

Why You Don’t Invite Your Mother to the Office - superchink
https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/dde19cf4a935

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darwinia
If this guy wrote a book, I buy it.

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caseyohara
I was thinking the same thing right at the end. Thoroughly enjoyed the story
and his style especially.

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Isamu
Maybe because I'm a software guy and not a lawyer, I can't imagine my mother
wanting to see my office. In fact I can't imagine anybody wanting to see my
office. Well, except my daughters, but even then they are mostly looking for
an opportunity to miss a day of school.

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michaelochurch
Brilliant.

I think it's astonishing that his mother can look at a beautiful office
(essentially, an elaborate lie that a corporation uses to impress the
Clueless) and think that must make him happy. It's as if a view of the Bay
makes up for shitty work and a terrible schedule. (I know people in biglaw;
some firms really are awful.)

Those ornate offices actually make a bad job worse, because once you work
there, it's a reminder of _their_ power, almost designed to make you feel
small in the same way that a medieval cathedral would.

I think that the corporate hangover in this country (seen in his mother's
expectation that he should enjoy the job because of an attractive office)
actually has something to do with the Great Depression. The 1930s scared the
shit out of people. Poverty entailed risk of death by starvation. People moved
across godforsaken expanses with nothing just for a chance. Then there was
World War II. After that, people wanted extreme stability in the postwar era.
They wanted to be done with fighting and looking for work, forever if
possible. This created a culture where jobs were long-lived, but companies
could treat people really badly. I'm not saying that they all did-- managers
had to stick around for long periods of time, too, so there were incentives to
be decent to subordinates that no longer exist-- but companies really could
treat our parents' generations worse because it was so stigmatized to change
jobs (cf. Duck Phillips's humiliating exile after Sterling-Cooper fires him).

Even the typical 55-year-old parent (born 1958) looks at the way we move and
thinks we're "entitled" or "unstable" for refusing to put up with garbage;
when they were our age, they put up with more boring work, worse behavior from
management, and an even more lethargic career ladder. It's the Golden Banana
Effect; even though they never experienced the Depression, they've kept the
stigma and that extreme fear of changing jobs (rational in the Great
Depression, but detrimental in a world where 5 years without progress leads to
downward mobility) stuck around for some time.

This might actually lead to a counterintuitive conclusion, which is that the
entrepreneurial hotbeds of the mid-21st century might be the currently
socialist-leaning countries in Northern Europe, because if another 1930s-style
Depression hits, the shock of it for US-style countries will just ruin
peoples' entrepreneurial impulses (if you experience real poverty, you often
lose that hatred of subordination that inspires people to do great things).
That's a scary thought, because while the 1950s economy still needed people to
be fairly subordinate, the 2050s economy will need the opposite.

I think the 1980s were probably the worst of it, because that was the time
when it was still completely socially unacceptable to lose or leave a job
(unless poached, and even that couldn't be pulled more than about once per
decade) but the new, more fluid economy was already coming into place.

That might be too much exposition for a (admittedly, very well-written and
thought-provoking) humor post, but there it is.

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comrh
I invited my mother to the office. She made nutella cookies that everyone
loved.

