About Comments: They’re turned on for paid subs for the duration of this weekend (Friday, October 4 through Sunday, October 6) and will be turned off again on Sunday night.
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.
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.