I’m trying to write about exploring the liberties of self employment and entrepreneurship, and trying to give a realistic, but positive view of this world, but I’m getting asked what specifically was so bad with my previous jobs, and why I riff so hard on the government job I had.

So, let’s have at it.

1. Absolutely horrible, ugly offices.

Like, truly ugly, damp, dark offices. It didn’t help that I was spoiled rotten in my previous job. The company I worked for before I went to government was a Scandinavian owned firm, they made A LOT of money, but they also did have a sense of value and duty toward their staff. For example, (and bear in mind that this was 2008 so stuff like this was not just uncommon, it was UNHEARD OF), we had a PlayStation in the brand new office we’d just moved into, a comfortable seating area with sofas and beanbags, little nooks for reading, and a fully kitted out kitchen.

This company bought these wonderful chairs for everyone who worked there, chairs that cost something like €800 each and adjusted from 50 different places, AND they paid 2 people to come to the office and go to every single one of us, adjusting the chair to our particular height, weight, and build, teaching us how to get the most out of this Rolls Royce of a chair.

Then I went to the government.

I kid you not, I was given a crap laptop, a cheap plastic stand and horrible corded mouse and keyboard, my desk was a bench that faced the wall, shared with 2 other damned souls, and my chair was a cruel joke.

Honestly, it was the most basic, hard, uncomfortable computer chair you can imagine, and it was broken, so 10 times a day, with no warning, the damn thing would give up and descend to its lowermost position, bringing my knees up to around my chin, much to repeated bemused frustration which quickly turned into rage.

From a lovely, well appointed kitchen, I went to a dingy, dirty, loud canteen, more like a prewar mess hall, where the coffee was the cheapest imaginable instant granules, the kind that gets sold in large buckets.

Spoiled rotten with inconsequential things and fluff?

Maybe.

Actually, you bet I was, but, it does make a difference when comparing between 2 jobs that both require you to sit for 8 hours a day, 2 jobs where one offered free great coffee, and the other forced you to bring your own (and lock it in your desk because otherwise goodbye good coffee), 2 jobs that both had stressors, but one felt like you were somewhat valued at least, and the other felt like you’re lucky to even be here, you don’t matter at all, and we know best, so keep your head down, your voice low and don’t get noticed.

The absolutely horrible, ugly offices I’ve described lead me quite nicely to…

2. Utter futility

It felt utterly futile and pointless to give your point of view because it was known, even if unsaid, that all important decisions had already been taken elsewhere and without you in that room, by people who did not know who you were, what you were hired to do, and what you knew. Honestly, that’s it — I can’t expand on this much more because that is exactly how it felt like, day in, day out, and you’re clocking in to only occasionally be told your input is needed on something, otherwise, word to the wise, keep your head down and your voice low and don’t get noticed.

In fact, it often felt that if you did offer your opinion, if this went against the grain or the current sentiment, however founded in expertise or however correct said opinion was, this would cost you somehow. Having a different opinion was seen as a sign of dissension, and therefore dangerous and to be stamped out.

3. Zero perks

I’ve mentioned the sad, sorry office, the crap laptop, the pitiful canteen, the horrible coffee.

There weren’t upsides to these things. There was nothing that counterbalanced this shit sandwich of a workplace, not so far as I could see.

I managed to somehow wrangle my way into working remotely a couple of days a week, and this was only because I was using products for which the agency I was employed at had no user licence, and there was a policy that no employee could bring their own device to the office, so my bosses had a hard choice; let me do my work from home, or have me unable to work with the right tools at the office. But certain small minded jealous colleagues felt that having the young upstart work from home was a challenge to their fiefdom, so as soon as this could be stopped, they damn well put a stop to it.

4. A Crap Wage

If I was at least getting paid well to suffer these indignities, I would probably have shut up and put up for a while or a lot longer, but I wasn’t.

The truth is that I took a pay cut from my previous job to go work this role at government, out of a naive, misguided sense of ‘giving back to the nation from the skills I’ve been lucky enough to learn’, but the government didn’t give one iota of a crap for the skills I had, and there was no real motivation at all to actually use me and what I know wisely.

So I felt like I was eating shit every day, and not even getting paid enough to do that. Very quickly I started to reason that hey, so long as I’m having to stand for this crap, then maybe I may as well go work in one of these new igaming firms that were starting to set up here in Malta — at least there I’d get paid almost double…

If the horrible offices, a sense of futility, a crap wage, and zero perks didn’t do it for you yet, here are some more reasons why I hated my government job, and couldn’t wait to quit and be done with it.

5. Working on meaningless projects

I was supposed to start going through government and government entity websites one by one, review all of their copy and content, and force some sort of user experience schema and standard onto them. This was going to be the meat of my role. As long as I stayed there though, I NEVER dedicated a single hour to actually doing this, because the fiefdoms were strong, and there was no will to challenge them.

The story I shared recently of the user guide for the product that never worked may be an outlier, but only slightly so.

In my time there, I lost count of the number of verbose reports, documents, and emails I was made to write for the sole purpose of covering someone’s ass somewhere, or “because this is how we have always done things”.

Meetings were a way of making sure the workday ticked along nicely with as little being done as possible, so spending ⅔ of a day in meetings was not seen as time wasted, oh no!

