipping, allowing Castro to route a ‘full’ shipping cost to both Zulily’s accounts and his own account, through which Castro unlawfully obtained $151,645.50 from customers; and (3) unrelated to the first two issues, by reducing the cost of expensive items that he was purchasing on Zulily.com to pennies per unit, a method by which he unlawfully obtained $40,842.31 from Zulily. Through these three methods, Castro stole a combined $302,278.52 before he was terminated in June 2022.
Unlike in the Office Space movie it was more than just moving a few cents around. He employee ordered over 1000 items in a month (to resell?). That should ring any alarm bell already.
> Inspired by Office Space film, software engineer steals over $300K
"Damn, it feels good to be a gangster."
Maybe if his name would have been Michael Bolton, he would have had a chance.
Not new, you just have to work less hard at coasting. Look at the cult-classic movie Office Space. The whole premise was about a guy who showed up to work every day and did the bare minimum and that was considered relatable and common. It was just you had to actually show up, stare at a computer screen and put in the effort to pretend to work.
I wasn't aware of the "IT crowd" comedy tv show. It definitely lifted my spirit up, perhaps in a similar way that layoff episode of "office space" would. It is black humor, but humor nonetheless, and some people do appreciate such form. Censoring comedy doesn't seem right.
This is the episode to which the parent post refers: https://youtu.be/TKOrr4XRbg8
There's an interview here that covers some of how it happened: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/2/19/18228673/office-space-oral-history
It does mention he worked for a military contractor, which probably provided an accelerated environment for learning corporate bs.
OT--But Mike Judge was interviewed recently on Fly On The Wall, the podcast from David Spade and Dana Carvey (who doesn't have a podcast these days?)... and it was a great episode. There's a part where he explains where the Butthead's guffawing laugh comes from.. so good.
The podcast is focused on interviewing SNL alums.. but has recently branched out a bit. Anyway, I didn't know this, but Mike Judge did some Milton (the character who later appeared in Office Space) short for them.
I recommend it.
>(the office) I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space.
Dilbert is a hand drawn comic so it will never have the media reach of TV. It also tends to focus more on the details of the bureaucratic brokenness for people to laugh rather than cry at in daily life.
The office is syndicated TV with a new episode every week. It simply has high rewatch value. The broken office bureaucracy is used as a plot device rather than the focus of the show. The show focuses on characters and how they react to work life which keeps the show more funny than sad.
I would argue that Office Space actually was more effective than both of these other two. It was a one off movie from over 20 years ago that people across age groups still regularly reference. You can only watch a movie so many times. There is not much opportunity for syndication or binge watching. After you watch it 20 times 20 years ago it kind of drops out of the yearly zeitgeist.
> But shouldn't we rather work on fixing those things instead of making them bearable by just turning off a camera in a Zoom meeting?
Yeah. Is it going to happen? Doubtful, because it's not necessarily good for business. Most people don't go to a job because they enjoy it, but because their salary outweighs the level of suck at that job. To make things more conventionally pleasant at a job may actually make a person's job suck more overall if it means shifting focus from getting work done to appearing social.
There is definitely something to be missed from the social opportunities at working in a physical office, but the movie Office Space is a classic for a reason. If a sequel was made taking place at a remote company, somehow I don't think it would be nearly as funny. COVID may have pushed remote work along, but said remote work is still a response to even more problematic corporate culture.
> All in all, there is a gnawing feeling in me that Covid made a significant dent on the once fun (Berlin Startup) tech working culture for good. And worse, I suspect there is gonna be more consequences down the road for the tech job market at large that few people seem to see.
I've seen the same thing happen to the Los Angeles tech scene. Absolutely dead. Sure, there's a teeny tiny bit, but trust me, there used to be more going on. This will have consequences because it's much harder to network with random people than it once was.
It sounds like you preferred the social aspect of being in the office. Not everybody does. The movie Office Space really hit on some key points: A mind-numbing commute, that wastes hours of "your time" that you don't get paid for. "Corporate Accounts Payable Nina speaking" Egomaniac of a boss/manager hovering over your shoulder telling you that you are typing wrong, and YOU need to work overtime while he buys a new sports-car. etc...
There is nothing that will pull me out of 'the zone' quicker then hearing distractions in the office. People talking, laughing, standing in front of your desk talking about shit that has nothing to do with you.
I would often go work IN THE SERVER ROOM, just to get away from the noise and distractions that existed in the office. [Open Office layouts need to be destroyed]
So WFH means I get 2 more hours a day of ME time. I sleep in later. I have more freedom of WHEN I work. If I get a flash of inspiration to solve a problem at 1am, I can jump in and fix it.
Being able to lean back and ask my co-worker: "Hey Bob, what was thing called in NGinx that we used last week?" is much less formal then trying to articulate in a slack/teams message.
BUT, I hated being interrupted by others asking things like "..what was thing called in NGinx that we used last week?" when I could have just been asked in Teams/Slack.
So to simplify these points; If you are pro-social: WFO is better If you are anti-social: WFH is better
> Back in the day
Well, this isn't that new, either - this was the plot of the 1999 movie "Office Space".
Humans have been doing this forever, just working hard enough to not be fired. If anything it's idealistic youth who tend to buck that trend and subscribe to hustle culture en masse. From the 1999 movie Office Space:
> Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
> Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
> Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation?
Wonder if this guy was influenced by the ending of the movie Office Space.
Apart from what's already been said: Watch the movie Office Space once every couple of years.
>Go re-watch "Office Space" from the 1990s
I like how you assume I can't recite that movie from memory.
There's a pretty good movie which lampoons the modern office and explains why people "quiet quit". It's called Office Space, and it was released in 1999.
>It's not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It's about all of us. I don't know what happened to me at that hypnotherapist and, I don't know, maybe it was just shock and it's wearing off now, but when I saw that fat man keel over and die - Michael, we don't have a lot of time on this earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.
I tend to describe Hackers as depicting what coding feels like on the inside.
All those great visuals, the pumping music, it captures the emotion of getting your teeth into a really gnarly problem, and the exuberance of eventually coming up with a solution. People watching over the shoulder of a developer at work are just going to see a bunch of scrolling text and tedious iterations of red, red, red, green, reload, alt-tab, change a thing, wait, red, red, red, green, and so on. But that workflow - if you dig the work - is enthralling. And when you solve the problem, it's worth throwing your hands up with glee, and (internally) belting out a cheesy action hero oneliner.
Not to mention when you are real-time dealing with attackers trying to compromise your systems, the chaos and exasperation and desperate attempts to block them very much match the climactic scene of The Plague and his hapless techno weenies typing "cookie".
I'm probably biased because of my age and the time in my career when I first watched the movie (around the same time as my first job) but to me it still feels like the most authentic silver screen portrayal of what I do. More modern shows often capture the cold, hard reality of the work better, which admittedly is just a bunch of text scrolling on a screen. And there are definitely works that better satirize the office culture, like Office Space and Silicon Valley. But there still hasn't been much that captured the excitement of the time, and can really explain to people outside of the industry why at least a certain subset of 1990s teenagers felt compelled to get into this apparently boring and nerdy career.
I suppose it's very "of its time", because nowadays everyone understands why kids want to get into IT - it's one of the most flexible and lucrative careers there is.
I'd recommend The Internet's Own Boy, Buckaroo Banzai, Real Genius, Office Space, or Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle ahead of Hackers and Sneakers.
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz which
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_quitting
This term was allegedly coined in 2009. According to Wikipedia editors, it is demonstrated in the film Office Space (1999) where the main character engages in "quiet quitting" and gets promoted.
I appreciate the nod to the prophetic movie Office Space, but I think they missed the most appropriate scene about wearing the minimum pieces of flair.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno
If people are doing the minimum work required by their employer, it hardly seems like a problem to me. If they decide to miss out on the "rat race" then that's how they choose to participate in their employee relationship. Maybe I'm missing something about this.
A move _away_ from paper, to government signed crypto certs and witness logs is the answer.
Then we just need to standardize on A5 as a standard for bills mailed out, since it'll fit inside of everyone's filing cabinets already. A5 for taxes would also be nicer too.
Then get school supplies made in A5 size (easier for kids to carry), and finally after a silent transition period where there's less and less in the US Letter size, we can relegate PC Load Letter to the Office Space movie.
Look, your preferences are totally valid.
What I’m referring to is this. I’ve worked at a few places that maintain an in-person office option for employees like you to support hybrid offices. These offices are frequently libraries though. Nobody is there. So the following happens.
If it’s a disciplined, remote-first place, this is accepted and ok. The subset of companies that can support this is small IMO.
For most others, they look at the empty office, hear preferences like yours that want in-personal back via appeals for community, at the extensive and the loud culture of OpEds in the Wall Street Journal/NYT by Peggy Noonan or Malcolm Gladwell about how remote work is critical for national and personal meaning, and then the return to office discussions start b/c employees support it as do thought leaders, the media, and politicians, and the nearly-empty office is expensive.
To be sure, there might be work places that stay totally in-person and you’re free to work there.
But the other issue is a lot of people don’t want work friends as their friends. This is loose scientific evidence, but Office Space is a very popular movie in the US and the Office in UK/US for this reason, for example.
So calls for return to office means, imo, a lot of people who would also love to be remote but can’t bc they’re not software engineers or wherever get swept back in. So your personal needs harm that greater good as I see it.
> I've seen "must not talk" with a product owner who served to represent the voice of the customer, and incidentally take credit for the work he didn't understand and somewhat obstructed.
The bits of Office Space with Tom Smykowski and the Bobs were funny when I first saw the movie, but as I grew older I realized their eternal truth: people hired as customer-engineer intermediaries (whether they're called "product owner", "business analyst", or anything else) get very tetchy when engineers start communicating directly with their user base because it threatens their job security.
I literally just grabbed 60 eggs from my chicken coop, came back to my computer and saw this hit the front page :D. Certainly agree it's not going to work for most people and it's a privileged position, but trends usually start from a small subset of the population and spread. I think the perception of working in IT is a great example of this... think of the movie Office Space, and then how companies like Google completely changed how we think about tech company culture in the early 2000s. Certainly Google was a well-funded golden startup, but eventually this ethos spread to much of tech.
I have long viewed Mike Judge[0] as the anti-Scott Adams. He works with many of the same topics but the result is far, far funnier. And he does not try to shove any particular political point of view at the expense of basic humor.
In reviewing Idiocracy, Salon stated, "Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism".[73] A writer for the libertarian magazine Reason seems to agree, comparing King of the Hill to the anti-authoritarian point of view of South Park and The Simpsons, though he calls the show more populist, noting the disdain King of the Hill seems to have for bureaucrats, professionals, and big-box chains.[74]
Still, Judge denies having political messages in his shows, saying in an IGN interview about King of the Hill:[72]
"I try to not let the show get too political. To me, it's more social than political I guess you'd say, because that's funnier. I don't really like political reference humor that much. Although I liked the episode "Hank's Bully" where Hank's talking to the mailman and he says, 'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?' To me that's just like more of a character thing about Hank than it is a political joke or anything. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff about the war, particularly." [Wikipedia]
[0]King of the Hill, Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, Idiocracy, Silicon Valley
This is not new or recent, but printers, photocopiers and projectors have always made my life confusing and painful. What should’ve been simple and what could’ve been intuitive has been made hellishly complex and unwieldy. The scene in Office Space showing them smashing a printer and the scene in The Office (US) where Pam is utterly defeated by a new copier [1] aren’t just jokes.
On relatively recent technologies, Bluetooth is unpredictable and finicky across different devices. One cannot effectively carry over one’s learning from one Bluetooth device to another. One cannot predict how a particular new Bluetooth device will work (or not) with one’s existing devices.
And then there are USB-C ports and cables. They all look alike, but you’d never easily know what it supports (which cable is the right one, power delivery, how much power can/will it handle, data transfer speed, is it Thunderbolt, etc.).
I can’t imagine how non-technical people roll the dice with all these and how much they must hate technology.
[1]: Season 5 Episode 19 (“Two Weeks”)
I’m taking about working between chains, not staying on a chain or other cryptos built on the same chain. Someone is building a decentralized exchange, the interaction or adding the next new crypto currency to that exchange and choosing how it is setting the price of the exchange or possibly relaying on other centralized exchanges - typically to set the exchange rate you would rely on the bid ask spread, but if it doesn’t look at other exchanges someone can just buy from one exchange where it’s cheaper and sell on the other. Have you seen office space? The movie where they make the program steel fractions of a penny in each transaction? This is doable in the setting of the prices and fees and the way rewards are set for liquidity, benefiting the person who created them - so who knows how these places work, no one except programmers, and maybe they gain trust over time from others that never had a problem with them before. But when something does goes wrong, who will foot the bill and be held accountable. That’s why centralized exchanges are a must because if something goes wrong you call the police.
