You may have seen this article getting some attention recently, which is entitled “After working at Google, I’ll never let myself love another job again.” It’s easy to fit this article into the box of “impressionable young people eventually need to come to grips with the realities of existence,” and there’s even an A-HA! moment in there where she realizes that HR doesn’t truly protect employees. Here is potentially the best section:
“After I quit, I promised myself to never love a job again. Not in the way I loved Google. Not with the devotion businesses wish to inspire when they provide for employees’ most basic needs like food and health care and belonging. No publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be.
So I took a role at a firm to which I felt no emotional attachment. I like my colleagues, but I’ve never met them in person. I found my own doctor; I cook my own food. My manager is 26 — too young for me to expect any parental warmth from him. When people ask me how I feel about my new position, I shrug: It’s a job.”
Indeed. I’ve felt this way for years. Over a decade, potentially. Let’s break it down a smidge.
Some companies are awesome, and do feel like “family”
I’ve seen this from afar with some friends, and I know people who feel this way. It is possible in these scenarios that the actual issue is “homophily” — sameness of everyone — and that might be a root cause of the company eventually losing revenue (can’t think differently, everyone agrees, people are conflict-averse), but maybe it’s a great, familial place to work. Nice.
More often than not…
… companies who consistently talk about how they are a “family” are usually a family in the worst sense, which means you get the back-stabbing and the bullshit and the conflict avoidance and the HIPPO mentality (in a work case it means CEO and lieutenants; in a family case it means patriarch or matriarch). Usually a lot of times, or so I’ve seen, companies realize they’re dysfunctional internally, and they don’t want to pay well, so they come out with these bullshit narratives around “mission” and “vision” and “purpose” and “familial atmosphere” to try and make you forget that it’s a stretch to buy fancier cheese once in a while. It’s all kinda garbage.
But wait, what is family, really?
Not everyone has a good family experience, and not everyone has good work experiences, and work is like family in that some jobs you have are great and help you learn about something or feel purpose, and some jobs are awful and regress you. Family members do the same stuff to you, in equal measure.
I’ve told this story in other blogs, but I have a cousin on my mom’s side who wigged out during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings to the point that it seemed like a mental health threat. I was still on Instagram then — I deleted it months later, and have been off since — and DM’ed her to see if she was OK. Within a few responses, she told me my entire family hated me. Now, this may be true. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is true. However, that’s what we call “bad family” or “unsupportive family.” Even if you 100% believe that to be true, Instagram DM is not the medium to convey it, especially when someone was checking on you. There are bad bosses, and there are bad cousins. That’s life.
At the same time, I have an aunt on my dad’s side — she passed away — who was a bit of a mess in her day, but generally a supportive person towards the end of her life. The last time I saw her was at my first wedding; she was actually married three times, and sometimes I think she would have been a nice resource during my divorce, when broadly no family members seemed to give a shit I was alive. So there’s “good family” and “good bosses.”
In this context and semantic way, work is like a family — mix of good and bad, no-support and much support.
Work is more like a neighborhood, honestly
There’s a guiding principle of some sort, be that the apartment complex management or the HOA.
There’s an immediate silo, usually your family in your house and maybe 1-2 other families you socialize with.
There are other silos, i.e. other families and residents.
Mostly the silos get along at a superficial level, i.e. waving to people as they walk their dog or jog.
Sometimes the silos clash, i.e. someone tries to add to their garage vertically and it’s an eyesore, or someone’s dog shits on your lawn, or stuff from your tree is falling over the fence line.
And then silos break up and people leave, i.e. moving to a bigger and better house — or downsizing.
The neighborhood analogy makes more sense than the family analogy.
Your takes?
