another April question

[snugglekitty]

Do you have a corporate job? How do you feel about it? If you don't, what do you have instead, and how do you feel about that?

Comments

[elkor.livejournal.com]

Do you have a corporate job?

If by "corporate" you mean "desk" or "white collar" then yes, I do.

How do you feel about it?

Personally, I like my field. I get to work with people who make stuff, and make some stuff myself, sometimes. I think if I had to only sit at a desk all day, every day, with no possibility of getting "hands on" I think I'd go crazy.

There are other companies (much larger ones) where people do just that, and I don't think I could do that for terribly long.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

If by "corporate" you mean "desk" or "white collar" then yes, I do.

I left it intentionally vague to see where people would go with it. Are there ways in which your job is not corporate?

[elkor.livejournal.com]

Are there ways in which your job is not corporate?

Well, not counting the side business I run selling knives and other "adult oriented equipment", what I do for a living has (to my mind) several exceptions to a "corporate" job.

*) Casual dress code (we typically wear Jeans and polos. Slacks and tie are "formal" for us, not even counting suits)

*) I get to get dirty. Working in the shop, putting stuff together, seeing how it runs, taking it apart.

[supercheesegirl.livejournal.com]

I have a corporate job. There are many things to like about it. I work with fantastic people, my work is challenging, I have many coworkers who are all doing the same job so there's a bond there. There are decent benefits at my company, and I am getting paid as well as I think I can ever expect to be paid.

What I don't like, though, is the fact that my work seems purposeless. In a way, my work helps humanity, because I am helping doctors write books that will teach others how to be doctors and therefore help people. But the good effects of my work are so far removed from me that I don't feel that at all. Mostly, I feel the part where this book is delayed for no good reason, that book can't be printed the way the authors would like because it's not going to make enough money, this other book is getting lots and lots of attention because it will make money. And I hate that I have to call doctors and interrupt their actual life-saving work to badger them to complete chapters on time.

Ideally, I would like to get back into an academic atmosphere. I don't care if I would be working directly with students or not--I feel like the atmosphere of a university is more the kind of place I'd like to be in. And when I have worked with students in the past, I found it very rewarding--I was doing work that directly benefitted someone who learned valuable stuff from me. That's what I'd rather have in the long term.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

Thanks for contributing. :) It's great that you have challenging work and coworkers you love.

The sense of purposelessness was what I disliked the most about the corporate world, when I was in it. My corporate job failed the test of being relevant in a postapocalyptic world, if you know what I mean. That felt like a litmus test to me.

[catya.livejournal.com]

Yep! I love my job, and it's fine with me to do relatively unimportant stuff (no one's life is majorly effected by my work) professionally.

I keep considering whether it would be the right move to try and combine my passion (community building) with my professional career (project management), but have not yet decided if i want to take that step. If sexism were no issue, i'd be much more likely to have made the decision already.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

Interesting. You and supercheesegirl both cited feeling like their work was unimportant. That was also something that I didn't like about life in the corporate world, too. I felt like they could have swapped me out for someone else at any time and no one would have noticed... and eventually they did. If anyone noticed, I haven't heard about it.

But I guess partly I wanted to do something that I felt only I could do. I think that is an aspect of finding meaning in one's work, at least for me.

[preraphaelite.livejournal.com]

I work for the Commonwealth, prosecuting domestic violence. This, needless to say, has its plusses and minuses (:

We've got a lot of great, smart people who care about what they're doing, and we get a lot of autonomy to do what we think is just and appropriate with our cases. At the same time, I'm wildly disappointed and frustrated by the lack of resources and overload of cases. Business, as I always say, is unfortunately booming.

[hanseth.livejournal.com]

I love my corporate job. I get to do what I enjoy, dress mostly how I want (blue jeans are OK most of the time), and work with other people who are intelligent and conscientious. And while my job may not be saving the world (I keep a website going so that we can sell polo shirts and canvas bags), I'm working for a good company that is very mindful of its impact on the world, and gives back to the community in tangible ways.

And I have advancement potential there -- I will not be doing the same thing for years and years. And I really like having an HR department with teeth, which is not something I ever had at any of the smaller companies I worked for, so I had no recourse when higherups would make homophobic, sexist, and racist comments and expect no one to react.

Oh, and I have really good benefits. Health care and dental are only the first among many. My favorites are the employee store (bean boots for two dollars!) and the use room (free use of tents and other equipment; rent a kayak or canoe for $5 a day).

Bean is sort of ridiculously good to their employees, though. This is unusual in the corporate world, I'm given to understand.

[hanseth.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the other thing I forgot to mention: my work is valued. It's clear to me (and my management) that they would not be able to swap me out for some random joe schmoe webmonkey off the street. And that makes me feel really, really good.