3 harsh truths about the workplace that affect hard working people more than rest. from twitter thread https://twitter.com/warikoo/status/1759084599270154582
I agree with most of them. i was in good places, aligned with my value system for first 20 years. In Hughes, employees challenging CEO Arun kumar were welcomed and handled well. I had a good time at Hughes. When I came to India and worked for Proteans, it was a good culture to work with, thanks to Sudhakar Gorti( i renamed my blog in that company’s name). if some thing was wrong, people were ready to change and move forward. No ego fights.
My own startup again was a great time that entirely aligned with my value system for 4 years. Stints at Accion Labs was good time. While overall company value system may not be aligned completely with me (based on my engagement with young engineers), I was provided freedom to execute startup engagements with startup founders or contribute in journey to create business opportunities and ability to find and take care of talented engineers who i could nurture, grow them and also learn from them and discovered a treasure of talent and found great engineers that i never worked in projects (still in touch).
While my environment did not create dissatisfaction in first 21 years, I skipped to express my dissatisfaction in last 4 years. The more spiritual I have become, I stopped to complain and at times feel that others are working to satisfy their needs and that always need not align with my needs.
In the last 3 years, less action and more patience and gratitude ( no action) did not work well for me. To be more honest, they were less exciting using old system, more interesting as job to earn more money for family, used old technology that needs to migrate and organisation expected me to engage with team members in way that did not align with my value system. Yes, compared to my experience for developing applications from scratch, these applications were at the end of life and migration and legacy apps with both technical debt and product debt.
One team, most stakeholder from startup en-cashed their equity and moved away, leaving legacy apps with huge technical debt (they created or purchased over years). knowledge present with contract engineers and some applications has no engineers with know-how.. Another team has locked themselves for years to rewrite legacy app in to new platform, took years and forgot migration of customers.(actual developers or new platform moved out). Looks like 90 to 100 stage of startup was not real fun. The system has been optimised and wonders were expected to happen under legacy constraints and with new engineers and no documentation and no product counterpart to clarify the working.
I did not express my dissatisfaction in these place. For me , the experience was that I was doctor-surgeon to take care of patient. I diagnosed, found tumour, got procedure done. Once patient came to normal health, there was no need of this doctor-surgeon who had independence mind. While I learnt to be happy that patient survived, it was not easy to let go of team members as part of ram-down first and at the end let go of myself at the end.
3 harsh truths about the workplace that affect hard working people more than rest.
1/ Good folks are dismissed as “too nice, too honest, too innocent, too naïve”.
- “You do not know what it takes to win in this brutal world.”
- And that’s true. Good people often finish last.
- Because the game favours the ones who bend rules, bypass them, and have flexible morals.
- So you have two options. Find a place that is non-negotiably aligned to your value system, or throw your ethics away!
2/ Early on in my career, I saw an unequal split of work given out by my manager.
- The hardworking ones got more and more work, and the lazy ones got less work. I thought, “That’s unfair.”
- My manager replied: “Good people pay a higher price for being good, than bad people pay for being bad.” What he meant was – if you are good, more work will continue to come to you BECAUSE you are good.
- So you have two options. Continue to pay the price or stop being as good.
3/ Notice how the good folks keep expressing their dissatisfaction in subtle ways, never to be noticed, until it is too late?
- And then the organisation wonders what happened for them to leave?
- Organisations assume no news is good news. So they rarely reach out to ask: “Are you doing okay?”
- So you have two choices. Share what you are feeling and make sure it is heard, or find yourself leaving the place because no one ever cared.
Most of the corporate world is designed for mass employment, putting people through a regimented process, expecting them to be compliant and follow orders, make the least noise, show up, work and go back home to come back again. It is NOT designed for the exceptional few.
- The ones who want to make a difference, the ones who care, the ones who see their work as an extension of their being.
- So if you are good, hunt down organisations whose culture nurtures your kind. Never give up on who you are, least of all for an organisation.
Srini - who am I? 