How to Fit into a Corporate Software Environment [Satire]

A concise and brutal guide for coders, hackers, code-slingers, code jockeys, programming gurus, freelance software engineers, and others who don’t consider themselves “corporate software developers” but end up working in corporate development environments anyway.

Note: I don’t intend to tar all companies with the same brush. I’ve worked for, worked with, and met so many excellent corporate developers and development teams who do really great work and have fantastic , healthy workplace cultures. This piece is intended to poke not at those, but at the other, fiercely self-involved corporations which, while on the decline in most areas, are nonetheless present and making most of their employees actively miserable.

1. Get unreasonably excited over tiny, insignificant changes.
   “Hey guys, you know how in our salesforce plugin we can only sort our customer quarterly financial breakdowns numerically? Well, I just gave us the ability to do it alphabetically as well!”
   You’ll need to get noticeably excited by this. Not too excited; getting too excited is weird and off-putting to corporate.
2. Ignore the meaninglessness of your job.
   Sure, maybe your entire work existence has been dedicated to building an extremely niche web portal for managing one minor segment of your data, and it turns out that it’s a bust and a couple months in nobody uses it. Despite how disheartening this may feel, you love your job!
3. Work and drinking are your only concerns.
   “Work hard, party hard” is the mantra of many a corporate culture. Work hard, long hours (which you’re only too excited to do, of course!), then when you can’t take it anymore, go out drinking with the same colleagues you’ve been working alongside all day. Drink ’til you can’t drink any more, sleep it off, and repeat.
4. Vacations are for proving your dedication.
   Your corporation cares about you, Valued Employee. They offer a generous amount of time off, and are very flexible about when you take it. Of course, they can afford to be generous, since you won’t really be on vacation: you’ll still be answering emails, taking calls, fielding emergencies, and checking in on the status of your projects — only now you’re doing it from a hotel on an island in the Bahamas instead of your New York office.
5. There’s no such thing as “too niche.”
   Everyone wants to be an expert. It’s hard to be good at everything, and fortunately, corporate environments don’t want you to be. Subject matter experts are all the rage, who needs well-rounded developers when you have a few developers who are really skilled at one particular thing, and a slew of interns and entry-level developers to write the low-quality support code around the beautiful niche sections that the experts write?
   If you want to get ahead, be an expert. The more niche, esoteric, and pointless to the outside world your knowledge is, the better.
6. “Learning” takes on a new meaning.
   Modern development of all kinds requires continual learning. In the context of corporate environments, “learning” means “training.” Understanding, deep connections, broad knowledge, and wisdom are all largely irrelevant — what you need is point-by-point training in a slew of systems. This ties in nicely with niche expertise. Spend your professional development time “learning” the intricacies of niche APIs, the ins and outs of your time-tracking system, and the hotkey combinations for the current version of your development studio that will be completely overhauled and replaced next year with a New-And-Better version that you’ll need to “learn” all over again.