I have been working at a certain company for more than two years, and I have witnessed this company transform from a small workshop into its current grand situation. I sincerely wish the company continues to thrive.
I am the kind of person who works hard without complaint and does not care about personal interests. As long as it is for the good of the company, I would rather suffer a little loss and would love to see the company flourish. However, my spirit of prioritizing the company's interests has not received the respect it deserves. I find myself increasingly disrespected; shrewd people think you are adorably foolish, while foolish people try to take advantage of you.
In any case, both shrewd and foolish people unanimously see you as a non-confrontational, naive person who can be easily manipulated and exploited for their interests.
The company will not protect you because the leaders believe that everyone acts for personal gain and that there cannot be employees who genuinely sacrifice personal interests for the company's benefit. Therefore, they may see your spirit as foolish, or even suspect you of having ulterior motives.
As a result, I have gradually been marginalized because the leaders who want to build their own circles see you as non-aggressive and likely to drag down their status, so I am destined to be an outsider. Any opinions or good suggestions I have cannot be communicated upward; they can only be diluted, and any achievements will certainly be diluted by more people, as everyone has developed a habit of seeking traces of their own contributions and logical cause-and-effect relationships with existing results.
Therefore, loyal and capable employees cannot survive in such a company, or rather, they cannot work without feeling depressed.
At this time, I found that newly hired employees, who had switched careers midway, actually received much higher salaries than I did, even though I had been there for over two years. Moreover, they contributed nothing in actual work, and even lacked understanding of the industry and effective implementation methods, yet they acted bossy, and a group of people applauded them, which made the atmosphere feel stifling. No one cares about the company's interests; everyone is just eager to seize more personal benefits, and everyone is happy, as the company is currently a lucrative entity that seems to have no issues with how long it can last.
The new boss is a real estate businessman who, after twenty glorious years in real estate, has accumulated wealth through various exploitative means. In his view, human nature is inherently greedy, and the company's interests are always in conflict with the users' interests. For the company to develop, it must continuously oppress the users' interests, but blatant oppression clearly has a bad impact, so a certain degree of external packaging is still needed. However, he is very averse to anyone treating this packaging as something substantial, so he emphasizes this point during meetings with middle and senior management.
At the same time, he believes that the company is merely a tool that can be sold off for excess profits at the right time. The company's value depends on the boss's own packaging and resource capabilities, and has nothing to do with anyone else. Therefore, he does not want any external communications to reflect the company's culture or team. If there are indeed remarkable achievements, they must be packaged as his personal accomplishments, and employees and users must not be mentioned. Unfortunately, over the years, the company seems to have had no impressive performance, so this direction of packaging has also come to nothing.
Thus, with such a boss, it is not surprising that the company exhibits personal utilitarianism, bureaucratism, and a reckless pursuit of quick success.
Moreover, the various meetings and business activities in the company are actually not many; they are more about praising and ideological education. For example, how to be grateful that the company has supported you, how users should be grateful that the company has helped them become wealthy, and any users attempting to leave the platform must be dealt with severely, including but not limited to confiscating side income, banning accounts, transferring team members, and canceling various benefits.
Later, when the department needed to select candidates for promotion, it required a presentation meeting where a group of people in the company would score. Whoever scores the highest can stand out, with different job levels and salary treatments. Many people value such opportunities greatly, and they successively went to perform. I did not go, but I imagined the atmosphere must have been very lively.
Since participation was voluntary, I did not take part. I can't really describe my feelings; perhaps it is because I have started to view the company through tinted glasses. I even feel that any contribution I make to the company feels very uncomfortable. I urgently need to withdraw from this state of contribution and let them perform without my involvement. Because this kind of indulgent management may one day be branded as a pyramid scheme, as an old employee who has been through it all, I feel powerless to prevent this situation, but I also cannot bear to see such things happen during my tenure.
When I successfully resigned, I felt relaxed; I could finally be myself again. I no longer have to participate in those superficial matters and the affairs of the world. I know that from now on, no miracles will happen in the company, and it will even be unavoidable to be branded as a pyramid scheme, but all of this has nothing to do with me anymore.
Later, a team came to invite me to visit the company. Although it was not far away, I still declined, saying that I would not go back to a place I had left. However, I still hope the platform can develop better because if the platform develops better, users can survive better on it.
In fact, many small companies, after growing into slightly larger ones due to certain opportunities, will go through such a stage, including the continuous loss of old employees and the constant influx of new employees. This is the norm of development. In this process, various reconstructions will also be experienced.
For example, when the company was just starting out as a small workshop, it realized the importance of user education and thus expanded its team. At this time, it needed to recruit a large number of middle management personnel from outside. Because the company believes that people brought in from outside can bring more possibilities and innovations to the platform.
However, those brought in from outside may not understand the platform's culture and may still be stuck in the atmosphere of past experiences. Therefore, they are very eager to validate and prove their correctness. In this case, whether the platform's past accumulation was intentional or meaningless is not an important factor; they need to rebuild something to replace the past. Thus, in this situation, it is essentially moving the original foundation.
However, if the newcomers do not bring better things, they can only refine and process the original elements of the company, which is also the main approach of many new employees. Once this approach is adopted, packaging through the platform's power becomes the main form of external promotion.
For example, a newcomer may package themselves as the company's super lecturer or cosmic lecturer, sounding as if they are on par with a creator deity, and then rename and rebrand the content contributed by users for external promotion. If there are no better proof images, they might as well create some. At first, they might feel a bit embarrassed, but after talking about it more, they even start to believe it themselves, without blushing or feeling guilty, shouting out loud.
However, this also leads to an irretrievable consequence: users are unwilling to be the main driving force behind the platform's development. They begin to close off their circles and are reluctant to actively participate in the company's activities. Although this is a gradual process, once it transforms into such a consequence, it cannot be reversed.
Over time, it will be found that too much vitality of the users has been consumed, so the strategy must be changed to become community operation service providers. The so-called lectures no longer play a substantive role, and even the company's account's appeal has lost its strong influence. At this time, another mindset is injected into the users' emotions: this stage is not theirs.
Years later, when someone is working on a new project, they still obtain some course materials from this company, thinking that it is the content that leads to success. I can only smile; these contents are quite ordinary, and the improvement of the company's performance is not due to this factor playing a key role. However, this also illustrates that cognition indeed determines the power of behavior.