Jon's Job Blog

The thesis of this essay is straightforward. When institutions will not tell the truth about what they have done, the only narrative defense available to the person on the other side of the action is to tell it themselves, in the open, on the record. The institutional silence is not neutral. The silence is doing work. It is preserving the institution’s self-description against contradiction, and the cost of preserving that self-description is borne by the person whose contradicting account is being kept out of the conversation. Choosing transparency is the practical move available to the person who refuses to absorb that cost. It is not a comfortable move. It is, in my experience, the cheapest of the available moves once the alternatives have been honestly considered.

I want to be careful about what I am and am not arguing. I am not arguing that everyone in a difficult employment situation should write a blog or publish their correspondence. Most people, for most situations, should not. The decision to make a career experience a matter of public record has real costs, and the costs are unevenly distributed across personalities, industries, financial cushions, and family obligations. I am arguing something narrower: that for the situations in which the institution’s narrative is going to be the only narrative on the record, and in which that narrative will produce continuing material consequences for the person it concerns, the calculation favors disclosure more often than the prevailing employment culture admits. The default assumption that the wronged employee should accept the institution’s account in exchange for severance and a quiet exit is, on examination, an arrangement that costs the employee more than it appears to. The first half of this essay is about why. The second half is about what the calculation looks like once the costs are visible.

When Institutions Will Not Tell the Truth

My own situation is the easiest place to start, because I have already, through the prior essays in this series, made it a matter of public record. My role at PPG was eliminated under circumstances the company has characterized one way and that I have characterized differently. The position was reposted, after my elimination, in Poland. The legal proceedings that followed have confirmed in writing that the termination was not for performance reasons. The internal communication I received about the elimination did not say so. The internal communication characterized the situation in language designed to be defensible to any internal audit and to discourage any external one. The distance between the two characterizations is the gap this essay is about. The gap is the place where the institutional silence is doing its work.

Most separations in white-collar work produce some version of this gap. The institution issues a brief, neutral, defensible statement. The departing employee signs an agreement that prevents them from contradicting it. The result is a public record consisting entirely of the institution’s account, with the employee’s account encumbered by contract from entering the record at all. The arrangement is sold to the employee as protection. It is, at the margin, protection of a kind. The employee has been paid not to argue. The payment is sometimes meaningful. The cost of the payment, which the arrangement does not name as a cost, is that the institutional account becomes, by default, the only account.

The default matters because the institutional account does not stop affecting the employee on the day of the separation. It travels. It enters the informal reference channels that operate between employers in any given regional industry. It shows up in the assumptions of recruiters who hear about the situation third-hand. It shapes how former colleagues describe the departure to their own networks. The non-disparagement clause that bound the employee at signing does not bind any of those other transmitters. They are free to repeat whatever they understood the institutional account to mean. The employee is the only party in the conversation who is contractually prevented from offering a corrective. The payment that purchased the silence was, in operational terms, a payment for narrative monopoly. The institution got something durable. The employee got something temporary.

I want to acknowledge a distinction here that some readers will need me to acknowledge, because the language of accountability has become enough of a cultural battleground that the distinction is sometimes assumed away. There are situations in which the institution is right and the employee is wrong. There are people who are terminated for performance reasons, or for genuine misconduct, or for behaviors that the institution has documented carefully and that the employee, with hindsight, would have to concede. Those situations exist. They are not what this essay is about. This essay is about the substantial subset of separations in which the institution’s account is, on inspection, inaccurate, and in which the inaccuracy is not random but systematic — the result of HR processes, legal posture, and internal political incentives that point the institution toward a particular kind of story regardless of what happened. In those cases, the institutional silence is not a neutral fact about how separations work. It is an active choice with predictable distributional consequences. The choice to break the silence on the employee side is, similarly, an active choice with consequences. I am claiming the second choice is undervalued, not that it is universal.

I should say that this pattern did not start with me. Years before I entered the workforce, my father lost a job for the first time when the company where he worked as an engineer was acquired by a larger industrial conglomerate. The deal included a clause protecting acquired employees from layoffs — for a couple of years. When the clause expired, the acquirer cut half of the engineering staff in one sweep, my father included. The clause had not been protection. It had been a timer. He took what he could get next, a low-paying job at a soldering shop, and worked it for about a month before a better offer came from another manufacturer.