I watched Office Space when I was younger and believed at the time that it was a gross over-caricaturization. It was a comedy movie, after all. No _real_ company could ever be that demoralizing to work for, there's no way you could put that much cluelessness, self-interest, and passive-agressive managerial evil into one building and not have it spontaneously combust, right? (Which I guess it did in the movie.)
Until I got a job in a mid-size financial services company. It was all that and a whole lot worse. It was literally forbidden to pin Dilbert comic strips to your cubicle wall. Not _any_ comic strips, only Dilbert ones weren't allowed. Up all night fixing an issue in prod caused by someone else? Tough, better be in your chair at 8:00 a.m. like any other day.
I lasted 10 months. It was horrible, but I don't actually regret it because it made me appreciate the value of a _good_ workplace run by and staffed by intelligent well-meaning people. Which still isn't as common as it should be, but definitely exist.
I would say that everyone should watch and understand Office Space, but I did watch it and didn't really understand it until I lived it - I thought it was a comedy just because it's funny, but really it's a Gen X cautionary tale about burnout that I was too inexperienced to understand. The quote from the movie that you reminded me of was "I did nothing and it was everything I thought it could be."
But the creator, Mike Judge, (of Beavis and Butthead fame) worked in early-mid Silicon Valley - he understood the culture he was skewering.
I think the movie Office Space might offer an example of the type of workplace OP is talking about.
> Every company I have worked at has been the same - very depressed people who have no enthusiasm for anything slowly dying as they sit there staring at the computer. It is in stark contrast to the physical labour jobs I have had, which have been very lively and happy places to work.
They even made a movie with that premise (Office Space).
You will never see an "Office Space" type movie for remote workers.
You're right. There are certainly some "make you think" movies that win for their portentousness and are promptly forgotten ("Crash" and "The English Patient" -- lookin' at you).
I ran the Google Cinema Club for 10 years. In all that time, no one ever asked for those movies, and we never even seriously considered them.
On the other hand, "The Princess Bride" was constantly being requested, as was "Office Space." There was some reason we couldn't show them; can't remember now what it was.
Too many facets to this question...
to adolescent me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_Science_(film)
to middle aged me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space
But, in relation to HN? Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22 mixed with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizopolis
Real Genius (1985) is a pretty good one. Apollo 13 has some hardware hack stuff. Wargames (1983) a little bit. Hackers (1995) did a good job of capturing what it felt like online during the tail end of the HPA BBS thing. Halt and Catch Fire is a good TV show. Others have mentioned Silicon Valley, Office Space and Mr Robot. The best related thing I’ve seen lately is Apple TV’s Mythic Quest, lolling right now thinking about it. Watch all of these.
Grandma’s Boy and Office Space for movies.
Various aspects of The IT Crowd, Silicon Valley and Mythic Quest for TV shows.
I almost thought this article was about the film "Office Space."
Nobody is talking about it because in-office workers run errands, slack off and coast through day as well. This is nothing new. The movie Office Space even made jokes about this back in 1999 [1]. However, what you seem to be advocating for, whether intended or not, is more micromanagement.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBfTrjPSShs
You are probably correct. Again people will bet on current system not being in use 15 years from now and it is not a problem until it is a problem.
On a better note Y2K brought us the movie "Office Space", so perhaps Y2K38 will give us another equally awesome movie.
On any given day, fewer than half of people with jobs really need to work. A lot of people attend their job and don't really do work -- not because they're lazy -- but because deep down they know it doesn't really matter.
We (collectively) invent work to slow ourselves down, or create jobs that don't really need to exist. We know that people who want jobs need to have things to do, but maybe that there just isn't that much that needs doing. George Jetson pushed a single red button for a living. There's a certain truth behind why the show's creators gave him that.
This has been the case at least long enough before the movie Office Space came out to have been well understood by then.
What a fun term "MFA fatigue".
One day I counted the number of times I needed to authenticate in order connect to my client's web server. The count was 8.
1 Unlock my PC 2 Login to client corp VPN 3 Unlock my phone 4 Enter PIN to MFA app to confirm login to VPN 5 Login to client corps' credentials generation app. 6 Unlock my phone again (screen lock has timed out by now) 7 Enter PIN to MFA app to confirm login to credentials generation app. 8 Login to client's server.
It reminds me of the "8 different bosses" scene from the film Office Space.
> Did this behavior start with the coda of Office Space or has it always been a thing?
No, it's such a cliche that's why Office Space chose to use it.
The movie Lost in America explores this theme much more generally.
The funniest thing about the end of Office Space is that by "dropping out" of software during the Y2k era and entering the construction field, the protagonist is just swapping one bubble for another, software for housing.
Don't bother working for a large company. If you haven't seen it already, just watch the movie Office Space (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/) and you can see everything you need to know about doing software at a big company.
That being said, you have to understand that your new job isn't at a "Big company", your new job is at Amazon: a completely different beast. I live in the greater Seattle area and I can tell you there are two types of Amazon workers doing software development - those who quietly work their jobs and never talk to non-Amazon folks about it one way or the other (e.g. "my Amazon job is great! You should work here!" or "My Amazon job is hell"), or people who are Ex-Amazon who have NOTHING good to say about working there (except for the fact that they left the job). Be careful.
> lots of people know Office Space
Do they really? I expect most people on HN to know it, but I’m not so sure about the general population. It’s one of my favourite movies and I often found myself referencing it in office settings, but had to stop because nobody got them, not even once. Most people hadn’t heard of it, and the few who had seen it didn’t like it.
I think Mike Judge is an absolute genius, but none of his movies have performed well commercially. Maybe they lack mass appeal, most people simply never experience toxic work environments, or they do, but fail to recognise it as such. Or the movies were just under-marketed. Whatever the cause, these things aren’t exactly household names.
Office Space is interesting, it’s one of these movies to which I see references all the times while I have never run into someone in real life who actually saw it or even heard of it. The other one being This is Spinal Tap.
I’m really not seeing any connection to office space beyond… toxic workplace culture… and I mean that’s kind of a thing in a lot of movies, so I’m really not sure why they bothered to draw the connection to Office Space at all.
Does look interesting though. The use of a camera focus shifting looks to be stylistically interesting and a good way to follow along with the characters mental mode switching.
I’m kind of hoping this is just a 1 season “long movie” and we get a nicely wrapped up story, because I’m struggling to see this concept really managing more than a season and a half before it feels like they would just dragging it out.
For those lost, this is a quote from the must-watch movie Office Space[1] (which was painfully accurate, though its probably a bit dated now). While you're at the TV, also watch Idiocracy[2], by the same writer/director.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Now that is a spectacular euphemism. That term sounds like something out of the movie "Office Space."
> Can anyone who's witnessed this transition weigh in?
Sure.
If you don't like the way you are treated in your organization today in an open office, you probably wouldn't like the way you are treated in one with cubicles.
Cubicle environments could be soul crushing (see the movie Office Space). They offer a bit of privacy, but noise, interruptions, a boss peering over your back at your screen unannounced could all still interrupt flow and focused work.
I have seen maybe half of these films. I was able to correctly name some of them immediately upon looking at them: Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, The Big Lebowski.
Some were obvious after reading the title: Star Wars, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (never saw it), Being John Malkovich, Space Jam (never saw it), Miami Vice (never saw it), Office Space.
Some that I half guessed or felt like I knew the name of the film but could not immediately recall the name: Castaway, Mad Max: Fury Road, Edward Scissorhands (Thought it was The Nightmare Before Christmas but Tim Burton so close enough)
Obvious ones: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
It's the plot of the movie 'office space'
{Anon for obvious reasons}
Yes. But possibly not in the way you were thinking of.
Waayyy back when I was still very much a green-horn / fledgling I was in charge of a revenue processing department that consisted of a whole bunch of AS400 batch queries (CSV output of course) that was imported in to Excel using various macros which also had various macros and look-up tables that processed and presented the data in an easy for users to edit format. Once they were done updating their figures all they had to do was hit a button that then exported that unholy mess in to a MS-Access DB (shudders... yeah, I know).
Anyway - For {$reason} I decided to write some code (functions were distributed between a mixture of VB, VBA and a few batch files) that would look for any numeric field and multiply the value by a very small random amount. It was very basic but used the day of the week to decide on how many fields to look for/update (Monday = 1 field, Tuesday = 2 different fields etc). Sometimes the random multiplication rounded the field value up, other times downwards, some times it made no difference. (And yes, I grew up on a diet of 80's movies about hackers and was heavily inspired by them. Side note - Office Space is a good one to watch).
Because the changes were so small and so random it wasn't picked up until their annual financial audit. By that stage the back-ups were useless.
Do I feel guilty? Yes. Would I do something like that ever again? I hope not. But Anon for obvious reasons.
I've never had a bullshit job, but I have had a lot of rather pointless meetings through my career... If you do take a bs job, isn't that exactly to pass the time while you make money? Or are there also bs demands put on you that you cannot get away from? So you're forced to do pointless stuff through-out the day, that makes little or no impact on the business as a whole? I think I'd become really, really cynical if I had to work like that. Chances are also that I'd become "creative" in such a job, but not in a good way. Or perhaps there are ways to macro such jobs? I'm really curious about these things... :p The only way I can relate to jobs like these are really through movies such as Office Space or Fight Club.
I was definitely spoiled by movies when I was growing up. Because of industry circumstances, 1999 was a very good year for movies. I can't think of recent movies that would be considered this generation's "Fight Club," "The Matrix," or "Office Space." On the plus side, there's currently a plethora of adequately entertaining movies for long-haul flights.
Some reading on 1999: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a23803/1999-movies/
Most US stock of multi-family housing in low and mid-rise apartments were not built with modern building code with STC above 45 (hotel framing AKA staggered studs). Furthermore, between floors sound can carry, and even older homes can drop in STC over time depending upon the material used in insulation as well as deterioration of materials over time. My friends that lived in only high rise buildings haven't had noise issues like myself and many others where we could hear conversations on the other side of walls of neighbors similar to the extent parodied in the movie Office Space with the main character's neighbor.
If you ever seen The Office Space movie you can't possibly question Graeber's thesis
Fun fact: Swingline never made a red stapler, the one in Office Space was a prop produced for the film by the production crew. Office Space popularized it to the point where Swingline actually started producing red staplers after the release of the film to capitalize on the demand.
I don't know what you should do about your job, but I'd recommend watching the movie Office Space.
> The Architect-Programmer model was also meant for offshoring.
I don't think this is true. The Architect-Programmer model precedes offshoring by decades, even if it was repurposed to facilitate offshoring.
It was the dominant model during the "Corporate IT" phase of the software industry (before the web/Internet took over), and was famously satirized in the classic movie Office Space and also in the Dilbert comics.
It has older roots in traditional corporate structures that strongly delineate "corporate" vs everyone else. The word "corporate" in office culture even used to mean "distant, out of touch bosses in luxury offices", and still kind of means that in industries with similarly stratified workforces.
I agree that your overall point is broadly correct, but I think that a good principle in internet discussion is to be "liberal in the evidence you accept, and conservative in the evidence you 'send'".
The overall thrust of the "there's too many sequels and remakes" argument is that recent cinema shows a staleness/creative exhaustion in the industry, which is relying on brand recognition to cover for its failings. One creator expanding on their animated shorts to make a feature film out of them (Office Space) or a filmmaker making a (relatively creative, I think) adaptation of Shakespeare (10 Things I Hate About You), doesn't really demonstrate that, IMO. Many of the other examples you cite do. Certainly people have been complaining about sequelitis in movies for as long as I can remember (30+ years).
My own impression of a big trend in film over recent decades is the decline of comedies, especially in the family comedy/romantic comedy sub-genres. But I don't have hard data on that either.
I honestly don't understand this current hang up on things being 'political'. The movies are largely going to be a reflection of the world we live in at that point in time, tapping into the collective consciousness of the moment.
Things feel more turbulent now, for many people, than in the 90s. Therefore we don't have 90's or early 2000s style movies about boring life or other inane things. Office Space would be a different film if it was written now, and Dude Where's My Car probably wouldn't even exist.
Lots of films were political about Vietnam during that period of time.
Lots of films were political about the war in Iraq, arguably too heavily in the US' favour to keep that support drummed up, after 9/11 happened.
Now it's about things like representation of minorities, nationalism, right wing threats, and so on, and I suppose "it's political" is another way of saying you're against the politics the movie chooses to explore, or represent.
To that end, it's only political if you disagree with it, and that lines up with me feeling that 'political' is being used as a pejorative.
(you as in anyone, not specifically you, the parent)
None of Office Space, Clerks, or Magnolia were enjoyed by masses upon initial release. And some that got acclaim on your list have faded a lot since then (e.g. American Beauty).
