I met Eric on Substack, where we read each other’s writing. He spends his days in a tech company doing the corporate thing. His Substack, I’m sure you’re right, is where he writes under a pen name, so he can take the corporate guy mask off and publish things like “New Guy, New Rut - Figuring out why the new guy bummed me out so much” and “How to avoid your job stealing the prime of your life.”
I expected him to be loose and irreverent, the way his writing is. But the Eric I met took his time. When I asked what something felt like, he stopped to think. When I pushed a little, he went there.
Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
“You’re an interesting guy,” I started. “You have this split that a lot of us have. The person that has to perform at work, and then you have this strong internal voice that’s often at odds. But when you talk about it, you don’t sound conflicted… Are you?”
Eric paused and thought for a moment. “I have this thing that I say to customers sometimes, and it’s a sports analogy. Basically, there’s the name on the front of my shirt, which is my jersey name, right? This is the team I work for, the company…”
I nodded to the letter E on my screen. Eric agreed to meet with me virtually, but he kept his camera off. “And then there’s the name on the back of my shirt. These are two different people talking to you. So there’s the stuff I gotta say to you based on the name on the front of my shirt. And that, in my mind, is like, it’s my job. I’m here to represent that name. So I take a lot of pride in doing that. That’s what I consider a good job, making my team represented well in the world.”
“Right, got it.” I said.
“But it doesn’t stop me from knowing I have to take care of the name on the back of my shirt. I’m going to have certain relationships that run in contrast to those, or in tension with that. So there are moments I have to be like, look, me as a reasoning human person — name on the back of my shirt — I understand what you’re saying. Me as a representative and team member — name on the front of my shirt — this is how we feel. And I guess I have learned to exist with that cognitive dissonance.”
He truly didn’t seem in conflict. Maybe because he had such a clean tidy metaphor... But there had to be more to this, because his Substack publication existed as a place for him to take the “team jersey” off. I wanted to know more about that.
“Tell me a bit about why you write on Substack?”
“Having to keep a mask on at work, it’s like playing chess. I’m just thinking, what am I doing to maximize the chances I get more out of this? But if I’m in that mode all the time, I can lose track of what I actually think or feel about a situation.”
“I can get too focused on what I would do to maximize my chances of a promotion or a raise or whatever and not even ask myself ‘What do I actually like or dislike about this person?’
“I started my Substack because I needed a place I could go to just be authentic and really work things out and decide what I actually feel. I needed to try to find that true north again. What’s moral, what’s not. Not what do I have to do, but what do I want to do. And because there’s not a lot of room for that in the world — let alone at work, which is taking up so much of my life anyway — the Substack has really done a lot for me.
“I feel like authenticity can be a muscle. And if you don’t use it, you start to lose it. And I think being able to find that true north and really reinforce who I am outside of work — knowing more about myself by just exploring that — has made it easier to navigate a world where I can’t always be that way.
“Because I don’t have to sit there and wonder, okay, I’m saying this because I think it’s what I need to do for right now to be successful at work, but have I lost track of what I really think? Have I lost track of what I really feel about this? With Substack, I’ve had the opportunity to explore those scenarios and find that compass again. And that part has made it easier. It’s definitely taken weight off those hard interactions I’ve had at work.”
“This makes so much sense to me,” I paused and glanced at my list of prepped questions for Eric, but decided to follow my curiosity instead.
“What would the best possible workplace be for you? From benefits to management to leadership…what would it have in order for you to feel like you’re thriving?”
“Well, I recognize it’s not necessarily something that works for everybody, but for me — I would like to be someplace that is absolutely transparent. The good, the bad, the ugly. I want to know if we’re losing money, I want to know if we’re making money. I just want to know what the deal is from all sides…”
“It’s really hard to tell what’s going on in a lot of companies in corporate America, it’s just so opaque. It’s a lot of like reading tea leaves and wondering if you’re okay.
The guessing and wondering can waste a lot of energy, I got that.
And then Eric went into personal dynamics and culture. “And if someone thinks I’m doing a terrible job, they should just tell me. We’ll just talk about it. I thrive in that degree of honesty. Maybe it’s just I’m from the northeast, so I’m kind of used to that environment. So for me, it would all start with that.
“From there, trying to find a place that is about mutual gain. I worked for a couple of places where, and some people hated this — when you talk behind someone’s back, they say, hold on, let me get that person on the phone and so we can hash it out right now. I love that. That to me is such an essential part of a successful work culture that’s going to actually grow. Because I just feel like people get stuck and it’s easy to get complacent in an organization that isn’t adapting in a way it needs to. You end up with people in the same position having the same problems and complaining about the same shit 10 years from now that they’re dealing with today.
“And it’s one of the funny things that puts people off a little bit when they interact with me, even in my current job, because I really have a hard time with that. If people want to complain about someone else, I’m just like, look, anything I’m saying to you right now is something I would say to them, and anything I would say to them is what I would say to you. I just want to work it out with you.”
