North Carolina Chronicles, Chapter 3: Job #1
I didn't last three months in the private sector.
The following story is true. The names have been changed because I don’t want people yelling at me.
Introduction: Before North Carolina
When I was a kid, I spent countless hours drawing maps. Of places I lived, places I’d been, even places that didn’t exist.
They weren’t…how you say…good. Most of them were just lines on a sheet of notebook paper amounting to a giant spaghetti junction. But they did impress my parents enough for my mom to push me to learn how to make real maps as a career.
That’s kind of what I did, at least at first. I went into undergrad undecided, but by the end of my freshman year, I’d decided on geography as my major and added a GIS minor. GIS is short for Geographic Information Systems,1 the software with which most modern professional quality maps are made.
A few different corporations specialize in GIS, but ESRI is by far the biggest, so the point of Minnesota’s GIS minor was really just to teach you how to use ESRI’s suite of GIS products. For this story to make sense, I need to give you a short history of these. I’ll try to speed through it so as not to bore you to sleep.
The product that more or less put ESRI on the map, so to speak, was ArcMap, initially released in 1999. ESRI continued updating and rereleasing this software, as one does, but eventually—as tends to happen with older software—it became antiquated at its core and ESRI replaced it. ArcGIS Pro was first released in 2015. Not only did it introduce new features that ArcMap never had, but it also had a much more intuitive user interface and ran significantly faster. Put simply, ArcGIS Pro was (and is) better software than ArcMap. In 2020, ESRI announced their intent to retire ArcMap in 2026, encouraging their userbase to switch to ArcGIS Pro as quickly as they could.
I was a student at Minnesota from 2016 to 2019. My GIS education came entirely within the period when ArcGIS Pro had been released but ArcMap was still receiving updates, so I learned how to use both. My educators correctly taught me that ArcGIS Pro was the future but, as you might expect, it took a little while for organizations to make the switch.2
Signing On
Fast-forward to the North Carolina part of this North Carolina Chronicle: I graduated with my master’s in May 2021 and, after a few months off, embarked on my first full-time job search in August. To that point, all of my professional planning experience had been in the public sector.3 I’d heard pretty hellish things about the private sector, but at that point, I was pretty much just looking for “job” with little regard for the specifics.
Besides, I’d battled through a lot of tough scenarios in my life and come out on top every time. I was resilient. You have to be to finish grad school. I could handle whatever any corporation was gonna throw at me.
As it turned out, the first offer I got was from the private sector as a transit planning consultant specializing in GIS. I won’t reveal the name of the company but I will say its name is three consonants long and sounds like the name of a buzzing insect if you try to sound it out as a word.
As the old adage goes, getting this job came down not to what I knew, but whom I knew. My grad school buddy Ricky got a job at the company’s Nashville office while I was recharging over the summer. He worked directly under Oscar, who would be my boss’ boss if I got the position, and put in a good word on my behalf.
My interview was a breeze. Oscar and my would-be boss Regina basically just asked me to confirm I knew how to use GIS and made sure I understood how to act professionally. It wasn’t even 30 minutes long and the offer came quickly with a pleasant surprise: the pay was moderately higher than average for an entry-level candidate in my position.
An Overlong Morning Commute
On November 15, 2021, I started what I assumed would be the first day of the rest of my life. I lived in Cary at the time and the job was based in Raleigh, but everyone was allowed to work from home as much or as little as they wanted, so after the initial week of orientation (during which I was required to report to the office), I just stayed home almost every day.
Immediately after that orientation was Thanksgiving. Leah4 and I had made non-refundable Thanksgiving plans before I got the offer, so one of my first questions to Regina was whether I’d be able to see those through. She assured me that I could, noting that employees were allowed to use more PTO hours than we had accrued as long as our overall balance remained higher than -40; the payroll system wouldn’t let it go any lower. If we left the company with a negative balance, we’d just have it deducted from our final paycheck.
Cool! Leah and I could still go to Florida. She and her immediate family had gone to the Emerald Coast for Thanksgiving every year for over two decades. She took 2020 off (because, y’know), so this would be her first time there in two years—a sort of return to normalcy, rare as those were—and she definitely wasn’t going to miss it. After we got back from Florida, I would begin my career in earnest.
