[HN Gopher] The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discont...
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The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'
Author : rustoo
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-08-10 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gallup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gallup.com)
| Zababa wrote:
| > Though pay is important, money alone isn't the solution. Some
| very well-paid people are among the most disengaged, and
| disengaged white-collar workers are slightly more likely than
| others to be looking for a job.
|
| Two things here:
|
| - Well-paid could still be under the market (happens a lot in
| software)
|
| - If you're well-off it's easier to not depend on your job
|
| If it's mostly the first problem, paying more will solve your
| problem.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I was in the first camp. Basically, well paid in absolute
| terms, but shite pay relative to other people in technology.
| Once WFH opened up my options, it took me all of week to find a
| position paying 2x as much.
|
| Surprisingly, they company I left has no problem replacing me
| in about as much time. Though, I'm not sure if my replacement
| was paid more than I was. I did cite pay as my sole reason for
| leaving, so it is possible.
| oxymoran wrote:
| Interesting tidbit regarding Gallup: the Fortune 500 company I
| work for manipulates our surveys by asking general questions
| about the company and then holding the supervisors accountable
| for the results even if all of the questions are way out of their
| control. So they leverage the the employee-supervisor
| relationship to make it seem like there is more happiness and
| less discontent.
|
| That being said, I find it hard to believe my company is the only
| one doing that, I even called Gallup about it and they did not
| seem to care. At all.
|
| Imagine what the real numbers look like.
| throwaway75787 wrote:
| Surveys set up by the likes of "Great Place to Work" and
| similar are nothing but HR and PR fluff. It's set up to be
| spinned and covered up.
| tripa wrote:
| I've said it before and I'd say it again with or without a
| throwaway: being certified "Great Place to Work" doesn't mean
| we're a good work environment, merely that we allocated >1
| FTE to winning the contest.
| Izkata wrote:
| FTE?
| tripa wrote:
| Full-Time Employee
| mohaine wrote:
| This. You can only win with quite a bit of work which a
| company without issues will not put in.
| Macha wrote:
| Seen this before too.
|
| 1. Company makes unpopular decision (cuts a benefit, partners
| with someone unpopular, enforces some tedious process to make
| management life earlier)
|
| 2. Next poll season comes round
|
| 3. Shock, results are down
|
| 4. Declare an aggregate engagement measure as an action item
| which incorporates both the happiness metric but others such as
| understanding of company strategy
|
| 5. Declare the problem with this metric are line managers not
| conveying company direction well enough
|
| 6. Declare you're taking action by measuring line management on
| this metric
|
| 7. A bunch of ensuing makework on something execs think is
| important (at a certain size, a singular company vision is just
| too generic for line employees to care), yet they sell it as
| taking action
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| simple solution == flat-as-possible org structure?
| clomond wrote:
| But once you make a formal structure flat enough, informal
| structures can start to solidify and dominate (think High
| School).
|
| I always try to keep this in mind, Valve which famously has
| a completely flat structure, ended up turning into an
| environment where things like popularity and ability to
| dispense resources defined the practiced org structure. Be
| careful what you wish for.
| danuker wrote:
| Perhaps "popularity and ability to dispense resources" is
| better than just "ability to dispense resources" (i.e.
| traditional hierarchy).
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Did you go to High School with the rampant bullying?
| Popularity is not linked at all with personality traits
| that make someone a good leader afaik. Traditional
| hierarchy at least tries to keep people who are a
| competent in power.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Did you go to High School with the rampant bullying"
|
| Do adults have judgement of pre-pubernecent 14 year olds?
| I mean, maybe some do, but...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| High school age is generally 14 to 18. And I wouldn't be
| so confident adults in unchecked power are better then
| high schoolers on morality and decency.
| kodah wrote:
| I've seen our internal surveys go like this as well. They'll be
| critical on themselves with easy-to-solve issues but if it's
| something substantive then the polling will be very obtuse.
| laurent92 wrote:
| In my company (a famous company which builds trucks) they
| introduced those bullshit happiness surveys during Covid. So
| we coordinated so that the average of our marks were 1, 3, 4,
| 10, 5, 5, 10, 4, 3, 1, which is a Batman graph. Fortunately
| the "1" matches the first lockdown, but the managers are
| still wondering why the spikes at 10.
| flapjaxy wrote:
| doing the real work right here!
| slumdev wrote:
| My employer administered questions regarding how many days per
| week the employees wanted to spend in-office versus WFH.
|
| Zero days per week in the office was not presented as an
| option.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| How many days per week do you want to spend in the office
| versus work from home?
|
| (A) Seven in office
|
| (B) Six in office
|
| (C) Five in office, seven evenings plus two days WFH
|
| (D) Please replace me
| MR4D wrote:
| (E) I have COVID and am going into the office to screw the
| company over.
|
| Will be interesting to see if this choice happens.
| mrRandomGuy wrote:
| AKA "we spent way too much on the lease for you to just work
| from home pleb"
| tomohawk wrote:
| In government situations, the space itself is at a premium
| (not what it costs). If your org has a certain amount of
| space for use, other orgs will try to steal it from you.
| The amount of space you control is an indication of how
| awesome your org is.
|
| There was this one org that had a few floors of a building
| for their use, but most of the desks sat empty most of the
| time. This came to the attention of a different org that
| was hard up for space. That had 2 people per desk at many
| desks. They got the "space manager" to take a look, but the
| target org got wind of what was going on and they called
| everyone to be in during that time. Those floors were
| overflowing with people when the space manager showed up.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I honestly think it comes down to this in the majority of
| the cases.
|
| "Look, we have a two-years contract where we pay X thousand
| dollars a month for 100 desks and we have on an average day
| 3 developers in our office. After one year of lockdowns, we
| know our developers work at least as well from home as from
| the office, but higher ups ask us why we pay so much for an
| empty building, so we will force you come back to the
| office as soon as we can, even if we don't save any money
| with that and most likely decrease our efficiency and
| employee satisfaction."
|
| I live in Germany and that's more or less what's happening
| at my company as we speak. Nobody complained about our
| performance or said they wished the company would enforce
| "work from office" rules, yet, they already try to slowly
| increase the days where we need to work from the office.
|
| In my opinion, once a month in the office is great for
| chatting and connecting with people, but when it comes to
| work output, it doesn't move the needle, it's actually a
| day lost to the business.
| lanstin wrote:
| Yeah I have been going in as requested but without my
| laptop. I am happy to chat but not going to pretend to do
| actual creative work.
| namdnay wrote:
| Hahaha you too? Saw this at a previous employer. Suddenly the
| Gallup scores became the sole responsibility of your direct
| manager. So guess what? One year later, everyone briefs their
| reports to make sure they don't get in trouble, Gallup scores
| were through the roof, trebles all round for HR!
| samirillian wrote:
| Funny to think about this as a kind of passive revolt. COVID-19
| response: failure, no exit, trapped; BLM: failure, no exit,
| trapped. Amazon unionization vote: failure, no exit, trapped.
| Going full remote, working from your castle instead of theirs,
| feeling the "great resignation," a large percentage of the
| population suddenly realize, perhaps because everyone is so very
| online, and very online people often care a lot about the
| proletariat, that their employers are _so fucked_ without them.
| And then you realize this formula:
|
| > Replacing workers requires one-half to two times the employee's
| annual salary. So, it costs $9,000 a year to keep each disengaged
| worker and between $25,000 and $100,000 to replace them.
|
| Does the right-libertarian dream merge with the Marxist dream,
| and everyone "gets wise" to what this calculus means for wage and
| equity negotiation, if we just keep holding the line, that we
| know what we're worth, what our time is worth to place Facebook
| pixels on websites, and we won't work for less.
| rpmisms wrote:
| > what our time is worth to place Facebook pixels on websites
|
| I felt this in my soul. I just left my old job (which I liked)
| to go fully remote for a weird little shop in Florida. They're
| actually embracing remote culture and keeping employees
| engaged. Makes the soulless toil a bit more bearable.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > $9,000 a year to keep each disengaged worker and between
| $25,000 and $100,000 to replace them.
|
| Given how job tenure has plummeted over the years, I have a hard
| time believing this is accurate. Does anyone know a place where
| retention efforts come anywhere close to hiring efforts?
| cratermoon wrote:
| > I have a hard time believing this is accurate
|
| How does that follow? It certainly seems that spending $9K/year
| or less compared to coughing up 3 to 10 times that to hire
| proves that attention to retention is nowhere near that given
| to hiring.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| But if it were accurate, wouldn't companies spend more effort
| on retention and engagement over hiring? This is a data point
| that I have seen claimed for years and years and yet
| companies don't act on it.
