This was an interesting post. It went from, correctly IMHO, calling out the OP for romanticizing life in the military, to romanticizing life in a consulting company. “Yes, we management consultants/ and or military members, are the cream of the cream, how can you poor other types even stand to get up in the morning, your lives are so wretched…”, yada, yada, yada
Personally, I thought it was a little snarky. . . unduly snarky. I don’t see where the OP was ‘romanticizing the military’, but more giving his base for comparison.
It confused me too, but for other reasons. 
Tripler
Unfortunately, that, in my experience, is the arrogant attitude of the high dollar consultant. Who in general, produces LESS than the low buck consultant, but maintains a higher profile and a busier schedule. The biggest problem I had with most of them was that they’d literally lock themselves in a room no one else had access to (this at several companies) and work on shit - on our dime - for other clients. Double billing, in other words. The other downside was their constant pressure to bring in more of their ilk, to make their company more money.
From a co-worker/client side, it always pissed me off that they’d be playing “I’m so important” games, running out of meetings to talk on their cell phones (in the earliest days of cell phones when few had them), not returning phone calls, and looking down on the people who were stupid enough to work directly for their client.
Oh, and a very large consulting firm was hired to do a search for the new CEO of the last company I worked IT for. Big shock, the guy they picked was one of their own VPs. He raped the company, layed off hundreds, moved the HQ for his own convenience and had them rent a jet for his private use. When they finally got rid of him some years after I left, the next CEO had to publicly apologize to the company’s larger customers for the company’s lack of people skills and failure to keep up development and R&D. All caused by that former asshole looting and gutting the company, and hiring his own ill-suited cronies for high level positions.
The money is nice, but I do it for the opportunity to write caustically satirical e-mails in response to nonsensical Corporate Announcements and self-contradictory Intra-Sector Policy Statements. It’s like a cross between the film Brazil, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, and Paranoia: The Role Playing Game of a Darkly Humorous Future.
I actually work with a (mostly) pretty good group of people so it’s not nearly as bad as some of the places I’ve worked before that seem to be populated by the kind of dullards msmith537 writes of, but the moments of genuine accomplishment are still few and far between. Oh, but there are three bars within walking distance. 
Yeah, anybody that tries to get me to sing the corporate jingle is going to get a fat raspberry instead. My company isn’t my family, my best friend, or my body politic. I like my current boss and many of my coworkers a lot, though; enough to go hiking, skydiving, scuba diving, et cetera with them, even though I generally prefer not socializing with co-workers.
I work with military people all the time–primarily Air Force–and there is a certain corps de esprit among them, but it is mostly based on playing pranks, working the system to get the most benefits and TDY pay, and counting down to retirement. There is some genuine enthusiasm for “the mission” (at least, if they’re tasked with doing anything worthwhile) but there is a heck of a lot of clockwatching going on, too, especially senior enlisted and officers who know that they aren’t or don’t care to aspire to a flag; I guarantee that an 16 year Major is just marking the days on the calender until retirement even more vigilantly than an office drone.
Stranger
Ok… from where I’m sitting, if you (and msmith and maybe others) see it as ‘romanticizing,’ then I really don’t see how I could have phrased the OP differently and still gotten my point across. Without that, there really is no point to the OP. My goal here is not, btw, to soapbox any love of military life.
I found the entire OP to be a bit, althought probably unintentionally, snarky. At the very least it’s a bit biased. The implication seems to be that the military is full of hard working, team oriented, motivated go-getters while the entire corporate world is full of incompetant, lazy clockwatchers.
I don’t believe that was my intent. I was simply attempting to convey to the OP that there are industries that share some of the organizational traits that the OP found desirable in the military:
- Sense of deep appreciation for the people I work with (ok not all the time, but there are a lot of people in consulting who I’m like "wow, that guy/girl is pretty smart)
- Traveling…experience all sorts of shit
- Long days / hard work
- Tough decisions
- Bad conditions (Not always, if you can get an upgrade;) )
- You see good leaders and good followers (and bad)
- You joke around with each other, you bitch and moan about the long hours and nasty conditions
There are a lot of serious negatives to management consulting as well. Some of what Chimera says about arrogance, conflicts of interest and mismanagement are true. Consulting firms themselves seem to be horribly mismanged as the only skills that are valued are 1) billing work and 2) selling business. You also tend to have no life of your own and the firms can often be very cultish.
