Those Were The Days
We are all prone to looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses and believing it was better than today. It’s part of how we survive as humans to forget the bad stuff and remember the good stuff. If it wasn’t, we’d never have more than one child (not because children aren’t lovely but because it is really hard work to raise a child. It’s totally worth it but every new parent of a second child says, “Oh, I forgot how exhausting/difficult/tedious/heart-wrenching/painful/confusing/time-consuming/expensive it is!”).
So when I, as a Boomer of advanced years, say that work is worse than it used to be, am I simply indulging in nostalgia?
That’s a difficult question for me to answer but I don’t think I am. We know that employee engagement has flat-lined since Gallup started their survey in 2000, whilst wages/salaries have also been flat in real terms. We also know that commuting has got worse, in terms of time (as people have moved further out to find cheaper housing), costs and overcrowding. This is the thing that people hate most, hence the relief for many to move to hybrid working and avoid it for at least some of the week.
Anecdotally, it seems that work has got worse too. Of course, it may that we are simply less tolerant but, whilst I think that is certainly true of those more recently entering the workforce (millennials and GenZ), it’s far from the whole picture.
We accept the work is a part of life but the trends over the past few decades are that work takes up more and delivers less. We work longer hours under more stress and yet we are able to achieve less with our income, we have to live smaller lives. What used to be good jobs that provided for a comfortable standard of living are now insufficient to fund the modest aspiration of achieving parity with our parents. Home ownership is out of reach, having a family is a stretch and any hope of a decent pension and a comfortable retirement has long since flown the coop. This is the first generation that will be worse of than their parents and have a lower quality of life (not including the existential threats of climate and environmental breakdown).
So, I don’t think it is me. I think it is objectively the fact that work is getting worse and has been for a few decades now. In fact, during the course of my life, since I entered the workforce as a callow youth in late 1970s.
Still you know what they say. Even nostalgia’s not what it used to be.
Somethin’ Stupid
There are macro and micro reasons for this. At the macro level, I’ve written before about the ‘Forces of Crapification’ that have come together and reinforced each other to degrade the work experience. These are:
Putting profits before people.
Valuing efficiency over effectiveness.
An obsession with process and measurement.
The spread of mobile phones and the ‘always on’ culture
Tech replacing human interaction
Increasing work loads, hours and stress
Ed Zitron has a slightly different take with his concept of the Rot economy and the ‘enshittification’ of everything (not as good as ‘Decrapify’, obviously, but it shows great minds think alike! Scatalogically, it seems.) He focuses on the tech industry and observes that the business models of the tech companies are all about growth and not about serving the customer, which leads to the state of affairs that they will change their products to increase growth even if it makes it worse for the customer.
This is why your daily experience of the internet is actually getting worse. It’s not in Facebook’s interest for you to only see posts from your friends and family, even though that’s what you want and what Facebook was created to do. Instead, they serve you posts of people you don’t know and adverts for products you don’t want and suppress the posts you do want to see because that makes you spend more time on the platform and connect with more people, which is growth for them.
It’s why almost every interface you use is getting worse because it being tweaked to serve the interests of the company rather than your needs.
Once you’ve seen this, you see it everywhere. In the workplace, an example par excellence is Enterprise Systems like SAP, which insist you have to change the organisation to fit their software to get the benefits. At a more personal level, it is those HR ‘self-service’ systems that make you spend hours entering and re-entering data to get something to happen instead of just having a quick phone-call with someone who can sort it for you. Although the self-service HR system probably runs on SAP, which they had to introduce so they could cut staff numbers to pay for the SAP implementation, so maybe it is the same thing after all.
I have to admit that I ethusiastically embraced the internet as a means to do things directly rather than have to queue up and speak to people. In fact, I have had an online bank account since 1984, before the Internet was even a thing, through the Bank of Scotland’s Prestel service. I thought it was great that we could do things ourselves, when we wanted, without the friction of having to go to a place and speak to people. But I have noticed that more and more friction has been introduced to these interfaces and they have become harder and harder to navigate.
