On being valued

I've had a long tech career, I've worked for so many startups I've almost lost track of them. However, I'm not sure I'd ever truly say that I've been "valued" in my career. I've created significant value in my career for organisations, but then I've been tossed aside the moment it was convenient for the company. Recently however, I've started to see that change, and I think maybe I've finally found the right room .

There was always something rewarding about building something new, fixing something, finding solutions, and figuring out what's next. What I've realised the hard way over time, is that other peoples & other organizations' perception of your value is extremely dynamic and mutable. How others perceive you as being valuable is a function of what they need from you rather than a reflection on your inherent value that you bring to the spaces you're in. Generally.

You can create significant value for an organisation, but as soon as you become a point of friction (demanding we do better by our customers, asking for additional resources, asking for better working conditions, etc), the company will toss you aside without a second thought. Institutional knowledge be damned.

In today's tech driven world people's perception of value was and is has been shifting. Many people want to get value without putting anything in as input (time, money, love, etc), they want output without input. There's a reason AI generated content is a hit with people who didn't value the production of content: they just wanted to be entertained and occupied, they didn't care about how they got there. That didn't matter to them.

However, we're also starting to see what people value shift, largely due to big tech platforms just not caring about us. Platforms are enshittifying rapidly to meet shareholder or oligarch whims, and this is showing people first hand how little these platforms valued them.

I think we've also seen this same thing in the workplace, with the massive layoffs, the "AI can replace these human jobs", and continuous union busting by large corporations and SMEs. We've seen the disastrous outcomes that follow next. Management treats humans as worthless, and consequent the company, which is a function of all of it's humans, becomes worthless (or at least reduced in value, eventually).

I've interviewed with a LOT of companies in my career, and one of the most frequent pieces of feedback I've received has been "you're so negative about your past employers", when what I said was the honest truth "I asked for better conditions, and was tossed aside", "I asked for medical leave, and was tossed aside", "I was used for my value but then that was not reciprocated by the company".

These are all things that have happened to me. Yeah, it is almost a depressive outlook on work via the repeated exposure to being under-valued and the PTSD that comes with that. Something my therapist often reminds me of is that repeated exposure to negative things leads you to question if you are innately valuable as a person, if you have worth as a person, or if you are worthless. It's an insidious thought pattern, and it affects everything.

A friend of mine recently published an article on Addiction through the lens of feminism (it's well worth a read). In it she mentions how Psychologists teach us to avoid sentences like “I am depressed, I am ADHD, I am borderline, etc.” and how we should instead use phrases like “I have depression, I have ADHD, I have BPD”. It's a subtle shift but the difference is massive: the latter describes us as having a condition whilst not shifting our entire identity to be centered around that condition. I have alcoholic tendencies, but I am not alcoholism, it's a part of me, but it is not my full self.

I recently wrote about finding the right room , and I think I would now go beyond focusing on just finding the right room and also acknowledging to your self when you're not in the right room.

I would now say you should be finding the right room in which your presence is actively valued, and where they make sure you know your presence is valued through affirmative actions.

This weekend was AtmosphereConf , and whilst I wasn't able to be there in person, I was attending remotely, and the number of times people gave me a shout out in there talks absolutely blew me away.

I think this weekend just proved that I'm now in the right rooms, even if I not even physically there. Y'all rock for that, thanks for making this trans girls' weekend.

Until next time!

Header Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash