As someone whose day job is in a random large multinational corporation, seeing something among colleagues got me thinking. So this post will mostly be random musings. Among the many things that apply to corporate work, as opposed to working in a small business, is how insulated people become from the true purpose of the company, god or evil as it may be. Now here I am not talking about people who want to just get through the month without too much hassle and get paid, but people who in fact want to do a decent job. This is also a sort of big picture way of viewing things.
There are off course corporations and corporations, and the final purpose may be more or less worthwhile. While corporations have extended beyond what the market would allow due to big government intervention in the normal processes, in some fields very large corporations are indispensable, due to capital intensive operations, huge R&D efforts, economies of scale and such. Take, for example, microprocessors. And advanced fab can cost billions; a new technology may need hundreds of engineers. Without corporations like Intel it would be hardly possible to do this.
Now it is fashionable in some circle to bash corporations as evil and corporate workers as soulless cogs in the machine, but fact of the matter is, if you do a job, you should generally try to do it to a decent standard, if only for yourself and not necessarily for the company. This can build self-respect, give a feeling of accomplishment, keep one up to date and in the position to change jobs should, and build good habits and discipline, which is important for humans.
Let’s have a sort on analogy, an example, if you will. In a communist country like Romania, things managed to last as long as they did in part because of people who, without direct social or economic incentive, wanted to do quality work, to accomplish something. But the results was, in the end, disastrous because these people were a minority.
A good number of the ones who tried to do a decent job in communism did so after, and despite all the problems of the transition and the crony pseudo capitalism implemented afterwards, managed to make due. The people who profited from the system without doing much work were in two categories: the ones who became “made men” in the mafia that took over got rich, the others were incapable to cope in the new system and got quite poor. These became very nostalgic for the old system, where they had the same pay and benefits for little work as others for a lot of work.
That is not to say you should buy corporate bullshit, listen to stupid propaganda during meetings, become a drone or dedicate your life to the company, just to keep a reasonable standard of quality in your work. Your job – unless you are among the lucky few who love what they do – should not define your life, but give you the resources to do what you love in what time you have left. And one should always strive to maximize as much such time. Work to live, not live to work, as the saying goes. True. Your job is not your life, but it is part of it, and like other parts you should try to do well. This principle applied to sex might save a few marriages as well.
Let’s assume engineer A does device modelling for a semiconductor company. His ultimate purpose is that his company sells chips to the customers. If this does not happen he does not get paid. So while the immediate purpose may be to model this or that transistor, the final purpose should be kept in mind. If he does not talk to the people who use the model, and they can’t use it, it is useless. If everyone does his little bit, but the bits don’t fit together, product does not reach the customer. And love or hate your job, you generally do not want to lose it. If losing it was preferable, you would just quit.
So keeping the results in mind is at least somewhat useful. It may make the job a little more bearable (if the final purpose is not selling cigarettes to children, mind you) if at least some good comes of it. After all more soul sucking can be worse than less soul sucking, all thing being equal. And this is not even most evident in engineer A which was used as an example, as in maybe accountant B which just moves papers about in the corporate office. So if you work, for example, at a corporation like Intel, keep in mind the processors it creates. Think of the children, if you will, how would they search for internet porn without computers?
