Not to mention the psychological pain of having to write out bizarre corporate-speak emails for hours on end:
Hi [such-and-such],
I hope you had a wonderful weekend!
I'm just checking in with you to follow up on our last discussion and the emails above with regards to your progress on [thing that's supposed to be your fucking job].
Per my last email I was hoping we would have this cleared away by last Friday as I am requiring it to be able to move ahead with [my job] in a timely manner, although I'm sure that you are already aware of this. I have reattached the related documents for your convenience.
Going forward, if you encounter any unforeseen delays in future please feel free to keep me apprised of the situation and to let me know where I might be of assistance.
Thanks in advance :)
If that shit makes you wince or gives you flashbacks, just imagine what it's like being autistic and how that would amplify the suffering - I can barely scrape by doing normal social interactions without adding an extra layer of complexity into the mix smh. (No wonder I went completely bonkers working a desk job...)
Meanwhile I can basically just say hello, goodbye and "Any update on x? I'm waiting on it for y" without coming across as rude. The bizarre corporate speak is still there but it's for specific uses.
There's one particular job where I had to do this bullshit (just a typical NGO hellhole) but there some people who were on the level where could drop all the pretense and be very terse with without worrying about causing offence. Obviously any of the IT team would get that kind of bare bones no-nonsense style of emails out of me because I know what they're like and what they need - and it sure ain't some fucking flowery essay.
It was all "Problem -> Attempted solutions in bullet points -> My hunch about the cause -> What I need from them and a deadline if I'm working to one".
Anyway, whatever I was doing made enough of an impression that the IT team started calling the office I was based at specifically to talk to me about IT problems at my site and to get me to do any physical stuff they couldn't do remotely like identifying a status light, hitting a button, or plugging something in, even when it wasn't my personal IT problem and all of this stuff was completely outside the purview of my job.
Before I figured out what was going on this would cause me to panic because I'd get a call from the national office number or someone would inform me that there's an IT team member that's trying to find me and I'd be wondering wtf I was about to get in trouble over.
Turns out that they just needed someone who was capable of following instructions and who was able to communicate things using specific language and they managed to find their guy on the inside. I mean, I get it - I've done tech support for family and friends where it feels like you're pulling teeth but it was weird knowing that there was this whole IT team that knew me by name and would use me exclusively as their human interface for that site when I had never met any of them in my life and often I'd be away from that office for days on end.
Part of me was like "Goddamn, you'd prefer to wait 3 days just to get me to do some 2 minute job for you?" and another part of me was like "Of course the IT office has an informal list of all the site names, each with particular staff members that they have identified as being above the 'typing the word Google into the Google search bar to bring up Google' level of tech literacy that they share amongst the team."
Turns out that they just needed someone who was capable of following instructions and who was able to communicate things using specific language and they managed to find their guy on the inside.
This is any office job where you have to communicate with different teams honestly, not just IT. Getting things done is just building a list of competent people you can call to bypass all the various filters. One of the most common conversations at work is just "who was your guy at X who got Y done?".
It's extremely funny when you get blowhards who think the way to get shit done is to talk to the boss though. The small business tyrant clients we have just jump to the "I'll just call the boss then" the moment there is the slightest bit of friction or delay and it always makes me laugh. My boss is actually a pretty standup guy and really good at what he does, but if you're not important enough he will literally wait months to action something and these guys never are.
I'm unemployed af so I am trying to start a shitty website making business and am trying to do a few cheap/free sites just to get a portfolio going. I was asked to make a new site for the local Blue Fascist Club and figured sure. Problem is that it's a bunch of old people that "don't understand technology" and can't give me a straight answer about why they have 3 different sites that are each in various stages of decay. The main one hasn't been touched in a decade. Another is just a parked domain. And for some reason instead of actually fixing their site issues, this past month they decided to have some random yahoo make a "new" site with Wix... it looks like shit and it's barely even a site.
Ok so I've been in communication with like 8 different people via email and text and am trying to be "professional" and no one seems to know shit about fuck. But like after a fucking week of trying to be professional, last night I was finally like "look, I just need to know if the club wants a shitty site or a good one. I was asked to make a site for the club and possibly a new appointed official. I'm kind of done wasting my time."
