News stories keep crossing my desk at Proxima Sales responding to the recent NYT piece on Amazon. The theme seems to be: "Here's our take on working our tech company staff to death: they like it." I'm pretty sure the authors of these essays can't hear the historically resonant tones of the pre-union-era (read wayyyy before unions) bosses saying that their immigrant, ethnic minority, and other under-class workers just love to work that hard.
All this glorification of how nicely workers are treated, while working for their entire careers with 24/7 availability to their employer, is just a bit too much to swallow.
The lovely CEO at VMware, Pat Gelsinger, is a good Christian guy who, back in the day, literally wrote the book on work-life balance. Today, he extolls in Business Insider the many ways that his company makes it easy to cheerfully work endlessly. He shows no signs of self-consciousness when he describes how easy they make it at VMware to bring your family on campus to share dinner with you AT WORK. He nearly broke an arm patting himself on the back for the annual Halloween family event. Recently, while salmon fishing at the mouth of the Columbia river with his son, he even found the off switch on his phone! (Pro tip: the Columbia is a nature-bats-last kind of river. If you think you can fish, take a call and survive the mighty Columbia rolling on....you just might be a tech CEO).
My intention is not to dun any particular company, or worse, blame the workers who go along with these arrangements. Nope. My intention is to invite you to apply to Proxima Sales. You will not be asked to be available 24/7. You will in fact be required to use your vacation, volunteer, family, and other leave time because we don't enjoy working with clinically exhausted martyrs. You'll make more money and have real time off. This value proposition is the very real reason that Proxima Sales has no trouble at all recruiting and retaining talent, in every department, that is far superior in skills and more experienced than our size should allow.
Will you ever take a call from a Proxima Sales client at 4pm on Christmas Eve? Maybe. I did last year, but Christmas isn't big at our house so I held phone duty for everyone on the team who was busy celebrating. Did one of our salespeople cut into her own vacation to onboard a new client who said their availability required it? Yes, she did. Will she do such a favor for that particular client again? That's another post.
We have no problem admitting that our distributed company, focused on building sales for our clients, is not a low-effort place to work. With genuine power to build your own schedule, we expect you to deliver phenomenal service to our clients and your co-workers when you're at work. We do not serve dinner so you'll need to arrange to eat with your family. Our bonus system rewards results rather than role-playing Mad Men, though, so if you have call reluctance, please continue avoiding the phone and don't call me.
If some of this sounds great, shoot me an email: kate@proxima-sales.com. If you think any of this was helpful or even slightly amusing, please join us so you can help share blogging duties.
