posted
Rage Against The Machine's cover of Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" has been my B-school anthem since I started. But I feel like Florence + The Machine's Dog Days Are Over has forced me to consider creating a B-school album rather than an anthem. Besides the obvious refrain of the dog days being over, this line just resonates with me so hard.
"You can't carry it with you if you want to survive."
Obviously there's other things in that song that don't match up with my scenario, but that's alright. I never worked for Maggie's Ma either. I think I'm ready to let go of some failures.
1: Five years of trying to get into the Foreign Service. This one is probably the hardest. I gave it everything I had. I really did. I guess part of being from a privileged background is to think that all challenges require an unbeatable combination of effort + time. So many other things have been like that. I still feel like I could be an awesome foreign service officer, I also feel like I *could* have been a foreign service officer for several years by now if I had made my attempts differently, especially when I made it to the oral exams. But that's done now. And that's OK. I'm doing other things.
2: Not getting a Master's degree when I was younger. If I had been better with my time, I would have started school four years ago. But that's done now. I'm doing it now, and it makes me happy. None of the friends I made these past few months would have been my friends then.
3: Losing my job at Unicity. I could have kept my job there if I'd been smarter. Maybe I would be climbing the ladder to and be salaried too if I had. I could have kept all my disagreements with policy strictly private. I could have managed my boss better. I could have handled the phone call that ended my job differently even if I don't think I did anything wrong. But that's done now. I'm doing other things, and they make me happy.
I'm done carrying them. I'll keep the lessons learned part of the experience, but I don't want to be those Taylors anymore. I've got more than enough things ahead of me that could make me happier.
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posted
what on earth is this unicity thing? i can see parts of its website on my phone and the ... way it is formatting its paragraphs to describe itself is setting off pretty much every business alarm bell i have
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: what on earth is this unicity thing? i can see parts of its website on my phone and the ... way it is formatting its paragraphs to describe itself is setting off pretty much every business alarm bell i have
Unicity is an MLM based firm in the nutrition and fitness industries. I started out doing inbound customer service for them, and eventually became their international distributor liaison.
I helped distributors educating them on product, and compensation, as well as handling logistics when they wanted to bring Unicity products to their local markets.
I ended up doing two jobs and having two bosses who had very different philosophies on what I should be doing with my time. It didn't end well.
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posted
You could have stopped with "...is an MLM..." and we would have supplied the "It didn't end well."
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: You could have stopped with "...is an MLM..." and we would have supplied the "It didn't end well."
Not that I'm a big proponent of the MLM model, but that's kind of a knee-jerk reaction, IMO. I worked at the corporate offices of a big MLM for 5 years and it was quite similar to working at any other large company. Same big company mentality, same politics. The people working directly with the distributors may have felt it differently, but for me, if it "didn't end well" it wasn't because it was an MLM, it was because there were the normal problems with stupid managers and ladder climbers, etc.
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Well, sure. At its best, office work at a MLM is like office work at any particularly corrupt retailer.
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Yeah, you're right. One big hazard of working at an MLM, same as for any particularly corrupt retailer (and you know who you are), is tripping over the women tied to the train tracks by the dastardly villains. You can hear them snickering everywhere.
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BlackBlade: Didn't you live in Hong Kong before at one point? How much did you pick up then?
But yeah, go out for some dim sum (is "guk fa cha" sufficiently non-tea-plant for Mormons?), watch some movies, and it should happen. Your knowledge of Mandarin will definitely help.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:Originally posted by advice for robots: Yeah, you're right. One big hazard of working at an MLM, same as for any particularly corrupt retailer (and you know who you are), is tripping over the women tied to the train tracks by the dastardly villains. You can hear them snickering everywhere.
When you work for an MLM (and obviously here we mean like actually working at it, as opposed to being the underclass of gullible marks that the company is designed to feed off of) your higher ups are ... people who manage or own an MLM. It takes a special sort of person to be — and want to continue to be — that person. A mover and a shaker at a MLM, without any particularly overriding sort of morality and/or awareness that would self-select them out of wanting to make that their industry.
And they're your bosses.
Needless to say, most people's experiences as workers at MLM's are tales with predictable endings, so
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posted
It's fair to note that the higher ups at MOST big businesses are as likely as not to consider profit and personal success higher goods than most other kinds of good, and this affects the company culture whether it's MLM or not.
There are some industries where this is less likely to be the case but I have no problem believing afr is correct that the office worker at an MLM is in much the same boat as the office workers at Initech.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: what on earth is this unicity thing? i can see parts of its website on my phone and the ... way it is formatting its paragraphs to describe itself is setting off pretty much every business alarm bell i have
Unicity is an MLM based firm in the nutrition and fitness industries. I started out doing inbound customer service for them, and eventually became their international distributor liaison.
I helped distributors educating them on product, and compensation, as well as handling logistics when they wanted to bring Unicity products to their local markets.
