I don't exactly love the work I do but for the most part the company I work for has been a pretty good employer (comparatively).
It's a tech firm, so competition is hot, but they've offered an OK salary, decent benefits, more-generous-than-the-legal-minimum vacation, sick days, and flexible WFH.
When I started there were about 70 odd people spread around the world. One thing that was different from any other organization I've worked for, was how grounded everyone was. The message was simple: we're all talented and professional people, and we're all here to deliver a nifty bit of software. Managers were pretty relaxed, the CEO joined our meetings every week, and I would be actively told to take half days off to relax, or be sent new equipment to make my life easier. No BS, just good people trying to do a good job.
Now there are around 200 people. Today my team was told by our department head that he'd be going on holiday, and while telling us what to do during his time off he said, “now just because I'm going away for 3 weeks don't get the idea that you guys can just do that”. Wow man, talk about tone deaf. This after I was told he wouldn't consider a department transfer for me until end of quarter because “we all have to power through this quarter as a team”.
After that, I spent a chunk of my morning preparing for a call with a prospective client, one that would be a big strategic win as they're a public agency in a foreign country that we've never broken into. My team lead DMs me, asking why I haven't been making enough calls during our scheduled calling time. I replied that I was preparing for this big call, and that I thought it was a better use of my time to win an interested prospect rather than cold call strangers. Unfortunately that was the wrong answer and this has been “tabled for our next 1:1 meeting”. So I begrudgingly made some half-assed calls, only to get another message 15 minutes later asking why I wasn't trying very hard to reach these leads: turns out my team lead was spying on my calls without telling me. I get that this is done via company property, but disregarding my own privacy, how the hell is it ok to violate the privacy of strangers who don't know they're being listened to by a 3rd party?
What. The. Fuck.
These are just two issues from today I wanted to vent about, but I think it's indicative of the transformation from a common-sense based start up to a bureaucratic, self-obliterating cash furnace. Managers become too distanced from lower-level staff and lose sense of what drives us to do a good job, and technocratic outside hires lose sight of the big picture by implementing ego-inflating performance metrics that they micro-manage thinking that the breath down my neck is what's going to drive me to do a good job.
I don't want to get rid of work entirely, but why can't we all just show up with common sense, have frank conversations with each other, and just be focused on doing our work well instead of passive-aggressive snipes, “circling back” or “tabling” for later? Can we not have direct, confrontational discussions with each other like adults?