After 20+ (mostly hellish, but somewhat productive) years at Centene, I had the misfortune of being re-orged under a Sr. VP that had no idea what anyone's background and contributions had been over the decades, so I and some others were shown the door in layoffs a couple months ago. I came across this article today that lays out perfectly how the last 20 years have been for a lot of us:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/gen-x-doesn-t-want-to-work-and-their-reasons-actually-make-sense/ss-AA1VYmbT?ocid=msedgntp&pc=W069&cvid=6a1dd379fcb443ba814542eb7b86d0fe&ei=107#image=1
Slides 16 (Corporate Culture Prioritizes Appearance Over Measurable Results) and 19 (Performance Reviews Emphasize Arbitrary Metrics Over Actual Contributions) really hit home, especially this from slide 16 - "Elaborate presentations mattered more than project outcomes. Workers who delivered results efficiently got overlooked while colleagues who mastered workplace theater earned promotions."
I have never seen a company waste so much time and money on worthless slide decks that are forgotten immediately after they are delivered. If you totaled all the wasted manpower in terms of the salaries of the people that had to drop everything they were doing to work on a deck for some muckety-muck that was coming to town or wanted an update on something, I would venture it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted salaries over the life of the company.
Anyway , time to get back to figuring out how I want to spend the rest of my career. I promised myself it would be doing something that provides meaningful, measurable, tangible results, so going back to Centene is off the table.