Our Collective Order-Keeping Fictions

reflections on office jobs and bureaucracy (part 1?)

An AI-generated image after prompting it for something about managerial bureaucracy and bullshit.

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About Comments: they’re off again, as my workweek is about to begin.

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This week, I started my second job out of college.

It’s wonderful so far, and different from my first job in a few particular ways that have confirmed some of my tentative conclusions about the business world.

I have enough material for at least five essays, and if this one does pretty well, I will eventually write them all. It is rare for me to make decisions about what to write and publish based on readership metrics, as I write primarily to clarify my own thoughts, but this case is a little different. I’ve been both talking about this stuff in therapy and writing about it in my journal—as well as using some of it as material for fiction—for years. So my thoughts are quite clear to me at this point. But if the statistics indicate that people enjoy this, I’ll definitely write a few more installments.

It’ll be fun to tell some of the stories I’ve stored up, if people find them interesting.

In this first one, I will explore five conclusions: one, my hypothesis on the real reason why huge US companies employ foreigners; two, that most managers are entirely useless; three, that stupidity is terrifyingly rampant; four, that bureaucracy exists to employ and thus collect taxes from cogs, and five, the revelatory role of remote work.

This sounds like my experience was entirely negative, and that wasn’t the case at all. I learned a lot, especially about what meaningful work really is and really means. And I don’t mean this to sound like a typical “my former employer was shit” kind of screed. I liked most of the people I worked with, and it wasn’t overall a bad job, especially for my first grown-up job.

The most pessimistic thing I learned, from talking to friends, is that my experience was completely typical of working for a large company.

In some ways, in fact, my company was better than average.

So I don’t intend this to be a fully negative statement, or a vomiting of frustration about the situation I just left. But most of what I learned about the business world did surprise me in negative ways, so this can’t be written as an uplifting and positive report.

At least not honestly.

Why Huge US Companies Employ Foreigners

The company I previously worked for was very large — a Fortune 500. I was one of their last US hires, and they’ve only hired people from Southeast Asia for years now.

For awhile, I thought the reason for this was solely economics. One US employee costs as much as four or five employees from that part of the world. And this is surely part of it, of course.

But this isn’t the main reason. It can’t be. Why not? These employees simply don’t know anything. The risk they are taking by hiring these people cannot possibly be worth the savings.

Please note that I’m not asserting that my observations apply to everyone from that part of the world. I have no idea how good or bad their educational system is, and I don’t think American education is very good, either. I’m referring only to the type of people from that part of the world who tend to have the correct on-paper qualifications and social connections to get hired by US companies and their knowledge level as relevant to the work that US companies like the one I just left need them to do, as that’s the subset I have direct experience with. That’s all I am making assertions about here—my realizations from that experience.

In addition to experiences that horrified me—like having to teach some of them the difference between mean and median—there were quite a few times when I thought I was being trolled in real life.

Here is just one example. I was asked to look at the conclusions of one of these employees. She had analyzed some data from call centers, wherein the goal is always to help the client get better FCR (first call resolution). Most customers are happy if their problem is solved with one call, so FCR is a solid metric to increase customer satisfaction.

The only mathematical concept that most of them had any grasp of, at all, was a correlation. But they only understood it on the most surface level. Not every correlation is meaningful, and not every correlation is desirable.

Having a child die correlates to a lower grocery bill, but nobody would recommend losing a child to improve one’s budget.

She reported to me, in genuine ecstasy, that she had found something with a 95% correlation to FCR! I knew immediately that something was wrong, so I asked her to walk me through it.

What she had found was transfers. It turned out that when a calltaker couldn’t help the customer and transferred them to someone else who could, that call was being coded as resolved about 95% of the time. This was incorrect; the calltaker had no way of knowing if the call was resolved or not. But the client’s training and procedures were so bad that the calltakers were under the impression that they could get away with deeming a transferred call as a first-call-resolved call.

My coworker was delighted. She couldn’t wait to talk to the client—which would happen in a few hours—and recommend that they increase their transfer rate to increase their FCR.

I explained the problem with this to her.

