The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
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gsb.stanford.edu
For all human history, the conditions of people were dire. Today people might be stuck in an office in their "best year", but people in the past had to toil all day to barely scrape by and didn't even have that many years to live.
It's only now that we live these comfortable lives with houses, heating, electricity, technology and a sea of information at our fingertips. These things all exist and keep functioning because people work.
And yet some think that "society has gone wrong", as if the past was paradise.
Work has been a human universal through history. There is surely an argument to be made about the fact that now we are so productive that we might not need to work as much as we had to.
At the same time I think we should be grateful that we live in the best life conditions ever seen by humanity.
Despite technology allowing us to work less, we work more. Yes we should be grateful of technological advancement, but too many people are unnecessarily depressed and suicidal, and it doesn't have to be this way.
Also, the idea of the high-leisure hunter gatherer is false. This is ideology masquerading as archaeology/history, and it confirms the biases of people who have genuine criticisms of modern life. http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gathere...
I've also gone hiking in the mountains in California. Been on the beach in Italy. Walked around in the center of Munich.
As a 14th century peasant I probably never even knew those places existed.
I can also get pain medication if I have a headache. I can go to a doctor to fix my broken bones if I happen to get one. Oh, and the likelihood of dying of a random infection or chicken pox is exceedingly low.
Is is worth spending more time in a nice, warm, comfortable office to be able to do all of those things? Hell yes. Is it all shits and giggles all the time? Of course not.
For all that we have issues with a culture where people check work emails at home and are otherwise on-call, we've moved remarkably far from a culture where work was truly pervasive, where it formed the backdrop of everything else.
All of which is to say that both the quality, as you point out, and the purity of our recreation have improved quite a lot. Counting up a nebulous "time off" value seems to seriously misunderstand the changes in how we live.
Or, that everyone who works hard reaps the rewards, ignoring the ever-increasing disparity in compensation?
And it's nice that 14th century peasants didn't work much, but as the article you linked to says, that happened to be a time of particularly high wages because the Black Death greatly reduced the supply of labor. In other words, it was not at all representative of the general lifestyle of a peasant.
That's not quite true. Farming is heavy, all day long work during sowing and harvest seasons, but other than these, which take a few weeks out of a year, it's not all that much work really. Keeping animals on the other hand requires some work every day (taking them in and out of the pasture, milking, cleaning sheds etc), but it's not all day long, it's really on the order of 1-2 hours a day.
Keep in mind also that for most of the history, farmers didn't really have all that much land to farm, and each farmer would work on much smaller plot than he and his family was physically able to. The reason for this is really Malthusian. If there's excess food, you have population growth, which makes you hit the carrying capacity only in a handful of generations. Look at American colonies for example. After they were founded, the population grew mostly through natural growth, further immigration being relatively unimportant -- foreign born population rarely exceeded 10%. Yet the population increased 20-fold in only 100 years.
This means that throughout most of the history, the farmer parents only had barely enough land to sustain themselves and 2 children -- only 2 children of each parent reproduced on average, otherwise you'd have population growth, which meant war or famine (or both). The farmer didn't have a lot of farming to do, because he just didn't have enough land to plow and sow.
If you are European, talk to some old people who grew up farming. My mother grew up on a farm in Eastern Europe, and her village only got electricity in early 1980s. When I talk to her, or my grandparents, or their neighbors, and I ask them if the life was poor back then, and what was the thing they needed the most, everyone always says that they had too little land. In America it was of course much different, for obvious reasons.
They were also dead by 35.
When you do manual work outdoors, there is a sort of physical element that allows you to get "in the zone" and it really feels like true work. But for white collar tasks like accounting, programming, and filing papers, there's not as often a moment for meditation or getting "in the zone". And there's something much more alienating about doing comfortable work that is held up, not because of the winter frost, but because of some corporate inefficiency.
Likewise, blue collar assembly-line labor, in which your entire day is spent building a single part for a huge machine, is much the same. The carpenter can feel delighted from finishing an entire chair, and a weaver might enjoy seeing many completed baskets, but the factory worker never knows rest, never knows any satisfaction, because the modern species of work never ends.
"Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." (Genesis 3:18-19)
An annoying aspect of software is that it takes a life of its own. It is never done, but there are feature requests, bugs, and updates.
You make a table, and that is it. It's done. Sure, you have to clean it, but mostly it will last a while until it breaks down.
If you hear someone sing in an office it's because they're either crazy or have been fired.
But there is also something to be said in favor of repetitive, low-qualification work. It frees the mind while you're doing it: you can think about something else, or even, yes, sing -- and most importantly, it doesn't follow you home.
Modern mid-level office jobs where you're constantly tethered to the company, at all hours and even during "holidays" (if you can get any) are the worst of the worst.
The mind and the body are meant to be worked together.
I think that jobs like programming which minimize physical movement and maximize mental work are unnatural.
I've worked as a programmer, but before that I worked farm labour.
My meals and my sleep have never been as good as those days when I did a full day on the farm, feeding animals, milking cows and taking in the hay.
This isn't strictly due to modern agriculture, either. Poor timing/freak weather events in the past wouldn't just cause farmers to lose their livelihood, it would also mean there was a very real risk of starvation. While losing your job and comfortable livelihood can certainly be stressful, there seem to be quite a few people who believe that work in the past wasn't just as, if not more, stressful.
The passage can be read her for anyone interested. http://www.bartleby.com/316/304.html
Do you guys in America even know how it is in Sweden for example? We don't have this competitive culture, and companies are trying hard to make their employees feel good at work. Nobody really works full 8 hours at big companies and nobody is stressed very much. Bosses never blame anyone directly for anything since it's not allowed, culture wise. People are very relaxed.
