Time in the Trenches
Brett April 3rd, 2008
I recently talked to a friend, who graduated with me from Notre Dame, who works in consulting. After the normal exchange of ‘what’s up’, ‘nothing’, I asked what he had been doing at work. He casually (and I almost didn’t notice) said he spent the week carrying boxes.
“What???” I exclaimed confused, “why would you be doing that.”
He responded that his company had sent him to Cincinnati for the week to ‘consult’ (and I use that with extreme generosity) with a company there. When he reported for work on Tuesday morning, the company informed him they had nothing for him to do. After sitting around for a few hours, the company finally found a task for him: move boxes in storage up to their top floor because no one else wanted to do it.
Now this Cincinnati company was being charged over $500/hr for an entire week for somebody to move something that probably would have cost $500 total to move in the first place.
Not only does this prove that company to be moronic, I felt really bad for my friend. How can any worker, after achieving a degree in finance, feel after being told all he was good enough to do was move boxes? I know he felt completely underutilized and like his whole time there, now, is a complete waste of time. While grunt work is to be expected when you start work, I hardly think that after a years time you should be moving boxes to ‘learn’ how to do your job correctly.
While this story is obviously an outlier, I think that too often a lesser version occurs to many young workers. How long do young professionals need to be gophers in order to take on greater tasks?? The age old adage that people must put in their time in the trenches is fast ending, and I think more and more young professionals will respond by leaving their jobs at increased rates.
