There’s an article that’s been getting a lot of attention on Substack called The death of the corporate job (there’s also a part 2). It keeps popping up on my feed and although it’s an eye-opening read, I can’t shake off some serious misgivings about it.
What it says is this: Millennial and Gen-Z workers have been tempted into corporate jobs with huge salaries, to find that the work itself lacks any purpose other than to help sustain a performance of corporate busy-ness. And while the experience of this might be soul-destroying, those who want to pursue more creative or intellectual endeavours find it hard to ‘escape’ because the pay is so good. What the writer found from talking to people in these roles is that many use the infrastructure of their work environment to pursue a creative personal project or operate a side-hustle, waiting for that to become financially self-sustaining enough that they can quit.
Here’s what it all builds up to:
“If you’re reading this from inside one of these roles, feeling like you’re going slightly mad from the cognitive dissonance, you’re not alone. The madness isn’t in you—it’s in the system that asks you to pretend that forwarding emails is a career.
The moment you stop believing in the corporate fiction is the moment you can start using it. Once you see it as infrastructure rather than identity, as a resource rather than a calling, everything shifts.
Your corporate role doesn’t need to be meaningful. It needs to be useful. Useful for building skills, for funding your real projects, for buying time while you figure out what matters to you.
The death of the corporate role isn’t a crisis. It’s freedom from having to pretend your spreadsheet about spreadsheets is your life’s work.” (Part 1)
Now, I appreciate a truth-bomb and it’s good to hear this honest perspective. The writer, Alex, is also right to point out that a lot of what people under the age of 35 have been sold about careers has turned out to be poor advice – but then again try to imagine giving useful career advice to children around the time of the financial crisis.
What got under my skin with the piece on corporate jobs was people in these extreme positions of privilege should get to feel any sense of victimhood.
Let’s get real shall we?
No one forced you into an incredibly well-remunerated corporate job. The corporation you work for isn’t some inevitable part of the stage furniture of your life, like school was, or having to obey laws which you might not agree with. It’s not depriving you from fulfilling your passion.
Alex has got it the wrong way around.
People are in these over-paid and under-worked jobs because it suits them extremely well. Imagine it: a job where you earn a six-figure salary, find yourself running out of tasks mid-way through the morning, and learn that no one notices when you take the rest of the day off to work on your creative side-project.
I’m afraid I don’t buy this complaint that the purposelessness of the work itself is so soul-sucking that these people lead genuinely unhappy lives.
Overpaid corporate drones know exactly what they’re doing. They’re in these jobs because they know a win-win situation when they see one.
If we’re being completely frank, the people who benefit the most are those, generally with school-age children, who want an elite lifestyle but do not possess any kind of specialised, technical expertise.
What suits them – what is, in fact, the holy grail – is a job that pays over £100k but involves little onsite attendance and long-deadline tasks with fuzzy deliverables and not much surveillance of what’s being done.
We all know that having children makes the life of a working person much harder to manage, unless they have someone else who can pick up nearly all the related tasks instead. People also don’t want to take a salary dip in middle age even while part of their attention is elsewhere, hence the demand for these low-intensity corporate jobs. This is not a criticism of parents but of a society that has a very weak answer for how to resource the essential work of looking after children.
Young people without kids who are already doing these kind of jobs – they’re just having an easy ride.
In part 2 of the piece, there’s a revealing quote from someone who came forward to Alex after reading part 1 with this:
“I make £120k to essentially be in meetings about meetings. My friend who’s a paramedic saves actual lives for £30k.”
The average UK salary at the moment is around £38k. The further you go from London, the lower the average for that region.
Canary Wharf desk drones know they’re overpaid but I’m not sure they’ve grasped how odd it is that they should feel trapped from leaving, when the vast majority of people are content enough on a lot less.
Inevitably, these type of observations bring us into the orbit of David Graeber and his concept of ‘bullshit jobs’ – those in which a repetitive process is performed without producing anything of use or value.
Corporate jobs which consist of having meetings to plan meetings to synergise stakeholder alignment probably do fall within this designation. But Graeber’s argument against such jobs is made in defence of the little man: the true drone whose low status is required to support the illusion that the people at the top are worthy of their absurdly-inflated pay packets.
