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Office Space turns 20: How the film changed the way we work
- pseudolus 8y agoI'd certainly give credit to Mike Judge for "Office Space" and "Silicon Valley" but he well and truly hit the nail on the head with the prescient "Idiocracy".
- goatlover 8y agoThat was supposed to take place generations in the future.
- pseudolus 8y agoIf only.
- Apocryphon 8y agoThis previous thread has some pretty good discussion and critiquing of Idiocracy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488520
- sifoobar 8y agoAgreed; the others are nice and all, but nothing beats the Time Masheen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3dhSnEtdWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3dhSnEtdWw
- elchief 8y agoIt wasn't supposed to be a documentary, sadly
- skrebbel 8y agoI've wondered about its premise, actually. Anecdotally where I live (the Netherlands) I don't feel that "smarter" people get fewer kids than "dumber" people do. Is there any data about this? Say, #kids vs education level?
- dmurdoch 8y agoStudies [1] have been done, and from what I can see at a cursory look most show a negative correlation, especially for female IQ. I think the disparity between high income to low income counties in the US would show this relatively well. [1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2013-boutwell.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2013-boutwell.pdf
- auiya 8y agoLots of interesting reading here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence I believe long-term fertility is largely eugenic, favoring those with desirable genes. Whether or not intelligence is viewed as desirable long-term, or if there is a shift, or short-term course-correction; that's going to take many generations to discern. In the US at least there is a perception that in the short term fertility and intelligence are negatively correlated. This is likely due to them erroneously viewing poverty as a proxy for intelligence, and there is a positive correlation between poverty and birth rate - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
- izzydata 8y agoIn some ways the world of Idiocracy is far superior to ours. In no future of the real world would the government be willing to find and give authority to whoever is deemed the most intelligent person on the planet. If we did that today things would look very different.
- 4thaccount 8y agoOffice Space is similar to Dilbert in how well it describes certain aspects of cubicle life. I'm lucky to work for a good company, but they all have aspects of these worlds that describe them too well.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoFrankly, open plan offices exhibit far worse versions of all the same things found in cubicle life. Really it’s just companies that respect basic human needs enough to foot the bill for private offices.. and everyone else who either engages in rationalized cost cutting or cargo cult bandwagoning.
- Hupriene 8y agoThe only real benefit of open plan offices is that they are slightly less ugly.
- 4thaccount 8y agoMy buddy recently left for another job where they have offices and it looks so much nicer. I'm sure he can concentrate much better.
- gilbetron 8y agoI worked for a small tech company that, like many, was valued extremely highly in 1999, but the owner didn't listen to advisors and so we fell down the cliff with the other tech companies. He was dejected, along with most of the company, for most of 2000/2001. The company still had steady revenue from government stuff, though, and those of us left kinda did what we want for several months with no guidance. I watched Office Space nearly daily (the owners stayed home watching whatever and rarely showed up) during that time. It was a weird, shared misery. I wasn't the only one. We even ordered some red staplers and had them floating around for a while. We also, for whatever reason, printed out tons of Jeff Goldblum face shots and hid them all around the company. 10 years later and the owner was still swearing whenever he'd find one.
- DevX101 8y agoI was going into college around when this film came out. I loved the movie, but it also made me adamant that I never wanted to work in a work environment depicted in the movie. This movie was definitely a part of the reason why I never majored in Comp Sci even though I loved the subject in high school. I assumed all tech employees would inevitably live the life of a cynical corporate drone in IT overwhelmed by bureaucracy and office politics. Fortunately many different companies emerged since then which had different approaches to work culture, but this movie probably changed my life!
- sigfubar 8y agoWhat did you major in, and how did that turn out for you?
- amatecha 8y ago"How the film changed the way we work" -- Printers don't use the error message "PC LOAD LETTER" anymore? ;)
- LeoPanthera 8y agoIt's actually a great example of a user-unfriendly UI. Most people still don't know what it means. PC does not stand for Personal Computer. The error message comprises three parts. "PC" is an abbreviation for "paper cassette", the tray which holds blank paper for the printer to use. These two-character codes are a legacy feature carried over from the first LaserJet printers, which could only use a two-character display for all printer status and error messages. "Load", in this context, is an instruction to refill the paper tray. "Letter" is the standard paper size (8.5 × 11 in.) used in the United States and Canada. Thus, the error is instructing the user to refill the paper tray with letter-sized paper. Variants are "PC LOAD LEGAL", meaning that the printer needs more legal size (8.5 × 14 in.) paper, and "MP LOAD [paper size]" meaning the printer needs paper in the "MP" (multi-purpose) tray, and "[paper size]" is the name of the size of paper specified for the print job.