I ended up doing two jobs and having two bosses who had very different philosophies on what I should be doing with my time. It didn't end well.
welp, if i'm reading this right, you were their international distributer liason, and that wasn't even yet a salaried position (for extra laughs, you could tell me your lunch break wasn't paid for)
and when i now sit back and read up on this company and see all their products, I'm looking at BS nutritional crap and (very very VERY) BS 'cleanses' for detoxifying your colon,
i think you should honestly take it as a point of pride (and relief) that you got canned from that job. it's an award. a thing of honor.
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quote:It's fair to note that the higher ups at MOST big businesses are as likely as not to consider profit and personal success higher goods than most other kinds of good, and this affects the company culture whether it's MLM or not.
right, but when weighed against an average of sorts, MLM's are just really, exceptionally, crappy. much like working for, oh, as a perfectly innocent and certainly not anecdotal experience, a telemarketing firm that tries to cold-call seniors and bilk them
quote:Originally posted by scifibum: There are some industries where this is less likely to be the case but I have no problem believing afr is correct that the office worker at an MLM is in much the same boat as the office workers at Initech.
well at least as far as such stories are concerned, i have never ever had an mlm employment tale told to me that was any better than what Office Space felt like, and i'd say this makes for a pretty grody 'best case scenario' for employment environs
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Office Space was successful because it resonated with a lot of people. I don't think anybody called it a best case scenario. I think companies actually have to work pretty hard to keep the crappy elements out of corporate/office culture, and I don't think most big ones do that.
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quote:Office Space was successful because it resonated with a lot of people.
yeah, but the reason it resonated is because it described a terrible job at a terrible company. this resonates with people who have had that terrible job and hopefully got out of it to greener pastures, or becomes a bittersweet celluloid commiseration to people who watch it and go 'oh my god, that's my job'
saying the office worker at an MLM is in much the same boat as the office workers at Initech? i suppose i can see the intended message that 'oh those are just bad jobs' but honestly initech was intentionally portrayed as a terrible job, so it doesn't look good (but seems surprisingly apt) to say the MLM average i'm describing is just like any other Initech.
And looking back at all the MLM stories I've been told, I think I could put them on a continuum between office space and in the mouth of madness
/e - *reads MLM mission statement, morphs into cronenbergian horror*
quote:Originally posted by advice for robots: Yeah, you're right. One big hazard of working at an MLM, same as for any particularly corrupt retailer (and you know who you are), is tripping over the women tied to the train tracks by the dastardly villains. You can hear them snickering everywhere.
When you work for an MLM (and obviously here we mean like actually working at it, as opposed to being the underclass of gullible marks that the company is designed to feed off of) your higher ups are ... people who manage or own an MLM. It takes a special sort of person to be — and want to continue to be — that person. A mover and a shaker at a MLM, without any particularly overriding sort of morality and/or awareness that would self-select them out of wanting to make that their industry.
And they're your bosses.
Needless to say, most people's experiences as workers at MLM's are tales with predictable endings, so
I'm not going to start defending the MLM business model, but not all MLMs are the type of shady snake oil and gas additive fly-by-night schemes that people usually lump all MLM-based companies into. Yes, those do exist in droves. Mine wasn't that kind of company, however, regardless of how much some people will continue to insist that it necessarily had to be, because duh, MLM. No, I don't agree with the whole MLM mindset. But where I worked, at least, I didn't feel like I was in some ethical gray area, or that my bosses and bosses' bosses had made some Faustian bargain so they could screw people over without guilt. It really was a legit company with plenty of legit products. It paid every commission check in full. It had a fair compensation plan, as those go. And, for people who could stand it, it offered an ongoing opportunity to build a successful and lucrative business. The founders of the company were and are very good people. If it had felt shady to me, I wouldn't have worked there very long.
Honestly, it was just like working for a CPG company that gets its products into customers' hands the traditional way, by wrestling for store shelf space and flooding the media with advertisements. With the same kinds of politics and cast of characters in its offices and cubicles. Being an MLM didn't automatically make it some special kind of evil.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: BlackBlade: Didn't you live in Hong Kong before at one point? How much did you pick up then?
But yeah, go out for some dim sum (is "guk fa cha" sufficiently non-tea-plant for Mormons?), watch some movies, and it should happen. Your knowledge of Mandarin will definitely help.
Yes, embarrassingly I lived in Hong Kong a total of 11 years, and only picked up like 15 words in Cantonese. I just didn't care growing up. At this age, it's way more important.
