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by irrational 775 days ago
I like the big companies because I can be paid a hefty six figure salary while working 4 hour days and spending the rest of the hours doing woodworking, gardening, home remodeling, baking, exercising, reading, etc.
4 comments

It's an odd thing - at all the big companies I've worked for, you can usually get all your work for the day done in 4 hours. Between meetings and status waste, that's all anybody expects from you.
What you personally do is only part of your job. Communicating with others is probably at least the other 50%. Even if your an individual consultant your clients will expect you to communicate with them.
Do meetings typically involve communication? I'm not familiar with practices in various companies.
I wish I could be so lucky. In recent years, every job I've worked for has reached a point where I had to endure 4 hours of meetings per day before we could even begin to get work done (if we were lucky)

The departments where people were casually putting in 4 hours per day mostly got axed during COVID and again during the 2024 recessions. There was a period of time where a lot of teams accumulated a lot of people so they could spread the work thin. Eventually management started catching on and put an end to that.

Do you count the meetings as work?
Yes. I have one 10-15 minute standup a day and one 15 minute one on one with my boss a week. Other than those I almost never have any meetings.
Surely. It'd be hard to get to 4 hours otherwise.
psst, stop saying it.

Companies would rather overwork 1 person than pay 2 and have both slightly under utilized