When I read about American culture, it seems insane.
I think you're quite correct that it's insane, but you can also view it through the lens of class war. There are some people in charge who have an unthinkable amount of capital, and they would like it to be this way everywhere.
'Culture' is led by leaders. Company culture comes from the top down. If you had a company leader who earnestly thought hunting down and murdering workers in rival companies was the best way to be a company, AND he was allowed to pursue that unregulated and unrestrained, you'd see a 'culture' straight out of the darkest cyberpunk because others would play copycat and it'd become the new normal. You'd have to deal with it on its own terms.
Of course it's insane, and of course it's killing people: in a sense that's a feature. This is the operating system on which we run. There's only workarounds, or changing the OS out from under the 'culture' it produces.
EDIT: To be more precise: typically ~20 days in the summer and additional ~5-15 days in the winter. Averages by country, Sweden 26 days: https://www.europeandataportal.eu/en/highlights/which-countr...
34 days (minimum?) when you include the 16 paid public holidays such as Christmas, New Year, Easter, Midsummer: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-...
Sounds lovely, though.
The promise of the modern society was that everyone being "equal", we would all become aristocrats. In fact we all became slaves.
(And of course, hunters gatherers lived, to the best of our knowledge, in classless groups where each individual worked very little each day).
1. Working outside (as mentioned) just doesn't compare with office job, i.e. it provides physical exercise, fresh air, being close to nature/animals. Now we're simulating all these things with gyms/vacations/zoos (I think the quality of such simulation is out of question?)
2. Work had to be done with your family, now there is no simulation for this in our society at all. And I would guess it was much better option than running as fast as we can (as most corporate people do) at 6:00PM, away from these annoying faces :)
Has nothing to do with the OP's comment, and it attempts to shift the conversation to justification.
>For all human history, the conditions of people were dire. Today people might be stuck in an office in their "best year", but people in the past had to toil all day to barely scrape by and didn't even have that many years to live.
Again, why are you doing this?
>It's only now that we live these comfortable lives with houses, heating, electricity, technology and a sea of information at our fingertips. These things all exist and keep functioning because people work.
Who is arguing against work in general? The article and the OP are discussing working conditions. Work doesn't have to be torture. America has a very unhealthy relationship with the idea of work and what it means. No pain no gain, right?
>And yet some think that "society has gone wrong", as if the past was paradise.
In the last 40-50 years, American society has taken some significant steps backwards, and the workers have felt it. If you're comparing conditions to hundreds or thousands of years ago, why? What is your goal?
>Work has been a human universal through history. There is surely an argument to be made about the fact that now we are so productive that we might not need to work as much as we had to.
At the same time I think we should be grateful that we live in the best life conditions ever seen by humanity.
You finally brushed against the point in your penultimate paragraph.
In the past work and exercise were nearly identical, now work looks something like sitting in a desk all day under fluorescent light.
Nutrition was once a result of simply eating what was available, but now has changed to a daily fight, something that requires constant effort and discipline in order to maintain as we are completely bombarded by those that seek to exploit our instinctive responses.
We've traded these and other things for safety, comfort, and reproductive success.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37775622
Though if we weren't so damn focused on having so much crap maybe a few of those animals would still be around.
For example:
- If I want meat, I perform task X
- If I want heat, I perform task X
- If I want cothes, I perform task X
In previous generations (more recent than you might assume) many of these desired outcomes had totally different tasks.
Its also a false dichotomy that things are work _OR_ play. Many things are a blend of Work/Play/Hobby or more simply just "living".
It would have been an evolutionary advantage to be interested in and inclined to perform various types of tasks for early humans. Modern work suppresses this human need. This is why we have hobbies and people are depressed.
More "free" time to watch Netflix may not be the pinnacle happiness and fulfillment. This is not to suggest that life was "easy" in the past.
Between 1950 and 1980, the average wage of the lower 90% of the economy rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, it rose by 1%. And during 1980 to 2010 we experienced the introduction of computers into the workplace. Average worker productivity skyrocketed at an absurd rate. Yet, every penny of that advancement and more was scalped by employers and shareholders. People are not being greedy in expecting more. They are intuitively sensing that they are being exploited more and more heavily every single year. No increase in productivity is ever reflected in increased earnings or free time or anything like that.
The notion of the New Deal was that 1 person working only 40 hours a week should be paid enough that they could raise an entire family on it comfortably. Do you think that could be done today? No, it couldn't. If you've got a couple kids, and you only have 1 40 hour job providing the income you are completely boned. You're poor. We have been racing backwards, and we have gained literally nothing for it.
What metrics did you use to determine this, other than life expectancy? A zoo animal may have a longer life expectancy, but a free animal arguably leads a more satisfying life according to their nature.
Something is definitely wrong.
No. There's been societies based on slavery or indentured servitude and industrial societies treating workers much like slaves and there's been also almost idyllic, often agrarian, societies far removed from war, exploitation and hunger.
Furthermore, given the incredible amount of energy and natural resources that the average person in rich countries is consuming we should all be living happy and meaningful lives and work one our per week.
We should instead ask the difficult question - why are even the richest societies so unhappy?
My understanding of primitive agrarian societies are that they have hard work, hard lives, poor diet, and a population that is generally at the edge of starvation. (In good times, population grows. In bad times...) You might want to read Guns, Germs and Steel as an example of a reference backing this view up. Or read through random snippets of history like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931... and get a sense for the very real struggles that people faced.