Except I wouldn’t. Because, somewhere on that trip, I caught an awful illness. I awoke on Monday, November 29, essentially unable to get out of bed. I let Regina know what was up and she implored me to ignore work and get some rest. Leah took me to the doctor so we could find out what exactly was sapping all of my energy. It could very well be covid, but the flu was also running buck wild after being pretty much nonexistent for more than a year during the pre-vaccine lockdowns. Sure enough, it was Influenza A.5
I began to feel better (relatively) on Tuesday, and by Wednesday I felt I could give work a go. Mistake. Two hours in, I realized my brain still wasn’t up for it and put down the laptop for the rest of the week.
During those two hours, I asked Regina how I should treat this week on my timecard. I thought I remembered from orientation that our PTO was not split between vacation time and sick leave, so—given I was already at negative PTO hours after Thanksgiving—I suggested I just take the week unpaid. Regina told me that was incorrect and to enter the other 38 hours as “PTO/Sick”, as all employees received 40 hours of sick leave per year. So I did. The system let me do it, and Regina had told me the system disallowed PTO balances below -40, so I rested assured that everything was alright.
It wasn’t alright.
The next Monday, I woke up to an email from Regina matter-of-factly stating that she had talked to HR and confirmed that my initial instinct was correct: vacation time and sick leave were in fact drawn from the same PTO bank. So when I submitted my timecard the previous week, I actually used 38 hours of PTO and would be unable to use any more for the foreseeable future. My balance was -42 hours, which I had been told was impossible. The email contained no apology, not so much as an acknowledgement that she had advised me in error.
My reply to Regina was strongly worded, but I believe it was warranted. I had done everything in my power to ensure I was acting correctly and was now being told I would simply be unable to use any meaningful vacation time for several months because a) I got the flu, and b) my boss provably screwed up and refused to acknowledge it. I copied HR on the email.
Regina’s reply still contained no apology, instead policing my tone and asking that I hop on a Teams call with her and the HR rep to discuss how to solve the problem. On that call, I asked several questions. Would I still be able to take days off surrounding Christmas to visit my family in South Dakota? It’d be our first holiday together since the world shut down. What about when my lease was up in February and Leah and I needed to move apartments? Most importantly, why would Regina tell me something that isn’t true?
I never got an answer to that last question,6 but I did learn my options for making things right: I could either retroactively adjust my timecard to take the previous week unpaid or I could just flex my work schedule around conflicts until I’d earned my PTO back. HR told me that retroactive timecard adjustments were hell on Payroll’s part and suggested I avoid them unless it was an emergency, but the alternative Regina suggested was to work four 10-hour days in a week every time I needed to take a long weekend. Who in their right mind would want to work longer days while they’re also trying to move apartments? This wasn’t my fault to begin with.
I reached out to Payroll the next day (with Regina copied), informing them of the situation and asking them to make the adjustment. Their reply, verbatim:
“Hi Eli. This is actually not allowed. If you have any PTO, you must use it before unpaid leave. If you have any more questions, please reach out to HR. Thanks!”
I was in the middle of typing something along the lines of, “What are you talking about? I had negative PTO when I submitted the timecard,” when Regina messaged me and told me she’d handle it.
Payroll deducted 38 hours of pay from my next paycheck. They told me they’d play around in the system to give me my PTO hours back, but it’d take a while and wouldn’t happen before Christmas. In the interim, Regina said she’d allow me to travel to South Dakota for the holidays under the condition that I worked from my parents’ place on regular, non-holiday weekdays. How generous.7
Three weeks, a nasty virus, and a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense after my hire date, I finally got into the thick of actual, real work. I met my project manager Michael, who assigned me work on GIS deliverables for a local transit project. It was pretty much exactly what I wanted to do out of grad school, what I was shooting for in my job search, and—in a sense—what I’d aimed for as a kid.
Then I actually had to start working.
An Honest Day’s Work
The company had me using ArcMap instead of ArcGIS Pro, which was pretty much inexcusable by 2022. When I asked Regina for an ArcGIS Pro license, she said our work group didn’t have any. When I elevated it to Oscar, he basically told me the company didn’t have the money for it. This was absolutely a lie; it’s a multi-billion-dollar company with offices on six continents. They had enough dough to pay me a few thousand bucks over market rate but they couldn’t shell out for one software license?
I reached out to Ricky and asked if they still had him using ArcMap. He said that he was initially on ArcMap, but was able to get an ArcGIS Pro license by reaching out to the region’s primary licensing agent, who was based out of the New Orleans office. I shot the agent an email and was immediately hit with an out-of-office autoreply that had been in place since before I was hired. So much for that.