You know what was enjoyed by masses from 1999 that you left out? Star Wars Episode 1.
Check back in twenty years to see what movies from the recent past hold up, and how many of them aren't from Marvel...
The Wikipedia article for 1999 in film is there for all to see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_in_film#1999_Wide-release_films
Between The King and I (Disney animated), Baby Geniuses, Doug's 1st Movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, Wing Commander, The Rage: Carrie 2, My Favorite Martian, and Office Space, I see plenty of sequels, low-effort trash, and remakes. And that's just stuff that came out in the first three months of the year.
edit: We got a remake of Wild Wild West, a remake of Tarzan, a sequel to Austin Powers, a sequel to The Brave Little Toaster, a prequel to Star Wars, and our second Shakespear adapation of the year in months 4-6.
double edit: In 7-9, we got another Muppet movie, an Inspector Gadget remake, The Haunting and The Thomas Crown Affair were both remakes, a Universal Soldier sequel, and a Dudley Do-Right remake.
I have no interest in continuing to analyze this list, thing were just as bad twenty years ago
Nowadays you have: superhero movies, sequels, remakes, empowerment of certain groups that aren't me, movies with a political message, or some sad dour art house movie that makes you walk out feeling bummed out about life.
Compare 1994 or 1999 movie releases to 2021.
Fight club, the matrix, forrest gump, Magnolia, office space, sixth sense, american beauty, clerks, etc.
Nowadays: the father?, Mank?, black messiah, , chicago 7?
It's not about creating magical new worlds with thought provoking ideas anymore.
Maybe I'm explaining it poorly but film seems to have gone the way of the music industry.
Commodified instead of inspired.
I LOVE going to the movies.
I just wish there was something I wanted to see.
> Who in the right mind thought that would be a good idea?
Someone who doesn’t care or know or care to know. If the company (or manager in some cases) doesn’t treat people right they may not do anything above the bare minimum to survive.
So the next time a problem comes up, e.g. the old password field in the database only holds 8 characters but someone sent a memo around requiring users to provide passwords of a certain length, they might just truncate the input - problem solved, now back to lunch. Or if they would have to argue or fill in a form for a new database, they might just not do it. It could even be that they have incentive for this, e.g., easier to get raise if they don’t ask for new task related things all the time.
Whenever something stupid happens I’m reminded of the movie Office Space, this happens even at FAANGs.
Office Space (the movie) If you don't get the reference.
Similar: See Dilbert, the cartoon version had a funny episode about company names through acquisitions.
Have employer/employee relationships always been so squeezed, so antagonistic, that the aspirational message included "living off dividends from your stonks" and "leanFIRE" because the only thing worth aspiring to is getting out from wage slavery? It can't be a healthy economy when so much of the public discussion is how unpleasant work is, and not because the work itself is bad, but because the management/expectations/timekeeping/etc. is?
Medical staff, obviously in COVID times, basically any retail worker, basically any callcenter worker, anyone in an Enterprise company as per the film Office Space, people working anything from agriculture to factory work to Amazon warehouses, to delivery drivers timed for the amount of seconds they can step out of the van at each stop, to developers hating on unreasonable expectations of delivery time and price, to takeovers and downsizing leaving fewer people with more work, to individual craftspeople expected to compete on price with mass manufacture, to ridiculous job hopping advice (change jobs every 18 months, never don't be applying for jobs!) to decreases in loyalty and trust.
The aspirational messages have shifted from "thank God you have food for the day" to "own a home" to "get a stable job" to "a gold watch for long service and a pension" to "flip houses for money or rental income" to "desperately try to get rich quick and get out". And then what else is there but escapism with Lamborghinis and stories?
I quit a job right after college because of the scene in Office Space where they smash the printer with a bat in the field. That movie was kind of a tip of the hat to the Luddites.
For a humorous example of this, there's the movie Office Space, and the fight over the number of pieces of flair that Joanna is wearing. She wears 15 pieces of flair, the company required minimum, compared to the boss' favourite, Brian, who wears 37 pieces of flair.
See I would define cult classic as something that was not popular at the time of release, but then slowly gained popularity several years on to the point of becoming mainstream in the present. The movie Office Space is a canonical example for me.
Yep, those are definitely signs of burnout. This happened to me this time last year. For me, I stopped coding and started building things with my hands (I renovated a house). The biggest problem with coding is the feedback loops. The endless minutiae of problems/bugs that must be fixed, the large holes (metaphorical) you must deep dive into to that make you lose sight of the origin and the end of the project.
Really if I think about it, the movie Office Space nailed it. Go do something else, coding will always be here.
Your customer with 90 trillion dollars will not be happy about it (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Number/MAX_SAFE_INTEGER). I have been bitten with this in production, although it was facebook id represented as number and not money amount.
On a more realistic scenario, imagine that get 1% cashback on their purchases. When you multiply their purchase amount by 0.01, you get sub-cent amounts. From a point of view of a particular customer, it doesn't matter much, so you can just floor the number. But on the scale of your whole organisation, it does matter; so, where's all the remainder are going to end up at? And even if you don't forget about these remainders, are you sure you will remember to add the values before the division, as 10 or 20, and not after, as 0.1 or 0.2? Because when you some the latter up, you won't get 0.3.
If you're just using a built-in 'number' type, you're facing these mistakes by yourself, but a well-written library for handling money will guard you against this. Types exist not only to represent values, but to guard you against doing such mistakes. (And if that's the first time ever you hear about this scenario, do yourself a favour and watch Office Space — which does not only include this scenario as a plot device, but is a terrific movie on it's own right).
I have to be honest, I tend to forget all the details when I don't work with these kinds of tasks for some time. Instead, I just remember that using any standard built-in integer type for money is a huge potential minefield. And since in Javascript it's really a float, even more so.
So much this. Networking(where you went to school and work) and luck(your country, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, your looks, your accent, being at the right place and the right time) are worth more than your CV and side projects but this is rarely mentioned in this field as it's always touted that tech is a pure meritocracy.
One can often read sour vents on reddit on devs who lose hope, get depressed and burn out after being unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs for so long while they keep grinding leetcode and churning projects on github because the internet told them that SW development is a meritocracy and the key to success is putting enough hard work in your free time even though there's devs coasting on six figure jobs who haven't written a line on github in their life on their free time.
Nope, it's definitely no meritocracy, the tech world is just as unfair as the rest but has much better PR about it: watch Silicon Valley TV series made by the satire comedy genius Mike Judge(Office Space, Idiocracy) where billionaire tech magnate Gavin Belson would always sugarcoat his hostile business decisions with talks of buddhist spirituality, endangered animals and making the world a better place while his true motivation was only the accumulation of more fame, wealth and power.
I'll just point out the existence of the movie "office space" in here as evidence that yes, people were frustrated with printers. That movie came out in 1999, and the most iconic scene is the printer being smashed. That resonated for very good reasons, printers (and drivers) were almost more obnoxious back then than they are now. Please lose the superior "adult in the room" tone.
If anyone does NOT get this reference... please watch
Office Space https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
It was always like this except in the hobbyist world, and I think maybe you and some developers are confused because the corporate takeover of the web is relatively recent. When I think of software development in the past I think of Office Space (the movie), not some idyllic times.
Hah. 32, aye. Riding that average!
Probably career suicidal (never admit it in your application) but honestly the thing I've found helps is just not caring about work at all. It's like the equivalent to acceptance in grief. Get the day done, look forward to the weekend, when you book time off make sure to book the following Monday.
I'll do the job as best I can for as long as I'm paid but if you think I'm here for any reason other than money to pay the bills you're completely delusional.
Watch the film Office Space, be inspired.
I've come to realize over the course of 20 years pursuing a career in tech, that work itself is the primary impediment standing in the way of ever working on my dreams. Sure, someone can moonlight and try to change the world. But 99 people of out 100 will never even come close. There's nothing more pathetic than a visionary with no access to resources.
Right now I am working with a guy in the solar industry, doing handyman work around his house until we come out of quarantine. It's hard work physically, but I find my mental health has recovered and my motivation and work capacity have never been higher.
I'm basically living the ending of the movie Office Space and searching for spiritual meaning. I donate plasma to make rent, and am looking into apps like Bacon (Uber for hourly jobs) as a way to transition out of obligation-based employment. Work should be a straight-up time-for-money exchange. Taking advantage of our work ethic and patriotism, saddling us to someone else's vision of meaningful work, is one of the great travesties undermining the American Dream. I learned this the hard way moving furniture for 3 years in my early 20s to support my web business because "someone has to do it". No, someone doesn't have to do it. Stand up for yourself and leave if your job stinks. Let the free market adjust wages to what they should be, double or quadruple what they are now. Don't get suckered into indentured servitude.
Highly recommend to watch the clip from the movie Office Space (only 54 sec long) [1]
The guy with the moustache is a blue collar worker and the other one is white collar worker (actually in Tech/IT)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lmW2tZP2kU
Is Office Space a comedy or a documentary?
I have no desire to defend the Soviet Union, but out of curiosity, do you think our current system rewards productivity? I'm thinking along the lines of the movie "Office Space".
I don't know much about the USSR, but I don't think they set everyone's salaries the same or distributed money equally, or any other nonsense like that.
That movie was titled Office Space, not The Office.
When I first saw the title it reminded me of the film Office Space and turns out that it is indeed from the 1999 film featuring Jennifer Aniston and of course the infamous printer smashing scene (https://youtu.be/fjsSr3z5nVk , clean SFW version) and Family Guy's take on it https://youtu.be/Cb6MalVtago
You work in a fortune 100 company, welcome to bureaucracy.
Those middle managers do not give a shit because they are middle management! Big companies have tons of people like who's only motivation is to simply not get fired (this is one point the movie Office Space nailed by the way.)
A fish rots from the head. If your executive leadership is not obsessed with its customers, nobody else will be. And you guys will continue to be rudderless which is demoralizing.
Big, fat, companies get lazy and that sucks for a guy who wants to make a difference. Go work somewhere that encourages logical (black/white) thinking and values engineers who want to turn customers into raging fans.
Or just work each day enough to not get fired, and build your own product on the side.
Watch Office Space [0]. It'll teach you everything you'll ever need to know about big corps.
There will be office politics, somebody will always either be too hot or too cold in the office, connections will be much more important than talent... yeah, especially that last one. If you want to get anything done in a big company and have any sort of leverage anywhere, connections, connections, connections.
You might get a meek yearly review just because someone in your echelon has cozied up to somebody in a higher echelon and wants a raise.
There might be a company-wide call for product-ideas with the promise of leading your own team should your idea be selected. To be fair, that does happen but the best ideas will be rejected by the committee and then resubmitted as their own.
Whichever company you pick, read the glassdoor reviews and look for stories on reddit and HN. I don't have any links handy but over the years there have been quite a few on reddit about the company structure in GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft). These pictures [1] remind me most of those.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804 [1]: https://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2011/7/5/organizational-charts-google-amazon-apple-facebook-oracle-an.html
Sounds like they were re-enacting Office Space. If you haven't seen that movie... It's culturally relevant even today. Has a bit of profanity and such though.
I worked at two Fortune 500 (> 50,000 people) public companies and now work at a medium-small sized private company (~500 people). I prefer medium-small company. Also - what number would be small? like < 100?
The only advantage to large companies is if there is a large presence in your area, moving internally between jobs is relatively easy if you want to change things up.
Advantages of small company:
- Privately owned so no stockholder BS or the constant downsizing/offshoring accounting games.
- Most time-wasting corporate stuff is very minimal at a small company. At large corp you could spend hours upon hours doing the mandatory annual security training which ironically required Flash installed to run the big brother tracking video course. Same for ethics, HR and other corporate-y trainings.
- No real politics. Large corp it was common to run into people that didn't contribute anything to the products/solutions. It appeared they existed to slow things down and act out Dilbert comic strips. This can really wear on you. Watch the movie Office Space.
- Want to try a new tech out? Talk with a couple people, give it a whirl - it has to have some purpose though. Large corp: "no, we use XYZ, we've always used XYZ"
Y2K has this tragicomic portrayal in the movie Office Space
Ah yes, I meant Office Space. Old but great movie.
That was the main plot of Office Space.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
The Matrix.
I always thought it would be interesting to have a prequel about the first person to escape. Office Space meets X Files, and the order of the complexity slowly becomes more apparent, until the movie turns into Playtime.
This show is so damn accurate it gives me anxiety.
It’s basically the best sequel to the movie Office Space we the tech community never asked for.
I blame the movie "Office Space" for influencing the AT&T employee's behavior (just kidding ;-)
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
This is a quote from the movie Office Space.
The longer I spend in a corporate job the more I realize that Office Space was a documentary.
