This past summer, after a short hiring process with only a single interview and a grueling two-hour online assessment, I ended up working for a large data-engineering company that was contracting with an American social-media conglomerate, a major player in the industry. Although nominally employed by one company, I was largely working on projects created and dictated by this other conglomerate, which determined my daily schedule, assigned tasks, and generally established the ground rules for work, breaks, and productivity. My own company, enthralled by this powerful source of income and prestige, was at its beck and call for anything related to any of its projects, and my daily schedule together with that of my coworkers was determined by this conglomerate down to the smallest detail.
This led, perhaps inevitably, to some questionable outcomes and working practices. As salaried employees, our own day-to-day experience on these important projects overseen by this silent corporate overlord was one of bureaucratic overreach—a kind of micromanagement that included tracking not only our tasks in a management system but also our hours, minutes, and seconds on the job. Clocking in and out was a matter of needless precision, decanting seconds and minutes and breaks and time on task until arriving at the ideal total; time away from the computer beyond a certain number of minutes meant that employees would time out, requiring them to make up the remaining minutes at the end of their shift.
It would be easy to condemn this corporate oversight as ridiculous, and it is, I admit, difficult to argue otherwise: it was excessive and ultimately inefficient, and employees resented a system dependent on metrics that oversimplified a more complex panorama of professional abilities that many thought were neglected or undervalued. Annoyed by the employee standards and the methods for keeping track of so-called employee productivity, I found myself coming to some unflattering conclusions about my company’s work culture and that of the giant social-media conglomerate: it was apparent that the closest this major player could come to understanding the productivity of what was ultimately a major investment in its human resources, even with its vast arsenal of cognitive and technical resources, was to track minutes and count task submissions for every one of its projects.
And while this was probably the result of poor project planning and lack of organization—largely venial because the projects involved systems that were fairly inchoate—the experience of that working schedule is symptomatic of a pervasive phenomenon in the corporate world, buttressed by carelessness, apathy, and cowardice: bullshit jobs and grotesque corporate inefficiency. The bigger and more complex the company, the more probable it is that bullshit will begin oozing from its pores. However grotesque, these pores and general bloating are human-derived; in all their infinite variety and fallibility, humans contribute to these corporate mass monsters and their decadent standards.
That brief experience contributed to my self-understanding as a professional translator interested in cultivating the highest possible standards of excellence. During this stint, I was living with the consequences of having another party determine standards that should have been self-created, dependent on my own set of professional ideals. And that is all the truer in a world overrun by power players and corporate entities that are willing and able to pigeonhole and co-opt workers in the service of their own impersonal ideals—although the word ideal, for these corporations, is probably not the right word.
As a counterpoise and breath of fresh air, small-business owners and solopreneurs have a distinct advantage over their larger counterparts on the open market: they are leaner and more efficient, and their motives and standards are apparent in their day-to-day operations. Corruption is less likely and values, more palpable; people are held accountable; excellence and quality assurance are no longer items on a list to be checked off by anonymous figures in a vast corporate bureaucracy, but integral parts of an individual’s personal ethics.
When a business entity is small enough to hold itself accountable and place integrity ahead of moneymaking and growth potential, excellence becomes a possibility—an excellence defined not by profit and endless self-enrichment but by actual values, which are by no means the prerogative of charities and nonprofits. Liberated from the fearmongering of investors and shareholders, small businesses have the opportunity to pursue other values than the merely pecuniary and avaricious. That is, at least, my own ideal for a small business worthy of the name.