So I continued using this deprecated, piece-of-crap software to do my work, but—even accounting for how slowly ArcMap ran—I really didn’t have that much work to do.8 They started me out only working on one project, and the timeline for deliverables was much slower than it actually took for me to crank them out. At one point, I even asked for more work—dangerous, I know—and I was told that they’d see what they could do, but also that there wasn’t much going on at the moment.
This was a major issue for a reason that’ll be pretty obvious to anyone who’s ever worked in consulting. The two most dreadful words imaginable: billable hours.
The company required that at least 90% of my hours be billed out to clients. Over the course of a 40-hour work week, that meant I was only allowed to spend four hours on stuff that wasn’t billable work. Under more normal circumstances, when I would presumably have more projects on my plate, this likely wouldn’t be an issue. But the work apparently just didn’t exist, so…what was I to do?
I was conservative in my estimate of how long I spent working on my lone billable project, but it still wasn’t nearly enough to get me to 90%. I ended up just putting a bunch of extra hours as “Admin” or “Professional Development” or some such non-billed activity. I was not in the business of defrauding a local municipality out of tax dollars for work I didn’t do.
Sure enough, Michael scolded me about my timecard the very next week. This started a back-and-forth of me saying I didn’t have enough work to do and him saying that it didn’t matter and that I couldn’t go below 90%. Eventually, it ended with him telling me to ask Regina if she could find more work for me on a different project. A few days later, she did: I was going to write a couple chapters of a grant for a transit project in Buffalo, New York.
I had never been to Buffalo9 and knew very little about their transit scene, but sure, I could BS my way through a few pages of technical writing. That’s the entire point of grad school.
This gave me enough work to fulfill the 90% rule for that week, but then came the other major issue, a mind-boggling organizational policy that required me to complete a nonsensical puzzle every week:
Our timecards were due on Thursdays at 2pm.
This meant that we had no choice but to predict what we might be doing for the second half of Thursday and all of Friday. Every week. And because we were at least 90% billable to clients, while we were just guesstimating how much of their time (and thus money) we were spending, we also had to be as precise as possible, or people (either the client themself or our project manager, or both) would chew us out. And we couldn’t just go back and change the timecard post facto because, remember, that’s apparently earth-shatteringly hard on Payroll’s part. (It’s worth noting that, at this point in mid-January, I still hadn’t gotten my PTO hours back.)
Predictably, this went poorly for me. That week, I scheduled most of Friday for the local transit project, but I ended up needing some files from Ricky10 to complete a task. He was on break when I originally messaged him to ask for the files and couldn’t get them to me until three hours later, so that was three hours I wasn’t working on the project despite already having submitted a timecard that said I was. I instead spent that time working on the Buffalo grant.
But, okay, easy enough fix. I’ll just charge my first three hours of work the next week to the Buffalo grant and spend it working on the local transit project. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
Until that Friday, when I got a completely different problem. I charged six hours to the Buffalo grant, but after about three hours, I was just…done writing it. So now I’d irrevocably charged some transit agency in Upstate New York for three hours that, knowing me, I probably just spent screwing around on Discord. How could I fix this one?
I needed answers, so I asked Michael and Regina two questions:
How do I make up for these overcharged hours?
Why do we submit our timecards on Thursday afternoons, anyway?
I never got an answer to that last question,11 but the answer to the first question was that…I couldn’t! The client in Buffalo was just out a few hundred bucks for no reason.12 Michael could tell I wasn’t okay with this, so he scheduled a Teams call with me for the next Monday to go over some timecard tips and tricks.
The Call
Michael started this call by telling me in no uncertain terms that the company gets upset at you if you bill anything to the company itself, and will likely take punitive action if you do it when it’s not “absolutely necessary”. I then informed him—for what felt like the 50th time—that I was low on work and didn’t have enough tasks to fill 36 hours on most weeks.
There are several ways he could have responded to this statement, which he had heard at least 49 times before. He could have repeated that he’d look for more work for me to do on the project. He could have once again told me to ask Regina to find work for me on another project. He could have just advised me to bill my hours to the project regardless of whether I was actually working on it.13 He didn’t do any of the above.
Michael’s actual response to this statement was that I just shouldn’t charge anything at all, that I should just submit a timecard with fewer than 40 hours on it. It was, he said, the best way to ensure I was keeping the company happy, to avoid angering its clients.
I gritted my teeth—thankfully invisible, as both our cameras were off. Michael continued rambling about how best to fill out my timecard to avoid getting on the company’s bad side. He called it “gamesmanship”. I fixated on that word. Was my paycheck supposed to be a game? Everywhere else I’d ever worked, the agreement was “perform work, receive money”. Here, I had to play guessing games, jump through hoops, and make sure I wasn’t biting the hand that fed me. I felt like a circus animal. My career felt like a joke.
