RICKRUCKER.COM
"Outlier" Purgatory: A Story of No Success
Now I'm laid off.
Don't spend three years working on an experimental novel. As a literary agent told me, "we'd turn down most of the classics today." That's the market. I've written a dozen novels since I was a kid. I edited endlessly, hit every note right. I spent 20,000 hours writing fiction throughout the formative years, and it paid off, I thought, big time, in a novel as good as anything.
Just no one cared. At all. Only a couple friends read it. Nobody published it. I was an "outlier" in a vacuum: a story of not being successful. Poetry don't sell, they tell me.
I had only a bachelor's degree in English, little hands-on "experience," and no really useful connections. But as it turned out, my alliterating ass had a great head for business, especially the visionary logistical intelligence which supposedly justifies paying executives exorbitant salaries. But I quickly found it useless in every job I took.
The company that fired me could have saved nearly $1,000,000 a year in payroll and overhead by using me to do my job.
Instead, I sat there and worked for a few hours a day, taking my meager pay. I didn't work hard. There was clearly no chance of promotion and no room to excel, right at the time the company needed help the most. They're a huge, old corporation, and now they're bankrupt. I had no tools at my disposal to demonstrate I could be one of the biggest assets in the company.
"Honesty
is the best policy - when there is money in it."
--Mark Twain
Having worked retail for years and finished up at a solid university, I began my corporate work life at a lawyer magazine in New York. I was on the lowest rung of the ladder. I quickly found I could have stayed at the lowest rung, indefinitely, no matter what. There are no provisions for fast-tracking a useful brain into service for the company. You simply fester where you are, constrained by idiotic assumptions about status and rank.
Like many Americans, I was hired through a staffing company. Here, you are not insured without paying an unaffordable fee through the agency. Being hired on as an interchangeable idiot is amusing when you are the smartest person in the room, but where else could I go? People who hire believe in the magic of the resume. Most of them are either HR or middle management, and they've accepted the bizarrely egalitarian model of corporate America, where everybody'd be equal if they all worked hard and had the same training. Despite the alarmingly frequent use of the word "genius" for competent, half-bright people with 113 IQs, "genius" is systemically excluded as a possibility, for the most part, especially if you're a "temp."
Every time I entered the staffing company's offices, the people were painting their nails, doing nothing. The institution's a Soviet-like legal fig leaf for avoiding costs of paying unemployment benefits. I was a little offended.
My boss ran her little research department okay, if by okay you mean horribly ("if we hire another person they'll have to give our department the same amount of money next year!"). Good thinkin' for an industry whose very existence is under assault!
But the first thing I noticed was her insecurity. After a while it was clear she didn't care about us working efficiently. All she cared about was appearing efficient to her bosses and rivals down the hall. Who can blame her?
Once, she ordered me not to hum. I believe she thought if I hummed around the office, people would conclude me eccentric, and this would reflect poorly on her. She was unusually mean and sharp-tongued with me, seemingly for no reason. I realized in retrospect I was making calls to company offices, and girls do better at that job. Male lawyer-types like girls. She wanted me out.
And Jesus, intelligence? Keep it to yourself, whatever you do. It threatens people, you see. Once, she said I would "never" write a document that would not be thoroughly overhauled by her. While this may have turned out true, this is a bizarre thing to say, unless you remember she was asserting her authority over my intelligence: which registered to her as a threat, nothing more.
" To succeed
in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."
-Voltaire
What about Voltaire the "outlier,"
father of the Enlightenment that supposedly begat our supposedly glorious free market?
He was imprisoned, exiled and nearly burnt alive for saying true, funny
and insightful things. Being burned alive spells failure in any language. When you're
facing conditions as essentially corrupt as say, the 18th century aristocracy or the old
Catholic Church, you do not win friends by being a go-getter. You make enemies. Duh.
But try telling that to the chipper folk at the Harvard Business Review...
Presumably, free market forces should compel companies to promote and reward any voice that leads to riches. But our corporations are so large and unwieldy (and sometimes free of market competition), and so fraught with the petty ego imbecilities of human beings, they no longer resemble scrappy little enterprises. They are bloated, monolithic institutions, replete with the corruption and incompetence we associate with the old aristocracy (think: Bush Administration), or at the very least, the old Soviet Union. In this context, as in most of human history, an outlier is a heretic, not only unrewarded, but positively discouraged or censured. Especially if you enter at the so-called "entry-level."
After all, once power is entrenched at the top,
who fires them? The economy?
