when: 2009-01-08 11:05 what: A Brief History Of Failure. look: Public where: GDI how: 14,236 tag: werkstatt

First:

With the new year comes certain changes at GDI for Your Humble Narrator. Strangely, I find myself doing the same approximate level of work, (sometimes less) for the same amount of time a day, only for more pay. There are no real new responsibilities other than the usual regime of attention to detail, quality control, periodic second-guessing, ad hoc training, and information resourcing; in fact, the whole of the reduced team appears to have been brought down (or raised up) to common levels of authority, in the sense that no one has authority over another except in the realm of professional knowledge. This is to say that while I still have an elevated manager to answer to, I am no more or less accountable for my actions as I was before, which was minimal to begin with. It's almost like being my own boss at times; I do my own thing, I have the luxury of zoning out and focusing on singular projects for days at a time, and I'm rarely asked to perform outside of my own sphere. On the other hand, five fingers: I'm now invited to meetings I was once barred from, communication between associates is smoother and more direct, and a smaller team means that when I excel at something it's that much more noticeable.

At the same time, I'm still a faceless drone, I still do grunt work in the trenches, I'm still laboring for the glory of the Party.

Am I okay with this? As long as I'm getting paid, what difference does it make the level of work I do? Or should I aspire to be more, to do more, to increase the sum of the parts in my brain?

I have a friend, a holdover from previous corporate jobs, who made the decision not to climb the ladders any more after so many years in it. She's ambitious and aggressive, forward-thinking and forthright, intelligent, sharp-witted, and shrewd. She could do anything she put her mind to, and even as she grew older, she still had myriad opportunities in front of her that she could just grab at because she had a skill-set that was in such demand in corporations. But she also realized that The Climb is effectively endless, and that the higher you actually go, the more danger you put yourself in, both internally from maintaining personal standards and externally from performance standards. So, one day (probably over a course of several days, actually) she made a conscious decision to get off the ladder, got married, bought a house, and started to be her own boss, both personally and professionally.

To be fair, climbing the ladder at GDI is incredibly difficult even with superior skills and a university-grade education, and it's a minor modern miracle that someone like Your Humble Narrator with only a modicum of skills and a truncated education was able to squeak by on the merits of my absurd sense of humor, thousand-yard stare, and rugged good looks. So it would figure that why would someone like me even try to put my weight on the rungs? There's a one in a hundred thousand chance that GDI would hire me on permanently, even if I performed above and beyond expectations and abilities, and that's on top of the one in a million chance that GDI tapped me to come onto the project in the first place; so again, as long as the money on the tree continues to grow back for the forseeable future and there's sufficient wiggle room between now and the eventual termination of the contract, (two years at a time at GDI) after which the possibility that I may ultimately end up in either one of two familiar scenarios, (unemployed and happy or gainfully employed and unhappy) what's the harm in throttling back?

Isn't this the very definition of "you are not your job?"


Briefly now, a short primer on the three significant signs of corporate bother, according to what I've been able to observe:

• Cutbacks: Not necessarily a barometer for trouble, in fact, most companies will dress cutbacks up as efforts to reduce waste and streamline operations. Targets for cutbacks can include, but aren't limited to, employee benefits, corporate amenities, vendors, contractors, paid time off, etc.
  
  
• Hiring freezes: When a company stops making money, or starts to lose money, one of the first overt signs is a hiring freeze, because while salaries may not be the biggest drains on capital, they are one of the more controllable factors.
  
  
• Downsizing: Downsizing and layoffs are more or less the same thing, except one sounds innocuous while the other sounds like a death knell. Outside economics can trigger downsizing, but downsizing can also be isolated, as when local offices reduce staff to consolidate locations, or when labor is outsourced. The bad sort of downsizing is done when a company fails to stop foundering even after cutbacks and hiring freezes, and then proceeds to borrow against itself, so to speak.

In any case, keeping calm and carrying on is the hard and fast rule if you find yourself in a bothersome situation, which is not to say you shouldn't keep your CV updated.

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