First rule of my new web dev business is gonna be "Say what you fucking mean"
My only regret is that I didn't pursue freelance right after college because I had the pipedream of some day getting a dead end job as a "code monkey".
After 2 decades of trying and failing to have a "career" I finally came to grips with the reality that I am unemployable under the current means of which people treat workers who have mental disabilities. So I'm finally going to just do my own thing and hope it sticks. The idea of having to "hustle" makes me sad but the thought of using a skill set that I'm actually decent at and enjoy doing to make money, and to further develop while being able to just take a fucking day off when I want to is pushing me.
So unironically, your comment does actually ring true, but I feel it's more based around a communist/socialist idea of being able to create art and still afford to live.
I'm trying to be super positive about this because I know me and if I hit a depression spell I'm gonna shut off. I'm actually a pessimist in real life.
Bro, freelancers/contractors/consultants who have a reputation for getting the job done and getting it done well are afforded huge amounts of latitude.
People will put up with all kinds of shenanigans from someone who is good at what they do when that person is external to a company hierarchy. You'll fucking love it.
There will be intra-office discussions where someone will be like:
"My goodness, that website designer you brought in to do this is extremely gruff. They're downright rude, if you ask me..."
And the other person is gonna shrug their shoulders and be like:
"Look, if you want to go hunting for someone else who is reliable, who can do this job to the same standards, and who isn't going to demand 3x the price then be my guest but in the meantime remember that we hired him to design our website not to act as our receptionist."
Get ready for some emails that you might as well have stored as proforma templates for stuff like telling a company's mahogany row that until their team has achieved consensus and clarity of purpose, you will not be able to move ahead on the project, that the whole thing will be delayed by however many days it takes before they have arrived at this point and that you have been contracted to produce one website so if their employees are requesting that multiple websites be built then you would be happy to duplicate the standing contract as many times as the team desires at the same cost per contract based on how many iterations of the website they request from you.
It's shit like that which will light a fire under everyone's arses because, as long as your contract is worded correctly, you're basically telling them "You don't have your shit together and I'm not going to waste my time trying to marshal your staff remotely when you have an entire management team dedicated to this task which they are clearly incapable of doing themselves. I know that you basically needed this website launched by the agreed-upon due date but your deadlines are your problem - I'm not the person who will have to answer to your board because your staff couldn't decide on which colour scheme or choice of font they liked better. Let me know when you're serious about this because I ain't here to play."
Obviously getting from here to a point where people will put up with your shit will take a bit of work but as soon as people start recognising you as the guy, you will be able to set terms and boundaries like you wouldn't believe.
You know if you're clever about it and you are inclined towards it, you can also parlay your experience as an outsider working with a company or a team for web design into consultancy - it's actually really hard for a top-heavy organisation to get a picture of what the fuck is going on, where it's going wrong, and what to do about it.
Often consultants will be like organisational psychologists who'll do shit like designing anonymous surveys or conducting interviews in a very slick way but it's often just feel good bullshit that is marketed to executives using trendy business language and pretty powerpoint presentations to conceal boilerplate advice. Not all of them are like this but if you've worked in an office job for long enough then you've probably been at a company that has brought these types of clowns on board while the staff at the coalface have been trying to find a way to communicate the fact that being micromanaged is killing productivity for months and months now but nobody has been willing to listen and now you're expected to do shit like rating how much you agree with statements such as "When working for this company, I feel as though I am achieving the best solutions possible for our customers" and "The company vision makes me feel inspired"
Some executive types will see through the bullshit though and some will recognise that you might have insight which is invaluable so you can put a price tag on this stuff. Worst case scenario is that they don't buy what you're selling.
But if someone does throw the right amount of cash your way and you're capable of doing this kind of work you'd be able to sit down with the executive team and be like:
"This manager usually takes a week to respond to my simple requests and they are unable to provide a response that is direct and unambiguous. If this is how they treat outsiders, they're probably treating their team even worse. Do you find that their team is consistently the worst performers, that they lose contracts at an abnormally high rate, and often there are preventable costs that they incur due to what is apparently a lack of action or initiative? Have you noticed that highly motivated staff typically last less than 6 months in this team?"