She didn’t understand.

I explained it again, more slowly and simply.

She still didn’t understand.

I tried again, in terms that were so simple and dumbed-down that I was a little nervous about talking to a coworker that way. It was the same way I would explain it to a 7-year-old child.

When she still insisted that the client would be happy—because it was a 95% correlation to FCR!!!—I pinged her boss, privately.

I got her boss on a call and almost begged her to step in, lest the client be presented with this lunacy and conclude that we’re all morons.

Her boss sighed heavily and thanked me.

A few weeks later, in an All-Hands meeting, that same coworker was asked to introduce a new hire, a young man who she had gone to school with and lived near her. Why?

Because the new hire was someone who had been hired on her recommendation.

So how could any company possibly justify hiring people this incompetent—often to analyze data related to products they’ve never used or seen? In some cases, they were analyzing data related to products that they had not just never used or seen, they had literally never been in the same time zone or on the same continent as anyone who had ever used or seen the product.

Here’s my hypothesis.

People from that part of the world, especially women addressing male managers, are almost tailor-made to placate managerial egos. It would be impossible for me to exaggerate the extent to which they existed to make managers feel like gods.

Every presentation a manager made was followed by a ritualistic going around the team members who had just been on the call so that everyone could take turns gushing about how brilliant the presentation was—how it was “masterful” and “brilliant,” the best presentation any of them had ever heard.

Every mildly amusing remark resulted in peals of laughter, as if the manager making it was Dave Chappelle on stage at a comedy special.

They even call the managers “sir,” the way that children from the South are meant to address their fathers and grandfathers.

And they never—literally never—pushed back or challenged in any way.

Part of the problems I had there (I had issues on my final team only, which had two male managers) were rooted in the fact that I was normally professional and respectful. Normal professionalism and courtesy, which included politely pushing back when warranted—next to that level of submissiveness and ego-placating—made me look like a raging feminist ball-busting bitch.

Why? Because the managers bought this feedback. Entirely. They truly believed that they were getting realistic, authentic feedback from their teams — that they were that good.

Most Managers Are Useless

My final team had two male managers, and I’ve already discussed the problems caused by being the only woman on the team from America and not Southeast Asia.

As far as I can tell, their primary work roles were to play office politics. They advocated for more hires and budgets for their department and teams, and decided what recommendations would go to the client.

Oddly, the recommendations that would go to the client were always the recommendations that were most likely to make the clients like the managers better, securing the managers’ positions by making them more crucial to the company as the person that client had the best relationship with and liked.

I cannot possibly guess how many times I spent a month doing rigorous math and coming up with perhaps seven solid recommendations, of which maybe one would go to the client, if there was a way to spin it so that the managers could be liked better by the clients.

Before that final team assignment, I had much better managers, at first a man and then a woman. Those managers knew what they didn’t know, appreciated honest feedback, and wanted me to do math, not manage their egos.

Those managers weren’t entirely useless, but for as much I truly liked them and enjoyed working with them, I don’t think their jobs and salaries were fully warranted. Most of what they did could have been done by trusting me and other employees a bit more, or by having them continue to do normal work but perhaps get paid a premium to spend one day a week ensuring the department paperwork was up to date.

Just as Elon Musk fired 90% of Twitter and it kept operating, I suspect that 90% of the managerial class could vanish and within two weeks everything would be back to normal, just more efficient.

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Extra space to allow for the “unlock one post free” option that Substack makes available for free subs, to give them a chance to see what they’re missing.

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Stupidity is Terrifyingly Rampant

The story I’ve already told gives some good examples here — the stupidity of my former coworker, and of my former managers who believed their own press, as it were — but there are so many more layers of it that I could describe.

When I put in my resignation, it took nine emails to thirteen different people to get a printable label so I could ship their computer back to them.

The intensely cumbersome and stupid set-up of their password syncing system meant that I lost at least one full day, often two, and more than once a full week, every time I was required to change my password.

Why not go to a biometrics system, where my face or fingerprint would let me into my laptop, eliminating the need for passwords entirely?

