Thank you for coming today, everyone. I’m here to announce that after five years, six bonuses and some newly vested stock options, I will be resigning from Zikkler effective at the end of the month. I want to emphasize that this resignation is not meant to be an indictment of my many incredible co-workers or a suggestion that I will be giving back or donating any of the money I made while I was here. I have simply come to realize that my personal mission of having a job that strangers think is impressive and kind of cool no longer aligns with what the company is doing.
When I first got hired to work as DMM at Zikkler, I did so with two simple goals in mind: to make the world a better place and to purchase a house near Lake Tahoe that was bigger than my brother-in-law’s. I have definitely accomplished the second goal, as you can see from the many photos I passed out comparing the two homes from multiple different angles. However, it is time to admit that I have not accomplished the first.
This job simply turned into something I did not expect, starting with my title. I was under the impression that I would be the Digital Media Mastermind, but after about two weeks, I learned that DMM actually stood for Data Monetization Manager. I probably should have figured out what it stood for before I accepted the job, but my contract just had so many zeroes in it, making it hard to focus on the details.
My first instinct after finding out about this was to resign immediately. However, after a great deal of soul-searching, I realized that I would have to return my signing bonus if I left after less than a year. I then decided that I could be more helpful by working to reform Zikkler from the inside.
And I tried. Lord knows how much I tried. I even went as far as directly confronting our CEO about it during one of our weekly executive meetings.
“Have we considered that some of the things we are doing, such as psychologically manipulating our users and selling their data to advertisers, might be bad?” I asked, looking him right in the eye.
“Yes,” he replied.
I found this answer extremely satisfactory and got right back to work after the meeting, secure in the knowledge that I had spoken up about an important issue and definitively changed our company for the better. It was not until years later, when I saw an exposé about bad things my company was doing in a trendy media outlet read by many attractive people in my luxury condo complex, that I realized how naïve I was.
And there was definitely no way I could have found out about all the bad things we were doing before that article came out, so please don’t bother asking me any questions about that.
Anyway, the exposé made me realize once and for all that, despite my best efforts, I was not succeeding at reforming Zikkler from the inside. The company culture had simply become too toxic for any one person to change, whether that person was me or Nelson Mandela. Not that I’m comparing myself to Nelson Mandela, but you should all feel free to do that if you’d like.
So after some more soul-searching that coincidentally took precisely as long as it took for my bank account to hit the $50 million mark, I decided that the best way to stop the people I meet on Tinder from frowning when I tell them where I work was to resign from Zikkler. I am not sure what my next move will be, but I do know that I want it to involve helping people cure themselves of their addictions to technology, doing some other things that sound generically “good,” and keeping my Lake Tahoe house.
Thank you again for coming, and please make sure to share any videos or articles about my resignation on social media. I’ve really got to promote the ol’ personal brand now that I’m back on the job market!