I waded through recruiter emails and job listings like constellations, skimming down to the perks: A better salary, vision, and dental, 401(k), year-end bonuses, catered lunch, off-sites to Hawaii, summits in Vegas, Open Bar Fridays, chef on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table. Job listings were an excellent place to intersect HR’s idea of fun versus a type-A guy’s idea of work-life balance.
And then it finally happened. I got a haircut and took personal time off, something of an anomaly for me. I shrugged off the office receptionist’s knowing looks whenever I came into the office wearing anything dressier than a shirt and jeans.
Some days later I ended up in downtown Boston. It wasn’t clear whether I was there for lunch or an interview, which was normal. I was prepared for both and dressed for neither. My guide led me through the trading desks filled with stiffs in suits to the communal kitchen, which had the trappings of every other financial company’s pantry: plastic bins of trail mix and cheese crackers, bowls of chips, and miniature candy bars. There was the requisite wholesale box of assorted energy bars, and in the fridge were bottles of flavored water, string cheese, and single-serving cartons of chocolate milk. It was hard to tell whether the company was training for a marathon or having an after-school snack.
Over catered Pakistani food, I met the team, including a multi millionaire who had made his fortune from the money transfer platform. He asked where I worked, and I told him.
“I know that company,” he said, tearing a piece of naan in two. “I think I tried to buy you guys.”
“I’m not trying to poach you, but it seems obvious to me you would be a great fit,” my friend told me over lunch while extolling the virtues of her employer: four hundred employees, no real competitors, a well-established banking software. She dipped a french fry into her thick milkshake. “If you wanted to run your own team, that’s something that could happen. You could try it on, and see what works for you.” It all sounded so relaxed.
Things had not ended well for the company’s competitors who got bought out cheap, but I was still intrigued. This company had a real business model — selling banking software platforms to corporates. It was a corner of the industry that I found well-paying, experimental, and, most important, redemptive of the whole enterprise. I could see how it might make me useful there.
There was, of course, a red flag. That spring, the wall street journal had come out with a scathing review of their management — How they were moving all the pieces so that they could get bought out in some years. It described a company culture where employees were disrespected and intimidated.
All of this made me leery, but I also wondered, privately, if there might be some benefit to joining an organization immediately after this sort of blowup. I’d read Foucault, a million years ago: discourse was probably still power. Surely, in that fallout, a brown guy with a lined-up resume would have a seat at the table.
Call it self-delusion or naïveté; I considered these calculations in my head as strategic.
Some weeks later, I took another personal day off without giving a reason, an act of defiance that I feared was transparent enough, and scheduled a full day of interviews at an asset management company instead. I had flown in from London at 5.30 in the morning, shaved in a foul-smelling toilet at Logan airport, put on a tie, pressed my palms over my crumpled suit jacket, and then ended up by 8.30 at a Starbucks across the road from the company. The office was a six-story brick building right by the water with fantastic views of the city. A security guard wearing a blue blazer checked my ID and waved me in. The waiting lobby was austere — Something that I was not used to coming from a world of short-skirted receptionists and bowls of nuts and chocolates.
What I found most surprising was that I liked it. The austerity of it all excited me. A financial firm without the usual glitz — What else happened here, I wondered — what else might they be doing that’s so enriching?
After months of working long hours into the night as part of the “down for the cause” mantra but without once hearing the word “bonus,” I was also thrilled by how the company appeared to rank on the ass-in-chair metric. By four in the evening, on a gloomy Friday afternoon, as my last interview was winding down, the office was dead quiet. With the exception of a half dozen employees pulling themselves on coffee and red bulls, it was almost entirely empty.
“We’re expecting big things from you and also ourselves,” the HR manager said at the end of the offer.
The job offered top-of-the-line insurance, partial 401(k) matching, and unlimited vacation, and it would entail a decent dollar pay jump, but with a title demotion. For the time being, I wouldn’t even be moving laterally. This was an ill-advised move in any professional context, and especially naïve in the business world: Leaving my current workplace I could be leaving potentially high-value stock options on the table. But I didn’t have enough stock options worth worrying about, and I didn’t care about a huge someday payout or titular glory — which was good, because a job title in this new place was non-existent.
As I walked back to the bus station, I pondered what I actually demanded from my employer — Any employer or the team where I worked. What I wanted in a workplace was simple. I wanted to be able to trust my manager. To receive fair and equal compensation. To not feel weirdly strong-armed or to have to constantly look over my shoulder. To put some faith in a system — any system would do — for accountability. To take it all much less personally, and not get too sucked in.
