We started a coup at work. Here's why.
Part 1 - The Company
Company gathering on a boat.
CTO comes to the front and points to the current slide. Two bars, both showing 80%, all in corporate colors. The OKRs are very good.
“This is our OKR goal and this our OKR completion. So you see we aimed for 80% and what we got is 80%, although I should say, like, there is some math behind this. Like, the 80% is a mathematical 80%. There's math involved. It's definitely more than 75%, let's just say.”
Applause.
We’re a data company. It’s not going so well.
If you're like me, and it's possible you are, you've been taught that you should excel at school. You should aim high and follow your passion. That way, you'd reach your predestined place in the world, which is on top of other people.
If you're like me, and it's possible you are, nobody ever told you that your mum and granddad suffered from severe depression, likely heritable. If that's the case, you might have found the corporate world a pathological nightmare, like me.
Product daily.
The new Vice President wants to meet even those teams that he's not going to be interacting with directly. He's the VP of … something or other. Is it Sales? Or Revenue? Strategy? Names have changed since the last quarterly management offsite.
“... Back when I was at [prestigious German car manufacturer]," he brags, "I told them to take the deal, and they didn't, and boom, it would have saved them 3 million. After that I was at [other prestigious German car manufacturer].”
That's his sales acumen speaking. We're not into the Sales mythology though, so we all we can do is nod.
“Also, I just turned thirty-and-twelve.”
I'm forty minus six, so he's got that on me.
“So, what do all these new big dogs do up there?” asks Niehls, my colleague. I'm finding new ways of appreciating him every day.
“Beats me!” VP says and laughs. Let’s call him VP-Foo.
There's a colleague who they forced to haul monitors and speakers for company events. More than his education would indicate. He's the hardware guy, right? He quit after two stretches of sick leave for burnout symptoms and 125 unpaid hours of overtime. They made him unplug speakers until his final day in office.
You'll never know his name. Or, even worse, you kinda knew about him or heard it from another colleague and you kinda knew who did it to him. Kinda.
The company does something with data, because of course it does. Maybe or maybe not it also does something with AI. Sometimes it does consulting.
Thus for management, it's important to be data-driven. Middle management has bought themselves some training on how to do data-driven management. They've learned all about those nasty cognitive biases that can get in the way of a good product. There's the highest-paid person's opinion (HIPPO) effect and the famous Dunning-Kruger effect.
There's a graph making the rounds that represents it. I'm sure you’ve seen it.
“You're the experts! My job is to listen to you!” our manager explains in the tone of an epiphany. Let’s call him manager.
Maybe, like me, you were really good at school and then studied physics or computational biology. Once, you set out to uncover the hidden secrets of the world.
You learned to write, to think, to argue, to read, to present, to research and also to code. Physics simulations are insanely cool.
There's one other thing you might have picked up at school without realizing it. You learned to recognize and feel in your bones the voice of authority, even if spoken by a man with a protein shake who happens to be your CTO. It’s tough to unlearn but it can be done.
Product quality is declining. It wasn't that good to begin with. The VP (a different one) explains that the goal is to reach an average product review score of 50 by the end of the year.
“It was already at 35 last month, so we just need to get another 15 points.”
“But it fluctuates every month. It was -5 two months ago. You said average.”
“Yes, I'm talking about the average in December.”
“It has to be at 50 in December?”
“Yes, the average.”
We don't know how to respond to that.
“How do we do that?” asks Lisa, another colleague, trying to be helpful.
“Don't worry. It's not a product issue. It's mostly relevant to the operations team. We are going to address our customer success issues. Any other questions?”
There aren't any. After he (let’s call him VP-Bar) leaves the daily, Lisa starts to grill manager.
“manager, can we finally get that download button shipped to the customers then? They've been requesting it since forever. It'll boost our scores. It’s in the feedback. Since we're talking about being data-driven...”
manager squirms. He does that a lot.
“CTO doesn't want that. For IP reasons.”
There was never any IP, we patchwork and resell open-source. It hasn't gotten better since ChatGPT. Also, remember HIPPO?
Chances are you can tell me what your manager thinks more readily than you can your teammates. Maybe even yourself. Your manager, in turn, is an expert in what their VP thinks, who’s an expert in what CTO thinks.
Manager knows for sure that we shouldn’t go to VP-Bar to complain about his new efficiency measures. Not as a group, at least. It might put too much pressure on him. We wouldn’t want that, of course.
At the same time, I am battling depression. Colleagues have quit on burnout. Let’s talk about pressure.