I instantly recognized the voice as M2F, before it even confirmed that by the description of how it was created. If I had a device with this voice, I would feel a strong urge to reenact the final printer scene from the movie Office Space.
Companies want their voice-enabled products to be purchased. Revulsion doesn't help.
> The industry is immature and is bottom heavy.
Depending upon your sub-sector of IT it can be completely inverted from that where there's far, far too many layers of management around maybe a handful of individual contributors. This is typical for most sub-fields of enterprise software that attract and retain a lot of non-technical people because the business requires interfacing with a culture of primarily non-technical-first customers. These companies tend to become the opposite of an IC-heavy IT shop - way too much positivity and a ton of stereotypical sales personalities (to be fair, the most common profession in the US specifically is salesperson). In fact, a lot of what the movie Office Space entails is what engineers at such an environment would go through in enterprise software and still does today, not what popular culture currently thinks of tech companies in the past 15 years.
Shawshank Redemption joins Office Space, Fight Club, and It's A Wonderful Life in the ranks of films saved by being shown on TV (whether via cable, DVD, or obsessive rebroadcasts over the holiday season before It's A Wonderful Life got snatched out of the public domain) after having bombed in theaters. They eventually found an audience even if the vagaries of the theater world kept them from making much in box office sensu stricto.
Another interesting part of that movie is the salami slicing plot line. Salami slicing is the name for collecting factional cents off thousands of transactions to accumulate a big payout without people noticing. It's featured in a bunch of movies:
- Superman III
- Hackers
- I love you Philip Morris
- Office Space
I mention it in my talk about how to program database systems safely when handling money to avoid situations like that. It can also happen by accident when converting between floats and Decimals incorrectly while programming.
https://github.com/pirate/django-concurrency-talk
I'm a little disappointed that the piece highlights unusual work environments like Google and Facebook and cites them as examples that things have changed in the last twenty years. A big part of what made the film work for me was that it took on the common case, not the exceptional. I understand that a lot of developers work for these top-tier companies but I suspect the majority work in environments that, even today, still look a lot like Office Space.
The gist of the article is that little has changed and I am tempted to agree. My work environment is better, but not everyones. My partner reports to an ineffective manager and a VP who emails over the weekend, expecting to see work product early the next Monday morning; there is a clear implication they should be working during the weekend. A friend of mine was complaining recently about a manager asking them if it was "good for the company" to be upgrading various software products on a schedule or if it was more about making their own job easier. And so on.
Office Space is kinda being remade today with each episode of Silicon Valley they make.
> “But as a piece of commentary, the film’s damning portrayal of bad management and inefficient workplaces holds up today.”
I’d say that tech workplaces have gotten worse in many ways after this movie’s time. Office plans are now usually not very conducive to getting work done without a noise canceling headset (which many companies won’t pay for), and the greed at the CxO levels for higher pay/compensation for themselves at the cost of thousands or even hundreds of thousands below their levels could be appalling in many larger companies.
If anything, we need an Office Space 2.0 to be made with contemporary observations and critiques.
Holy cow that is one of the single saddest things that I have ever heard. I've known some cowardly heartless bastards in my career but no one that low.
There is a local tech company here that used to have a yearly event where they'd invite the entire tech community in for beer, popcorn and a screening of either Office Space or a bunch of episodes of the IT Crowd.
I rarely see a comment on HN whose assessment and opinion are more foreign to my personal experience than this one.
Open plans are much better than cubicles. The transition to open plans and standing desks has been a boon for social interaction in teams, more role-crossover, and just more physical movement in general.
Office Space is a timeless and incredible film, but one aspect of it that seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction.
edit: Look, I know that some people like cubicles. If you do, that's fine. But if you actually seriously like small, cramped, stuffed cubicles in Office Space (or The Matrix) - which absolutely existed in the late 90s and early 2000s in IT and seem to have largely disappeared - I'd really like to hear why. If you do like cubicles: how do you move? Do you really have the discipline to get up and walk around every once in a while? Or do you end up having much less body movement than open plan participants?
It does seem like one could make a plausible case that Office Space has had the biggest impact on real world life of any movie of all time. Just skimming down the list, it doesn't look like there's anything on the AFI or BFI top 100 even comes close. Maybe 12 angry men has had a real influence on juries in some unseen way, or maybe The Social Network has also had a big influence on what careers people choose, but there's nothing that immediately seems super obvious as surpassing it.
True story. I know a company that did a major layoff in by showing office space. As the movie progressed, HR walked around and tapped people on the shoulder. If you were still there for the end of the movie, you were still there...
At a past startup that had become overrun with back-stabbing middle-management obsessed with building their own respective empires and in permanent cover-your-ass mode, regularly throwing people from engineering or operations under the bus, the glassdoor reviews predictably became overwhelmingly negative.
Every all-hands meeting started concluding with requests that the staff make glowing company reviews. It was a scene straight out of the movie Office Space. The first couple times they did this, the Glassdoor reviews would get a bunch of 5-star contrived "Everything's perfect, best company ever." additions within the same day or two. We in engineering and operations knew they were coming out of the sales & marketing departments, since we all wanted to burn the place to the ground thanks to the awful management.
I've seen very similar patterns on other glassdoor company pages. When you see a bunch of positive reviews clustered around the same time period for a company otherwise full of negative stuff, the positive is probably more sales & marketing propaganda, it's their job.
But everyone pays the higher prices while very few hustle CC rewards programs. Just like that superman movie plot or Office Space, the GP is gathering up all those fractional pennies and using them to buy first class air travel.
Its just a line from an old movie Office Space.
It’s tough, the balance between the two extremes that you’re talking about. Immigrants, and the previous generations, were a lot more preoccupied with survival than with self-actualization. Watching a movie like Office Space becomes interesting to view from the perspective of survival. It’s almost indulgent. This guy has a well-paying job, his biggest woe is that his manager is not likeable, and he’s unhappy? But when you live it, you understand.
For me, the balance has been most aptly described by the phrase: you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want. You can travel, follow your bliss, whatever it takes to find some self-actualization (very important in the western world), but you pay a price. This way, you’re not completely discounting the value of ‘finding yourself’, but, like any major decision, you assess the ROI.
In office space Peter Gibbons, our white Alpha, and the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
In King of the Hill, our white Alpha, Hank Hill, the only guy with any common sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from all falling apart in a world that has gone Haywire.
In Idiocracy, our White Alpha, Joe Bauer, the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from falling apart in a world that has gone haywire.
In Extract, Joel, our down to earth White Alpha, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
And in Silicon Valley, well- you get the idea. I love Mike Judge films, he is an astute observer and hilarious. but his ouvre is not broad. He's got a formula, and it works, and that's fine.
Office Space and Silicon Valley, sure, but Idiocracy has aged _horribly_.
That movie is full of memes that haven't been relevant since the mid-00s (and specifically, the humor in the movie has a distinct Bush-era vibe which straight-up feels foreign in 2018... it feels like a period piece even though it's set in the future), and I lost whatever enjoyment of it that I had left when actual Neo-Nazis began using the movie to promote their pseudoscience about race and intelligence.
Office Space(1999).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
timeless....
> I started fantasizing that the company would crash and burn, and I would be standing there among the rubble...
Have you had a part in writing Office Space [0] screenplay? It's Milton's wish.
[0] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
"Federal pound me in the ass prison" is a quote from the movie Office Space.
If you already knew this, then I guess the applicable movie quote this time is "Lighten up, Francis" from Stripes.
Movies are fictional.
If a celebrity is giving an endorsement in a scripted movie I'm obviously going to think of the endorsement differently if theyre giving it in an Instagram post. That's where the FTC says "hey, you have to be clear you are benefiting from this advertisement" because otherwise (in a movie) it would be clear the endorsement isn't personal or organic.
Also not all of what you may call "product placements" in movies is paid. For one example, the red Swingline stapler in Office Space wasn't a paid product placement nor did Swingline even make a red version, it was a product invented for the movie, Mike Judge had an auto body shop do a paint job on a black stapler. Yet the movie created a market for red Swingline staplers, Swingline started producing red staplers, and it became their best selling product.
Reminds me of the film "Office Space", where the protagonist has something like eight managers he answers to. I worked for such a "flat" organization once, and that's how it was. It was not a good thing.
Well, I'd expect more people associate federal jobs with the movie Office Space or the "hustle" of their local DMV.
This was satirized pretty well in the movie Office Space with the "15 pieces of flair" thing...
This comment really baffles me, particularly the Office Space reference. Generally I see that movie invoked specifically to reference the meaninglessness of most white-collar work. TPS reports and pieces of flair are supposed to be absurd examples of things that employers to do dehumanize and control employees - the opposite of meaningful goals.
I think most people want meaningful (purposeful?) lives. Some find that almost exclusively through their work, some through their nonprofessional activities, some through their families. Most are probably a mixture. I think people often find happiness through figuring out what's important to them and organizing their life around that.
You can have meaning or you can have happiness. You cannot have both -- at least not all of the time. This conflict can be seen clearly in a movie like "Office Space", where both the male and female leads are working for happiness (and survival) whereas the work environment expects them to be working for meaning. (How many pieces of flair are you wearing?)
The trick to this discussion is that people on one side of the discussion frankly don't understand folks on the other side. The things they say and do don't make any sense. If you're a meaning person, you read the title of this essay -- "If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?" and think if you're successful, why wouldn't you be working 70 hours a week? You're doing what you love, making a difference in the world! It's only those that are unsuccessful, those who work for meaning but aren't very effective, that would spend a lot of time doing nothing.
For both camps, it seems the world is full of people from the other camp, basically ruining things for the rest of us. It would be great if we could convey this critical piece of information to people early on in life. So much time and energy is spent in conflicts with other folks where it's not needed.
> Office Space ?
Funky anecdote coming up.
We went to see Office Space when it was in the cinemas, after having heard a number of good things about it. There were 8 of us. 7, myself included, kept bursting into laughter throughout the film. The last one didn't really register.
When we walked out, the silent one quipped: "I don't get how that was supposed to be funny. I see that same stuff at work every day."
> Does anyone know of anecdotes where someone says "I left tech because of discrimination, but it was way worse in this other industry, so I returned?"
Office Space ?
Hard to believe that movie is almost two decades old now.
watch the movie Office Space and do what Milton did.
In the books I've written I added references to movies that I liked as part of the examples. I remember including a "PC Load Letter" error message as a homage to Office Space. Other examples were more obscure, such an address or phone number of one of the characters in the movie.
Give the man a medal.
It’s anti-free speech but it’s the most badass way to leave a building when being let go. I see this in the light of the movie office space.
At least in my state (MA) a while ago being fired with cause means not eligible for unemployment[1]. I knew this from someone (last century) being fired for being overheard quoting "office space" the movie on the phone, and therefor suspected of being dangerous. He was not given a chance to defend himself, but hated the job anyway.
"PETER Boy. I tell ya, one of these days... One of these days it's gonna be like
He mimics a machine gun. Brian, a waiter, does it too, in Peter's face."
He went to hearing to get his unemployment, and won because the layer from bigco, sent to the hearing from out of state literally wouldn't answer any questions.
http://www.masslegalhelp.org/employment-unemployment/ui-if-fired
For non-Americans who are having trouble imagining this, note that the movie "Office Space" was filmed in Dallas. The stop-and-go traffic in the intro? That's every day, twice a day. The only difference between Dallas and Houston is that Houston has even fewer sidewalks.
I recently watched the movie Office Space.
Oh, such a wonderful working environment. To have the privacy and isolation from distractions and interruptions that a cubicle gives. What I wouldn't give to work in such a great office space.
> my duty is to act as a bridge betweeen you and my bosses and my customers and my customer service etc.
Obligatory 'Office Space' Movie Meme => http://weknowmemes.com/generator/uploads/generated/g1384740369505006881.jpg
> This feeds directly into the popular narrative that the working poor somehow lack moral fortitude.
Not really. Not every bad job is held by an oppressed proletariat. Many times they're held by mischievous PFYs who still think they're immortal and that $20 is a lot of money. Youthful indiscretions are one the most common sources of this type of behavior. It's extremely common to not have a professional attitude in your "first real job", or to not even consider most minimum wage jobs as a "real job". There's an entire genre of movies that relies on this culture. Slacker culture has been part of pop culture for decades, now. When you don't have any actual responsibilities it's pretty common to treat any new ones like a big joke, or as "suggestions".
And it doesn't just happen at work - there are people with extremely cavalier attitudes towards education. I had a conversation with my kid about other kids getting around attendance rules in high school by showing up to class and then "going to the bathroom" and not returning to class again. Skipping class to go smoke, race, shop, etc has been a thing for at least 50 years. It's kind of telling, though, that most slacker movies were about college-age (or younger) kids. Ones for adults (e.g. Office Space) are pretty rare and rather niche.
