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.
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
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.
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.
> Popularity is not linked at all with personality traits that make someone a good leader afaik.
On the contrary! Good personality traits evolved because they make for good leaders.
…which makes me depressed about being on the spectrum because it means I had to accept I could never be a “leader”.
(Well, I am a technical lead, it’s in my job-description, but that’s only because I get -Wpedantic on peoples’ code - and not because I can inspire people)
Do you have a source for this. I wouldn't say from for example actors and musicians(ultimate popularity contests) that most of them would even be remotely good leaders.
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.
I'm not entirely sure what you are expecting me to say. I didn't say every adult will be a bully. But not every teenager in high school is a bully either. The existence of "well adjusted adult" doesn't have anything to do with this. You can have "well adjusted adults" and still have rampant bullying. The point I'm making is that a traditional hierarchy tries to put the "wall adjusted adults" with good leadership skills in leadership positions. In contrast to a flat hierarchy where it's essentially just a popularity contest.
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.
There's another aspect here, too. Companies get tax breaks to put offices in certain locations, and those tax breaks are frequently based on having a certain percentage occupancy.
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.
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.
I took the GPTW survey a while back at a former workplace.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's come to the point where if a company mentions that they participate in those surveys during the hiring process, that's a yellow flag.
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!
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.
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.
Reminds me about a cohort of colleagues at a place I worked that would have some fun conspiring similarly to this. Seemed HR and the company wanted everyone to fall in line. We called ourselves "the loose ends".
I work for an employer where anything is on the table for dealing with the deservedly poor reputation including buying "Best Workplace" awards. So... most of these surveys are actually probably counter-indicators.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
And? Evidently, there was a huge increase in labor supply relative to demand for that type of labor in the decades since the 1970s. Hence the workers could not negotiate higher wages.
If the workers had better options, they would have chosen to go elsewhere.
Around me, I now see restaurants and stores closing earlier, which must mean they are no longer able to find labor willing to work at the low wages they were expecting them to.
>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.
That article is about choosing between 10 different comparable items. It is not about giving money to a store that happens to be open when you want to give it money, versus a store that is closed.
I think lots of people needed to bank when they weren't working so banking hours needed to get extended. The banks that filled that need saw increases in customers and most other banks had to do the same or lose customers.
Or.... maybe people shouldn't have to work jobs where they can't even get away to go to the bank to do business. Oh, but wait, companies can't let anyone go run errands, who is going to keep the 24/7 machine going?
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
It's true this is a problem. It's actually a problem I ran into at another job and one of the reasons I left that job. It goes hand in hand with letting a bunch of a team attrit and then ignoring that fact. I find it often happens when a direct manager doesn't know how to handle their manager or their managers manager. I have also found that in most cases the person requesting the 'critical' item never actually wanted it immediately but after it filtered down from two managers who are desperately trying to look good it became a 'critical' item.
It's definitely a problem and while there are some ways to just work around your boss it's often just easier to find another job.
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).
> 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?
Well, the average person does gain something from being able to shop and bank at all.
If you are required to be in the office from 9 am - 5 pm Monday-Friday and grocery stores and banks are only open from 9 am - 5 pm Monday-Friday (or even 8 am - 6 pm if you live in an area where long commutes are normal) you're effectively excluded from banking and shopping entirely.
This seems to be a systematic means of excluding people in some places in Europe. Stores and banks in some places were only open from 8 am to 5 or 6 pm Monday - Saturday. Orthodox Judaism forbids work (including house work) on Saturday, so Jewish people working 9-5 jobs had very limited access to services.
If it's going to be a weekly or biweekly thing like groceries or banking, and just about everyone needs it, why have every full-time employee work it out ad-hoc? It seems simpler to have those places open a few more hours a day.
(And if you want to reduce how much people work then it's better to just shorten the standard work week than to add in a weekly grocery exception.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I don’t know their situation, but it might be an illusion. Some people are great at making it seem like they’re doing a lot, when they actually just look very busy.
It’s more of a petard hoisting situation. Some people carved out an subject matter that could have been much smaller and now that some business conditions have changed, they have as much work to do as the next three groups combined. Those other groups, including mine, only have so much work because they’ve taken the message to delegate incorrectly, and instead of an orderly handoff starting three years ago, it’s now rushed because it’s load shedding.
Add to the middle of this that we have deals or licenses running out and have decided that on top of everything else we should save some money too. The opportunity costs are probably killing us. But to keep them from completely killing us, other people are still cranking out major features including architectural changes, so we have those disruptions hitting too. It’s chaos.
