You’ve probably noticed that working in a corporation is risky precisely because it’s so unpredictable. The gap between what the corporation promises and what a specific person actually does is so vast that it’s hard to know when the end will come, or who exactly it will hit and why. Office work is dangerous. And yet, people keep gravitating toward it.
Anyone who’s bothered to look into the job market knows that Ukraine has a severe shortage of skilled tradespeople. Wages in many trades exceed office salaries. We’ve even lived to see the day when the “engineer” everyone once despised is now in short supply too. But people go to offices anyway. Well, then don’t complain when they fire you.
The picture of the world in people’s heads determines their behavior—including whether they have a job or not. Here are three more examples on our topic. The first is the “value of a diploma.” Everyone’s familiar with the freshly minted graduate demanding an immediate thousand-dollar salary. His academy taught him his diploma was worth that much. So he sits on his mother’s neck—or the state’s—until they finally send him off to work for whatever they offer.
The second example concerns employers. Many know that finding remote work, unless you’re an IT specialist, is quite difficult. In the employer’s mind, work is identical to being present at the workplace. So they get presence instead of work. The third example is the misanthropic “science” of marketing. The viciousness of this devilish doctrine is that it claims to know something about people’s needs. The trouble is that the people themselves know nothing about their own needs. As someone put it: “If focus groups had existed at the dawn of automobile manufacturing, we’d all be riding around in carriages pulled by little horses.” No, I’m not against market analysis and recommendations derived from it—they’re useful and even necessary. But claiming knowledge that doesn’t exist—please, don’t do that. Yet marketers tell corporations exactly what kind of carriages and horses the consumer craves. Enormous resources go into all of this. The market inevitably punishes this activity, and so there you are—oops—you’re fired (usually, unfortunately, not marketing).