It's important that we recognize that professionalism is not a natural (or an exclusive) trait. Babies don't pop out of the womb screaming "Please advise." The teenage years are full of people pushing boundaries to learn how they fit into society. We expect mistakes at that age, and those expectations are frequently met.
I've literally met hundreds of people who blew off classes because they weren't the ones paying for it, or who called in sick after a hangover or because they didn't like their job. I've stood around at parties listening to people tell stories of how they ditched work. I had a co-worker call in sick because he "couldn't get his car out of the garage." And having six dead grandmothers in a year is a trope now. It's not everyone, for sure, but it happens. It's just that people do it less with the jobs that they value in the careers they've invested into.
That said, we do need a lot of labor reforms around hours worked, employee rights and privacy, cost of living adjustments, etc. And we need better safety nets for citizens. But those will always extend far more slowly to a job that can be filled by 90% of the population. The supply of entry-level workers far outstrips the demand.
It's a reference to the movie Office Space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy3rjQGc6lA
I think it's actually more like the movie "Office Space". The characters in The Office seem to actually like each other deep down, whereas the Office Space setting has much fewer nice qualities.
I consider Office Space a documentary.
Do you consider Office Space a hacker movie?
Here's why I switched out of a CS major in 2009 as a sophomore (to math) after being convinced that I'd major in CS since high school.
* Feeling that I can learn programming on my own, and wanting to experiment with something I wouldn't otherwise teach myself in college
Of course CS != programming, but in my head at the time I saw them as the same. I'd been teaching myself programming since I was a kid, and I knew I'd be able to teach myself whatever I needed to know if needed. Thus I felt that it made more sense for me to study something totally foreign to me that I wouldn't otherwise learn on my own.
* Fear of living out the rest of my life like the movie Office Space, everything being so damn predictable
This was before software engineering was considered "cool" or had any prestige. Being a software engineer and sitting at a desk all day in a gray cubicle writing enterprise software or whatever sounded boring as hell. As a socially awkward introvert with no other skills, I felt that majoring in CS would inevitably lead me down that comfortable but unfulfilling route, which frightened me. It wasn't just the fear of living a boring life, I just hated the predictability, knowing that I'd never be more than some boring code monkey with a decent salary (though not finance/doctor/lawyer money) and boring job (at the time I clearly knew absolutely nothing about entrepreneurship).
* Not feeling passionate about programming anymore, and feeling like I'd never be able to compete with all my classmates who are so damn passionate about it (and not caring anymore)
A lot of people in the field seemed to be super passionate about programming, coding all day and all night. I had gotten into it at 12 years old because I wanted to make video games, but as my interest in video games was receding, I realized I wasn't really as into it as I thought I was. I felt like there was no way I'd ever be able to compete with my competition who lived and breathed programming.
* CS is boring
This was a huge revelation for me. On one hand I loved programming and thought it was awesome that I could do what I considered fun and get school credit for it. But at some point I realized that although I love the programming part, I found the CS I was being taught mind-numbingly boring. I couldn't care less about sorting algorithms, binary trees, graph traversal algorithms, and most of the other abstract crap I was supposed to learn. I just didn't see why I had to know that stuff.
I've realized that I get super interested in this same material when the knowledge is directly necessary for something I'm trying to build, but otherwise I couldn't care less.
* CS is hard
I thought math was easier, which was honestly part of the reason why I switched to math. Given the obsession companies have on GPA, it was a logical decision.
* Fear of becoming like my classmates
I was a socially awkward introvert, and I wanted to be social and extroverted. I don't know how it is now, but at the time the CS department had the highest concentration of socially awkward introverted weirdos, not to mention the complete lack of women. I remember working in the CS lounge once and facepalming at cringey jokes. I didn't want to be around these losers lest I become one of them.
* Wanting to work on more important problems
I think the industry has a tendency of thinking that software engineering problems are the most important problems facing humanity right now.
For some reason I thought majoring in math would give me the toolkit to solve the most important problems in the world. Maybe I was too brainwashed by those movies where some genius in a flash of revelation scribbles some equation on a whiteboard.
* Wanting to make a ton of money
Software engineering money was good, but I didn't like how quickly and steeply the money topped out. I didn't want to enter an industry knowing that my compensation would cap out at $200k/yr (I don't think the tech giants were dishing out $300k/yr all-in comp packages to new grads back then, or if they were I wasn't aware). I wanted the sky to be the limit, which is why I became interested in finance (again, I wasn't aware of entrepreneurship at the time).
---
Of course going back I probably would've majored in CS because the interview process in the industry skews towards CS knowledge, and math eventually became boring and too abstract and isn't as relevant.
I couldn't agree more about your analysis of Idiocracy. While the movie is entertaining, I found it surprising that it ignored the developing world (where intelligence/IQ/appropriate-proxy is increasing and poverty decreasing).
The whole movie seemed to be a cheap dig on stereotypes of rural/redneck behavior rather than any meaningful look at society. The conclusion that it hand-holds the audience is that the "wrong" kind of Americans don't respect intellectuals enough and they will ruin the country. The movie literally ends by the educated savior being respected for being smart.
I don't agree with your indictment of satire in general; I consider Idiocracy to be pretty ham-fisted in that regard. Especially compared to much better Mike Judge works like Office Space and Silicon Valley.
The two years I spent in Corporate America on any given day was either living an episode of The Office or Office Space.
People burnt out by fire drills coming from above, scared to use PTO as it was "bad optics", not receiving credit or appreciation, etc.
WORTH REMEMBERING: By nature of an employee showing up daily is to perpetually commit to the job. It is entirely up to person and their risk capacity. Saw a lot of "stuck" people who didn't like their job, but also wouldn't venture out to change that or actually tap into their true potential.
There is not "obviously" something wrong.
Would you say there is obviously something wrong with the plumbing industry that keeps women away? Or is it just that the smell of shit is too unpleasant? Likewise, some aspects of tech could simply be unpleasant to women, and there are reasons why men are more likely to put up with unpleasant work (like the need to feed a family). I have personally experienced a lot of unpleasant aspects of the tech industry (let's just say the movie "Office Space" is not far off the mark), unrelated to gender.
Mind you, I am not claiming nothing is wrong (although personally I consider it unlikely), just that it is not obvious, because there are other explanations for the gender ratio that don't involve "wrongness".
Isn't this the same as the premise of the movie Office Space?
I missed one of my favorites: Office Space.
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
I thought about creating a syllabus of essential biz/capitalism/media movies for new grads tonight. "Network", "There Will Be Blood", "Office Space", etc.
Let's build this thing...
And wouldn't the smartest fraction of the population, or at least the researchers think they're the smartest, have the best skills at shamming and avoiding individual busywork and finding careers where they can ruminate in relative peace compared to working in a busy call center, for example?
Even in general at very large scale, a world of limited and shrinking economic opportunity but unlimited and expanding education (well, until the future student loan crash arrives), means you can try to pile on busywork but the people shamming and pencil whipping it are better at shamming and pencil whipping and everything else, than any other cohort in the history of humanity...
As a cultural touchstone look at the movie "Office Space" still relevant today. He stares at the walls for an hour or two every day trying to look busy. Sure you might have to pass three interviews with ten people while proving P=NP and writing a javascript compiler to GET the job, but to DO the job you have to update TPS report headers every couple weeks and that's about it, other than loading letter size paper into the laser printer and staring at walls looking busy. Not to spoil the plot of the movie but the lead actor is not a theoretical physicist although if he were, it would be a dream job for him, work about an hour a week then look really busy the other 39+ hours while working on physics.
I know three ex-Apple employees, they all describe it as akin to the film Office Space.
My theory is that the whole point of the new UFO campus is to jolt the working environment out of the 1980's. Sort of like replacing, rather than updating, the Mac Classic OS, in a way.
[am I getting downvoted for knowing people who worked at Apple, or for having a theory?]
"I had it good and now I don't have it good and I don't know what to do about it" is a fairly formulaic structure for a human interest story, and while I really loathe human suffering, it's also hard for me to sympathise with the subjects in stories such as this one.
>“If you’ve worked at a large company for 10 years and get laid off, chances are your skills are six generations behind,” says Jonathan Nelson, chief executive officer of the Valley social network Hackers/Founders, which organizes meetups for startup developers.
10 years? To quote the character Samir from the film Office Space "It would be nice to have that kind of job security." I've grown up in a US workforce where staying in the same job for more than 2 years is essentially taking a pay-cut because raises / bonuses don't keep up with real-world inflation (milk & brisket, for instance). To further belabor my point, I joined the work force during a Recession, and statistics indicate my lifetime take-home (salary, benefits, etc) will be significantly lower than...well, what these folks enjoyed during their prime earning years. I won't even have a decent interest rate environment for my savings to grow without joining in the equities casino.
For the life of me I have a lot of trouble feeling sorry for their plight, and wish them all the best of luck packing up their possessions, their savings, and moving to a place they can afford, like Mississippi or Indiana. As Sick Boy might say, "You had it, you lost it, and it's gone forever." Such is one theory of life.
Office Space is often cited as a slow burn sleeper movie, not so popular when it was released, picking up fans over the years.
Office Space came out in 1999. Fridays started removing the junk from their walls in 2005 followed by Ruby Tuesday in 2007 because they were supposedly embarrassed with the depiction of restaurants like theirs in a 6- or 8-year old movie? Not a real strong temporal correlation there.
I've noticed this being a thing. Actually, its my #1 dream after doing ASIMUV full time (which will hopefully will become a reality). Also, its a comment easter egg because Im referring to the movie office space. The protagonist quit his job at a software company to go and work in construction. :)
Our society has a difficult time talking about power. You're better able to get actionable advice from experienced people in an intimate setting, like a classroom, than you will be able to from books. Which is why an MBA may work better in this regard.
A good way to learn is to pay close attention to the way managers talk about it. Movies like Office Space and The Office cut close at the truth, but don't quite get you there. They're dramatizations, moving at the speed of narrative, whereas real situations move at the speed of conversation.
One of the key things to remember is that qualifications have very, very little to do with it. The main thing they're looking for is for other people to like you. "Like you" is manager-speak for the sort of respect that will get them to take you seriously as a manager. If you ask them to do something, will they do it? Even if it has nothing to do with their job duties? That's a quality of a good manager.
Second, they need to need your services and they need to get it at the right price. They once tapped me to hire a junior engineer under me. I could not find anyone willing to work for the prices they wanted to pay, so I couldn't move up. Eventually they decided to switch technology stacks rather than acquire human capital.
During these talks, it was all I could do to keep up with the hidden meanings behind the things they were saying. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it with the benefit of hindsight, there are aspects of that experience that clearly show why there's so much coded language around this process and how I screwed things up by not understanding the language and expectations beforehand. I regret nothing, as I've got way better options than middle management at a non-technical firm.
Office Space should be /required viewing/ in high school. That movie taught me more about what to expect in the typical American office than any other experience in my life.
Why not go proper "office space" on it? Take it outside of city, beat it with baseball bat, make some massive heel drops on it? All of this of course to same music, film it and put on yt.
Honestly I think the dynamics of the movie are lost on any generation that was not in the work force at that time. In that period, outside of the valley, a good deal of people would end up working at a Innotec, at some point in their life and it is a soul sucking experience. Working with the mundane individuals who have learned how to work the corporate system but produce nothing can really kill motivation. Further dealing with people who are in charge of decision making, but are obviously incompetent can create a Peter.
Office Space was not about a lazy guy, it was commentary, at the time, about how the faceless enterprise software shop can burn a person out, at it's heart is was a fairly accurate portrayal of burnout, something a majority of developers experience at least once in their life.
It struck a cord with developers of that era and is why it became a cult classic with them. The cast of characters had an uncanny familiarity to may people one would meet in these bad software shops. I think some may be lost in translation now due to the fact that the "Innotecs" where the first shops that packs up and went to Asian.
Every seen that "Office Space" documentary, err, I mean comedy, where the poor TPS report programmer has like eight bosses all telling him what to do because he works solely for them? Well...
Personally, I just don't like paying for something else monthly, or hourly. Even if it's a slightly better deal; I just don't want the hassle of another monthly bill-- looking for errors, new fees, the date the good deal goes away, the trust I hand over when giving out my credit/debit card. I know it doesn't make logical sense. As to a gaming computer, I would rather spend a couple of grand upfront, and know I can patch it together for the next few years. Same with an automobile, I don't mind driving an older car.(my current car is a POS to some individuals, but it's never seen a mechanic, it's safe, and it gets me where I need to go. I do need to thank the engineers at Toyoya though. They made some pretty indestructible automobiles.)
Sometimes, I think about that quote in that movie Office Space, when Peter Gibbons said, "You know, I've never really liked paying bills."
