(part 1 of my 2000 word essay) (sorry, my bad)

I know several people who have worked for 20 or more years at the same large organisation (government or corporate) and it blows my mind.

I have a friend who works at a local retail business whose boss is universally despised. Every time I think I have some sob story about the stupid architects and their dazzlingly defunct Ant file - I just need to swap stories with him to be quickly humbled and realise that perhaps things are not so bad for me after all. This boss of his is a guy who can throw a party, invite everyone and have an open bar (literally free as in beer)... and yet not have anyone turn up. This guy is such a colossal spoon that he can't even give away free alcohol. The mind boggles.

I really don't know how my friend and these 20 year veterans of corporate bungling manage to stick it out. I think that it is, in a way, a triumph of grit and determination and character under severe and prolonged stress. I think perhaps there is something in them that instead of getting more and more frustrated with each new offense to common sense, they are able to let last weeks insanity go. They've found some way to continually 'build a bridge and get over it', or perhaps they've seen so much insanity that they have built up an immunity to it, I don't know.

The sprinter may go faster, but the marathon runner goes further.

At the other end of the 'lifer' spectrum, are the people who stick it out because of fear. They take enormous abuse because they fear something worse than their current job. So they get bullied mercilessly. I knew one chap who was so scared of job interviews that he wouldn't even consider looking for work elsewhere. The people who live in constant fear are the one I pity the most. I genuinely feel bad for them.

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But I suppose if I were to turn it around and look at us from their point of view I would see other things. Perhaps they would see the incredible psychological pressure of financial uncertainty. Being the first ones to get shot in a revolution, I mean recession. Not knowing where your next contract or next big customer is going to come from.

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Specifically for the situation you mention, large financial institutions there are a number of things to master:

The first of these is regime change. Every couple of years (or perhaps more frequently) you will get new boss, or a new layer of bosses. They might for instance hire an ex-consultant at high level who 'mysteriously' somehow ends up bringing in his old firm to replace everyone or brings in a bunch of his old cronies to work under him, who bring in their buddies (etc). This can be quite a sudden thing, and you have to be genuinely nimble to survive (somehow running along on top of the avalanche).

The second thing is that many projects are going to fail, and even if you did the majority of the work and almost got it across the line all by yourself and the rest of the team of 20 did less combined than you, you can still end up getting blamed for failure. The blame game is very important and there are some strategies you can use to avoid being 'it', such as documenting the instructions you've been given, and not burning bridges, and cultivating friendships outside of your group (so that when (or preferably before) the project burns down, you teleport to safety in another project). Personally I don't do so well at this. I get far too attached to the imaginary win condition of the project succeeding, and so I force it across the line even if it means pissing off a lot of other people. If I could somehow find it within me to let projects fail I would probably have done better in banking.

(HN spat the dummy at my patented wall of text (tm), so I have to break this up into multiple posts, apologies in advance, hope you find it useful)