Felicia Sullivan writing about modern work. She nails it:

In my career, I’ve been thanked a handful of times for going above and beyond, over delivering. Over working. Peers of mine recommended that I give more for the same amount of money because that will set me apart. As what? A sucker. A fool. A person who can be used by the season to profit and so readily discard me when my usefulness fades. It’s one-way corporate entitlement.

She’s writing in the context of that awful TikTok of the woman getting let go from Cloudflare.

A bunch of my friends commented about how ‘this is how life is now, she should suck it up’, and it blew me away. This isn’t and should never be normal.

I last held a full time job in mid 2017, and the way Sullivan describes it exactly matches my experience. When I started out on my own, a friend told me his mantra:

Don’t do work for companies. Do work for people.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t take on corporate clients, but he doesn’t hesitate to decline an opportunity if the person he’s dealing with is a bad fit. Easier said than done, but I try to hold to it, and it’s made my work so enjoyable. I’m also lucky that my wife’s job has health insurance and other big-company perks, though when I listen to her work stories, I sometimes wonder if it’s worth it. Sullivan again:

Working long hours is absurd and unhealthy. Expecting overwork, over-delivery is absurd… Money is the glue that binds us and being stuck and grimy and tethered can make us terribly unkind. The kind of unkind where you have no problem sitting across from someone on a screen and telling them they’ve lost their job because it’s a business decision.