What bugs the heck out of you at work but doesn't seem to bother your coworkers?

"We'll wait a few more minutes for person X to join, then get the meeting started," like the other ten people who made the effort to show up on time deserve to be punished with extra meeting time for being responsible. Bonus points if this causes the meeting to run a few minutes long.

That Edge is now the only "approved" browser anyone is allowed to use, per our admin (taking input from a third party security consultant). Most people in other departments don't care, they use whatever gets put in front of them because their needs are basic and their tolerance for bullshit is too high for their own good. The rest of us in IT (well most of us) hate it.

I had to go uninstall Chrome and even a few Firefox installations, manually, from any workstation that had them. And I've never felt dirtier in my job. Like everytime I punched in my credentials to authorize the uninstall, Microsoft's stock rose by the smallest amount.

Legitimately, the more of a Microsoft 365/Azure/Endpoint/Entra/Shithole/Power BI/SharePoint clusterfuck my workstation becomes, the less enthused I am about the entire IT profession.

Permanently Deleted

Any microsoft application. Constant bugs, crashes and a tendency to break everything if you accidentally use them in any other way than microsoft intended.

Also, ads in a fucking operation system? I don't see how anyone can find that acceptable.

Everyone happily careening toward totally preventable catastrophe, then doing surprised pikachu face.

There’s a high pitched sound coming from one of the air ducts. It’s driving me crazy but no one else seems to hear it.

I don’t work at the moment, but here is a list of stuff I’m glad to be away from:

• That guy over there that grunts and coughs and clears his throat every 37 seconds.
• Having ten minute standup meetings every day, that take at least 45 minutes every day and could have been replaced by looking at the status page in the wiki.
• That other guy over there that raises his voice and yells and carries on every time he is on the phone, completely unaware that his phone has a microphone, and that anyone else exists
• People who eat stinky stuff for lunch at their desk, chewing with their mouth open while watching the football at full volume. Go and use the lunch room, you inconsiderate fuck.
• my boss over in the next cubicle who yells out someone’s name, expecting them to be there, and then yells a series of instructions whether they are there or not. I’m trying to think, can’t you just get up and walk all the way over to another cubicle to talk at a reasonable volume, like a normal person?
• The woman that just started, sitting in the next cubicle, that reeks of foul perfume. I know when she arrives and leaves by the smog cloud, the revolting stench that follows her around the office, and the trail of people vomiting and struggling to breathe after she goes past. I tried to do the right thing and talk to her and she conveniently can’t speak English, unaware that I can hear her on the phone speaking flawlessly.

People having video calls at their desks. We have soundproof booths and conference rooms but no, people will just talk loudly in the open space area. It's like people talking on the phone on a bus. Hearing only one side of the conversation is super distracting. Sometimes two people sitting next to each other will be on the same video call. I guess more people are bothered but not enough to do something about it.

When people message with a "hi" or "hello" and then say nothing more till I reply.

It annoys the hell out of me. Like, why can't you just say what you want. It wastes so much of my time and mental energy to switch back and forth while I wait for your reply after replying to your utterly useless hello.

My co-workers.

Teams! It literally never works on Linux and you cannot change a single thing about it. I'm so tired of having to tell people that today my teams cannot share shit, which worked flawlessly yesterday.

We have 3 (three. Three!!) redundant monitoring and alerting systems and have yet to detect the issues routinely found by our customers. Its not because we didn't detect them, it's because we have so many false positives we stopped looking (but still run the monitors).

Uuuuuugffhhhhhj

Don't schedule a &$&% meeting during lunchtime without serving up lunch to us!

The noise. FML. If I have to listen to another coworker take calls at the top of their voice one cubicle over...

The moderator of a daily web-meeting saying "Who wants to go first?".

We have these breaking news tv screens all over the lunch room. I absolutely hate it, can I please enjoy my lunch in peace?

Dirty pits. I work as a mechanic on busses and try to keep my pit clean. If the work I'm doing makes a lot of sand fall down, I sweep it aside so I don't walk through it. If the bus has a leak, I put something beneath it to catch the oil/coolant/fuel until I get to fix it.

Most of the coworkers don't care and their pit is a mess. They ask for help with something and you have to navigate through puddles and sand piles to get to them.

They also don't put the shared equipment back on its right place so you waste a lot of time trying to find it.

Any Microsoft App. Most annoying Excel. I'm working with it almost the whole day and some simple things can break it. Heck, when doing a bit more complex stuff, it brings my work computer to its knees. Like wtf.

Pizza parties, "lunch and learns", lunch at a restaurant with the boss...

All of that condescending shit that is intended and expected to deprive people of time away from the office, building, worksite, whatever if they need it.

I value my personal time and it's not easily replaced by free food.

Some of the other comments in the thread are great too...

Overabundance of redundant or unnecessary meetings in general is another one for me.

An absolute lack of consideration in regards to chat etiquette. Man now that I think about it, it's chat threads/notification in particular.

