Being emotionally detached from really stupid leadership decisions is harder than it seems
Took me a lot of years to not think it’s my company that is being run into the ground. I should not - and nowadays could not - care any less.
my company
You mean “my responsibility”, right?
The book The Responsibility Virus helped me a lot with this. Most people are over-responsible for the choices of others, specifically ones they can’t reasonably influence, anyway.
I found out that https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ explains a lot of the dysfunctions that one finds in an office / corporate environment.
The company doesn’t care about you. The company doesn’t care about you. The company doesn’t care about you.
My uncle spent years preaching to me about the need to be loyal to a company. I never drank the Kool-Aid. He spent 21 years working for an investment banking company in their IT department. 4 years before he was set to retire with a full pension, etc. his company was acquired by a larger bank. He lost everything except his 401k. He then spent the next 12 years working to get his time back so he’d be able to retire. He died 2 years ago and the company sent a bouquet of flowers.
THE COMPANY DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU!!
Not even if you do valuable or efficent stuff for the company. You’re disposable.
also you might not be replaceable but your manager might be an idiot
They refer to you as … HUMAN RESOURCES
You aren’t a person, you are an instrument the company uses to make more money for itself. If you die or can no longer work, you will be replaced by another human resource.
I had a prof twisting himself into knots trying to argue that human resources really is a positive term because companies care about and maintain their resources
The most important traits for doing well at work (in this order):
- clear, effective, and efficient communication
- taking ownership of problems
- having your boss and team members like you on a personal level
- competence at your tasks
Your employer does not care about you. You are not important or irreplaceable
Take your time and energy and put it into your life, not their business
I have had coworkers die (not work related) and by the time you hear about it (like the next day) they have already worked out who will get the work done so the machine doesn’t have to stop
I had a workmate develop a chronic illness after an infection of COVID, and he had to leave under hardship. People that hung out with him as best mates for years stopped talking to him in a matter of days.
There’s no such thing as quiet quitting. I prefer acting your wage.
Explanation please? Not a native speaker here…
“Quiet quitting” is a term made up my small business tyrants in the United States to describe workers doing their job as it is described on the contract, and not going “above and beyond”. They somehow believe they’re owed more than they pay for.
You don’t have to run the rat race to get promoted. You don’t have to be at your desk at 7am and leave at 7pm to put on a show. Just be competent. Most people are not. You’ll eventually get promoted once you are old and white enough.
It should be noted that this is advice specific to white men in Western countries 😆 but yes, it’s true.
They’re not your friends, even if they act like that.
The management just sees you as expense factor and does not care about you except for how to get the most work done for the least amount of money. Your team leader does not care about you and only cares if their numbers look good. Your colleagues do not care about you and only see you as competition or the idiot they can give their work to.
If someone is nice to you they want something from you not because they like you.
That dealing with the bullshit of clique social groups and the fallout of not falling in with them doesn’t end with high school. In fact, it gets even worse in the workplace.
Always agree on compensation/salary before starting your work.
There is no ideal place to work where they “do it right”, whatever kind of “right” you care about right now. When you change jobs, you merely exchange one set of problems for another.
It’s suffocating to be in a middle management position because you get squeezed by the higher-ups and your own team. If the higher-ups make a decision that your team dislikes or vice versa, you’re going to be in the shitter with whichever party suffered every time even if you had the best intentions.
I learnt meritocracy is a joke long before I discovered that it was literally invented to be a joke.
it’s the same story of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ too
At least meritocracy makes sense vs the physically impossible bootstraps one.
Also, i thought ghengis khan was all about meritocracy. That and marrying off his daughters and sending the kings to die.
Also, i thought ghengis khan was all about meritocracy.
No… Genghis Khan wasn’t a joke. Meritocracy is.
Yeah, looking busy is way more important than being productive a lot of the time. You always need to be doing something, so you just go through the motions of doing things because otherwise you’ll get shit from your employers. Waiting in good faith for more real tasks to emerge isn’t enough, so you must invent chores.
At least, that was very consistently my experience in retail.
Can confirm, not in retail but a fully remote programmer, managers are still very often concerned that “everybody has something to do” much more than “everything gets done”.
“idle hands are the devil’s work” but also “god rested on the seventh day”… uh oh my brain is short-circuiting…
Hold on dearly to any leverage you might have over your employer
Hold on to that leverage over your employer with a union
Minimum wage, minimum effort
