To be honest, I don't really care what happens to them.
I only just realized this, and it feels like a strange thing to admit about a company that gave me nearly a decade of my career, but there it is. For a long time, I held a grudge – I wanted them to fail, because I was mad. But somewhere in the last five years, the grudge wore down into something much flatter. And today I don't wish them much of anything – not failure, not success. Just… nothing.
That's not me saying I have no feelings about the place. I'm grateful for the time I spent there and everything I got to build – and I also know it was shitty how it ended. Both things are true, and they've been true the whole time (which maybe is the point).
I used to think this was a story about them, but it's not. It's a story about what I learned while I was there – about what happens when a company wants to be seen one way, and what it costs to help them actually become it.
This is the story of how I developed the core thesis of all my work today – the thing I eventually built a business around. It’s not a story about a bad company. It's a story about the predictable patterns that show up when leadership isn't aligned, when values are just tacked on, when the people inside a company know the truth long before anyone says it out loud.
. . .
When I first landed my position as a mid-level marketer at this architecture firm, I called it my dream job to anyone who would listen.
I even remember posting about it on Twitter (RIP), and I didn't mean it hyperbolically. I was entering the real second act of my career: a new design degree in hand, a Great Recession weathered through scrappy, duct-taped-together freelance work that, by some miracle, built me a solid portfolio of writing about the built environment. I hadn't yet had my first real job in architecture, but I already had a strong voice for writing about it.
I wasn’t fresh-out-of-college young, but I was a lot younger than I am now, and I was eager. Much of my skepticism about the profession of architecture – the egos involved, the superficiality of work I couldn't make myself care about – was already ingrained. But in my mind, that skepticism was just the counterbalance to the other side of the profession, and the one I was now buying into: the one connected to people, to service, to the public and civic infrastructure that societies move around. The one that makes buildings that have meaning, and that last.
That’s what drew me to this "dream job."
And for a time, that foundation held true. The work this firm produced felt meaningful – something I truly gave a shit about – even though I learned pretty quickly that it wasn't all perfect. The culture was very patriarchal, and it wore on me in more ways than one. And still, I felt like there was real purpose to work with, and that kept me going.
But what I couldn't predict when I took the job was something already in motion. There were seismic shifts coming in the firm's leadership – the kind that happen every generation at architecture firms. In this case, the firm was planning for retirements, and as part of that transition, the partnership was changing too. Different people – more people – in charge. Including a new partner whose career was built on a really different kind of architecture: not libraries and civic spaces, but housing developments. Small- and mid-size urban infill projects that were arguably nicely designed, aesthetically pleasing – and also actively contributing to gentrification and the whitening of Black neighborhoods.
In my eyes: another counterbalance. A prickly disconnect.
This shift was brand new when I started the job – the new partner came on just a couple months before me – and no one quite knew how it would play out. The message from the top was that it made sense: there was “alignment,” this was a new era, but not a wholesale change.
(Looking back, I think the writing was on the wall. But that's how hindsight works.)
For my first few years there, the shift was more atmosphere than fact. The tilt came on gradually, but by my fourth year, the firm’s work was visibly skewing toward more private developers and less public-realm clients like higher education institutions and library systems.
And the more that side of the business grew, the more gross I started to feel. The more I was required to “sell” ideas I didn’t believe in, the more disconnected I became from the reasons I'd come to this firm in the first place.
Slowly but surely, I watched some of the people I most respected – for their ethics, their morals, their care for the work – leave. Some by choice and some forced out, as is typical in these situations – and I can’t say I didn’t see the patterns.
But the tail end of 2016, just after the presidential election, is when I remember things really cracking open. While the country was having its reckoning with power – how it gets acquired, who gets to hold it – we were having our own in the office. Blow-ups between the women and the men, tensions that had been there all along finally showing up in actual voices, with real rage behind them.
