How Mom, Dad, and the Nuns Helped Me Deal With Corporate Psychopathy

 

 

 

 

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From an excellent blog on work in tech: Companies will tell us “we’re a family!” and encourage us to put the company before the personal. Companies benefit when employees put the job first. Sometimes this is healthy – a sort of “we’re stronger together” vibe – but sometimes it’s not. And it can be really difficult to tell the difference. I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are. (I’m speaking mostly about the US here; that’s what I know.) Most employees have essentially no workplace protections; in most states you can be fired for no reason and no notice. Because healthcare is tied to your job, getting fired can be a medical emergency on top of a financial one. There are very few mechanisms for dealing with bad workplaces. There are very rarely consequences for poor behavior; anything from run-of-the-mill bad management to harassment and abuse often goes unchecked. So when I encourage people to think of themselves first, it’s against this backdrop. It’s true that healthy workplaces exist, where more collectivist ways of thinking work out well. But companies will lie to you about being that kind of place, and there are no consequences for that. I’m comfortable with advice that can sometimes lean towards the mercenary if it prevents folks from being burned. I’d love to live in a world where less mercenary advice wasn’t dangerous, but that’s not our world. My upbringing with a bullying abusive father, a volatile raging mother who favored verbal abuse and Will Smith-styled, round-house, open-handed, slaps across the face, and an elementary school experience replete with beatings, verbal abuse and gender shaming actually helped me when it came to working in the tech-bro work world at the Joe Big Ass Corp and other places - because not once, not ever, did I fall for the "we are family" bullshit.    Instead, I operated on the principle of keeping my team's tender bits out of the sharp, unrelenting gearbox of corporate machinery. While I had to, as a manager, get groups of people to work together efficiently, I never (ever) took my eye off what the corporate goal du jour was costing us as humans and worked to attenuate the burden on my teams.    Full disclosure: My behavior as a manager stemmed not from any sense of moral high ground.. I was simply jousting with my past which I had overlaid on whatever corporate work situation I found myself in.  That fact by itself doesn't make my past actions wrong however... Often times, even with my own personal filter, I was dead on balls accurate about situational assessments and my approach to moving forward.

 

 

 

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