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4 hours ago
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We all want to do awesome things and make an impact at work. However, what we call “work” is a relationship between employer and employee that’s inherently and persistently designed to benefit the former over the latter. How do we meaningfully contribute, earn a living, and maybe even enjoy ourselves when the organization simply does not care about us?
It’s harsh, but that’s captialism, baby! Any organization (“org”) exists for a purpose that’s greater than the individuals within it (e.g., profit, public service). We are a means to that end. Same goes for anything we personally get out of the arrangement be it salary, experience, foosball tables, or free lunches.
This precarious and lopsided power dynamic manifests itself in our day-to-day in a variety of weird ways we often take for granted. Even if it never gets to something as extreme as layoffs or restructuring we still have to navigate this as best we can.
We need to do our best work possible all while one tiny fact looms in the back of our minds. At the end of the day we’re just line items on somebody’s spreadsheet.
Hundreds Of People In A Trenchcoat
One prevailing assumption that crumbles under the slightest scrutiny is that an org is a cohesive entity. We all know deep down it’s merely a collective made up of people, and yet we overlook this all the time. Heaven help us all if the company refers to itself as family. Ugh!
The head of the collective—executive leadership—isn’t a single brain. It could be 3, 5, or 7 brains all trying to act like a cohesive unit. But if you personally had 7 brains inside your head how do you think you’d come across to others? Companies are not rational actors.
Anything an org does is just an emergent property of humans trying to work together. Organizations, especially large ones, are not optimizing for complete or perfect decisions. They’re optimizing for as much alignment and consensus as they can get to keep moving (sometimes by fiat).
By necessity these decisions will always be suboptimal and that will infuriate workers who care about what they do. Most of these decisions will not make sense because we can’t interpret a collective action as if it came from an individual. Rich Gilbert nails it in his great video “Caring Less About Work can get us what we really want”:
If you’re going to work and and you’re getting frustrated and you’re intelligent and you’re looking around at all the dummies around that are not making the right decision, that is by design.
We can plead, “How could they DO this?” or complain, “This is a dumb decision,” but executive leadership really is at arm’s length to us and our work. Leadership lacks the detail we regularly see in the course of our work and they’re dealing in the abstract. Actions from leadership will therefore often feel extreme, sudden, swift, half-baked, reactive, fickle, or temperamental.
The ultimate effect is that the org doesn’t care about us. One could even argue that it cannot care about us. An org is operating on another plane of reality entirely. Whatever it “does” says nothing about the individuals along for the ride. We’re better off not trying to interpret its actions too closely, lest we break our brains.
Corporate Dick Moves
Most of the time Hanlon’s razor explains the dysfunction we see, but the nature of orgs can also provide temptation or cover for some willful disregard and gaslighting.
A good example of gaslighting might be a lack of true upward mobility. Does the company promote often? Or does it say it will and then take forever to actually do it? How about raises—do they even happen and how are they calculated? Does the company promote from within or does it recruit a higher position with a new joiner?
That’s the carrot, but the stick is far worse! We’re always on the chopping block whether we know it or not. Not even management or the CTO are safe. Layoffs are ever-present and come in several forms.
If we’re unlucky enough to work somewhere that does stack ranking (e.g., Microsoft, Meta, Shopify) we can kinda sorta at least see it coming. Yay? Despite all evidence to the contrary CEOs absolutely love this shit. They definitely do not care who’s let go and for those who remain—until the next quarter—they don’t care about the paranoia or distrust it causes.
Maybe stack ranking is too cumbersome… Probably best to just do layoffs arbitrarily. The company doesn’t even need to be in trouble! Entirely profitable companies can do layoffs, often more than once and with impunity. It’s a great flex for shareholders—so trendy that the stock price might go down if CEOs don’t do it. WTF? As Anil Dash notes this is more than just cutting costs:
Big tech CEOs and VCs really love performing for each other. We know they hang out in group chats like high schoolers, preening and sending each other texts, each trying to make sure they’re all wearing the latest fashions, whether it’s a gold chain or a MAGA hat or just repeating a phrase that they heard from another founder.
The “return to office” push is another such trend. There’s no positive intepretation for it that has any basis in our post-2020 reality. Even supposing it’s not a “quiet layoff” it’s still not good. Executives continue to poke this bear—up to a full 5 days a week in a physical office—and when we go along with it then the org knows it can do almost anything it wants to us.
And perhaps the darkest trend in recent times is the holy grail for CEOs—not hiring people in the first place.