Quite apart from having to declare my humanity by correctly identifying inanimate objects in poorly rendered images, I now have to navigate various tricks to make me buy things I don’t need or lock myself into subscriptions I don’t want. If you’ve ever tried to avoid adding Amazon Prime to your purchase, or much worse, cancel it after you’ve been tricked into opting in, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
So what was supposed to make life easier and more joyful is now making life more difficult, fraught and tedious. All so the companies you are using, both the platforms and suppliers, can cut staff, reduce costs and increase profits. Oh, and spam you endlessly about things you don’t need whilst pestering you to rate the quality of service on those scouring pads you bought last week. Because nothing says ‘The Customer is King’ like annoying the f*ck out of them every time they buy from you.
All this reminds me of Clay Christiansen’s explanation of why financialisation is destroying innovation. He pointed out that companies used to put their profits and free cash flow into Research and Development that would yield the technological breakthroughs they wanted over the next 40 years. This was the source of major innovations like the telephone, the motor vehicle, commercial airplanes and other innovations that boosted the economy. Government’s too invested in this way, which led to the Internet itself, for example.
But then financialisation came along and instead of investing in R&D with a 40 year horizon, companies began looking to invest in areas that provided a return in a much shorter time scale, in order to boost growth, revenue and profits. R&D investment fell and was replaced with a number of smaller investments, often speculative, in incremental projects.
So now we have a lot of money chasing a small number of investment opportunities that offer high returns in the short term, and much less money looking for the next truly breakthrough innovation.
Which is why, instead of curing cancer or finding ways to address the climate crisis or solving any of the 101 things that would actually improve your quality of life, money is flowing into ways for you to do what you do now, only worse but locked into dependency on a large and indifferent corporation.
You know, like the metaverse lets you have virtual meetings, but worse than Zoom. Or crypto lets you use money, only less securely and reliably than the Banking system. Or AI lets you create graphics from a few prompts that are literally the modern equivalent of clip art but with bits of it oddly wrong, yet only costing you a ‘small’ monthly subscription. For now. As long as you can ‘prove’ you’re human.
Make you yearn for the return of clippy, doesn’t it?
Yeah, so those are some of the reasons why it’s all gone to crap.
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These Days
But that’s all big picture stuff. What is it about work itself, the worsening of the work experience?
Well, I tried to jot down a few things that sprang to mind. I ended up with a lot of things that sprang to mind. I’m sure I haven’t got everything, so I’d love to hear your additions or amendments. But first, here’s my ‘starter for ten’.
The technology
I’ve touched upon this already but the tech we have at work has become a real drag. We were promised that it would release us from drudgery but it’s done the opposite, it’s ensnared us in it’s Kafkaesque web (no pun intended). ‘Enshittification’ has not just happened to the workplace tech, it’s in the procurement specs.
I remember the days when people waxed lyrical about the paperless office and being able to work from anywhere. Well, we eventually got rid of paper (mostly) but replaced it with information overload and data dungeons where our documents and presentations go to die; whilst working from anywhere means we also can’t escape work - anywhere!!
And I haven’t even mentioned the average number of log-ins that employees have to use. It’s about 40, since you ask. That’s several different user interfaces too. Many seemingly designed by a spider dipped in ink crawling across a sheet of paper.
Open Plan offices
The norm used to be small offices, either shared or, if you were lucky or ‘important’, to yourself. It wasn’t without it’s problems (you might end up sharing with someone with unpleasant habits. Like smoking. Which they were allowed to do indoors. I know! Wild, right?) but you had a relatively small, controllable space, with a door you could shut. It was like this because buildings had to have internal walls.
Then they figured out how to make buildings with open floors. Finance directors realised that all those walls and doors cost money, so they picked up on this idea that had been around for while called ‘open plan’. Only they improved it (in their terms) by putting people much closer together than originally envisaged and found you could squeeze everyone into a much smaller (and cheaper) space.
And so we all got shoved into open plan offices. And mostly hated it. These distraction and disruption engines were ideal for no-one and sub-optimal for everyone but became the norm for the modern organisation.
All in the name of ‘progress’, of course.
Gaslighting and double-speak
When I entered the workforce, most organisations had a paternalistic outlook. Some still offered a ‘job for life’ but all generally cared about their workforce (in the UK, that is). Of course, management looked after their interests, which were not the same as the employees, but there was respect on both sides despite the conflict. Employers asked for loyalty but, in return, they cared for their employees.
Today, few people believe their employers care for them. Benefits have been pared away over time, wages suppressed, sackings used as a means of cost control. We all know it’s just about profit and efficiency and employees are just expendable resources for the organisational machine. We can debate whether that’s a good or bad thing but it’s reality.