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quote:It's fair to note that the higher ups at MOST big businesses are as likely as not to consider profit and personal success higher goods than most other kinds of good, and this affects the company culture whether it's MLM or not.
right, but when weighed against an average of sorts, MLM's are just really, exceptionally, crappy. much like working for, oh, as a perfectly innocent and certainly not anecdotal experience, a telemarketing firm that tries to cold-call seniors and bilk them
quote:Originally posted by scifibum: There are some industries where this is less likely to be the case but I have no problem believing afr is correct that the office worker at an MLM is in much the same boat as the office workers at Initech.
well at least as far as such stories are concerned, i have never ever had an mlm employment tale told to me that was any better than what Office Space felt like, and i'd say this makes for a pretty grody 'best case scenario' for employment environs
Well it got me two years of legitimate work experience struggling to solve problems of an international scope. It made me smarter as a worker, and resulted in my going to business school. I'm sure I could have learned those same lessons in a much more positive environment, but I learned them at Unicity.
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yeah, who's going to talk about automatic categorical evil? we're (or at least I am) talking about the odds that you aren't gonna have a bad time working for an MLM being ... low. when we're talking about the probabilities involved in what your bosses are like? you said you're not going to defend the MLM business model, which is good (Insert obligatory Penn & Teller link I can't link here because there's unclothed human bodies in it for a bit at the beginning oh no) but upper management at an MLM does. At least to themselves. And it says a lot about your odds of having a good time working for an MLM, if, uh, the surfeit of horror stories about MLM employment don't already do so to a convincing extent. Those odds aren't zero, obviously. But it is not nor should it be a controversial position that you should probably avoid ever working at an MLM. I would actually go so far as to say that at a certain level of understanding of what the MLM model actually is, at a certain level of awareness of the system you use is, continuing to work at an MLM becomes to some extent an immoral decision.
/e
quote:Yes, embarrassingly I lived in Hong Kong a total of 11 years, and only picked up like 15 words in Cantonese. I just didn't care growing up. At this age, it's way more important.
honestly 15 words is impressive. shy of total immersion or a skazillion hours of impressively dedicated study you apparently just don't pick up the language because it's so absurdly difficult and tonal.
i could have grown up in hong kong and maybe have learned, possibly, assuming i paid attention, that the word 'cantonese' is a word that means a particular language.
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posted
Kinda like working in the porn industry. Got it.
Due to some of my job responsibilities I was probably more familiar with the compensation plan/business model than the average employee. I know it's easy to structure those to where they're quite predatory and unethical and favor a few people at the expense of the many schmucks who follow them in. That's easy to see. I'd say the majority of large, long-lasting MLM-based companies don't structure theirs that way. I've known a few former employees of the little fly-by-night one-product companies that are just out to bilk their distributor force, and yeah, they have some horror stories. However, I know an awful lot of people who do or did work for more established MLMs and rarely hear a horror story specific to the MLM nature of the company. Plenty of stories about office politics and corporate BS, but you can find those anywhere.
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quote:I'd say the majority of large, long-lasting MLM-based companies don't structure theirs that way.
Could you name one or two of these companies? I've had friends involved in several MLM organizations, including some of the most well-known MLM brands, and none have had a good story. The best outcome I'm aware of is "bled money for years while trying really really hard to achieve the unrealistic potential that was sold to them until they gave up."
Posts: 3275 | Registered: May 2007
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Ack, no, because I have no interest in defending any particular company that I name. Most people are going to have a miserable time of trying to build a lasting, lucrative business with any MLM. Many will be disenchanted. It's incredibly hard to do, even when the compensation plan is structured fairly in their favor. The ones who do succeed are very good at sales already. Like I said, I'm not going to defend the MLM model or speak for anyone who tries to succeed as a distributor. I'm talking about being an employee at the company, and we're talking about whether that means you've had to sell your soul. I'm contending that at some companies, you actually can sleep at night after working there each day.
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quote:Ack, no, because I have no interest in defending any particular company that I name.
No problem. I was just curious.
quote:Most people are going to have a miserable time of trying to build a lasting, lucrative business with any MLM.
The fact that all MLMs very much preach the opposite when recruiting distributors is perhaps the biggest problem with MLMs. Well, that and math.
quote:I'm talking about being an employee at the company, and we're talking about whether that means you've had to sell your soul. I'm contending that at some companies, you actually can sleep at night after working there each day.
I don't think it requires selling your soul, but I don't think working for a company that does unambiguously immoral things is necessarily a soul-selling offense in and of itself. I still drink coke and eat nestle products even though distant branches of both companies have done some really really horrible stuff. We compartmentalize and our immediate needs and desires are usually a higher priority than our lofty and inconsistently applied morality.
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quote:Most people are going to have a miserable time of trying to build a lasting, lucrative business with any MLM.
The fact that all MLMs very much preach the opposite when recruiting distributors is perhaps the biggest problem with MLMs. Well, that and math.
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Of course they preach the opposite. That's marketing 101. The honest ones at least acknowledge that you aren't going to get anywhere unless you work damned hard at it, but still make success possible. Anyone going into real estate or commission-based sales faces the same dream/reality disconnect.
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