- ceejayoz 8y agoWe discovered these displays could be updated via a curl command at one of my previous jobs and they quickly started saying things like "FEED ME KITTENS".
- walrus01 8y agoTurns out that in the year 2018/2019, if you leave printers connected directly to the Internet, which will print any jobs sent to them, you get this as a result: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18119576/pewdiepie-printer-hack-t-series-youtube https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18119576/pewdiepie-print... https://github.com/RUB-NDS/PRET https://github.com/RUB-NDS/PRET
- LyndsySimon 8y agoI had a boss that absolutely freaked out when he saw that the printer was set to scroll “SELF DESTRUCT IN”, “3...”, “2...”, “1...”, “MAYBE NEXT TIME!” every few minutes. I had a cron job set up to run a Python script every minute with a 1:10 chance of displaying it. He stood there watching it for probably an hour, before running to his office and making a panicked call to PC Services about how our network had been hacked. I messaged a friend in that department and owned up to it. He later told me he logged an hour “solving” that problem and requested a copy of my script.
- btilly 8y agoTrue 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...
- flukus 8y agoI spent 15 months as "the glitch". Started on a 3 month contract to cover someone on maternity leave. After 3 months nothing was said, after 6 months the woman on leave came back and nothing was said, after 12 months still nothing. Eventually after 18 months they told me they would not be renewing my non-existent 12 month contract.
- cableshaft 8y agoI spent 12 months as "the glitch" myself. It was my first office job, in data entry, at a business office for Verizon. Me and two other people were hired as temps for a project that was just supposed to last three months. Those three months pass, and my supervisor didn't hear anything about letting us go, and wanted to keep us as long as possible, so he just had us keep filling out our timesheets. 12 months after our job was supposed to have ended, someone finally realized it and he let us know he had to end our contract. It was also a wake-up call that people that work in these offices can really struggle with working with proprietary enterprise systems. I was practically a star in the office because I could work around all the various bugs that some enterprise Java application had so we could order all the things we needed to for other business units (I had to do some seriously janky stuff to get it to work, like close and reopen windows at certain points to keep it from crashing, choose unintuitive options, interpret what weird and unexplained acronyms mean, etc).
- paulryanrogers 8y agoWas it meant to be funny or relaxing in some way? Just strikes me as sadistic or incompetent. When facing a potentially life altering event I'd rather be told face-to-face, like an adult.
- jMyles 8y ago
- purplezooey 8y agoNotice there are no open plan offices in the movie.
- jandrese 8y agoOnly because it was made before open plan offices were really a thing.
- Zelphyr 8y agoAnd the “cube farms” as we called them back them were almost as bad. Worse in some ways. They gave a false sense of privacy and people could be louder than they otherwise might have been because they thought those fake 3” walls were sound proof somehow. I remember one co-worker drumming his desk in his cube opposite me all day. It was unbelievably distracting.
- purplezooey 8y agoYes, those were horrible. Filled with some kind of tissue paper or just air.
- Alex3917 8y agoIt 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.
- jhpriestley 8y agoSupposedly "birth of a nation" led to a revival of the KKK.
- Alex3917 8y agoYeah that's definitely fair. There have been a lot of movies that have been very successful (for better or worse) at changing how people think about and contextualize the past.
- ken 8y ago> Maybe 12 angry men has had a real influence on juries in some unseen way At least one highly visible influence: "Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated that seeing 12 Angry Men while she was in college influenced her decision to pursue a career in law." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Angry_Men_(1957_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Angry_Men_(1957_film)
- dylan604 8y agoJust today read an article on The Social Network being nearly 10 years old now. Of course it's a Sorkin script (with the commentary that's to be expected), but the article mentions how much more sleazy Facebook is perceived today than it was even at that time. How much different would the script be in the light of what we know now? Can't find the link I like Sorkin's work and even tend to agree with his points, he just gets a bit self-righteous and preachy in some of it.
