I've had a lot going on lately, and I'm not in a good place, but I feel like it makes enough sense to me, that I'm at least at peace with the fact that I'm not in a good place, and there's very little point in blaming myself for it.
I work in public service. I have my entire career. I did a little bit of work in the private sector, but I'm not really about the whole private sector attitude of “If it's not making us money, it's not worth doing.”. Fucking customers over not because it was the right thing to do, but the right thing to do for the sake of made up numbers on a balance sheet made me feel like shit, so I learned it wasn't for me. I started out in military service, then went to college, then got into working in local government. I love the work I do, and I have a pretty broad skillset in both left/right brain areas, so all I really want to do is progress to the level in my career where I can actually paddle us in a direction, instead of just blindly paddling to survive.
I'm in my mid-30s now, so I really should be at the point where my professional network is built up, and I'm leveraging what I've learned by observation and service to the cause in order to really help my institution, but lately, things have been bad. About seven years ago, I came to the realization that things were gonna get real rocky. We had a lot of folks who were grandfathered in on an older benefits and compensation plan that was way better than the one we transitioned to after the financial crisis. I'm talking, way lower healthcare premiums, at least double in retirement incentives than what we get now, and two times the leave that we get, plus a year-over-year leave bank growth that winds up tripling what's available to anybody who came on after the US economy took a shit back in '08.
So a lot of these people stayed in their roles and just rode things out until they were ready to retire, easily sliding up the ladder and streamlining their departments, eliminating junior and mid-level roles in favor of just having these 20-30 year long-timers shoulder the brunt of the labor. Now, this streamlining didn't go great. The institution functioned, but at a severe cost. Because of the streamlining, we were unable to document process and policy changes, and responsibilities were divided among staff members based on momentary needs, rather than being aligned to job titles and targeted to the kinds of skills those titles carried. We also missed out on a lot of opportunities to modernize and automate labor because we just had long-timers that were accustomed to how things worked 20 years ago, and they weren't expected to train people to take over for them due to the elimination of junior roles, so a lot of our processes went decades without a fresh set of eyes, or any attempt at innovation. We were paint by numbers. It took me a few years in the institution to see the writing on the wall, that all of these people were gonna retire as one big rolling wave of shit, and it was gonna result in a lot or problems with retention of both staff, institutional knowledge, and actually meeting our institutional goals. On top of that, not having to compete to fill these positions for decades, plus over 12 years of pay freezes meant that the compensation for these jobs was badly out of alignment with the private sector, so anybody we did hire would essentially be the dregs that couldn't get better work elsewhere, and unlike other government institutions, we didn't even have the historical benefit of good secondary compensation packages to justify the low pay.
Last week, my workplace announced that they were eliminating a whole department. Everyone in that job would be scattered to a bunch of other roles in the institution that have nothing to do with the skillsets that they were hired for. I, unfortunately, have been interviewing to get into that department for the last year, and have been struggling because they want people with a master's degree. Yeah, they can't get those, because the compensation for these jobs doesn't justify that kind of experience, but I was getting pulled for interviews anyway despite not meeting minimums, because the hiring pools were just that bad. To be clear, I'm very well educated and skilled well above my paper, but just lack the paper. The people interviewing me know I can do the job –But pleasing the panel is only half the battle. You also have to please admin and HR, and they are disconnected from the process, so impressing without the paper requirements is an uphill battle.
This announcement went over like a lead balloon. The staff in the department got a 1-day heads up that their jobs were eliminated, but the announcement was made before the plans were complete, so they will be staying in roles that they've been effectively told they were too incompetent to serve and were demoted from for the next 6 months. Not great. To make matters worse, this department is critical to our day to day function, and the plan to replace the department is going to fill it from another department in our institution that we basically have had non-stop issues with due to mismanagement and frankly, a lack of experience and education in what it is that our part of the government actually does. We've had integrity issues with this department that's taking over too, like people lying about making phone calls and office visits, closing out service requests without having even read the reports, and just straight up closing tickets with no notes because the metrics of how long it had been open without any work being done on it looking bad in their stats.
This is the fourth time this has happened to me in seven years I've been with the institution: I get the experience and requirements to start interviewing for a position, and the whole job that I start interviewing for gets eliminated in a no-notice restructure. To make matters worse, most of my skills are in tech, so it's not like I'm interviewing for some obscure, outdated thing that my institution doesn't need –I just want to use my institutional AND tech knowledge to really serve the institution well, rather than being yet another siloed to incompetence ass in a chair.
