Hard Work is a Total Reward

So my dear soulless Fortune 100 corporation has decided that us ungrateful little individual contributors -- you know, us grunts that actually turn dumb ideas and crazy notions into normalized reality -- need to be reminded of how much Big Brother is doing for us. So they've outsourced a "Total Rewards" web site containing such information as which health insurance plan I'm on, how much my 401K is currently worth, and how much stock I've got... if I stick around long enough for it to vest. And of course it's personally identifiable to me because hey, what could go wrong?

But nothing's going to go wrong because our dear Big Brother soulless Fortune 100 corporation has pieces of paper saying that nothing's going to go wrong. Frankly, I'd be rather more comfortable if I had the vendor's cars as collateral -- just take the keys as they come into work one day, you know. Not that it would help anything, but making such an obscene demand should cut down on offers to provide solutions like this that a lot of people (judging by internal response) don't really need and certainly don't want to have outsourced as a matter of course.

The real issue, though, really boils down to the cheesy "Frequent Flyer" name they gave it: Rewards. I'm paid labor. I'm compensated with a salary which is, to the best of my knowledge, legally owed to me under the assortment of contracts and agreements that I (foolishly?) signed onto so many years ago. I may get rewards when I do something particularly clever -- or suffer greatly as a result of somebody else doing something foolish -- but they are in no way tied to my current compensation, other than being on the same auto-deposit program (if applicable). And that's what the real problem is with the name: it betrays the key difference in how I view my work and how the grand old Fortune 100 views it. I am working for earned wages augmented by benefits in my mind, whereas the company believes that it can reward me as it sees fit. All the more reason to find a company that still believes in properly compensating its employees, I suppose.

The good news is that my time working there -- I really don't see myself continuing past February -- has actually been reasonably well spent. I was in a meeting today where they went over all of the work that went into a 2+ year project and I just found myself thinking, "Yeah, I've done that on Project Andrea. And when Project Andrea got an upgrade as part of the Barry program, we did that other feature. Project Chantal and Dean recycled my component Erin that I wrote that was just like that... hey wow!" So it was fairly reassuring to feel that I have learned all sorts of stuff that will be valuable in other projects like Arthur, Bertha and Cesar. Sure, some of the work -- Sebastien, Tanya, Van and Wendy -- were dismally un-reusable, usually to being ill-advised in the first place. And it was also kind of sad that all of our happy talk about the value of component reuse (going back a couple of years now) doesn't appear to have actually resulted in any reuse of code or components that would result in actual savings by ensuring that a problem like what, oh say, Erin could solve stayed solved.

Project and component names borrowed with pride from over here. Great way to name projects on a pre-official basis, I think -- far more honest than most naming conventions.