I called Clarke. “Well, it’s not Fintech or payment systems,” he said, deliberating. “So, that’s a totally new field that you are jumping into. But it’s asset management which is fairly stable. And the company — it’s beloved by a lot of portfolio managers around. The trade-off for that is you will have to start from the ground floor. But you know that. I’m sure you’ve thought about that.”
I had not really thought about that even though I knew it to be in the back of my head. But I believed that it was a decent place to work, I told him. I didn’t see the harm. I confessed that I thought asset management had a fair long term potential. Clarke was quiet for a moment.
“For me, it’s a specter of finance that might either be in its final good years or maybe not. But the cycle will turn someday if you hang in long enough,” he said. “There almost isn’t a company in Boston you can work for what’s good enough in your ballpark. Maybe a few hedge funds actively making good money, but that’s it. It’s a very short list.”
I’m just going to take it, I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
I scheduled a meeting to give notice. The delivery manager Nicole and I sat down in the glass conference room facing the software developers outside, and I offered the lines I had been rehearsing in my head: I learned so much, enjoyed my time, and was grateful they had taken a chance on me. None of this was a lie. They had taken a chance on me when times were rough in 2008. I had enjoyed my tenure, to a point. It had been an invaluable education. It felt like a century ago.
Nicole leaned back in her chair and nodded. Around and around went her wedding ring. I knew that she had shed some tears when she fired my friend Jessica, and I felt a little disappointed that I didn’t get the same affection. She asked, perfunctorily, if there was anything that the company could do to get me to stay. I told her no, and we both seemed to be relieved.
I thought it was most dignified to personally tell the COO I was leaving even though I had texted him a hint that things were moving. It was like a protocol he drilled into my head when we started to work together. “Don’t f**** me up” — He had said and I didn’t intend to do that either, but he was in Australia and when he got back Nicole beat me to the punch. Throughout the day, I eyed him, and he studiously ignored me. When I approached him once from far, he turned on his heel, walking away while staring into the middle distance.
That evening, from the blissful isolation of one of the conference rooms, I saw him striding across the office in my direction. Still avoiding eye contact, he entered the conference room, sat down, and told me he had heard my news. News: like my spouse was pregnant, or I was dying, or something equally groundbreaking. I nodded and tried not to apologize. Like a high school drama student running lines, he thanked me for my work. “I’m sorry I yelled at you that one time,” he said to the window behind me.
I had gotten to know him, I thought. We were in some ways — warm acquaintances if not friends. We were never family. I did not understand the sacrifices he had made for the company, or how far he would go to protect it. I didn’t know what made him tick. There was a coldness in him now that mystified me.
I reassured him that it was fine. This was a lie, but not for his benefit. I needed to believe it much more than he did.
At the end of October, as the leaves were falling to the ground, I deleted personal files from my laptop and ate a final handful of cookies from the kitchen, then shoved a couple more into my jacket pocket — A trait that I never understood myself. The HR manager was too overextended to conduct an exit interview, for which I was grateful. I had nothing left to contribute. I said a few overly sentimental farewells and signed more paperwork along with an NDA, none of which I fully understood. It did not occur to me that I could ask for more time, or even say no.
After surrendering my badge, I walked away from the office, wild with possibility. My backpack, light without a work laptop, flapped against my spine as I cruised up Corporate drive. I felt liberated, disengaged, and free. Turning the corner, I passed a group of workers taking a break to run in matching company T-shirts, trotting through the path like a string of well-broke ponies, and I pitied them.
That evening, Ana and I drove into Hampton beach, snaking through the lit curving roads of Rye. We pulled over at a lookout and sat on a boulder, eating the cookies that I had stolen from the kitchen. Across the water, the lights flickered. Fog settled over the town, draping itself around the sand, the road, and the piers.
All this time and I could have left months ago. For nearly ten years, I had been seduced by the glitz of exchanging calling cards with exotic titles, and the sexiness of traveling all around the globe or staying in exotic locations. They made it look so glamorous, knowing what you wanted and getting it. I had been ready to believe in them, eager to organize my life around their principles. I had trusted them to tell me who I was, what mattered, and how to live. I had trusted them to have a plan and believed that it was the best way forward for me. I thought they knew something that I did not know. It had all continued for ten long years until one day my nine-year-old when I returned back from an international trip asked me casually — So daddy, when are you going back? I had ended up updating my resume the same night and now here we were.
I floated in relief. Watching the city, wrapped in Ana’s shawl, I did not see that I was in such good company: an entire decade spent away from the ones I loved most — Such an immense waste. I started to understand a bit about my own ambitions and my newly bubbling disregard for driven, aggressive, arrogant men from America’s tall-rise offices as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all.
It had become a global affliction.