My government is terrified of AI. In that other countries stand to make all the money with it. So they've done this thing (there's a word for it ...) where they award public funds to fresh, do-innovation companies with AI in their name. The funds are supposed to be used for public research projects. No, it's technically not illegal. Yet it sounds like ... nevermind.
CTO wasn't happy that I refused to sign the sheet saying I'd worked on the project. Which I may or may not have. Legally speaking, I can't say either is true, and might be liable both ways.
The escape line? "Can you send that in an email?"
manager, of course, calls me into a meeting to discuss the incident. He says: You need to sign. It's for the good of the company (=CTO) and also everybody does it! So why must you be such a petty, overcorrect, little [redacted].
To be fair, he’s listening to CTO’s angry voice messages while we're talking. It’s tough on him.
Does he not know that CTO will sell the company as soon as anybody wants it and get filthy rich?
They want me to be a reverse Robin Hood.
[redacted]. The word is [redacted].
How long I’ve had it? To some degree always, at least that’s what I’m realizing. My mum’s depression went untreated for almost her entire life. My grandpa sat on the sofa a lot and didn’t talk.
But there are moments when it reaches into you and turns you inside out. When that happens, opening the laptop makes a foggy darkness squeeze my mind shut. I can’t ignore it. I sought help and found it.
Meds have gotten better. It take 10 mg Escitalopram and so long as depression doesn’t flare up, I don't even notice. When it does, the meds keep me functioning.
The company’s values are:
We strive for excellence.
Solutions over problems (that’s my favorite).
Facts over feelings.
We are all different, yet all voices matter.
At this point, we’d be better off not having values at all. That way people might not notice how much we're missing the mark on each one of them.
One of my core values is fairness. I won’t find that among company values.
There are things from my past, I wouldn’t call them values but … internalized thoughts. Thoughts that I’ve heard repeated over and over in childhood.
These tend to come up in therapy. One if them is the idea of having to be the best at everything. Being on top. At the top of the top.
Yeah, it does tend to make me very ill.
In case you’re wondering: people in the company are not very different. We are diferent on the Myers-Briggs scale, sure (they had us fill out the test and made a whole show of it. With a face mosaic slideshow of everyone and their Myers-Briggs type and all that.)
The company value doesn’t say diversity though. It also doesn’t not say diversity. It says diversity to the degree that a company running on alpha-male energy can possibly get away with.
To make sure everybody gets the idea, one person gets to explain what the value means to them at the end of every company-wide clapfest. Sometimes it’s a woman.
Last time, it was CEO: “Let me explain how I think we’re all different …”
Applause again.
Meanwhile, I’m having trouble telling apart our managers, they’re that much copies of each other.
I could quit, sure, and I’ve thought about it. I’m sure you have, too. Supposedly, we can get a job anywhere, but A) I have a son now B) I’m tired and C) this isn’t the first time. These companies are all parodies of each other. Also, I love my colleagues. They are real people with real desires, wanting to be treated humanely and with dignity.
“This AI thing might help us deal with our diversity issues,” manager muses, “we’ve gotten the feedback again that our customer support is very … um …”
“Yeah but that’s bullshit.”
“Excuse me? I know it’s not perfect, but I’m trying to find a constructive solution.” He can be very offended.
“How is that a solution?”
“So people see themselves represented.”
By an AI? They’ll see themselves represented by a brown-faced AI customer support agent? Is that what diversity is about?
D) I love my colleagues.
manager has caught on to our dislike of VP-Bar's new bread-and-circuses program. It's meant to balance out VP-Bar's new efficiency measures. We’re talking free coffee at the office. We’re talking tracking customer support tickets with a stopwatch.
Also, there’s a “Best Employee” gift card contest every month now. Managers shortlist people, then we all vote. During clapfests, there's a round of applause for the winner and an Amazon gift card. Not a very valuable gift card, either.
At one point, two people won. VP-Bar insisted to split the gift card 80-20 between the two. The 20 went to the part-timer.
To address our concerns, manager comes up with an impromptu workshop. What are our criticisms of the “Best Employee” format?
“It’s just such authoritarian bullshit,” says Lisa - I love her! - and continues, “they’ve noticed we’re unhappy and so they resort to giving us hand-outs.”
manager hasn’t stopped squirming in a while, yet this one makes him almost shiver.
“So how do we improve? We need to be constructive. Solutions over problems.”
The improvement is implicit in the criticism though. Stop the authoritarian bullshit and treat people like people.
Some people care about money. That’s an easy one. I’m not one of them, unfortunately, and if you’ve read this far, neither are you. I care about physics, about sci-fi literature, about philosophy. And fairness. I want to see my work affect the world, even slightly.
