On Being a [Prestigious] Cog
What’s Wrong with Corporate America and What the Rank-and-File must do to fix it
The nation’s top universities have produced an unprecedented crop of highly educated, highly motivated employees. But what happens to them when they graduate and enter the rank-and-file at prestigious firms? If we take a moment to see the world through their lens, we find a more human view of what’s happening on Wall Street, the impending crisis in Silicon Valley, and the importance of taking a stand to fix the system now.
When I graduated from college in 2006, there were two choices for someone with a liberal arts degree and a 3.9 GPA: finance or consulting. Law was a theoretical option, but it was losing panache, and if you had a trust fund you might consider a nonprofit.
But for the vast majority of us who didn’t know what we wanted to do, but knew we wanted to continue doing well, we defaulted to our habit of pursuing the most-prestigious-thing. We bought Vault study guides and submitted our glowing transcripts and celebrated our Wall Street offers with the same giddy things-are-going-to-be-okay-because-I’m-one-of-the-chosen relief with which we had, four years earlier, celebrated our college admissions.
We weren’t bad people. We were ambitious and hopeful and deeply wanted to do well. But we were also products of an upbringing wherein we’d been nurtured as “high potential” from an early age: encouraged, expected and accustomed to succeed. It’s not that we didn’t know any better than to measure success by prestige: we didn’t know any different.
When we got to our prestigious jobs things started to unravel. We worked 100 hour weeks doing…. mostly nothing. We sat waiting for urgent assignments that, when they came in, were either mindless or impossible. We were compensated well for this, and some of us did good things with that money – supported family members and paid back loans and gave to charity – but most of us spent it recklessly on nights out and fancy things we didn’t use in impulsive attempts to make the most of what little time we had out of the office.
The majority of our bosses were unhelpful at best – they’d made fortunes in the market run up and preferred dedicating their mental energy to deciding how to spend their money than checking our work (though, when a more astute client discovered errors, were all to happy to throw us under the bus).
Because it was our first job, and because we couldn’t let go of the fact that we’d worked so hard to get here and it therefore must be the best possible thing, we accepted this as the reality of the real world. We came to understand pay not as reward for value produced, but as compensation for sacrifice made: for willingness to smile at bosses’ bad tempers and to cancel family commitments in order to reset margins on a powerpoint deck.
It’s why, when Occupy Wall Street started to criticize us for never considering the borrower at the bottom of the mortgage chain, we didn’t know what to say: of course we didn’t think about them. We’d lived with one playbook, and consideration of the individual was nowhere in it. How could they expect a guy who feels like a cog in a wheel to treat a borrower like anything other than a number on a spreadsheet?
Whether Wall Street firms were too big to fail is perhaps a less important question than whether they got too big to manage. In a culture of checked out bosses overseeing jaded employees, amidst compensation that felt wholly unrelated to value creation, how could things not have gone wrong?
The good news is that Occupy seems to have had a real effect on the Obama generation’s view of Wall Street. My firm’s top seven picks for analyst interns turned us down in favor of positions at the likes of Facebook, Palantir and Google. And even as I collected their rejections, I couldn’t help but cheer at their courage to choose a path that wasn’t just about money and prestige.
Oh wait….that’s exactly what they did.
The shift of today’s best and brightest from Finance to Tech is a recasting of the same story: it replaces suits with hoodies and big bonuses with over-the-top employee perks, but is setting up a cultural scenario analogous to the one we saw on Wall Street seven years ago:
1) Like 2006-era bankers, managers at Google and Facebook hit it big in the company IPOs and now focus on what they want, which is not necessarily what’s best for consumers.
2) Like 2006-era college grads, ambitious overachievers are flooding the lower ranks for all the wrong reasons, becoming disillusioned as they watch their bosses “Call in Rich.”
3) Like 2006-era financial services, the market is becoming oversaturated as more and more companies race to find the next big thing and more and more shareholder money floods to support it.
4) Like 2006-era financial oversight, regulators in Silicon Valley have no idea how to monitor their charges (give me one government official who stands a chance at understanding the work of a CalTech PhD at Palantir).
But what does it matter if a manager at Google focuses on his pet project instead of mentoring his junior? Who cares if morale is low at Facebook because employees are paid based on when they got there instead of what they do? What does it matter if a lot of companies are trying to create the next Farmville, and regulators don’t exactly get the math on a Palantir algorithm? It’s not like a computer program is going to bring down the real economy.