As we wrapped up the call, which somehow lasted almost 45 minutes, I asked Michael how he would suggest I bill the time we spent on this discussion. There are several ways he could have responded to this question. He could have told me to bill it as “Admin” but make sure I keep my non-billable hours down for the remainder of the week. He could have told me to bill it as “Training”; he was a superior teaching me company culture and policy, after all. He could have just advised me to bill my hours to the project regardless of whether I was actually working on it.14 He didn’t do any of the above.
Michael’s actual answer to this question was just one word: “don’t”.
I held my breath and bit my tongue. He continued: “I know that’s not the answer you want to hear, but it’s best for everyone involved. I have a lot of working conversations that I don’t bill to anybody, and I’ve found that giving a couple extra hours a week to the company is worth it for the invaluable knowledge you gain from these conversations. Speaking from experience, Regina would tell you to do the same thing.”
We said our goodbyes—his confident, mine timid. I took a moment to absorb what I’d just heard.
In concept, I’m not unfamiliar with gaining something worthwhile out of unpaid labor. Most of my passion projects, including The Low Major, require a lot of work for exactly zero pay. I still feel fulfilled working on these projects, either because I’m aware many of my friends find great value in them or because I had a lot of fun researching them (or both). Barring an act of god, this entire 5,000-word article will earn me $0.00 despite requiring several hours of labor.
But the job offer I signed with this company was an agreement to receive money for performing labor. No more, no less. What had the company given me to earn a couple free hours of my time every week?
So far, my boss had misadvised me into unwittingly spending 38 hours of PTO that I didn’t have, refused to elaborate or apologize, and scolded me for being understandably upset at the whole ordeal. HR then tried to sweep it under the rug, and when I didn’t take kindly to that, Payroll tried to quash my efforts to reclaim what was rightfully mine. (It took until the final week of January for me to regain the PTO hours I lost in the first week of December.)
So far, the company had me working on garbage, obsolete GIS software for most of my primary tasks. They refused to pay for current, useful software despite hiring me specifically for my GIS skills.
So far, my project manager had continuously given me an insufficient amount of work, yet also continuously chided me for not billing enough hours outside the company. When I asked for more work, he either told me it didn’t exist or passed the buck to someone else.
So far, the act of submitting my timecard felt more like a game of Minesweeper than a routine, mundane task meant to put money in my bank account.15 No one at the company could tell me why it had to be this way.
The company hadn’t earned anything from me. In fact, they didn’t deserve me at all. Not long after I got off that call—at about 1pm EST on January 31, 2022—I decided none of this was worth it. I was going to quit.
A Quick Evening Commute
To make sure this wasn’t a bad decision, I spent the rest of the week mulling it over with Leah, my friends, my family, and my former grad school colleagues. Universally, the response to my story was that my company’s culture was very much not normal. Ricky was upset I wanted to leave, but understood that I needed to, saying the company was “doing me dirty”. All one of my other grad school friends could muster was, “Wtf?”. Several friends online offered condolences. A few suggested my company could be partaking in fraud16 or wage theft.17 My mother, usually a strong proponent of sticking things out through tough times, stood by my decision to quit.
On the morning of Monday, February 7, I emailed my two weeks notice to Regina. I didn’t get any response at all for about five hours, then—without warning—she called me on Teams and looped in an HR rep. She informed me that while my courtesy in giving two weeks notice was appreciated, it would be unnecessary, as they did not have enough work for me to complete over the next two weeks for it to be worth retaining me during that time. You’re telling me!
I turned in my equipment the next day. My time with the company—at my first full-time professional opportunity—lasted 85 calendar days.
Epilogue: What Next?
The company didn’t relist my position until some four months after I vacated it. By then, I was already at Job #2 (which you’ll hear about in a future chapter). I only heard my former position was relisted because a grad school colleague of mine, Rose, was unhappy at her current position and wanted more details on my experience with the company.
At a lunch late that June, Rose and I exchanged horror stories: I told her the bulk of what you’ve read in this chapter and she told me why she wanted to leave her position, another private sector transit planning gig at a similar company. Her billable hours problem was basically the opposite of mine. Her company’s threshold was even stricter than mine’s (95%), but her company kept giving her several hours of required non-billable work and then scolding her for going below the threshold. They’d send her to a mandatory full-day training in Charlotte and then go all ShockedPikachu.jpg when that resulted in her timecard billing eight hours to the company.