And wars exist also, and especially, among tribes.
Growing food without modern technologies, fertilizers and pesticides was also an extremely hard job. It’s not like growing tomatoes in your back garden.
There are millions and millions of people out there in their 20s and 30s who work part time and do whatever they want with the other time, because that provides "enough" money for the life they want to live.
I personally work roughly 50% time. I work a few years, then a quit and do whatever I want for a few years. Right now I'm driving around Africa, have not gone to work since mid-2015, it's fantastic.
My brother just built a house and had his first child with his wife. He works 4 days a week, looking to get down to 3. When his wife goes back to work she will work 3, maybe only two. They don't have a lot of money, but they have "enough" for the life they want and they spend a lot of time surfing, walking on the beach etc. They're both early 30s.
Right. and what happens when they get old? how will they ever be able to retire?
It's sort of like most people turning their noses when someone (used to; now it's different) said they were starting a business: "Oh, well what happens when you fail and can't get a job? How will you ever be able to live then?" People find a way and it sounds like the people the poster was referencing, know themselves well enough to make their decisions. While on the other hand, comparing people to the "norm" many times comes from someone who doesn't know themselves and their wants well (or ignores them), and uses the norm as their gauge for "success," or what have you. For a subset of people, retirement isn't something they want or even need. One of the sentiments I hear often from those still working in older age, "What, retire? Now? I've been working my entire life, what the hell am I gonna do in retirement besides die?" or "60 years of doing shit I didn't want, so I could enjoy 15 doing only the things my body allows now."
Life's short. If you want to do things, do them. The only reason you don't is because you live in fear. There will always be drawbacks to going against the status quo, but that's the price you pay to get what you want.
Because they are currently living on not a whole lot, they are not going to need a whole lot in retirement either, because they will be accustomed to having less money.
Before you get all uppity about healthcare costs, just remember there is only one developed country on the entire planet where anyone would even think about that. They don't live in it.
As a reference point, I was reading a very detailed write-up of what a single person would spend in retirement per year, and it was more than double what I was living on working full-time as a Software Engineer.
Food and water can be quite cheap: the grocery stores are filled with healthy foods you can get for less than 1$ per lb in most of the US: corn, whole wheat flour, bananas, apples, grapes, onions, beans, rolled oats, etc.
The biggest problem with living cheaply is Housing, Healthcare and Tax. for the most part these are mandated by the gov regulations to be really expensive. Once those are solved, we'll be able to live quite cost effectively. I've seen some people get around that by living in a camper van, traveling the world - not for everyone, i know. But, the tiny house movement shows us we can get a tiny house for just 20K.
What you are suggesting would lead to a generation that saves more and consumes less.
When GDP seems to be the only success metric that matters, I often wonder if such education is omitted intentionally.
How many musicians do you know that play in clubs? Most are working two restaurant jobs, renting a room, and scraping money together to buy strings, just for the chance to entertain a crowd for little or no pay.
It's all perspective, really.
Don’t forget your commute. And you’ll still need your wife to get the kids to school and pick them up. Hope you earn enough for that and she’s happy st home. And you should help out with dinner and the lunches and homework. And when you get the kids to bed it’s 8 and you’re exhausted.
Enjoy your weekend.
I really wish part time work was more of a thing in this industry...
Yes, kids require a lot of things that cost money and a lot of time from the parents. Yes, they make you significantly less productive at work when something is wrong. Yes, life is much easier without kids.
But having and raising children is literally one of the most natural things to want to do with your life. A culture that views children mostly as inconveniences is a sick culture.
But true, I didn't add in family.
Can you share your story? How did you make it?
I always wanted my own business as I saw it as a route to mental and financial freedom. I was under no false impressions of the difficulty involved as I've seen my family struggle (and prosper) while running their own businesses.
Anyway, I started by building a little product on the side whilst working. I sold the product to a few hedge funds and investment bank divisions that I could get into via my contacts (both from university and work). That little product turned into this: https://osrec.co.uk/products/heavymetl and provides good recurring income.
I then put together a SaaS product for bookkeeping/accounting/invoicing: https://usebx.com/app . It was rather well received, and we even got a few corporate clients to sign up. We're working on version 2, which I think will be even better! We tend to pick up customers that have become irritated by quickbooks/Xero/Sage.
Then there's the consulting piece, which is ongoing. We basically help institutions get out of sticky tech situations that your average developer might struggle with without specific financial regulation knowledge. E.g. helping an investment bank prove that their implementation of a data store for financial greeks is in accordance with BCBS239. Not easy to do unless you know the regs, and can suggest ways in which they can become compliant if they are not.
Random tips that I picked up along the way:
- Tenacity and passion are important - A healthy bank balance is important, primarily to keep anxiety away - Don't ever appear desperate for business. Big turn off for a client. - A well defined product sells better than a poorly defined one - A good product sells better than a bad one (i.e. don't believe the ship rubbish early mantra - it does have its place, however, if you are going into a mature market, users want something good and reliable first time or they bail) - Build things often and well. Don't be lazy with quality control. Have the guts to build without a framework! It can really bolster your technical prowess. - Be nice to people. A friendly interaction has often turned into business. - Be assertive with difficult clients. Often this applies to the non-techy clients that come out with sarcastic remarks such as "you charged us £50k for pressing a few buttons. Why can't we have XYZ as well as ABC?" or "I thought this was included in the original contract?". Make it clear to them that if they don't see the value in the service or can't deal straightforwardly, then we don't need them as a client. They soon come around, when they have to go back to their manual error-prone ways.