It was at that second company, years later, that the episode occurred which has become, in our family, the template for everything this essay argues. He had proposed changes that would have run the plant better. The changes cut against the general manager’s preferences. What followed, as he tells it, was not a debate about the merits. A political operator went around the floor collecting statements from coworkers — coached statements, he has always maintained, and false ones — to build the file that made the termination easy to execute and easy to defend. This is his account, not a court record, and I present it as what it is: the story a competent man tells about how the record was rewritten around him. But I have now watched enough institutional record-keeping from the inside to find the account entirely plausible, because the mechanics he describes are the mechanics I have seen.

The lesson he took from it, and the lesson I inherited before I understood I was inheriting anything, is the thesis of this essay in miniature. The person who tells the truth about how the operation actually runs loses the org-chart fight to the person who plays it. The file wins, whoever writes the file. And the machinery that produces the file is not built to be accurate. It is built to be sufficient. Which means the only durable defense available to the person on the other side of it is a record of his own — kept plainly, kept early, and kept where the operator cannot edit it. My father did not have that option in his industry and his era. I do.

There is a postscript. One of the men who, by his account, supplied those statements is now serving a lengthy federal sentence for child pornography offenses. A conviction for one thing is not evidence of lying about another, and I want to be precise about that. But when the institutional file and a man’s word are the only two records that exist, it is fair to note what has since become knowable about the people who built the file. Character, it turns out, was not evenly distributed among the participants.

What the Accounting Cannot See

To understand why the institutional account is so often inaccurate, it helps to look at the broader pattern of what corporate accounting systems can and cannot measure. The pattern is the same one Essay 17 described, and it is the pattern that produces the gap between what employers know about their workforces and what they choose to know.

One example. Presenteeism — the practice of working while sick, exhausted, or otherwise impaired — costs U.S. companies in excess of one hundred fifty billion dollars annually, roughly an order of magnitude more than absenteeism. The average employee loses around fifty-seven days of productive output per year to presenteeism. Depression-related presenteeism alone accounts for about thirty-three billion dollars. None of this appears on any balance sheet, because the accounting system that produces balance sheets does not have a column for it. The cost is real. The cost is borne. The cost is not measured. The accounting system, which the executive class treats as a comprehensive description of the business, is structurally blind to a category of cost roughly equal to the entire pre-tax profit of many large companies. The blindness is not an oversight. It is the architecture of the measurement framework.

A second example, from the opposite direction. The McKinsey Health Institute, in a study covering more than thirty thousand employees across thirty countries, estimated that investment in employee health could produce roughly twelve trillion dollars in global economic value, with more than three-quarters of that value coming from improved productivity and reduced presenteeism. The same study found that only about two percent of the assessed companies were running employee surveys with a focused emphasis on health and wellbeing. The opportunity is enormous. The measurement is essentially absent. The institutions that would benefit from the investment are not in a position to make the investment, because their measurement frameworks cannot represent the return. The frameworks make the cost of the investment visible and the return invisible, which means the investment looks, from the inside, like an unalloyed expense. The result, predictably, is that the investment does not happen.

The work of Zeynep Ton, at MIT Sloan and at the Good Jobs Institute, has documented this asymmetry at the level of operational management. Ton’s argument is that companies in many sectors have settled into what she calls a bad jobs equilibrium, in which low wages produce high turnover, high turnover produces operational dysfunction, operational dysfunction produces reduced profitability, and reduced profitability is then cited as the reason the company cannot afford to invest in its workforce. The cycle is self-sustaining because the financial statement format itself reinforces it. Wage investment appears as a visible line item; turnover cost is scattered across multiple line items or not captured at all. Ton estimates that employers spend between ten and twenty-five percent of their labor budgets on replacement costs alone — and in one case she documents, forty-five percent — yet most companies have never calculated the figure. The accounting format makes the trap legible only after it has produced the outcome the trap was designed, structurally, to produce.

