It’s been well-documented. In Massachusetts I had a working shelf life of only about 5-7 years. Then my authentic self would irritate like a mohair sweater, and I’d become the pain in the ass they had to heave ho.

I moved west and bucked the trend. Managed to stay at my last gig a whomping 14 years. That’s a long run by any standard. Here in Silicon Valley, it’s comparable to the Pleistocene. It was my own little Belle Époque of working life. Better yet, I George Castanza’ed that shit and left on a high note!

But the real change is I changed “industries.” Air quotes on that baby, since not sure living in the universe of grant-making, grant-getting and not making a profit is an industry.

Somewhere around 1989, I got my first gig temping in Accounts Payable at as biomedical research lab. In my spare time at work–that time was vast–they let me help out the grants management office and photocopy grant applications.

Two historic notes from the paragraph above on the state of technology in the late 80s for any children stumbling across these words. (1) Photocopying involved making documents on paper kind of like the books like your parents probably have on shelves. And (2) Accountants used to match paper purchase orders to paper invoices to paper packing slips that were tucked inside boxes to tell you what was inside the box. As a temp, I innovated and iterated and all sorts of forward thinking reengineering buzzwords on the matching process like no one had done before — I put them in alphabetical order by vendor than numerical order by PO. A day’s task became an hour’s.

A couple of things leapt out to that much younger (childlike really) me as far superior working conditions at the non-profit, touchstones to this day. First and foremost, no one gave a shit about what I was wearing, pantyhose were a non-existent accessory, and sneakers were shoes. Secondly, there were smart people in abundance working on smart things. (As a bonus, they were smart people who were around my age who liked drinking beer even more than I did.)

Thus, a career in grants management, research administration, budgeting and all sorts of office work skills was born. At that one place, I went from photocopying grants to helping negotiate the budget for a chunk of the human genome project. Heady times.

The niche I found — I am good at exactly the kind of things a HUGE chunk of the population think are annoying snoozefests of boring bureaucracy. Deftness with expense reports alone is a career goldmine. Everyone hates expense reports, except for the accountants who make you do them.

Over the years, I sorted out another observation that has served me well. There’s a scoldy, pinched-faced, frumpy archetype as the face of any kind of office administration. She — it’s always a she — favors kitties to people, likes rules and lives to nag.

She doesn’t wear sneakers, swear like a marine or crack jokes whenever feasible.

I’ve never actually met that archetype per se. But, I sure as fuck have met a village worth of people who embraced office tasks as a fiefdom with a will toward severing heads for minor infractions. Mostly, I’ve realized, there’s a subgroup of humans in every workplace who desperately need some control over something somewhere. And, hell, paperwork can be that thing.

I don’t take myself that seriously, and that has been my saving grace. Alongside a sense of humor and not being an asshole.

Honest though — Even when I worked at a hospital, most office work is not life or death. (Out on a tangent, one of the last things I did in my last job was help push for a grant to provide public info on Ebola, which was close.)

I’m babbling here. Setting a scene. Indulging myself. Call me Tarantino.

Zooming to present day — I’ve switched gears entirely. I’m in corporate America. I’m in Silicon Valley–white hot, phone app, VC-courting, insert every single cliche about San Francisco in 2019–tech.

I’m so in tech, I’m working with the engineers. I’m so in tech, I have the logo-ed hoodie to prove it. I’m so in tech, I’m drinking cold brew and kombucha on tap.

Here’s what I’m feeling, since my jump.

The wealthy philanthropy I left spends less daily on making employees happy than the scrappy, fighting for market and funding startup.

So far, they also spend more time emailing, messaging, calling the staff on off hours and blurring life/work balance boundaries, despite claiming the opposite.

The “flat structure” I left in philanthropy is bollocks. I knew that, but holy fuck, by every metric I’m getting treated better and more evenly for essentially the same functional work. I swear if I get called “just an assistant” here, the CEO might fight the person. He told me as much.

With much greater differences in roles, responsibilities and personalities — from sales and marketing and creatives to software developers and data scientists — the vibe is LESS siloed and way friendlier.

The friendliness alone is killing me. I’m pretty sure at least one person from every department has introduced themselves and said something relevant about my new role, my bio or my brief introduction in front of the company. (I wonder when they’ll discover I am far older and less hip than at first glance.)

I lost little in personal benefits, even though I believed with the change in scale, I’d lose more. Ed benefit, check; catered food, check; free coffee, check. And the big one, closed at the end of the year for a week with pay. (On the last one, as I was walking out the door, they were fixing the “with pay.”)

The local philanthropies could learn from scrappy startups in Silicon Valley. Here are some things that could easily be adopted:

• Real investment in sustainability – not only with staffing to lead the effort, but with physical changes, like available containers and what not to be used by staff. Did you know in California, you can bring your own reusable takeout containers to restaurants?
• Monthly commuter and health and wellness subsidies
• A more flexible education subsidy
• A less traditional approach to time off/time cards
• Much more generation health benefit subsidies
• Recognize anniversaries. I went to work for 14 years, and several colleagues even longer, and got nothing. At 20 years, one person got a card and small party, because her coworker pushed for it. Thank people for showing up everyday with even the simplest gesture. There are different balloons for new employees, birthdays and work anniversaries floating everywhere. It’s a tiny corporate investment for a smile.
• Fig newtons. OK, it’s not the branded “Newtons,” but there are fig bars aplenty. I shall endeavor to eat my weight in fruit and cake.
• Dispense carbonated water without wasteful, individual bottles. Carbon dioxide isn’t rare or hard to get.
• Set up the office space for use by humans over aesthetics. Wider array of conference rooms and configurations, better tech, etc. Here’s another example, there’s no way I’m not sorting trash/recycling/compost when I pass multiple rows of each container throughout the space.
• Practice more transparency and better communication. There are actual secret, private things where I work — IP, customers, strategies. For the first time I had to sign an NDA, even just to interview. Yet, in the four walls, calendars are all open at all levels, important info is kept on the corporate-wide shared drive, open permissions on Slack groups are the norm. Information roams free.
• Imbed volunteering and community service into the culture. Next week, a group of new hires including moi, will spend an afternoon volunteering at an org in the community as part of our training. They also use caterers who partner with the local food banks for leftovers.
• Pay to the real market. It’s nonsensical to pay less than what is needed to survive in the expensive Bay Area. Not scientific, but my own job search showed me I was underpaid EVEN matched with an offer I didn’t take from a nonprofit.

Turns out, even in the cold, corporate world, people can do good work, be smart, care deeply about a mission and help other people and their communities.

And so the adventure continues.