In Praise of the Crappy Office Job
There are benefits to working in an office, even in a job you don’t particularly like, for a boss with questionable management skills. All of the downsides of a crappy, or even just an OK job, also help us develop skills, we may not know we are developing. Working in a structured environment, with people we don’t particularly like, teach us how to negotiate, navigate social hierarchies and difficult situations, and deal with repetition, work within a structure, and with stress. I meet a lot of people, and have worked in different situations, with people from a wide variety of backgrounds. And I’ve noticed that people who have corporate jobs usually also have these skills (that people who work primarily on their own, or don’t work, often don’t have):
You learn to get along with people you don’t like. It really is a skill to stay on congenial terms with people you aren’t particularly interested in, or perhaps not fond of. This skill translates to lots of other situations in life when you need to interact with a variety of people.
Good communication skills. Dealing with people with a variety of temperaments, with different roles and interests in what you’re saying teaches us to adapt our communication to our audience. Even if you don’t think about it, you learn how to do it. We learn to think - what does this other person care about, what do they know about the situation?
Not to take everything personally Not to say that we don’t take things personally, but we can’t everything personally at work. We are one person in an organization that may have a dozen people or thousands. We are one person, and what we want isn’t at the centre. This is painful at times, but a good lesson for life. Sometimes things are all about us, and sometimes they aren’t.
How to do things that aren’t fun. All jobs have things that aren’t fun, that are drudgery. Office work teaches us to stick it up and do it. Life is full of tasks like this. It’s part of our work as adults to learn to suck it up and get it done.
How to work with structure & predictability. People have a variety of reactions to predictable, some love a routine and many people want to escape it. But routine makes it easier to do things we don’t particularly like and makes work more efficient because we can predict what is going to happen.