If people think “AI” can meaningfully replace human developers, we’re in for a reckoning very soon. For one, we need junior developers and senior developers cannot exist in a vacuum. A generational talent gap is coming. For another, worsening software quality will erode and ruin companies. We’re left to ride this wave until orgs finally comprehend that developers do more than just produce code.
We’re Cogs In The Machine
Ahem, that last section got a little negative! However, a sober acknowledgment of the circumstances around us is the first step in loving our jobs.
Yes, really. We can throw up our hands and lament that we’re just cogs in the machine, but I prefer to turn that idiom on its head a bit. It’s an apt metaphor.
I’m just one gear of many. I have limited capabilities as do my neighbouring gears—I can rotate clockwise or counterclockwise. When I do something my neighbours react in turn, and vice versa. We come in different sizes and shapes resulting in differences in torque transmission, rotational speed, and so on.
My direct neighbours are very obviously cooperating with me as our teeth are interlocking. Conversely, the further away a gear is from me the less direct, and evident, our influence on each other becomes. The overall machine from my point of view begins to act strangely, resists me, or jams up completely.
This actual machine would certainly be useless if it were real. The point is there’s little sense in struggling over the distant cogs but there’s plenty to focus on right around us.
The concentric circles of concern, influence, and control, popularized by Stephen Covey, is a famous framework for personal effectiveness and decision-making that translates extremely well to the context of an org. The org overall is our circle of concern—it completely surrounds us but is so far removed that we can only observe and adapt to it in relatively minor ways.
Think Globally, Act Locally
What this means is we can put the overall organization and its shenanigans in the back of our minds while we optimize our local relationships and maximize our job satisfaction with real people and meaningful tasks. This is within our circle of influence. Namely, this is our manager, our reports, and our peers or teammates.
We should figure out what our manager needs in order to perform their job and then become their ally towards those causes. This feedback loop builds trust very quickly and we’ll feel more empowered. Our boss also acts as a “canary in the coal mine”—if they’re comfortable in the org maybe we can be, too.
If we ourselves have direct reports, then we practice servant leadership and put as much energy into these relationships as we can. Listen to them every day, figure out what they need, and collaborate with them on those actions. I know I became the leader I am today thanks to my reports.
Obviously we spend most of our time with our fellow developers, designers, architects, QAs, product managers, analysts, and so on. These are the people, on a daily basis, that we want to impress and be impressed by. Ideally, they’re just plain fun to hang out with, too!
Never underestimate how much job satisfaction can be derived from the mutual respect and admiration among people who like each other and are operating at the top of their game.
This is the real company that we work for, as it were. It’s a subset of the overall org that we can readily interpret because none of it is abstract. It also means we don’t have to withdraw or disengage under the crushing weight of organizational nonsense. There will always be a venue where we can practice core principles—empathy, support, excellence, collaboration, camaraderie—and that means we can still grow our careers and our networks.
Yep, You’re A Resource—Valuable And Finite
Once we’ve drawn our local boundaries we know where to best apply ourselves. However, we also need to understand our individual boundaries, or rather how much we apply ourselves. This is within our circle of control.
We start by not volunteering at work. We already have a job that we get paid for, so anything beyond that is extra work and in case I haven’t been clear so far—the org won’t care.
Despite our best intentions, such work will be thankless and the law of diminishing returns will slap us in the face so hard we’ll get whiplash. We can do ourselves some serious lasting damage if we don’t exercise a healthy level of self-discipline.
This isn’t the same as coasting, holding back, or phoning it in. There are plenty of ways to do a lot of good work within our circle of control. Indeed, it’s the only thing we truly control—applying our skills and abilities and getting direct satisfaction from that.
There will always be times where we feel an urge to do more than asked, show some initiative, or simply seek appreciation from those beyond our circle of influence. We can indulge these urges, if we want, but we must be mindful. Whenever we’re doing extra work it should be clear to us why we’re doing it.
The simplest (and least likely) reason to “volunteer” ourselves is because the org compensates us for it. What? It could happen! Maybe.
Alternatively, we can “compensate” ourselves. We can always do extra work as long as we’re getting something out of it. This runs the gamut from acquiring a new skill to optimizing an annoying workflow bottleneck to securing our team’s delivery of a long-awaited feature.
Whatever the reason or result, any extra work is a courtesy we extend to ourselves or our circle of influence. We should always assume that only we (or our teammates) will appreciate it. If that’s not enough to justify the effort then we don’t do it.
This threshold of what constitutes extra work (or if we should do it) will be personal. The calculation will vary per person. Some can tolerate a great deal if the pay is good, while others can’t. Others will risk burning themselves out doing small favors for everybody, and others won’t.
