The Tower of Babel

Why a corporate job may not be suitable for you

I don't consider myself Catholic or Christian — I may try to become a proper Buddhist someday, though – despite my traditional Mexican upbringing. But that doesn't mean I can't be spiritual. I have beliefs and I believe that stories are a very good tool to explain things, things that are in our subconscious but we can't yet articulate. Sometimes we first need to dream before we can articulate the things we mean.

Here's my TL;DR of the story of The Tower of Babel: At some point in the history of Judeo-Christian tradition, it is said that humans decided to build a tower so high it could reach heaven. This was all possible because the people spoke the same language. God then noticed their plans and the tower. From that moment, the people began speaking different languages. The tower's construction then became an impossible feat. Since they couldn't understand each other, the disagreements between them halted the tower's construction.

Why do I bring this up?

The mission of a large corporation is similar to building a tower so high it can reach heaven: It's a very, very ambitious goal (whatever its nature is). If you've ever worked at a large corporation, I'm sure you've experienced something like this at some point: In a corporation — any corporation – you'll usually be asked to do something redundant, unnecessary, or pointless. For example: During my time as a TSE, we were asked to write the following for every support case...

• Handoff Notes: To transfer the case and not have a colleague read through the entire case history. If you are very responsible you'd want to add preventive handoff notes for all your cases all the time (in case someone else needs to handle it urgently).
• Case Summary: Cases used to be automatically closed with a generic message after various days of inactivity from the customer. But at some point, it was decided we needed to proactively close the cases and send a summary of what had happened so far. If the customer then responded, we would have to repeat this every time the case was about to be closed due to inactivity.
• Case Closing Notes: Once a case is closed, we were asked to add an internal note describing...
  • What had happened
  • What resources (internal and external) had been used to resolve the case
  • Various other details

Each of these 3 texts had its own different template. If you didn't use the template, you may have to explain to someone why you didn't do so and risk making it a bigger issue in the eyes of management. You would usually find yourself writing the same thing over and over just to change the grammatical person since whoever was reading it would be different at times (the customer, a colleague, a case reviewer, etc.). Toward the end of my time as a TSE, I wrote all my summaries as if they were going to be sent to the customer. That way, colleagues could still understand it and literally paste the text when introducing themselves to save time, a precious resource when handling impactful, high-priority issues in big tech).

These 3 texts essentially had the very same content. Any person reading them would want the same thing out of it: "I want to know what's happened so far so I can do my job". Essentially: "I want to know what's up with the case". But it was all more convoluted than it had to be because "TSEs and management couldn't speak the same language".

I did try to change this situation. I would be heard by some people, but in the end, the operation would continue the same. Being unable to improve this situation left me feeling like Sisyphus — a mortal punished by Greek gods by having to push a boulder to the top of a mountain; only for it to fall every time it reached the top– the 3 notes being my boulder.

I have no reason to believe this situation was specific to anything other than corp. I had one other similar job before TSE filled with more of the same. So if you are particularly averse to redundant, unnecessary, or pointless tasks on a daily basis, then you should be very careful when taking up a corporate job. But what about all this makes us feel unfulfilled? What's at the core of this? Let's touch upon that next.