I've worked for a dozen years in IT at a very large, very stupid corporation which has gotten larger and stupider every year. I've been phoning it in almost my entire career, and despite that I get ridiculous raises and promotions all the time. Most of my projects I consider to be failures in one way or another. Either came in late and over-budget, undelivered on features, was poorly designed and difficult to use etc. The only successes were the small projects early in my career where I wore all the hats and did everything myself. So that is really all I am good for but instead I manage teams working on projects worth as much as 12 million a year.
I recently tried to take a step sideways and get a different job in the company where I'd be more hands on and six months later they had me take over the group. Despite the fact that I mostly wasted my time here. My only real useful survival skill here is sounding smart on the phone and winning lots of the status meetings, and that seems to be the key success criteria.
So I just sort of look at it as one big joke and tell myself I'm just here for the lulz and the fat paychecks as long as they are dumb enough to keep writing them but...that's not exactly true. Sometimes I do get stressed out and angry about how lame we are. Usually this happens when I work with a very small software vendor and can compare their productivity to ours.
I'm going to spend the better part of my life doing this work, and its meaningless. And I tell myself I do this so...my kid can have the same great opportunities that I passed up. He will probably do the same.
Sometimes I'll resolve to try harder and make a difference but I probably have similar akrasia and ennui issues as Rain. I had the same problems in school. I'd score in the 98-99th percentile on all standardized tests and average Cs in most classes since I would never do homework.
So I just sort of look at it as one big joke and tell myself I'm just here for the lulz and the fat paychecks as long as they are dumb enough to keep writing them
Why can't anyone tell you're wearing that business suit ironically?
Related to: Outside the Laboratory, Ghosts in the Machine
We've all observed how people can be very smart in some contexts, and stupid in others. People compartmentalize, which has been previously hypothesized as the reason for some epic failures to understand things that should be obvious.
It's also important to remember that we are not immune. To that end, I want to start off by considering some comfortable examples, where someone else is the butt of the joke, and then consider examples which might make you more uneasy.
The reassuring cases concern smart people who become stupid when confronted with our area of expertise. If you're a software developer, that tends to be people who can't figure out something basic about Windows. "I've tried closing the app and restarting, and I've tried rebooting, and it doesn't work, I still can't find my file." You take a deep breath, refrain from rolling your eyes and asking what the heck their mental model is, what they think closing-and-restarting has to do with a misplaced file, and you go looking for some obvious places, like the Desktop, where they keep all their files but somehow neglected to look this time. If it's not there, chances are it will be in My Documents.
It's sometimes draining to be called on for this kind of thing, but it can be reassuring. My dad is a high calibre mathematician, dealing in abstractions at a level that seems stratospheric compared to my rusty-college-math. But we sometimes get into conversations like the above, and I get a slightly guilty self-esteem boost from them.
Now, the harder question: how do we compartmentalize?
I propose work-life compartmentalization as a case study. "Work-life balance" is how we rationalize that separation. It's OK, we think, to put up with some unpleasantness from 9 to 5, as long as we can look forward to getting home, kicking our shoes off and relaxing, alone or among family or friends. And perhaps that's reasonable enough.
But this logic leads many people to tolerate: stress, taking orders, doing work that we think is meaningless, filling out paperwork that will never actually be read, pouring our energy into projects we're certain are failure-bound but never speaking up about that to avoid being branded "not a team player", being bored in endless meetings which are thinly disguised status games, feeling unproductive and stupid but grinding on anyway because it's "office hours" and that's when we are supposed to work, and so on.
And those are only the milder symptoms. Workplace bullying, crunch mode, dodgy workplace ethics are worryingly prevalent. (There are large variations in this type of workplace toxicity; some of us are lucky enough to never catch but a whiff of it, some of us unfortunately are exposed to a high degree. That these are real and widespread phenomena is evidenced by the success of TV shows showing office life as its darkest; humor is a defense mechanism.)
Things snapped into focus for me one day when a manager asked me to lie to a client about my education record in order to get a contract. I refused, expecting to be fired; that didn't happen. Had I really been at risk? The incident anyway fueled a resolve to try and apply at work the same standards that I do in life - when I think rationally.
In everyday life, rationality suggests we try to avoid boredom, tells us it's unwise to make promises we can't keep, to avoid getting entangled in our own lies, and so on. What might happen if we tried to apply the same standards in the workplace?
Instead of tolerating boredom in meetings, you may find it more effective to apply a set of criteria to any meeting - does it have an agenda, a list of participants, a set ending time and a known objective - and not show up if it doesn't meet them.
You might refuse to give long-term schedule estimate for tasks that you didn't really believe in, and instead try breaking the task down, working in short timeboxed iterations and updating your estimates based on observed reality, committing only to as much work as is compatible with maintaining peak productivity.
You might stop tolerating the most egregious status games that go on in the workplace, and strive instead for effective collective action: teamwork.
Those would be merely sane behaviours. It is, perhaps, optional to extend this thinking to actually challenging the usual workplace norms, and starting to do things differently just because they would be better that way. The world is crazy, and that includes the world of work. People who insist on not checking their brain at the door of the workplace are still few and far between, and to really change a workplace it takes a critical mass of them.
But I've seen it happen, and helped it happen, and the results make me want to find out more about other areas where I still compartmentalize. The prospect is a little scary - I still find it unpleasant to find out I've been stupid - but also exciting.