Ton’s counter-model, the good jobs system, is documented in operating companies whose performance over decades makes the argument hard to dismiss. Costco pays an average wage roughly double the retail industry average and has a turnover rate of about eight percent against an industry average of around sixty percent. The company promotes from within, provides healthcare to part-time staff, and has outperformed the S&P 500 over the multi-decade window in which both can be compared. Sam’s Club, following a deliberate operational redesign that included raising wages, simplifying work groups, and reducing SKU complexity, produced labor productivity improvements of about sixteen percent, turnover reductions of twenty-five percent for hourly staff and more for managers, and sales growth of around twenty-five percent over a two-year window without opening new stores. The CEO who led that redesign was subsequently promoted to run the larger Walmart organization. The Spanish supermarket chain Mercadona, with around eighty thousand employees and nineteen billion euros in revenue, maintains a turnover rate of under four percent and, in one year, distributed half of a five-hundred-million-euro profit to its workforce. The math is not unique to American retail. The choice not to see the math is what makes the bad-jobs equilibrium so durable elsewhere.

The reason these counter-models are not the default is the reason this essay is about transparency. The bad-jobs equilibrium is the equilibrium of the metric system that cannot see what it is destroying. The good-jobs equilibrium requires either a measurement system that can see investment returns the standard one cannot, or a decision-maker willing to act on the conviction that the standard one is wrong. The decision-makers willing to act on that conviction tend to be founders, family owners, or operators with enough independence from quarterly capital markets pressure to make the case stick. The rest of the corporate landscape continues to operate on a measurement system that, as a structural matter, cannot distinguish a humane workplace from an extractive one because the categories that would make the distinction legible do not exist in the categories it uses.

The Surveillance Substitute

There is a parallel development worth noting, because it explains how the bad-jobs equilibrium has continued to maintain itself even as the operational case against it has accumulated. As trust and investment have receded as management practices, surveillance has expanded to fill the space. The employee-monitoring software market grew from roughly two and a half billion dollars in 2023 to over three billion in 2024 and is on track to surpass eight billion by the end of the decade. The share of U.S. companies using monitoring tools went from around thirty percent a decade ago to roughly eighty percent by 2020, and continues to rise. The majority of monitored employees report increased stress; a substantial majority report that the monitoring either has no effect on their performance or actively reduces it. The technology is not, on the available evidence, producing the productivity gains it markets. It is producing something else. The something else is the experience of being watched, and the experience of being watched is a substitute for the trust that the good-jobs model requires and that the bad-jobs model has decided it cannot afford.

This is the operational link between Essay 17’s metric critique and this essay’s case for transparency. The institution that has chosen surveillance over investment, and that has chosen accounting categories that hide the cost of the choice, is not an institution that can be trusted to describe its separations accurately. The mechanisms that would produce accurate description — honest measurement, two-way feedback, leadership that solicits dissent — are precisely the mechanisms the bad-jobs equilibrium does not maintain. The institution’s narrative about the employee’s departure is a product of the same measurement framework that produced the conditions causing the departure in the first place. Expecting that narrative to be accurate is expecting the framework to do something the framework is not designed to do. Transparency on the employee side is, among other things, a response to the predictable inadequacy of the framework on the institution side.

Knowledge as Personal Capital, Documentation as Anti-Transparency

There is a smaller, more domestic version of the same dynamic that is worth describing because it is the everyday face of the structural problem, and I have encountered it in a quieter form by moving from one company to another. At the company I had been at for four and a half years, the working culture treated documentation as the precondition of work rather than as something one got to if there was time. Work, in that environment, did not get done unless it was getting documented first; the document was, in effect, the artifact the work was organized around. At the company I work at now, the working culture is closer to the reverse. Documentation, where it exists, is treated as optional and as something to be produced later if the time presents itself, which it generally does not. Substantial portions of the institutional knowledge necessary to do the work live entirely in the heads of the people who happen to have done the work in the past. The transfer mechanism, when transfer occurs at all, tends to be observation after the fact rather than collaboration or written process.

