White-Collar Work Is Increasingly Meaningless

"Iteration" vs. "communication," among other themes.

That chart above is from some new-ish Microsoft report on the future of work — I’ve read parts of the report, but not all of it, and I can only assume that the solution at the end of the report is “Buy Office Online” — and while it doesn’t seem that bad in terms of 57% vs. 43%, you need to also remember what “work” is. Ideally, you’re supposed to complete tasks and create things — services, products, experiences — for people, in exchange for money. That’s kinda the base-level description of the economy. Instead, it seems like most people nowadays are “communicating,” and if you’ve ever worked inside an office for 11 seconds, you know that the “communication” often isn’t very strong or coherent, so in the 57% of time you’re doing that (which I bet is higher), what are you really doing?

I think you have a couple of different things at play here:

1. With the advent of more tech in workplaces and SaaS and all that, some of the core functions became easier to do. The sheer invention of Excel probably made work 100x easier, even though Excel can be the devil. But, people still need relevance and they need to justify their income. So they increasingly spend more time “communicating” or “going back and forth,” i.e. “circling back” on things. Most of this is meaningless, but in your mind, it keeps you from getting canned.

2. We made the middle too fat. Most middle managers don’t know how to iterate or create or do new things. They know how to call meetings and discipline you and have poorly-organized Zoom calls.

3. We created “busy” as a proxy for “action” to the point that our surveillance software tracks busy items — mouse activity, emails sent, etc. — and claims it’s measuring “productivity.” No. Those are different things.

4. Being “slammed” and constantly discussing your email volume and everything you have to respond to, etc. feels good and relevant and like you’re now protected in some way.

5. A lot of people in workplaces are kinda dense, and job role is often pretty amorphous or unclear, so firing off emails and Slack messages and calling meetings feels like a way to “get everyone on the same page,” even though usually 11 other meetings have to be called to clarify what happened in the first six meetings.

In short, a lot of white-collar jobs are meaningless, have become increasingly meaningless, and will be automated out, but we’re running from this reality.

I think the biggest culprit is the mistaken confusion around “busy” as “productive” or “busy” as “relevant/important.” People like to feel as if they do big, important, contextual things all day. Most people sit around and wait for someone who makes more money to tell them “It’s OK to do that,” and the reason they spend their days this way is because they know that if they don’t spend their days that way, the person with more money will go nuts on them for showcasing any autonomy or innovation or go-get-it nature, even though all executives and middle managers claim that’s what they want to see. It’s a beautiful little circle. Managers ask for drive and innovation, yet often if you show it without respecting their authority, they throw you on a PIP. And we wonder why engagement scores have dropped for 12 straight years minus one.

So the “busy” vs. “productive” thing is a big issue, but so is the issue of job role, job design, who does what, and how long things take. I’ve met a lot of middle managers in my life. Some think that creating a spreadsheet of tweets takes seven days. Oftentimes, it takes 32 minutes because Twitter provides you said output. Something like that. People in organizations get very confused about how long actions take, and they usually have too many direct reports + are too busy kissing ass up the chain themselves to really understand who does what, who’s truly busy, who’s sitting around all day, etc. If you’re an employee that sits around all day, and finances seem tight at your company, you will start sending 10,000 emails/day to seem relevant. We all do this.

In this way, “communications” > “iteration.”

It is interesting to see this gradual (sudden?) decline of the white-collar job, which was the gold standard for parents — “Timmy got an offer from JPMorgan!” — for literally 3–4 generations. Parents still love that type of stuff because it seems relatively stable, but I believe most people entering the workforce nowadays (if TikTok trends are to be believed) realize it’s mostly pointless busy work that’s not far off from automation, and middle managers (who also shouldn’t be far off from automation) chasing pointless priorities and nickels in the couch cushions of whatever industry/vertical they’re in.

I wouldn’t say RIP to the white-collar job just yet — we still need a tax base and consumers, after all — but it’s increasingly become more meaningless.

Takes?