“Over six years, my title changed—Enterprise Architect, Director of Strategy, Principal of Technology.” This is a wonderful essay. For a couple of months recently, I watched a group of men build a house next to where I was staying. They were skilled and produced something both useful and enduring. I asked myself how it came to be that we valued bullshit jobs with bullshit titles more than what I saw these men do.
I lasted about six years at a Fortune 500 company. For years I had a recurring nightmare that I was back there and would wake up in a state of panic. The only good thing about the nightmares was that I was still young and skinny. My former coworkers still believe the empty slogans. Thoreau had it right, “the mass of men (and now women) lead lives of quiet desperation.”
This is everywhere. I worked for a local government and my reviews were centered around process improvements and extra curricular activity. As a PM you’d think excellent project management would be a priority. No. As long as the projects were not going badly then the focus shifted to virtue signaling in other ways. I pulled back on extra curricular activities and my boss said I wasn’t “engaged”. What? I was spending more time doing my job.
I work for a government. Man do I feel this. With ever increasing calls for efficiency which result in cycles of cuts to positions like admin, biologists, engineers, etc; however, we seemingly get more and more of these jobs like "Director of Strategic Innovation". Unfortunately, when people think government is bloated, its the productive jobs they disproportionately get cut (rather than getting more efficient, we get less done and less efficiently so). Because some decision maker thinks that a director of innovation is cheaper than a team of actual staff who do stuff, which may innovate. but they manage air and write briefing notes. Still, I also hold the public accountable because they reach for the laser like a cat, rather than actually trying to have better government.
Great article. But it was not all for waste, remember there was a lot of credit card competition in the 70's and at least some of your efforts allowed them to survive over others. A more pertinent issue might be how our corporate tax code subsidizes the vaporous as well as the innovative. A subject that I am currently writing about.
I wasn’t even born then :-) so I missed the glory days …but during my six years at Mastercard (2017–2023), I can’t think of a single thing I did that added real value. But I did a lot of innovation signaling.
One more time: If you don’t develop, produce or sell the product or service, you are overhead and should be justifying your cost daily. (I see that things haven’t changed much since I left corporate America.)
You seem to think in the absence of those businesses you list, their services (payment processing, internet infrastructure, enterprise healthcare software, etc) would still be available but for free. If that’s your assumption for any given service, then no business adds value.
I also noticed several companies in your list didn't even exist before 2010, making them a strange choice of example for entrenchment and failure to innovate.
I live in Chicago and in August 2024 the DNC was here for 4 days for their convention. Not once during that time did any democrat mention the out of control crime and dreadful public schools here. And then they wonder why people like me voted for someone like Trump.
SW Side man tried to leap over bench, threatened to kill city judge: prosecutors.
This article reminds me of a great quote from the Yes Minister tv series (though I am not sure if the quote originates there): "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."
I think of this quote often. I've worked in tech, for example, and seen updates rolled out that were worse than useless: they simply changed things because updates had to be released and changes had to be included.
There's a strange amount of wheel spinning. Perhaps the guiding principle (conscious or not) is that with sufficient wheel-spinning in place, something of value might accidentally, finally, and actually happen!
I wrote something about this, from a professor's perspective, many years ago (http://thecresset.org/2014/Michaelmas/Meilaender_M14.html). My theory (though surely only a partial explanation): with the expansion of higher education, we are producing large numbers of people whose apparent credentials far exceed their actual ability. (Not a comment on you personally, Sarah!) They require jobs that match their own perception of self-worth. Therefore we need to produce lots of jobs that appear important even though the people holding them don't actually do anything.
“Over six years, my title changed—Enterprise Architect, Director of Strategy, Principal of Technology.” This is a wonderful essay. For a couple of months recently, I watched a group of men build a house next to where I was staying. They were skilled and produced something both useful and enduring. I asked myself how it came to be that we valued bullshit jobs with bullshit titles more than what I saw these men do.
