A general question that happens to be my predicament at current. I’m a general safety admin/manager that has automated most of my tasks(emails/excel sheets)
Most days I doomscroll fediverse and lurk irc/matrix channels on the work desktop but am curious about more practical or useful things I should be doing instead. It’s looking like this will be my life for a good while since job market is abysmal and promotions are hyperstagnate(have also hit a wall in improving my scripts). If anyone has any similar experiences, please share and advise, as I feel quite lost and trapped :/
I very annoyingly have yet to see this suggestion - go talk to your fucking coworkers!! If everyone is showing up every day, then you have a whole office full of work friends to make! Make a habit of hanging out at the coffee maker or water cooler or whatever and shoot the shit. Ask people how their weekend was. Introduce yourself to people you haven’t met before. Just chat with people for 15 min or so at a time, and then go back to your desk and do something fun/for personal development/for professional development. Then you have things to talk about - and then just always have some job related task on the backburner that you can keep working on, so when people ask about what you are doing at work, you can say “oh yeah, I’m working on X, which will have Y benefit.”
THIS IS HOW YOU PROGRESS IN YOUR CAREER. Yeah, working on your skills is super valuable. But the people who go far, the people who are never short on job offers or pay raises, are the people who have lots of friends.
Unfortunately, this will not help when working with people who are only interested in sports. I was asked which team i followed for the World Championship in football, to which i responded “I don’t watch football”.
Response: “Then what sports do you watch?”
“I don’t watch sports.”
His eyes widened while he stood there thinking for a second. “Then what do you do in your spare time?” He asked, flabbergasted. I told him there are other things in life than watching sports.
It’s like this for everyone I work with. They’re all hillbillies. I need to get out.
I’ve had good luck sharing my own interests instead. A few years ago I got super into watching SpaceX’s rocket launches because it’s honestly spectacular and they know how to do a really good livestream, plus watching the booster come back from orbit and softly touchdown is pretty incredible (I’ve had a hard time enjoying the live streams since Musk’s involvement with Trump of course)
But popping over to a coworker and going “hey there’s a rocket launch in 2 minutes, wanna take 8 minutes and watch it with me?” is a brilliant ice breaker
Trust me, my coworkers would not care about anything as exciting as a space launch! I’ve tried sharing my own interests with them, but they’re not interested. The only thing I can talk with them about is my dog (because he’s allowed in the office, and they love him).
Have you tried… watching sports? I’m kidding. However, with something like the World Cup coming up it’s pretty easy to feign a passing interest. Even my mother seems in to it, and she usually couldn’t tell a football from a pinecone.
I have tried. Just not my thing lol. Like, at all. I love playing sports, I just don’t see the fun in watching someone else play.
And don’t get me started on the people who’s complaining about what someone on their team did wrong; they wouldn’t be able to do what the athlete do if they got 1000 tries!
You need BLUFFBALL. A Bit from a TV show that somebody made kinda real.
Holy shit, that’s awesome!!! Also, I haven’t watched IT Crowd this year, so thanks for reminding me!
I mean, yeah, get out. But in the meantime I would suggest trying your best to find some way to relate. In 2 years maybe one of those guys will hear about a good job opportunity and pass it along to you “because he’s a nice guy who gets his work done - even if he’s a bit screwy to not watch sports”
The people I’m referring to are warehouse packers and repair technicians, while I create the automations for the warehouse. I highly doubt they’ll be able to recommend me in the future.
Talk to people?! That’s insane. Far better to deep dive into arcane coding disciplines and submerge oneself in niche strategy/fantasy roleplay. Fucking norm.