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Comment by tastynacho | Hacker News Reader

> There's a lot of bullshit work assigned in a typical corporate job

yeah its called being young and being inexperienced. Gotta put the time in before you're qualified to enjoy the meat..

Which was true for the last generation, when you were supposed – and did – put up with the bullshit, because the company would care for you and offer you employment until retirement, and afterwards offer an adequate pension.

Nowadays, in far too many companies all you get for hard work is getting downsized. I can't blame people for not wanting to put up with that, and there's not nearly enough reasonable companies around.

You sound like a twenty-something whose historical perspective is lacking. It's been at least several generations, probably more, since that kind of job (expected lifetime employment with pension) has been widespread.

You sound like a twenty-something whose historical perspective is lacking. It's been several generations, probably more, since that kind of job (expected lifetime employment with pension) has been widespread.

I'm 40 now and I certainly didn't get a company to "care for" me; that promise went away generations ago. The last time anyone was hiring on those terms was maybe the 70's. Three generations have gone by since anyone pretended that lifetime employment is actually still a thing.

And with no guarantee of upward mobility, why would someone put up with it?

Nothing is guaranteed, so I'm not sure what the lack of one has to do with anything.

Switching companies every 3 or 4 years is the new normal - you can't expect to ever get promoted within the same company. There's still upward mobility - its just that it's within an industry, not an individual company.

But I'm still a lot less likely to accept crap work just to hope that I get promoted later. The expected value of the upside is smaller, so should the downside be.

Agreed, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

If your labour has market value and you're taking crap from your employer, shop around for a new job. The other way of saying that we don't have lifetime employment anymore is that we don't have to suffer through lifetime employment anymore.

You don't have to tolerate stultifying bureaucracy. You don't have to suffer nitwit bosses. You don't have to deal with impossible coworkers. With an open labour market, you can work where you like.

A couple of days ago someone posted patio11's blog article on his experience working in Japan as a salaryman. The other side of the security of lifetime employment over there is that you have to tolerate horrible working conditions at your lifetime employer, and the labour market is so rigid that if you ever leave your employer, no one else will ever hire you.

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