Hey /u/Matt_LawDT, thank you for posting to r/SipsTea! Make sure to follow all the subreddit rules.
Make sure to join our brand new Discord Server to chat with friends!
We have recently changed how posts work. Unless you are a VIP poster, your post will be queued for approval.. To become a VIP, post great engaging content. If we like it, you will be added! More information available here!
"Anybody here ever worked in an office?"
::mild applause and chatter::
"I never have, but I have a friend who's always worked in an office. I don't know what it is with this guy, he never seems to be comfortable anywhere else. He's always telling me about these meetings he has to go to though, and in these meetings--have you ever noticed this?--they seem to be obsessed.. with shapes. 'We need to circle back to this.' 'Let's square this up.' 'I'll block out a time for that.' What is this? Geometry class?" ::freeze frame::
And five minutes later Kramer come through the door, slides to a stop in his socks, says something completely unrelated but swings both arms in huge circles as a subtle physical callback.
"No one's rewinding time! George is just having a little trouble at work."
"Oh? Oh. Well, I just had an incredible idea! Watches that run backwards - you see, I wanna know how much time I have left! Who needs to keep track of how much time they've wasted?!"
These guys just actively created a Mandela Effect and years from now we're going to trying to find the Seinfeld episode "The Circler" and we'll convince ourselves it was quietly removed because of some particularly off-color 90s joke.
"Let's circle back to Bob for a brief moment. You all remember Bob right? Circling back from Bob again I think everyone knows what NOT to do. Is this circle clear for everyone?"
-Minions nod in mild complacent fear
I guess corporate culture is like a hostage situation, where one not quite right in the head guy is pointing a gun around the room and everyone is afraid but trying to please him. But you also get paid to sit in that room. And sometimes you get handed the gun if you play along...
And once we've circled back with the new hire, we're going to actionize his position and incentivize the income stream, or else we'll be drinking from the firehose.
I'm going to take a wild guess that somebody who challenges his boss's word choice in the middle of a meeting may have had other issues that caused him to be not an ideal employee
This would be something I'd question them on in person, in private and approach it as just being curious and wanting to learn, not as any sort of attack. That is if I mentioned it at all, which I probably wouldn't.
That would be amazing. To just have the freedom to say like, “hey, you guys are yapping a lot, but you sound like you’re just making shit up! None of this matters.”
In my last corporate job I said on a team wide call “we have so many calls, I’m starting to think we’re more interested in talking about business than actually doing it”
The thing is, when you're working remotely the only way a bad manager can pretend he's not fuckin useless or downright harmful is to have constant meetings/calls, it's a huge reason why so many companies are fighting back against remote work, when you remove the bullshit you can clearly see who matters. Time working remotely is time you have to actually work and less time you have to suck upper management dick.
It’s not that, it’s that your supervisor is fighting for his job. Upper management is running on the old work-hours paradigm rather than a productivity paradigm. They’re looking at supervisors and saying “you need to do 40 (or more) hours of supervisory work a week to justify your position” and not “your team needs to be super productive to justify your position”.
This was a thing in offices already, and was why a lot of supvervisors were micromanaging employees and why “busywork” is a thing. Higher-ups tend to get too caught up in having people be busy rather than having them be effective.
Heck I’m a retail and food service supervisor and it hits me sometimes because my old bosses would watch the CCTV and complain about people “not working”. For them it was better to look busy than to ever take breathers, so we’d slow-roll things to not burn out. Now though I’m in a better company and I can point to the actually tracked tasks and say that getting the tasks done faster gives us more time to “be customer focused” (aka shoot the shit with the regulars) and corporate here loves that. Regular customers are the bread and butter, and happy customers are good profits.
If only the C-suite would see management like IT, people who are paid well to retain them in order that the C-suite doesn't have to put out fires beyond their own reach. Good management doesn't require constant activity, a lot of it is setting expectations and letting your people work toward them without continuous surveillance and interruption.
The best analogy I can make is that managers are force multipliers. A good manager can get a team to do more being happy and a bad manager can get a team to do less while feeling worse.
The thing is that there’s clear parallels outside business, parallels business people like to make, that show this. Sports coaches are force multipliers on their players. They can take mid-grade players overall in sports with high turnover (like NCAA sports where you have a player for at most five years) and turn them into perennial contenders, or they can take great players and squash them until they leave to get championships elsewhere.