Yet nothing in the way organisations speak to their staff acknowledges this. Quite the opposite. We are told we should give 110%, invest ourselves emotionally in our work, be happy, be purposeful, be loyal, work harder, improve ourselves and be responsible for our own careers. We are told the organisation has values and a mission and a purpose, even if we see no evidence of this in our lived reality.
I could go on. I probably will further down this list.
It’s bad enough being served a shit sandwich every day, without being told to believe it’s sirloin steak.
Inequality
The ‘bosses’ obviously earned more than I did when I started. However, it wasn’t a huge amount more. It seemed like a reasonable gap, they still lived a similar life to me (or more probably, my parents) but a bit more upscale.
Now the gap is absolutely huge. It’s not just the CEO but all the C-suite, and the board, and the advisors. These people earn high multiples more than their employees, and the gap is growing. They no longer live in the same world, they share little life experience with the people they gaslight, er, sorry, I mean ‘lead’. Or maybe I don’t.
It would be easy to characterise them as out of-touch, indifferent and over-privileged parasites on the workforce. So easy. And so easy to resent them too. Wouldn’t it?
Lack of care
I mean, they don’t really give a shit, do they? Just look at the communities abandoned when they decide to move production to a cheaper country. See all the people Big Tech have just dumped to improve their short-term profits.
Excessive Workloads
In the UK we work longer hours than ever (well, since the Factories Act gave us the 40 hour week). We’ve had decades of ‘efficiency’ measures that always end up with us being asked to do more with less, all the while the fuckocracy of the modern organisation creates more meaningless work for us to wade through to get anything actually done. Burnout is going through the roof. The cogs are breaking but still they crank up the machine another few notches.
Dissassociation
Do you sometimes wonder what your job is for? Do you see the end result of the process that you are part of? Are you able to see the outcome of your actions? Or do you sit there, shuffling bits around a screen, and wonder if your computer is actually connected to anything?
Perhaps your job actually is moving bits around. Perhaps that releases kinetic energy that is harvested to drive a huge turbine that does something useful. Maybe every email you send generates a micro-joule that helps to irrigate a field in Africa so that a mother can feed her children.
Or maybe it’s all pointless.
Green-washing, well-washing, tick-boxing in general
Not just going through the motions but being really proud of going through the motions!
Look, we’re looking after the environment - in a really shallow and narrowly-defined way that stops us getting prosecuted!
Look, we take care of our employees by giving them yoga and other stuff that doesn’t actually deal with the harms that we cause them through overwork and shitty management!
Aren’t we great and progressive and cuddly and ineffectual!
Oh, I wasn’t supposed to say that last bit out loud!
Values, Mission and Purpose
Oh god, make it stop!
All those overpaid, out-of-touch people go to an exclusive spa hotel for a week with a bunch of similarly endowed consultants to come up with the biggest load of bilge seen since last week’s discharges by Southern Water.
Then they write the values all over the walls, tell you about a mission that’s so anodyne it could apply to anything and sign you up to a purpose that is somewhere between meaningless and outright offensive.
Still, at least having the values on the walls is a handy reminder when you see just how different the practised values are from these espoused one. Not that they’d welcome you pointing that out to them. If you ever saw them.
Remember, one of Enron’s values was ‘Integrity’.
Boundary Violations
It used to be that you went work, did your 9-5, then went home. You couldn’t really work at home because all the stuff you needed was at the office. (If you were more senior, you might take some paperwork home with you but there was a limit to how much of that you could lug back and forth). You couldn’t work weekends, without special arrangements, because the office was shut. If you did have to do any work outside office hours, you got paid overtime, or given time off in lieu.
Work and your personal life were clearly demarcated and work wasn’t meant to spill over over it’s boundaries into ‘life’.
Sounds like bliss, doesn’t it? Apart from having to be in the office by 9 am every day (well, I found that a struggle!).
And today? Boundaries have well and truly been trampled on. You are expected to work beyond your contracted hours, without any extra pay (let alone overtime paid at between 1.25 and 2 times your rate) or time off in lieu. You are given a phone so you can be on call all the time, and work can intrude into your life at home, or out enjoying yourself, or even your moments of intimacy. Do have any idea what this does to your stress levels?