I never got a good answer to that, but I suspect that “keeping a metric ton of IT guys employed” was part of the unspoken answer.

I eventually found my own version of a “fixer” in the IT department, someone who could pull strings and call in favors. I helped him solve some academic problems for one of his kids, on my own time, and he went out of his way to try to make my life easier.

But even he could only do so much. The inefficiency that was a feature, not a bug, was staggering.

Bureaucracy Exists To Collect Taxes From Cogs

I almost used the word “midwit” here, but I don’t mean it in the usual way that it’s used on the internet—to imply that someone is arrogant about their self-perceived intelligence and not nearly as smart as they think they are.

I chose the word “cogs” because I mean to refer to the sizable portion of the citizenry who are either unable or unwilling to do manual labor, but lack the ambition, drive, education — and sometimes the intelligence — to become knowledge workers, artists, content creators, entrepreneurs, etc.

These people are the vast majority of any large company, able to hide in plain sight, often getting paid for 40 hours while spending fewer than ten doing things that aren’t really necessary. Checking boxes that didn’t need to be boxes in the first place, enforcing rules that were made up to prevent a repeat of a past situation that only happened because of a one-off involving an idiot having an accident—that sort of thing. Or people whose entire job is a bit of fluffery that isn’t really needed—like the people whose entire job is to make PowerPoints.

Yes, in any large company, there are people whose entire job is to make PowerPoints.

I don’t mean to disparage them as humans. PowerPoints that are very nice-looking and easy to follow are useful in many endeavors.

I bring PowerPoints up because it’s such a perfect example of our modern predicament. We can’t just present ideas. We need an entire subset of the workforce whose whole job is to split our idea presentation into small, digestible pieces that fit on a slide.

These people are needed, to make the digestible pieces attractive and entertaining, because we require this kind of shameful, childish spoon-feeding in order to tolerate hearing a new idea or proposal presented to us.

One of the miracles of capitalism is that it finds a way to create enough jobs for almost everyone willing to even appear to try to work, given even a mostly free market, as we have in the US.

This miracle is also a serious detriment, as the corrupt government system is dependent on the taxes paid by these people.

To address it from another angle: one of my favorite novels is The Stand, by Stephen King. It tells the story of a highly contagious man-made virus that escapes the lab and sweeps the globe. Sounds familiar, right?

Unlike COVID, this one has an over-99% fatality rate. The handful of people who are, for whatever reason, naturally immune to it begin to gather and try to rebuild society.

There’s a very powerful scene wherein a group of survivors are talking about the trouble they’re in. One character points out that all of them are “educated,” but in this new, post-Apocalyptic world, their skills are basically useless. Nobody needs a John Dunne poem explicated, a philosophical argument analyzed, or historical trivia recited. What they need, desperately, is practical knowledge about how the real world actually works, how to tell what water is safe to drink and what isn’t, how to achieve things like turning the power back on, and how to diagnose and treat their own illnesses and injuries.

In the pre-Apocalypse world, they were all upper middle class folks with healthy incomes and cushy jobs. In the post-Apocalypse world, they’re basically worthless.

I’ve thought about this scene approximately nine million times during the last four and a half years.

In a world without computers or modern conveniences, knowledge of mathematics would not be as useful as knowledge of medicine or how to turn the power back on. But it would be useful. I could help prevent many problems and accidents by helping make careful, error-free plans to build things, calculating dosages without the help of pharmacists, etc.

But even I, with a high level of expertise in mathematics, the discipline that underpins everything but isn’t often the user-relevant level of things, would not be an ideal Apocalypse companion.

We really are shockingly removed from the realities of life and that which sustains life, and nothing showed me this more clearly than my experience navigating the bureaucracy of a huge company.

This mass-employment-to-middle-class-standards-doing-stuff-that-doesn’t-really-matter is a privilege of capitalism and the luxuries it provides, but it’s worth seeing it realistically.

The Revelatory Role of Remote Work

I have read many arguments that big companies, like Amazon, are trying to move away from remote work because in-office relationships build camaraderie and promote cohesion, leading to better brainstorming and such. My experience has convinced me that this is utter horseshit.