I was finally offered
a job at the lawyer magazine for corporate minimum wage, $14 an hour. Not
even the full hourly wage they were paying the staffing company, and not
enough to live in New York, for sure. I
quit.
It wasn't until
I began working at a web start-up company that I realized I might be really
good at
business. I'd always just kinda imagined an office had to be drudgery. But this was fun. Their business
model was a mutation on Internet marketing, you see, totally
variable and in flux. I was hired on at low pay, and had
barely any official duties. So I stared at our company web site all
day. Strange things started to happen. All I did was think up ideas. I outperformed everybody,
me vs. the office in total, about 20-1. I was actually using the service and
thinking like a customer; they were having Powerpoint presentations I wasn't invited to.
I came
up with dozens of viable notions, continually, embedded in efficiently-written
emails that analyzed every potential refutation and counter-argument. I assessed
the competition, thought up ways to improve our services, and most of all, just
tried to get our failure of a web site friendly and intuitive. I demonstrated a
weird aptitude for thinking through basic cost benefit stuff. "What do you do
all day?" I realized I was doing what the CEO was supposed to be doing, by accident.
But after a while
it was just kind of awkward how many
ideas I was having. I mean, the CEO and people in power were supposed to be
the thinkers. But you couldn't even respond to my emails, they were so self-contained. They
were so rationally airtight they were almost like orders, meticulously charting out the
next five years of the company's expansion. I'm pretty sure most people
were just afraid of me.
Getting no outward response or attention from anyone in
middle-management, I just started emailing the company heads, ignoring everyone
else. Also thinking maybe they'd hit me with some of that sweet venture capital
in a no-frills manner, like the infamous executive bonuses. It never
happened.
I had
not gone through the proper channels, the normal human status considerations.
Meanwhile, they kept hiring new executives at hundred thousand dollar salaries,
which enraged me, since I was living in New York, going into debt, and I hadn't
seen the new people contribute much of anything.
Plus
it was clear to me that some $100,000 executives were not particularly bright,
or at least not familiar enough with the new Internet. Nobody in power really
knew what Wikipedia was at that time, I don't think. They'd barely heard of
Youtube. It was like Bush with the Shias and Sunnis. I wasn't invited to
meetings, and then I wasn't invited to meetings that were solely based on my
ideas.
It
wasn't entirely their fault. They were all good at their jobs, and maybe in
other positions, were well worth big salaries. It was just it had become an Internet
company. You know, the ones with the 22 year old CEOs? Now here's a
question for Malcolm Gladwell: why did "outliers" like the Google guys have to start
their own companies? A: they were turned down by old people. So what do
outliers without ideas good enough to get venture capital do? A: get turned down
by old people, become old people. Human communities intuitively code
excessive intelligence in subordinates as a moral violation, or a threat to the
hierarchy.
The
social, corporate dynamic is so inflexible every major technology company from the last
thirty years has been started by kids in their 20s. Not one big corporation had the
vision to employ these kids to do their thing and make them money, in a
self-interested, fair capitalistic manner. Nobody. Also, height is
the single best predictor of success in high power America. Height. The
charlatanry is right out in the open.
After a while my
emotions got the best of me. At the end of my "paid internship" period, a formal
offer was made to extend my internship, but it was pointed out that some days I
wore the same shirt two days in a row (I didn't say I was saint). This was too
much. Bill Gates had slept under his desk, but I was supposed to conform to some
irrelevant corporate behaviors with zero practical application to the company's
dire financial situation? When the company couldn't nearly turn a profit, yet?
Just cause some guy was trying to sound like what he thought a boss should sound
like?
So, with very little encouragement, no offers of money (I would have been satisfied with $38,000 a year, I think, still not enough to live in New York), and every indication that things were going to remain awful: no matter what I did, or thought up, I left. I made a little list of 40 solid money-saving, business-expanding, user-interface improving ideas I had proposed in my few months at the company. God knows how many more I could have come up with, with the slightest incentive.
I'm sure the entire office of 20
people couldn't have produced a list of 10, all together, as a group, but just dropped
it and moved to Chicago. They're still in business, anyway, I'm sure
they used some of them.
Bottom
line: I wasn't promoted, or paid attention to, because it was simply awkward,
contrary to the dull corporate spirit, which allowed hiring a useless idiot at
$150,000, but not giving a living wage to someone on the lowest rung, no matter
what they did, or how valuable they might be.
It was
probably a stupid thing for me to do, since I could have gradually massaged my
way in, but I couldn't afford living in New York anymore, anyway.
"Before
a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool.
After he speaks, it is seldom
necessary
to
assume it."