|
| Companies are either making a near universal error that has
| been well publicized at this point or the number is wrong and
| hiring is nowhere near that expensive.
|
| Amazon is a very data driven company. But they have no
| problem churning through people like crazy. They are a
| company with hire to fire, so if hiring an SDE cost $50,000,
| they are letting managers spend 50K to fiddle with attrition
| stats.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| But those numbers are averages, my case is special because
| of X, Y, and Z. I'm sure every manager can rationalize this
| away.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Indeed, plenty of employees also tend to make this error.
| They'll fight against unions because "I can bargain
| better than a conglomerate of employees could"
| danaris wrote:
| > But if it were accurate, wouldn't companies spend more
| effort on retention and engagement over hiring?
|
| Retention and engagement are hard, complicated problems.
| The mindset that employees are interchangeable cogs with no
| real needs of their own--particularly psychological needs
| that have anything to do with the workplace--is still a
| very strong one in every sector of the American workplace.
| Even for those companies where management, as a whole, does
| genuinely understand that it benefits everyone to have
| engaged employees, if you ask 10 people "how do you keep
| employees engaged?" you'll get 12 different answers.
|
| We're still just a few steps away from tenant farmers,
| sweatshops, and company towns. The fact that there's
| research that shows spending on retention is massively more
| effective than spending on hiring will take _generations_
| more to actually catch on amongst the American executive
| class...unless we can manage to pull together a serious
| union renaissance and demand the better conditions that
| will actually help everyone.
| lostcolony wrote:
| It's an average, not a universal. Confronted with the data,
| you COULD choose to increase engagement, or look to reduce
| cost of churn.
|
| Amazon delays equity a lot, so it may look financially
| sensible to churn through people.
|
| Beyond that though, companies make plenty of universal
| errors. Can you think of any other errors the -average-
| company makes, that may cost them money?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I can think of plenty of companies that do plenty of
| things wrong, or at least seem to be wrong. I can't think
| of many things virtually all of them do wrong, especially
| ones that are so well publicized and are at the
| organizational level rather than the individual team
| level.
|
| I can see equity being a reason for Amazon, but it is
| hardly just equity granting companies that are this way.
| lostcolony wrote:
| You call it out yourself; it may not even be "the
| company" is seeing much change in retention, but
| different parts of the org are. Others have solid
| retention.
|
| But retention also isn't an easy metric to solve for.
| It's not "just do X and watch that number improve". The
| closest thing companies do is throw money at people, but
| that only works if you're so far higher than the rest of
| the market that people are looking at a massive paycut if
| they go somewhere else, and that still is only one data
| point affecting those averages. Certainly, no company
| that I left could have kept me by throwing $9k more at
| me; I made more than that with every company change I
| made, let alone what actually caused me to start looking
| in the first place.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| A few things:
|
| 1) Just like in Sales, on average it is cheaper _and_
| marginally more profitable to retain an employee than to
| recruit a new one. This includes cost to recruit,
| interview, onboard, etc.
|
| 2) The exceptions here that throw off the average are those
| companies with strong inbound hiring pipelines (ex: Amazon
| will never have a shortage of applicants) that reduce the
| costs of recruiting + interviewing, and retaining high
| performers (e.g.: the cost of losing an upper-decile
| performer is much more significant.)
| cratermoon wrote:
| That goes back to how different costs are accounted for in
| the corporate world, how they appear on the bottom line,
| and how they affect valuation and the stock price. I don't
| pretend to understand corporate account practices, but
| generally, look at what's considered an asset, what's
| considered a liability, and what sort of costs can be
| amortized and or taken as a tax credit.
|
| I imagine that if there was a law that said companies could
| write off half or more what they spend on employee
| retention and development, you'd see Amazon and others put
| a lot more money that direction.
| hinkley wrote:
| I remember when it was all the rage to point out how the CEO to
| build up a company might not be the best choice to keep it
| working smoothly once it begins to see the limits of growth.
|
| Maybe this is true of everyone and simply less documented.
| Silicon Valley has hijacked "disruption" but in many ways the
| old definition still applies to the same people. Tom was a
| disruptive influence so when he demanded a raise we let him go
| instead.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| For employers it's game theory. If employees are commodities
| then it's better to keep the pay structure and have X amount of
| attrition than to pay everyone more to keep attrition low.
| basseq wrote:
| The "$9,000 to keep" figure is the _cost_ to keep a
| disengaged worker _on top of their salary_. This is the 18%
| of lost productivity against a $50k average salary. (Which
| suggests $50k of value creation in a given year dropping to
| $41k.)
|
| The article doesn't address pay as a way to increase
| engagement--and thus decrease attrition. Indirectly, the
| article suggests that increasing pay wouldn't actually have
| that much effect, with the real benefit coming from managers
| "who give workers a sense of purpose, inspiration and
| motivation to perform".
|
| Mathematically, you would need every 2% of average
| "retention" raise to yield a 1% drop in retention rate to
| break even, notwithstanding that 18% productivity drop.
|
| Put another way, it's not about employees being commodities.
| It's about (generally) pay-for-retention programs NOT ONLY
| failing, but in the worst case negatively affecting those
| people who _are_ engaged by forcing them to continue to
| interact with disengaged people who decided to stick around a
| little longer.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| I think I finally figured part of this out. Like you said,
| employers treat workers as commodities. This worked out great
| for them in the short term, as they saved money by not giving
| raises etc. In the long term, though, workers started
| realizing they often had to go back to the market to get
| meaningful pay raises. Now you have a situation where workers
| are switching as often as every 12-24 months, and the thing
| not previously accounted for is onboarding costs. In a
| situation where workers stay an average of 5 years, let's say
| they take a year to become net productive, you're losing
| about 20% of their time as an investment for 80% payoff. Now,
| though, that static year of onboarding costs accounts for
| 50-65% of their entire tenure. That's a huge swing against
| companies, who are suddenly realizing retention might be a
| problem. So the economic/management theory that everyone is
| just an interchangeable commodity is running up against the
| wall of reality, where second-order effects have taken over
| and destroyed a bunch of business value that could be
| captured in a more stable environment.
|
| There's an additional problem that firms are caught in a game
| theoretic trap. If you're the only firm providing stability,
| your investments in that in the short term might make you
| less competitive on pay, which means you'll train up people
| who might leave seeing higher pay elsewhere. So stability
| investments might be rational in the long term, but because
| of market conditions you get killed in the short term, and
| you end up tempted to abandon your strategy after a few bad
| quarters where it looks like they aren't paying off.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > If you're the only firm providing stability, your
| investments in that in the short term might make you less
| competitive on pay
|
| You're contradicting yourself here. Above you were saying
| that the way to keep employees is to give them proper
| raises, and thus enhance stability. How come greater
| stability equals less competitive pay?
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| Yeah sorry, I was writing it on the fly right before a
| meeting and just dumped my thoughts out. I think I was
| thinking something like this:
|
| If you spend money internally on promotes, you'll have
| less money to compete in the market for new hires.
| Therefore you might get some indicators that things
| aren't working, for example you might lose out on
| desirable candidates in the short term. Also retention
| might be a lagging indicator, because maybe some of your
| people already have their foot out the door, so it may
| look like people are continuing to leave in response to
| the old incentives before they realize things have
| changed.
|
| Ideally you exist in an organization where everyone is on
| the same page about your strategy and anticipates those
| kind of negative indicators, but maybe understanding is
| fragmented and a bunch of stakeholders push back when
| they see those negative signals.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > you'll have less money to compete in the market for new
| hires
|
| Why would that be the case? We already established that
| the company would pay industry level salaries to new
| hires and existing employees alike. Moreover, because you
| have less turnover, you need to hire less, so you have
| less wasted money on hiring and training.
|
| All in all, I just fail to understand why companies don't
| value existing employees more. I think it's the fact that
| they take advantage of people's aversion to change and
| interviews. They rely on people NOT going to interviews.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| It's all relative, though. If you increase salaries for
| retention, it has to come out of some other pot. Maybe
| that isn't your new hire pool, but you're going to see a
| negative metric of _some_ kind somewhere. Now don 't get
| me wrong, I still think it's better in the long term. But
| my point is that you'll get some kind of negative signal
| by pulling back funds elsewhere, and a firm at that point
| has to have the discipline not to freak out and stay on
| course.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| If you're correct, and it costs more money to keep
| people, then we are wrong: it's not cheaper to go for
| stability.
