I manage a whole team of engineers. Last month, some C-level asshole with an MBA told a bunch of developers, to our faces, that our volunteer-run hackathons that we operate for the general public should instead be the general public contributing code to us directly.

We run those programs to build good will and help train new developers into the field. And this suit wants to milk them for shitty code we can’t even use (legally). This is in an industry which continues to get massive layoffs.

This isn’t his first bad idea. The others include removing perks, changing our department name three times in a year, and general fuckery of priorities.

So yeah, as a boss, I’m absolutely checked out.

I’ve spent the better part of the last decade of my 16 years in technology either trying to shield my team from a constant river of bullshit or contributing to projects that are clearly DOA from day one.

Got laid off a month ago and to be completely honest, I’m pretty bummed about the idea of going back to another corporate job. I’m going to do what I’ve gotta do to take care of my family. But there’s an increasingly large part of me that isn’t sure I want to do this until I retire. Don’t get me wrong, I do my job for the money; not the enjoyment. Anymore, a “good” job is one that I don’t hate. But it would be nice to work at something that doesn’t feel like a total waste of my time and expertise.

I get surveys at work asking me how much I believe the workplace aligns with company value x, y, z etc. Every question I just respond : I don’t have an opinion. I literally have no clue and do not care, I’m here to get paid.

My manager was an engineer who got promoted… Now she is still responsible for some technical contributions but also has to manage a team

She is extremely checked out.

Bosses checked out first.

Everyone is bagging on Boeing. The leadership packed up and went east years ago. Boeing leadership doesn’t care so much they moved.

And now everyone is forgetting that the elite bailed on the US long ago.

In my last job, I spent about 5 consecutive years kicking nothing but ass, getting 4.0 or higher annual reviews, customers saying how good and quick I got shit done. My “reward” for all that hard work…blanket 2.5% raise, the same as the6 people who show up at 8:45 at the earliest, take long breaks, longer lunches, gone by 4:30 because [this week’s BS excuse], and are consistently behind on every project.

Because of that I would spend weeks at a time at my desk just watching youtube, reading imdb or fandoms, playing games on my phone, shooting the breeze with toners or online shopping. I built a new AR pistol and a PC over the span of 3 months doing all my shopping and comparison from my work PC. Then, after some personal stuff went down, at my last review (4.5), I told my boss that there’s no reason I shouldn’t be a Sr Programmer at this point. His response was “Some people get promoted quicker than others, some get promoted too soon. You need to be patient”

I completely checked out at that point and started applying for new jobs. It took about 6 months but even when I went to turn in my resignation my old boss is so damn scattered & detached it took me 3 tries to slip it into conversation instead of just saying “fuck it i’m out”

My new job? Kinda the same. But I make over 10% more and am far ahead of the current peer that anything I do look like magic. I still don’t care.

Fucking fortune

I just learned about enshitefication, worsening of quality to maximize profits. That sounds like what the workplace has become. Capitalism is enshittefying work, or life in general.

I’m still burnt tf out and unemployed but I felt this big time when I was working in corporate at a large company.

I don’t have a degree, just was good enough in an environment where the average was pretty bad, and I got along with everyone so it wasn’t long before I had risen up a bit. The higher I got, the closer I got to business school types. My work became less structured, more stressful, more chaotic. It felt like there was a new disaster that I had to solve, every week, and every time it was totally avoidable and often was directly caused by these catty assholes starting shit on purpose.

I started to lose sight of what I was even doing. When I met someone and they asked me what my job was, I couldn’t give a straight answer because I was basically just doing whatever the fuck my superiors arbitrarily decided that week. They’d often assign me projects, then a couple days later pull me off the project and put me on something else that’s not even in my area of specialty, and then get mad that I wasn’t meeting the original project’s deadlines.

Our department had a lot of specific lingo that everyone knew and learned in training. On occasion they’d decide that a term wasn’t good enough, despite everyone knowing its meaning well, so they would arbitrarily change it. I was usually tasked with relaying these stupid fucking changes and trying to justify why everyone should follow suit. I would literally wring my hands cringing about how much of a fucking joker I looked when orating the senior management’s petty degree du jour.

I was a fairly fast, efficient worker, and my quality was consistent so I gained a reputation for being the go to guy for getting shit done quickly. That’s great, I’m respected by my peers, right? No because it just meant they would get more and more comfortable with shorter deadlines, faster project turnaround, quality expected to rise with each one.

They would constantly use that manipulative family rhetoric and to my utter shame I fell for it to a degree, and stayed there far longer than was healthy because I didn’t want to let the team and my mentor down. It was moot in the end. Eventually I hit a mental wall that I could not surpasse. It became physically impossible for me to do the work. I would try to type and my vision would blur. If I tried to work out a problem my head would start throbbing and I’d feel nauseous. I became unable to do anything. I’d often end up spending a lot of my work time anxiously pacing around my office trying to calm my mind rather than working. I started taking a lot of time off. I was closing myself off to the world, stopped hanging out with friends, stopped texting people, started to drink too much again.

One day there was a very stressful emergency in my family that I had to attend to and in a moment of overwhelming inability to deal with it, I found the clarity I had been lacking for a while. The next day I put in my two weeks. It hurt more than I expected. I really bought into that family shit, like a fool’s fool. I don’t know what the future holds for employment for me but I will never return to the corporate world. It’s like another plane of existence where everyone is aware of what a farce it all is, how performative and fake, how no one in charge knows or cares. But everyone pretends to care. And in a way, they do care because they’ll drive themselves mad for it.

The Great Delusion

While managers are touted as one of the solutions to bridging the broken contract between companies and employees, they have just as much (if not more) of a case of the doldrums.

Wrong on both counts.

That all means that people who might have struck while the iron was hot just a couple years ago during the Great Resignation are left feeling stagnant, checking into their jobs while checked out. “While these frustrated employees may have left under previous market conditions, declines in hiring and increases in inflation substantially elevate the risk associated with changing jobs,” Wigert added. He called this new era the “Great Detachment.”

Weren’t you all lying to us printing article after article about how the economy was actually doing fine when Biden was still on the ticket? Shameless.

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