So that's it, in a nutshell! Sorry if I rambled. All the best :)
Pay: A little less. But I'm working about half the hours. I've had time to start a little side company and to work on another I'm most of the way through, as well as explore other maybe-careers (photography, videography, audio) without impacting my cash flow. I spend a little less money, but some of that is willing: I'm not at work, I don't have to pay $10 for lunch, I can make a small salad. I've had no trouble keeping up my retirement accounts. If I retire.
Stress: much lighter overall, but the occasional terror-spike. Finding work is challenging, and there have been dry spots that made me very antsy, but I enjoy it, and the company I do most of my work through is good at keeping me busy without having to spend my time on sales. I'm moving in with my girlfriend, and that'll just about halve my expenses while placing me in a much more convenient/walkable area, so this should go down further. (She is sometimes a little miffed that I work so little. But I cook, and I cook pretty well, and I'm paying rent, so.)
If you have an in-demand skillset, you can do very well. For me, it's devops, but it's devops informed with the way that I've done everything else in a tech group, from web and mobile to databases, so I'm not approaching it either from a sysadmin point of view or some dogmatic Agile-esque one, and I can help in a lot of ways.
Also, shameless plug: i'm always willing to chat with new prospective clients. ;) Email's in my profile.
The part about a big tech company being a stressful environment isn't the thing that surprised me, but rather people's responses to how they react to either being on the receiving side of the stress, and management's failure to respond to this or even try to talk about it.
The thing that bugs me the most about the entire situation is that most of the stress that seems to exist, mostly exists because of people who have no idea what they're doing, make decisions they have no business making. Then you have engineers that either come from cultures that are high in agreeableness, or they've never been very assertive themselves and just accept these decisions, thinking it's a situation of "if I don't do this I'm going to get fired".
Most of the people I work with don't even consider the option of just taking an extended period of time off to prevent being burned out because they're basically tied to their employment due to work visas (you guessed it, Indian and Chinese workers) and a lot of them are trying to support family back home. So even leaving their job and taking extended time off isn't a viable option.
Don't even get me started on how I've seen people's physical and mental health completely deteriorate. I know lots of people in my organization that are extremely depressed and wouldn't even be the least bit surprised if I heard they ate a bullet tomorrow.
This whole industry has just motivated me to work to achieve financial independence/early retirement as soon as I can just so I never have to think about working with incompetent people in my life again, or at least, have the financial freedom to cut those relationships once they do arise. It sucks because I know I'll be working on tech related projects for the rest of my life, but I have to ignore the desire to work on things that will actually make a difference so that I can build up that nest egg to have the financial freedom and peace of mind to actually pursue it.
If anything what was once intention for one person, turns into style/culture/rationalizations for many others. Let me try to turn the abstraction into an example. Have you ever heard a manager say about someone who works very very hard, "(S)he is passionate about technology"? My favorite one in the world is, "This is a startup, what do you expect." "This is a startup, if you want a 9 to 5 this is not the place for you."
As an older but still young enough (I hope) techie, I've learned to see that the platitudes and promises, the myth about changing the world or bullying about working hard (because what you describe reminds me of bullying) affects YOUNG PEOPLE the most.
And those young people, maybe a small percentage will make a lot of money at a young age. I know a few and I'm not even in Silicon Valley. Many others will piss their 20's away working long hours and drown their livers with company-sponsored drinks.
I know it's hard, but I think you have a responsibility to step in when you see things like this.
I've been severely depressed before, and if someone, even if I didn't know them very well, had done something to indicate that they knew what I was going through, it would have helped. Sometimes people who are suicidal are convinced that if they did eat a bullet tomorrow, no one would care.
I've started the conversation with the peers that I know well at this point and have encouraged them to start looking after their own mental+physical health, seeking treatment/help, because frankly, no one in my org's management chain cares about the consequences they have on others' wellbeing.
What sort of frightens me is that the more I look around me the more I realize that a lot of people seem to be having issues with mental health and stress - some are just better at hiding it than others.
People stop taking advantage when you stop letting them. More than you might expect actually respect it. I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression, and it’s certainly done wonders for my mental health.
I've had to fight numerous battles with my boss, along the lines of, "I don't care who scheduled the meeting, I already have plans tonight, and it's not reasonable to make me change them with no notice."
This mentality has turned out to be (a) well worth it for my marriage, and (b) not actually a big deal in the scheme of things.
I find the fact that you even feel you need to include this part disgusting. I'm paid for 40 hours a week. You are not required to pay me overtime. You do not get a second extra of my time
I am salaried, and they do pay me well, so I'm willing to work more than 40 hours from time to time, when schedules are tight.
I think that for me, my criteria for being OK with more-than-40 are probably something like: (0) it had better not be that much more than 40, (1) it had better not be an exception, not the rule, and (2) it had better be something I can plan for, so I'm not jerking around my family/friends.
If I can generally set my own hours, and you give me a ton of vacation time, pay me well, and give me other good incentives just for working there, I'm much more likely to put in a few extra hours every now and then if something comes up.
> I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression
I am sure it has helped.
The "if you give them an inch they'll take a mile" philosophy applies. My wife tends to try and accommodate, and it has meant she isn't respected in her current position.
Meanwhile, same company, I've made it clear that I have boundaries. I may allow some time after my usual working hours; if I do, I will leave early/arrive late the next day. I'm not putting in over 40 hours, and -I- get to determine when my schedule changes.
And, perversely, it's led to greater recognition, promotion, etc. The fact I act like I am in control leads people to believe I am, and should be given, control.
