Friends from college and I keep in touch daily using a forum, and our most favoritest thread has to do with fate’s ability to hand one of our friends terrible employment experiences. He calls it his Aura of Suckitude, and the very best parts are quotes from his old boss’s emails. His boss (who took over after many other people quit all at once) is unqualified, confused, and self-absorbed. But for our benefit, his emails make him look like a modern-day Police Squad character:
boy you guys sure are quiet. must be all of these plants i put over here, sucking up all the carbon monoxide.
Subject: RE: Chef’s
Yeah I need a vacation from u!!!!!1 LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOOOOLLLLLOOOOOOLLLL
While my family has been in the loop all along, most of you probably don’t know that I’ve accepted a new position, this one at MIT. I’ll be the new Communications Manager for the Comparative Media Studies program and the Center for Future Civic Media.
It’s a big step in the right direction—lots more web and design work with a larger group of people, including undergrad and graduate students—but it’s about as easy leaving Tufts as it was leaving Houghton Mifflin, i.e., not very. Both set me up for seizing really good opportunities, and that is, after all, why I’m leaving for MIT now.
My last day at Tufts is August 22nd, so I’m keeping myself under the gun to finish a revamped website for the Feinstein Center before then. I start right back up at MIT on Monday the 25th.
And while I’m really excited to focus on web-based work, I will miss getting to edit and design lovely reports like this:
A friend just described to me how her company is going to announce a reorganization tomorrow. Word is, her boss is going to be fired. Other managers will be forced to double their workloads. Unfilled managerial positions will likely be eliminated altogether.
There’s almost nothing as unexpectedly hard to a young employee as watching a re-org, downsizing, or outsourcing target their managers. Workers in their twenties crave good leadership; even more, they crave dependable leadership. They want boundaries and a sense of the routine. When a study last year described today’s twenty-somethings as the “entitlement generation”—as arrogant, impatient, and unteachable—many experienced professionals disagreed, arguing that new workers are great workers so long as they have a sense of their leaders’ interest in them and their careers. As an “old codger” at The Future of Work told me, “Organizations totally underutilize their employees, largely I think because too many of them are still using Industrial Age and assembly-line assumptions that people are interchangeable, like machines.” This interchangeability makes every employee nervous about his or her job security—but it hits young, impressionable workers hardest, because they watch it happen to people they thought had job security, namely, their managers.
One’s first job is already full of insecurity. Young workers often live paycheck to paycheck, then often while carrying education debt. They’re learning how to be professional, how to navigate office politics, and how to balance work and private life.
But one of the still-mystical promises of the much-maligned American Dream is that the deeper you get into a career, the more essential you become. By putting in your years, you’re supposed to overcome indespensability. It’s the one instance of increasing your invincibility as you get older.
But as my friend and her company are about to (re)discover, there’s no such thing as an indespensable American worker. You compete for your job before you have it—and while you have it—from the day you enter the workforce until the day you leave it.
It’s a though lesson to accept. And accepting it doesn’t make it any easier to watch your coworkers depart.