Or whatever. Maybe you notice that the different team leads are engaged in a tug of war over you, maybe some manager just cannot make up their mind on anything, maybe none of the staff seem to have any clue what's going on, maybe nobody knows how to delegate jobs... you get the picture.
If you're able to apply organisational analysis and maybe prescribe some solutions, there's almost certainly a market out there for this kind of work. This might sound like a special kind of hell to you, it might be something that's really outside of the scope of your skill set, or it might be something that you'd take to really well. Just an idea that you might consider kicking around.
I realize this is exaggerated, but do you actually get useful responses with emails of that length? When I have to send a work email I can't write more than 2 sentences and expect a meaningful response, if I get one at all. The best is when you're literally trying to help someone else do their job and they don't respond. It's always managers too! ITS LITERALLY THEIR JOB TO REPLY TO EMAILS
I'd write a two-sentence email and people would get dark on me for it.
I'd write something flowery like that and people wouldn't read it.
I'd write something that would open with the lede, turn flowery for a paragraph or two, and then close with the lede and it still wouldn't be okay for whatever reason.
There were people who couldn't fucking answer bullet points when it was completely explicit.
Idk, part of it was that the staff felt overworked, a lot of it was that the role I was in represented a significant change especially with regards to the power balance in the organisation so staff were digging their heels in so as to obstruct my project by any means possible, part of it was just people being inscrutable jerks.
I pissed so many hours up the wall talking to managers to get them to performance-manage their staff on getting them to read and respond to their emails and "wrapping around" communication so that shitty staff wouldn't get away with basically lying about the expectations I was placing on them or what was being asked from them to achieve tasks. That place had a really weird culture.
I know it probably sounds like I was working as a hatchet man but that's the opposite of what I was actually doing. I don't really want to give specifics so I can maintain some anonymity but in round about terms my role was straddling the lines between compliance with regards to accreditation and internal policy as well driving devolution of power, mostly through organisational change.
Not to mention the psychological pain of having to write out bizarre corporate-speak emails for hours on end:
If that shit makes you wince or gives you flashbacks, just imagine what it's like being autistic and how that would amplify the suffering - I can barely scrape by doing normal social interactions without adding an extra layer of complexity into the mix smh. (No wonder I went completely bonkers working a desk job...)
I've written that exact email so many times
common american L tbh
Meanwhile I can basically just say hello, goodbye and "Any update on x? I'm waiting on it for y" without coming across as rude. The bizarre corporate speak is still there but it's for specific uses.
Y'know what's funny?
There's one particular job where I had to do this bullshit (just a typical NGO hellhole) but there some people who were on the level where could drop all the pretense and be very terse with without worrying about causing offence. Obviously any of the IT team would get that kind of bare bones no-nonsense style of emails out of me because I know what they're like and what they need - and it sure ain't some fucking flowery essay.
It was all "Problem -> Attempted solutions in bullet points -> My hunch about the cause -> What I need from them and a deadline if I'm working to one".
Anyway, whatever I was doing made enough of an impression that the IT team started calling the office I was based at specifically to talk to me about IT problems at my site and to get me to do any physical stuff they couldn't do remotely like identifying a status light, hitting a button, or plugging something in, even when it wasn't my personal IT problem and all of this stuff was completely outside the purview of my job.
Before I figured out what was going on this would cause me to panic because I'd get a call from the national office number or someone would inform me that there's an IT team member that's trying to find me and I'd be wondering wtf I was about to get in trouble over.
Turns out that they just needed someone who was capable of following instructions and who was able to communicate things using specific language and they managed to find their guy on the inside. I mean, I get it - I've done tech support for family and friends where it feels like you're pulling teeth but it was weird knowing that there was this whole IT team that knew me by name and would use me exclusively as their human interface for that site when I had never met any of them in my life and often I'd be away from that office for days on end.