Europe certainly has a better model here than the US (more vacation, unemployment benefits), but there's room for improvement (eg. basic income).
Personally I left my office job in NYC about 4 months ago and have been traveling for the last 2 months (in South America). Being here and meeting other travelers (especially European), digital nomads, etc. has really made me realize how toxic American rat race work culture is. One Colombian I met who spent time living in the U.S. summed it up the best - Americans only seem to think about money.
Now I know some of you will say "but Colombia is poorer than us!" That may be the case, but it doesn't dispute the fact that our culture has become toxic - money/work obsessed, 2 weeks/year vacation, usurious amounts of student loan debt, etc.
If you need an example of a country with a bit more sense - I met a 28 year old Finnish guy here in Colombia in the middle of a multi-month vacation. His job back in Finland? Working in the deli section of a supermarket selling sausages. Completely blew my mind. If he were born in America and in the same occupation, he would probably not have the time or money for a 2 month international vacation. I've got friends the same age in professional occupations (eg. economist for the government) forgoing vacations until they pay back their 6-8% interest student loans. Europe in general has a much healthier attitude when it comes to work/life balance than America. Though on the bright side, at least we have it better than Asia (minus the student loan and healthcare part).
Makes you wonder why are there more Europeans moving to the US than the other way around.
I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach.
To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10 days of vacation time that they somehow guilted him into throwing away after he had actually flown halfway around the world.
20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. I don't see any hint of that expectation anymore. It's a combination of employers with serious boundary issues, and empoloyees fearing the ramifications of pushing back.
You really need to stand up for yourself these days. But at least I've found that if you do so, it generally works.
I am an H1B from India working for the American subsidiary of an India company. For a short period of time, I was put on a project that was created by some other team and finally abandoned by the customer. Then, 1-2 years later, new customer management decided to bring the project back to life. Only thing was the new management didn't know it was still in prototype stage. They tried to go to market with it, only to find issues.
Unfortunately for me, when this customer approached my company, I was free and I got assigned to this project. I did what they asked to. It was only for a month of so. Then, I heard nothing from this customer for a couple of months. Then they showed up again asking me to make some changes, that lasted for 1-2 weeks. It repeated once or twice again. Then I never heard from them.
2 years passed by after I worked on this project for the first time. I must have worked on and off for 2 months total in this so far. I went to India on a 40 day vacation for my brother's and my marriage. I get an email from the manager who handles this customer that this customer has come back again and they want me to work. I tried to work from India as much as I could. But this manager insisted on me cancelling my vacation. Finally, he escalated to my actual manager's boss's boss, saying that I have to cancel my honeymoon. I was scared of loosing my visa, so I ended my cancelling my honeymoon. Since my brother and I got married within the same month, we had our honeymoon's planned together. So he also had to cancel.
The day I got the email from the manager asking me to cancel my honeymoon, I stayed in room for the whole day. I was incredibly stressed and miserable.
I was never the same person after this. I lost all my interest in work and my company. I will resign within 1 or 2 months and leave US altogether. There is a good chance I will regret it later, but it has become too much for me to handle.
My reasoning is that in a couple of months max I'll have another job. A better paid job, with a sensible schedule (not this ridiculous 2 hour lunch stop), with a sensible dress code and standard ways to do things. While the people that made me feel bad today will be, no doubt, in exactly the same trouble that they're today because they don't know any better and they don't listen.
Don't leave the US for that bad experience. Do leave if you feel that you'll be better off in your country for other reasons, but not because of an awful person. Do you want to feel all your life that a single idiot ruined your life plans?
How much time do you need to stay in that company to keep your visa? From your story it seems that you've been there for four years. If it isn't much more than a year more, resist. Pretend indifference or, even better, feel it. Make plans for what you'll do when you can change jobs. Get support from your wife and family. And trust yourself.
You can. Get rid of your phone. Most of us don't have a job that actually requires a phone, and it's really as matter of your work willing to take advantage of the fact that most of you won't push back when pressed. You can take advantage of the fact that they won't pay for you to carry a phone.
I finally got rid of my phone about a month ago. Started off deleting all the apps, stopped carrying it. Finally, took a roofing hammer and smashed it to bits. I may purchase a pay-as-you-go "brick" and leave it in the trunk of my car for emergencies, but otherwise I will never have an internet connected device that I carry on me at all times. It's needless for most of us.
You can talk about how convenient it is to have things like Maps at all times, and to be sure that is convenient. Just requires a little forethought and planning. Don't give into the FOMO, smash your phone.
The beautiful thing about that is it makes it difficult, but not impossible, to reach me. No one on my project has my number. They know who does. That person knows to respect my time. They also know I don't always pick up.
So there's multiple levels of filtering that means that if it arrives, it arrives as a voicemail, and is something so important it requires attention ASAP, -and- is something that can't be addressed by someone else (since if it is, it'll be faster to find someone who can figure it out than to reach me). So it's a very small class of problems that actually get through, and they're usually the ones I -do- care about.
I was probably checking it more for the first month to be honest, but after breaking my own and others expectations of a swift reply I find it much easier to respond at my leisure.
Edit: communication at work is expected over internal IM and email, and my previous solution was to not give out my number. I feel this works better.
After all, if I'm 3 hours late responding and it was dire I would have been contacted via other means.
