49-year-old designer is penalized at work for keeping his personal life private, and is fed up with corporate culture treating basic boundaries as a career-ending red flag

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  • I'm Tired of Being Penalized In "Corporate America" for Protecting My Privacy

    We all know that "Corporate America" is shady as h I, and that there are a number of "unspoken" tactics used to hold people down,
  • Man covering his face at an office desk with a laptop, glasses, and folders in the background.
  • deny them promotions, or even get them fired. With that being said, it seems like one of the most widely accepted/open forms of shadiness is
  • the understanding that refusing to share details about your personal life does not work favorably for you, and that absolutely disgusts me. And I'm not even talking about super-
  • intimate personal details, I'm talking about sharing details about your weekend, what your favorite songs are, what kinds of things your kids
  • like to do for fun, etc. My answer to all of that is NONE OF YOUR D BUSINESS. IN
  • Some people like to keep their work and personal lives separate, and I'm one of them. How the h I does that
  • affect my job performance in any way? I'm 49M and I'm divorced with two kids, 20F and 18M, and that's all they need to know. I have no issues
  • with people trying to be friendly and ask certain questions, but when I keep my answers basic and make it indirectly clear that I don't talk much
  • Man sitting at an office desk with his eyes closed and one hand pressed to his face.
  • about that stuff, then people should respect that and move the h Ion, but they just can't. Some teams I've been on even have these cringy-a forced "work bonding sessions"
  • where they make people ask and answer personal questions in a setting where it's pretty much impossible to avoid answering or say "No." It all makes me so incredibly sick and angry.
  • I'm a designer paid to design. Period. I'm not here to make friends or make enemies; I'm here to do a job. I'm very pleasant, friendly, get along with EVERYONE, and will even crack
  • a joke or two, so why can't we just leave it at that? It's so crazy to me that jobs will (secretly) use things about your personal life to cut your salary/j you around because they
  • know you have stuff going on at home and need the money, but then also find ways to punish you for NOT revealing things about your personal life to them too. I was even told by
  • my boss that it's hard to build a rapport with people who don't talk much about their personal lives, and that some find it difficult to have "work trust" with people who don't
  • reveal much about themselves, which is just pure unadulterated buffoonery to me. What the h I does me going to the beach with my
  • kids on the weekend have to do with solving a usability problem on an app? Anyone want to answer that?
  • To be clear, nothing was said to me that would constitute an HR claim (they wouldn't help much anyway), as my boss was just explaining to me WHY people will often ask about/try
  • to dig into personal things about me, but I still find it to be a bunch of unfair bs. Jobs have no problem whacking you in a nanosecond if
  • their numbers dip even for a single day. They don't factor in your kids, family, and all the personal ish you've told them over the years, because the bottom line is that
  • you're just another replaceable cog in the wheel, yet YOU'RE somehow still an unreliable "aloof" untrustworthy unpromotable weirdo
  • for choosing to just forego the personal conversations altogether and focus on what they're actually paying you to do... YOUR JOB!
  • D ed if you do, d ed if you don't. I absolutely hate "Corporate America" with a passion.

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