I'd been there over four years, and was barely inching into any kind of leadership at this point, but something in me stopped waiting for permission. I’m nothing if not tenacious, so rather than leave, I doubled down on trying to make change from the inside. Who knows – maybe I was trying to make up for what I felt was disconnected on the external side of the work. Either way, I spent the next several years working really hard to build the integrity and the values that first drew me to this place.
And for a long time, it worked. They went along with me, until they didn't.
. . .
The morning after the election: I remember that I barely made it to work that day, because I was at home sobbing. But after watching Hillary’s concession speech, I found myself needing to be in community (at the time, work was the one I had) so I dragged myself there, not really knowing what to expect. I walked into a somber office and shortly after, I was sitting in a conference room with two of my female colleagues. None of us could even pretend to work.
We'd spent the day before certain we were about to elect the first woman president, and by morning we’d been reminded, again, that being a woman comes with a penalty. That's not a feeling the men in the office were having. They couldn’t.
At some point in that room, the anguish turned into a decision. We found a local equity and diversity consultant and hired them to run all-office workshops, because doing nothing had suddenly become impossible to imagine.
The workshops were uncomfortable for people. They were hard. Harder for some than others. They revealed bias – mine, everyone's. They revealed pain that had been in the building the whole time, unspoken. But they also revealed a team that wanted to work on this together, and they gave us something we'd never had: shared language. Equity vs. equality. Bias – the kind everyone holds. Small vocabulary, huge difference.
And they gave us momentum. Which is how, a few months later, the Just label (a corporate transparency program that measures a company’s social justice and equity practices) came off the "wouldn't this be cool to take on" wishlist – where it had been sitting, untouched, for over a year – and became an actual initiative in motion. We were embarking on a real assessment of where the firm stood – an objective picture of what we said we valued, scored against what we actually did – and I was leading it.
The assessment revealed some issues that could be corrected with decisions and policy changes: give administrative employees the same level of continuing education benefits as the designers; add a socially responsible investment option to the 401(k) plan; add paid parental leave, which was a huge deal at the time.
Others were bigger, more structural, and could not be fixed with a policy edit. At the head of that list, and the only 1-star category the assessment revealed: gender diversity. 70% of senior leadership was men. I don’t need to point out the connection between this and all the other things I’ve described leading up to this… but let’s acknowledge it anyway.
Over the next handful of years, a couple colleagues and I developed a youth design and activism program called Your Street, Your Voice. It was specifically created to engage young Black, Brown, and other folks who are grossly underrepresented in design professions – a way to hopefully plant the seeds for a new, and more diverse, generation of design leaders. This program was developed and run by my colleagues, me, and other volunteers – but the company supported it financially.
And as is my way, I treated this program like a stepping stone for what should come next (can’t stop, won’t stop building!). By 2019, I’d connected with a local high school whose student body is majority Black and where nearly all of the students receive need-based financial aid. Precisely the people who never see design or architecture as a career path for themselves. The school already had an established Corporate Work Study program – one that gets the students real work experience every year, starting as freshmen. I didn’t need to invent the program – it already existed – I just had to convince leadership that we should do it. And so we did.
Plenty of other work happened during these years as well: a DEI committee; a social and environmental advocates committee; continued policy changes that came along with Just label renewals; a hiring committee that (somewhat) democratized hiring decisions; rewritten job ads with more focus on equity and diversity.
We were really doing it!
I was so proud of all of this work, and at the same time, never satisfied that it was enough. And this is where the tide begins to turn against me.
. . .
Truth be told, people will go along for a while and do some version of pretending that they give a shit about these issues, but if it’s not really in their DNA to move this way, they do get tired of it.
It’s hard to recall exactly how and in what order things happened – it was a lot of years ago, and memories are fallible. But I do know that the further along this path I pushed, the more I started to feel the pushback from certain leaders. Some version of “stay in your lane” and “haven’t we already done enough” vibes.
It definitely wasn’t everyone in leadership, but there was a faction. It became clear that this part of the work just wasn’t what they gave a shit about.