“There’s just so much opportunity to find common ground with people and recognize that you feel the same things. I just feel like it doesn’t happen enough.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Like, I have a guy that I work with right now. I’m feeling really bad for him because he is being so punished right now for being so authentic. He has a very common name, right? We’ll just say his name’s Danny…”
“Danny gets on calls — these giant calls — and we had one not long after I started this job where the senior leader of our biggest enterprise customer, his name was Dan, basically the same name. So we’re getting on a call. There’s like 200 people on this call. Dan, the senior leader, is like, alright, I’m just waiting for this one other person. Danny, the person I’m referring to — the person getting punished for his authenticity — he gets on the line. He’s like, ‘Oh Dan, don’t worry. Danny’s here.’ Zero sense of being afraid to joke to a higher-up in that moment.
“He treats everyone the same — from the janitor to the CEO. And because of that, he doesn’t play that game. He doesn’t put the mask on. And for that reason, people are afraid of putting him in front of certain types of leaders and customers.
“But this dude Danny and I have crushed it. Like everywhere that he goes, he’s the mayor of that place. He’ll be talking to the person at the Dunkin’ Donuts and in the bureaucratic offices in the back and everyone’s like, oh, Danny. He’s charming. And then you come back into our internal corporate world and people are just like, oh my god, Danny put his foot in it again. He’s going to say something embarrassing. And I don’t know, I just think it’s a story that’s very reflective of one of the things that I think is the easiest to change and the most in need of change — people being more forgiving of others being real like that.”
The Danny story made me think about job security and if Eric had ever been on the wrong side of a layoff himself.
“You know, I worked for a large insurance company that ended up moving a lot of our staff to like two hours away from where it originally was in a major city, and then they had us start training a remote office — I think it was the Philippines. And of course, all along, they’re like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll never have layoffs. We’ll never have layoffs.’ And lo and behold, a year later, the whole crew is laid off.”
He clarified. “It was one of my first jobs. I had gotten the job in the mail room, moved up into some of these, like, sort of adjacent positions, doing still, like, menial sort of administrative tasks.
“And for me, I was very young at the time, so being a little bit brash — I felt this coming, and I would ask in, like, town halls, ‘Isn’t this gonna mean layoffs?’ I would never do that now, right?
“But at the time, I wasn’t as keen to how much that could negatively impact me. And obviously you get the answers you’d probably expect, which is, ‘No, of course not. You know, we’re just trying to maximize and optimize and all of the efficiencies and things that come with that.’
“So having somebody stone-faced telling me one thing and knowing intuitively that it was something else — I mean, this was one of my first real corporate job, so I knew that that was a thing, but it’s not until you really see it that you’re like, wow, that’s real. That’s actually how it is.”
“And then, you know, we moved the office to a cheaper location and a lot of the people ended up uprooting their whole lives to move to this place. And I remember kind of feeling like a fool on a pulpit at the time, trying to tell people, well, you know that we’re also training our replacements. Like, this has gotta be just a step on the way to that outcome, you know?
“I started looking for another job back in the city where we were originally working, and eventually I did move back there before the layoffs came, so I was fortunate for that. But it was tough. It was hard kind of seeing the punch coming, and seeing so many people that I cared about not getting out of the way.
“I ended up leaving right before the layoffs but I took a huge demotion to do so. I ended up jumping into a job at a company where we did legal documents. I was like, driving a truck and then going into law firms and stuff. It was just kind of out of my field. But I knew I needed to go. It was one of those, like, even if this wasn’t great, it’s better than the nothing I see coming.”
“It sounds like your inner voice was louder than what everyone around you was willing to hear,” I said.
“You know, one of the people I worked with in the mail room — he ended up being my boss in the mail room. His wife was the head of HR for the whole insurance company and he had worked there for 20 years or something. He was still convinced, ‘Oh, there’s no way they’re going to do these layoffs.’
“And I remember saying, you know, ‘Tom, like, come on man. All the writing’s on the wall.’ It was sad when the layoffs happened. I was so early in my career, it didn’t cost me nearly as much as it did a lot of these folks that were close to retirement, or had been there 15, 20 years in some instances.”
“What about today, in your current role?” I asked. “You’re doing well... You’ve been promoted a few times in a handful of years. How secure do you feel?”
“I think it’s a really tough time to feel secure,” he said. “I work in technology.”
On Substack, Eric Bourgeois is Ithinkyoureworthadamn, and he publishes: I’m sure you’re right. He also collaborates with Mug on As Per My Last Newsletter and As Per My Last Podcast.
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If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it along to a colleague, a friend, or anyone who’s ever felt like work should be more than it is.
And if you have a personal story, about a workplace that shaped you, a manager who saw you (or didn’t), a moment that stuck, I’d love to hear it. Anonymously, over Zoom. Reach me at humandoingshumanbeings@gmail.com.
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I’m blushing like a kid who peed his pants at the school dance after reading this. You did a magic trick and made me sound like I had something to say, which I commend you for. Thanks so much Cat! It was my pleasure doing it.