The Relationships Objection

I believe that many people truly believe what they’re saying about the need for in-office relationships, but only because they don’t think about it very hard.

Almost everyone has a significant connection with someone they only know online, and while it’s not as deep or meaningful as their in-person friendships, it’s not trivial by any means—and it’s more than enough for collaborating effectively, which is what work requires.

Truly meaningful and deep personal relationships require in-person time. I have written about this. But I do not believe that work relationships do. They require communication for collaboration. And that’s not just doable online, it’s in many cases easier. Judgments based on appearance, aesthetics, feelings, and personal “energy” or “mood” being communicated don’t have to matter at all—as they shouldn’t.

Some believe that the objections to remote work are about commercial real estate and companies that had just signed 10-year, 20-year, or even longer leases in 2020 when COVID happened. Downtown areas where office workers are no longer buying lunches and paying parking fees. That may have something to do with it, some of the time, but I doubt that’s the main reason, either.

I think it’s either entirely or almost entirely about manager-level office workers being forced to face how useless and unnecessary the vast majority of them really are, and their terror that someone will figure it out.

Remote work means that managers can only justify their salaries in much more limited ways. If they can walk around the office feeling important, interrupting people, and picking both favorites and outcasts based on in-person relationships, they seem to have more credibility.

In the absence of that, they have to do shady things, like selectively choose which recommendations a client sees based on what will make the client most likely to like them and sign a new contract—securing their own position.

Remote work also means that people can, at least potentially, be judged solely on their work. I think the remote situation is at least partly why my former coworkers from Southeast Asia were so extreme in their obseqiousness and performative ego-servicing. In person, they could have taken it down several notches for the same effect.

Managers need people to want to please them, and that’s a lot less of a factor remotely.

It also eliminates a lot of things that shouldn’t matter, but in an office do end up mattering.

I do my best work when I am set up to feel calm and am free from anxiety triggers. If I had to put on a business suit and be in an office with my back to the door, my best performance would be 50% lower than it is at home, immediately.

In my case, my best work involves intense thinking about math and coding. I get my full brainpower available for that when I’m comfortable—wearing a Count Von Count t-shirt and gym shorts, with brain.fm playing into my ears, and can take a short break to go sit on my bed and meditate anytime I want.

Absolutely none of my energy needs to go to placating anyone’s ego, impressing anyone with how I dress, or pretending I’m not an introvert by going around the office having conversations I don’t want to have, draining my energy.

Remote work is not going anywhere, because it’s too in-demand for all the reasons I’ve just described. Big companies like Amazon may be able to get away with removing it, but that’s just going to create an opening for smaller companies to poach their best talent.

It even makes economic sense, since these smaller companies will be able to pay somewhat less. Why? If I had to live in a city, commute, and procure a professional wardrobe—which for women also means make-up and expensive haircuts—I’d need a noticeable raise.

Remote workers can live in lower cost-of-living areas and simply don’t require the same salaries as urban dwellers.

A Return to Something Older

I will write about this at great length someday, but remote work is also a return to something that used to be entirely common in the American experience: spending most of your time, including your income-earning time, at home.

This promotes a sense of autonomy and self-ownership that is very threatening to certain types of people. And, I suspect, to certain elements in our government.

Conclusion

I have dozens more possible stories and several more conclusions. As I said in the introduction, reader response will determine if I write more installments on this topic.

But if I had to summarize the overarching message from all of it — all of what my first job out of college taught me — it would be that the vast majority of what keeps our society stable and in working order is a series of collective fictions.

And working in a large company might be the best way to examine many of them, up close and personal, and see how made up the fiction really is.

In my new job, there’s almost zero bureaucracy. I report to one guy. I have a much higher level of accountability — a plan for each day, and a report for what did or didn’t get done from the plan — but the challenge is already making me grow, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I’ve gone from being a piece in the huge, unwieldy machine of a giant company to a job where everything I do matters.

And I think doing meaningful work—from home—is a return to something foundational, both to American life and to what humans need for sanity and emotional health.

I am blessed.

Have a great weekend, y’all!

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