I’ve kept my hobby something that I’ve only told to a handful of coworkers in the company. Even my boss knew about it.
I make custom Warhammer miniatures and I have a YouTube channel. Here’s the thing, at some point I began doing little skits at the beginning of my tutorials and the news have went nuclear in my company. People laugh behind my back over something they don’t understand. Because they’re not the target audience.
But for the most part, I’ve been able to silence them when they’ve learnt how much I earn from each commission. While I don’t make any money from videos as of yet they attract new customer interactions. And turns out I’m ever becoming more successful with a waiting list of 7 people.
But it also has attracted new undesired attention. Recently I’ve had arguments over my sales performance this year, which was to be expected lower when last year I made a 28% increase in sales from the year prior. But still they’ve forced me to tell I would increase another 7% this year. Which we all knew it was unlikely, specially if I would take a parental leave. They were setting me up for failure because apparently we can’t tell higher ups sales are going to shrink even when we know they’ll do.
So 2 days after being scolded, my boss tell me he wants to have lunch with me. And one of the things he brought is how me monetizing my hobby could make higher ups think that I want my future outside the company. And I know exactly whose mouth that bullshit came from without even telling me.
No shit! Of course I do! But what I do when I’m not on the clock is none of your business. Like I want to deal with people’s nonsense for my entire life just to collect the breadcrumps. Last year I brought 400.000$ in benefits just to collect a 10k$ commission.
You practically give your entire life to them and it will never be enough. If they have shut their mouths they would have found my best compliant and hardworking side, now they’ll only get bare minimum me.
Fuck corporate. It is the cancer of the industry.