Corporate Life

Meetings, standups, titles, offices and interviews: the rituals of the modern corporation, and what they are actually for.

• 2026-11-05 — Meat Filter The first gate to an engineering job is someone reading questions they don't understand off a 2015 script. Not an interview. A meat filter.
• 2026-10-16 — Another Day of Pretending The machine writes, reviews, deploys and sells, 24/7. Everyone is an end node, everyone knows, and they all show up to pretend they're needed.
• 2026-09-21 — Show and Tell A daily half-hour standup for nine people costs $124,200 a year, and nobody signs a purchase order for it. Show and tell, for adults.
• 2026-07-26 — Out of Ideas For twenty years engineering was the bottleneck everyone hid behind. Now features ship in seconds and the real question is exposed.
• 2026-07-25 — On Call You aren't paid for your accomplishments. You're paid for availability: to be reachable, to show up on the call, to catch whatever's thrown.
• 2026-07-02 — Time Served There are no senior engineers, only great, average and bad ones. Seniority measures years served without getting fired.
• 2026-07-02 — A Throat to Choke The one thing a human can do that AI can't is be held accountable: blamed, fired, made afraid. That's why the junior still gets hired.
• 2026-06-25 — What Else Are You Gonna Do 'I make a lot.' 'Numbers go up.' 'What else are you gonna do?' What a person says while selling his life by the day until 65.
• 2026-06-25 — My Job Is Easy The classic way to get rich isn't building. It's hiring people who take 0.25% over four years, call themselves lucky, and say the job is easy.
• 2026-06-18 — Made-Up Ranks Junior, senior, staff, SVP: knighthoods handed out by managers no smarter than anyone else, for more responsibility and less pay.
• 2026-06-18 — I Love It Here The boss loves the office, and so do his managers. Of course they do: it was never a workplace. It's a parade where they get to be seen.
• 2026-06-18 — Blind Blind is hell shipped as an app: anonymous, indebted, visa-bound tech workers shouting their total comp into the dark.
• 2026-06-18 — All Hands The all-hands as party congress: the leader takes credit for numbers he didn't lift, staff recite charts like scripture, gratitude required.
• 2026-06-17 — You Already Lost The moment you show up to the interview, you've lost. Hiring is one-to-many: companies buy redundancy on purpose and price talent as risk.
• 2026-06-17 — Choose Your Caste Four castes in tech: the independent founder, the funded founder who lost the band, the foot soldier in big tech, and everyone outside.
• 2026-06-17 — Adult Daycare You carry a laptop across the city so a building can watch you type. COVID proved the work didn't need the office. The office needs you.
• 2026-06-10 — Reverse Frankenstein The corporation runs Frankenstein in reverse: it takes a whole person and renders them into parts, Mr. Hands, Mr. Brain, Mr. Eye.
• 2026-05-26 — Two Weeks a Year If your job grants two weeks of vacation a year, you're alive for two weeks a year. Eighty years times two weeks is the actual math.
• 2026-05-04 — Throttling Down Within thirty seconds of a corporate meeting, the room's effective IQ collapses to the middle. The meeting throttles the smartest person in it.
• 2026-04-17 — Hunger Games for Coders Hackathons are the new job interviews. Investments are the new jobs. Office jobs are gone. They just haven't been buried yet.
• 2026-04-08 — Daily Tribute In a world of Slack, Jira and email, the daily standup shouldn't exist. It survives because it was never about information. It's tribute.
• 2026-02-22 — The Bottleneck Report to a manager who can't perceive the shape of a good idea and every insight has to crawl through the narrowest point in the building.
• 2025-10-20 — The Daily Standup: Midwit's Favorite Daily standups aren't meetings. They're corporate roll call: fifteen minutes pulling engineers out of deep work to recite what Jira already knows.
• 2025-10-07 — Managed servitude Employment as servitude with a LinkedIn glow-up and a 401(k): the same chains, better branding, standing desks and free snacks.

Other topics: AI and Jobs · Money and Ownership · School and Conditioning · Agency and the Midwit · Power and Control

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