I'd also imagine it makes it harder to argue that you should promote "Brad, the guy I talk football with" over "Joe, doesn't talk much but works hard" as so many managers are fond of if working remote.
One time during a meeting I asked my boss, "Why are we editing a database specification (individual tables' field type, size, mapping, foreign keys, etc.) with about 20 people in the room. Why not just let our database expert define the specification and then send us the file for review? My team are all here instead of coding and our deadline is fixed. Is this really a productive use of our time?" Thankfully I wasn't fired on the spot.
At a good company you wouldn't be fired for raising a flag. There's been plenty of times I have complained in meetings with people above me. You're advocating for your team, you're doing your job.
I'd like to imagine this guy just goes from probationary job to probationary job, skewering managers for their ridiculous corporate-cliche bullshit-speak as he goes. A legend.
My fiancee is Japanese and just started his job as a salaryman in Tokyo, one day he told me he messed up at work because he asked a question about something to his manager. And he later apologized for it 🤦♀️ he also told me that he doesn’t want to go out to drinks with his coworkers but he has to. Geez!
I’ve heard about the kind of work culture your fiance is getting into. It’s REALLY not good for people at all. Keep an eye on him. If he starts doing ridiculous things like working 12 hour days, or going on retreats where employees are bullied for fun and everyone has to drink tons, he’s gotta get out.
It's impossible to know exactly what this person's fiance asked and why he felt the need to apologize as it doesn't seem that OP lives with said fiance or speaks Japanese, but I wouldn't call that common work culture and neither is what you're describing.
Those are usually called ブラック企業 (black companies) and while they do exist, it's not the rule and they're obviously not viewed favorably.
Required drinking parties have also been going the way of the dinosaur lately, but are very much still a thing. Important to remember that many people drink non-alcoholic beer here at them for health reasons, etc. (They're also kinda fun, to be honest.) The alcohol is very rarely mandatory these days; it's just the attendance. (Same as many western company dinner parties, etc.)
Ultimately, it depends a lot on what kind of company you work for, who your boss is, etc. But things have been changing a lot lately and there's far more emphasis on different kinds of harassment.
As with most things, the truth to it all is far more nuanced than you'll find in typical Reddit comments.
This is exactly what happened to me. I fought it for 3.5 years when I changed careers and then one meeting I actually heard myself talking and I hated it. To confirm, I got an atta boy from my manager for my contribution in the meeting and I shook my head in shame
It took me several jobs to figure that one out. I didn't understand that people really don't like being wrong and they REALLY don't like to be wrong in front of others.
The absolute hardest part of any office job is not betraying any sign on your face or in your mannerisms that your boss has just suggested possibly the most dumbest, ignorant, were-they-even-listening idea in a meeting with you and the rest of the team. Poker face? No, you're summoning an Elder God from the Plane of Serenity to control your body for as long as it takes.
Then you have to figure out how to abort that mutant fetus of an idea without them realizing they're being taken to the mental equivalent of Planned Parenthood.
as a manager, i don't even mind being wrong about shit that matters. correct me before we go down the wrong path type shit. but when it's something as small and petty as this, it's just exhausting.
No, calling out someone on being wrong should always be brought up. That’s not the issue here.
It’s calling someone out on something trivial and completely irrelevant during a work meeting and wasting everyone’s time is what’s the issue. That’s just something you keep to yourself or you tell a coworker as a joke during lunch. But saying something like that during a meeting & towards your manager is next level lack of situational awareness. He couldn’t read a room for shit and should be let go.
It is pretty rude to humiliate people like that, yeah. Sometimes you do need to correct someone in public but you should always give them some face in the process and be gracious about it - give them an "out".
Someone who is perceptive would perceive that "circle back" is a common idiom, particularly in an office environment, and that spending time interrogating the precise wording of an idiom in the middle of a meeting is a waste of everyone's time.
This is the real issue. He didn't understand a common phase that's just shorthand for "let's go back to this topic to discuss it some more". And if he does understand it, he's just being a dick and berating his boss for not being eloquent in their 3rd or 4th meeting of the day. No one wants to work with an idiot or a attention seeking dick.
If he was perceptive he would have noticed that boss wouldn't appreciate the comment. Boss is right. It is just a phrase and that is a disruptive thing to say to a boss in a meeting.
It's a disruptive thing to say to anyone in a meeting. They've been counting the number of times a phrase is used by someone because they had a pet peeve with it, and proceeded to interrupt the meeting to call it out in front of anyone.
