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Dear Mr. Feinberg,
It is with great pleasure that I announce that I am giving you my resignation from this inner circle of hell you call a workplace, effective immediately. After getting hired here a year ago following my graduation from a top ranked university, where I busted my butt in class, and spent countless hours at the unpaid internships now required of all people between the ages of 18-22, I thought that I was the luckiest person in the world. I had beaten the odds. I had accomplished something that The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Forbes Magazine had all told me was unattainable: I had gotten a job. I was so happy at first. My mom took me to J.Crew and Ann Taylor and we bought the shit out of some blazers and pencil skirts and “statement” necklaces I was told I so desperately needed. I chopped off my long hair and got a more sensible cut with side bangs and lowlights. I watched YouTube tutorials about sock buns and low chignons and proper bobby pin placement. I switched from the smoky eye to a neutral palette and forgot all about liquid eyeliner. I threw out my red lipstick. I bought pantyhose and kitten heels. I wore tweed for the first time in my life and broke out in hives. Then I bought Benadryl and powered through it.
I came into work early and I stayed late. I wrote reports and made copies and got coffee and planned meetings. I picked up dry cleaning and edited drafts. I spoke to clients and handled their affairs. I sent thank you notes and gift baskets and purchased your wife’s birthday present. I looked after your calendar, scheduled dentist appointments, ran errands, and picked your children up from school. I looked after the interns and wrote their recommendation letters. I ordered lunch and memorized your coffee order and sat in on meetings when you didn’t feel like going. I cried at in the bathroom and didn’t tell HR about the leering or the comments or the grabbing. I taught you how to use Excel and didn’t laugh when you asked me how to add an attachment to an email. I dealt with your indecisiveness, incompetence, and complete inability to do your job. I scheduled your marriage counseling and made sure to purchase the jewelry for Stacy, your mistress, on the secret credit card your wife doesn’t know about. I was careful. I was dedicated. And now I’m done.
After all of the countless hours spent in lectures, the papers, the exams, the office hours, and the career fairs, no one ever told me about this. No one ever sat me down and said that my diploma would be nothing more than a decoration and that my self-respect would be dwindled down to nothing. I wasn’t warned about the awfulness and bitterness and unhappiness. I wasn’t prepared for 15-hour workdays and a salary of $24,000 a year. I didn’t realize that I would have to stay on my parents’ health insurance policy because I couldn’t afford to pay for my own. No one told me that I’d be living with four other people in a row house located in a questionable part of town. No one told me that my portion of the rent in said shitty house would cost me nearly half my yearly salary. Someone must have forgotten to mention that you have to rob Peter to pay Paul when it comes to student loans and that it’s only a matter of time before you’ll succumb to credit cards. I wasn’t warned about the shitty people in the workspace or, really, shitty people in general.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not entirely your fault, Mr. Feinberg. In fact, most of it is not. You’re just a middle-aged guy, working a middle-grade job, living in a middle-class suburb of a middle-sized city. You’re not quite at the bottom, but you will never, ever be at the top. You drink away your sad life and try to make sense of your sad marriage and hope to God that your children don’t end up with the same sad fate. You’re not happy, but you’re not unhappy, either, because that would require feeling anything at all. Truth be told, it’s been a long time since you’ve experienced an emotion other than defeat. So forgive me, Mr. Feinberg, for not wanting to be like you.
I hate this job, I hate this office, and I hate how miserable everyone is. I hate how Linda in HR is on her third divorce and has her NutriSystem sent directly to her cubicle. I hate how Bob in Accounting types with his pointer fingers and refuses to use Excel spreadsheets. I hate that we play “easy listening” radio stations at too high of a volume and that this office hasn’t been renovated since before I was born. I hate how no one seems to really work and every day is a countdown to retirement. No one has passion. No one has drive. No one has ambition. Everyone here exists; nothing more, nothing less. And I want no part of it.
I want to feel excitement. I want to love my job. Hell, I’ll even settle for just liking it. This whole “suck it up, everyone hates their life” mentality is ruining this country. We’re creating settlers and middle managers and complete complacency, and I will not be a part of it. I’m going to set out on a mission to find myself and to find a career that I truly enjoy. I might fail, and I’m sure that you and everyone like you would like to see that happen. But if I do, at least I’ll know that I tried. At least I tried to be better than existing. At least I tried to be better than a cubicle at the dead end office of a dead end company. I want to learn and I want to experience things and I want to feel some sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.
You say that Millennials are lazy, but we’re not, sir. We just don’t want to settle. We want to work hard, but we want to work hard at something that matters. We want to be innovative and we want to be creative and we want to test our limits. We want to invent things and save lives and be funny and, yeah, some of us really do want to wear jeans to work. We’re not bad people, we’re just different. We may crash and burn in our endeavors, but at least we’ll know we tried. And so I’m going to go try. I’m going to go try to find myself and find my calling and find my passion. I’m going to eat Ramen noodles and pound the pavement and maybe I’ll even backpack across Europe, because I can. I’m going to live. I’m going to thrive. I’m going to try to make it.