|
| Maybe it's like in the prisoner dilemma: you can't go
| lower than the market peak because no-one will come to
| you, even if you offer more on average than the industry
| average. This way, we reward the job hoppers with the
| peak salaries. Peak salaries means over time the average
| goes up too. I guess it's how free markets operate.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >In the long term, though, workers started realizing they
| often had to go back to the market to get meaningful pay
| raises.
|
| This has always been known. There simply was less demand
| for the labor that some workers were selling to get
| meaningful pay raises. Now that those supply and demand
| curves are shifting, especially in favor for those at the
| bottom of the pay scale, they have the option of selling
| their labor at a higher price.
|
| I am curious how it turns out in the next few decades as
| lower birthrate effects cause younger, lower paid workforce
| numbers to decrease. Especially if it is not offset by
| labor from immigrants.
| 71a54xd wrote:
| Completely agree. At this point I'm relatively convinced
| you always have to go "back to the market" to get a
| meaningful pay raise. Even if you switch to the product
| side or make 2-3 compensation incentives, you're likely not
| going to see that much of a cumulative pay bump -
| especially if you're not in the top 1% of engineers (which
| I certainly am not). Once you're in the 6-8yrs of
| experience range it gets a bit more drab unless you want to
| start your own gig - that is of course if making more money
| is in the cards.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| But if employees are commodities and companies can get away
| with thinking that way, that number is either inaccurate or
| everyone is getting it wrong.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I mean, I'm not these companies and I don't know the exact
| formula, but you'd be looking at things like the attrition
| rate, the cost of hiring, the cost of raises but also the
| value of wages across the whole market. There's some low-
| key collusion going on for sure (not necessarily outright
| collusion although some firms have been caught doing that
| too, but multiple firms all employing the same strategy
| keeps wages low for everyone). Now obviously developers do
| have enough leverage that they earn more than many
| professions, but it's obvious that many are under-valued.
|
| If it truly were more expensive to hire than to give
| raises, more firms would be giving raises.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > If it truly were more expensive to hire than to give
| raises, more firms would be giving raises.
|
| I don't disagree but the real world is more complex.
| Recruiting is an entire department in most companies that
| have a vested interest in hiring from outside. They will
| pull all strings to keep getting money for hiring.
|
| Corporate structures are really inefficient
| mindvirus wrote:
| I wonder how much it has to do with vacations. Rationally I know
| I need a vacation, but I don't know what I'd do - and so I've
| taken long weekends here and there but never two weeks
| disconnected.
| k4ch0w wrote:
| I stayed home and unplugged all work devices. I would just
| focus on your hobbies and improving your living situation or
| see your friends (Depending on where you live I know this can
| be hard for covid reasons). I took two weeks and I feel a lot
| better. Sometimes you just need to step away from the grind.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Yeah, I basically just want my family to take a vacation
| while I stay home and chill for a few days.
| crftr wrote:
| > Sometimes you just need to step away from the grind.
|
| Was your work routed to someone else during your time off?
|
| I would truly like to step away and relax. But the last time
| I tried to step away, I couldn't stop ruminating over all the
| unfinished work in my queue. My hunch is that it's not
| possible to truly relax unless someone else can temporarily
| step-in for the vacationer. Otherwise, on return, we're just
| greeted with an even-larger pile of work.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > but I don't know what I'd do
|
| How about "nothing."
| [deleted]
| g_sch wrote:
| Can anyone make heads or tails of the chart with the survey
| numbers? I'm having a hard time understanding how
| "Engaged/Disengaged" maps to the question they ask ("To what
| extent are you currently looking for a different job than the one
| you have now?"), why "Not Engaged" (which would presumably be a
| superset of the "Actively Disengaged" group) has lower numbers
| than "Actively Disengaged", and why no combinations seem to sum
| to anywhere near 100%. Extremely confusing all around!
| bartread wrote:
| > because the highest quit rate is among not engaged and actively
| disengaged workers.
|
| As opposed to what, exactly? What are you expecting to see?
| Highly engaged employees mass quitting? The situation described
| in this piece sounds fairly normal to me. People who aren't that
| fussed about their jobs, or actually dislike them, are always
| much more likely to quit.
|
| The real question is whether there has been an increase in the
| percentage of employees who are not engaged or actively
| disengaged. The article might answer that question but I'm afraid
| I'd disengaged before I got to that point.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| I would argue that "not engaged" isn't the worst thing in the
| world. The expectation that we devote our lives to work is one
| of the biggest things that dissolved during the pandemic. I am
| far less engaged at my job than I have been in years, which
| actually makes me better at it because I'm almost never
| stressed out anymore.
| ineptech wrote:
| "Engaged" and "disengaged" are terms of art in management
| which refer to whether someone is totally checked out or not.
| Someone who spends most of the day on Facebook is
| "disengaged", even if they're very competent and get more
| done in an hour than their teammates do in eight. Someone who
| basically takes their job seriously and puts in a reasonable
| effort is "engaged", even if they're a total idiot with net
| negative productivity.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| And they're apparently pretty approximate, if being
| 'disengaged' means that you're only 18% less productive
| than your 'engaged' coworkers. And then they provide the
| striking statistic that it will cost an employer up to 2X
| the annual salary of the 'disengaged' worker to replace
| them - that's equivalent to ten years of their not working
| hard, doesn't seem worth it, somehow.
| ineptech wrote:
| Totally agree, the numbers in this article strike me as
| ranging from "suspect" to "bullshit". I should've
| clarified that I was defining how I and (I think) other
| real managers use those terms.
|
| For example, my guess would be that the lost value from a
| disengaged employee is closer to 100% of their salary
| than 18%, because of how they drag the rest of the team
| down by generating bugs, derailing conversations, needing
| constant help to un-fuck their local env, etc.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have some highly engaged coworkers who are in the process of
| burning out. I think they're only still here because the entire
| company would crumble if they stopped.
|
| Coworkers have commented that if we lose these people we are
| fucked, and I just keep thinking: can't you see that they are
| already gone? You better make plans, because as soon as they go
| I'm splitting too.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Yeah, once the burnout reaches a certain point, they _will_
| disengage, and then their right in the middle of the pack of
| the leavers.
| bartread wrote:
| > I have some highly engaged coworkers who are in the process
| of burning out.
|
| This is a real problem. I'm consistently encouraging my team
| to take time off as and when they need it, and to make sure
| they're only working their contracted hours: everyone running
| themselves into the ground is the last thing we need.
|
| Also, if everyone's running on the red line the whole time
| you actually lose the ability to plan effectively because you
| have no idea what the world looks like when everyone is
| simply doing a "normal", healthy, sustainable workload.
| nopcode wrote:
| I resigned during the pandemic.
|
| The lockdown stripped my job to the essentials: No colleagues, no
| coffee corner, no nice fancy office, no treats (lunches, dinners,
| drinks), brainstorms, etc. I was left with something that was
| boring me to death. I felt perfectly happy in that job for 5
| years before covid.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes, exactly this. I realized the separation between work and
| home is very important to me. The little things, like lunches
| with colleagues, were something to look forward to.
| irrational wrote:
| It's interesting how different people are. All those things you
| list are reasons I would want to quit a job. I don't ever want
| to work in an office ever again.
| iammisc wrote:
| You must understand that this attitude is the minority. Most
| people like their workplace because they like the people
| there.
|
| My dad worked in pharma sales for 30 years. Do you think he
| cared to sell the drugs? I mean... in that the drugs were
| helping people, he was happy. But his reason for going to
| work everyday was talking to his colleagues. To this day, he
| and his old colleagues still visit each other, still party
| together, and vacation together.
|
| When I tell my parents that I do things like work on
| programming projects outside of work, they think I'm crazy.
| Being genuinely interested in the content of your work so
| much so that you'd do it outside of a job is unique to
| engineering professions, IME.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| Are you sure that this attitude is the minority?
|
| I can easily go have fun with people outside of work, so I
| have no incentive to put up with the annoying parts of
| office work just to get to interact with people.
| iammisc wrote:
| Well you have to work, so it's better to do it with
| people you like.
|
| Obviously, if you didn't have to work, you wouldn't work
| just to see office mates.
|
| But if you do have to work, slogging away in a common
| place with friends is more compelling than sitting behind
| a computer.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| >But if you do have to work, slogging away in a common
| place with friends is more compelling than sitting behind
| a computer.
|
| Not for me. When it comes to work, I would rather sit
| behind a computer at home and talk with my friends on
| another computer at the same time than sit behind a
| computer at an office and talk with my friends there in
| person.
