I didn’t really intend on doing another post about this, but I had an idea of an analogy in mind, but I never actually got to it, because when I get into the writing zone my fingers take over, and before I knew it, I had blathered on about stocks and I didn’t feel like making some bloated mega post about it and adding this into it when I could separate it and boost my post count instead.
There’s this film on Netflix I saw a while back, called The Platform. I believe it was a Mexican film, but it was a rather good film, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something fresh and unique to rehashed American cinema and doesn’t mind reading subtitles or can understand Spanish.
The film is about this, for lack of a better term, prison, that is an indeterminate number of floors, where every single floor has two people occupying them. In the center of every single floor is a big, square shaped hole. Every single day, a large platform descends the hole, sequentially stopping on every single floor for like two minutes. On the platform is a massive spread of a elaborate feast, and the people on the floors ravenously stuff their faces and eat what they can before the platform descends to the next level below.
Naturally, this means those at the top of the prison have the advantage of having the most available, and cream of the crop foods available to them, and as the platform sinks lower and lower into the prison, eventually runs out of food, leading to those in the lower levels to become violent and homicidal from hunger.
Spoiler alert, here’s the kicker: the amount of food on the platform could modestly feed every single person in the entire prison, if all the people could get on the same page and agree to only eat a set amount. However, naturally that is an impossibility when you have so many different personalities, so it’s a system perfectly designed to ensure chaos is always maintained.
So, back to the analogy: at my job, every single department has a pool of money (the platform) in which employees typically get their seemingly given, annual 2.5% cost of living wage increase, at the very minimum. There is a nominal amount more in the pool, for deserving employees to get a little bit than 2.5%, but for the most part, these pools are set so that pretty much everyone could get their, at the very least, their cost-of-living increase, because the world is always getting more expensive, and that 2.5% goes a long way with keeping up with society.
Over the last two years, I’ve received 1.68 and 2.2% wage increases, in spite of all the contributions I’ve made to my team. I’m not trying to inflate my contributions to the team, but I did design the exact workflow and process that kept my entire fucking team afloat for the last three years, and steered the car steady despite it being a volatile and explosive Ford Pinto, so I think I would’ve at least, deserved my fucking 2.5%.
I’d like to blame my shitty bosses for these shitty raises, but to their credit, the problem is actually those within the prison that exist higher than all of us. They’re basically wolfing down all of the food from the platform by giving themselves and their cliquey accomplices elevated raises, and by the time the platform gets down to my level, there’s barely anything left to give me, or my subordinates.
As shitty as my wage increases have been, I’ve had to go the last two years trying to explain to my reports why they’re now getting these sub-2% raises when they’ve all been getting 2.5%+ every year before the recent ones.
The difference is, in The Platform, floor assignments change randomly every single week, and pairs could be on floor 4 one week, and then be on floor 201 the next. At my job, those who are at the bottom of the prison usually remain there, and short of some dignity-robbing ass-kissing and joining the cliques of the company, is usually impossible to get to a higher floor to where there might be some food left on the platform.
Aside from the shitty raises, my primary reason for leaving is simply the fact that I’ve identified that within my department exists something of an inner circle of people, to where pretty much every position of power within it, is occupied by someone in it, and those not in it, don’t seem to be able to climb the ladder. I’ve watched people who came into the company at the same time or later than me, rocket past my position in the company, and it’s not difficult to see how, based on the people they fraternize with.
I actually tried to make a move within the department, during a re-org. I identified a position under a boss I used to work under, and I thought it would be a good fit. However, when I learned that the interviewing would be done by several people, among them being some inner circle people, I kind of knew that my chances were dust.
In essence, I should thank the experience, because it was upon getting that rejection did it dawn on me that I should probably consider that I should be the one who needed to leave the company. The clarity gained has been invaluable, and fuck the stocks and the shitty raises, I have succeeded at getting the fuck out of a toxic environment, and hopefully the next chapter of my career will prove to be a successful upgrade.
