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Antiwork

Being forced to do my job badly by incompetent leadership is awful

I'm doing my best to just not care whether the company fails or not. But as someone who takes a lot of pride in doing my best work and seeing positive results, working underneath completely incompetent senior leadership and being forced to carry out terrible strategies is so demoralizing. For context, this is in the media/journalism sector, and the job actually used to be pretty great. But starting last year there was a creep of micromanagement from above that involved stripping any creative input and decision-making from the editorial teams. It's gotten to the point now where we're barely even allowed to write our own headlines. Most of them are composed by an AI and then adjusted by an SEO specialist who has almost no knowledge or experience of the subject matter. The headlines are awful and hard to read and traffic is suffering as a result. The worst part…


I'm doing my best to just not care whether the company fails or not. But as someone who takes a lot of pride in doing my best work and seeing positive results, working underneath completely incompetent senior leadership and being forced to carry out terrible strategies is so demoralizing.

For context, this is in the media/journalism sector, and the job actually used to be pretty great. But starting last year there was a creep of micromanagement from above that involved stripping any creative input and decision-making from the editorial teams. It's gotten to the point now where we're barely even allowed to write our own headlines. Most of them are composed by an AI and then adjusted by an SEO specialist who has almost no knowledge or experience of the subject matter. The headlines are awful and hard to read and traffic is suffering as a result.

The worst part is there's no way to object or suggest changes or contribute ideas. All the talent and experience among the editorial teams is going to waste. Senior management is completely closed off from the front line. They basically get together in meetings and make decisions based on a combination of panic, ego, very limited data and (I suspect) cocaine, and then call the managing editors together to give them the latest commandments to be carried down from the mountain. These commandments change from week to week, often in completely opposing directions. One time I saw a big new initiative announced and then within literally about four hours there was another message saying “actually, never mind, we're not doing that.”

KPIs are down as a result of this and the response from senior management has been to intensify monitoring of writer and editor performance, because obviously individual writers and editors must be to blame. “Performance” is measured in number of articles edited and number of words written. Because in a time when the internet is being flooded with AI-produced sludge, senior management thinks “more words!” is the key to success rather than more careful curation and quality control.

To cap it all off, the job market is completely dead right now, so there's no chance of escape any time soon. All I can do is try my best to stop caring.

Wild that people who earn the biggest salaries can piledrive a company into the dirt with zero repercussions.

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