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| "so it's better to do it with people you like."
|
| How does that equate to me being able to interview
| everyone at an office while I am being interviewed to be
| hired?
|
| What you are getting at is some mantra of just be happy
| with where you are at.
| quaffapint wrote:
| I used to be this way in my first job when I was surrounded
| by people in the same life stages (recently married started
| having kids/etc). I still hang out with those same people
| outside the office.
|
| Now that I'm an older person and surrounded by younger
| people who are doing their own thing I don't socialize much
| at the office outside the basic daily banter. I left to be
| able to go remote. Then I can just socialize outside the
| office which I enjoy more.
| irrational wrote:
| I don't believe you are right. Literally everyone I've
| talked to the past year and a half has said how much they
| enjoy working remotely and that they never want to go back
| to an office. Both of our experiences are anecdotal, but
| from my perspective, those wanting to go back to the office
| are in the tiny minority, so much so that you are the first
| one I've heard express that view.
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| "Most people like their workplace because they like the
| people there."
|
| Do you have anything to back that up?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Indeed. Besides the free food, those are the less desirable
| parts of work to me.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The free food didn't really excite me much. It was mostly
| junk food, or something dressed up as natural and healthy
| but turned out, when you looked at the label, to be junk.
| The coffee was good, though.
|
| Junk like https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-
| ultra-processed... and https://www.cookinglight.com/eating-
| smart/clean-eating/how-u...
| mgh2 wrote:
| I mean wow, I get that boredom can slowly kill a white-collar
| worker, but...think of the millions trying to cross the border
| just for a slim chance of a better future.
|
| To me this sounds like a typical American/tech worker
| entitlement problem. Do you even know how privileged you are by
| the simple fact that you are American?
|
| Most jobs are only eligible for Americans, while millions who
| are qualified are not allowed to work just because they were
| born in a different place.
|
| Billions struggling to even get food on the table...it is all
| perspective. A little bit of "hardship" just because you have
| to work from home? Come on...
| hinkley wrote:
| If nobody is allowed to be sad because someone else has it
| worse off, then nobody is allowed to be happy until everybody
| is happy.
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| Thinking about suffering in a comparative / absolute sense is
| often pointless and doesn't do anything to alleviate the
| suffering. Asking someone "Do you know how privileged you
| are" reeks of condescension and lacks empathy.
|
| What you're doing is not helpful. I'd be surprised if you
| were actually trying to make the OP feel better.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Everybody is looking for empathy. The intention of the
| comment was to create empathy for the less fortunate, and
| maybe change the OP's perspective to find a solution.
|
| It is not about feelings, but rather truth - which can hurt
| sometimes.
| evan_ wrote:
| My life isn't improved because others are suffering.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Sure, it is not. Maybe you are not using your talents
| properly.
|
| Consider a change in career to help others, maybe then you
| will find meaning and fulfillment...
| RobRivera wrote:
| Why do you exhibit such rage towards fellow humans
| seeking their definition of happiness?
|
| I know what its like to not know where my next meal is
| com8ng from, and I wouldnt be offended by anothers'
| journey for improvement.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Changing away from a career in tech could be a one-way
| operation. Future employers may read a five-year foray
| into an unrelated type of work as a negative, and make it
| harder to find a job similar to what you did before.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Tell that to the billionaires who complain about their
| problems.
| itronitron wrote:
| I don't know about GP's perspective, but from my own
| experience in a similar situation (pre-pandemic) the boredom
| is a massive source of stress because we are expected to be
| constantly improving our skills, knowledge, and 'productive
| output' in order to have valuable work experience to improve
| our likelihood of having future employment opportunities and
| access to healthcare.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Same. I quit at the end of April. I'm calling it a sabbatical
| and barring the unexpected I should be able to take a year. I
| was burnt out anyway. See the section titled "Leaving without a
| job" here https://lethain.com/deciding-to-switch/
| logosmonkey wrote:
| Pay me well, provide good benefits, allow a flexible work
| schedule where I can work when I want to and still get day to day
| life stuff done and hire enough people so I can consistently work
| only the 40 hours you are actually paying me for. My current job
| does that and I love it. When something critical comes up I'm
| happy to work over a weekend to hit a deadline because I know my
| manager will comp me back time when I need it.
|
| The thing that's always burned me out at work is letting people
| on my team go through attrition or layoffs and expecting the rest
| of us to pick up all the slack like it didn't take 3 other people
| to do it.
|
| It's frankly a pretty simple formula.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > When something critical comes up
|
| The problem: _everything_ looks 'critical' to folks with a
| greedy and selfish streak who rise high in management and have
| their pay tied to the quarterly stock price. That's how we
| ended up with 24/7 support and "five nines" availability. I'm
| old enough to remember that banks opened late and closed early,
| didn't operate on weekends or holidays, and if you didn't get
| your paycheck cashed by 4pm Friday you were out of luck until
| Monday at 10am. Grocery stores, malls, and tons of other places
| opened in the morning and closed at night, and most places
| didn't open on Sunday at all. Those that did opened later
| "after church".
| pattyj wrote:
| The greed and selfishness of my managers are significant
| factors in determining who I want to work for/with. And why
| I'm so grateful I can work with people I am friends with
| outside of work.
|
| But I understand this is difficult, even impossible, to know
| during the interview process.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > during the interview process
|
| I think assuming management is greedy and selfish until
| proven otherwise is a good way to approach interviewing.
| Negotiating compensation will give lots of clues. Ask for
| more money, or a different TC structure and see what
| happens. For comparison, ask for something that doesn't
| cost anything.
| valesco wrote:
| What if the interviewer is looking for a true teammate
| and is put off by your attitude, and thinks you are
| greedy and selfish, a mercenary? You lose that good job
| with a test that lumps together the best and the worst
| actors.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 'a true teammate and is put off by your attitude, and
| thinks you are greedy'
|
| True teammates are cool, but is he prepared to feed my
| family and adopt my children in case I get killed by a
| bus?
|
| What is the extent of mutual sacrafice 'true teammates'
| are gonna do for each other? Or is it a manipulative boss
| getting you to sacrafice family for the sake of the
| business? Or is is a naive idiot getting both of you to
| sacrafice for the business?
|
| Yoy responsibility is to family and yourself first. Jobs
| come and go.
| selestify wrote:
| Most of us are here at our jobs because we need to earn a
| living, and not because we just love scrum so much that
| we'd do it even if we had to do it for free.
|
| Of course you'd want to maximize your pay. Any coworker
| who drinks the Koolaid and doesn't understand that isn't
| a coworker I'd want to be with.
| pattyj wrote:
| Sure. I was thinking about large enough companies where
| you may not be negotiating directly with your day-to-day
| workmates.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's a really good thing for banks and grocery stores to be
| open more, though. There's a big difference between trying to
| squeeze more hours out of a salaried worker vs. hiring more
| people to cover more shifts.
|
| For support, it depends on whether you're hiring more people
| (good), offering optional on-call time for extra money or
| reduced hours (probably fine), or forcing people to be on-
| call on top of a normal work week (bad).
| cratermoon wrote:
| > It's a really good thing for banks and grocery stores to
| be open more, though
|
| Is it? Why? What has the average person gained from being
| able to shop and bank 24/7? Are you sure they aren't just
| being given more incentive to spend money and support
| greedy management and investors?
| [deleted]
| chousuke wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with 24/7 support and high
| availability; just pay people to do evening and night shifts
| and compensate anyone who gets called to help with an
| incident outside normal working hours.
|
| Night shifts can be pretty rough, but back when I still did
| shifts I sacrificed a couple nights around new year once and
| added a good chunk of money to my usual income that month
| over a few days due to getting holiday compensation (double
| pay) plus night shift compensation and that got doubled again
| for being an emergency substitute for another person who'd
| gotten sick.
|
| You only get problems when social manipulation is used to
| pressure workers into providing that level of support without
| appropriate compensation.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I think GP's point is precisely that once you normalize
| something that used to be a special case requiring extra
| compensation, it's hard to make the case that you need to
| get paid extra for your extra work, since it's, well, no
| longer extra?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It depends how the labor supply and demand curves are
| moving. The case for extra compensation is that you will
| stop working there if you do not get extra compensation.
