I’ve been in Richmond, Virginia, for the last two days, for some internal work travel. The purpose of the trip was framed as “team building,” as two companies merged together. Lots of changes have been happening internally that have been confusing, frustrating, and ill planned and communicated. We also semi recently had a layoff. So needless to say, morale hasn’t been great, so this trip was meant to help with that and help build culture and a sense of “togetherness.”
On Tuesday, we met up at a co-working space in downtown Richmond, where we had a conference room booked for two hours. We spent no more than ten minutes on this central “team building” activity, where we had to piece together a Lego building just so. Then, we spent the next hour and ten minutes, voicing our complaints, in a very structured and subtly coded way, about everything that was wrong with our roles, our team, cross-functional team collaboration, our management, and the company/product. After that was done, we were “released” and told to get ready to go bowling. We went to neighborhood bowling alley, ate some pizza, wings, and fried buffalo cauliflower. A lot of my colleagues had way too much to drink. As for me, I left at around 9:15 and was sleeping by 10:30, as I was still set on hitting the gym this morning, which I did!
As my friend who works in tech says, the problems that people in tech have are so far removed from the reality of most everyday people with “regular” jobs. The fact that most of us took flights and had paid hotels (and a daily stipend for food/ride shares) simply for a “team building” Lego activity that lasted ten minutes can sound pretty preposterous to someone who doesn’t work in our industry (and what could sound even more insane is that we had a fixed budget for our evening activity of bowling and subpar dinner, and thus could not afford a “real” team restaurant dinner, yet somehow there seemed to be no limit on the alcohol spend that night…).
Another friend, who is a retired middle school science teacher, told me she was recently out with another retired teacher for lunch around the Embarcadero in San Francisco. It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, and they saw tons of young people walking around. “We were wondering, ‘Shouldn’t they be working?’ Such a different life than a teacher…'” she had messaged me.
There are a lot of stupid, completely senseless things we have to deal with when working in tech: ridiculous politics, bureaucracies, “products” that don’t work but we need to sell and support, toxic and/or unrealistic management. But we also get luxuries that so many do not get: flexibility to work from home, work wherever we want, whenever we want, relatively good benefits and perks, and higher than average pay. If we want, we can take a longer lunch in the middle of the workday and make up for it later in the evening. We have the flexibility to go to a doctor’s appointment or hair cut in the middle of the day and just move some meetings around. All of my dog-owning colleagues take their dogs on multiple walks during the day from home, no questions asked. And we accept it as part of “work-life.” As a teacher, you’d never be able to do this.
There’s no such thing as the perfect job. There’s always a give-and-take situation with every company, every role, every single thing you do in life. So we just have to maximize what we have for what we really want and what matters to us.