Perhaps a middle ground is having a dedicated work phone, and then turning that off when you are not on the clock and not rostered to be on call.
https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/7029561?hl=en
I was amazed that I wasn't bothered once. The no release thing leading up to the vacation was a huge saver I think. Thats not to say I haven't been fucked by this company. I worked all day December 30th (Saturday I think) and a half day on NYE this year. But in general things I've put in like only doing releases on Tuesday to keep them far away from the weekend and only doing system patches once per month outside of super critical things (Meltdown and Spectre) have saved me. Again though I still get fucked on occasion.
But I mostly fuck myself into working either because I feel pressured by the sheer weight of ever building tasks and bugs or because there is something fun I want to try in our application, generally performance optimizations make me happy and give me a sense of accomplishment. I can be found doing those some early Saturday mornings before getting on with my day.
From what I've seen, in a sample size of three commercial workplaces with software projects, I think it varies from person to person and company to company.
At my current enterprisey gig, my perception is that some of my colleagues are very poor at setting boundaries with work, especially in terms of signing out of the team's slack after hours. This isn't forced by the environment, it's people choosing to remain plugged in. Some of my other colleagues are much better at setting boundaries. I managed to last about 1.5 years in my role before checking my work email or work slack outside of business hours.
In previous gigs at a small company I've seen far worse culture in terms of crunch time to hit project milestones or close deals, but also fairly positive leadership at times from the CEO telling people to go home.
You want to work for a company where people signing in to company slack/Skype when they are meant to be on leave are kindly but firmly hounded by colleagues and management to disconnect and go actually have their holiday.
Maybe I am sort of fresh in the workforce (3 yrs) but I just don't allow this - if I am not in the office I don't work. I don't have slack on my phone or whatever and I have strict boundaries working 9-5. Does it become worse when I have more exp?
But most of this is self-inflicted via tacitly accepting and reinforcing cultural norms that don't actually need to be followed. I've yet to work at a place that attempted to abuse my boundaries once I made it clear I respected them. I.e., "Didn't you see that email I sent last night?" "I did when I got in today", they now know I don't check email after hours. No one wants to 'officially' say "You should have no work life balance; we expect you to be on call 24/7", so just making it clear that you won't voluntarily do it, and will presume that you are always truly off the clock when not at work, means they tacitly accept it.
I keep weird hours due to working remotely and across time zones, and I do encourage people to contact me by phone for anything time-sensitive when I'm offline. But that almost never happens, people are usually OK with waiting until I get back online to answer their queries.
Some form of this is more the rule than the exception on my team, because the people who don't work remotely still have lives (pick up the kids, avoid the rush-hour traffic, whatever) -- and also have to be flexible about their hours due to the multiple time zones.
This includes people with 1 to 25+ years experience FWIW. So I wouldn't worry about it, if you want to have a strict 9-5 boundary you can find good places to work (just not on anything mission-critical). If you prefer to work 40 hours a week on some other reasonable schedule, you can also find good places to work.
I once had a colleague who worked a very strict 9-5 and could have been called in an emergency but we all understood it would have to be a REAL emergency before we bothered that guy. He did a great job and everyone respected him, despite his being probably the only guy in the building keeping such a rigid schedule.
It's painful to watch. Glad to hear you're not falling for it.
This is commonplace in Europe. Vacation is vacation, and largely this is respected.
For full time roles, they DO have 23 to 25 days vacation minimum, unlike that evil PTO of 15 days (or worse, unlimited vacation) where you have to cancel your honeymoon if you get the flu that year.
Getting on calls at 8pm (due to time zone different), emails on the weekend, work travel on bank holidays, etc.
A thousand times this. Very few of the lessons my parents taught me apply in the corporate world. Be honest and straight with people, assume good intent, take responsibility, etc.
All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors.
I am not even allowed to tell a candidate (another human being that probably NEEDS a paycheck) why I didn't hire them and what they can do to improve their viability.
Just because the company has discarded this person it also means I must discard them as well? It kills me every time, but I NEED my paycheck more than I prefer to help my fellow human.
Companies didn't create these policies arbitrarily and unprovoked. They became necessary because of some people who took advantage of the legal system to get settlements. It's in the company's best interest to protect itself from frivolous lawsuits, so it's better to be safe than sorry.
Which isn't to say that there aren't people who actually are discriminated against, but in this example it's not a company "discarding" someone as much as it is covering its bases.
He didn't win, but we still had lawyer costs and what not. It is not an overblown fear at all.
It would take some hard evidence for me, the unemployed or in the less powerful position, to really make a go of proving I wasn't hired because of some discrimination.
The fear of blackballing on the employee side for many things and the fear of lawsuits (which, when you sign on at employer, typically includes some language about arbitration these days) on the employer side are overblown, I agree, and makes everyone cut throat.
I want to make enough to pay for rent, food, and have some time off to chill. Your company wants to stay and business and make money. Let's make a deal that benefits us both.
I thought that it was the other way around. You need to have always ready the reasons why a candidate has been rejected and give them on request. Otherwise, they can sue you as your reasons are not clean and transparent.
But, I guess that this depends on the country's laws.
Conversely, one company I worked for did have us provide candidates thorough feedback, though that was only for those who didn't pass from a code challenge to an interview. Perhaps the hiring managers have them feedback, I'm not sure.
PS: the code challenge we gave was carefully put together so as to both be reasonably quick to complete for a skilled developer, but be vague enough in requirements to not have a single answer that could be copy-pasted from a Google search. For anyone who didn't pass, I'd typically write two to three pages, focused entirely on objective metrics, and online resources for further learning should the candidate choose to apply again in the future. We didn't use it as a binary yes / no test, but to inform the discussion we would have in the in-person interview assuming the candidate had a sufficient level of skill.
"We found someone more qualified. Thank you for your interest."
