Modern corporate life has warped some of my perspectives on careers, the nature of work and even the way people relate to each other. No experience did more damage to my sweetly naive belief in the goodness of humans and the purity of the capitalist model than my time with a company I’ll call The Salt Mine. One lesson in particular stands out:  the importance of visibility (or lack thereof) versus the importance of output.

At The Salt Mine, we did large projects for clients. We estimated the number of hours we would need to finish a job, then take the “official” rates of each of the people assigned to the job and come up with a rough estimate of the total cost to complete the project.  We’d make sure to shoehorn in plenty of hours for the highest paid consultants, and despite long, stern lectures on the necessity to report all hours worked we’d see staff, again and again, pressured to report working 10 hours when they were clocking in at 8 am and leaving at 11 pm.

To make the whole thing just a little more unpleasant, the managers (an intermediate role between the staff and the executives) were required to bill so many chargeable hours per week. As a manager, you had an odd choice to make – under-report your time and risk looking like you couldn’t keep up with your peers, or overreport your hours and risk making the projects you were shepherding less profitable (and it would be illegal, a la Tom Cruise in The Firm, but that’s just a minor detail).

For a while that practice created an uneasy balance between insane working hours and a reasonable, measured approach to working effectively until you were tired, then giving up for the day. Deadlines had to be met, too, and many of the staff were junior, inexperienced people, requiring mentoring and training.  Time spent training was not billable, though.  So we muddled along, trying to keep projects profitable while making sure we billed enough hours to justify our jobs.

Fade to six months later.

The executives had a wonderful idea. Business was good, but hiring good people to execute projects cost money.  Managers were getting the work done, and for the most part everyone left work at a reasonable hour by Salt Mine standards (7 or 8).  So let’s take this environment, and start publicly shaming managers by posting their billable hours by week on a big scoreboard visible to the whole office.

Keep in mind these were billable hours, not just hours worked. If a manager spent a day in training either for himself or training others, it wasn’t billable.  Billable meant you did work on a specific project for a specific client.  Billable time suddenly became very important.  The rumor went around that top billers would be promoted, and bottom billers wouldn’t.  The rumor was soon converted to policy, and the mayhem commenced.

You might think that ruining the profitability of the projects would bother the executives, but the simple truth was that revenue from the clients was based on a fixed fee. The profitability was merely an internal measuring stick, but since all of the consultants were on salary, 8 hours worked cost the firm exactly the same as 14.  Managers, though, were faced with the prospect of eating their own hours to make the project appear more profitable – but then looking shabby on what we called “the leader board” – or overbilling, making their billable hours look good but having horrible profit margins on their projects.

a separate piece of crap

The managers quickly separated into two groups. One engaged in mutually assured destruction.  The idea for this group was to work 120 billable hours per week, and to hell with profitability.  Face time, especially in front of the client, became the single goal of this group.  We’ll call these The Bloods, for the colors of their eyes.  The second group collapsed, effectively.  They knew they couldn’t keep up the manic pace and decided to work like they’d always worked – work 6 hours when 6 hours were necessary, get training, go out for lunch, and so on.  We’ll call this group the Crips, for the crippling of their spirits as they watched the leaderboard publicly declaring that they weren’t carrying their part of the load.

Stop and consider what you would have done. I’d argue almost everyone in corporate America thinks of themselves as Bloods.  They’d like to think they could just “do their job” but too often face time becomes critical for middle management.  I thought I could laugh off the pressure.  I was a mercenary, and had never considered even for a second making a long-term career out of The Salt Mine; it was a stop on the journey there and back again.  But that leaderboard changed things for me.  I had one of The Salt Mine’s largest clients to manage.  With tens of thousands of billable hours budgeted, I had the ability to create vast amounts of work for myself (necessary or not) and proceeded to do so.

So as time went on, the leaderboard settled into a bit of a pattern. I managed to hang on near the top – never the most hours, but never down in dreaded less-than-60-hours-per-week time.  My health suffered; my relationship with my girlfriend at the time wound down; and the patient mentoring I had done with my staff turned into barks of “just give it to me I’ll do it hell’s bells am I the only one who can get crap done around here give me that bottle of Tums yes you make yourself useful.”  I was Madonna, in other words.

