This is a bit of a podcast-but-written light rant, but I wanted to try something different with my writing. Or rather go back to my own less structured style for this one.

Corporate Personas

I guess the thing that I’ve always found weird is that once you enter corporate life you almost have to have a different persona than you have at home. I’ve known lots of people that are in corporate type jobs, whether that’s in tech or otherwise, and you know them outside of work and then you see them at work and they’re this completely different person. Sometimes they talk about different hobbies or they say they have different hobbies or they don’t talk about their hobbies at all. They’re really boring and plain and they have no interesting qualities in them in corporate life. They’ve become this literal drone-type character.

And I don’t like to use stereotypes but that’s the only thing I can think of to describe it. They’re like a carbon copy of someone else. If you line them all up in a row and ask them the same questions they would give you the same generic answers as everybody else because when you work in a corporate environment you can’t really have a personality.

Now I can only say this personally from a woman’s perspective, but I think it’s the same whether you’re a woman in corporate or you’re a man in corporate. There are these two generic personalities in each of those roles and it’s just so weird to me.

MY Online Personality

And that’s why I kind of just wanted to roll back. I removed everything from my LinkedIn. I stripped it all out except for some things like my projects and maybe skills. I removed my education and my experience off of there. I left just my contact information and a redirect to my website.

Now my website is more personal. You’re here. You’re viewing my website right now. It’s very old school. It looks like a website you would have built back in the late 90s or early 2000s, back in the day of personal websites or vanity sites as we called them in the mid to late 90s. Before they were blogs. They did have journaling aspects but they had the same standard layout. Header, left sidebar, content. You’d have stuff in the left sidebar. You’d have your blog posts in the content area. Your name up at the top.

But anyway I digress.

I’ve made my website about me. I may have business knowledge and technical knowledge but I’m still a person. I’m still a human being. I have a personality. I have hobbies. I play video games. I have cats. I live life. I have ups and downs just like anybody else.

Back to Corporate

And I feel like if you work in corporate it’s OK to have a personality. I don’t know why so many people feel like they can’t have a personality, they can’t be unique. It’s rare that you run across somebody who is unique in a corporate environment. I don’t know why this is something that gets “trained” out of people. It’s a shame.

Because if you’re allowed to be you and allowed to have a distinct or unique personality in business, corporate, tech, fintech, whatever industry you’re in, if you’re allowed to have that creative side to you, that unique personality, you can be a creative thinker. You can think outside the box. You don’t always have to stick to that mentality of, this is the way we’ve always done it so this is the way we’re going to continue to do it. Tried and true methods are great and they work a lot of the time but when they don’t work they don’t work and you need to think of a different way to do things.

I think what’s happening now is that everything is so generic that things are just being done the way they’re done and everybody follows a trend and even if the trend isn’t relevant to your industry you follow it anyway. And that comes from a lack of personality in the office. It shouldn’t be frowned upon. It should be a good thing.

I don’t mean you need to be crazy or rude or insulting or politically incorrect. I just mean that you can still be a person and work in an office and I don’t understand how that’s slowly going away.

Movies are Generic Too

The only thing I can think of is that it’s the same as movies nowadays. Every single person looks exactly the same in any movie that is put out by Hollywood. Different plots, different scenarios, sure the story may be good, but it’s the same faces. Not necessarily the same actors but the same faces. They’re all gorgeous when it’s needless to be so gorgeous. Sometimes they’re all the same size.

And when you do see people of different sizes in movies, and I’ll speak to this as a plus-size person myself, they’re often playing the fool or some sex-crazed plus-size person chasing after men all the time. Or instead of fat and jolly they’re grumpy and frumpy. And if it’s a plus-size man in a movie or TV show he’s usually pretty jolly and happy and always chasing after a gorgeous thin woman. And plus-size women are often chasing shallow men who have no interest.

Big Bad AI

I don’t want to completely blame AI. I use AI. If you’ve seen some of my pictures I don’t mind generating corporate headshots because I don’t want to do a corporate headshot session right now. It’s not in my budget and it’s not something I feel comfortable doing right now so I just play around with AI a little bit. I use AI to help rewrite some things. Not completely. I’ve always used Word. I used Grammarly heavily when it came out to help structure sentences and paragraphs and it wasn’t a big deal back then. You used tools to help you properly structure things and it was considered smart.

Now if you do that it’s suddenly a bad thing. Not because people are worried about power or water usage but because it’s AI and you shouldn’t use AI to help you write or come up with creative ideas. But it’s a tool. As long as we don’t let it take over completely I think it’s a good thing.

But I’ve rambled.

Back to My Point

My main point is that I like my website to have personality. I like it to be fun and have my unique personality in it. I’m really tired of not being me in a corporate environment.

So if you hire me as a contractor, short term or long term, if I’m on retainer, if I’m an employee, I’m going to show up authentically me. That’s who I’m going to be.

It doesn’t work in every environment. Some people don’t want authenticity. The best bosses I’ve ever had appreciated honesty, authenticity, and hard work. They valued it. Others you tell the truth, you give them the facts, you tell them the way things are and they seem like they take it OK but they really don’t.

If you know what I’m saying.

Let’s Wrap This Up

So yeah. It’s sad. And I wanted to move away from that. I didn’t want some gray and dark blue website that just spouts the same messaging everyone else does.

When I’m speaking or teaching you’re going to see authentically me. Not some generic, bland version just repeating what everyone else says.

I have 30 years in programming, web development, technical processes, quality control, teaching, administration, nonprofit leadership. I have experience. I’m in my 50s. My corporate life isn’t over. It just needs to be adjusted a little bit.

And that’s where we are.

I’ve used Word to write this. I’ve used dictation. I’ve edited it. And yes I’ll probably use AI to clean up a sentence or two. I don’t think I’m going to lose my authenticity by doing that and I don’t plan to.

That’s the truth.

That’s the way things are.

Welcome to Heather 2026.

P.S. This isn’t a judgment on anyone who thrives in corporate structure or prefers to keep their personality separate from their job. If that works for you, truly, I respect that. I’m just at a point where that doesn’t work for me anymore.