- Joined
- Feb 2, 2019
I once asked my aunt who ran a business a question about this. I asked, what if I have no degree, lied about it, pretended to be good at the job, then instead spend the first year with my nose in the books every evening so that I get good at it while I learn and she never finds out?
And she was looking at me like I was crazy.
"What the fuck do I care if no problems arise?"
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I don't really lie or brownnose; I put myself at an equal level to them and connect about things that truly are part of myself and my history. Most people aren't really interested enough to discover the precise genuine nature of your interests anyways; they just want to feel like you're kinda like them in some way. I bonded with one guy over both of us disliking cheese once. I think people in general are far too self-involved to really care too much.
And those few people with genuine interest? They only appreciate getting to know you better and discovering if it's a little different than they expected, because then you're a movie/book that keeps on delivering with unexpected twists.
But I've also never worked at the same place for more than 2 years unless it was my own business, so maybe my strategy is not too long-lived?
Yeah, this is why I prefer smaller companies where people actually somewhat resemble people instead of automatons.
Honestly, I've had good colleague relations in most places, but I've never once made a friend at work. There were one or two that thought I was their friend though. Oh wait, now that I think about it, I'm wrong, I made one friend once at work.
Just shoot me now. I can't even see myself applying for such a job.
I did once take over the ad manager role and it was all diversity oriented. I just slowly overtime replaced most of the pictures with white people and that alone seemed to increase sales, but maybe I was fooling myself these things are hard to tell. All of our clients that I had met were white. And you just want to show people themselves in your pictures as closely as possible, you know? You want to make themselves feel; you belong with us.
I also replaced all the white americans with their perfect smiles with white dutch people with our goofy looks as well.
I don't have enough experience to know for sure, but I don't think corporate values are really connected to the everyday work at ground floor.
I suppose it's theoretically possible for a corporation to be really effective in that way, who do the japanese thing where one day a year the executives work at ground floor to identify and solve deeper problems.
But most of the time executives are just playing a very different game than the ground-workers. They may just be trying to up the value of the firm by laying off staff, or trying to temporarily make it appear more valuable by juggling numbers and moving departments around to get a bigger bonus. Their values are often more luxury oriented too. To show off to each other how much integrity they have by making their staff swallow their bullshit. A lot of the consultancy game is actually convincing these kind of people how amazing they actually are while doing their dirty work for them, or at least, so it seems to me as an outside observer.
It reminds me of that metaphor that there are three types of people who work jobs; sociopaths, losers and clueless.
The sociopaths write the rules while not following them, the losers accept the rules while knowing they are bullshit, whereas the clueless actually believe them. I think it's called the gervais principle.
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