I lasted about six years at a Fortune 500 company. For years I had a recurring nightmare that I was back there and would wake up in a state of panic. The only good thing about the nightmares was that I was still young and skinny. My former coworkers still believe the empty slogans. Thoreau had it right, “the mass of men (and now women) lead lives of quiet desperation.”
This is everywhere. I worked for a local government and my reviews were centered around process improvements and extra curricular activity. As a PM you’d think excellent project management would be a priority. No. As long as the projects were not going badly then the focus shifted to virtue signaling in other ways. I pulled back on extra curricular activities and my boss said I wasn’t “engaged”. What? I was spending more time doing my job.
I work for a government. Man do I feel this. With ever increasing calls for efficiency which result in cycles of cuts to positions like admin, biologists, engineers, etc; however, we seemingly get more and more of these jobs like "Director of Strategic Innovation". Unfortunately, when people think government is bloated, its the productive jobs they disproportionately get cut (rather than getting more efficient, we get less done and less efficiently so). Because some decision maker thinks that a director of innovation is cheaper than a team of actual staff who do stuff, which may innovate. but they manage air and write briefing notes. Still, I also hold the public accountable because they reach for the laser like a cat, rather than actually trying to have better government.
Great article. But it was not all for waste, remember there was a lot of credit card competition in the 70's and at least some of your efforts allowed them to survive over others. A more pertinent issue might be how our corporate tax code subsidizes the vaporous as well as the innovative. A subject that I am currently writing about.
I wasn’t even born then :-) so I missed the glory days …but during my six years at Mastercard (2017–2023), I can’t think of a single thing I did that added real value. But I did a lot of innovation signaling.
One more time: If you don’t develop, produce or sell the product or service, you are overhead and should be justifying your cost daily. (I see that things haven’t changed much since I left corporate America.)
You seem to think in the absence of those businesses you list, their services (payment processing, internet infrastructure, enterprise healthcare software, etc) would still be available but for free. If that’s your assumption for any given service, then no business adds value.
I also noticed several companies in your list didn't even exist before 2010, making them a strange choice of example for entrenchment and failure to innovate.
I live in Chicago and in August 2024 the DNC was here for 4 days for their convention. Not once during that time did any democrat mention the out of control crime and dreadful public schools here. And then they wonder why people like me voted for someone like Trump.
SW Side man tried to leap over bench, threatened to kill city judge: prosecutors.
CWBChicago. Sept 16, 2025
https://cwbchicago.com/2025/09/sw-side-man-tried-to-leap-over-bench-threatened-to-kill-city-judge-prosecutors.html
“Suburban woman punched, knocked out downtown Chicago.” (3 min)
ABC 7 Chicago. Sept 2, 2025
https://youtu.be/XO4fiMnDYPY?si=VF787BPRWN-uEI2B
The dog waited till it was safe to come out!
“They were ambushed in front of the house…A violent attack on a woman and a child in France.” Translation of the title.
Alhurra. July 23, 2025. (1 min)
https://youtube.com/shorts/Ztw_qN0xSa8?si=fvmWdjnzqLprW78i
This article reminds me of a great quote from the Yes Minister tv series (though I am not sure if the quote originates there): "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7336003-he-s-suffering-from-politician-s-logic-something-must-be-done-this
I think of this quote often. I've worked in tech, for example, and seen updates rolled out that were worse than useless: they simply changed things because updates had to be released and changes had to be included.
There's a strange amount of wheel spinning. Perhaps the guiding principle (conscious or not) is that with sufficient wheel-spinning in place, something of value might accidentally, finally, and actually happen!
I wrote something about this, from a professor's perspective, many years ago (http://thecresset.org/2014/Michaelmas/Meilaender_M14.html). My theory (though surely only a partial explanation): with the expansion of higher education, we are producing large numbers of people whose apparent credentials far exceed their actual ability. (Not a comment on you personally, Sarah!) They require jobs that match their own perception of self-worth. Therefore we need to produce lots of jobs that appear important even though the people holding them don't actually do anything.