Let's Get One Thing Straight

A friend of mine read a previous post and asked if I stumbled into disability support work due to lack of options. That this was a last resort dressed up as a pivot.

Let's correct that. 😒

I made a choice. A deliberate one. With a list of reasons longer than your morning affirmations, and considerably less bullshit.

Here's why I feel at home outside the world I spent fifteen years in...

People with no corporate agenda. There's a particular kind of clean you feel when you get your hands dirty for someone who has no interest in outmaneuvering you. No politics. No angles. Just the work. You show up, you make a difference, and you go home. That's it. The closest I got to that was doing freelance work.

Corporate politics will find you. Doesn't matter if it's a scrappy ten-person outfit or a multinational with a Chief Culture Officer. The bullshit scales accordingly. I've watched good people get gutted by process, by perception, by a bad day. I've been at the receiving end. Both at small and big companies. Done with that.

The work must mean something. Not to a shareholder. Not to a KPI on a dashboard. To the person in front of me. That's different. Feels better.

HR is mostly theatre. Rules written by people with no context, policed by people afraid of anything other than buzzwords and what's trending in woke news. There are CEOs now - look at what happened at Bolt - who are reaching the same conclusion I did, just with more press coverage. The house of cards must come down.

AI ain't got sh*t on me. Every second LinkedIn post is either pointless excitement (or that fake LinkedIn excitement) or low-grade panic about who AI is going to replace next. Support work isn't on that list. You can't prompt presence. You can't vibe code empathy. Whatever Elon, Zuck and Altman take, it won't be this.

Effort actually counts. The correlation between what I put in and what comes back is honest. No performance review distorted by someone's opinion about how I said "F*uck" in the corridor. No promotion held hostage (or demotion) to how "proactive" i was or cos' the boss "felt slighted". I work hard, I show up right, I get results. Simple. Radical, by corporate standards. 🤯

Soooo, no. I didn't fall into this. I walked in with both eyes open, having weighed it properly.

The perception thing,what people might think, that was the one con that gave me pause. Old programming. The kind that gets installed early and runs quietly in the background for years before you notice it.

I noticed it. And I shut it down.