The problem with "real" micro-offices is that a lot of SMBs don't own the physical property, and instead they rent. These properties often have drop ceilings, so even if the "walls" of the office(s) hit the ceiling, sound would still very easily travel up and over (and removing the drop ceilings is expensive/hard).
Companies had an alternative: Cubicles.
They were modular, relatively inexpensive, and gave the experience of an office but without needing building work or cooperation with the landlord. But people "hated" those and companies that utilised them were seen as dinosaurs (see the movie Office Space). Then a few companies did open plan, and every said they were young, forward thinking, and trendy so of course a bunch of companies are going to follow suit...
Ultimately micro-offices would be wonderful, but they have practical and cost problems. Plus let us not forget fire codes. That alone can dictate how an office will be laid out (so fire exits are visible, etc).
Somebody should make Office Space 2. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
Do you know that by invoking "Case of the Mondays" you're referring to a specific character from the movie Office Space ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AB9zPfXqQQ ) who, in making that comment and then chuckling to herself as she walked away, presented almost a perfect example of someone who thinks they are far more funny than anyone else does? You do get that right?
I felt the same. It had the surface qualities of a series about nerdy/geeky computers in the 80s. But missed the essence. I identify much more with Mike Judge's work in Office Space & his Silicon Valley tv series.
:'(
Brings the film 'Office Space' to mind:
Michael Bolton: You think the pet rock was a really great idea? Tom Smykowski: Sure it was. The guy made a million dollars.
My advice: be more professional. What you posted makes you sound childish with how you might "get even" for them doing this to you.
Remove this post, walk away from the job, gain other employment and try and get paid from them for the work you have done.
Have you seen the movie "Office Space"? There is a scene where they just stop paying an employee in hopes they get the picture and just leave on their own. A non-confrontational way to part ways....
Some people seem to expect more from their job than just a place in a cubicle where they can do their duty for 8 hours and then go home. They want to have fun, be together with cool people and so on. If you can't bond over music, there is one fun factor less (btw Michael Bolton was a reference to the movie "Office Space").
If you manage to run your company as a factory where individuality doesn't matter, only code output or whatever, good for you. I don't see why it should be the go-to model for everyone, though.
I seem to remember blog posts about the music system at GitHub. Not sure if they play music over speakers? If anybody would put Michael Bolton on, the feelgood atmosphere might receive a serious dent.
Btw I am not a recruiter.
ever seen the movie 'Office Space'?
'fun' dress code is only fun when the person wants to dress in that manner.
> I have no idea what TPS reports are.
"Office Space" is an important movie for anyone reading HN.
Office Space (1999) is a great and rather funny movie about this topic: [7,9 stars on IMDb]
* IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
* Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IwzZYRejZQ
This reminds me slightly of the scene in the movie "Office Space" when the consultants were interviewing one of the employees and he was discussing "People Skills".
I've only watched an episode and I thought it was hilarious. I don't even think it's an exaggeration. I've worked for a company that went from a startup to a massive company complete with big name bands playing to 12 people. I think we've all seen bro-grammers. The roving packs of engineers was spot on. There really are tons of crazy vehicles... my main transportation is this thing: http://www.larryvsharry.com/bike/bullittstraight.jpg
For the people who don't find it funny, you may in the future. I actually didn't think Office Space was funny the first time I saw it as it just cut too close to the bone. Now I see it as one of the funniest movies I've ever watched.
I think they'll ultimately need to ease up on the wacky humor and make it more of a drama, similar to Entourage or other HBO rags-to-riches shows like How to Make It in America. I'd be concerned at such a pivot, but Mike Judge had episodes of King of the Hill full of real, warm, human drama, so I think he can pull it off. Office Space had heart at its core, too.
I liked original versions of Pirate of Silicon Valley, and original Office Space - nothing beats those two movies on Startups.
However, the theme (and reality) of entrepreneurs facing all sorts of challenges and storms, and still stand like a mountain to support their products/platforms/ideas reminds us how power a human being is! just amazing...
That seems appropriate, since Judge did "Office Space", the finest documentary ever made about the tech industry.
Starry eye programmers from outside the Bay Area should be forced to watch the Office Space movie for an idea of what Silicon Valley is really like: a gindingly dull suburb.
Much more impressed if they can use a macbook to ignite the cig.
Do you remember the movie "Office Space" and the "jump to conclusions mat"? There's a law of nature that all SO answers must be about 9 steps ahead in a different direction from the question. A much more correct interaction would be "can I turn my macbook into an ashtray?" "Yes, just make sure to remove all the plastic first"
My instantaneous reaction was someone's making an art exhibit and their macbook ashtray will be sitting right next to their vintage Mac aquarium conversion. Or they have a broken mac and want the weirdest possible ashtray for their company smoking area.
That's my guess. For all, for the sake of argument, let's say this developer did hire somebody to pump up his numbers. They could even be extorting him to pay them more in exchange for their silence. It reminds me of the movie 'Office Space' ... where they rig their software to shave fractional-pennies off of each transaction for an eventual payday, only to have their plan work too well too quickly.
I like open offices. I grew up with cubicles -- no thank you. I'll take the downsides to open offices to the downsides of being isolated. Just use headphones. And for companies, have rooms where people can go for focused, quiet work when they need that.
I was apprehensive moving from cubicles to open space, but I actually find that I appreciate the social aspect of it. I'd rather not be alone all day in my tiny enclosed corner of the world. There's a good reason movies like Office Space exist.
To be honest, I read that in the voice of a character from the Office Space movie. You know, the guy with thin-rim glasses and suspenders.
I like to treat Dilbert and Office Space as slightly-fictionalized-for-the-sake-of-humor documentaries.
They could, but realistically that isn't going to happen. Hence the Office Space reference:
Michael Bolton: Yeah, well, at least your name isn't Michael Bolton. Samir: You know, there's nothing wrong with that name. Michael Bolton: There *was* nothing wrong with it... until I was about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys. Samir: Hmm... well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael? Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.
Michael Bolton, the character in the movie, laments that he shares his name with a (real life) signer. He could go by another name, but refuses to because he thinks that the singer is at fault. Realistically Michael Bolton, the song singer, will never change his name, so Michael Bolton, the office worker, is choosing to instead complain and live with it. The humor comes from the ridiculous nature of the office worker's stance.
(Also, assuming the wifi on these buses is not in violation of FCC regulations, this really is this guys problem, not Google's.)
Merger of large .com and .gov ruining .gov for everyone, environmental damage for everyone not just stockholders, lack of economic agility / flexibility ruining economic conditions for everyone else, the previously mentioned Dilbertian damage to culture and lifestyle impacting to some extent everyone, obvious lifestyle problems like traffic jams and parking lots and general commuter lifestyle negatively impacting everyone... (also edited to add the larger one player is, the less of a free market exists for everyone else, so lack of competition ruins the marketplace for everyone)
Simply calculate the ratio of people claiming in public that they wanna work at a smaller company vs wanting to work at a larger company. HN is not representative in general, but in this specific example no one really wants to work at Innitech from the Office Space movie.
Or the total aggregate of whining about working conditions about dilbertian megacorp inc vs smaller more flexible companies.
So, you wanna run a zoo.. Well OK. Nothing wrong with keeping both giant Elephants and tiny little Meerkats, in fact some diversity is an excellent idea. They're each cool in their own way. But its ignoring reality to not accept that the giant elephant exhibit is going to produce somewhat more smelly biological solid waste than the tiny little Meerkat exhibit.
I don't blame the devs either. I know they crap with which they must deal. It must be like the movie Office Space mixed with endless meetings, thousands of pages of specification docs with the agility of an 12th century stone wall.
True, but I suspect that doesn't massively prolong most movies, only big ones that people are passionate about (Star Wars, The Godfather Trilogy, etc).
Just randomly picking... 2004. Top 10 movies from that year, and pulling future media sales predictions out of my ass:
Shrek 2 kids movie, profitable regardless. Spider-Man 2 probably poor The Passion of the Christ probably poor Meet the Fockers nobody cares. The Incredibles kids movie, profitable regardless. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban great. The Day After Tomorrow nobody cares. The Bourne Supremacy possibly good. National Treasure nobody cares. The Polar Express nobody cares.
I mean, I am sure all of these will have future releases on new media. There is no reason not to re-release movies, it is essentially printing money), but will many of them see dramatic sales that will really change how we view the profitability of those movies? Meet the Fockers was a good movie, but nobody is going to give a shit if you re-release it in 3D, 4K resolution, "hyperdisk". Only a few have that potential I think, and it gets more bleak if you stop looking at the top 10.
After the initial burst of home media sales, I just don't see most movies getting anything more than a trickle of revenue. For every movie like Office Space, there are dozens that aren't.
The complement of procrastination is wild passion. One who's capable of procrastinating with one sort of things is exactly the type of guy who's capable of getting some other things done if only he does things that call him on a deeper level.
It seems that among the great scores in school you haven't bumped into anything would have ignited that passion in you. That is OK because schools are pretty much designed to kill all passion, and you're so young anyway. There are a lot of people who can't get things done because they aren't smart enough: it's always better to be a procrastinator in comparison.
Procrastination is your way to reject activities that don't mean enough to you.
Nobody procrastinates splitting and carrying wood if the heating of his house depends on it. Your behaviour is effectively saying that reading Hacker News is more meaningful to you than your work. That is a good hint: find work that you would rather do whenever you find yourself procrastinating at your current work.
Another hint: you're suffering because you'd like to care about your work. THat's passion speaking already.
You would like to do lots and lots of good work: you just can't get to it where you're working now. There are a lot of people who would kill for such a talent and go happily abuse the smarts you have so that they could only work for three hours and then go play Patience for the rest of the day.
Also consider that three hours of real work per day is pretty average for the hours of a regular workday.
Other people fake it, too, and work on looking busy, even subconsciously. Yet you can find people at the kitchen all day long, drinking coffee. Or browsing Facebook at their computers. It's all a subtle game where everybody knows that nobody really does productive work all the time but everybody also knows that they're not to admit it, even to each others.
Note that this behaviour is not intentional: it's simply that people aren't generally wired to do creative things for hours in a row, day after day. What people can bear, for example, is 8-hour shifts on the assembly line five days a week numbing your mind, and then consider what even that does to them! Not to mention creative mental work that you can't force like you can force your muscles! I've talked about this with many people and the consensus seems to be that roughly four hours of real work per day means a good day and you're likely to just work the rest of the day wrestling with your guilt because you think you could do more.
Thus, consider the fact what you do during the three hours is that what is important. Not the things you could've achieved, according your imagination, in the other five hours.
Further, if you're working more than eight hours a day, it's no wonder you're super frustrated and trying to get out by procrastinating. You say you do "bullshit" for 7-8 hours and 3 hours of real work, that adds up to 10-11 hours a day. That's a lot of precious time spent for something you could've just done in three hours with much less stress!
Finally, go Watch Office Space. Again. While it's supposed to be mostly funny it just happens that the movie hits the chord on so many levels that it's nearly creeping in its truthfulness.
I recently found out that Swingline never originally made a red stapler, but started making them in 2002 (3 years after Office Space was released) because they got so many requests for it after the movie was released.
Story linked here: http://www.techcomedy.com/www.redswinglinestapler.com/history.php
Also, watch the movie Office Space and read lots of Dilbert cartoons to mentally prepare for your mind numbing career in IT.
It's a reference to a similar topic of conversation in the movie Office Space.
"I was thinking particularly of its use in the movie "Office Space"."
I didn't invent it, I have personally been subjected to a conversation right out of the movie WRT powerpoint at a previous employer, "Yes, I know you have the corporate minimum of 25 pieces of flair in your powerpoint, but you only have the minimum 25 pieces, and brownnoser over there has 47 pieces of flair in his powerpoint, isn't that great, and you wouldn't want my boss to think you only want to do the minimum, would you? I mean I'm not telling you that you have to add an animated dancing robot to card #72, but I'm hoping you yourself will want to add an animated dancing robot, without my having to tell you to do more than the minimum..." What a steaming pile of coaching. I am thankful not to work there anymore... It wasn't word for word outta the movie (didn't use the word flair, I believe it was "animations and font color changes") but close enough. Actually I think the coaching conversation happened before the movie?
> flair
Thank you for finally providing me a concise word for so much of what goes on with typical Powerpoint use.
--
P.S. For those unfamiliar with the term (in this context).
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flair
I was thinking particularly of its use in the movie "Office Space".
Easy now. That was a movie line from Office Space.
Ah, the heart of this is why "success" (full stop) should mean financial success. An insidious association in our culture.
Office Space is a profound movie, btw.
Silicon Valley : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
Director & writer is Mike Judge who is known for his animated series Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill as well as the classic Office Space.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
That's an opinion(so of course it can't be wrong) that I have heard, it is being debated fairly intelligently downthread along with a debate about the fantastic King of the Hill and Office Space.