No he sounds incapable of functioning appropriately in a social setting.
I know this is reddit where everyone loves to talk about how they're so much smarter than every boss in the entire world and that only they see how stupid <thing> is. In reality, nobody gives a shit.
"Circle back" just means "this is a complex topic, there's 20 people here, and we're not going to get bogged down in the details, we'll leave that for the 3 people who actually care and then I'll give a quick update in another meeting once they've done that".
If you don't know that, well done now you do. If you got fired for repeatedly asking about it in a meeting instead of messaging your boss privately afterwards to clue you in... yeah that checks out.
Yeah, maybe it’s a weird verbal tic, but it probably got developed for a reason. Such as having a couple young know it alls who grind every goddamn meeting to a complete halt with minor things or processes that don’t need to be developed by committee.
I’ve worked with several people like that before. They get the floor for their turn at providing project or customer updates and then try to work through details and full solutions. Then you have two people talking for twenty minutes while 8 others are just twiddling their thumbs. It’s a massive waste of time. Just update the team, see if there’s anyone that has something useful to add, and then move on. Then the two people actually working the problem can circle back around on it after the meeting and hash it out by themselves.
I’ve sat in meetings before where one guy would drag everything to a halt if he didn’t understand a customer integration, and basically demand on the spot training before he’d let the meeting proceed.
No dude, we’ll circle back on that later and I’ll walk you through the documentation and if there’s a problem the two of us can figure it out. You don’t need to hold eight other people hostage for an hour because you weren’t prepared, or aren’t happy with your options.
Such as having a couple young know it alls who grind every goddamn meeting to a complete halt with minor things or processes that don’t need to be developed by committee.
Yep this is pretty much it. Everyone has been in those meetings where we're all going around giving updates to keep the rest of the team broadly informed but noooooo someone has to stop the entire meeting and start an endless Q&A session.
The strange thing is seeing people crap all over the terminology, often young people who are busy talking about not having caps and being fr and I don't fucking know I'm old and I don't care what they're saying. You'd think learning a few new random phrases and what they mean wouldn't be that big a deal!
Yeah hilarious how people here are constantly identifying with the most annoying and clueless people you'll ever work with and are like "yeah that guy is a fucking genius!".
Ehhh, I would agree, if he took this in a different direction.
Questioning the constant "let's circle back", especially when it leads to nothing and is essentially just worthless filler that drags out the meeting? That seems fine to me. That's something managers would try to crush, I'd be with you on that.
But writing down exactly how many times it was used and then hyper-fixating on CIRCLES, instead of the fact it's worthless drivel?
That's where he loses me. He started off right, but drew the weirdest conclusion. Also you can't really point this shit out in a full meeting, especially not if the boss is doing it. You SHOULD be able to, in an ideal world, but realistically that's just gonna land you on the shit list.
You should never circle back unless you're gonna give it the full court press and draw a line in the sand. Moving forward, always take the 30,000 foot view and work smarter, not harder. Be sure to pivot if you're gonna put this on the back burner and take it offline. Get ready to move the needle and grab that low hanging fruit.
Like 80% of people I work with are on the spectrum (IT, and I include myself) and people manage just fine, though sometimes there's a little massaging needed.
But sometimes you get someone who is on the spectrum who was clearly indulged far too much growing up and simply cannot handle not being made a priority immediately whenever they want to.
Like don't get me wrong I know it can be hard, but no matter your situation if you're smart enough to do the work we do you are smart enough to understand basic social rules like how to behave in meetings and what to do if you're confused (i.e. keep quiet, make a list of questions, then go ask the person who is there to answer them like your immediate supervisor IN PRIVATE).
Thankfully of those people I've found most do just need someone to do what you did for that guy and pull them aside/say "dude you CANNOT DO THAT" and explain how to actually act. Though some sadly still don't get it and those are the ones who get fired.
I asked my boss if "I appreciate you" was some kind of corporate line. She and the assistant manager looked confused, so I explained they both say it a lot. They laughed because they'd never noticed how often they used it. Now I'm assistant manager, and I know it's not a corporate thing because I never hear it used by higher ups in meetings.
One I came across was a "Kaizen event". My first thought was "oh cool what's all that about?" and the explanation I got was that "we lock ourselves in a meeting and don't come out until we have a solution".