The shift between the two cultures has been informative in a way I did not anticipate. The well-documented environment had its own problems, which the prior essays in this series have catalogued, but the absence of those problems in the second environment is not the relief I expected it to be. It is the cost I had not appreciated until I was paying it. Knowledge that lives in individual heads is knowledge that cannot be questioned, audited, improved, or shared without the individual’s active participation. The arrangement gives the holder of the knowledge a form of power that survives the value of the knowledge itself. It also locks the team into the holder’s particular way of doing things, because no one else has the information needed to propose alternatives. When the holder eventually leaves — through retirement, departure, or, in my own previous case, elimination — the institution loses the knowledge entirely. The cost of the loss is paid by the team that has to reconstruct what was never written down. The choice not to document is, when one looks at it closely, a choice to make the institution more brittle in exchange for keeping the documenter more central. The trade is rarely named as a trade. It is treated as the natural order of how work gets done. The natural order is, in fact, a long-running institutional preference for opacity at the operational level, and it produces, predictably, opacity at every other level the operational level supports.

The Computerworld Validation

I want to return briefly to the Computerworld ranking I described in Essay 17, because it functions, for me, as a particular kind of external validation of the case for transparency. The ranking moved from eighteen to thirty-eight over a single year. The PPG team that I left behind, by the account of a former colleague who has chosen to share with me what he has seen, continues to operate on the legacy reporting infrastructure I had been hired to modernize. The Power BI transition I was driving did not proceed. The SSRS system I had been tasked with replacing remained in place. The employee survey results have continued to produce poor scores. The problems I described before my elimination, the problems my elimination was justified by reference to a restructuring that was supposed to address, are the same problems that have produced the ranking drop. The ranking did not come from nowhere. It came from the same place my prior assessments came from. The difference is that the ranking is a third party, whereas I was an employee, and the institution’s response to the third party is different from its response to the employee.

This is the validation that makes the public record useful. When the institutional account is contradicted, as a matter of structural fact, by the outcomes the institution’s own measurement systems eventually report, the gap between the institutional account and the individual’s account narrows on the institution’s side. The institution is, in effect, retroactively confirming the individual’s account through outcomes the institution did not intend to produce. The retroactive confirmation does not undo the elimination. It does not produce restitution. What it does, for the individual, is locate the original assessment on a record that includes the institutional outcomes that subsequently validated it. The blog, in my case, is the record. The Computerworld drop is, among other things, evidence that the assessment the blog has been describing was accurate when it was offered. The institution will not say so. The institution does not have to. The numbers are saying it on the institution’s behalf.

The Public Record Is Cheaper Than the Private Burden

I want to turn now to the case I made at the opening of this essay, which is that the cost of going public is lower than the cost of not going public, once both are honestly accounted for. This is a personal calculation, and the calculation will run differently for different people. I am describing the calculation as it ran for me, with the understanding that other people’s versions will involve different inputs.

The visible cost of going public is the loss of optionality. Once an essay series exists, future employers will, if they look, find it. Some will not look. Some will find it and not care. Some will find it and decide it disqualifies the writer from a role. The third group is the cost. The first two groups are not. The size of the third group, in my industry and at my level, is smaller than the conventional wisdom suggests, partly because the demographic that does extensive online vetting of mid-career professionals is itself a particular demographic with its own characteristic concerns, and partly because the analytical sophistication of the writing — if the writing is analytically sophisticated — functions as a credential of its own. A potential employer who is reflexively put off by the existence of public commentary on a former employer is, in many cases, a potential employer the writer is better off being filtered out of. The screening goes in both directions. The blog is the writer’s screen as much as it is the employer’s.

The invisible cost of not going public is harder to describe but in my experience larger. The institutional account, in the absence of a counter-account, becomes the account. It travels. It shapes future references. It conditions the writer’s own sense of what happened, because the writer has nowhere to put their own account except inside their own head, where it accumulates without the discipline of being articulated for a reader. The writing process, separate from any audience effect, has a clarifying function. Pennebaker’s research on expressive writing has documented the effect quantitatively: unemployed professionals who wrote about their job loss found re-employment at roughly four times the rate of those who did not, across a body of replication studies the Department of Labor has classified as high-quality evidence. The writing is not a self-indulgence. The writing is the practical work of converting an experience into a structure the writer can act from, and the act of publication is the part of the work that holds the writing to a standard. A private journal can be sloppy. A public essay has to be defensible. The discipline of defensibility is what produces the clarification.

