About This Series
Jon's Job Blog is a 22-part exploration of modern work culture, examining the gap between corporate values and lived employee experience. Drawing from personal narrative and organizational research, the series moves from systemic critique through human impact to reconstruction.
Each essay stands alone but contributes to a larger conversation about restoring empathy, accountability, and purpose to work.
Why This Project Exists
After 4.5 years in robotic process automation at a Fortune 500 company, I experienced firsthand the tension between stated corporate values and operational reality. This series documents that experience—not to assign blame, but to examine patterns that are structural, not individual.
The project serves multiple purposes: it's personal processing after an abrupt termination, analytical examination of organizational dysfunction, and social commentary on how modern work culture affects human dignity, neurodivergent professionals, and the social contract between employers and employees.
I write with the background of someone who's worked in forestry, finance, and digital systems. I bring a forester's lens for ecosystems, a finance professional's understanding of incentive structures, and a technologist's awareness of how automation reshapes human work. My recent ADHD diagnosis added another layer of clarity about what I'd been navigating all along.
What to Expect
The series maintains a deliberate tone: mature, reflective, analytically rigorous, yet accessible. I avoid corporate jargon unless analyzing it. I ground observations in research from organizational theory, business ethics, and workplace psychology. Each essay connects personal experience to broader patterns, using individual moments to illuminate systemic dynamics.
The 22 essays follow a three-act structure, designed to take readers from critique through human cost to reconstruction. They're meant to be read in order but work as standalone pieces.
The Structure
The series is organized in three acts, each exploring a different dimension of modern corporate experience:
Part I: Corporate Reality — The System Behind the Slogans establishes credibility as both insider and observer. These essays examine structural contradictions between stated values and lived experience.
Part II: The Human Cost — What Work Takes When It Stops Caring translates corporate abstraction into human emotion—the exhaustion of masking, the coercion of "choice," and the silence demanded by professionalism.
Part III: Recovery & Rebuilding — Reclaiming Work, Purpose, and Voice rebuilds hope without naivety, exploring what comes after disillusionment—how purpose re-emerges through community, creativity, and transparency.
For the complete roadmap of all 22 essays, see the Archive.
A Note on Community
If you're in a position to support others—whether through local food banks, community services, or direct mutual aid—that work matters. The distance between employed and unemployed, housed and unhoused, stable and struggling is shorter than most of us imagine. Building systems of care outside corporate structures is how we survive the gaps between what companies promise and what they deliver.