Part of me was like "Goddamn, you'd prefer to wait 3 days just to get me to do some 2 minute job for you?" and another part of me was like "Of course the IT office has an informal list of all the site names, each with particular staff members that they have identified as being above the 'typing the word Google into the Google search bar to bring up Google' level of tech literacy that they share amongst the team."
This is any office job where you have to communicate with different teams honestly, not just IT. Getting things done is just building a list of competent people you can call to bypass all the various filters. One of the most common conversations at work is just "who was your guy at X who got Y done?".
It's extremely funny when you get blowhards who think the way to get shit done is to talk to the boss though. The small business tyrant clients we have just jump to the "I'll just call the boss then" the moment there is the slightest bit of friction or delay and it always makes me laugh. My boss is actually a pretty standup guy and really good at what he does, but if you're not important enough he will literally wait months to action something and these guys never are.
Email "masking" is the fucking worst.
I'm unemployed af so I am trying to start a shitty website making business and am trying to do a few cheap/free sites just to get a portfolio going. I was asked to make a new site for the local Blue Fascist Club and figured sure. Problem is that it's a bunch of old people that "don't understand technology" and can't give me a straight answer about why they have 3 different sites that are each in various stages of decay. The main one hasn't been touched in a decade. Another is just a parked domain. And for some reason instead of actually fixing their site issues, this past month they decided to have some random yahoo make a "new" site with Wix... it looks like shit and it's barely even a site.
Ok so I've been in communication with like 8 different people via email and text and am trying to be "professional" and no one seems to know shit about fuck. But like after a fucking week of trying to be professional, last night I was finally like "look, I just need to know if the club wants a shitty site or a good one. I was asked to make a site for the club and possibly a new appointed official. I'm kind of done wasting my time."
First rule of my new web dev business is gonna be "Say what you fucking mean"
In all seriousness, I'm sorry that you're having to go through that.
First off, lol!
My only regret is that I didn't pursue freelance right after college because I had the pipedream of some day getting a dead end job as a "code monkey".
After 2 decades of trying and failing to have a "career" I finally came to grips with the reality that I am unemployable under the current means of which people treat workers who have mental disabilities. So I'm finally going to just do my own thing and hope it sticks. The idea of having to "hustle" makes me sad but the thought of using a skill set that I'm actually decent at and enjoy doing to make money, and to further develop while being able to just take a fucking day off when I want to is pushing me.
So unironically, your comment does actually ring true, but I feel it's more based around a communist/socialist idea of being able to create art and still afford to live.
I'm trying to be super positive about this because I know me and if I hit a depression spell I'm gonna shut off. I'm actually a pessimist in real life.
Bro, freelancers/contractors/consultants who have a reputation for getting the job done and getting it done well are afforded huge amounts of latitude.
People will put up with all kinds of shenanigans from someone who is good at what they do when that person is external to a company hierarchy. You'll fucking love it.
There will be intra-office discussions where someone will be like:
"My goodness, that website designer you brought in to do this is extremely gruff. They're downright rude, if you ask me..."
And the other person is gonna shrug their shoulders and be like:
"Look, if you want to go hunting for someone else who is reliable, who can do this job to the same standards, and who isn't going to demand 3x the price then be my guest but in the meantime remember that we hired him to design our website not to act as our receptionist."
Get ready for some emails that you might as well have stored as proforma templates for stuff like telling a company's mahogany row that until their team has achieved consensus and clarity of purpose, you will not be able to move ahead on the project, that the whole thing will be delayed by however many days it takes before they have arrived at this point and that you have been contracted to produce one website so if their employees are requesting that multiple websites be built then you would be happy to duplicate the standing contract as many times as the team desires at the same cost per contract based on how many iterations of the website they request from you.
It's shit like that which will light a fire under everyone's arses because, as long as your contract is worded correctly, you're basically telling them "You don't have your shit together and I'm not going to waste my time trying to marshal your staff remotely when you have an entire management team dedicated to this task which they are clearly incapable of doing themselves. I know that you basically needed this website launched by the agreed-upon due date but your deadlines are your problem - I'm not the person who will have to answer to your board because your staff couldn't decide on which colour scheme or choice of font they liked better. Let me know when you're serious about this because I ain't here to play."