It’s been real, Mr. Feinberg. I appreciate the experience, I really do. I’m not selfish and I’m not ungrateful, I’m just not happy. And I deserve to be happy, Mr. Feinberg. And so I quit. I’m done. I’m out. You do you, Mr. Feinberg. I’m going to go do me.
Sincerely,
A Millennial
Respond
Catie Warren
Catie struggles with adulthood and has been celebrating her 21st birthday for the past three years. She attended college in the nation’s capital and to this day is angry that Pit Bull lied to her, as you cannot, in fact, party on The White House lawn. Prior to her success with PGP, Catie was most famous for being featured in her hometown newspaper regarding her 5th grade Science Fair Project for which she did not place. In her spare time, she enjoys attributing famous historical quotes to Marilyn Monroe and getting in fights with thirteen year olds on twitter. Email: catie@grandex.co
@catie__warren
@catie__warren
Sounds like someone majored in MKTG/MGMT…
Although I admire the sentiment, I think there’s something to be said for the notion that “work is something I do so I can afford to do things I actually want to do.” It’s great if you can get a job that you like, but the workplace is not the first place I want to look for fulfillment.
Crying in the bathroom and getting paid for it. #PGP
“We may crash and burn in our endeavors, but at least we’ll know we tried. And so I’m going to go try. I’m going to go try to find myself and find my calling and find my passion.”
What if that passion that you’re searching for is being a housewife?
I’m a let you finish but this is the greatest resignation ever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_flight_attendant_incident
nice try hipster.
You chopped off your long hair? You must really hate men.
It’s called paying your dues. Being that I am only 26 and have a bit of a different life story, the bottom line is that for whatever reason all these millennials have some idea that they are going to pop out of college and be gainfully employed.
While some are lucky enough to get a job out of college, they all end up eventually hating it. Why?
Because you have to pay your dues. Makin’ copies, brewing coffee, staying late, coming in early – it’s your turn to start back at the bottom and work your way up.
ProTip: Make yourself invaluable. This doesn’t come in the form of a salary, but more in what you contribute to the company as a whole. The real trick – find something you love to do and turn it into a career. Those of us that have found the shangri la who are lucky enough to love what we do, paid well for it, and our work reflects that. But EVERYONE has to start somewhere. I put my time in, got noticed through stupid ventures like getting published because my manager made a smart ass comment to me, participated in conferences, and educated myself outside of work on how I could be better at my craft.
The beautiful part of Engineering is that if you aren’t socially retarded and can dress well – the world is your oyster.
Find your passion and make a career of it – you will never work a day in your life.
As millennials, we have this idea that we’ll be gainfully employed right out of college because that’s what our parents assured us would happen from the time we started kindergarten.
I truly hate the idea of “paying dues.” I already did that in college. Companies and universities now use interns and student workers as cheap and/or free labor and feel no remorse when they demand that we flay ourselves alive for the elusive Holy Grail of “valuable experience.” Most of the time, it means jack shit because companies are getting so much more specialized and internally unique that hiring total outsiders is in decline. Have you seen a job description lately? Most of them describe skill sets possessed by people who don’t exist.
Making yourself invaluable helps, but oftentimes the higher-ups are so incompetent that they either don’t realize who’s worth a damn and who’s dead weight or they’re too lazy to do anything about it. Then when a project inevitably falls apart because one person leaves or retires and those in charge didn’t bother to ensure that body of knowledge was immortalized in document form or spread to younger workers (TRUE STORY, btw), the company takes a hit and employees are subjected to the cheerleading seminar where everyone except the culpable parties are passive-aggressively blamed.
In the present time, jobs are scarce, middle management is full of yes-men with little skill and upward mobility is laughably poor. My personal bitterness isn’t just about “paying dues,” because that implies a brighter future. An awful lot of us are just stuck in a rut where there is no happy tomorrow. That’s why imaginary letters like this get written.
Rarely have I agreed with an article’s point of view so strongly. It sounds like you and I have worked at the same companies.
“Paying your dues” is a fast-track ticket to mental atrophy. I don’t know why, but the people who were already in the corporate world when we arrived (I’m 26) have this “do what the boss says enough times, and they might promote you!” attitude that’s as spirit-crushing as it is misguided.
The problem with “do what the boss says” is that “what the boss says” is more often than not a simple task, the result of which is simply either “done” or “not done.” Update some links on this web page. Pull a raw data set that includes fields a-e and e-mail the CSV file to them so that they can look at a few non-formatted numbers and make the decision their brainless gut told them to make in the first place. The day “what the boss says” is something akin to “figure out how to accomplish this business goal” is the day that boss becomes my leader.
The problem with tasks such as these is that they’re easily automated. If we spend our time practicing esoteric, company-specific procedures that $5 and just as many brain cells can automate, then how safe is our job with that company? Even more scary for the company–how much human resource utility are they just leaving on the table, because their management thinks success in business is a bureaucratic endeavor.