I’d like to say the story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. My stress level went through the roof.  After a serious illness my doctor told me, without humor, that I was killing myself.  Despite hovering towards the top of billable hours and winning new business right and left, I was given a backhanded promotion (promoted in grade but not allowed to refer to myself by the new title for another year for headcount reasons).  Colleagues who had coasted along at the bottom of the leaderboard weren’t fired, or held accountable, or given last pick of clients for the next year, or stripped of staff:  nothing happened to them except that they went home at 6 like normal people.  After one or two near-physical altercations in the office and one more health scare, I jumped ship after my demand that my salary be doubled was laughed off.

It’s a funny story – not a funny ha-hah story but a funny stepping-on-a-rake-and-putting-out-an-eye story. I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, but I look back on those times and wonder.  It’s not a great mystery, if I’m honest with myself.  I lost sight of the forest for the trees, too immersed in day-to-day details to step back and wonder why I was submitting to this treatment like I was some kind of corporate Andy Dufresne (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_dufresne) – except I was tunneling for freedom.  That period of time might have been one of the best times in my life to talk to a career coach, or read 48 Days to the Work You Love, or even read The Four Hour Workweek.  But I didn’t – but because I didn’t, I’m able to share a cautionary tale with you.  If you’re in that same situation, let me know and I can point you to a resource that can help you get out of that mess.  Like a soldier in a dated war movie, I can gasp out “go on, save yerself!  I’m done for, but you can still save yourself!”  I hope you do.

And maybe it does have a happy ending; I learned my lesson and got out.

(photo by kevindooley)

What do you owe to the future and the past – if anything? Do you owe anything to your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and other people from the generations before you? What, if anything, do you owe to your children? Many people are in the habit of speaking of debts and dues in regards to the future and past generations of their family, but what do you really, truly owe?

I want to take a simple example. If your parents paid for your college education, do you have an obligation to pay for your children’s college education, or does the “college education obligation” reset at zero each generation? One line of thinking would be that it is a gift, given by your parents to you. You have no obligation to pass on the gift. Another line of thinking would be that you are selfishly failing to repay the assistance you received.

To complicate it even further, what if you think it’s a mistake? What if your grandparents put themselves through college, paid for your parents, who then didn’t pay for you because they thought their grandparents came out better for working their way through college? I know that may be a bit of a stretch, but it’s possible. But by increasing the “generational obligation” are you increasing expectations unreasonably?

A college education is one thing, but take material items. I was given a brand-new car as a high school graduation present. Does that mean I owe my children new cars? Should I only give it to them, if, like I did, they receive full scholarships to college (and therefore didn’t need any of the money that my grandparents and parents had thought I might for school)?

I don’t plan to buy my kids ‘fancy’ cars or send them to school. Plans change, of course, as do circumstances. But the concept of a generational contract – something that is owed – is odd when you think of it, because in a sense you have no choice in it, and due to your own circumstances you may not have the ability to live up to your obligation. Even if my parents had paid for me to go to a private college (say, $10,000 per year at the time) I am not sure I would be able to do the same for my children – if in 18 years the same school would cost $40,000 per year. Or more.

In the best circumstances, people love their families and will do anything for them. But does that mean giving up career choices? A choice of a place to live? If you have ailing parents in the future and they refused to move, would you give up following your career or even just living in a place of your choosing to stay near to them? If your parents raised you in a particular religion or ethnic culture, do you have an obligation to at least introduce it to your children?

I can imagine that some people look at the level of obligation implied by children and get a little queasy thinking about everything they will owe to them. It’s not the first thing you think about in regards to children, but it is one of the things to consider. And your parents (and other older relatives) will rely on you when they are older for support and care and even “continuing the family traditions.” In some senses, one of the hardest things may be to break these expectations – to not raise the kids Catholic, or tell your parents you are moving to California when they don’t want to leave their home in Chicago. Knowing what your choice will be in these types of situations, before you have to make it, is probably worth considering.