The Price of Corporate Work

Setting aside the obvious perks of money, having a corporate job is the easiest way to stop making decisions.

It’s funny how, as a graduate, I hungered for experience. To work in companies that delivered amazing things. Then, as I “climbed up”, I grew to hate the structure. But not for the normal reasons like money or control. It’s actually because the higher I climbed the corporate ranks, the less independent I became.

Employment is like a pebble in your shoe because it is a small, constant irritation that you feel all day, but you keep walking anyway because you need to reach your destination. - Khe Hy

A promotion then is like getting a new shoe. Comfortable for a while because you can’t feel the pebble, but sooner or later, the irritation of that damn pebble comes back.

The price of corporate

I don’t have to spend too long explaining what corporate is because most of us have had corporate jobs before.

Whether by choice or not, it’s the default way the world currently does work. And, just to be precise here, I don’t mean service people. Like hospitals, cafes, people that mostly work with their hands. My gripe is with corporate knowledge work.

And my feelings is not of pure hate too, it’s more nuanced and complicated than that. Corporate jobs have given me the experience, luck and skill that affords me what I do now. So, I am not about to go and tell everyone to start their own business. Nor am I saying that it’s the best path forward.

Any person worthy of their opinion will tell you that it’s all about trade-offs. And that’s what I’ll tell you too.

After collecting notes and doing my own thinking on this for a long time, I think the price of corporate can be categorized into three things.

You don’t know what value you bring

If you build software for a bank and the bank has a strong year, nobody can honestly separate your contribution from the new software or just the economy. Individual contribution inside a collective enterprise is not cleanly attributable. You can’t say I did “X” which meant you got “Y”, so I deserve “Z”. And it’s just not possible to get something like this. There is an entire economic literature on the principal-agent problem and there is no version where a clean attribution is possible.

Say you were planning a trip with friends and you took charge of everything, the itinerary, the logistics, everything. Can you really put a dollar figure on that value? Can you actually equate a number to the value you brought to the friendship?

You can’t, well not accurately anyways. So, imagine trying to do that for corporations. This vagueness of value actually works against because it’s a way to get the most value from you at the cheapest rate.

Not to sound overly skeptical but when you join a company, you have little leverage against them (not none), which means it’s in their best interest to hide your value because if you knew your true value, you would have more leverage over them.

You get measured in time, not value

So, as a total result of this vagueness of value, we’ve resorted to using a proxy.

And this proxy has to be observable, comparable between people, and hard to argue with. Hence, the hourly rate model. And we know the common pitfalls of such a proxy. Like two people paid at the same rate can bring in very different value but on paper, they are the same.

One of the biggest problem with time as a representation of value is best explained by Goodhart’s Law. Once a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. The number starts reshaping the thing it was brought in to describe. It means it’s in your best interest to stretch out the time for a given task because you’re paid by the hour. It also means it’s the corporation’s best interest to squeeze as much value out of you per hour.

And to do that, corporations employ other methods to get you to spend your hours. In his book, Developer Hegemony, Erik Dietrich calls this ” the cult of hours”. The more hours you spend for a company, the more “loyal” you seem.

And that loyalty is rewarded with medals and titles you can earn. Like “overachiever” or “go-getter”. Things that make you feel good but don’t actually do anything. It’s cultural and social norms that make us work considerably harder than expected in a salaried role even though there is no mechanism that pays you more for it.

I am not saying this is the case for all companies, but certainly most that I have seen. To me, the more depressing news is that It's not about value, it's about time in companies. Which means, it almost doesn’t matter what impact you have anymore as long as you meet the minimum requirement for your job, you’re safe.

No freedom to work on what you want

Aside from loyalty and not being to equate value to hours, there’s another problem with the hourly rate model.

Let’s say you’re really good at using Excel and your company notices. So, they start giving you harder and more Excel work. You take pride in that because you earned a title and you’re recognized for your expertise. But it’s 2026 now, what if you see someone else using AI and you want to learnt that because it’s interesting ?

Do you think your company will let you pivot to AI and take you off Excel? Most companies won’t let you. Because if you get very good at delivery, delivery becomes the whole of what you are assessed on.

Which means any time you want to work on something other than what you are known for, there will be resistance. Herminia Ibarra, in her book “Reinventing Your Career” says that sometimes people leave companies because they need to leave behind what they’ve become known for.

A company will only train and advocate for you as long as it’s good for them. The minute your value per hour goes down, they won’t be so supportive. Once you’re competent enough to do the job, your employer often stops being your primary source of learning. Continued growth increasingly becomes something you have to pursue yourself.

