I’ve did the agency job for seven and a half years. Seven performance reviews, countless town hall meetings (one a month, sometimes), and more all-hands sessions than I’d care to count. And in every single performance review, without fail, the first question is the same.
“So, can you tell me about our company values?”
Crickets. Every time. Tumbleweed drifting across the carpet tiles.
Not because I’m dim. Not because I’m disengaged. But because nobody – and I mean nobody – actually remembers company values. They exist in slide decks and laminated posters in the kitchen and that one page on the intranet that nobody visits. They do not exist in my head, because my head is full of more pressing things. Like why a server runs out of disk space every week. Like the website going live tomorrow and the mental checklist I’m running through while someone at the front of the room asks if there are any questions.
There aren’t. There never are. Everyone’s doing the same thing I am.
Here’s what’s happening with language in the corporate world, and it’s the same pattern I keep coming back to. Someone decides that plain, clear English isn’t good enough. It needs to be elevated. It needs a phrase. Something that sounds meaningful, that you could put on a mug or a wall print, that makes it feel like the company has a soul. And so instead of saying “we try to be decent to each other,” you get a value. Something with a capital letter. Something you’re expected to memorise and recite.
I’m 55. I’m a developer. Do you know what I care about? I care about the ticket I was halfway through when you pulled me into this room. I care about writing code that actually works, that the next developer can read without wanting to cry. I care about shipping things. I care about getting into that state where the work is just flowing and the clock disappears entirely, which is the closest thing to happiness my job reliably provides.
I do not care – and I am sorry if this is blunt – about how many trees were planted for every print run. I do not care about B-Corp status or the net zero roadmap or whatever this quarter’s sustainability initiative is called. I’m not saying those things are bad. I’m saying they are not what makes a developer good at their job, and asking me to perform enthusiasm for them is a peculiar way to spend forty-five minutes of my performance review.
The values I actually have – the ones nobody asked me to memorise – are simpler. Do the work well. Don’t break things. Help the person next to you when they’re stuck. Leave the codebase better than you found it. These feel, to me, more like actual values than whatever’s on that laminated poster.
But I nod along. I’ve always nodded along. Good little drone.
There’s a reason freelance work suits me in a way that employment never quite did, and it comes down to this: I don’t have to perform. You don’t like who I am, how I think, or how I say things? Fine – genuinely, no hard feelings. But I also get to opt out of the corporate speak, the values theatre, the careful management of how things are said rather than what’s actually being said.
I’ll give you an example from my agency days. Account managers were terrified of certain clients. You always knew when one of those calls had just happened. You’d hear a phone being put down slightly harder than necessary, then a long sigh, then the pitter-patter of feet across the office floor heading in your direction.
“I’ve just got off the phone. They want a change.”
“What change?”
“I’m not entirely sure. Something like…” and then would follow a garbled, anxiety-filtered version of whatever the client had actually said, already mangled by the time it passed from client to account manager, account manager to manager, manager to project manager, and finally to me.
I learned something from this, which is that clients who were labelled as difficult usually weren’t. They were frustrated. Frustrated because nobody was listening properly, or because something simple was being made complicated by the layers between them and the person actually doing the work.
So I’d say: email me their number. I’ll call them.
And I would. And it was fine. Better than fine – a couple of minutes of actually listening to what they wanted, and it was sorted. No whispers. No sighs. No pitter-patter.
That’s what I choose now. Direct, or nothing. Do the work, do it well, say what you mean. No laminated posters required.
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