Being emotionally detached from really stupid leadership decisions is harder than it seems
Took me a lot of years to not think it’s my company that is being run into the ground. I should not - and nowadays could not - care any less.
my company
You mean “my responsibility”, right?
The book The Responsibility Virus helped me a lot with this. Most people are over-responsible for the choices of others, specifically ones they can’t reasonably influence, anyway.
I found out that https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ explains a lot of the dysfunctions that one finds in an office / corporate environment.
The company doesn’t care about you. The company doesn’t care about you. The company doesn’t care about you.
My uncle spent years preaching to me about the need to be loyal to a company. I never drank the Kool-Aid. He spent 21 years working for an investment banking company in their IT department. 4 years before he was set to retire with a full pension, etc. his company was acquired by a larger bank. He lost everything except his 401k. He then spent the next 12 years working to get his time back so he’d be able to retire. He died 2 years ago and the company sent a bouquet of flowers.
THE COMPANY DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU!!
How do you lose a pension? It doesn’t matter where you work or if a company gets bought.
So the way he explained it to me was that essentially when the company was purchased all your accruals were reset and the pension was tied to years of service, which he hadn’t reached yet, then with the merger you were essentially a new employee. There was also a lot tied to retirement plans linked to corporate stocks that were basically useless after they merged. Either way, beyond working for the same company forever, his eggs were (mostly) in one basket.
Yet another reason to be glad to live in the EU:
Basically, “any employee’s contract of employment will be transferred automatically on the same terms as before in the event of a transfer of the undertaking. This means that if an employer changes control of the business, the new employer cannot reduce the employees’ terms and conditions”
This regulation and strong unions are the backbone of job security in the EU.
The company cares about you in the same way a beef farmer cares about his cattle.
No, they don’t care that much
Not even if you do valuable or efficent stuff for the company. You’re disposable.
also you might not be replaceable but your manager might be an idiot
The most important traits for doing well at work (in this order):
- clear, effective, and efficient communication
- taking ownership of problems
- having your boss and team members like you on a personal level
- competence at your tasks
I’m halfway through scrolling this long thread, and this is the first comment I’ve seen that isn’t overly cynical. It’s also correct.
I’ve been working for 38 years, and I’ve been someone who makes promotion decisions for 15 of them. The third one is helpful, not essential, but the others are super important. The people who rise to leadership positions aren’t necessarily the top technical people, they’re the ones who do those things with a good attitude.
The other thing I’d add is that they’re people who are able to see the big picture and how the details relate to it, which is part of strategic thinking.
I’m not sure if the competence is really in the last place. I’d say it’s on the equal level. Great communication and ownership of the problems means little if you can’t really solve the problems.
People have those things in spectrums, not all or nothing. You have to have at least some of all of them, but I’d argue that mediocre competency with really good communication and accountability is a better combination that really good competency with one of the others being mediocre.
I still kinda disagree. We’re talking here about engineering role after all. I have a colleague who is a code wizard, but has kinda problem with (under)communicating. He’s still widely respected as a very good engineer, people know his communication style and adapt to it.
But if you’re a mediocre problem solver, you can’t really make up for it with communication skills. That kinda moves you into non-engineering role like PO, SM or perhaps support engineer.
But I would say this - once you reach a certain high level of competence, then the communication skills, leadership, ownership can become the real differentiating factors. But you can’t really get there without the high level of competence first.
We’re talking here about engineering role after all.
where? seemed like general advice.
Even then, thee aren’t mutually exclusive. your competence will affect how people see you on a personal level, at least at work. And your competence affects your ability to be given problems to own. You’re not gonna give the nice but still inexperienced employee to own an important problem domain. they might be able to work under the owner and gain experience, though.
Documentation and presentation are highly undervalued, and your ability to understand and spread that knowledge can overcome that lack of experience to actually handle the task yourself.
Your employer does not care about you. You are not important or irreplaceable
Take your time and energy and put it into your life, not their business
I have had coworkers die (not work related) and by the time you hear about it (like the next day) they have already worked out who will get the work done so the machine doesn’t have to stop
I don’t think taking action to fill a hole is indicative of not caring.
I’m all for filling holes!
There is no ideal place to work where they “do it right”, whatever kind of “right” you care about right now. When you change jobs, you merely exchange one set of problems for another.
Having worked 7 different jobs that all were in the same field made me have some backbone of standards that nobody else could have built without going through that, though. It’s a blessing and a curse, so be warned. The things I picked up on that I never realized I would care so much about in the healthcare field is good office administration and Director of Care leadership. The morale is just as important as the pay rate.
The longer you work anywhere – and I mean ANYWHERE – the more you see the bullshit and corruption and crappy rules or policies and inequality all over.
For me it has been about the 3 year mark anywhere I’ve worked: once you get past that, you fade away from “damn I’m glad to have a job and be making money!” and towards “this is absolute bulls#!t that [boss] did [thing] and hurt the workers in the process!” or similar3 years? What nirvana corp do you work at?
Funny, that’s actually what motivated me at my last job. Things were fucked up, but not so fucked up that it was overwhelming. It was the Goldilocks zone of just fucked up enough that I think I can not only fix it, but look good if I do. It was a fun journey, all told, but there were definitely frustrations, even ones that lasted years.
the Goldilocks zone of just fucked up enough
Hahaha, I love it
Thanks, I agree!
Today businesses increase like mushrooms after rain, and decrease like mushrooms before summer.
