Corporate America needs a wake up call

Dont hate - There are doers and there are barnacles. I've been both, and they both serve an important purpose in a healthy corporate ecosystem.

Barnacles exist to extract value out of the organization with minimal effort and as little disruption as possible. Sure, its annoying when the big boss needs to shift work onto the backs of doers, but those doers are willingly shouldering that burden by virtue of being doers. The barnacle chills, does what he needs to do to skate by and goes home.

If you are deciding to be a doer in your organization, you need to accept the fact that you will be picking up the slack of at least a few barnacles. When I have decided to be a doer, I have tried to put it in perspective of what value barnacles offer and appreciate them for what they are.

If you decide to be a barnacle you need to understand that you are there to be a evaluator of the difficulty of work (You sit around as a blank channel that busy work goes through, and important work gets fucked up by until it can be pushed onto a doer) - ideally you should be a filtration system for your team, shouldering enough low hanging fruit busywork so that the challenging stuff can be prioritized onto a doer. As a barnacle you are there to put necessary and needed curbs on the worst instincts of senior management, you push back on stupid wellness initiatives, or unneeded meetings, you get about 70% of your work done (enough to not get fired). You also need to understand that barnacles are like fat on a animals belly, they build up in healthy times in order to be trimmed in lean times, you are the sacrificial lamb in harder times and should be proud to be the first one fired (I've been fired for being a barnacle before, did I bitch and moan? No I was proud to be a blocker for someone who mightve needed the job or been passionate enough to work hard at it).

Barnacles ultimately build up due to senior management wanting to rapidly expand headcount within their domain. It is a power move. Just like market inefficiencies build up sub-standard allocation of capital, labor inefficiencies within an organization build up a sub-standard allocation of labor. Work is simply not going to be allocated 100% evenly, no matter how dire the need to lend a hand someone will be getting a free ride. The thing to remember though is just because the barnacle is objectively shitty and his job, he may not necessarily be shitty at his function (To increase headcount, to do the bare minimum, etc). If a whole organization was populated by barnacles it would be a nightmare, sure. But the inverse is true as well - if a whole organization was populated by doers the organization would be equally as toxic and difficult to work with. And this may come as a shock for college students, but we have all met plenty of mediocre barnacles even in glorious IB. There are plenty of folks who subscribe to the notion of work hard for 1 year, coast for 1, work hard for another year, coast for 2, work another year, coast for 3, etc. This is a predictable route for a decent amount of lifers because we all know desk time doesn't correlate to quality of work (you can be a barnacle and work 80 hr weeks, I've done it I would know).  

IMO being a doer can be great if you are trying to get to a goal (next step, promotion, etc. But being a barnacle is preferable in certain scenarios where you aren't really into the job and you are just milking it for the benefits and check. Take a moment to appreciate barnacles though, because without them doers wouldn't look so good.