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| People are still working the same retail jobs they did in
| the days before 24/7 expectations and, after taking into
| account inflation, making about the same amount of money.
| https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-
| fairy/
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >The problem: everything looks 'critical' to folks with a
| greedy and selfish streak who rise high in management and
| have their pay tied to the quarterly stock price. That's how
| we ended up with 24/7 support and "five nines" availability.
|
| I think it was because customers preferred to patronize banks
| and stores that were open longer hours, and so they won
| business by selling something customers wanted. Similarly, I
| thought customers liked 24/7 support and five nines
| availability (especially for internet and electricity).
|
| If labor prices go up, then maybe those perks will be scaled
| back because customers will not be able to afford them. I
| already see fast food restaurants around me no longer open
| before 11AM and after 7PM.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > customers preferred to patronize banks and stores that
| were open longer hours
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-tyranny-of-
| ch...
| itronitron wrote:
| I recommend the following rules to organizations that are hoping
| to maintain or maximize employee engagement. I may have missed a
| few.
|
| 1. Do not lie to new hires during the hiring process. I know this
| is a hard one because you want to sell the company, but it is
| important to set expectations appropriately. Unmet expectations
| (created by the company) will ultimately be paid by the company
| in full.
|
| 2. Do not antagonize new hires during the sign on and orientation
| process. Choose the employees that manage or take part in the
| sign on/orientation process very carefully.
|
| 3. Do not move employees down the organizational hierarchy as a
| consequence of a re-organization. This is so common that I think
| most managers don't even register that it's happening. Breaking
| this rule is more likely to diminish the engagement and foster
| the exodus of long-term employees. While that may be the entire
| point of the reorg currently disengaged employees have less
| engagement to diminish so the reorg is more likely to have a
| negative impact on highly engaged employees.
|
| 4. Don't measure employee engagement by how often the employee
| comes and talks to _you_. If you 're making decisions based on
| what you are hearing from the employees that are always at your
| door, then may God help you (especially if those employees are
| above you in the management chain, because in that case you are
| not actually making any decisions).
|
| 5. Equally enforce the professional standards of conduct set by
| the organization. Every company has fuck-ups. Stories of how the
| company deals with those fuck-ups will be passed down to future
| generations. In some cases those stories will literally define
| the company. An organization that is not equally enforcing
| professional standards of conduct is not meeting employee
| expectations.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I'd argue that companies need to start with the hiring process
| itself. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210727-the-rise-
| of-ne...
|
| Companies are focused on getting the perfect person for the job
| who can come up to speed and be productive nearly immediately
| because they put no money or effort into actually developing
| employees (see: loyalty), Because employers are stuck on the
| treadmill of needing a person _now_ to fill a need _just in
| time_ , they are so averse to "false positives", hiring someone
| who doesn't work out, they have put in a gantlet to try to
| prevent that.
|
| Also, to your point 4, it's not just that, it's the whole
| culture of "looking busy" instead of being productive. See for
| example: https://gameworldobserver.com/2021/08/04/xsolla-
| fires-150-em...
| mumblemumble wrote:
| 46% -> 48%
|
| That's not exactly a huge surge. Perhaps we're not seeing a big
| shift in worker attitudes, so much as we're seeing a big shift in
| what people are talking about right now.
| itronitron wrote:
| Presumably they are only surveying people that are _still
| employed_ so maybe that is the threshold at which people opt
| out.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| When you are dealing with over a 100 million people (as a very
| conservative estimate of the US working population), that's a
| meaningful shift.
| bawana wrote:
| This is just fake news. Corporate America has gotten rid of
| employees in favor of gig workers. Gig workers by definition are
| not engaged/vested in their job. Dont try and 'blame' this on the
| employees (you cant find good help anymore) since they really
| have not had an improvement in their lot since the 1970s. In the
| good old days, the disenfranchised would have joined a
| 'revolution'. Unfortunately, for all our free speech,
| disinformation is paralyzing everyone in their own information
| bubbles.
| rektide wrote:
| i find myself quite sympathetic to this perspective.
|
| to revitalize, some serious change is needed, that opens a wide
| number of people a sense of agency & possibility & opportunity.
| with the titanization of industry, there's less & less compelling
| ways to employ oneself, & re-enabling upstarts & small scale
| competitors (who are not simply bought out & plucked up as soon
| as they show promise).
|
| it is the difference between vitality & perpetual decay (an
| upward, out-of-reaching, effervscing decay), as i see it.
| iammisc wrote:
| Why are you being downvoted? You're absolutely right. There's
| fewer and fewer ways to be self-employed these days. Even
| traditional avenues of wealth creation (real estate rentals,
| for example) have been closed to everyone except those with the
| most capital. Whereas you used to commonly see apartments
| rented by some older widow who had acquired a few properties or
| inherited them. Today, more and more seem to be owned by large
| landlord corporations. Public economic policy (lack of anti-
| trust enforcement) is not helping.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| The days when a house might cost one year or at most two
| years income are long gone.
|
| Back then a common scenario was buy a house, fix it up a bit,
| save, use first house's equity and the savings as down
| payments on a second house. Next thing you know (if nothing
| goes wrong) you own a bunch of houses and have a semi-passive
| income stream to live on.
|
| There are very few places in the USA where that is even
| remotely possible any more.
|
| And real estate has been the most common path to wealth for a
| century or more.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| ADDITION: Of course the houses were rented out for the
| income.
| iammisc wrote:
| Median home value in FL is $226.6k
|
| Median income in FL is 58k. That's 3-4 years of income. Not
| much different.
|
| the only places where housing prices have gone nuts are the
| coastal cities, which 'everyone'[1] wants to live in for
| cultural reasons.
|
| [1] everyone is in quotes because it's abundantly clear
| that there are two classes of people in the us, those that
| matter to the elite and those that don't, and only those
| that matter want to live in the coast cities.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| HN is very much against the whole anti-work movement and
| still likes to push a bootstraps narrative as a collective.
| It makes sense when you think of what Y Combinator is and the
| kinds of people it attracts.
| iammisc wrote:
| But the comment I replied to was not 'anti-work'... far
| from it
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What are you suggesting as an alternative? Less economic
| opportunity?
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Just that there is a future where those who don't want to
| work a menial job aren't forced to do so in order to
| survive. Which may mean accepting a lower level of
| productivity. But a lot of people get bored without work,
| and extra money to buy nice things will always motivate
| people, so there will still be a large labor pool and
| automation can take care of the rest.
| iammisc wrote:
| This technocratic vision of the future does not square
| away with human nature and reality.
|
| Much more likely is a Butlerian Jihad to destroy
| automation and return us to a more pastoral way of life,
| even with advanced technology.
|
| Only socially awkward engineers, business majors (most of
| whom are incredibly anti-social contrary to common
| perception), and finance types actually believe in this
| vision. Normal people are horrified, or will be once they
| actually experience what this entails.
|
| Humans are not meant to lack meaningful work.
| jnwatson wrote:
| > Humans are not meant to lack meaningful work.
|
| Citation needed.
| iammisc wrote:
| The opposite claim 'humans are okay lackin meaningful
| work' also needs a citation, as its easily demonstrably
| false in history.
|
| Contrary to popular belief our civilization is not the
| only one that has come close to being able to provide
| basically all its needs. Many other civilizations have
| and eventually the class whose needs are provided for
| disintegrates due to their own decay. We will make claims
| that the 'barbarians' sacked rome, and while this is
| technically true, they are not the reason for the decline
| of the Roman Empire. The truth is, by the time the
| barbarians attacked, rome was a shell of its former self.
| In times past, the Roman army would have put an end to
| the barbarians. But the societal decay from the elites of
| the empire meant the systems that preserved them there
| slowly fell into disrepair.
|
| Broadly speaking we are witnessing the same thing now
| except at a grander scale because now even for the lower
| classes it's not obvious they need to work.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Is it meaningful work if it can be easily automated by
| contemporary technology but we choose not to?
|
| And I agree that we do need meaningful work on a human
| level; it's why I don't say "nobody should work". But
| meaningful work might only mean two hours a day. If
| that's all you want to do, you're prolly not gonna be
| able to afford a new iPhone any time soon but you
| shouldn't go hungry, homeless or untreated.
| nanidin wrote:
| > Why are you being downvoted?
|
| Lack of proper capitalization.
| bwb wrote:
| Question, how much of this is American culture of working people
| 50+ hours with no life balance? I wonder if everyone had 4 weeks
| paid vacation and strict 40 hour weeks how much of this would be
| occurring.
|
| That doesn't fix bad bosses or bad culture in an organization.
| But at least it means you are not in that environment 24/7.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| I can't imagine why people might be discontent...
|
| All that's really being asked of us is to give up all our
| productive years in service to people with no ethics, to make
| them richer. People who are more than happy to use you up and
| toss your corpse on the pile when you die. Is that really too
| much?
|
| How dare you think you deserve something for your toils. Your
| masters have worked you incredibly hard -- harder than you
| thought possible! Why should you get the credit when their wrist
| is sore from cracking the whip? You didn't even think yourself
| _capable_ , and look what you can do with proper motivation!