From my perspective having been both military and civilian, I’d say it’s not so much civilians are lazy clockwatchers at all. You get that in both environments.
For me, it’s that in the military you’re part of a family who won’t kick you to the curb if someone doesn’t like you. If someone is a lazy fuckup, the military will try its best to work with you to make you not a lazy fuckup.
In the civilian world, the boss wakes up in a bad mood, or just doesn’t like you because you voted Democrat and he voted Republican, you’re fired.
In the military people play games & politics, but you can’t be fired without good reason. In the civilian sector, we’ve got what’s called “at will employment.”
You also can’t quit.
True, and as a very young soldier I used to dream of the day I’d be able to tell my boss to fuck off and walk out the door. But I grew up.
Ultimately, the problem in the civilian world is that everyone who doesn’t work as hard as you is a “lazy moron” and everyone who works harder than you is a “backstabbing asshole”.
The ability to move to other companies when it suits your needs, to advance your career or take advantage of new opportunities, or simply to go where your talents will be appreciated is not the same as telling your boss to fuck off. It’s silly to dismiss the ability to quit your job as a youthful indiscretion.
I would ask the OP how YOU do it. How do you stand the regimenting of almost every aspect of your life? They tell you where you live, what you eat, what your job is, who you live with… They may tell you one day to go out and die – not kill yourself, but do something so risky it amounts to it. You have hardly any choices to make, and you might be imprisoned if you disobey an order.
And they will keep you as long as they want to. Even the end of your term of service is out of your hands.
How can you stand it?
One thing about the OP. You mention that you’ve managed to get rid of everyone who was a problem. That’s probably true. But where did they go? You probably managed to transfer them out of your unit. Which means they’re now someone else’s problem.
I worked in the private sector all my working life, but some of it was DoD work. Sometimes it was a tight productive crew. Sometimes it wasn’t. I don’t think the military or the government is qualitatively any different. I think individuals differ (and they differ across time) and I think individual managers and corporate cultures differ. I’ve known go-getters within lack-luster groups and drones in go-getter outfits. Infinite variety…
The military might be more prone to be energetic simply because it is more heavily populated that the average population with young men who have been highly indoctrinated and often, being located away from family, don’t have that much else to do. Just a WAG.
It’s silly to tell a young person who has been told he’ll got to jail if he quits that it’s silly to imagine the ability to quit.
How does this apply to anything I said?
You said:
What did you mean?
You were listing all the advantages of life in the military. I was pointing out some of the advantages of life in the private sector. The ability to quit a bad situation and find something new is a significant advantage. How you ended up in the military really doesn’t factor into it.
Your original quote
The flip side of this is that you can’t quit. I don’t see this as a major controversy.
A bit biased? That’s being nice. It’s completely biased. I tried to say as much by saying the military is all I’ve known. You call it snarky, I call it something I see all the time and which I’d like to test the reality of. That’s why I’m looking for other viewpoints. Sue me.
I’ll take a stab at this*. Lemme pull out my soapbox.
Regimenting: that depends. Some jobs are that way, others aren’t. My current job has me working 0730-1600, weekends off, with a 10-day trip to Europe or Asia once every 1-2 months (pretty good). I have to wear a flight suit every day (excellent). If something pops up, I let my immediate boss know and take the day off/leave early/arrive late (excellent). I get 30 days of leave per year which I can take whenever I want within the parameters of our deployment schedule (excellent). I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner wherever I want, whenever I want (excellent). Bottom line: not sure where the regiment is. Uniformity, yes, with the flight suit, but hey, lots of jobs require some sort of outfit. I get to wear a flight suit. That, to me, is pretty cool.