Obviously getting from here to a point where people will put up with your shit will take a bit of work but as soon as people start recognising you as the guy, you will be able to set terms and boundaries like you wouldn't believe.
You know if you're clever about it and you are inclined towards it, you can also parlay your experience as an outsider working with a company or a team for web design into consultancy - it's actually really hard for a top-heavy organisation to get a picture of what the fuck is going on, where it's going wrong, and what to do about it.
Often consultants will be like organisational psychologists who'll do shit like designing anonymous surveys or conducting interviews in a very slick way but it's often just feel good bullshit that is marketed to executives using trendy business language and pretty powerpoint presentations to conceal boilerplate advice. Not all of them are like this but if you've worked in an office job for long enough then you've probably been at a company that has brought these types of clowns on board while the staff at the coalface have been trying to find a way to communicate the fact that being micromanaged is killing productivity for months and months now but nobody has been willing to listen and now you're expected to do shit like rating how much you agree with statements such as "When working for this company, I feel as though I am achieving the best solutions possible for our customers" and "The company vision makes me feel inspired"
Some executive types will see through the bullshit though and some will recognise that you might have insight which is invaluable so you can put a price tag on this stuff. Worst case scenario is that they don't buy what you're selling.
But if someone does throw the right amount of cash your way and you're capable of doing this kind of work you'd be able to sit down with the executive team and be like:
"This manager usually takes a week to respond to my simple requests and they are unable to provide a response that is direct and unambiguous. If this is how they treat outsiders, they're probably treating their team even worse. Do you find that their team is consistently the worst performers, that they lose contracts at an abnormally high rate, and often there are preventable costs that they incur due to what is apparently a lack of action or initiative? Have you noticed that highly motivated staff typically last less than 6 months in this team?"
Or whatever. Maybe you notice that the different team leads are engaged in a tug of war over you, maybe some manager just cannot make up their mind on anything, maybe none of the staff seem to have any clue what's going on, maybe nobody knows how to delegate jobs... you get the picture.
If you're able to apply organisational analysis and maybe prescribe some solutions, there's almost certainly a market out there for this kind of work. This might sound like a special kind of hell to you, it might be something that's really outside of the scope of your skill set, or it might be something that you'd take to really well. Just an idea that you might consider kicking around.
I realize this is exaggerated, but do you actually get useful responses with emails of that length? When I have to send a work email I can't write more than 2 sentences and expect a meaningful response, if I get one at all. The best is when you're literally trying to help someone else do their job and they don't respond. It's always managers too! ITS LITERALLY THEIR JOB TO REPLY TO EMAILS
I'd get people doing weaponised shell-game on me:
I'd write a two-sentence email and people would get dark on me for it.
I'd write something flowery like that and people wouldn't read it.
I'd write something that would open with the lede, turn flowery for a paragraph or two, and then close with the lede and it still wouldn't be okay for whatever reason.
There were people who couldn't fucking answer bullet points when it was completely explicit.
Idk, part of it was that the staff felt overworked, a lot of it was that the role I was in represented a significant change especially with regards to the power balance in the organisation so staff were digging their heels in so as to obstruct my project by any means possible, part of it was just people being inscrutable jerks.
I pissed so many hours up the wall talking to managers to get them to performance-manage their staff on getting them to read and respond to their emails and "wrapping around" communication so that shitty staff wouldn't get away with basically lying about the expectations I was placing on them or what was being asked from them to achieve tasks. That place had a really weird culture.
I know it probably sounds like I was working as a hatchet man but that's the opposite of what I was actually doing. I don't really want to give specifics so I can maintain some anonymity but in round about terms my role was straddling the lines between compliance with regards to accreditation and internal policy as well driving devolution of power, mostly through organisational change.
My God is that how Americans write emails ? I would go crazy if I had to write so much to say so little.
It varies between different office cultures and it's a bit of an exaggeration but it's also pretty plausible that you'd see something like this.
Although I should mention that I'm not an American, I just live in a Yankee running dog country but it's pretty much the same shit.