- 8y ago
- StevePerkins 8y ago> "Instead of personality-stripping cubicles, organisations would go on to favour open-air office plans..." Absolutely nothing fundamental has changed. I feel like if "Office Space" were being re-made today, open floor plans would be one of the horrors that it would lampoon. Not so much the open floor plans themselves, mind you. But rather the surreal absurdism of which they're just an example. Twenty years ago, we understood that "Hawaiian Shirt Day" was superficially supposed to be a morale booster, but was actually a morale sink in practice. Today, open floor plans were initially pitched as "collaboration" aids, but most people have to come to realize that they're really about cost savings, and are counter-productive to actually getting focused work done. Most white collar humor comes from shining a cynical spotlight on the disconnect between what business leaders say, and what business workers actually experience. And the Kafkaesque situation of most people feeling this way, yet us not being able to openly say so in the workplace itself. The superficial examples may change, but that underlying theme is still central to white collar office work. Perhaps it always will be.
- amatecha 8y agoHey, why aren't you wearing your Hawaiian shirt, dude?
- amatecha 8y ago(I'm pointing out the fact that one of the reasons Hawaiian shirt days are a bust is because it ends up being a continuous peer pressure situation when some employees don't participate. Seen it happen to so many people whose workplace enacts some kind of "[something] t-shirt day".)
- harry8 8y agoInstead of responding to everything s%&t about cubicles, organisations made all those things even worse by going with open plan. Good heuristic on these trends. "Will everyone absolutely hate it?" If so, it'll get really popular. Hotdesking. Oh yeah! It'll drive everyone nuts! What else you got?
- 8y ago
- sifoobar 8y agoFunny story: I had just started working at a SV-based startup with mandatory surfing lessons and a fivefinger-wearing transhumanist CEO when Silicon Valley started. Watching it was very painful, to say the least. Having to go through it is one thing, having your nose rubbed in it another.
- cabaalis 8y agoI fail to see how the "nah-gonna-work-here-anyway" joke is a racist microaggression. Being unable to pronounce a name and making a joke about it could happen just as easily with a name like "Tom Snuffaluffagus." I see a distinct difference between joking about a difficult name and joking about the physical attributes or ethnic history of a person of color.
- gowld 8y agoIt shows that Samir Nagheenanajar doesn't quite fit in to that society (people can't remember his name), and that people take him a little less seriously than they do others, due to something that has nothing to do with his life choices and (almost) can't change. And it's something that comes from being born in a different culture with a very different language. "Nagheenanajar" isn't a difficult name in India, but it is in Silicon Valley. "microaggression" doesn't mean malicious intent, it means one of an endless series of small unpleasant things that pile up over time to make an impact.
- maceurt 8y agoIf I go to India then, should I expect them to not make fun of my name or pronounce my name perfectly? Once any name, culture, ethnicity, becomes large enough in size in a population then people will start learning how to pronounce their name and about their culture naturally. For cultures or ethnicities that are small in size in a country, then naturally people are gonna have a harder time, because they are not as exposed to those people. It would be a net negative in time for a whole population to learn about a small subsection of the population, because it would waste more time for the general population overall than is worth saved through hurt feelings and a feeling of being unwelcome.
- jogjayr 8y ago> should I expect them to not make fun of my name Absolutely yes. Anything else would be rude. > or pronounce my name perfectly? Basic courtesy demands that they make their best effort. > a net negative in time for a whole population to learn about a small subsection of the population That's a strawman. No one's asking anyone to do a deep-dive on other cultures. > it would waste more time for the general population overall than is worth saved through hurt feelings I don't think good manners take that much time. Learning and remembering people's names is universal table stakes for interpersonal interaction. A polite society is its own reward - within reason, cost benefit analyses like that are kind of silly.
- synesso 8y agoThere's a great between-the-lines take in this movie. Bill Lumbergh is dating Peter's girlfriend on the Saturday. That's why he forces him into work ... and why the girlfriend also leaves a message.
- dlbucci 8y agoWasn't it a different Bill Lumbergh that she had actually seen?
- LarryMade2 8y agoMakes sense. I never picked up on that.
- joegahona 8y agoIsn't Lumbergh at the office when he calls Peter multiple times?
- rjain15 8y ago>"inept managers, mind-numbing bureaucracy, forced office parties, repetitive busywork and jargon-filled memos read by none." till date, I have to read jargon-filled memos and watch mind numbing training videos. Nothing has changed.
- Consultant32452 8y agoI've actively avoided learning and using my current employer's jargin/TLAs/etc. Every review I get high praise for communication, how well I work with teams of different skillsets/expertise. I can't help but believe that I'm considered a good communicator because I use "real" words to describe things instead of the made up nonsensical "official" terminology.
- gerbilly 8y agoAt my wife's job a manager uses the word "efforting", for example: "We are are efforting a change to last night's ..."