Where I live, what job, who I live with: I live wherever I want. I can ask for base housing, and they will give me two shots at different houses, so if I don’t like the first house, I can opt for the second. Both will be either on base or in a military housing area. If I don’t like either or don’t even want to bother with base housing at all, I can find a house anywhere out in town, with a housing allowance. My next job will be in San Diego near North Island. I seriously would love base housing there. Right across the street from the Pacific Ocean. I can live with that. And I live with my family, by my choice (granted, sometimes I wish it were otherwise 
).
The job thing is a bit more complicated. Do they tell me what my job is? Sort of. I applied for Naval Aviation–it’s a volunteer gig. For most of my jobs, one of the requirements is that I’m an aviator. Nothing wrong with that. Along the way, I have input as to what I want to fly and where I want to go (sometimes people don’t get what they want, but they often do). Once finished with my initial squadron, I can either wait for the detailer (the guy that assigns jobs) to shove somehting down my throat when that time rolls around, or I can find something I want to do in a location I like, and see if he can get me there. If not, I can backdoor it and sell myself to that job, so the high ranking folks there bug my detailer until he agrees to let them have me. Then I get my official orders which tell me what job I’m going to–usually what you want.
Doing dangerous things: I’d have to hazard an educated guess here and say that most folks that join the military are totally fine with some element of risk. Like I said, I’ve been shot at and done other dangerous things in my training and job. I can’t say that I live for danger and risk, but it definitely makes the job interesting and something to be proud about. You want to learn something about your character? Put yourself in a multi-crew aircraft, have a SAM guide on you, and try and keep your wits about you and lead your crew. Go through water survival or SERE school. They will teach you a bit about yourself. These are tough, but good things. I could go on, but I’m boring myself, much less anyone reading this.
And it’s rare that you have a situation where someone tells you to “go out and die.” Extremely rare. It’s usually a situation which starts fine and deteriorates for whatever reasons, and things are all the sudden a bit dicey. The days of storming the machine gun nest with no cover and no support are more or less over.
End of service: It’s very unlikely I’ll be called back when I retire, but it’s a risk I accept by taking the retirement check. The way I see it, especially after this thread, if they suck me back in during retirement, will it really be all that bad? Probably not.
*Keep in mind, I’m an O-4, which is going to be a drastically differing viewpoint than an Enlisted member.
Oy!, some of the bad apples are admin sep’d, some are dishonorably discharged if they’ve seen a courts-martial, and others are, yes, moved to a different office/unit/sqadron/whatever. Then they become someone else’s problem, but if you’re a caring person you try to squeeze them into something that suits the deficiency–e.g., if someone doesn’t play well with others, you try and find some job where he can sit in the corner and do good work and not have much interaction with others. Although that’s probably more the exception than the rule.
Ignoring the misanthropy of one poster, the thing I find interesting about this thread is the paucity of current or retired military input. I’ve worked with (and listened to the tales of) several lifers and nearly all of them had stories more simiolar to Tripler’s than to flyboy’s.
I do not question flyboy’s experience. I can take a number of sections out of my work career and describe them in ways similar to his. I can also take sections of my work career and describe them in ways to make the situation of flyboy’s spouse look like a dream job. My guess is that two factors influence flyboy’s perception:
first would be a run of good luck in landing positions in departments (squadrons, whatever) where bullshit just happened to be lower than the norm;
second would be that I suspect that flyboy brings an attitude to his job that very likely reduces the aggravation level he encounters at work.
I’ve been in a number of jobs where I figured the situation was OK (if not ideal, by any means), while some of my co-workers thought that there could be no worse working conditions. I typically recognize that everyone has strengths and weaknesses and simply make allowances for that. I have often been questioned as to why I have not hated or fought with one worker or supervisor or another and have generally responded that I simply saw no reason to let their shortcomings interfere with my day. If flyboy unconsciously does the same thing, then his work environment is going to seem a lot better (to him) than any environment where the staff is described as though they get up each morning looking for ways to torment him.
I’d still like to hear more direct comments from service personnel regarding whether they see the military workplace in the same way that flyboy sees his, (and, if they have retired, whether they see a significant difference out in the civilian world).
Yeah well I’d like to hear you say something about that before you go begging other people’s opinions.
Man up, bro.