Here is a list of movies that critics and non-critics consider to be much better post WWII satires than Idiocracy, according to internet ratings of these movies. Note: many of these are more humorous and brutal while being less crude and light-hearted than Idiocracy. Also many have plot, emotion, and deep characterization.
Films: American Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dr. Strangelove, Office Space(also Mike Judge)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire
My main problem with Idiocracy as a satire is that the message it sends is flatly incorrect, because the rules of their world are not the same as ours. It is a satire of some alternate universe in which we are not living, it has no applicability for the world we live in.
Film's message: "If our societies ever end up giving a competitive advantage to low IQ people, time travel will be necessary to correct society's decline."
The truth:"If our societies ever end up giving a competitive advantage to low IQ people, natural selection will take care of it, since intelligence seems to be a competitive advantage for apes."
I think the true message is also a better call to arms for both intelligent people and unintelligent people. The movie Idiocracy seemed like it was made to be consumed by the citizens of the low-IQ world, in both plot and acting. I do enjoy its light-heartedness.
Much more realistic are the famous dystopian texts, especially Harrison Bergeron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
Meh, 58% if you click 'Top Critics' and filter out the blog-spam critics. A solid F+.
Plus all the big national papers: the Times, Post, Journal, and LA Times, plus all the trades: Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly all shat on it, and many of the small local paper reviews that are counted as positive are mixed at best:
"Although never boring and almost continually amusing, Extract doesn't work as a movie because you don't buy a minute of it, even as silly satire."
or
"Extract has some flavor, but the comedic kick is diluted by flat characters and a thin story."
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/extract/critic-reviews
It reminds me of something Tim Heidecker said about the horrible reviews for 'Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie': "If you're a critic and you walk out of a theater wondering what the filmmakers could have possibly been thinking, maybe you missed something?"
You would think critics would give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who made Idiocracy and Office Space, especially considering the critical reappraisal each of them has gotten in the years since their release.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend Judge's 2009 movie 'Extract' with Jason Bateman of Arrested Development.
It sort of inverts the Office Space formula and shows the sometimes taxing, even soul-crushing nature of entrepreneurship.
It seems to follow the pattern of Office Space and Idiocracy in being panned by critics and ignored by audiences at first, and then quickly developing a cult following and being recognized as pretty brilliant.
Well I have seen most of the episodes of King of the Hill and pretty much agree with that assessment.
It's not about the setting or the characters or even the jokes (which are both more dry and generally less funny than other projects, and I love dry humour).
It's about the complete reversal of the counter-culture commentary that made Office Space and Idiocracy popular. If you choose a boring hack writer setting (teacher wife, blue collar father, stupid son, etc, etc) for your show then you better make that choice the focus of your commentary, like the Simpsons did. The setting was chosen in order to comment on it. If King of the Hill was doing that then the commentary appeared to be "Isn't this nice. See how wonderful life can be when you don't question your place? Learning won't make you happy, conformity will. Good hard work and ignorance can be fulfilling".
I don't think anyone is wrong for liking it, but you certainly can't complain that fans of Judge's other work dislike that level of support for an anti-intellectual outlook.
Really? I thought most people found it pretty mediocre...especially compared to Office Space. The movie itself had a very hard time getting released, IIRC. So maybe my standards were so low coming into the movie that I ended up liking it (which I guess would kind of prove the movie's prophecy in some way...)
The departures come at a time when Google is in transition, its becoming "old." Having worked there between the time it exited its giddily irresponsible teen years to the start of its midlife crisis, I recognized the symptoms. What was humorous to me was that I lived through that the first time at Sun (at Sun 10 years) from Sun just going public to the point where they were struggling with their identity. And for much of that time Eric Schmidt was either my boss, or my boss' boss. 'one hop' in the food chain as it were. At Google I mentioned to Eric that we'd been in this movie before :-) He pointed out the numbers were a lot bigger in the picture on this go round. From what I hear from friends who have left after I did, the movie is playing out the same way.
The last group I was in at Sun was the Java group that later was the core of JavaSoft. It had been populated with low employee number 'refugees' as one of them put it. A number of folks certainly had enough money to not work if they chose to. But an interesting thing happens.
When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering.
This was one of the messages in the movie Office Space which is sometimes expressed as 'Work like you don't need to work.'
The change is both subtle and dramatic. People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support. They sometimes stop everything they are doing to spend a couple of months to help a promising new employee get their bearings and become effective. They push back on schedule fantasies with hard nosed realities, they tell upper management when things are borked or when they are making bad calls. When you don't care if you get fired, as long as your a reasonably principled person, you can become immensely more effective.
And you learn is that it isn't that you don't like work, its that you don't like bogus things that get in your way at work. Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on. Sure pretty much everyone takes some time off to just breathe and think three related thoughts in succession, but once decompressed from the demands of that large organization, they engage in their vision with diligence and passion. Because of that I am not at all surprised when people who became financially independent at a company continue to work there for many more years. How they work changes, and sometimes what they work on changes, but making things happen is a powerful drug.
As for the median thing, my experience is that people I've interviewed have short stints with longer stints in the middle, so they go job A -> B -> C then at job D they find someone or something to keep their attention and work there for a longer time 5, 6, 10 years then move on. My cycle time seems to be 5 to 10 years but its really an individual thing.
One movie I saw get this right is Office Space, where Peter's computer has to do 69 different things before finally quitting.
True, it exits from a Mac-like GUI to a DOS prompt, but I loved the depiction of office software as finicky, time-consuming, and frustrating.
I would say that it's mostly based on the culture you cultivate for your brand and yourself. In Gabe's post he mentioned Initech, the company from the movie Office Space, because it represents the quintessentially shitty corporately inundated fortune 50 company. Consequently, when I think of FOSS programmers, their job is either to work on this FOSS project (hired by yahoo to work on freebsd), or they're unfulfilled by their current job and use FOSS as a way to be creative and enjoy their craft. Prolific people are driven by obsession (my opinion); so even if they use that to make ends meat, it's not the end of the line for their work.
You just made me realise it will be a total disaster. Because Google aren't buying the entirety of Motorola, they are buying the cellphone/consumer division of the company.
Hence if the clever ploys are true which John Gruber alluded too, then motorola are smart. And being smart they have already moved the best talent back to the other company "Motorola Solutions" and Google are buying a pile of average to bad.
Plus I doubt Google is ready for the HR mess thats about to hit them. If anyone here has been through a large restructure or merger then you can appreciate just how disruptive and demoralising the process is. Productivity and loyalty will plummet.
If you haven't been through a process like that go watch the movie "Office Space" its a light hearted view of a dark subject, and is way to close to home on many points.
downvote freely (but then don't laugh when watching Office Space).
If you have enough life experience, or read enough of Matt Groening, worst case watch enough Office movies/series, then you could suspect that bosses can be manipulative sociopaths, who do not deserve any professional courtesy.
BTW: most bosses don't fire f2f (Office Space), but with an indirection, through Human Resources Services (or hire scumbags, likeUp in the Air) [and then good luck, with your file].
I guess Steve had a reason to do this, and I respect him for having the guts to stand up in such a public way against dirty careerist office background politics, management decision support and calendaring theory.
Maybe this case doesn't fit, I have no clue (in my experience, it can be the "right thing to do" in large organisations detached from true ethics). But if Steve felt it this way, then it was this way (see Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation)
Right or wrong, there is a sense that some people have that any place that mandates Windows usage to developers is the equivalent of "Initech" from the movie Office Space. At least, that's the feeling I get from similar discussions with my undergrad friends.
summary: too much flair vs not enough
(Office Space movie reference. Hilarious must see.)
I think notmyname's comment is great. It's so true the parallel to office space. The reason office space was such a successful movie was because of the real world experiences in corporate america that the audience has itself experienced. Thanks for sharing the comical real world example of office space like life
Sounds like something out of Office Space the movie.
I tend to be fond of movies based on true stories. For true stories about people who set an impossible-sounding goal and accomplished it, I will nominate "October Sky" and "Cool Runnings". Neither has an office setting. The first is about a young man who did not want to end up a coal miner, like his father. He and some friends began making rockets and managed to parley that into college scholarships. IIRC, he ultimately ended up working for NASA. The second is about the origin of the first Jamaican bobsled team (that went to the Olympics).
Hopefully, people will see how this might be relevant to folks wanting to found a new business. Office Space is a good movie but is now kind of disturbing to me as someone who currently works in cubicleville. I think of it as "dire warning" rather than "inspiration".
Seems like a circular question. Office Space is a movie about work because it specifically defines itself as a movie about work. But when I nominate (as I now will) Apocalypse Now as a great movie about the experience of being a soldier in Vietnam, everybody will look at me funny. As if soldiers weren't professionals being paid to go to work.
Of course, I might be wrong about Apocalypse Now, as I've never actually been an infantryman in the Vietnam War. I have been a science grad student, however, and I can say without hesitation that Real Genius is the Apocalypse Now of graduate school. Even the physically-impossible hacker tall tales in that movie are note-perfect.
EDIT: More examples. Adaptation is very much a movie about being a professional screenwriter. And there are dozens of movies about being a professional cop, musician, athlete, reporter, or artist.
>Let's face it -- the movie that sums up the life of a corporate developer best is _Office Space_. The IT Crowd doesn't make it much more appealing. >Meanwhile, lawyers and doctors and biotech and all sorts of other fields where there are more women -- they get the awesome shows and movies.
That's it! We need the IT port of House!
Even if you disregard who you work with, what else do medicine and law have that compsci doesn't?
* your family & friends will be able to grasp what you do
* on average, in those fields you can have a much greater positive impact on other people than you can employed developer
* your field is insulated by the need for education - you don't have to worry about 16-year-olds who think working 20 hour days is fun
* codes of professionalism (whether or not they're slavishly followed)
* regulatory boards that can and do eject bad apples
* very hard to outsource to India or other destination du jour
* law firms and medical practices don't go boom and bust as often as tech firms do
I'm a female developer and I honestly don't care... but then again, I've made myself impossible to compete with. I'd also gnaw off my own leg before working in a corporate tech environment.
Let's face it -- the movie that sums up the life of a corporate developer best is _Office Space_. The IT Crowd doesn't make it much more appealing.
Meanwhile, lawyers and doctors and biotech and all sorts of other fields where there are more women -- they get the awesome shows and movies.
I wanted to "just try the industry for a year" before going back to school to do a PhD. I have ended up being a "Java Enterprise Douchebag" for years :-(
I strongly advise against trying a normal job. Everything you could learn you could learn faster by simply watching the movie "Office Space".
"Does he honestly believe that a movie about Batman eating a bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie about me?"
You're confusing execution with the idea. The idea of you sitting around eating a bowl of cereal might seem boring, until you look at other ideas.
An author sitting around a hotel in the middle of winter. (The Shining) A mother and son sitting in a car. (Cujo) Office workers dealing with life. (Office Space) A man trying to get a rug. (The Big Lebowski)
The idea (A Dilbert movie) isn't the execution. It's merely the idea. A movie about you doesn't have to be boring. But the execution of it could result in a boring movie.
The problem with ideas is people always refer to the idea as bad, yet point to perceived execution as the reason. Just because an idea is good doesn't mean it's going to be a good movie.
A good idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a good movie. A bad idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
I think Hogan's Heroes is an excellent example. Really, a comedy about POWs in WW2? Really?
I had a similar thought the last time I watched "Office Space", that movie is over 10 years old now and the clothes they wore would work well today.
I think it's mostly slang from people in their 20s/30s. It was used most prominently in Office Space, a 1999 film.
"Boreout is a management theory that posits that lack of work, boredom, and consequent lack of satisfaction are a common malaise affecting individuals working in modern organizations, especially in office-based white collar jobs. This theory was first expounded in 2008..." (emphasis mine)
2008? We've had a generation of movies, books, etc. in which this idea is one of the main themes at the very least. Office Space, anyone? Fight Club, even?
Precisely.
In fact, on the day of the video, we had started with the discussion, "do we change the name of our company?" This, however, turned out to be a much more enjoyable option.
It's a little like the "Michael Bolton" bit in the movie Office Space. Although the singer (in this fictional setting) knew little of the inconvenience caused to the fellow who he shared a name with, it became a nuisance nevertheless.
That was the spot we were in. We didn't feel that Discovery had done anything deliberate here. They likely just came up with a name (or the producers of the program did) and used it. They may have seen that someone had the URL and was operating with it, but didn't think much more of it.
In a way, I'm quite happy that the program is so bad. (Well, from what I hear at least--I've only watched a brief snippet.) Being so poorly received means that the program will likely not be renewed. Sure, it will live on in syndication for another few years, but we'll likely outlive it.