Don’t get attached, move on to the next better mushroom 🍄
You don’t have to run the rat race to get promoted. You don’t have to be at your desk at 7am and leave at 7pm to put on a show. Just be competent. Most people are not. You’ll eventually get promoted once you are old and white enough.
It should be noted that this is advice specific to white men in Western countries 😆 but yes, it’s true.
Sometimes it’s better if your employer doesn’t know everything you can do. If you’re not careful you’ll end up Inventory Controller/shipper/IT services/reception/Safety officer, and you’ll only ever be paid for whatever your initial position was.
I wanted to be a system engineer, I got hired as a devops, I started doing a bit of system engineer, called hr and said that I’m working on infrastructure and I need my title changed or else I won’t be able to continue my work, my title was changed, no I do system engineer stuff and less of devops, this was a very rare occasion but it can happen from time to time.
No matter how much you invest you’re time and effort for your job: You are expendable, and the only people who will know you were absent from home because of work 20 years later, will be your kids.
It’s suffocating to be in a middle management position because you get squeezed by the higher-ups and your own team. If the higher-ups make a decision that your team dislikes or vice versa, you’re going to be in the shitter with whichever party suffered every time even if you had the best intentions.
This is the purpose of middle management. You’re the one responsible to the C-levels for what happens on your team, and you’re the first line of defense for the C-levels to ignore the complaints of their lowers. Thus you get shafted from both sides.
The only way to be good at middle management is to basically throw everyone under the bus all the time. When your subordinates complain about policy, it’s all “this isn’t me, management made this decision.” And “I’ll pass it along to management”… When management complains about the team, it’s all “they’re not being motivated, how about we give them pizza” or something. You know, useless one time “gifts” that should “improve morale” but actually does nothing, and costs less than actually increasing wages.
There’s no such thing as quiet quitting. I prefer acting your wage.
Explanation please? Not a native speaker here…
“Quiet quitting” is a term made up my small business tyrants in the United States to describe workers doing their job as it is described on the contract, and not going “above and beyond”. They somehow believe they’re owed more than they pay for.
There was a phenomenon in the US labor market during 2022/2023 called “quiet quitting” where laborers across the market realized that companies weren’t paying wages adequately or to a level that reflected the kind of work laborers would perform.
It was thought that companies paid their workers short of what the workers are owed, and in response to that, a large number of people, many trending young, started behaving according to those wages.
This often meant reducing work speed or efficiency, reducing communication, etc. Laborers would claim that they were doing the bare minimum to match their wage compensation.
The other side of this is that the US labor market at that time favored laborers over companies. Workers had more leverage about getting job offers and negotiating terms than companies had, partly due to a rebound from COVID.
This meant that there wasn’t as much of an anxiety of workers being fired from their position since they would find it easy to get another job. So people did look for other jobs, often while working, to see if they might improve their circumstances and land a job that pays better.
The “quiet” part was about sliding back on performance or even job tasks themselves, and the “quitting” part was about workers possibly leaving companies for other offers.
I might have conflated The Great Resignation with this, but both phenomena affect the other.
If someone is paid three times the average salary of his county, acting his wage would be actually working his ass off?
It all depends on the cost of living relative to the wages accrued. Often wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living, so people feel more and more that the deal with their employers gets worse and worse. Someone earning 200k/year might be living the same as someone working 60k/year depending on where those people live
Now, there is something to be said about why cost of living should vary from place to place. Part of it is scarcity of habitation: if there aren’t very many available flats or lots, there might be fierce competition for people to fill what flats or lots do become available. Supply and demand.
Other aspects might be debt accrued by businesses that they pass on to their customers, externalities like wars or laws, etc.
I also want to point out that a lot of people associate more wealth with more consumption, so you might see people rise to spend all of the new resources they accumulate rather than securitizing and saving that wealth for unforeseen events. Lots of people consume at terribly non-sustainable rates, and there should be conversations about what effects behaviors can have on the world, outside of the economy.
Thanks!
Minimum wage, minimum effort
Efficient workers get more work if you’re in the office. I work from home, and that allows me to work efficiently until my work is done, set up scheduled emails to go out at the time I would’ve otherwise been done, then do what I want until then.
I see your work doesn’t have invasive programs that check idle mouse and idle keyboard behaviors.
this is an old one but i can’t help thinking, what if they installed it without my knowledge, after all, my work laptop was given to me already pre prepared by our IT department.
It’s a double edged sword. I was very efficient, and did get more work, which got me noticed and eventually promoted out of a doing position into a leading position
It’s a nice change, the work is light, the people side of the work is easy. I have higher pay and much more free time
My biggest lesson was that decades of work means nothing if you become disabled (in the US).
You can end up with literally nothing and lose literally everything if you become disabled. Even if you still have skills, even though you worked hard to contribute to society for decades, it can all go away overnight and you can suddenly not afford food anymore. There’s no safety net, and you won’t learn that until you need it.
Because fuck you.
Boundaries. Establish them and defend them with every ounce of your being. If you don’t, most employers will grind you in to the dirt and send you out to pasture when you eventually crack under the pressure. Better to establish healthy boundaries up front. Not only will you find yourself more frequently surrounded by people you like and share mutual respect with, you will be happier and land fewer “shit” jobs because employers looking for people to send to the meat grinder will see that they can’t grind you down and you’ll be filtered from the hiring pool before you ever have to suffer at their hands.