I think employees are more disengaged. This is anecdotal, but the pandemic and climate change have tainted my work with a certain hopelessness. It’s hard to listen to “best quarter yet!” CEO pep speeches and feel like enthusiastic about some new feature you code when existential threats seem close at hand. Combine that with economic policies that seem to create and obliterate fortunes with a hand wave, an increasing wealth gap, and an extremely inaccessible housing market, and it is hard to keep your your hopes up and your nose down.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you are working hard as a manager then you are doing it wrong. Your goal is to make sure the team is highly qualified and are moving in the right direction. And then shield the team from external BS. That’s it. It isn’t rocket science.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> $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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> let's say they take a year to become net productive
That's some crazy long time for becoming productive. Do you have any examples of the kind of projects where this would happen? As a freelancer I expect myself to be productive within a week, preferably from the second or third day onwards with smaller tasks. May be that I'm finding just easy projects.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It depends on how retention interacts with other variables. I would argue that you can make exponential gains in things like product quality over the long term by retaining a critical mass of experienced personnel, which translates to higher earnings etc. But yes if you view personnel costs as a line item in isolation and on a quarterly basis, you might not see those effects.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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"
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I'm CTO at a small NGO in Bogotá 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm at a constant balance of 2 months of vacation because it's actually stressful to take more time off. Typically I stay up way too late before/after vacation trying to get everything done.
I've also noticed unnecessary urgency/escalation when someone is not in the office to deal with things. Say it's a Friday and I am in the office, but I am in back to back meetings and then have time blocked off to meet a deadline. Someone asks me to help on something semi-urgent, but they see I am booked, and they are generally OK with waiting, even if it delays until Monday. However,if they see a Friday OOO/vacation message in e-mail/slack, urgency is automatically ratcheted up and they want it done now.
I think there must be some psychological factors involved. It's OK if someone is technically "available" but does not have time. However if someone is takes a day off and is "unavailable" and there is wait..that is less acceptable.
I made sure to wrap up my work before I left. I sympathize with you on that one but there is always more work to be done. You shouldn't need to work to catch up when you're back. You'll catch up as your time permits but don't sacrifice your personal health for a job.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I work for a very big tech company that was not remote before covid. We did a huge survey recently and it showed that there is a small percentage that want only remote, and the rest is half and half split between "back to office" and "1-2 days in the office". We do have great office perks though
Yeah, I do not work for a big tech company, nor are there any big tech companies in my region. So nobody gets free food or other big tech company perks. That is surely coloring the reasons why nobody I know wants to work in the office.
I've worked at home for a few years now, and don't ever want to go back to the office unless:
- Commute is sub 10 minutes
- I get an office with a closing door
In 20 years, I've had that combo for maybe 18 months. I lost it when my team had to move to accommodate a management-heavy org that required the personal offices.
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.
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.
>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.
I like all the people I work with and have know them all for 10+ years, but I would never spend time with them outside of work. The idea of conflating my private and public lives is anathema to me.
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.
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/
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.
I think some folks are use to the noise and filler time at the office. In absence of that kind of chatter, work becomes a bit more soul sucking than expected so it's no surprise to me that anyone would want to move to another job just for some kind of change that requires interfacing with co-workers (training, on-boarding, etc).
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.
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.
No, this isn't about spreading the truth. This is pretty clearly all about you thinking you have such a useful, considerate perspective of the world, when in reality you don't even have a basic understanding of human psychology.
Telling someone who's miserable, "Oh, you think you're miserable? Well look at how much worse it could be!" is idiotic. Almost everyone knows their suffering could be worse. But knowing that doesn't do anything to stop the suffering.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This crisis may be of a more spiritual nature than is evident on the surface.
How much is enough, when is enough enough, what is my purpose for existing, how can I be of service while not being taken advantaged of, and without unreasonable demands?
There being an energy imbalance in the world comes from somewhere. It could not have come, at least not so fast, without an imbalance in the human psyche for the last couple of hundred years.
There is a need for reckoning, though it needs to start from within.
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).
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.
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.
The money going to shareholders isn't really coming from the workers though, it's coming from stock price appreciation. They could cut their dividends and give that to employees instead, but they don't have large dividends to begin with.
I'm not making a value judgement, I'm just saying that increasing wages across the entire economy will cause increased prices unless something offsets it (e.g. increased productivity that keeps pace with wage increases... which doesn't seem likely).
