I’m writing this from a toilet cubicle in a Grade A office building in the CBD because it’s literally the only place I can have five minutes of “unproductive” time without someone pinging me for a status update on Teams.
I’m 37. I’m a Finance Manager. I’ve spent the last decade being the “numbers guy” who never sleeps. If there’s a discrepancy in the consolidated accounts at 2 AM, I’m the one digging through the ledgers. If a regional CFO needs a last-minute board deck for a 9 AM meeting, I’m the one staying until the sun comes up to “massage the data.” I thought this made me indispensable. I thought this was “career growth.”
But I’ve finally realized: The more “efficient” you are in a Singaporean corporate environment, the more you are penalized with a higher workload that makes your hourly rate look like a joke.
In our culture, we have this toxic obsession with “responsiveness.” If I don’t reply to a WhatsApp message from a stakeholder within 90 seconds—even if it’s 9 PM on a Sunday—there’s this palpable sense of “disappointment.” We’ve traded the 9-to-6 for a 24/7 digital leash. We talk about “Financial Hub” status and “Digital Transformation,” but all we’ve really done is provide cheap labour that is as good as working for free once you calculate the actual hours spent on “ad-hoc” requests.
The “Lean Team” Illusion
My company recently did a “restructuring.” They called it “optimizing the headcount.” What it actually meant was they removed three people in my department and told me that, since I’m so “detail-oriented,” I could easily absorb their portfolios. No pay raise. Just a “thank you for your synergy.”
Now, I’m doing the work of four people, managing P&L for three different regions while trying to ensure our compliance posture isn’t compromised by the very “cost-cutting” measures the board just approved. It’s a joke. We are obsessed with “lean” until the audit fails, and when it does, the blame falls on the middle manager who was told to provide high-level expertise for what essentially amounts to “volunteer hours” after 6 PM.
The Performative Hustle
And don’t get me started on the office culture. I see people staying until 8 PM just to “look busy” because the boss hasn’t left yet. We are a nation of world-class actors. We pretend to be “collaborating” in meetings that could have been an email. We write “minutes” for discussions that achieved nothing. We spend $15 on a salad bowl at Amoy Street just to feel like we belong to the “high-SES” crowd, only to go back to a desk and get treated like cheap labour by a director who hasn’t opened an Excel sheet since 2004.
The Breaking Point
I’m tired. I’m tired of the “urgent” emails that aren’t urgent. I’m tired of the “dynamic” reporting requirements that change every two days. I’m tired of being told that I should be “grateful” for a bonus that barely covers the inflation on my groceries.
We aren’t “professionals” anymore. We are just high-bandwidth spreadsheet processors with human skin. We’ve optimized our lives so much that we are basically giving away our best years for free.
To my fellow corporate warriors in SG: When was the last time you turned off your phone for a full day without feeling a pang of existential dread? When was the last time you did something that didn’t have a KPI attached to it?
I think I’m done. I think I’m going to take my expertise and go find a job where “Urgent” actually means a financial crisis is happening, not that I’m expected to provide free overtime because a bar chart has the wrong shade of blue.
TL;DR: Being “good at your job” in a Singaporean MNC is just an invitation for the company to treat you as cheap labour as good as working for free. The “hustle” is a total scam.