|
| Now return to work, or you might find yourself without healthcare
| in a pandemic.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Honestly, this sentiment is valid for most of the working
| class. But in our industry, it's not the majority of cases. I
| feel well compensated and not overworked.
|
| Now, is my work fulfilling? No.
| shadowwolf007 wrote:
| On the flip side, the only time I've ever felt like my work
| was fulfilling and valuable was when was under-compensated
| and insanely overworked (like 80 hours was a pretty
| reasonable work week).
| pornel wrote:
| It can be both true that you're earning many times more than
| an average worker, and still severely underpaid compared to
| the value you've created for your employer.
|
| The wealth inequality in the world is just staggering. You
| may be well off to the point money is not an problem for you,
| and still be piss-poor compared to your company's CEO and
| shareholders.
| kuraudo wrote:
| How can we determine what the percentage is? I'm also in your
| boat in feeling well compensated and not overworked, but I
| anecdotally feel like I'm very fortunate in this regard
| despite what I thought was the norm.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > But in our industry, it's not the majority of cases. I feel
| well compensated and not overworked.
|
| If you are inclined to compare your compensation to
| compensation of workers in other industries, take a minute
| and compare the compensation of your c-suite with those in
| other industries as well. You will notice that you are
| underpaid and massive amount of gains are flowing to your
| execs.
| bradly wrote:
| I left work this year and while not overworked, I do feel
| like employers could increase my time off by 50% while
| reducing my time-in-seat by 20% but choose not to. I probably
| would have kept working with more time off, but 3-4 weeks off
| a year, just wasn't enough for the life my family and I
| wanted wanted to have.
|
| Compensation was the hardest thing to leave, but when looking
| at the life I wanted to live I realized I had what I needed
| to to full-fill that life now. Mentally it is very hard,
| though. I had a great engineering job at Apple and after over
| 4 years I had a sizable chunk of RSU's to walk away from.
| What helped me with the RSU's was realizing that eventually I
| would leave-whether now or in 20 years-so walking away from
| RSU's is non-avoidable so I tried to frame it as a sunk cost.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I feel lucky as I now I have 5 paid weeks off a year, which
| is very generous by North American standards.
|
| It's true time is more valuable than money. However at this
| point I am very sick of being at home.
|
| Re: the RSUs that is a good point. I've been at Google for
| coming up on 10 years, and one thing that keeps me here is
| the RSU "handcuffs", for sure.
| mgh2 wrote:
| This is a consequence on a shift in society's values and
| culture: https://m-g-h.medium.com/why-we-are-
| dispensable-7a577eba4f3e
| norov wrote:
| That article cannot be read unless you install their app or
| create an account.
|
| A shift in society's values indeed.
| newfriend wrote:
| Sorry, but what's the alternative exactly? Force people who do
| actually work, produce, create, etc to pay for people who think
| working is beneath them? Should you be given free shit simply
| because you exist?
|
| If you don't want to work for someone else, then start a
| business. If you don't want to work at all, then figure out how
| you're going to live. No one is forcing you to do anything.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| > Sorry, but what's the alternative exactly?
|
| How about not exploiting people?
|
| > Should you be given free shit simply because you exist?
|
| Seems to work for the _very wealthy_ , _celebrities_ , and so
| on. Why, precisely, isn't this acceptable for everyone?
|
| I'm not against people working. I'm against the wealthy
| callously exploiting people for grins while they, I dunno,
| race into space?
| newfriend wrote:
| Care to explain how I'm paying for the "very wealthy,
| celebrities, and so on"?
|
| Who says they're being callously exploited? Because some
| company's founder now has hundreds of billions, that
| entitles random warehouse workers to share profits?
| VelkaMorava wrote:
| > Care to explain how I'm paying for the "very wealthy,
| celebrities, and so on"?
|
| Sure.
|
| 1) Look at financial crisis of 2008 and the banks bail
| out. I have always been taught there is no such thing as
| a free lunch in economics. Well, apparently you can
| overleverage yourself, profit insanely on it and when it
| finally goes tits up, you cry a bit and yell "too big to
| fail". I have always been taught that risk is the basic
| principle of capitalism. If your idea or product is bad,
| no one gives you money for it, you run out of money and
| go bankrupt. Obviously not if you are a bank or military
| contractor (looking at you, Boeing).
|
| 2) One of the biggest company in my country, owned by our
| current prime minister Andrej Babis... oh sorry, it is
| owned by 2 trust funds which are indirectly owned by
| Babis. Anyway, that company is currently asking for 123
| million CZK in subsidies. This is a company with a
| turnover of 161 billion and 3,8 billion CZK profit. Why
| are they asking for subsidies? Can't they use ~3,24% of
| their last year's profit?
|
| 3) Continuation of previous point, except in US terms.
| You can strong arm government into giving you subsidies,
| otherwise you are gonna leave the city / state / country
| and it's gonna lose jobs. See here for examples:
| https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/top-100-parents
|
| One of the biggest recipients is Tesla. On this note I
| find it absurd that tax money collected from normal
| people is paying for a billionaire's wet dream. Notice
| how I said normal people. Because the rich have ways to
| steal... damn, sorry - evade... dang, I did it again.
| Avoid taxes is what I meant.
| https://itep.org/55-profitable-corporations-zero-
| corporate-t...
|
| 4) Look at coronavirus V-shaped recovery. It was apparent
| airlines are gonna be in a bit of a trouble, becaues of
| the... oh yeah, the global pandemic which put lockdowns
| in place. Anyway, airlines bought back stock and then
| asked for bailouts. Which they of course got. https://www
| .dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2020/03/18/amer...
|
| I have stopped caring for explaining how you are paying
| for the very wealthy. If these examples above didn't sway
| you, nothing will.
| zoolily wrote:
| The warehouse workers worked for it, just like the
| founder. The distribution of profits between the two
| isn't a natural law. It's the outcome of a particular
| regulatory environment that the very wealthy have created
| over the last half century.
|
| As for how you're paying for the wealthy, there are many
| ways. You're paying for the US government to negotiate
| with other countries to change their local laws either
| directly or via treaties to create a similar regulatory
| environment globally. You're also paying for
| externalities, like what happens with a fly ash lake or
| manure lagoon overflows, or the consequences of air
| pollution.
| jollybean wrote:
| "How about not exploiting people?"
|
| ? If there is exploitation at large, it's the people
| reading this that are doing the exploitation by leveraging
| against workers paid 'barely survival wages' in developing
| countries will crying about 'not being engaged at work'
| while earning 10x the global income average doing work that
| is actually intellectual, whilst the global average worker
| toils at something generally menial and more classically
| work.
|
| The modern world is an utter utopia relative to the life of
| almost any person living at any point in history, if you're
| reading this, you're living at a higher standard of living
| that most Kings and Emperors. Probably higher than even the
| richest people in the world just two generations ago.
|
| Our civilization and high standard of living requires
| 'work', which fall upon us to do, and whether it is
| 'engaging' or not is mostly besides the point.
|
| Most companies are made up of regular people doing regular
| work even at the upper layers, most companies are small or
| mid-sized and execs. are definitely not rolling in cash,
| there's actually a very thin slice of people earning truly
| outsized incomes.
|
| It's ok to vent and be frustrated ... but it's also little
| bit disturbing to read some of the commentary here.
| kuraudo wrote:
| I think the animus is against overworking people for low pay
| with virtual monopoly protection against labor unions or
| alternatives, although I'm sure there are those who also
| advocate for universal basic income. I'm not sure that I
| believe cut-throat capitalism is the only answer, but I feel
| your sentiment that the alternative solutions are not well
| presented at the moment.
| jshen wrote:
| Most of Europe is a good example of alternatives.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| > Should you be given free shit simply because you exist?
|
| Yes?
|
| > Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of
| person.
|
| > No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman
| or degrading treatment or punishment.
|
| > Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social
| security and is entitled to realization, through national
| effort and international co-operation and in accordance with
| the organization and resources of each State, of the
| economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his
| dignity and the free development of his personality.
|
| > Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of
| employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to
| protection against unemployment.
|
| > Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including
| reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays
| with pay.
|
| > etc.
|
| > https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-
| huma...
| newfriend wrote:
| None of these things indicate that I should be forced to
| pay for someone who doesn't want to work.