> The money going to shareholders isn't really coming from the workers though, it's coming from stock price appreciation. They could cut their dividends and give that to employees instead, but they don't have large dividends to begin with.
Money is conserved: the profits go somewhere, even if to retained earnings that the corporation spends; some amount could be given to the workers to spend. Again, how is that more inflationary?
Also, spending is inflationary only in certain conditions, such as when demand is constrained. Not all spending is inflationary.
I agree with this. You should run the numbers and look at how much companies could improve workers wages by. I did this a few years ago with Walmart, I was surprised by how small the amount was. I think these companies are more constrained than you think, and the huge difference in earnings (which I'm not defending) between the executives and the average worker is more due to their scale and the fact that they can skim a bit off every worker than due to pure exploitation. E.g. Walmart has ~2m employees. $100 from each is $200m more for the executives, but it's not really going to make much a difference to an employee to get an extra $100 per year.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The environment is collapsing the government is stealing my money through reckless printing and inflation. I am priced out of a home and a decent life. Corona is here to stay. Why should I still bother with working
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
>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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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 Babiš... oh sorry, it is owned by 2 trust funds which are indirectly owned by Babiš. 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.
? 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.
> 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.
>> 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?
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.
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?
Whereas yours hasn't been challenged nearly enough.
Your position is only tenable if you are part of an upper class that has others in a lower class working for them, and involuntarily donating the fruits of their labor. In another word, you wish to reintroduce slavery.
Sanity check: You think that the existence of all-you-can-eat restaurants, whose basic balance sheets contradict your assertion that food is not abundant, is classist and promotes slavery?
Sanity check: all you can eat restaurants are not free. You still pay for the food. And there's only so much you can eat during opening hours.
Your problem is that you presume food is abundant because it just is. Reality is that food is being produced, by people who want to be paid for it. Take away that payment, and they will stop producing.
I didn't claim that all-you-can-eats were free, only that they could stay in business despite apparently operating at a loss. This is precisely because the food is much cheaper than a rationalist or economist would predict it to be; it's abundant.
Food is abundant because of the Haber process [1] and other industrial-era improvements to food production. Only about 2% of our total labor output is required in order to produce all of our food [2]. The government subsidizes 10% of all food production and purchases [3][4]. If we already can afford to pay 2% of our population to make all of the food, and we already give away 10% of it for free, then it seems like we could reasonably discuss giving away more food for free without disenfranchising farmers.
Edit: I just realized that you might be clueless about this entire corner of sociology, so I should tell you about government cheese [5]. WP says, "Government cheese was created to maintain the price of dairy when dairy industry subsidies artificially increased the supply of milk and created a surplus of milk that was then converted into cheese, butter, or powdered milk." In other words, the government put too much money into making food, and gave away the surplus, and this has been happening continuously for decades.
I still don't get why you think all you can eat restaurants operate at a loss. Businesses that operate at a loss close after a while; all you can eat restaurants are no different. However, they tend to turn a profit by charging you a pretty sum just for the privilege of eating there (you do know you have to pay for all-you-can-eat restaurants, right?), in the hope that you are not so hungry that you will bankrupt them. In other words, they are taking a gamble - but it's a gamble that usually works out fine for them.
Your link specifically says that 2% of the labor force are farmers. It does NOT say that all people involved in the entire chain of activities that ends with food sitting on your plate represent just 2% of the labor force. Other people involved are the people who make the fertilizer, the people who package the food (for example, by canning it), the people who put it on store shelves, and the people who transport it all at each stage. Your fourth link has a helpful chart: actual farming represents a mere 7.6% of the cost of the food.
Your links do not establish that 10% of the food production was subsidized. Even if they did, a subsidy is not free money; it is paid from taxes that everybody pays. Thus, assuming the 10% number holds up, the only conclusion that you can draw is that 10% of the cost of food production is socialized.
It does not logically follow that if we pay a certain percentage of the labor force for food production, we can therefore afford to give the food away for free. That assumes there is undue profit in the chain that could be removed. Such profit might exist, but you have done nothing to establish that as a fact.
Sociology is not the science of government cheese. Even so, the overproduction only represents yet another failure of central planning; the free market would not have made such a mistake. It is public money, taken from tax payers, and spent on producing unwanted goods. Nothing about it is free.
However, that 'sociology' does explain a lot about why you are so horribly misinformed about how the world works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.