I’m not sure if Rose genuinely thought my former situation was better than her current one or if she just figured a change of scenery couldn’t hurt, but she applied for my former position, got the offer, and accepted it. I checked in with her a few months later to ask how it was treating her. She told me that she had experienced many of the same detriments I had,18 but that she had adjusted to the culture and could see herself sticking around for a while.
I wondered how she could grin and bear that awful workplace while I couldn’t. Was there something wrong with me? Was I somehow broken for not being able to endure a few measly months of professional disrespect? Did normal people have a much higher tolerance for this and would I just have to step my game up to have any shot at a career?
Clearly this wasn’t the case…right? I’d held other professional planning positions in the past and experienced very little organizational tomfoolery. I was at Chapel Hill for over a year and a half with basically no issue. Was that the issue? Did I have it too good? Was I simply too enlightened from working in non-toxic environments that the disarray and lack of care I experienced at the company instinctively sent me packing? Was Rose foolish for thinking the company was at all an acceptable place to work?
Obviously, I rejected that last part out of hand. I respected Rose, even if I didn’t quite understand her. But I also rejected the first part. There’s no such thing as having it too good. Having good working relationships and being able to report your hours without being threatened with punitive action…these are just things everybody should have at their jobs.
No, my lesson from this was pretty simple: the private sector was just as hellish as I’d heard it was, and it was going to continue to be able to operate that way because there were enough qualified workers willing to withstand poor conditions that corporations didn’t even need to pretend to care about bettering them. I couldn’t be one of those workers. I couldn’t go back. At least, not to a consulting firm.
But I was a non-automotive transportation planner—my specialties were active transportation (bicycle/pedestrian) and public transit—and North Carolina was the “Good Roads State”. Most municipalities didn’t prioritize non-automotive transportation, so there just weren’t many public sector opportunities for work I actually wanted to do. Those that did exist were highly coveted and usually called for much more professional experience than I had.19
This all leads me to my actual takeaway from my talk with Rose—the entire point of this chapter: I had no future in North Carolina.
North Carolina Chronicles
Chapter 1: The Cop
Chapter 2: The State Fair
Chapter 3: Job #1
Chapter 4: Fast Food
Chapter 5: Job #2
Or sometimes Geographic Information Science, but usually the former.
My internship with Hennepin County in 2018 had me on ArcMap, but when I left for North Carolina in 2019 to pursue my city planning master’s, I got an internship with the Town of Chapel Hill and they were all switched over to ArcGIS Pro.
At the two internships I mentioned in the previous footnote
The only name in the story I haven’t changed.
As of this writing, I still haven’t caught covid. At least, not symptomatically. (knocks on wood) Part of that is because I’ve taken so many precautions, but I still count myself extremely lucky for it.
I’d figure it out on my own time later. Rereading the employee handbook, I noticed it referred to a “legacy sick bank” for employees hired before a certain date a few years in the past. The company had just combined vacation time and sick leave a few years ago and Regina was still on the legacy system, in which they were treated as separate entities. In short, she got sick leave but I didn’t. It’s a pretty simple explanation and I don’t understand why I couldn’t have heard it from her directly. She still never apologized.
As it turned out, almost nobody else, including Regina, worked on the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and I was still new enough that I didn’t really have any time-sensitive work, so they basically just paid for me to sit in the general vicinity of my open laptop for a week.
See previous footnote.
I still haven’t. It’s one of very few major U.S. cities I have yet to visit, along with Miami, Charleston, and pretty much anything in Texas south of San Antonio.
Ricky held most of my workload before I was hired. The local transit project I worked on was originally his territory.
I still don’t know the answer.
You might ask why I care so much about this, and you’d be right to prod at least a little. Everyone in the know understands that clients of consulting firms aren’t actually getting 40 hours of work when they pay for 40 hours. Most people account for basic inefficiencies: work breaks, mistakes, miscommunications, et cetera. This isn’t that, though; this is my company having a nonsensical policy that leads to countless hours being misattributed, then just shrugging it off when informed that this leads to clients being billed for hours after a project has already been completed.
I don’t suspect anyone would ever say this out loud, but it seems to be what the company implicitly wanted us to do.
I’m not saying; I’m just saying.
Kidding. I’m actually good at Minesweeper.
I am not alleging this here.
I personally got paid for every hour I worked, so I’m not alleging this either. I absolutely billed the call between Michael and me as “Admin”.
She did not, thankfully, get the flu a week into her tenure.
Either that or they were part-time internships like the one I had at Chapel Hill.