Oh, and if you just do the work you are paid for, you are considered mercenary. A Quiet Quitter. It’s not enough to do the job, you have to emotionally commit to it.
And your friends and family can have what’s left over. Unless there are exceptional circumstances…
Precarity
From ‘job for life’ to ‘job unless the CEO needs to make his bonus for this quarter’.
Part of the salami-slicing of benefits has been the removal of various employment protections and a ‘casualisation’ of the workforce. The number of ‘staffers’ has been reduced, replaced by short-term contractors (a lot of the people who work ‘at Google’ are not ‘Googlers’, for example). Each re-org slims the core a bit more.
Then there’s the impact of globalisation and mergers, which can lead to the transfer of jobs to another city, another country, leaving you high and dry.
And now ‘remote working’ puts you in competition with everyone in the world, whilst AI puts you in competition with software. And you know they don’t care who wins here, as long as it looks good on the bottom line (even, as we’ve determined, it makes the products worse for the customer).
They like it this way. It keeps you hungry and the profits rolling in.
For What It’s Worth
Well, I worked up a head of steam there, didn’t I?
A lot of these are inter-related, so I hope I wasn’t too repetitive. I’m sure I wasn’t comprehensive, so I welcome your thoughts and additions.
Alongside this is the issue of Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber wrote about so well. These are jobs that really are of no value, economically or socially, but are well rewarded and regarded in Corporate Life. Marketing, corporate law, administration, HR and the rest of the bureaucracy are full of Bullshit Jobs. You can make a fine career out of Bullshit Jobs and earn enough for a very pleasant life style. However, once you realise they are, ultimately, pointless then you suffer grave moral injury, which is exacerbated by the fact that you feel you can’t complain because most people would envy your comfortable position.
Imagine spending years studying for qualifications, rising up to a well-paid position and then realising it has been utterly futile but you can’t admit that out loud? You’re in hell but to most people it looks like paradise, like a Scotsman on a desert island dreaming of a wet cloudy day in Glasgow.
Were the great man still alive, I think he might be writing about Bullshit Businesses. Ones which fulfill no useful function and indeed are often actively harmful to the planet and society but generate great wealth for their top executives and shareholders. Not through the operation of the business, but as a vehicle for various financial and legal manoeuvres to extract money from consumers, governments, markets, investors and any other sucker they come across.
I can think of a few of those but I think that will have to wait for another time.
Hanging On The Telephone
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or any other topic I have rambled on about. I’m interested to hear about your experience in Corporate Fantasyland and what your challenges are (especially if they are about making good trouble or getting the hell out!). Maybe I can help you figure out what to do next.
So get in touch, I’d love to hear from you
Book a call on my Calendly page
Email me at colin@colinnewlyn.com
“These are jobs that really are of no value, economically or socially, but are well rewarded and regarded in Corporate Life”
You could argue my previous job as an analyst was a bullshit job but at least I created those reports and did that analysis, the true bullshit jobs were those of my bosses, requesting the reports, very concerned about what shade of blue we used on that graph but never actually making decisions based on what the analysis told them
Like ignoring my screaming 5 alarm fire messages about how pissed our customers were getting as we bent over backwards to accommodate vendors, pissed at me and my boss to the point they got rid of her and I talked my way into a (pleasantly lucrative) redundancy…. Well given 6 months later they got a $10 million fine for ignoring those warnings you’d think they wished they listened, but I guarantee the people who ignored the warnings will happily take home their unearned huge salaries and ‘painful cuts’ will fall on the people who were not responsible
After a lifetime of being in jobs where I actually did things. Some useful, some arguably not (I know people weren’t reading some of those reports and they sure weren’t acting on them) I have recently started a job in management and the number of times I realise ‘oh it’s just easier if I do this’ is insane
Instead of meetings to arrange delegation of work and teaching my staff how to do it it’s just easier for me to do it and it’s reinforced for me how right I was when I used to get frustrated at bosses using a calendar full of meetings to show how busy they were…. A meeting is not an accomplishment!!! A meeting is a thing you begrudgingly tolerate as they can sometimes be useful in arranging actual useful work but the meeting itself is not ‘doing something’ however we have an ever expanding army of middle management (that I have now joined) who justify their existence by arranging ever more meetings
It’s infuriating