The Dumbest White-Collar Logic Of Them All

Start here, with this Substack newsletter from Stowe Boyd .

There’s a whole section in there about layoffs — an interesting topic, and definitely something to wring your hands over, but also completely unavoidable. Companies used to exist (maybe in 1950) for a societally net-good reason of providing jobs and income and a way out of the home (just for men back then). Now they basically just exist to make the founders and owners rich, and not much else. That pivot gutted a lot of other aspects of American life, but that’s way too complicated to dive into on a Friday post, so we won’t for now.

Basically, layoffs are inevitable. They happen almost everywhere, even at companies with $3 trillion market caps. They happen for various reasons and now we call them “right-sizing” or whatever, but the point is: you cannot run from them. I got laid off from a church in February. A church!

In that Boyd article I linked up top, a few different white-collar professionals talk about how, when they start a new job, they want to be seen as “irreplaceable.” That’s so LOL. It’s even ROFL. No one is irreplaceable, not even the CEO (you can always find someone willing to step up and try to be a CEO for the compensation), and thinking you are irreplaceable or bulletproof is amazing corporate delusion. It’s up there with “Work is family!” (No it’s not.)

This is a complicated issue and if you really buy into old-school notions of “productivity” and “the firm” and “moving up,” you are ignoring me by now already, so let me just add one semi-salient point here.

The whole “I must be seen as irreplaceable” argument has a very distinct cousin: busy vs. productive. To be seen as “irreplaceable,” what a lot of people in white-collar do is they become insanely busy. They take on every piece of shit hurled over the fence. They are in meetings constantly. Lots of deadlines and tasks. They are good little busy bees.

The thing is, at the end of the day, all that matters to people who make layoff decisions is what you ship or sell. Where’s the money? The second tier (sometimes) is “How annoying is this person?” An annoying person that ships can still be laid off — bothersome to execs — and a non-annoying person who doesn’t face revenue can be retained. But those are outliers.

People make themselves busy (or at least appear busy) to be seen as “layoff-proof,” but they often busy themselves with things that don’t matter to anyone with decision-making clout or ability at the company. As such, their “busy” is gone in a puff of smoke, because when costs must be cut, “Look at how slammed my calendar is” doesn’t mean a thing. There’s a rubber and a road with productivity (or at least revenue generation) and busy. Productivity usually wins. I actually hate saying “productivity” in this context, because it’s such a suitcase word for corporate, and most executives don’t really care if Cindy or Timmy is “productive.” They either want them to generate revenue, help others generate revenue without pushing back or asking questions, or go find another job.

The “I Must Become Layoff-Proof” element of white-collar is laughable to watch. No one can protect themselves from layoffs, least of all with the emergence of more automated solutions, and the push to be seen as “busy” and thus “relevant” is usually a comedy of errors as well.

For now at least, the only solution is to realize there still are enough jobs that need filling, and there are industries with lower barriers to entry if you get run out of various things over 10–20 years. There’s still some employment hope. It’s waning, but it still exists. If you do get laid off, which does happen to most of us more than once, you can always throw up the green banner skin on LinkedIn and start looking.

Do you think busy somehow means relevant?