| [deleted]
| decebalus1 wrote:
| I would gladly pay taxes to cover someone who isn't able
| to work for one reason or another. Because you never know
| what life gives you. In an unfortunate turn of events,
| that person can be me or you. I would NOT pay taxes to
| subsidize Bezos's business so that he can have his space
| cowboy adventures. That's just the latest and most
| popular. But the same applies for the 2008 bailouts,
| Covid stimulus bailouts, corporate tax cuts, corporate
| tax incentives, corporations paying peanuts forcing
| people to strain the (already thin) social safety net
| (see how many fully employed folks are on food stamps)
| etc.. The latter is perpetual, business as usual and
| except for some people complaining (the 'radical left')
| it's regarded as 'the right thing to do'. The former has
| been beaten out of the American consciousness by decades
| of rightwing propaganda.
| agent327 wrote:
| >> Should you be given free shit simply because you exist?
|
| >Yes?
|
| Surely you understand the logistical problem this brings:
| if you get given free shit, there must also be a party who
| is giving free shit. Let's say you live on an island with
| just one other person. You are both entitled to free shit,
| but somebody has to put in the work to get the shit. Should
| the other person work to get his own shit and your shit, or
| should you work to get your shit and also his shit?
|
| Where is the shit going to come from, in a way that doesn't
| require slavery for others?
| myWindoonn wrote:
| Sure. Let's ask for something easier, then; let's only
| have free stuff which is already in abundance. We aren't
| living on a remote island; we are living in a society
| which already has lots of extra stuff which could be
| given away for free.
|
| For example, how can an all-you-can-eat restaurant stay
| in business if they let everybody eat as much as they
| (rationally-economically) want to eat, and labor has to
| be paid? If food is abundant, then the cost of each
| individual patron's meal is negligible and it becomes a
| question of whether enough people come through the door
| to pay for labor.
| agent327 wrote:
| On my hypothetical island, pretty much the only thing in
| abundance is sand. Everything else you have to work for.
| Who is going to do that work?
|
| Your problem is that you don't see that all that
| "abundance" of food was grown by people, transported by
| people, prepared by people, and served by people, and
| none of them are your slaves. If they had the chance to
| get their own free shit without having to do all that
| labour, they totally would. But then who would remain to
| do the work?
|
| The all you can eat restaurant stays in business by
| charging enough for meals that they can be reasonably
| sure that you'll won't eat more than the food is worth.
| However, that doesn't reduce the value of the food to
| zero.
|
| Let's try another thought experiment. In my experience,
| all you "shit should be free" types assume all value
| flows from the state. That's wrong; it flows from
| individuals that are taxed by the state. Why don't you,
| as an individual, open an all you can eat restaurant
| where people can eat for free? Why not be the change you
| want to see?
| claudiulodro wrote:
| I believe the "through national effort and international
| co-operation and in accordance with the organization and
| resources of each State" line covers that situation.
| [deleted]
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| I think you misread the whole thing you posted. It
| literally talks about the right to work and the right to
| leisure with respect to reasonable working hours. I don't
| see any right to just sit on your ass and consume things.
| mgh2 wrote:
| *Only if you are American. Good luck if you are not.
| oo0shiny wrote:
| 1. Separate health care from employment. 2. Four day work
| weeks for the same pay. 3. Tax wealthy corporations fairly to
| provide more social services for those who can't work.
|
| Would be a good start.
| setr wrote:
| >All that's really being asked of us is to give up all our
| productive years in service to people with no ethics, to make
| them richer. People who are more than happy to use you up and
| toss your corpse on the pile when you die. Is that really too
| much?
|
| It's been that way for thousands of years -- what's new now?
| ornornor wrote:
| People have been suffering and dying in terrible ways since
| the dawn of time. And yet we're trying to improve on this to
| reduce suffering and death. What's your point?
| setr wrote:
| because events are transpiring now, supposedly based on
| this, yet the described boat is the same from 50 years ago,
| 20 years ago, and even 2 years ago.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| Echo chambers used to be the local pub. Now it's an entire
| subreddit.
|
| Thousands of years ago, the upper class could kill you if you
| disobeyed. The stakes aren't as high nowadays. Yay for
| separating courts from employers.
|
| An insane amount of capital looking for ROI probably also
| helps put people in a spot where they can afford to take a
| chance.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Don't even get me started on these recent, "safety" demands
| either. Now that some number of peasants have died of this
| plague, many of them don't want to work under the conditions
| that make them vulnerable to it. The utter villains!
| bississippi wrote:
| But but there is free sandwiches and a ping pong table so you
| can come to our company and "change the world" and "build back
| better"
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > To engage workers, managers must fulfill the 12 essential
| elements of engagement
|
| Hm. There are few jobs that can become life goals, most are
| boring. And with a years long pandemic and uncertain future, to
| work or not to work? Work for what purpose? No level of engaging
| is enough if people can see through the ruse. If anything i d
| expect more people to go solo
| netr0ute wrote:
| > There are few jobs that can become life goals, most are
| boring.
|
| That's because the big tech megacorps raised the bar in order
| to attract the best workers available so they could grow to
| have the "eliteness" that you see today. The problem is, there
| are only so many Apples or Netflixes with this kind of strategy
| so everything else looks boring in comparison.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I wouldn't expect a job at Netflix or Apple to be much more
| exciting than most other jobs. I thought they were attractive
| workplaces because of pay, perks, and because it looks good
| on your CV.
| netr0ute wrote:
| > because of pay, perks, and because it looks good on your
| CV.
|
| That's what makes them exciting.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| The pay and the perks can definitely make it more
| pleasant, but the thing that stands out is all those
| companies are operating at global scale. Working there,
| you will likely be routinely confronted with the awe-
| inducing scale and impact your work has on the daily life
| of almost everybody. In my case, for the people I already
| knew and cared for, I felt a sense of stewardship, and
| for new acquaintances, because they had already
| interacted with my work, they already provided me with a
| baseline of appreciation / professional credibility.
| cratermoon wrote:
| That quote sounds so formulaic I can almost hear the cash
| registers ringing up the fees for the consultants hired to
| implement them. Surely this new corporate initiative, which we
| sent senior management to workshop about at a golf resort in
| Hawaii (the same week the team was doing 18-hour days to ship
| the product for the customer deadline), will bring happiness
| and good things to our essential human resources.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I feel like if you sacrifice enough in wages you can always
| have a fascinating job. And moving to a developing country can
| leave you with a roughly equivalent salary after adjusting for
| purchasing powe parity. I don't have hard data but that's what
| I've been doing for the last four years.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Interesting. So you do freelance/consulting work and are
| really picky about the projects you take on, or what?
| dkn775 wrote:
| Work for gov particularly police or some kind of job where
| you have to deal w social stuff. City gov is the best for
| this as you get a lot of flexibility
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| No, I'm CTO at a small NGO in Bogota that models the
| effects of government policy. Which I got because a friend
| started the NGO. So I guess I'm not evidence that such
| opportunities are rife.
|
| But they do seem to be. Native English speakers are quite
| valuable in their own right here. And there's a strong big-
| fish-small-pond effect if you're an expert in something.
| Research tends to be written in English, as does
| documentation.
| bscvbscv wrote:
| > few jobs that can become life goals, most are boring.
|
| Humans have been doing "boring" work their whole lives for
| millions of years, it has never been a problem.
|
| The problem is that people are working for organizations that
| are DOING HARM to them and their people. Not only is their work
| not productive, it is destructive. Not only is their work
| meaningless, but it endeavors to undermine meaning itself.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| yeah thats what i mean, people will do boring work if they
| feel the other rewards of life make it worthwhile. right now
| in an uncertain lonely period one questions whether the juice
| is worth the squeeze
| Jetrel wrote:
| Yeah. This right here.
|
| The problem with corporate america isn't that the work is
| boring; it's that for most jobs it's actually evil at some
| point in the pipeline. (To use a metaphor - you're still
| morally culpable if you're carrying boxes of bullets to the
| soldiers doing the actual killing). Almost no matter what
| industry you're in, whether it's shoes, or batteries, or
| electronics, you know that somewhere on the other side of the
| world, _actual slavery_ is providing materials and labor for
| what you 're selling, and you really wonder why we can't all
| mutually agree to make that illegal.
|
| There are very few professions (often stuff like medicine,
| teaching, etc) where someone can sit back and think "yeah, my
| day job is a net positive for humanity".
|
| It's hard enough to cope with when something is a decent
| "material good" on its own - like if you're selling shoes
| (virtually all of which get made in sweatshops), at least you
| have the pride in the fact that shoes are a necessity. It
| sucks that slavery was involved in making them, but at least
| you know people are getting genuinely good clothing out of
| it.
|
| But when you don't have that - when you are, say, working in
| market analysis or advertising, and you realize your job
| isn't actually making anything or filling any material need -
| or even just bringing people joy, yeah, it's a bit worse than
| being meaningless. You're flushing the best years of your
| life down the toilet to make a little more money for some
| private equity firm. Great.
| kazen44 wrote:
| This disconnect between one's labour and the value it
| produces has been known for a very long time (Entfremdung).
| marx, hegel, Feuerbach all talked about it.
|
| I think the main issue with modern corporate america is
| that too few people see the direct impact of their job.
| especially in pure office jobs without any technical
| inclination.
|
| Doing boring work isn't bad per se, but it should lead to
| something that improves thanks to your labour.
| handrous wrote:
| I'd say boring isn't the same thing as (perceived)
| meaninglessness. I kinda _like_ lots of work that 's
| considered boring, personally--but pointless, wasteful,
| meaningless, or unappreciated? Let alone harmful? I won't
| become disengaged, because I'll never be engaged to begin
| with.
| [deleted]
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Pretty obviously can't have a real great resignation without
| significant wage increases, which would most likely increase
| inflation (or more accurately, be symptomatic of latent inflation
| that hadn't yet reached prices).