People who carry on side conversations in threads. You're giving everyone else who has participated in the thread the choice of "disable notifications for this thread and risk missing something relevant come back around, or get a notification for every single side message they're sending". Especially when someone is chiming in like 4 hours later. "Glad you guys got this sorted out". Yes, all 12 of us on-call people in this thread needed to get that message direct to our phones at 3a.m. 4 hours after the outage has been resolved. Thanks for that. Very fucking helpful. High value communication.

People who will not use threads. I don't need a new fucking notification every 20 seconds because you guys are deciding to have a chat about e-bikes. Make a goddamn thread or use a room made for chit chat, we're all on the same team, we're all in on-call positions. I'm paid to respond when this thing makes a noise. I am NOT comfortable muting the team channel.

It's addressed elsewhere in these comments, but +1 to folks who just message you "hi". Go get stabbed.

On the topic of notification fatigue:

People who will just not finish a thought.

Before hitting their enter button.

So they end up like doing this thing.

Where you get a notification every 15 seconds, because they are just absolutely addicted.

To their enter key I mean.

They are addicted to thier enter key.

their*

Oh.

I guess I could have just edited that message instead of sending the correction with the thing.

Asterisk? Asterisx? I forget what it's called.

LOL.

Anyway, that thing.

Also, when I'm helping you I am 100% going to stop what I am doing every time I get a message and read the message. There's no way for me to know whether or not you're messaging me "Oh never mind, I had a typo" or "here is more relevant info to make your work easier". That message may very well have immediate impact on what I'm doing, and affect the course I take. Of course I'm going to stop what I'm doing to read it. So maybe don't wait 5 minutes to send me the message "k" after I kindly, thoughtfully provide you with the status update "I think it's the fizzibob, let me verify in the logs real quick" of my own volition so that you are not only aware of what's going on, but don't have any question as to whether or not your question is still being looked at.

Mandatory webcam on calls/meetings. I get that it works for team building when half the developers are at home at any given time, but it exhausts me in meetings.

You sit there with nothing to say/do while you listen, constantly having to look forward and pay attention. Then your jaw starts to feel tense, but you can't just open your mouth or move around too much.

Total torture for 60+ minute meetings. In my previous company we had the webcams always off, so I could relax or if it was only talking with no presentation even sit on my couch away from the PC.

People clipping their nails at their desk.

The lights at my previous workplace. They were super bright, depressing, fluorescent lights, and even though we had windows with natural light coming thru, they'd have the overhead lights on at full blast. Not only was it a massive waste of electricity, the lights actually hurt my eyes, and made me hate my workplace. I loved the WFH phase during covid since I could just rely on natural light - and was so much more productive and in a better mood. Unfortunately they started calling us back into the office with 3 compulsory days, and that was the last straw which made me quit my job.

Everything: from 8am to 5pm I'm a steaming ball of anger that struggles to act polite while planning small acts of office terrorism.

but the thing that bugs me the most is the general absence of people that "just do their job".
There are a lot of people that do fuck-all and a lot of people that work their lives off and both of those groups expect you to walk at their pace. I'd like to meet more people in the middle.

• Toxic Positivity: "Everything is always great" and the unspoken rule to never talk about your issues.
• Mental health issues not being taken seriously and/or treatment being forced on you
• Alcohol culture: "if we haven't had a beer together, i don't know you"
• meetings. As a programmer i can be super productive, but then i'll be interrupted by a meeting... and that meeting is an hour long... completely stripping my concentration and now i gotta get it back up...
• retro-meetings ... talking about what has been done in the last week... and what we liked and what we hated... i never know what to say "yeah i finished shit" or "i hate working with this shit" but then you have to elaborate....

Perfume and cologne. MAI GAD I hate it so much and it makes me sick, and they come to work drenched in it. One was wearing essential oils for a while, the fumes of which set off my asthma so badly I had to go see my respirologist for a stronger puffer, and I finally had to come out and tell her it made me sick.

Secondly, casual racism. I had one CW the other day tell me she didn't care for Indians (by which she means indigenous people), and another who told me she hoped I wasn't 'getting Jewed' out of something. I was quite horrified. I eat lunch alone for the most part and refuse to have social contact with them.

Slow computers and awful cheap Keyboards

That we all accept that working our butts off for at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with only around 2 weeks of vacation a year in the hopes that we can save just enough to retire at 65+ is normal. The social contract is broken, and everyone except the top 1% of earners is paying the price.

In recent weeks: Not having a plan.

Our manager was on vacation for a few weeks and so everyone was kind of just doing whatever they wanted. We're a software dev team, so one colleague was working on UI, another colleague was working on authentication and a third worked on some showcase.

Now our manager is back and we did planning and it's like, that showcase isn't relevant until the end of the next milestone, and we're not going to need the backend, nor its UI+authentication for the next two milestones.
Only really my work is directly relevant, because I did the incredible strategy of working towards the bare minimum we need.

I kind of don't care, if we're inefficient. It's not my job to manage the place. But I hate not knowing what I should work towards.

