I found it funny and ironic that you were talking about what other people do with their time, while working. But I think this is pretty common. There are down times in a day, and doing small talk with coworkers is good and healthy. I think it promotes camaraderie and a way to de-stress and unwind.
Now as for the two groups, the ones that churn out a lot of output, and those that don't seem to do anything, I would like to offer a different perspective. Assuming that both groups actually do their work, there are jobs that don't really produce a lot of results. This is common in IT. I worked as a DBA, and our job is to maintain the databases, and make sure they are up, and working well. One of the biggest indicator at the end of the year that we did our jobs well, is that we did not have downtimes, and the data are intact. For other groups, they have no idea, and any slowdown they experience, they blame it on us. What they fail to realize is that data is constantly being added to the database all the time, and them not noticing much difference apart from a slight slowdown is already good. It's not like we can just as easily upgrade the hardware and software all the time [this causes downtime].
So yeah, there are a lot of jobs that don't really show explosive output that pushes the needle. Some just make sure things are chugging along nicely even though it seems to others that it doesn't amount to anything useful.
And, there is plenty of work going on too. We don't have to be driven to working extremes - without that friendship and connection, the workplace is more stressful. Perhaps that is why so many GenZ struggle - because they don't actually know how to make real friends.
De-risking jobs are always hard for most people to understand. They only care when things don't work, not when they do work. It is also hard to sell a product on risk mitigation in many cases, because the "saving" can't be enumerated easily.
Exactly. A lot of times, boring is good for us. When we can focus on our routinary work without any escalations, that is a good day. And yeah, trying to get budget is always difficult. The best way to do get an increase is showing the number of complaints/downtime, which is bad for us, but necessary.