The second invisible cost of not going public is community. The writer who tells the truth in public discovers, often to their surprise, that other people have been carrying versions of the same experience and have not had the language for it. The discovery does not undo the experience. It does change what the experience means. The experience that one carried alone is a different experience from the experience one shares with others who have carried analogous versions. The institutional account, by design, isolates. The public account, by design, connects. The connection is the second-order benefit of the disclosure, and it is the benefit the conventional employment advice cannot account for, because the conventional employment advice is operating on a model in which the employee is alone with their situation and the situation is purely individual. The situation is not purely individual. It is structural. The discovery of the structural dimension, through the public account, is what converts the experience from a personal misfortune into a piece of evidence about a recurring pattern. The recurring pattern is what the writing is, ultimately, about.

The Limits of the Argument

I do not want to oversell the case. There are real constraints on transparency that the case for it has to respect. Non-disparagement clauses, where they exist and have been signed, are legally binding within their scope, and the scope, when one reads the document carefully, is usually narrower than the popular understanding of the clause suggests. The clauses generally prohibit derogatory statements about the company, its officers, and its products. They do not generally prohibit factual descriptions of the writer’s own experience, particularly where the descriptions are matters of independently documentable record. The legal posture that follows from this is one of careful, factual, named-source writing about what happened, with characterizations limited to what the available evidence supports. The writing in this series has been constructed under that posture. It is not a rant. It is a documented account. The documentation is the protection.

There is also a limit on what disclosure can accomplish. The writer who expects the public account to produce institutional contrition, public apology, or material restitution will be disappointed. None of these is what disclosure produces. What disclosure produces is the existence of a counter-account on the public record, the development of community among readers who recognize themselves in the account, the analytical practice that strengthens the writer’s own thinking, and the small but cumulative pressure that public accounts of structural dysfunction exert on the cultures the dysfunction depends on. None of these are dramatic. All of them are real. The dramatic outcome — the resignation of the executive, the apology from the board, the reform of the policy — is not what disclosure is for. Disclosure is for the slower work of contributing to a record that, in aggregate, makes certain kinds of institutional behavior harder to sustain.

The other thing disclosure does is reset the relationship between the writer and the institution. Once the account exists in public, the institution’s leverage over the writer is reduced, because the principal currency that leverage operated in — the threat that the institution’s account would prevail by default — is no longer available. The threat has been called. The account is on the record. Whatever happens next happens in a different posture, with the writer no longer carrying the burden of a story they cannot tell. That shift, more than anything else the disclosure accomplishes, is what the case for transparency turns on. The writer who has told the truth in public is, at minimum, no longer alone with it. The non-aloneness is the durable thing the writing produces, and the durability is what makes the cost of the writing worth absorbing.

Closing

What happens when you make your career a public record? You lose control of the story, in the sense that the story is now a thing other people can read and judge and refer to. You also gain something more valuable, which is that you stop being alone in the story. The story, once written, is something that exists outside the writer’s head, with a structure other readers can apprehend. The structure is what makes connection possible. The connection is what makes the experience bearable. The bearability is the point.

The institutional silence in employment law is sometimes described as protection of the worker. It is not protection of the worker. It is protection of the institution’s narrative monopoly, purchased from the worker for an amount that is usually less than the cost of the monopoly to the worker over time. The worker who accepts the trade is making a calculation, and the calculation is rational on the terms the institution has presented. The terms are incomplete. The honest terms include the invisible cost of carrying the institutional account alone, the analytical and emotional cost of having no public framework for what happened, the practical cost of being unable to correct misinformation that travels in the writer’s former industry, and the relational cost of being unable to connect with others who have carried similar experiences. The honest terms also include the corresponding benefits of transparency: clarification, community, the practical discipline of writing under public accountability, and the small contribution to a body of public evidence that makes certain institutional behaviors harder to maintain.

The decision to publish is not a decision for everyone. For the people for whom it is the right decision, the prevailing employment culture has been making the case against it loudly for so long that the case for it is sometimes hard to hear. This essay has tried to make the case for it. The argument is that institutional silence is a particular kind of cost, that the cost is structurally hidden from the people paying it, and that the alternative — named, careful, factual public writing about what happened — is a defense the employment culture has structural reasons to discourage even when it is, on balance, the better choice for the person in the situation. The discouragement is part of what the apparatus does. The transparency is part of what dismantles the discouragement. The dismantling is slow. The slowness is the price. The price is one I have been willing to pay, and I do not regret the trade.

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