Then you aren't doing it right. There is something exceedingly shocking about a brutal bluntness. Master this and you will forever change your perspective on job interviews, relationships, marriage, and leadership. You will know when you really nail it because people will begin to describe you as articulate or eloquent.
Honesty is highly valued, which is counter-intuitive to perceptions of the corporate work culture where kindness is the most highly valued interpersonal quality. How can you be brutally honest if honesty often hurts peoples' feelings? Be confident and frame your remarks with a dose of empathy. People don't like having their feelings trampled upon, but they generally prefer that to little white lies.
> but only when used appropriately (strategically).
Epic fail. Always be honest and direct with people. If there is some policy preventing the most direct and appropriate answer then don't respond at all. People are generally good at discerning when you are tap-dancing or spinning your wheels (cowardly bullshit).
> but I NEED my paycheck more than
Once you have allowed your ethics to be compromised the blood is in the water. This is a natural stress that other people will detect as a deception and a weakness. You are compromised and available for manipulation. You are a puppet. If a job makes me feel that insecure, like the last one, I will leave and go work somewhere else.
I'm doing that in my current company and I feel it will get me fired (which I don't mind that much). When asked why my development tasks are taking so long, I'm honestly pointing out the myriad of architecture/design and infrastructure/CI/CD fuckups I have to spend time dealing with every day (I work in a major bank). Of course, people responsible for setting up things this way are still running things, and don't want to hear about consequences of their previous decisions.
If the product is crap in production everybody will be harmed, but at least you might have a get out of jail card. When I have pulled this in the past it serves as a forcing function for decision makers to revisit their poorly conceived decisions. For some reason it is so much easier to make bad decisions and order the consequences of such across an organization than it is to simply own it.
Honesty is not bullying and if someone's idea of honesty is that, then that someone is likely a dick.
Honesty is not about unleashing ones negative emotions on other people, but geek culture tend to equate the two and then proceed from there.
Really? I've never heard that. Can you give some examples? Preferably ones that seem harmless but could go wrong. I guess providing such examples is my job but I'm too tiered, so help me out.
As a consequence, I was able to provide detailed feedback every time I rejected a candidate, for example, without even thinking of the legal consequences.
This means no going out for drinks to make a deal, no business lunch to brainstorm, no meeting on the golf course to pitch your plan. Not even a discussion of confidential matters in the private office of one or the other.
Liability as in the more that you have said, the more likely it is that a lawsuit will be filed based on a misunderstanding of what you did say.
It doesn't matter how unlikely the lawsuit is to win on the merits. Fighting in court and discovery both bring costs and distractions that institutions would prefer to avoid.
I really like interview questions that have binary results. If you can do X, you can do this job. That way if a candidate fails, they pretty much know why they failed. They couldn't do X. It's not always possible to phrase questions like that, but when I can, I do.
"All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors."
The corporate world is only a reflection of the society that makes it up. There are plenty of people who are dishonest and manipulative. There is no real way to "fix" the corporate world.
Ergo there are only two ways to fix it, both of them only involving yourself:
I see a number of comments here opining that the current workforce health crisis is driven by a "money is happiness" society. You know what money buys you in this case? Freedom. The freedom to act how you wish and not care about this game.
Once you are free from that, it is a matter of perspective:
"The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."
- "This is Water", David Foster Wallace https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf
I think they should have given you a personality test before giving you HR responsibilities. I'm not trying to disparage you, but you seem not particularly suited to that job.
The myth of equal contactual relationship between employer/employee is painful to see turned into a helpful platitude of the genre "if you don't like it, find somewhere else."
The older I get, the more apparent it becomes that most of my peers and friends have lived extremely "privileged" lives solely based on the freedom of choice that they've had over certain aspects of life. In most cases the source of the privilege is a combination of well educated guardians and money.
I find when talking to these people, they can never seem to fathom why someone can't just simply "get out" of a situation like this, or don't seem to understand what it could possibly be about their upbringing that lets them see the world this way or gives them a certain advantage. A lot of them seem to just see this privilege as a scalar value that just corresponds to a net worth, rather than seeing it as this incredibly powerful resource that can seed safety, well-being, knowledge, personal skills, mental stability, ... the list goes on.
They don't all have it uniformly bad in all areas in exactly the same way, and there is no shame looking for something that better matches your ethics, personality, productive style of working, etc. Don't stay at a place you know is wrong longer than you need to for being called "naive".
> "if you don't like it, find somewhere else."
>> don't give your best efforts to the place you're at
> "It kills me every time, but I NEED my paycheck more than I prefer to help my fellow human."
What's killing you here? "It" is your decision to comply. A more active phrasing might be "I kill me every time I choose to comply with management's requests..."
Also, it sounds like you chose to believe, if only by accident, that money is a human need. This is false...we simply have cultures around the world where asking our community for support is not considered acceptable. Again, this is a lie. If you ask enough people for help, you'll eventually find someone willing. There's more than enough of everything to go around, especially money.
But ultimately, it all comes back to money. That's the rub, isn't it? Whether it's your or someone else's, "money makes the world go round".
It’s not uncommon when applying for a job that you take a “personality test” that measures not just technical knowledge, but also scores you on traditionally “soft” traits like assertiveness vs. agreeableness, with the hiring manager getting a readout of where you fall relative to the “ideal” range of that metric for the job you’re applying for.
We recently had an open position, and I know for a fact that we turned down multiple perfectly qualified people with successful track records in this exact role because they didn’t pass a personality test they received after the interview process - the reasoning for giving them the test after was that this personality test is particularly expensive. The “solution” was not to ditch the expensive personality test, but to bite the bullet and give all the rest of the candidates the test beforehand. But my eyes were opened.