Quit that job and enjoy starting over, networking with people who can actually teach you something.
Please take this with a grain of salt as I like the articles you write – but reread the first few sentences of your response and tell me you don’t get a “spoiled little entitled brat” overtone.
Your parents also promised you Santa was real, and the Easter bunny, and that life is fair.
It’s not. There are no trophy for 8th place(despite what society is doing now) and the strongest survive. Does it suck? Absolutely – but it’s more or less the lay of the land.
You haven’t earned anything. You wen’t to college, that isn’t paying your dues- that is making you employable.You had an internship in college, again, this just adds to the concept of making you employable.
Once you are actually employed, your internships and degrees really amount to nothing. You start at the bottom and start building your career based on accomplishments and notoriety. You achieve success based on how you solidly contribute to the company and make a measurable impact. Unfortunately, your first few jobs out of college are all about bolstering that Resume’ to the point you can be selective enough to not work for an ass-hat who micromanages.
As a side note – I shed no tears for all those kids who went out and got a degree in expressive thought or underwater basket weaving because their parents told them to “go learn what their passion is”. The industry doesn’t need more Liberal Arts majors, and with the cost of college being what it is – you have to look at it as an investment. Once you are done with school HOPEFULLY you can land a gig where you can actually start to develop a career. Those of us that chose Engineering(and even the fewer of us that enjoy it) have no problem finding high paying gigs out of school, because of the great “brain drain”. Our society needs more People in Math and Science, and less in liberal arts.
So blame your parents, but remember they were too at one point trying to break the shackles of the 60s/70s culture.
I didn’t write this article, and I’m sorry if that’s the impression I got across. I also apologize to the real author.
I despise trust fund babies as much as the next person, but when I said “our parents,” I’m really referring to the generation ahead of us. They kind of fucked things up and then pretended as if everything was fine when we were about to graduate. Even the counselors at my school were totally confident we’d all get hired immediately.
I also realize that you have a point with STEM majors, but it’s doubletalk to go on a Liberal Arts tirade right after encouraging people to find something they love and stick with it. An awful lot of my friends are musicians and social workers.
I’m an engineer as well, but it took me a year after grad school to find anything. The brain drain isn’t happening in every industry quite yet, and even where it is, there are hiring freezes galore due to reduced government contracts and sequestration. I’m an aerospace engineer, so unfortunately my industry is almost entirely military-driven. Now I’m working a thousand miles from home in a backwater town doing things tangentially related to my education. Futhermore, without getting into detail, I accomplished FAR more in terms of real shit at the lab job I had during grad school and the year after at the university than I probably ever will working at my current company.
It’s pure fantasy to think that companies automatically value the heavy contributors. I probably won’t be recognized for anything I do for years, and that’s if I’m lucky. I work for a subsidiary of one of the largest corporations on the planet, so maybe it’s a problem with large numbers. The truth is that getting noticed is much more about luck and the person who actually notices you rather than anything you personally contribute. Letters like this get written because we’d rather not spend our 20s hating ourselves only for life to get marginally better. And we’re not cynically resigned to this “that’s just the way the world works” worldview. The main point is that millennials take a shitload of flak for being “lazy” and “entitled” when all we really want is to get as much out of our careers as we put in rather than do the equivalent of pour money down a well and hope it tosses something back.
There will always be a better engineer than you out there — some sick fuck that enjoys self torture with transfer functions and hardcore analog circuits. I can’t do what he does, I wouldn’t even try, but finding a skill set that you’re generally good at and can tolerate the jobs to which it lends itself is key.
I worked on a farm through HS and college. Physically exhausting. My current job is mentally exhausting, it’s much worse. However, I’m pretty damn good at it (and my coworkers are awesome) — if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be “putting in my dues” and would stick out a year to get a decent grasp of the landscape, then quit. I worked for bullshit pay on that farm, but it taught me a lot about work ethic, and you’re damn right I leave that on my resume over hardcore engineering I did in school/otherwise. If you’re not learning anything and nobody will be impressed with your accomplishments in your current position, it’s not worth doing.
I fortunately work with the best people in the industry, they pay me well, and that alone will take me to any almost any major city in the US. The only dues I pay is the sacrifice of not living in TX at the moment — however, like a communist government, I always have 3 and 5 year plans. Both roads lead to Rome, otherwise known as San Marcos, TX.
There is nothing in San Marcos outside of Tx State kids and a river.
Go get it man.
An epic house on the river and making one of those super hot blondes my wife, life could be much, much worse.
15 hour weeks for $24k. What?
15 Hour workdays for 24k is run of the mill for people starting out in any type of political campaign work. That is assuming you get paid at all.
Just to be clear for us guys, ‘statement’ necklaces are all of the pearl variety, correct?
Shit, I’ve been doing it wrong.
I’d like to hear the other side of this. Maybe she sucked at her job?