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Which is exactly what's happening. Our starting offers are up
| 15% over pre-pandemic and we're still having trouble closing
| the candidates we want.
| cratermoon wrote:
| What does your interview process look like, if you don't mind
| my asking.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > significant wage increases, which would most likely increase
| inflation
|
| Or it could decrease corporate profits, as more goes to their
| workers and less to their managers and shareholders.
|
| Hasn't it been at an historical extreme the other way? If so,
| the adjustment should be expected and shouldn't be
| inflationary.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Increasing wages across the board should lead to increased
| inflation either way unless people start saving at higher
| rates.
|
| Edit: my reasoning is that increased wages leads to increased
| spending, which increases prices unless goods/services can be
| supplied cheaper, which is unlikely since productivity growth
| is low.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Given M amount of money, if that money goes to shareholders
| or the company coffers or managers or workers, it can be
| spent or saved. Why is it more likely to be spent by
| workers?
|
| I gotta say, the notion that it's somehow a negative that
| workers get a larger share is a bit convenient for the
| shareholders, managers, and companies.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| The "engagement level" actually agrees with Price's Law:
|
| "The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of
| the work."
|
| Since SMEs have been declining since 2000 onward, Price's Law
| would say that as larger corporations take more of GDP,
| engagement rates will plummet compared to 2000 when the majority
| of GDP came from SMEs.
|
| I vaguely remember the cross-over happening in the mid-2000s.
| Everybody shrugged. But it was a major change.
| ineptech wrote:
| Isn't a lot of this probably just normal resignations that are
| not caused by covid so much as delayed by it? If X% of workers
| resign in a normal month for one reason or another, and we have a
| year where people can't do that or don't feel comfortable doing
| it, it would be expected to see a big spike once that year ends,
| right? Wouldn't the economical explanation be, "This system has
| been perturbed and has not found a new normal yet, so it's too
| early to extrapolate"?
|
| I guess that proving that would require lots more polling and
| statistical rigor and would produce no viral headlines, but it
| seems like a more economical explanation.
| onelastjob wrote:
| My opinion is that we need to move to four day work weeks and
| each day should have six working hours. Knowledge workers are
| wasting their lives at work when they could get the same amount
| done in fewer hours.
| standardUser wrote:
| We (a smaller company) have had half day Fridays since early in
| the pandemic. This is great, but I wish I could convince the
| powers that be that those 4 hours on Friday are the least
| productive hours of the week, and that giving an entire day off
| would be _vastly_ more beneficial than the half days. I 'm on
| the verge of looking for a new job, but if we had every Friday
| off I would plan on sticking around a long, long time!
| superfrank wrote:
| > Knowledge workers are wasting their lives at work when they
| could get the same amount done in fewer hours.
|
| I'm curious what job you have. I'm a SWE who is in the process
| of moving into a manager role. As an IC, I am 100% certain that
| I could get the same amount of work done in a 24 hour work
| week. In fact, I was probably working less than that already
| and still meeting my deadlines and getting great reviews. As a
| manager for the same team, at the same company, I am now
| working a full 40 and there's no way I could cut 40% of my
| hours without a massive drop in output.
|
| I'm not against a 4 day work week (in fact, my manager is
| talking about trying it out in Q4 for our department), but not
| everyone is an IC knowledge worker. There are plenty of roles
| where time does directly correlate with productivity, which is
| why this discussion is so complicated.
| boston_clone wrote:
| Based off my interactions with my current management and my
| previous role where I straddled the line of IC and manager,
| the biggest identifiable time suck has always been meetings.
| Too long, too many, not well-enough defined agendas (or no
| agenda at all!), no action items, etc. Does that sound
| accurate? I'm curious as to where else the time could go.
|
| I also do believe that this is somewhat intentional; to keep
| people too busy to think freely and effectively, so that a
| status quo is maintained.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| I think this is a trigger for looking at the work you're
| doing, if it's actually necessary, or just busy work created
| by bureaucracy. If it is needed, should it be spread out
| among more people.
| superfrank wrote:
| > If it is needed, should it be spread out among more
| people.
|
| I agree, but that's kind of my point. There are plenty of
| people doing 40 hours worth of needed work right now. If we
| switch to a shorter work week, that work will need to be
| distributed to more people.
|
| It's not an impossible problem to solve, but OPs comment
| seems to imply that there are no trade offs to be made if
| we switched to a 24 hour work week and I'm just trying to
| point out that that isn't the case.
| zeku wrote:
| Could you give me some productivity tips? I would love to
| become better at managing my time. I seem to always be able
| to fill my 40 hours and still feel like I didn't accomplish
| enough.
|
| I'm a SWE working on a small team.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > I am now working a full 40 and there's no way I could cut
| 40% of my hours without a massive drop in output.
|
| I expect the following has at least in part occurred:
|
| 1. Your participation in "meetings" has increased
| significantly. Management tends to conveniently forget that
| interruptions have follow-on disruptions on focus. This is
| compounded by the Doorway Effect [0].
|
| 2. You don't trust your direct reports to handle the level of
| autonomy you had as an IC. You're being pushed by _your_
| management to provide status updates so you have to scurry
| around poking ICs.
|
| 3. You're still expected to have at least a portion of your
| IC output in addition to your management duties.
|
| 4. You've discovered the productivity of your team is a bell
| curve. Some can get work done quickly while others are much
| slower. This may be related to their skill/experience or
| their particular tasks.
|
| 5. You're pressured by management to split up work to deliver
| a baby in a month. This causes you to take on even more IC
| work to try to accede to such stupid expectations.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorway_Effect
| rcurry wrote:
| Learning to manage is a lot like learning how to write a
| novel - at first you think you need all those words but then
| you can learn to cut fifty percent of what you wrote and
| still get the same point across. It's kind of the same deal
| with the hours spent at work - identify and eliminate time
| sinks and suddenly you're doing the same work in half the
| time.
| kylebyproxy wrote:
| I'd love to see companies warm up to nontraditional employment
| arrangements. I've always wanted to be able to split my time
| between different jobs; e.g., half the year in an office
| environment, then half the year doing something outdoors. I
| feel like breaking up the monotony would help keep things fresh
| all around and generally improve my wellbeing.
| mikebowman wrote:
| This kind of thinking is what's always intrigued me about
| freelancing/consulting. If I get bored of coding, I can take
| 6 months off and work an outdoor summer job, or reduce my
| coding hours to 20 hours/week and get a part time job at a
| coffee shop or something like that.
| kuraudo wrote:
| I don't think it's an issue of getting the same amount done in
| fewer hours, I think that those hours are likely the actual
| productive hours anyway so we might as well adopt that schedule
| as you advocate.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| yes! For about 2 decades, I worked for normal companies with
| normal 40 hour weeks, but, I negotiated a 20% salary decrease,
| and I didn't work Mondays (so, 32 hour work weeks).
|
| This worked out really well for me. I was satisfied with my
| work accomplishments, I had plenty of extra time to write books
| and spend more time with family and friends. I don't miss that
| 20% loss of income.
| kuraudo wrote:
| > One Gallup client that focused on propelling organic growth
| through effective workplace culture found that engagement reduces
| turnover in critical high-turnover roles by 36 percentage points
| and reduces the 100-day attrition rate by nine points.
|
| I think fair pay and better working hours have a lot more to do
| with employee retention than so-called engagement. I manage a
| team that is well compensated and has excellent work life; we
| work on some really boring stuff, but this team hasn't lost a
| single employee to more interesting work over the years.
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