Or could it? If Wall Street firms were too big to fail, is it such a stretch to think Silicon Valley firms are, too? In the same way I had no clue my financial security depended so much on subprime borrowers, I have no idea the extent to which our economy, much less my personal security, depends upon the ethics and attention of the very opaque and very interconnected tech companies on whom I am increasingly reliant.
But I do know their cultures are starting to decay and that toxic work environments, overseen by sub-par outside oversight, fueled by naïve shareholder money, has historically proven problematic.
So what do we, the rank and file, do?
The only way these cultures are going to change is if they have to, and they only have to when people no longer want to work for them. I’m not saying don’t work in finance or don’t work in tech: I’m saying don’t work in a job where you’re miserable.
Because when you’re miserable in your job, you stop caring about the work product, and that’s bad for the broader economy. All the new regulation on Wall Street is there because people don’t trust the work product: imagine how much easier and cheaper it would be if they created cultures where you cared about something other than your next bonus, and therefore did work that didn’t need so much checking?
But our companies don’t think like that. And they’re not going to until we insist they start. Why us? Because we drive the machine. They’ll pretend it’s not true, but the whole thing falls apart without the cogs in the wheel.
But I’m replaceable: it won’t matter.
A) True: the firm will find someone to take your role, but over the long-term, these organizations will decay as talent moves to more innovative companies; and, B) Read what you just said: did you seriously spend all that money on a fancy education to do a job where you’re totally replaceable?
Fine. But what do I do instead?
What I love most when I see people quit jobs they hate is that they never go do nothing. In fact, they do the opposite: they start companies or join cool new ones or spend a couple years working for a non-profit. They react to the lack of caring and being replaceable with overenthusiasm for having impact and a meaningful role. And they feel liberated because they’re doing what they want.
I used to think it was enormously selfish of me to consider leaving a job voluntarily when unemployment is at an all-time high. I now think collecting a paycheck for sitting miserable in a job reformatting powerpoint slides, when I have the will and capability to have more impact at a time the economy needs it, is far more selfish.
So don’t leave to sit on your couch – unless it’s to actively think about what really drives you. Rather, leave to help rebuild our economy, and take the lessons you’ve learned about the way you (don’t) want to be treated to build a better system.
The economy is slow and it’s not getting better anytime soon. Did you see your last bonus check? The differential between what you’ll get by doing what you want and what you get by doing the job you’re in is shrinking. And if you’re on Wall Street: do not listen when your boss tells you it’ll be better next year: even if profits continue to go up in financial services firms, so much is being spent on regulation, the bonus pool is going to be stagnant for a while. And if there is a rally? They’ll hire you back. Unless, perhaps, you write an essay telling everyone to quit, you will always be able to find a job at one of these firms – not because you’re good, not because they like you, but because it’s a lot cheaper for them to hire someone they’ve already trained.
But I really like my boss, actually, and he says I should stick it out…
Your boss lives in a different world than you do. He’s got a mortgage and kids in private school: he doesn’t have the same freedom to try something else. As for his argument that you’re learning a lot: of course you’re learning a lot: our generation was bred to learn a lot. You’ll learn a lot wherever you go, so the more important question is whether anything you’re currently learning matters to you, or whether it’s just making you someone you don’t really want to be.
But my friends at [law firm, consulting firm, publishing house] are miserable, too.
That doesn’t make it okay. It’s so enormously sad to me when we get written off as Arrogant Millennials for thinking we ought to have purpose in our careers: what does it say about the bosses ahead of us, that they believe work is necessarily unsatisfying? And if that’s their reality, is theirs really a track we want to get on?
Let’s be honest: our generation isn’t going to make as much money as our parents’ generation. Which means we’ve got to find something else to keep us motivated. And looking at how much trouble the blind pursuit of economic growth has gotten us into, I don’t necessarily think that’ s a bad thing for the world. And looking at all the older adults I know in crisis because they’re learning now that money and prestige isn’t everything, the fact we’re getting that lesson at an age when, and in a country with the kind of opportunity where, we can do something about it, isn’t a bad thing for us.
Those of us who are lucky enough to have landed prestigious jobs have had so many opportunities it’s almost difficult to comprehend. But the chance to find and pursue what we really care about, and to use that passion and energy to build companies that treat people well so they’re motivated to do good work: that’s our greatest opportunity yet. Shame on us if waste it.
Email me when I. M. H. O. publishes stories