Kay

All wage work is theft.

feel you on this

i was being managed out of my company by my favorite boss of my career because he was being pushed to bc i was underperforming due to long covid

he gave me a super clean way to just get out by bending rules and getting a little bit in trouble for me

but the fact that i definitely helped my company bill over $40m unbilled invoices in collaboration with an analyst last year meant nothing to our company's new overlords.

it doesn't matter how good you are at your job, they don't care, they just want number go up and nothing else matters because it's not quantifiable enough except when it is they ignore the data anyway

hope your next thing gets you everything you want and need

I had a good enough tech job before I got my current one that I sometimes think about that other life where I never changed careers and just lived there and did that indefinitely. and my career was going places, I was getting noticed for making useful and profitable software, but also, the company got bought a couple years after I left, and even the titans of aerospace aren't invulnerable to a new boss making bad decisions for his own perverse incentives

One of the few things that keeps me sane working in retail is the occasional nice feeling that I've helped someone directly. Even if it's just registers, I help them by being quick, friendly, not wasting their time, bagging their stuff if they want, etc.

It honestly makes sense that you see more depression in office jobs - there's now nobody to genuinely appreciate anything you're doing, just other employees who review your performance as a measure of cost/profit analysis of your existence, to them you are a number on a spreadsheet more than a valuable human being.

I've straight up told my past few bosses that I'm here to get a salary for as little effort as possible because that is what the world requires me to do in order to continue to exist in any kind of comfort. I must be doing something "right" despite that considering I'm still employed here but I do feel like I'm just fading away and once I can't stay anymore life as I know it is probably over.

I feel this. I worked in web design for a big company for a long while and put so much effort into these major branding projects and stuff, and like genuinely felt proud of how nice the thing I made looked and worked. None of it exists anymore, except maybe on the Internet Archive, maybe. I spent a bazillion hours making neat little interactive Flash bits and pieces and character animations, which got much longer use before getting taken down, but also knowing Flash was pretty much terminal and that’d all be gone soon enough too. A solid chunk of my career exists only in screenshots that I took myself at home and I find that gutting in a weird way.

yeah :/

But just think of all the value you created for the shareholders!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes, I wish there was some feasible (and, uh, legal) way for me to nuke everything I was responsible for the moment when I’m pushed out the door. A fail-deadly self destruct mechanism to just wipe out every trace of my ever having been at the company. A real Joe Pesci “Ey, fuck me? Fuck YOU!” type arrangement.

yeah. in my first job in IT, there were a few things i put together that i was genuinely very proud of. we had a keypad entry system for one of our offices that worked really well and cost the company maybe £100 (ignoring my own labour) when an off the shelf system would’ve cost a Lot more. it was based around active directory (because everyone had an AD account and a phone extension) and mqtt. it had a simple web portal for managing your door code, that used single sign-on. it had out-of-hours alerting. it worked very well; i even designed a PCB to go into the off-the-shelf outdoors keypad I used, in case we expanded it.
when i first started at that job, setting a workstation up for a new employee was a day-long process; when I left it was a twenty-minute job regardless of how many you were setting up at once, and all the software and network access was set up with AD groups and OUs.
we had a server on the network that stored terabytes of old client data because they’d usually want reprints a year or more later, when I left it was a much smaller drive backed by amazon glacier for long-term archival and there was a little tool I built so that non-technical staff could self-serve restore the files from glacier.
we got a new phone system to replace the ageing cisco callmanager, and i put in the effort to figure out how to retain the autoconf stuff that the cisco hardphones had before, even though the new phone system emphatically Did Not Support Cisco Handsets.
it barely paid a living wage and i was stressed and angry 24/7 but god i haven’t felt anywhere near as competent in a role since.

it does not matter how hard you work, because when they decide it’s redundancy time, the only thing they look at is how much your salary is, not how much money you’ve saved the company, not how much labour you’ve automated, it sucks.

That was cohesive.
And coherent.
You did well, regardless of how well it was compensated or recognized at the time.
You're DOING even better now.
I'm really happy for you!
And I'm proud of you for learning from the experiences, & sharing that wisdom with others now.
THANK YOU for sharing the gift of your intellect & experience with us here & on YT now.
May any hangover be minimal & the recovery be swift & both sides of your pillow always be refreshingly cool.

Maybe this is why I can't stand even applying for jobs. I can't find a single one that isn't just going to sap away all of my spirits and conscious thoughts, from the very first time I had an Idea at a temp job in 2008 only to have it brutally shut down by a floor manager.

This is the one place where doing manual labor is actually nice, every thought I have at my job is entirely for me and my bosses don't get to hear any of it unless I feel like sharing. I've gained about 15 pounds of muscle working here and that's the only reason I care about working hard. The company can fuck itself, they didn't nail down the part of exercise that makes my life better so I'm walking out the door with it every day. Then I remember the time this job sent me to the ER and realize that if I would like to continue being able to walk at age 45 I'm going to have to get a job like the one you describe and wow it hurts, thanks for putting it in words, at least I have a name for it now.