Corporate Tales 101

Never have I ever wanted to get into a 9-5 job but here I am, doing one. The politics inside every corporate office are beyond description, good, bad, and the worst. Fortunately, mine isn't like that, it goot a healthy environment. That's the best part of my life that I landed in an IT company that's serving me in this aspect as well, it is a crucial thing I must say.

This is a startup, competing with the market leaders already, so working in a fast growing unique companies are beneficial in many ways. Like you guys start from the small, oftentimes from scratch. With the company, you grow as well, little by little. Things aren't like you know zero, and the company is already sitting at thousand points.

If I may compare my growth, the learning one, the skills that I learnet is definitely way more than the day I stepped in. The curve is upward, straight into the sky. When I entered, I had little knowledge and a willpower like a mountain. As the company’s product kept growing, I started building myself as well with the necessary tech stacks, learnt on the go and did practical implementation little by little to add bricks in the broader picture. Little by little we kept adding bricks, one after another in our product and I too kept learning on that process, one after another.

But what now? We have already built a significant portion of our product, in the final stage with one and another is heading towards the finish line as well. Now a newcomer wont be able to cope up with the tech stack if he or she isn't familiar with them already. So whats their learning curve? They gotta go for bigger tasks…the standard to join in the company has set a bar that wasn't there before. That's why I got a learning curve from zero to current state, and that's what I tried to quote there that these kinda startups are great for the learning curve to get skyrocketed.

📸 Rostyslav Savchyn

So back to corporate ethics. There are a few things that I learnt on the go amidst corporate politics. This is a profession, we get paid as per our contract, and we are bound to give our best to fulfill those conditions. Not to go out of the promised timeframe and keep serving. At the beginning, I used to do that willingly, dragging office work at home, staying busy even after the working hours. Was good for my personal growth and company as well, but it destroys the work ethics. The expectation of the company gets corrupted, takes this for granted, imposes on others that they aren't comfortable with. I changed this, now I strictly maintain the 9-5 work hours except in rare cases. Now I do realise the need of personal time, after 5, it takes an hour to reach home and to get freshen up. And then, its family time or to devote in personal growth specifically.

What's politics in here? Few are like, they would check-in lately so obviously they gotta check out late, and a few extra hours in the office makes them look like they are doing the overtime for the sake of the company, pushing it towards several steps at once which wasn't possible if he had maintained 9-5. From the tech, we had worked for hours late at night too, the difference is, we can work from home as well without staying in the office to showcase. His intentions could be good as well, sleeping in the office to meet some deadlines but those do hamper the environment. Management takes them as the ultimate workaholic guy, dedicated to the company's benefit just because he was there, in the office, to meet the deadline. My question would be, why didn't he see coming and done without stepping in for the extra hours, enjoying this special attention.

If we compare the impact of our works, respectively, won't matter, the management does see only what they find appealing, a visual output. In the backend server, you may develop an entire ecosystem but it wont get visualised that way by the management whereas a paper submission would yield extra attention that he went beyond the working hours and submitted a paper for the company.

Well, these are enjoyable to me, used to bother at first seeing them getting extra attention for such acts that aren't even logical. Then my senior said to me, “Eagles don't fly with the flies.” They know our values, we don't need to shout.