So, a few days after this, I get brought in to a monthly touch-up with my manager, and she asks me about my goals. And I just feel this dread creep in. I like my manager. She's great as a person, but kind of sucks at being a realistic mentor, and just goes through the motions on employee reviews, giving shit and exceptional employees 3/5 ratings across the board, and asking questions she doesn't really want to hear the answers to because it's required by her out of touch bosses. I decide I'm gonna be pretty open about this, that right now I'm not thinking deeply about my goals, because I had goals, and the recent restructure shot them all to shit, and I need time to understand how things are going to shake out before I start planning to pick up the pieces and find a way to move forward. Basically, I just need time to breathe, because the institution has been flailing for years to fix decades of decay –in my opinion, while also desperately avoiding addressing the problems that caused that decay.
But she gets a little pushy about my goals, saying that I need to be working on bettering myself, and not just doing the bare minimum to get through a day, which I kind of took personally. I recently finished writing two separate automation platforms and being project lead on both of those projects when the project managers fell out of them due to resigning due to a toxic departmental environment, or just no longer having faith in the institution to weather the challenges in front of it. I led four more major process reviews this year, and made recommendations to management for how to restructure these processes in order to save thousands of hours of wasted labor per year, and realign our staff to better serve our primary areas of concern. I excelled this last year for a low-ranking employee and only getting paid ~$33,000 per year. I bust my ass every day, alternating between shoring up systems that have been neglected materially for decades to the point where the automated processes we established are fully broken, and then dealing with front-line service problems with customers who are angry about our broken lanes of communication, and not delivering on promises in a timely matter if at all. It's not just me either, I got multiple awards last year for excellence, innovation, and leadership from people outside of my department.
So I explained all of this, and started really aggressively pointing out that I got a 3/5 on my review, disputed it, and that it's been two months since I disputed my review and I've heard nothing, and still haven't received an answer as to what criteria is expected in order to earn a 4/5 on my review in that time. I pointed out the awards I'd received, the outsized role I've taken in leadership, the teams that I established, and the material savings I've made for the institution, and then rounded back to this being the fourth time the institution has eliminated the promotion path that I had spent time building networks, mentorship, doing internships, and qualifications for. Four times I've done the work to move up, not to be told “no”, but to have the whole department shut down as I'm knocking at the door and trying to better my position in my institution. I kind of started to rant at this point, talking about how I was in my late 30s, and at a point where I can't afford to live in the city that I work in, can barely afford the medical bills I incur from the injuries I've received working the careers I have chosen, and on top of that, even without kids, am trapped in such a shitty place to live that I deal with gun violence and extreme exposure to people spiraling into drug use being within feet of where I live. Basically, I done had goals. I done did the things to meet those goals, and I'm not just in the same place financially than I was in my 20s when I started this journey, but I'm now significantly worse off because my dollars shrank and I damaged my body and mind working at a place that valued the shit out of her boomer employees, but just repeatedly fucked over her millennial employees and gaslighted us into thinking that putting more time in and showing loyalty would get us what we wanted.
The meeting didn't go bad. She took it well. But I could see in her eyes she was just powerless to change anything for me, and what she wanted in that moment, was for me to just stop being honest, and to instead be pleasant and accept the 3 on my review, even though SHE knew it was a slap in the face for all the work I put in, because the powers that be have made it prohibitively difficult for her to actually reward her staff with the reviews they deserve even though they are totally meaningless, and that our whole institution is structured to ensure that the people who see the work you do, have absolutely no impact whatsoever on how you are compensated for it. What she wanted in that moment, was for me to make up some pleasant sounding aspirational bullshit so she could write it down in her notebook, and point to the fact that she'd gone through the motions of her job, because she is just as overwhelmed and underappreciated as I am.
I dunno, if I had to wrap a pretty bow on it, management isn't fucking me. Administration isn't fucking me. HR isn't fucking me. Everyone is doing what they have to do in order to get through the day, and nobody who is making decisions is even thinking about me. I don't matter. The worker doesn't matter. All that matters is that the executives get their bonus and promotion, councilmembers cruise into re-election, and that means that no complaints about how broken anything is can surface to create a scandal, and the taxpayers are convinced that their tax dollars are as low as they can possibly be, regardless of whether or not they are receiving any value from them at all.
And yeah, I hear you: “You have a shit attitude”. I didn't. I worked at this for years before I became bitter. I did what I was told. I went to school. I served. I tried to learn and listen to every leader I could, and take in good faith that they knew what the fuck they were talking about better than I did. At the end of the day, I'm on the ass end of problems that are way bigger than me, and it's not personal. I get that. It doesn't take the stink off of it.