alt Hacker NewsI mean this sympathetically, but you and your partner seem to have an unhealthy relationship with work.
Employment is a business transaction. You sell the company your time - it gives you money. That’s the deal. The company is not your family, your father or a secret ledger of who worked hardest.
Think of it like buying groceries. You don’t expect the supermarket to love you because you’ve shopped there for 15 years. The supermarket doesn’t expect you to keep buying burnt bread out of loyalty. Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.
Once you understand this, corporate behavior becomes much less mysterious and much less emotionally destructive. You stop thinking you must deserve to be seen, deserve to be noticed, deserve to be loved.
There are no sacrifice points. Unused vacation days aren’t loyalty deposits. Working nights isn’t an insurance policy. Being liked by 30 people doesn’t give you 30 votes at budget time.
Your partner may have been excellent, and the executive may be a fool. Both things can be true. But a corporation is a bundle of incentives, budgets, politics, and contracts wearing a branded hoodie.
Do good work. Be kind to colleagues. Take pride in your craft. But take your vacation, keep your CV fresh, maintain relationships outside the company and never EVER outsource your sense of worth to an org chart.
Talk to an expert on relationships.
Replies
This is great take, I agree.
This is how I view work and any relationship to corporate for a long time now, and it took lots of pain to finally recognize it. I'd go even further than that: your primary role is to be selfish and pull in as much bacon as you can as fast as you can, then get out.
I recognize myself a long time ago in your partner, so much mental energy wasted to the game where I could instead just clock in, do some stuff, clock out and spend the rest of my energy where it matters: at home, with friends, cooking, working on personal projects. Let the insane corporate climbers light themselves on fire to keep management warm, I'll derive my worth elsewhere.
I agree with most of what you write but “Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.” Is true but only when rationality is assumed and that the interests of those doing the firing actually align with the overall corporation.
Corporations are made of people and the structures can be very dysfunctional. I’ve seen it and I’m sure it’s common elsewhere, many decisions are made with no actual rational understanding of “economic sense”. An example is firing someone to save costs but needing to then hire 2 new people to replace them, increasing communication costs and having to pay a training cost.