corporately disposable

What to expect...

Tone: outside voice

Snark level: Moderate

Other special provisions: this blog post is a pure opinion piece and therefore most likely wrong.

me and my friends are burning down linky dink. normies call it ‘linkedin’.

to us our motivations are clear as day. but some people just don’t get it.

i responded briefly to ole dude’s post. i can’t help feeling i could have explained more thoroughly but i’m a millennial slouching toward boomerism, so i suck at texting and responding via mobile apps.

so for anyone wondering just what the hell is going on on linkedin, let me explain the best way i know how.

many of us are frustrated. we’re tired of being told to be our careers. to dedicate all our waking hours (and even our dreaming hours) to the things we do to pay the bills. it’s not enough to throw yourself completely into your work—don’t forget to monetize your hobbies too! doing something for the fun of it is amateur hour...well, technically it is, and that’s why we enjoy doing it.

so we’re expected to give everything to the capital-C Company while accepting that the Company won’t return the favor to us.

i’d say it’s more than a coincidence that this upheaval is happening at a time when the tech industry is seeing wave after wave of layoffs. many people have been rolling with the good times for the past two decades and now they’re feeling the bite many of us have had to fear every working day. a career mostly in oil and gas tends to make one numb to layoffs, so i have to remind myself to have empathy as people familiarize themselves with an experience i now consider commonplace.

and let’s not forget about the federal workers kicked to the curb courtesy of doge cuts, which very well may result in savings of a grand total of...jack crap.

we’ve been told to kiss the ring and we’ll be rewarded. but many of us are looking around, asking what kind of reward is this? and we’re coming to terms with something we’ve known in our hearts for a while but thought it still benefited us to deny:

we’re all corporately disposable.

it doesn’t really matter how good a job we do. if the Company has record profits but sees that it can hike up its stock price with a layoff or two, then we’re all on the chopping block again.

and don’t dare think you can ask for a raise because you’ve worked really hard and accomplished some truly amazing stuff. no sir, no ma’am—that money belongs to the shareholders, in the form of generous dividends and stock buybacks.

the new Company attitude is, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.

but if you can’t get, then you got no choice but to throw a fit.

so that’s we’re doing on linkedin, unified behind a hashtag (#WeirdLinkedIn) , claimed to have been created by the wonderful orana velarde. i can neither confirm nor deny the validity of her claim, but i can confirm she’s been quite kind to me, so i’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

some of us tried kissing the gold-plated ring, only to discover the ring was made of copper the whole time.

and now we’re telling others to kiss off.

will anything change? who the hell knows. prolly not.

but if you don’t like where you’re headed and feel you can’t do nothing to stop it—

well then

you might as well enjoy the ride however you can.