"Uplifting news" being shared like an offline version of Reddit. Same basic idea too: some good news about some rare stroke of luck for some individual where a few hundred or a few thousand or a few million exactly like them weren't so lucky but didn't get the uplifting news report because that would be a downer.

That shit depresses me but it's on me to at least put on a neutral face when I hear about some kid selling lemonade to pay for their dad's lethal but treatable medical problem until someone rich gets some cheap-for-themselves PR and the kid gets to keep their dad alive... unlike a few thousand that could not.

Not documenting work. Lazy people suck when it comes time to troubleshoot something with zero documentation.

Having to relogin every two weeks with two-factor authentication. Everything is a MS Office document, in particular ridiculous spreadsheets. Everyone writes in acronyms that they assume everyone else knows. Even though there is always a lot of new staff, every email assumes everyone has been working there forever. ("It's that time of the year again! You need to complete your GRD before week 5 of the COG and send it to the OSYN. Probably you are already an expert in completing these forms after so many years, but if you need instructions, please go to our IDRN and enter your ICRJ.")

My work keeps putting on social events that involve a boat. Boat to this island or that island or just sail around on a boat for the afternoon. Everyone else seems to think it's fun, but I really would rather not be stranded for hours of forced bonding with my coworkers because we have to wait for the damn boat to take us back.

The temperature. It's always just cold enough in the building that I need to wear a jacket. Also the people who feel the need to eat stinky foods at their desk.

uncompensated driving, commute times, etc

people don't realize how much their car is costing them. IRS rate is like $0.60 a mile. running errands for work all day? 45-minute commute? yeah you're effectively making less than minimum wage now

very difficult to get people to understand though

2 mandatory office days even for consultants. If you want to be at the office, fine. But don't make everyone be because of some so-called fairness. Catering to some imaginary average person isn't fair, it's hurting everyone a little or a lot. Alas since I'm working via an agency, I got to follow client directives. Luckily I have good rapport with both my agency and my project team lead so I can kinda toe the line.

Also the inability or rather unwillingness of my fellow devs to follow protocol. Ticket not approved by business? You don't touch it. Yet the geniuses I work with went total yolo mode on a project I'm not on. So I wasn't there to remind them and now they're upset they got told off they spent a week on tickets that they were asked to discuss with the business. And that they aren't getting praise for their efficiency. It's government work, not your hobby project. That's a week of budget spent on work they may need to reverse because they didn't even put it on a branch. Maybe when they hear it from higher up they'll listen because I really get the impression when it comes from me it is seen as my personal opinion. No, I just figured out early how the office politics work and play the game I'm paid for. I voice my opinion plenty but here it actually aligns with the organisation expectations.

Blatant disregard for preserving people's hearing. Most of my coworkers are of the opinion that not wearing hearing protection while operating loud tools and equipment (chainsaws, pneumatic drills etc) is not a big deal. What's worse they will often not bother to give a heads up to people working nearby that they are about to start. As a musician, and also someone with a family history of hearing loss, this kind of behavior pisses me off

Rattling ceiling tiles. I have a stick at my desk devoted to banging on ceiling tiles so they stop rattling. That sound is literally one of the most annoying things I experience.

No one else seems to care.

"We're good people, and our goals are noble. Therefore, rules don't apply to us."

(Proceeds to break important laws)

One place I worked had end of shift meetings every day for the transition between third and first shift. First shift was supposed to get there 15 minutes early, but hardly ever did. This was a stand-up meeting at the end of an 8 hour shift. Look assholes, I'm tired and I wanna go home.Your disrespect of my time isn't helping my attitude toward this shit-hole company. Also, apparently, they didn't need to do this for second shift, because, you know, first shift is tired and wants to leave on time. Imagine that. I ended up quitting when they tacked on extra hours for us to work at the last minute during the week of Thanksgiving, so that effectively we'd still end up working 40 hours. What's the fucking point of holidays if you're just going to make us work more hours anyway?

The guy who gives safety meetings says “um” between every phrase

Pet peeve: no "stay logged in" option for a system I use multiple times per day

Someone clipping their nails

Standups and retrospectives.

The disgusting coffee machine

A lack of basic level manuals and work flows for basic job duties.

Holy shit folks, where is my picture book that lets me know how this 15 year old point of sale system out in a rural post office is supposed to do the things that I need it to do?

I deliver pIzza and all of our in-store routing software is tied to Google. It's a good GPS but it gets so much wrong. During rushes it's the job of the managers to route us on doubles or triples and I've gotten routed on badly-chosen doubles (i.e. 3 miles from each other) because Google thought the addresses were right next to each other. Sometimes it's a customer issue, like a typo on the website but most of the time it's Google being dumb.

People saying "10-4” on the radio when they mean "affirmative" or "yes"

Good questions. I own priorities, my team owns operation. Fixing this is on our list of priorities, not high enough to get the amount of attention needed to really fix it.

literally everything. I hate the work, I hate the pay, and I absolutely hate the people. I'm quiting in December to travel the world for a while, which will be great, as long as they don't kill me first

Death to America