It’s exceedingly difficult to feel any sympathy for someone who does one of these bullshit jobs for £120,000 per year – a six-figure salary not too far off that of the Prime Minister.
We are effectively talking about the salaries of “the 1%” – the very people David Graeber himself was so against. People accepting this kind of over-payment for being the least useful employees in a company were, in his eyes, vampires. And just as Alex describes, they set up the rest of their lifestyle to be reliant on this level of income. What he doesn’t seem to acknowledge is the incentive is then not only to stay in that job but to protect the empty hours within it.
“I know developers who do their “official” job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks. Consultants who’ve automated their actual deliverables and spend most of their time on side projects.” (Part 1)
There’s something else that needs correcting here: these jobs are a problem, but not for the people in them.
It’s not costless to slack off work, even at a corporation. In the end it’s the customer who pays for product prices inflating to pay for an infrastructure which keeps bloating to accommodate more freeloaders. Not only that but a lot of public sector money flows towards corporate services and guess who pays for that: the citizen. But we’re supposed to see something heroic in the 28-year-old who rebels by using work hours to hone a five year business plan for a start-up which delivers some non-essential tech solution.
It’s all so tone-deaf.
So is the notion that people feel they can’t escape from the corporate sector because they are imprisoned in mortgages and lifestyle expectations that mean lowering their salary to anywhere near that of an average worker becomes an unthinkable act of self-harm.
Yes, housing is expensive in London and the South East – it’s outrageous really. But it’s a choice to set your expectation on the most expensive kind and to lock yourself into paying for that. Practically everyone aged 35 and under is screwed when it comes to housing.
The overpaid and under-tasked corporate job isn’t the prison, it’s a fortification.
What I want people in these corporate jobs who are feeling unfulfilled to know is that you really don’t have to do what you’re doing.
You don’t need to earn such a large amount of money to subsidise your side projects. I’d go as far as to say that insisting on earning that much is probably what’s holding you back.
Let me give you an example of how I built something alongside a full-time job.
Until recently I worked full-time in a civil service type role where I helped Members of Parliament with statistical enquiries. It was a genuinely fulfilling job. The pay was nowhere even close to that of a corporate job but plenty by normal standards. I wrote two books during this time, both now published.
With the idea of my first book in mind, I realised I would have to take time off to write, which is also probably a good idea if you’re pursuing any major project. I’m not someone who can do research and writing in the evenings as well as that.
I put together a pitch, wrote some of the book already as a sample, and contacted agents. Two got back to me and with one I had an instant click.
The agent helped me to get a publisher and with that came an advance.
That advance, though modest, was what made the dream possible. I took all of my paid annual leave in one go and added on some unpaid leave. I think I did 3 weeks unpaid for the first book and 6 weeks unpaid for the second, which ended up being a much heavier project.
On book two, I did also end up working weekends when that leave ran out, which took a real toll on my energy levels. It was hard, but doable.
If your goal is something like launching a company, designing a product or building an app, you’ll also find you get more done and feel better about it if you plan time off work to focus on it fully.
I’d like to give more advice on this in a future post because the financial security is only one side of it. Who are you and what’s your credibility? How realistic is your plan, where’s your proof that it will succeed?
Where do we go from here? Alex has some thoughts:
“The corporate world won’t reform. But individuals are finding ways to survive it intact.” The death of the corporate job, part 2
To this I say no, you’re right, it won’t.
Corporations love this. When the next Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman or Nate Silver emerges it will be with the inevitable backstory of how they toiled on the side of a boring corporate job, burning the candle at both ends to make a feverish vision real.
This will be a lesson to us all that corporations are the crucibles of precisely this kind of thing. It’s worth a few employees slacking off if one of them really does achieve big personal success. Their former employer will gladly take the credit that their ‘infrastructure’ made it possible.
Under-working in these bullshit jobs also doesn’t harm a company’s bottom line, since these jobs provide little value in the first place. You’re not taking any real risk by giving a half-arsed performance. If they need to make efficiency savings they’ll just get rid of these roles.
People in these types of position should make the most of the generous opportunities they have and please, for God’s sake, stop acting like a rebel for doing so.
Surely I’m not the only one who feels a real lack of patience for this complaining?
Originally published on Substack: https://georginasturge.substack.com/p/being-a-corporate-drone-does-not