That’s one reason I have depression.
Our team convenes for what turns out to be a crisis meeting. It’s the aftershock of the “Best Employee” workshop. We ended up wanting to talk to other teams to hear how they feel about it.
This has put manager into crisis mode. First he whines that it was his workshop to begin with. Then he squirms about what his managers will think of him. He’s sure they won't like us going over their heads. Then he smites us for being so complicated. Then he leaves for his next meeting, announcing to follow up on the topic in 1:1 shakedowns meetings.
My colleagues are shocked.
“He seemed so offended, didn’t he? How can we make it right?”
“I’m offended, too,” I say, “this was supposed to be about us, but within five seconds, it turned into a mental support meeting for managers.”
That gets them thinking.
Sure, I am an outlier in many ways. You might be too, though. But I’m not alone in struggling with mental health issues, not statistically, not among my friends, not in the company, not even in my team.
Once you start talking to your colleagues about being unhappy, it’ll turn out they aren’t happy either. Some have the same symptoms of burnout. You could have known this, but somehow you didn’t.
You inhabit a world that’s structured to amplify the feelings and thoughts of few people while muting others. There’s a probably a term for it…
It might be a natural byproduct of power differentials. Yet if ever there was a playbook on how to stifle opposition, it would have this in it: have everyone think they’re outliers.
manager feels like he needs to explain his outburst.
“I wanted to show that it’s important to show emotion sometimes.”
The 1:1 shakedowns are still on schedule, though.
There was a day when opening my laptop made me almost retch. Not a metaphor. As I said: inside-out. I had to call in sick for four weeks. It’s that bad. Yes, I should definitely quit.
That's the usual advice: just quit. Quit and quit and quit again. Meanwhile, the corporate machine is churning out management drones to assimilate every part of the corporate world and soon, everything else.
I write up a “How to respond” guide to prepare us for the 1:1s with manager. Our goal remains: reach out to other teams.
“What he’s doing is divide-and-conquer. The counter is to have a single line of communication. That’s why we have to plan what to say in the 1:1s.”
This actually works and my colleagues see the value in it.
The life strategies I have learned all revolve around looking out for myself. Find a job that fits you, learn how to be a better negotiator, have a therapist, learn resilience. Check, check, check and check. All of those work on the individual level.
What I have never learned is how to work at the collective level. Just haven’t. Why not?
Everyone fights for themselves, yet management is a highly organized planning machine with a manifesto, quarterly strategy meetings, and yearly training camps retreats.
Unofficial team meeting.
“I want to start an Initiative.”
Doubtful looks.
“What we see is that some people’s views and feelings are amplified, while we are systematically silenced. In that workshop, we started talking about how to improve our situation. The moment we said we wanted to have agency, it turned into a therapy session for manager.”
It’s not that they think this is wrong, it’s that they don’t want to hear it.
“What we need is some way to speak as a group. That’s the only way we're going to get our voice back.”
“They’re not going to like that.”
That’s right, but doesn’t that tell the whole story? And why is that always the first thing anybody ever thinks about?
“We’ll play all nice and diplomatic. My plan: We need liaisons to other teams, I have some people in mind who we can talk to. Do you know of people? We need a Signal channel. Let’s take on the gift card contest as a testcase to see if we can get people to rally behind us.”
My colleagues need to think about this. What is management gonna think?
After three days, 5 out of 6 are in.
All I’ve ever learned, career-wise, is to look out for myself, and so it is for everyone. For me, it made me very very ill.
If you’re like me, and it’s possible you are, you’ve found the corporate world a touchy-feely, anti-dissent, anti-competence, autocracy ruled by people who, in the real world, you’d never speak to a second time. They may not even be fully human. Are you?
Learn how to save yourself in the next part.
My spouse works for a completely different type of company. But this article repeats everything I’ve heard about his work experiences almost verbatim.
I've recently moved from front line work to corporate and this is eerily similar to what I'm experiencing, even in a completely different industry. I've had a 1:1 for being 'negative' (asking for clarity of purpose on a pointless task) and frequently hear the 'solution over problems' line (a favorite for managers who have no idea what they're doing). It seems about 80% of the people in my 120+ office spend the majority of their day trying to justify their role. Layers upon layers of middle management. It drives me insane with rage thinking about the wasted resources. I work for a government department.
I've been thinking a lot about the Bullshit Jobs essay by David Graeber and how spiritually corrosive it is to spend so much of our lives in these environments. We aren't meant to live like this. I don't know what the solution is, I'm in the same boat regarding quitting. Maybe I can get some satisfaction in being an agitator? Thank you for your writing on this, off to read part 2