- noahl 8y agoA coworker at a previous company had a red Swingline stapler on his desk. He told me that at one point, the company was giving them out to any employee who had to change desks more than some number of times in a single year. They eventually stopped this practice when they moved so many people that they ran out of stapler budget. (But they didn't run out of moving budget!)
- bellerose 8y agoI remember reading a comment on youtube about the ending of the movie. Supposedly who ever wrote the script wanted something to happen where Peter would detest his new job in construction. The director didn't want it and so the ending is a happy one.
- sevensor 8y agoI think the DVD had both endings -- I'm sure I've seen the other one.
- gerbilly 8y agoYes the DVD does have the alternate ending. What happens is that the construction foreman comes up to Peter and Lawerence and says something like: "Can you guys do more shovelling and less talking please? That would be great."
- nsxwolf 8y agoWhat a depressing end that would have been. It would have sucked all the joy out of the film. I honestly wonder if it would have been remembered as fondly had that made it in.
- WaltPurvis 8y agoMike Judge was both the director and sole screenwriter of Office Space.
- rb808 8y agoJira. Even though the movie predates it, I feel like it should have been in there.
- robterrell 8y agoIn the new modern version of Office Space, we'll take Jira into the field with a baseball bat...
- mirceal 8y agowhat if jira bring the grasshopper plugin? grasshopper? field? grass? hopper? you’re kind of f’d
- wtmt 8y ago> “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.
- commandlinefan 8y ago> noise canceling headset (which many companies won’t pay for) I'm trapped in an open-office dystopia too - by the end of the day, my ears hurt from wearing these damned headphones all day. And I have some really expensive ones.
- maire 8y agoThe thing I remember most about Office Space is how the questions asked in Contextual Inquiries sound exactly the same as the questions asked by "the two Bobs". In the winter of 2008 (the real estate crash) I was in charge of designing a new UI. I sent a UI/UX team to do a contextual inquiry of our biggest users. Unfortunately our Finance customers freaked out at the contextual inquiries because they thought we were getting rid of their jobs! You tell me if this sounds like a Contextual Inquiry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkmuI5W694o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkmuI5W694o
- bitwize 8y agoOne time I proposed shadowing one of my company's data analysts to get a better handle on what their job is so I could write code with better knowledge of how the software is actually used. The business analyst, whose job it was to bring the requirements from the DAs to the software engineers, started acting very threatened...
- austincheney 8y agoIf Office Space were remade today it would be all about hyper-sensitivity, worship of popular developers by name, walk outs, and Dunning-Kruger people. Unfortunately, a key target audience would likely take this as a serious personal attack.
- mr_toad 8y ago> worship of popular developers by name Worship is a bit of a strong word, but in any case the likes of Lovelace, Turing, Von-Neuman, Knuth, K&R, Stallman, Wozniak, Berners-Lee, Torvalds all predate the movie.
- xenospn 8y agoAnd Code-Bro Libertarians. Don't forget those.
- kentrado 8y agoI don't know what code bro mean, but what's wrong with believing in liberty?
- 24gttghh 8y agoSome people believe their personal liberty gives them the right to infringe on other people's personal liberty. Those people sometimes call themselves "libertarians" in the US, when in reality they are anarcho-capitalists.
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- jim_bailie 8y agoI always felt that there should have been a sequel where Peter, Michael and Samir eventually reunited and started that company Penetrode.
- foreigner 8y agoThis movie had a big effect on my personally. I quit my job of 5 years in no small part because of watching it.
- yhoiseth 8y agoHow did that turn out?
- foreigner 8y agoAt the time it made me deliriously happy. After I was at my new job for a month I amused my new coworkers by commenting "It still feels like I'm on vacation from my previous job. I just can't get it in to my head that I don't have to go back there!" Looking back on it 20 years later, still one of the best moves I've ever done.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DrScump 8y agoI'm surprised that neither the article nor comments here to date point out that the original setting was the cartoon shorts series "Milton"[0], where Milton and Lumbergh are the central characters. The film's climax with Milton's breakdown is foreshadowed in the Milton series ("I could put strychnine in the guacamole...") [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_(cartoon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_(cartoon) I think Gary Cole was underrated; he was awesome in "American Gothic".
- knorker 8y ago> personality-stripping cubicles Oh, if only we could have cubicles! Now tech companies are instead taking after boiler room call centers. They didn't know how good they had it.
- cmiles74 8y agoI'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.
- nikisweeting 8y agoAnother 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 https://github.com/pirate/django-concurrency-talk
- jugg1es 8y agoMike Judge is a prescient person.