To each their own, I say. We can’t feel guilty or less of ourselves when we see somebody else’s circle of control is different than our own. We can only define it for ourselves and work happily within those confines.
Gee, Thanks…?
We should be careful about counting any vague, top-down forms of recognition as fair exchange for extra work or validation that we’re doing a good job.
If we’re doing great work everyone will know because our circle of influence (manager, reports, peers) will be singing our praises. Word will spread. We don’t need to actively seek out credit or accolades by trying to do more.
Either way, the slippery slope here is that an understanding of your contributions loses valuable detail at the org level. By definition, the wider our reputation the less control we have over its interpretaton. The org doesn’t care about us, so when all is said and done even the brightest star at the company will still be a resource.
This perverse form of “recognition” could backfire on us in several ways. We might become the subject matter expert for some arcane legacy system or a new feature that requires constant maintenance. We risk getting typecast as “The Only Person Who Knows How To Do X”. We’ll get saddled with an additional workload or a new role we don’t actually have the bandwidth for.
Again, we might actually be OK with such recognition—some could be legitimate career opportunities—but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking it’s true gratitude on the part of the org.
Job Seeking As A Hobby
However much we ingratiate ourselves with the org nothing is guaranteed. Despite the many YouTubers who naively pontificate on how to become recession-proof or dodge layoffs whenever the org flinches, no single company is going to save us. We have to be ready to save ourselves, and at any moment.
This means job seeking on a casual and continual basis. Treat it like a hobby. Yes, even if we have a job already. And yes, even if we love that job.
Think of the activities we do almost exclusively when we’re between jobs and do them on a smaller scale more regularly. Keeping our resume up to date, for instance, is far easier if we document our accomplishments as they happen.
We can also practice other activities like staying in touch with colleagues, researching companies and their cultures, attending meetups or networking events, and even doing interviews!
A low key job search can help in a few ways. For one, should we suddenly find ourselves unemployed we’re better prepared. We’ve already done some of the legwork that’d feel much harder to do in the moment. Any practice we’ve done also comes across as confidence to potential recruiters and interviewers.
Second, it’s a chance for introspection and self-awareness. We’ll come to know more clearly what we like or dislike about our current job. It will also help to identify what we’re capable of and what we expect of ourselves or others. Useful for future jobs, yes, but this understanding makes us better at our current job, too.
If nothing else, it might just cheer us up from time to time. I’ve had more than one Very Bad Day that found me cruising jobs on LinkedIn during my lunch break. And at one particularly toxic company I had a draft resignation letter open for a couple of months. Whenever the job wore me down I’d edit it a bit more. You know, as a treat! By the time I actually sent that letter it was bulletproof and very satisfying.
Ultimately, proactive job seeking like this provides us with confidence, autonomy, and options.
Sorry, One More Thing About Executives
I’ve tried very hard to describe organizational behavior on its own terms and not as the deliberate intent of specific people.
Just like us, executives have a role to play as part of the org, too. They may benefit from the system more than we do but they’re subjected to it all the same. Your CEO might actually be a nice human being. Most of them are! Elon Musk, on the other hand, is a demon wearing a meat suit. It’s the billionaires—and leaders who emulate them—that we need to worry about.
So, I don’t have any useful advice for Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Altman. For anyone else in a leadership position I can only hope you looking into every nook and cranny of your org, seeing the people working for you, and doing right by them as best you can.
You Do You
I’ll admit I started writing this while in a somewhat bitter mood. However, it was a good exercise in helping me firm up some positive and actionable lessons. I find it reassuring that how I navigate an org doesn’t have to contradict my personal principles or how I work. In fact, they’re the very tools I need.
I firmly believe that we can find a way to exist—flourish, even—without the org eroding our personal values. We don’t want to be naive, but that doesn’t mean we just give in to cynicism.
The steps seem simple enough. Make peace with the fact that any org is an irrational entity that always exists on the periphery. Focus our attention and effort on our circle of influence. Maintain rigorous and healthy personal boundaries. Always be ready to move on.
It sucks that we have to do so even if we like where we work or feel like we’re doing well. It’s human nature to worry less about our well-being when the risks or costs are not evident or immediate. However, things are lovely until suddenly they’re not. Protect yourself.
My promise to you is that there will be far more good days than bad days. Ultimately, the fact that your job doesn’t care about you is liberating! It’s not personal. You do you.
My promise to myself is that I’m going to spend less time accommodating the company and more time empowering myself. Less time worried about what the CEO thinks and more time worried about how my coworkers feel. Less energy trying to save the world and more time simply being proud of myself and my work.