--H.L.
Mencken
Old Mencken believed
all communities naturally revile and expunge any intelligent person in their
midst. It's not really a conscious thing. It's more like a reflex action
somewhere below the spleen. It's especially exacerbated in corporate
environments due to competition factors. Once you attain some worldly status, or
renown in a resume, you can succeed. And clearly Ivy League schools are
simply resume fig leaves for high intelligence (or increasingly, now
clannishness and richness). These kids can get fast-tracked into high positions,
speedily. Mencken himself was editor in chief of a city's daily newspaper by the
time he was 25. Without a college education, however, it's a good thing he
didn't start out in a contemporary American corporation. In my last job, which I
held for more than a year, I exchanged more words with my superviser in the
initial interview than the entire year afterward
.
I got a
job back in Chicago, in a corporate "factory," writing little ad profiles for small
businesses. Once again, it was through a staffing agency, meaning I had no insurance.
The pay was terrible, corporate minimum wage once again, even though we
were producing way more words on a daily basis than full-paid advertising copywriters.
And that was at average
output, not the sick wordcount I could crank if you were paying
me.
It was stress-free
and pleasant. I liked my immediate bosses, despite not knowing them. The famine of
conversation in this place was flabbergasting, and surely retarding to innovation, but
then again there wasn't innovation. I was exposed to zero inner workings,
so it was difficult to have ideas. Nonetheless, in my first few months I
had a few. I sent them on to different people, once again got zero acknowledgement.
For a company that only sells two products, thinking up a new product
to sell is a pretty big deal, even if it's only one flawed idea. So I was
doing all I could, in the context. Nothin'. They don't even respond to the emails,
like condescendingly, "good thinkin'!" It's like the quasi-retards in college classes who just
sit there while the professor awkwardly tries to elicit discussion,
futilely.
There's a certain tone I've noticed in response in these ideas, too. Like
say I have a plausible idea. Maybe it's not perfect, this idea--maybe
it's flawed--but we could discuss it. It's simply processed like a
bewildering faux pas. It's downright weird. Almost like people can't think.
They're just vaguely alarmed by it. And they're your
bosses.
I sank into the
easiness of the job and shut off my brain, most of the time. The
office was notably inefficient, but it wasn't my concern. For instance, we had
a whole staff and bureaucratic procedure to handle quality assurance, while
hiring one competent human editor could have replaced the entire bloated,
unnecessarily complex QA apparatus, which required adhering to an idiotic,
time-wasting checklist.
Now in theory, I could have torn off and outperformed everybody, which
would have likely led to nothing, no increase in pay or status: this place
was comatose. Comatose right as the stock was plunging in value to under a dollar, from
$80, the year before. But we were chronically supplied with just enough
work to spread it evenly amongst the writers, so it was never an option. One week we
had so much work we were allowed to clock overtime hours. I did 61 profiles
in one day (office average: 8 or 9) with smoke breaks and lunch.
That means with working extra hours and weekends, I could have conceivably
replaced the entire writing staff of more than 20, personally, most months.
I tried to pitch the idea of me doing overtime all the time, in lieu of
hiring on new staff, but we never had enough of a workload to justify new hires,
so nothing happened. Then we got the lay-off announcement.
Some efficiency company, like the guys from Office Space, were brought
in. Presumably you're paying for those people's big brains. But there's no
mechanism whatsoever for determining whether you already have the brains in the
office, just sitting there. Unlike in Office Space, the efficiency company
didn't even speak to any of us. I guess the efficiency company was incompetent,
too.
I had
only a vague notion of what the corporation was doing outside our department,
but I'd heard enough to know it sounded stupid. I figured here was the same
phenomenon I'd witnessed at the web start up: an old company trying to
transition into an Internet company. But the old executives are overseeing it,
botching it totally, and the young people who could save the company are stuck
on the lowest rungs, exiled there, with no tools to demonstrate their
worthiness. Even if they could, it'd just be an awkward threat to the hierarchy.
That was just my hunch, although it's probably accurate.
God knows what I could have done to help this very large corporation stay in business. They're bankrupt, now. If one of them had tossed out an Email, "any ideas? Take a look at this web site for our new multimillion dollar gamble to save the corporation?" That email never came. Would have taken a couple seconds to send.
Every ruling class up to the French Revolution was incompetent and parasitic. Most ruling classes around the world still are. This miraculous capitalism everybody's tethered to is supposed to reward the smart moves, but I haven't seen too many, in my time in corporate America. Bankruptcy is all that purges bad management. Otherwise it sits there and festers.
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