“The new world of work!” But, uh, the wrong people are making the decisions

Ted Bauer
3 min readOct 1, 2021

Been quoting Ed Zitron a decent amount recently, so I’ll keep that up here and quote from this interview he did with Numlock News:

They say, “Oh, there’s collaboration, spontaneity, office culture.” Which does not exist. “It’s so beautiful and it happens.” But they’re not in the office. Where are they? Reed Hastings at Netflix, he goes off about this, “Oh, the spontaneity of the office.” He doesn’t have an office. Does not have one. Has not had one in years. How often is he with the proles, walking around? Never. None of these people are. And that’s the larger problem, that these decisions about labor are being made by people who do not labor.

Here lies the essence of all that: “… decisions about labor are being made by people who do NOT labor.”

Indeed, and it’s always been that way. At the top of companies, you have the most power, influence, and authority, but you’re also furthest from (a) the end consumer of whatever you do and (b) the people that actually do the work to get that product/service out. You have no real fucking clue what’s going on, to be honest. We love to write articles about CEOs who go to the loading dock or take customer calls (remember Anne Hathaway’s character in The Intern?), but those are maybe 1 in every 5,000 C-Suiters. Most just live in…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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