Wait, do you think I am saying I just straight up do not do my job of keeping those systems running, healthy, and accessible for those that need those services? Do you think that is what everyone is saying with these types of discussions? If you do, then you my friend need to learn about this thing called sarcasm. It is almost the default tone on the internet.
The fact that you may think any of what I said means I am neglecting the core functions of my job says a lot about how much you know about this subject, and the modern working office compared to how much you think you know.
What I am saying, that you seem to not be able to grasp for whatever reason, is that the actual core functions of a lot jobs do not take 40-60 hours to do competently. There is an enormous amount of time wasted in the modern “office setting workplace” on things that serve no purpose other than to make the boss look like they are adding value. If you and the blue collar folks are getting mad at the white collar office worker for that then you have been tricked into supporting positions that work against your own interests.
For example using your warehouse management system: If part of my job is insuring the health an availability of an auto scaling cluster of EC2 instances or ECS containers , some Lamda functions, a DB cluster, etc (or the GCP/Azure equivalents) so the warehouse management system is up and running 24/7, and I can get that done in ~5 hours a week, including monitoring, maintenance and planning for upgrades and whatnot what value is spending say 2 additional hours a week in a team meeting to give my boss a status update on that adding for me, the warehouse workers, etc? He gets the project update messages on work completed as it is , but he still wants to hear the same thing in a meeting anyway. Multiply that by a bunch of other systems and services for things that are not the warehouse management system and you can get a picture of how the bosses meetings are wasting hours a week to give him information he is already getting in written for anyway.
If you are coming to these kinds of discussions with the assumption that time spent “on the clock” directly relates to amount of valuable work done across the board then you are sadly mistaken.
