Culture Shock: A Real Life Experience
One of the topics often discussed in our transition classes for retiring/separating military personnel is corporate culture. After a life of service to one’s country and allegiance to the Constitution, what’s it like to work in the private sector?
While it would be nice to fully appreciate and understand a company’s culture before taking a job, that’s not always possible. Rest assured that whatever you have experienced in the military or any profession where you have climbed the military “corporate ladder,” when you leave that profession and seek work elsewhere, you are in for an adjustment. Most of the people I deal with are leaving military service in their mid-forties to mid-fifties. This group is usually in for the biggest shock because of their age and their having to work in companies or organizations fundamentally different from the military.
A friend of mine referred me to a book about one man’s mid-life transition from the literary world to the high-tech world. It’s a true story about the frustrations of having to find work as a fifty-year-old man with a wife and three young children. While his story is highly entertaining and informative, he is open about his fears, feelings, and frustrations with having to make a mid-life transition.
Dan Lyons, a writer for HBO’s Silicon Valley, has written a great book, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-up Bubble, about his transition from being a writer for Newsweek when he was suddenly laid off because the news magazine was in decline. After a struggle to find work, he took a job in marketing with HubSpot, a tech start-up, where he was twice the age of millennial’s who worked for the company. This is a book about culture shock where a serious minded adult works with youngsters who enjoy frat house games, play fast and loose with the rules, relax in bean bag chairs, require safe spaces and are hyper-sensitive about their feelings. At his first day on the new job he notes that he is really different from everybody else, “my hair is gray, my cholesterol is too high, and I’m probably the only person in this room who has had a colonoscopy.” His story is about an accomplished professional who is thrust into a strange and unfamiliar world of young techies who have drunk the cool-aide about their “awesome” product. He notes, “Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent inventing their own reality.” And so it goes as Dan explains the strange world of tech start-ups, where young college grads, willing to work for next to nothing join tech firms in the hopes that their product will someday go public making all of them instant millionaires.
Dan’s book is a great read. It’s engaging and wildly entertaining. I couldn’t help but pity Dan for having gone through such a humiliating experience but grateful that he has exposed the spin-meisters who sell mediocre products and services by using hyper marketing techniques on an unsuspecting public.
Dan also exposes the youth culture of our country where over 82 million millennial’s dominate the American workforce. To many of them 30 is old and 50 is ancient. “I had expected the transition might be rough, but even so, I’m taken aback by how much I’m struggling. The weird language and relentlessly chipper attitudes are both the polar opposite of the world I know,” Dan says.
This book is a must read for those who are forced or seek to make a mid-life career transition.
