What goes on exactly in typical white-collar work?

[mad_scientist]

Hey guys,

 

For a few years now I have been employed in a few blue-collar jobs but I am wondering, how do white collar jobs compare in comparison?

 

Is a regular white-collar office job stressful? If you have an office job, what do you do exactly in your work on a daily basis? Would one feel less exhausted at the end of a working week if they have white-collar work in comparison to blue-collar work?

 

My dad died when I was young and I never saw him work and same with my mother (she's only ever worked a few temporary jobs but those didn't last long) and hence my reason for my asking. Both my parents were relatively uneducated so my reasons for seeking the life experiences of those on SFN to gain new insights!

 

What are everyone's experiences of white-collar work here?

 

Cheers,

mad_scientist

Edited June 8, 2017 by mad_scientist

[imatfaal]

I tend to sit and pretend to work at my desk whilst in fact I am browsing Scienceforums.net.

 

In reality the work is a mixture of

1. Obtaining information

2. Processing and understanding said information

3. Re-packaging this information for dessemination

4. Evaluating performance of steps 1-3

 

The information comes in via email, telephone, web-sources, trade press, textbooks and legal texts, and word of mouth; the processing is done in various methods from handwritten calculations and note-taking to custom software and requesting expert opinion; the repackaging is normally verbal to my principals, verbal/instructive to my staff, and every so often office memos and special reports; and the evaluation is mainly self-inflicted. Of course all 4 steps are, in effect, carried out simultaneously and as a mish-mash but that is the very basic idea.

 

I am lucky in that in my case this process is very rarely carried out to solve the same problem twice

[KipIngram]

White collar work can be very stressful. I've been the VP of engineering for a couple of small companies here in the Houston area. Both were very intense, "get it done" environments. I had fairly large teams to assign detailed work to, but in both cases the owner or CEO looked right at me when it came to how things had turned out. I had to learn what I could reasonably expect from the various people on my team, make sure they had appropriate assignments, and make sure they progressed appropriately. When they didn't, I had to figure out how to adjust project plans to recover from the setback. In addition to that I was also responsible for the architectural integrity of our products. In the most stressful of those two gigs the owner generally had a few very very high level elements he wanted to see in the architecture, and it was on me to figure out the rest of it. My team at that company was fairly junior - they were capable of doing good work at the detail level, but none of them really saw "the big picture," so I had to make sure that all those pieces of work came together in a way that got the job done.

 

For a while in there I worked 80-90 hour weeks, sometimes slept on site, and so on (especially in the last few weeks before our big annual trade show).

 

So yes - white collar work can thoroughly stress and exhaust you. But it's not all like that. I now work for IBM; they bought the small company I was working for in 2012. This job is very low stress. I often don't feel really challenged - I miss the intensity of those earlier jobs. But I can't deny that I'm much more relaxed than I was then, and I'm getting old enough that that's probably best.

[iNow]

Lots of emails... like hundreds and hundreds... lots of conference calls... some you lead, some you listen to, most you must hear a recording of if you were too busy when it was happening live and missed it. Tons of assignments, many due at the same time, usually without enough resources (money, people, tools, etc. to get it done). You need to be comfortable switching from PowerPoint to excel to a huge contract in word full of terms and conditions, and you need to be good at thinking quickly on your feet to address unexpected "fires" or emergencies.

 

You often feel like you're never off work. There's no 9-5 setup. If I'm awake, I'm working...just sometimes more, sometimes less... even evenings, weekends, and holidays (boy have I got a story to tell about my 2016 New Year's Eve and day... doubt I'll ever forget).

 

You need to be resourceful and know how to get things done, how to make things happen even when you have no real authority over other groups. You need to take ownership of issues even when fault for their creation rests elsewhere. You need to be cognizant of and cautious with politics, aware that stated motivations are often insincere. You need to be precise with language, manic about doing what you say, self-aware enough to proactively decline work and requests you can't deliver on, and be okay in environments full of brilliant people who often have little patience and unrealistic expectations.

 

When you're in a role that's customer-facing, magnify those stressors by at least ten, especially when they pay you several millions of dollars per year and you're personally responsible for retaining and growing that revenue. The expectations and pressures in those situations scale rapidly and often in unexpected ways.

 

All that said... there's a reason it tends to pay more and have better benefits. It takes sacrifice and not everyone can do it.

[KipIngram]

That's all spot on. The politics can be maddening, especially in larger companies. In those small companies I mentioned in my last post (especially the first one) I had full authority to make things happen, so it was ok with me that the boss looked only at me re: the results. It was a lot of responsibility, but I had the means to deliver. Lines of authority in various parts of the company were very clear - you knew exactly who was in charge of every department.

 

Not so in my current job at IBM. I sometimes feel like no one is really in charge of anything - everything is done "collaboratively," and you have to massage people's egos and know your way around the "pseudo organization" to get anything done. It's taken me years to become even somewhat competent at it. When they bought the small company they brought in their own management. I was bummed at first that I was no longer in management, but after some time watching how management "works" at IBM I began to realize that I really wanted no part of it.

 

Which is all just a way of saying that exactly what white collar work is like varies enormously from company to company.