I Did It For Denise
Or: How to give a shit when you really just don't give a shit
“But Robby, I DON’T care about what I’ve worked on at this company, it’s just enterprise bullshit!”
The hardest part about being a coach is when I want to just tell someone, you know what? You’re right. Your boss is an asshole, your company is toxic, your product is boring. Because even though all of that might be true, so what? When you’re interviewing for a new job, you can’t just pass that information along with an “amirite?” wink. And when you’re walking into a new job, you need to be excited about what you’re building- even if it’s just enterprise bullshit.
Everyone wants a “mission driven” role, and every company claims to be “mission driven”. But employees also want to make “capitalism driven” salaries, and companies are doing a lot of stretching when they say their mission “drives” the company- sure it does, in the same way that an intoxicated Uber passenger “drives” from the backseat.
I’m not saying that you will never find mission driven work, but it’s not as black and white as that. The most mission driven companies I’ve worked at were often the hardest. When leadership made decisions about projects and partnerships that I felt cheapened the work we did, or were in opposition to our mission, I was scandalized. How could we work with this evil company? So what if they were writing a blank check for our product, they’re bad and we’re good!
And that was when a mentor took me aside and explained to me concepts that I wouldn’t fully comprehend until discovering Michael Parenti years later- in brief, there is no conscientious consumption in capitalism. And at the end of the day, whether you’re working in e-commerce or fintech or health tech or at a nonprofit, there’s really only one reason a company exists.
But regardless of how you feel, whether you are looking to find a new role or exceed at your current one, you need to be able to demonstrate the ability to align incentives. The goal here is to show you how to find something to take pride in, no matter what you are building.
Examples From My Journey
Early in my career I was interviewing at a company that sold furniture on the internet. This is the kind of thing that most people would look at and think ok, well, that’s pretty mundane. It’s e-commerce with some of the most difficult logistics you could imagine, what is there to be proud of? And often, when we had to work late or put in some extra work on a complex project, my coworkers would say “All of this so Denise in Oklahoma can get her sectional sofa”.
I struggled with how I spoke about this job in interviews because I had bought that narrative. In fact, because I couldn’t find anything to be proud of in my work, I spent all my time talking shit about the leadership instead. When I realized that this wasn’t it, I took some time to actually step back, get over my ego, and think “who was I helping? It has to be someone.”
And then it came back to me, exactly what I had said in my interview nearly 4 years prior. My entire life, my father has been a wholesale furniture salesman. When I was a kid I would wait by the door for him to get home from work, driving all over the tristate area with his massive books of glossy furniture pictures that I would help put together. Multiple times per year he’d be gone, flying to markets and warehouses and factories all over the world, bringing home Chinese teas and Brazilian CDs as apologies for his absence.
But thanks to this company that had, for all their faults, finally cracked the code for selling furniture online, he traded in the company car for a Herman Miller desk chair. His long days of driving were exchanged for easier days of Zoom calls. And he’d shot up the food chain, as he became the go-to for the digitalization of his craft, not only at his company but as a consultant for others. And I never had to collate thousands of shiny photos of furniture ever again.
Redemption For Denise
I’m lucky to have that personal connection to the company, but that wasn’t the only story I found. I started to ask, what’s so bad about Denise that we are maligning her use of our service? If it’s so easy to look down on her, how can we elevate her? So I flipped the script, and told interviewers that we were flattening the earth. Living in a metropolitan area, I have access to all kinds of furniture stores, so much so that I can easily take for granted the home goods that are essentials for every day living.
But Denise, in rural Oklahoma, has to drive almost an hour to get to the only furniture store in her town, where selection is incredibly limited. And when she’s buying her child’s first bed, the bed that her baby will grow up into a young adult in, she deserves to have the same options that I do. And there is absolutely nothing false about that. It’s almost uplifting enough of a story to help me forget that this same company sold $200k worth of beds to a federal detention center where migrants were to be held. But I don’t talk about that in interviews.
Years later I was working at a company selling cosmetics. When I interviewed at this company, I spoke about my personal gender journey, and how their makeup was the first that I purchased and learned to use to help make me feel good in my own skin. And while working there, coworkers would again joke about the effort we were putting in to make sure that “Ashleigh Lynn gets her lipstick in time.” And when they did, I would remind them of our Denise.
In this case, Denise was not a hypothetical person. She was a real person, a cancer patient, who had sent us an email. As a woman in her 40s going through intense chemotherapy, she had not only lost all of her eyebrows and eyelashes, but the color in her face had all but disappeared. She wanted to tell us that because of our “no-makeup makeup” brand, she was able to feel like herself again. Not a glammed out teenager, but a real adult woman with beauty and strength. She might be the .01% of our customers, but if I’m going to wake up at 3am on black friday to launch a sale, and I need my Simpsons-esque “Do It For Her” motivation to get me going until the coffee kicks in, I’m doing it for Denise.
Back To This Enterprise Bullshit
So here’s a client who, understandably, cannot for the life of her understand why she should be proud of her work. She works on a team that works on sub-feature of a sub-feature of an enterprise solution that’s identified with a three letter acronym that the vast majority of its users don’t even know the meaning of, and is constantly dealing with requests from major enterprise users who are nameless, faceless, and probably make more of the same corporate slop themselves.
So we broke it down.
Me: “So you don’t think this is important. Why?”
Them: “Because all of the users are big corporate bullshit companies”
Me: “All of them?”
Them: “Well all the ones that matter”
Me: “Maybe all the ones that matter to your finance department, but clearly they aren’t the ones that matter to you. Is there a free, or small business tier?”
Them: “I don’t even know to be honest”
After checking the marketing site, yes, there is a free tier. Ok. That’s progress.
Me: “Great. So a mom and pop business who wants to adapt and grow an e-commerce presence can use your product. Your code. And we’ve identified that the product you build might not be sexy, but it’s part of web infrastructure- meaning, without it, the internet in it’s current state wouldn’t exist.”
Them: “Right, but I only did a small part of it and-”
Me: “You did it. It doesn’t matter how big it was. It doesn’t matter if someone else would have done it if you didn’t. You did it. You built something that helps thousands of businesses sell their products over the internet, and your code is running on thousands of websites, and being used by millions of customers around the world. So every one line of code you’ve written is a small butterfly wing that is creating a huge wind. And if that isn’t enough, great- then you tell the interviewer that you’re ready for even more impact.”
This is when my client said the one thing that makes me happiest to hear in a session:
“Goddammit Robby, fine.”
This paraphrased conversation is from an actual client in my NextPath Embark Jobseeker’s Cohort. The next program will be starting on April 20th, and there are still spots available for women and genderqueer SWEs. If you believe this type of coaching from an experienced technology leader could be beneficial to you, let’s talk.
This is genius Robby! It can be hard to see the forest for the trees when you feel like just a cog in the machine. Love this perspective shift