Lies you’re told in corporate tech
One day, all the work you’ve put in will pay off — just not yet. This myth is at the heart of what corporate tech employees hear, breathe, and live daily as they work in the most innovative and cutting-edge workplaces in the world. For many, it’s both a lie and a promise that will never come true, and instead will lead them down a path toward burnout, exhaustion, mental health challenges, physical symptoms, and a stifled joy for the career they once loved.
In fact, research shows that 62% of tech employees feel physically and emotionally drained, and nearly half of IT professionals with high risk of burnout consider quitting within the next six months. The health repercussions aren’t just hypothetical — people with burnout have an 84% increased risk of Type 2 diabetes. The American Heart Association alerts people to the increased risk of coronary heart disease and high cholesterol. The Society for Human Resource Management found close to half of employees feel burned out, 30% call it stress, 22% call it anxiety, and only 40% are fulfilled. Other research has shown burnout and insomnia are linked — each increasing the risk for the other.
To recover from the lies you’ve been told, first we must identify the lies. What promises has your tech employer made to you? And do they have a history of coming to fruition, or do the goalposts keep moving? When I worked at Facebook, each day I walked in and faced walls covered in their “homegrown” mantras and mottos. “This is now your company”, “Be Bold” and notably, “The journey is 1% done.” Therein lies a truth we should all believe: that no matter how much we give of ourselves, it will never be enough. The vast majority of us won’t “make it” in tech. And if we find our jobs have somehow robbed us of ourselves along the way, was the journey really worth it?
“Someday” you’ll get the credit, recognition, and compensation you deserve
Are you waiting for your promotion, your moment in the spotlight, or even just a mention at your next team all-hands? You might find yourself waiting indefinitely. In a survey of more than 10,000 IT professionals, the top reason for wanting to leave their role is feeling underpaid or underappreciated.
That was exactly what drove me to leave my job at Facebook in 2021, after over 4 years of consistently reaching or exceeding my goals and successfully delivering my team’s work with no promotion in sight. My scope increased significantly over those 4 years; my team’s budgets, programs and projects succeeded and grew; I was a proponent and driver of my broader org’s geographic and scope expansion, and our impact was certainly positive for the company. Yet, those sweet promo goalposts were always juuuuuust out of reach.
Feeling appreciated at work means being fairly compensated. And ultimately, finding a new, higher paying job is one of the only ways you can guarantee yourself a meaningful increase in compensation. While tech jobs have a reputation for being highly paid and rife with benefits (and some are), others are still much too low for the round-the-clock expectations. “Working in Tech Doesn’t Automatically Make You Rich” -- we see that even in tech, folks struggle to earn enough to pay off student loan debt and live in high cost of living tech hubs. But then again, we hear sensational stories about how if you’ve got the right mix of cutting edge skills, you might find yourself in a comp war with other top talent, getting poached by Zuck for tens of millions of dollars. And so, the myth of “someday this will all pay off” is perpetuated.
After work, you’re off — and can have great work/life balance
In my first corporate tech role, I ignored the internal red flag when my new boss sent me a welcome email from maternity leave. I know she was excited to grow her team, but also, get the fuck off your screen and connect with the new life you brought into the world!!! In retrospect, that was the earliest warning signal that this manager was a world-class boundary violator. Instead, in my excitement of working at my shiny new gig, I brushed off my inner voice. But the personal ramifications of “this is now your company” cut deep.
Sure, you can have work life balance, but you better be ready to stay in a marginal place in your organization. Or you can stay up late working on a PR fire or a weekend crisis, and become a shining star. The unspoken message becomes very clear: Being available for work at any time of day or night is how you grow your career. Ignore work and set clear boundaries on your off time, at a cost. The cost, specifically, is that “high impact” asks will stop coming, and you’ll be passed up for future projects, promotions and other career opportunities.
EG - I had a kid while working at my first tech startup, and set clear boundaries around my time. When my org was tapped to open a new office in Portland, they said we were all “in the running” to be chosen for helping with this exciting new venture. But I never heard from the guy leading the project about my opportunity, and when I asked why, he said something like, “You have such strict boundaries around your personal life, I just didn’t think you’d be open to it.”