If we would have been called Mythbusters... we would have been completely screwed. ;-)
It's an Office Space reference.
In the movie, the PHBs hold a meeting in which they solemnly instruct all their employees to ask "Is what I'm doing good for the company?" before they do anything.
The audience rolls its eyes in sympathy, for the reasons you've pointed out here.
Office Space was a movie. A good movie, but a movie, nonetheless. It taps into human fantasies about being trapped in a cubicle, turning the tables, lashing out at our oppressors, etc. But it doesn't represent reality. Working for someone else is a voluntary association, not slavery or imprisonment.
Note that at the end of the movie, the people in the movie have grown up a little bit, and realized that all the stuff they did was unnecessary. They can do anything they want with their lives, because the world is full of possibility. So, sure, watch Office Space, but take away that ending message rather than an insane plan for wreaking havoc on your boss and coworkers.
Pull an "Office Space". I am serious. Only go into the office when you feel like it. Do things that you enjoy, watch some kung-fu movies with your kids or whatever. It can take months to fire someone as long as you don't get into a fight, and you'll get severance. When your boss gives you shit about your work hours, literally tell him "Sorry, I have a meeting with the consultants" and leave for the day. You're talented, you'll get another job, and there is a decent chance you will not even be fired. They will let you work from home or in a different dept. after your boss complains about you to his boss.
Jump to Conclusions Mat is a reference to the movie Office Space. It's a great movie you should check out some time.
Before the film Office Space, there was no red version of the swingline stapler. After the film, they were inundated with requests for a red version of their stapler.
So they manufactured it.
I'm gonna have to disagree. It was entertaining, but the movie was entirely farcical. Its assumption re:how the world might potentially degenerate was silly, but I'm baffled at how people think that could possibly happen. It's like watching Office Space by the same director and thinking that taking a guy's stapler will definitely lead to him burning down a building.
Comparing the influence of a cheesy movie to one of the stapleholds of science fiction is ridiculous. The fact that Idiocracy owes its existence to the concepts of The Time Machine suggests that it's a derivative work, meaning it's not as influential at all. I'm not saying The Time Machine was a good warning, either, not as much as 1984 and certainly not as much as Brave New World, which is arguably the best prediction we've seen from a book, so saying Idiocracy is as right as The Time Machine isn't saying much to begin with.
The typical view of a business type by a software engineer is not pretty. It gets pretty close to, we do all the work, they do little but interfere with us, and then they take all the money. So it's an uphill battle to have a good relationship. (The _truth_ of this view varies wildly from company to company, but the perception is always there.)
See the movie "Office Space" for details. :)
Things that are a good idea: * Your technical staff is probably very smart, and not just about their jobs. Listen to them. They're particularly good at working with data. If they say that your market research doesn't sound right, even though that's your job and not theirs, it's worth going through it. Geeks are generally happy to learn things, too, so if you're actually right and can show it, we really like that too.
* Give your geeks the big picture. It really does help, because we're constantly making long-term tradeoffs, and if we know where the company is going, we'll be less likely to need to say, "Uh, we need to do a massive project for that feature, sorry!"
* Try to give clear requirements and make changes early. It's not an easy thing to ask, but a change made in planning phases is cheap. A change made when the project is in beta is expensive if not impossible. A business type giving a list of changes every day late in the project is infuriating.
* As a corollary, ask to see things early. A prototype with partial functionality is good. It's really true that a lot of times a business type just can't reasonably know what they want until they have something to play with (which is fine), so get that sooner, when things can be cheaply redesigned.
* Understand that changes aren't free. Schedules get made based on original requirements. If the requirements change, it will take longer to finish. If the deadline is fixed, you can't ask for something new without giving something up. Business types that understand this are much, much easier to work with than ones that don't, and are by far the exception.
* Programming requires uninterrupted time, like making a painting or writing an essay. If someone asks you a five minute question, it can take half an hour or more to get back in the flow of what you were doing. Try and send not-urgent questions via email, schedule meetings for the beginning or end of days, and if you can take, "Can I get back to you in 15 minutes?" for an answer, that'd help.
* Understand that these guys can, and do, do the math with respect to compensation. When I had a CEO that asked everyone to put in 60 hour weeks, and then we ended up with 3 figure bonuses when he got a 7 figure bonus at the end of the project - none of us ever respected him. If we're giving more than expected, and we will, show us some of the reward, or watch us leave. Even in a down economy, a competent techie can find greener pastures if it turns into us vs. them.
* Techies are not big on hierarchy and authority. After all, especially in a technology company, we know more about what we do than you do, and if that's the core product, there's often conflict between who is in charge and who knows about what actually is the product that pays the bills. We like to think that we work _with_ the business types, not _for_ the business types. If you project the story of doing some useful work that we don't want to do (like find buyers for our product, get us good press, find investors, stuff we want to happen but don't want to do), it'll go a lot better than if you present yourselves as 'leaders' with 'vision' and expect us to do your bidding. It's a team, and while we get that the buck has to stop somewhere and it's going to be the person with the title in the end, prima-donna VPs are just as well liked by us as prima-donna developers by you.
Someone could write an equivalent set of bullets in the other direction - yes, business people are smart, their jobs are hard, and they're often worth the salary they earn too (and certainly a lot of techies are useless.) But I'm probably not that someone. :) Hope that this is somewhat useful to you, though! I certainly have found that some business people treated technical people well and were good to work with, and others, not so much.
Even if you didn't care about learning business through film, I would recommend these. Most are classics and highly enjoyable. I left out the great ones already mentioned.
Risky Business - going from idea to execution in a very short time
High Fidelity - small business, vertical expansion, labor relations
There Will Be Blood - "I have a competition in me."
Office Space - process reengineering, efficiency, employee motivation
It's A Wonderful Life - customer service, community building, ethics
The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit - work life balance
The Player - handling office and industry politics
Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room - ethics (and the catastrophe that befalls those without them)
it creates the culture as seen in the office space movie "in a given week, I do about 15 minutes worth of work".
Take a simple form, and a programmer in a corporate environment will tell you that it'll take them a week to finish. That same programmer, working for themselves would finish that same form in a couple of hours.
eh. Any time someone uses a phrase like "is in the best interests of the company" I think of the movie "Office Space".
You see, every company has a culture, and culture is much more than slogans. If from the very beginning the employee felt like he couldn't speak up "because it was not in his job description" then there's something deeply wrong about the culture, slogan or not.
It's a reference to the movie "Office Space." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/quotes
I also enjoyed Mike Judge's other film "Idiocracy". It's not explicitly a hacker film, but it's a sci-fi story about an average guy in a world of idiots, so it verges on hacker territory. It also has some examples of hilariously bad human/computer interface design.
(And if you're into cry-yourself-to-sleep-reality movies, there's also Outsourced, a recent comedy about a call center manager who must train his replacements in India. I found it surprisingly enjoyable. Its primary themes are culture clash and figuring out what's important in life, so it shares similarities with Office Space and Gung Ho.)
I've been thinking about this. I'm a writer, and I've wondered whether it would be possible to get together a good director and good actresses and make a really good porno.
Right now? I think the answer's no. The problem is that you're going for two audiences: the porn-watchers and the content-seekers. The porn-watchers pay for the scene. The more scenes you have, the better. The content-watchers are the ones who'd watch something straight through if it was worth watching. The problem is, a large part of writing-directing is a matter of taste. When you're writing a sex scene into something, you only keep what you absolutely need to advance the plot. Most porn scenes are 10-20 minutes long, which means even if you only have one per film, you're making a really imbalanced product.
I can see writing an interesting, compulsive scene if you've got great characters and great acting, and if you weave plot in. But the more of that you add, the worse the scene gets for the porn-watcher. It's much more a zero-sum game, where you can't win with both at the same time.
And that gets to the bigger problem: porn is not intended to be art. It's meant to soothe people who aren't getting something they should be getting. If you're getting great sex, you don't need porn. You can subsist entirely on art pieces that aren't erotic in that sense. I'd put porn in the same category as something like Office Space in that the main intent isn't artistic merit, it's helping somebody who's in a situation they don't like. The fact that it's no sex versus a dull job doesn't change the fact that neither one is quite as funny if you aren't in that sort of a situation.
(Art nudes, by the way, aren't meant to be erotic. Usually they're meant to capture the human body in its entirety, and there's nothing erotic about the human body unless it's actively teasing you. The novel Syrup has a great scene describing this. Nudes aren't sexy unless you've been teased with a partly-clothed body, and when the girl isn't deliberately denying you the sight of more.)
Now, I can see porn becoming more integrated with movies and TV. I can imagine, in a long-running TV show, a "moment of release" sex scene that literally climaxes seasons of building tension. But that's not the porn industry. That's a little porn added on to a much bigger thing.
Look at how porn is used in books. Pulp writers (Dean Koontz and kin) use it wholesale to raise reader interest during boring sequences. That's pornography in the current sense. Once you hit higher art, though, sex scenes are always used to portray something. You lose the full erotic impact. People aren't buying literature to jerk off: if anything, the jerking is incidental.
And so there lies the problem. Pornography is by its nature a low-brow product. If people pay for more, they'll pay for something that's not inherently pornography. And that means the current porn industry is screwed (ahahaha pun). If you want to masturbate, amateurs are perfectly fine. If you need a level higher, there's always piracy in the form of streaming legal videos, which the porn industry, shady as it is, can't compete with as easily as the RIAA can. They're fighting a battle with everything against them.
Also be sure to watch the movie "Office space".
In the case of youtube it seems most copyright owners tacitly accept the presence of their material, probably because they recognize the promotional value.
It's a weird situation now where people casually link to illegal material, like a Family Guy episode or a clip from Office Space, and nobody even blinks.
Too many bosses like lumberg (from the movie Office Space) out there.
Can't get any referrals.
Besides Microsoft and the rest are scouring the streets of third world cities like bombay and Calcutta picking up throwaway kids and teaching them how to program.
Only one out of 50 makes it but when they kick in they only cost $15 an hour.
Who the heck needs those expensive kids with Computer Science degrees.
Very well stated cog........ The best artistic portrayal of how "leadership" works (in the software development anyways) was with the character "Blumberg" (or at least I think it was blumberg... something like that) in the movie "Office Space". He was the manager of the character played by Ron Livingston (or at least I think that was his name)........
Hilarious movie. I've watched it dozens of times, though not for a few years now and that's why I'm a little hazy on the names. But whenever anyone starts talking about leadership in this business Blumberg is the guy that pops to mind and that's just because after over 2 decades working in the industry he's the guy who best characterizes all the managers and supervisors I've had to work for.
And a guy on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's Movie Week made a cool $250,000 just by knowing about that plot device from Office Space:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5monB4fIzy8
It looks like he was excited to get that question.
I'm in NYC. We have Central Park and lots of Barnes & Nobles and Starbucks and stuff like that. If I could get the startup I have in mind going ... which I'm trying to do, just having difficulty finding available tech talent ... hint hint ... I'd have mandatory random blocks of individual "Go out and walk around Central Park for a few hours and distract your conscious mind while your subconscious mind calculates solutions" time and random blocks of group "Go out to Starbucks, get some fresh air and discuss projects outside the office for a change of pace." time.
Also weekly company movie viewings - either outings if something good is playing or good 'ol Netflix.
Our first movie would be Office Space, as a friendly reminder of why starting your own thing is the best thing to do in life.
My undergraduate education was in Industrial Engineering. Industrial Engineers are the outsourcers. They have been portrayed memorably as "efficiency experts" in movies such as American Beauty and Office Space. There will always be jobs for Industrial Engineers, until they start outsourcing the outsourcing.
This is the same problem engineers have...lol have you ever seen the movie office space? the easy answer is to hire someone who is a people person and knows a little about programming. Let them deal with the customer/public and you can continue to do what you do best...hack.
I'm coasting along now with a 2.8 GPA and a willingness to let it slip to a 2.0. I'm an industrial engineering student and you may remember us as the efficiency experts from movies such as Office Space and American Beauty. The salary for an Industrial Engineer in Pittsburgh is almost constant for anyone with a QPA over 2.0. Those with better grades just get to work for a more nationally known firm instead of a local manufacturer.
College is so aversive to me because all it does is prepare me to work for someone else, at a guaranteed salary of 55k per year (sixty by the time I graduate?). True failure for me will be taking a job as an Industrial Engineer. I can't think of anything I want to do less. But if I haven't become successful by the time I graduate from college and no one is funding me, I won't have much of a choice.
I'm running my current startup like a business. We're not seeking funding and we're growing very slowly. We have no costs so everything we make is profit. We haven't made any profit because we haven't actually sold anything but we'll get there eventually.
"the office" TV series and "office space" are good ones if you want to know what the rest of your life will be like if you don't start a successful startup.