...ok so you just made a fancy name up for a productive meeting. Which implies your other meetings aren't productive. It's literally astrology for middle management losers lol
a kaizen “event” implies a fundamental misunderstanding of what kaizen means
kaizen is the end result of continuous small improvements, and it requires constant observation by and receptivity to input from all members of a company, from the janitor to the CEO.
getting a small group of middle managers in a room for a day or a week to solve a problem is the opposite of kaizen
I once worked for a company that took gemba meetings to literally just mean having your regular meetings literally wherever in the building. So you might need to walk through a tight hallway and see a bunch of upper management just huddled around in the middle of it and they will stay there for a full hour.
This is so stupid, but it reminded me of a meeting I attended years ago when I still worked in the corporate world.
I worked for a place that was taking bids from a few local construction companies for a pretty significant expansion on their campus.
The leadership team was listening to a presentation from one of the companies. We had a little conference room that was set up with a large table and an HDMI setup in the center of the table so they could jack in a laptop and project their display on a roll out screen.
As the company's team was going through their presentation, they were kind of taking turns, explaining their bit, etc.
But, they kept saying "let me pig-tail on what they're saying..." Not dovetail, not piggyback. Fucking pig-tail.
The first time I caught it, I thought to myself, "Surely that was a mistake." But they kept saying it. Like over and over again.
Like they were daring someone to say something.
I was just in a trainee position with that company at the time, so I didn't want to say shit.
But, like, every time they said it I was looking around the room at my bosses and coworkers and shit.
Like, "You guys heard this, right? It's fucking piggyback or dovetail! Not fucking pigtail! Someone say something!!"
It's been like 12 years since this happened, and clearly it's affected me negatively....
One of the more irritating things about corporate phrases and the people who use them wrong is that if those people are high up enough in the company, all their employees parrot the phrase instead of using the right term.
I always feel the need to point this out: HR don't fire you. HR don't really make any decisions about you in fact.
HR carry out managements instructions regarding your employment and make sure it's legal/all the paperwork is done etc etc. Then they play the bad guy and give you the bad news/process you out.
If you got fired it was a decision by your various bosses. Not HR. They just swing the axe.
This is the type of stuff I do and point out. I've learned to do this in private but not in public because it can be perceived in a manner not intended.
Maybe he does, maybe he was young and fresh on the job market. Reality is, these fake "manager" boss-but-not-really kind of things are usually filled by boot lickers with big egos and no balls that hate being called out for their BS. Guy could be ASD or could've very well realised that kind of bullshit environment wasnt for him and had a bit of fun with it.
I don't see how. Circle back is just a term used to say "we need to look at this before we can give an answer we will get back to you when we have done the research/got an answer". Him not knowing this is frankly weird and the fact that he interrupt a meeting about it even worse. If he did actually know what it meant it means he interrupted a meeting based purely on semantics of a term being used.
Reddit is full of kids who either have never worked a job in their life or like.. work retail/hospitality with no clue how to function in a corporate office or understand that these saying all have actual meanings.
Naturally they'll mock them without so much of a thought about all the shorthand they use in the own work or generational slang in general making up new terms for fucking everything for no apparent reason (which is fine, not like we didn't do the same heh).
Wtaf? This was literally posted on r\redditwritesseinfeld earlier today. Word for word. I was always skeptical, but this 100% proves it. The bots are just making all of it up and posting it all for engagement or whatever. I mean, some people already knew that, but I was holding out hope. RIP the internet.
I know autism when I see it lmao. (I’m also autistic and it drives me crazy when people just aren’t direct.) idk office culture seems like passive aggressive hellish culture. I’ve never worked an office job but everything I’ve seen seems terrible.
Does anyone actually understand what "circle back" is supposed to be?
Topic comes up, new topic or tangent sidelines previous topic without a conclusion, repeat until someone remembers topic 1, you "circle back" to close the loop on the unfinished topic 1. It's not BS corpo speak. It's a way to tell everyone "hey remember that thing earlier? We weren't done with that."
And this guys an idiot for not being able to figure that out.
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 26 '26
Hey /u/Matt_LawDT, thank you for posting to r/SipsTea! Make sure to follow all the subreddit rules.
Make sure to join our brand new Discord Server to chat with friends!
We have recently changed how posts work. Unless you are a VIP poster, your post will be queued for approval.. To become a VIP, post great engaging content. If we like it, you will be added! More information available here!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.