Which is why i think that Learning is Freedom from everything. It’s what frees you to choose your own work and go to do more interesting stuff beyond what your current employer wants. I am a strong advocate for learning on your own time to earn your freedom, not to provide your company more value.

But the upside is, you get to fail cheaply

That’s the three biggest things you pay when you stay in corporate. But, what do you get in return ?

What you get is some mental and financial protection from the world. It’s not full proof but it does help.

With a corporate job, you don’t have to think about how to sustain yourself with your time and skills apart from when you do switch companies. Because of the hourly rate model, all you have to do is meet the minimum requirement of exertion. Not to mention, do it long enough and you get rewarded with the loyalty titles that give you permission to do even less.

The protection though is not 100% because a restructure or an economic downturn can make you redundant. But you can always find another job and get protection again later. So, really with three big downsides, you do get protection in return.

But what if you don’t want to pay?

Say you’re on the same page as me and you’ve decided you’d rather not pay.

Well, what awaits you is a world of freedom, self-doubt, excitement, loneliness and hard work. But mostly, adventure.

I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan, and the part that resembles this is when Frodo had to leave the Shire. Somewhere comfortable and known and full of people who loved him, to go and do the one thing nobody could do on his behalf.

Leaving corporate is nowhere near that dramatic, but it can feel like it. Because corporate jobs for all it’s downside, is familiar and it’s safe (somewhat). Leaving that always feels wrong. But what has helped, is picturing myself as the hero on the hero’s journey, as I am about to embark on an incredibly difficult but amazing journey.

So, it’s easy to think that someone starts their own business for the fame, or the money, or the “fuck corporate” reason. All of which are valid. But my reason is for the freedom of choice. To be independent enough to choose the the work I want and to control my own value into the world. But that does mean, if I fail, there will be no hourly net to catch me.

And a form of independence I love, is the idea of being wealthy. Not just financially but in every aspect of life too. Morgan Housel has a spectrum of wealth that I use as my definition. Nineteen levels and my current goal is to get to level 15. (Yes, I am aware that gamifying wealth is weird)

You can go to bed and wake up when you want to. You have time to exercise, eat well, learn, think slowly, and clear your calendar when you want it to be clear. ~ Wealth level 15

The price of corporate is too steep for me, it costs way too much. But what’s next ?

The price of independence

Financially, all the advice out there about going independent is sound. Things like having a runway (enough savings to sustain you for a few months) or learning how to price the work or learning what actually makes a good business (hint: it’s not passion).

But apart from the financial cost, there are other factors that “cost” you too.

Part of having a corporate job is having certainty (and someone to blame). Anytime you make a decision about something, you have your team, your manager, your manager’s manager, your manager’s manager’s dog and more to blame. You have a whole slew of people to fact check you against your own thoughts. Granted, they are always looking out for the company’s best interest, but nonetheless, you still have people to check your work.

The biggest factor in going independent is having the trust and faith that the decisions you make are the right ones.

Frank Knight said this back in 1921. Where there’s genuine uncertainty rather than measurable risk, the only instrument left to handle it with is judgment, and judgment is unevenly distributed. That means there’s no framework, only how good my judgment happens to be. Thankfully I have experience, skills and knowledge from previous years to guide me on that.

It’s also a lonely path because only someone else who started their own business will understand this journey. Only they will understand the self-doubt, wavering confidence and restless nights. To have full control over my time is scarier than one might actually think.

We’ve been so conditioned in the corporate setting to always check in, to make sure our managers are happy, that we have no experience deciding on our own. What’s left is your own judgment and it’s can be slippery because intuition and arrogance feel identical from the inside. How can you ever know if you’re making the right choice ? Or just too blind that you think you’re making the right one?

An entrepreneur, a freelancer or self-employed ?

I hate all of the names that describe people trying to do their own thing. “free-agent” is the closest thing that best describes this. Because I am not trying to win business deals all the time nor am I just waiting around for work to come to me. We’ve gotten so used to identifying ourselves with jobs that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to just be ourselves. Visakan describes this the best in his piece about trying to describe this.

Okay, as complex as this “corporate vs independence” is, I think it actually boils down to a single question even if it takes on many facets. it’s “how much risk and uncertainty can you tolerate?”

In corporate, you give up what you work on, who you work with, and what any of it is ultimately for. What you get back is a some protection from the world both financially and mentally.

Going independent (I don’t know a better term for this) means you have full control. But the responsibility for everything is also on you. You’re taking a calculated risk that what you’re doing will pay off.

As of August 2026, I am still fairly new in this independent game and if you want to see how I am doing, come see my log.