Here I was pining to get stuff done, and these people are happy to while the time away in a meeting, only to have to back everything that was said in the meeting in an email right after. “We spoke, bla bla yadda yadda.” Kill me now.

6. Being at the beck and call and whim of political appointees and incompetents

This is, perhaps, to be expected from a role in a government agency, but the amount of incompetent sycophants and ministerial appointees, all of whom you must treat with the requisite respect and tread carefully around was just a point of infuriating rage for me.

I was under the impression that we were going to be using technology to develop exciting, usable solutions for the greater good of the nation, and instead here we are listening to some semi-literate technological freaking ogre, just because he votes correctly and has the ear of someone in power.

Shut the front door and don’t let it catch you on the ass on the way out.

I was, of course, naive and wrong. Things got even worse in the years after I left, or so I am told.

7. Constantly changing focus

This was a sticking point for me. How can I do good work if every week the focus changes entirely and I’m supposed to give my all to something else now?

Last week I was working on this white paper about open protocols for usability and accessibility on this set of websites, but today, and for the foreseeable future, I need to abandon that, probably forever, because someone from on high had a dream about some crap that must be focused on right away.

Fark’s sake man…

8. Ignorant people taking decisions they have no business even thinking about

Self explanatory in fact, but if we are to take a specific example, I’ll give you one.

When I joined the government, I had the experience of running a successful digital advertising program, which back then, was a novel skill because not everyone and their dog and their mother had boosted an Instagram post and therefore automatically becoming a ‘seasoned digital marketing executive’.

I digress.

I had the experience of doing this. Me. Not my boss. Not another consultant in some other department. Not the chairman (yes, he was a man, so I’m not being gendered by not saying chairperson; of course he was a man.) And not the comms people at the agency I worked for, in fact, certainly not them, because I SET UP THE GODDAMN FACEBOOK ADS ACCOUNT FOR THE AGENCY.

So you can only imagine my spitballed rage and utter lividity at being second guessed on every damn thing in every damn advert, and this was a poxy little campaign we were running for a couple hundred Euro max, when I was used to managing a million dollar budget per quarter in my previous job.

Of course, I understood that for this agency to advertise on Facebook it was the shiny new toy and everyone wanted their grubby little paws on it, but the fact remained that I KNEW WHAT THE HELL I WAS DOING, AND ALL OF THEM HAD NO CLUE, and to my brain, it made no sense that I am getting overruled by ingoramuses who knew nothing about what I had been hired to do and had experience doing.

9. Immense technical debt to incredibly crap technology

This is a little nerdy, and probably even above my pay-grade, given I’m not technical in the sense that a coder or developer is, BUT, even I could understand that we were building houses of cards on incredibly unstable, untested, unproven, and often eye gougingly expensive ‘solutions’ or technologies, and that whoever had to maintain these ‘solutions’, or whoever came after us, ‘miskin hu’, as we say in Maltese, or ‘woe betide them’ in the King’s.

That didn’t sit well with me at all. 

I couldn’t square away the fact that what we’re doing is wasteful, ‘of the moment’, won’t age well, won’t scale up, and won’t be a good result for anyone, least of all the taxpayer, who at this point, I still naively felt was my client, and for whom I therefore again naively felt, I ought to advocate for.

10. Dealing With Suppliers And Providers That Were Even Stupider Than My Bosses

And yet, somehow still held sway and power over my bosses.

I often sat in meetings with these men (they were always men) thinking, wow, how did we get to the backseat of buying a technological solution where now we are not actually shopping and ticking things off our shopping list, but being sold to and told what we need, and it’s all crap we don’t, in fact.

11. A Contagious Sense Of Despair From Most Of My Colleagues

Obviously, dealing with this crap day in, day out, when you have studied, and learned, and tried all you can in furtherance of your knowledge and so as to boost your career, only to sit in a cold, damp office, with a boss that won’t listen to you, decisions taken without any input from or involvement of you, and you’re just a cog, a functionary, on a shit wage, and you can’t even get excited about any project you’re working or a light at the end of the tunnel you can just about make out — it doesn’t take long for despair to set in in these circumstances.

I may, in fact, have been unfair to a number of people I worked with during this time, simply because I was not as jaded and disappointed as they were, because I had far fewer years of being shat on by the job.

And for that I am genuinely sorry and I apologise wholeheartedly.

I hope you all got out from under that yoke eventually. I know that at least some of you did.

I know that I couldn’t escape soon or quick enough.

EPILOGUE

Do I blame anyone? Do I regret anything?

No.

It was my choice to take this job, even if it was the wrong choice. I still learned a lot, mostly that I DON’T EVER WANT TO DO THAT AGAIN, but hey, that’s still learning.

I don’t have regrets generally because I am what I am now as a product of all I’ve ever done and experienced, and this job was part of that, therefore, so be it.

And in the end, I hated it then, but looking back now, a lot of it was also tragically hilarious, if your idea of hilarity is a younger me constantly expecting, saying, and doing entirely the wrong thing.

And, I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

In fact, a good friend and colleague had actually warned me before I switched jobs, telling me, “I can’t think of a worse fit for this than you.”

But that’s a story for next year.