What are the biggest lessons you have learned in the corporate world?

Good to share

What are the biggest lessons you have learned in the corporate world?

A simple list

1. DTA: Don’t Trust Anyone, especially Management and HR.
2. Shit travels up. If I complain to my boss, then he’ll complain to his, and so on. Never complain about your superiors to peers or staff.
3. Nobody works for free. If you’re doing work, get paid for it.
4. Stay out of the huddle. Every office has a group of people who congregate at the water cooler, break room, or cafeteria. The sole purpose of these groups is to commiserate and brew negativity.
5. Your manager is not your friend.
6. HR is there solely to protect the management and the company. Woe unto you if you think that they give one shit about you.
7. HR is generally useless and underperforms. Do not expect their support.
8. If you work in IT, then you need an exit strategy. Your goal should be to reach the management level as soon as possible. There is no upward potential in being an individual contributor; the pace of change is vicious and unrelenting, and it is inevitable that you will simply be unable to keep up. Do you see a lot of senior IT talent in their 50’s and 60’s? Nope.
9. If you want to make real money, then you need to be managing people.
10. Everything is about sales. If you are not directly tied to generating income, then you’re seen as an expense or cost center. That’s bad for business—and bad for your career. Income generators keep their jobs. Expenses get reorganized or cut.
11. Interview carefully. The person directly managing you will make or break your career with the company.
12. Work less, not more. You are paid based upon a 40-hour workweek—not a 50-hour or a 60-hour one. It is your boss’s problem to figure out how to staff and manage resources effectively.
13. Avoid personal debt like the plague. Debt makes you a slave to your income, which in turn makes you a slave to your employer. Your goal should be to be able to walk away from any job, at any time, for any reason.
14. Network. I cannot stress this enough. No one gets jobs by applying to company websites, because HR and Recruiting are broken. Your best opportunities will come from people you know.
15. Maintain your integrity. Always do what you say you will do. Never over-promise and under-deliver.
16. Create compelling, concise content that is uniquely your own and that is recognized as such.
17. Don’t become complacent. Everyone is replaceable and will eventually be replaced.
18. Never share with colleagues any information that can be used against you. They will do so, eventually. Try to recall the Miranda warnings on TV: Anything you say can and will be used against you…
19. Your boss knows less about how to be a manager than what is required. Managers are professional politicians.
20. Your current company doesn’t give a fuck about you. Companies act in their own self-interest.
21. You should be advancing in role, title and pay level every 2–3 years as a junior to mid-level employee, every 3–4 years as a mid-level to senior employee, and every 4–5 years as an executive. If you are not, then find a new job.
22. If your company doesn’t pay bonuses or cost-of-living adjustments, then leave. No one can afford failure to keep pace with inflation, and high performance should always be rewarded.
23. Pay attention to your employee benefits, particularly if you have a family. Companies have gotten stingy, and you can end up paying huge sums for deductibles and for out-of-pocket and uncovered expenses.
24. Remote work (telecommuting) may be convenient, but it limits your potential growth. No one ever scored a big promotion from being in a remote-only role. In-person office relationships are critical.
25. Age discrimination is real. Your chances of finding work after 50 diminish every year. The exceptions are management positions at the director and management level, for which an older age is expected.
26. Save every penny that you can.
27. An MBA is worthwhile only when you have a plan that includes an ROI (return on investment). As a general rule, if you have more than 15 years’ experience in the same industry, an MBA won’t make you more employable.
28. If you have student loans, work for a non-profit early in your career while you can afford to make less. The PSLF program sets up 120 qualified payments on time (using income-based repayment) and you are done. The moment you have children, you can throw away any frugality plan you imagined you had.
29. Choose your college by understanding that you are buying into a social network. If you want to live and work in Boston, attending UC Santa Barbara, for example, isn’t going to amount to shit, and you’ll be just like every other asshole out there. The potential for referrals and networking is huge. That’s why Harvard charges $50k a year.
30. Be inspired by what your employer does, or you will never do your best work. Any asshole with a keyboard can collect a check. To be inspired is to be fulfilled as a person, and there is no better formula for happiness.
31. Stress is a motherfucker and will eat you alive. No one lay to his or her deathbed and said, “I wish that I had worked harder,” or “I wish that I had saved more.” Instead, they always wish for more time. Companies don’t give a fuck about your workload, your stress, or whether, you live or die, quit or get fired. You are there for one purpose only: to make them money, thus and fulfilling their shareholder and stakeholder expectations. Don’t be a statistics
32. Be nice. Nice people get things, and mean people suck.
33. If your boss is a rotten fuck, leave at the earliest opportunity. Toxic managers are never worth it.
34. Culture trumps strategy (or talent) every time. If you can’t fit in, you’re fucked. Adapt or die, or move back to wherever you came from. You need to be aware that the US has MANY different cultural areas, each with different norms. If you’re East Coast and go to Seattle, you will never fit in. If you're from the West coast and go to the Deep South, i.e., the former slave states, you are fucked. And if you’re from Texas and go to New England, you are fucked. Each area has its own personalities and cultural norms that will leave you frustrated and on the outside looking in. You’ve been warned!
35. When you land a job, commute time is a huge issue. Almost every major metropolitan area in the U.S. and abroad is in complete gridlock. Shortly after World War II, the United States made the fateful decision in favor of the automobile as the default standard of transportation. The emergence of national and state highways created a massive infrastructure that worked fine when there were around 120 million people in the country, but now it sucks balls with 330 million. If the amount of time that you spend in the car commuting back and forth to work isn’t part of your game plan, you are fucked. It will eat away at you like a cancer. There is nothing worse than spending $1,000 per month to own and operate a car just to go to work in the city. You are fucked! Chicago, Boston, and NYC are the only cities in the country with good enough light rail or commuter rail systems to avoid this trap. And these are also three of the most expensive cities in the country. For my money, I’d rather take that $1,000 per month and spend it on rent or a mortgage than a car, and take back the 80–100 hours per month you’ll be sitting in a car to play with my kids, go on dates—anything other than commuting.
36. You are in charge of your career.
37. Your employer doesn’t own you and isn’t doing you a favor by employing you.
38. Bad bosses are everywhere. Your first priority is to smoke them out in advance and never accept a position working for one. No matter what they are paying, it is not enough.