You can “have it all,” but not really — not completely. You can be a “mediocre” performer doing an excellent job observing work life balance. Or a top performer giving every waking hour to your inbox, while vacations, family dinners, and entire seasons of your life whiz by unnoticed.
You are a valuable part of an important team
Those signs I mentioned when you walk into the shiny Meta office buildings are meant to inspire, to communicate that you're a special part of an important team doing meaningful work. You’re one of the lucky ones… My team and I were working on the “bleeding edge of technology” -- brand new AI classifiers -- and responsible for major improvements on the social media platforms most Americans use daily. So, we must have mattered deeply to the company…right?
Looking back, those mottos were hollow; the false promises of a company that doesn’t actually have anyone’s back. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”, “Move fast and break things,” “This is now YOUR company” were attempts to instill ownership in employees. What they really meant was, if you take a risk and it works out, we get to claim it for the company and share in your success. But if you take a risk and fail, it’s on you alone.
You matter deeply at work
You are an important part of this team! No one else has your vision. Talent. Leadership. Innovation. Resilience. Words of affirmation are important, especially in corporate jobs where words are the primary form of communication. But too often, these specific words are meaningless. Sure, you and your manager may be tight; or maybe you have coworkers you genuinely enjoy spending time with. The reality is, though reports vary, that the average tenure of a big tech employee is just 1-3 years.
As we’ve seen with big tech layoffs in recent years, in which hundreds of thousands (there’s even a tracker for that) of our so-called “work family” were unceremoniously trimmed from the corporate rosters — we are all expendable in the eyes of our employers. It will take mere days, possibly weeks if you were highly specialized, for your boss to find another you. And they will be told, too, that they are now an important part of the team…the family. As the old adage goes, we are replaceable everywhere but home.
The truth is, as Sarah Jaffe says, work will not love you back. It might be fun for a while, or a position might bring you deep purpose and meaning, and that’s great. But buying into corporate lies we are commonly told in the tech industry puts us in a vulnerable position, and one that’s much harder to recover from once we’ve fallen for empty promises.
You just need to be more resilient
In early 2021, after over 4 years of growing my team’s portfolio of work, consistently reaching and exceeding our productivity goals, clawing my way out of a conflict of interest situation with my manager, and taking on more and more high-impact work for the company, I was finally in the running for a promotion. I felt sure that I would achieve it -- my team had recently restructured, taking on an exciting new product area with no new staffing, in a way that would enable Facebook users to more effectively connect and offer support during local and/or global emergencies. And I had four years of solid performance behind me.
It was the pandemic, and my dad was also dying, which my coworkers knew because I had relocated with my family to NJ to be with him for several months while he was sick. Upon returning from bereavement leave in late February, I was met with the news that I had not, in fact, attained the promotion I was up for. I later found out that the person who got it was a young white guy with an MBA, in an ads/business-facing role. He had been able to quantify an impressive financial impact, and his manager, someone I considered a friend and had known for years as a colleague, fought for him to be promoted over me.
It didn’t matter that I’d worked on incredibly complex workflows that literally nobody else in the world was doing. It didn’t matter that the 2020 elections went off without a hitch at Facebook. And it definitely didn’t matter that I did that while my dad was dying, while my marriage was falling apart, while raising young kids with special needs. I had “hung in there” for over four years with virtually no recognition. No matter how resilient I was, there was always something more devastating to “bounce back” from. No matter how much I achieved in my role, someone could always fight a little harder for the competition to get recognized. No matter how much they told us the meritocracy worked, I finally realized that if I wanted to achieve real success, I would need to break free from the invisible forces holding me back at work.
I recently read some essays in the book “Engage: Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous Futures,” and this line struck me to my core: "The project of endurance can develop the capacity to never be alive.”
This “project” relies on the myth that enduring external hardship at the expense of our internal wellbeing will someday pay off. It requires that people stop themselves from speaking out or advocating for improved conditions. It demands more and more resilience in the face of disappointment or discouragement. This is how we end up cowing to toxic bosses, slogging through jobs that won’t love us back while our one wild and precious life passes us by. Instead, we need to reclaim our agency, find our self-determination, and push back against norms of mistreatment, boundary-crossing, and abuse.