And then… a pandemic.
I don’t think the pandemic is what broke things, but I do think it gave an opening for a different kind of survival mechanics. Easy to say these “extra” issues don’t matter when your business is just trying to survive.
. . .
And now it’s mid-2021, a Wednesday morning. I’m in a meeting with the high school student interns and my colleagues who were working with and mentoring them. I get a Slack message from one of the partners I don’t typically hear from: “hey Audrey, can you talk after you're done with your meeting?”
My heart sank into my stomach. It does the same as I sit here writing this over five years later.
You know what happened, without me even saying the words. My “position had been eliminated,” marketing was getting “restructured” and there was no place for me. My time there (nearly 10 years) was abruptly ending. I’ll spare you the gory details about how that conversation went – it was not my finest hour, but I also didn’t say anything I regret.
My world was rocked, and there’s no other way to put it.
. . .
Some months before this happened, the firm had done a round of layoffs (this time around, easy to blame Covid). But when I saw the announcement about who was getting let go, I couldn’t let it go. I did the math: almost all women and people of color. So I did the only thing I knew how to do – I called it out explicitly to the leadership team. I said some version of, “if we want to keep talking about equity, we cannot make decisions like this. It simply has to stop. Otherwise we’re lying.”
I can’t be sure, of course, but I always felt like that situation was the nail in my coffin. It was the marker of my being too much. My unwillingness to turn a blind eye and let decisions like that – so counter to the values I was tasked with talking about – be made without consequence.
. . .
What came after my departure is the thing that honestly held me together.
An outpouring of messages from colleagues who were shocked that I was gone. And they weren’t just you were great and we’ll miss you, best of luck kind of messages. They were real.
“I have always felt that you were someone who was looking out for the rest of us.”
“You were such a powerful force in a lot of things that really matter and make this life real.”
“It feels like you’re always punching up and trying to make important changes.”
“You have always spoken up for other perspectives that are often missing.”
“You were the conscience of this place.”
Those are direct quotes, and I know because I saved them. I saved them because I needed them. While the rest of the details of this story probably have some fuzzy edges, those statements are certain.
In the months and years after my departure, the company saw a steady stream of exits – to the point where most of the people I worked with over those years are no longer there. The marketing team I hired, trained, mentored made quick moves to leave. I won’t sit here and say that every departure was because of mine, but I have heard from some that they felt like my ousting was a turning point of some kind. Whether that’s true or not is subjective, but it feels apt.
And this brings me to the thing I’m still repeating today – in my work and increasingly, in my writing: employees know. They know what’s going on long before it becomes a crisis.
. . .
A couple of years after I was gone, one of the firm's principals told me – unprompted – the decision to let me go wasn't right. "I don’t even think it was the right decision for the business." I appreciated hearing it – not because it changed anything, but because I already knew it was true. It didn't really matter, but it wasn't nothing.
As for the grudge: I'd like to tell you I let it go, but that would be generous. In truth, it just wore out. Somewhere around year three, I noticed the edges were gone – I wasn't rooting for them to fail anymore. I was too busy building something of my own, as I started my business around that time. I honestly don't know if those two facts are related. (They probably are.)
So no – I don't wish them anything. Not failure, not success. Just nothing.
But here's what I know now that I couldn't have known back when I called it my dream job:
Every place needs work. The good ones aren't good by chance – they're built, on purpose, by people who actually want it, at the top, where it costs something. And values that are claimed but not kept have an expiration date. You can't negotiate with it.
If my story gives you anything, let it be this: I held on too long. Part of me used to wish I'd walked out on my own terms. But in the end, I'm glad it happened the way it did – because it lit a fire under me to keep doing this work, my way.
This newsletter is where I'll keep tending that fire. Hopeful realism: the honest look at how organizations actually behave – and the belief that better is buildable, anywhere people at the top genuinely want it. That's the kind of thinking project you'll find here each month.
I'm glad you're here.
. . .