I’m very worried that applying metrics to people, not performance, is creating a homogeneous culture that goes along to get along, resulting in silent acceptance of the situation described in the article.
From "Neoliberalism: origins, theory, definition"
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.htm...
So how from the ground up can we make corporate culture in America more focused on the social health of their employees?
I know as a team lead I've tried to empower the people under me to manage their own time, and actively encouraged them to ignore workplace communication after hours
The biggest issue with RSI and other repetive-use injuries (which happens in many professions and even athletics, especially with bad form) is that it happens slowly, then suddenly. It's so slow that it's discomfort. And you ignore that discomfort, especially as your concentration is on a computer monitor with important stuff to worry about being displayed on it. Also, sometimes inflammation happens later (later that night, later that week, etc.).
Start now to reduce your RSI (and RSI isn't your only problem, more on that below):
Get an external keyboard either that has an ergonomic design is is comfortable for you, and a mouse too. A Mac keyboard will be nightmare, don't use it. A Mac 'Magic Mouse' or trackpad will cause damage. It's not made for serious long-term work (there might be a lawsuit one day).
Pro tip: this may sound crazy, but get two mice, one left, one right. Change often. Learn to use the lefty even if you're right-handed, or vice-versa. You'll be surprised at how quickly you get used to it (and you'll laugh when someone tries to show you something on your workstation).
Get a desk that moves up and down. Spend some time standing, some time sitting. Again, change often.
Next, other than RSI is your neck and back. As your rhomboids get stretched and weak from forward rotation of the shoulders, the rear neck muscles get stretched and weak, the serratus goes unused, the chest and front-neck muscles get short and tight... You arch your head forward which causes your head (which already weighs about 8 pounds) to exert a lot more than 8 pounds of force on those muscle groups. And you also look at your phone all day, which you hold down below you. Well you're in for a world of nightmares and headaches that'll make the RSI a distraction by comparison.
Start early to avoid these things, before it becomes too late.
Sincerely,
A guy with some greying and screwed up wrists/hands and neck.
Suddenly, pain everywhere. The tips of my fingers were burning after every keystroke, some of the muscles/tendons in my right wrist felt like they were about to snap after using the mouse for a few hours.
How are these products still on the market? Two weeks in I bought my own mouse and keyboard and haven't had a single bit of pain since.
I was in so much pain one day I couldn't use the mouse with my right hand, and began using it with my left hand. The pain gradually went away and I've never had problems since. I think I had a bad habit of some kind when mousing with my right hand I never developed when using my left. Now almost exclusively mouse left handed.
That said, physical exercise, especially hiking and yoga, have helped my neck, back, arm, leg stiffness & pain, etc. considerably. It's as necessary as brushing teeth for me to feel physically ok to be able to keep working in an office.
Stretching is only half the battle. One must stretch the correct muscles (the ones that are too tight, like the pecs and scalenes) and strengthen the ones that are loose and weak (like the rhomboids, serratus and others).
If pursuing weightlifting, which I highly highly recommend, I recommend a real trainer (not most half-baked ones you see in gyms), and spending a lot of time specifically nerding out on exercise physiology, even physical therapy. There are some very good YouTube channels - one of my favorite is Calisthenics Movement.
One simply cannot work in an office or at a computer workstation and expect not to have the body pains of a coal miner by the time you hit your 40's without balancing out muscular strength and joint mobility that you lose by doing this.
Much of strength training, a lot of people are surprised to know, involve neurological connections created simply using muscles in movement patterns that are new. It's very similar to the way you learn proprioception (standing on a skateboard, surfboard, or a subway car without holding onto anything). In the same way, muscles get stronger simply because more fibers are recruited, due to repetitive motions. In the early stages, this is much and perhaps most of the 'gains' in strength.
It's getting late and I've fallen into a rabbit hole. In short, do weight training or SOME sort of mobility work (yoga, pilates, whatever) if you work at a computer for a living. These random HN messages can save you thousands of dollars of future medical bills / PT bills and incalculable discomfort.
I began to get problems in my right wrist from too much mousing (and probably using wrong mice for too long). I started switching between right and left mouse usage, and not only did it reduce the pain in the right side, but I found I adapted to left mousing fairly quickly and easily.
Currently, have switched out my mouse for a trackball in the right hand and a trackpad in the left (though occasionally). Next up is the keyboard and chair.
The body adapts to whatever you do. If you crawl around all day long on all fours scratching at rocks, your body will adapt to that, too. Adaptations have a price.
The height of your chair and the desk are critical here. [1] I have a desk that I can adjust between standing and normal, and I switch between the two when I can. That can be expensive, though.
I started to make a list of muscular issues (interior shoulder rotation, pelvic tilt) but I realized that first, I'm not qualified to provide the top problems that everyone faces, and second, I'm not really sure which resources to best learn from. Instead, I suggest people spend some time searching in YouTube (or the web) for 'computer posture problems' or 'shoulder pain computer' or 'neck pain text neck' and looking at the Physical Therapy links, sometimes which have a lot of information.
At a high level what works for ME is to 'switch it up.' Use left mouse and right mouse. Stand and sit. I never use a laptop, but at my age I've reached the point that my body punishes me viciously if I sit hunched over for even a couple of hours of time or angle my shoulder, neck or right forearm too long in one bad position.
Body awareness is important and it's hard to convey what that really means - I learned that from a PT and from weight training. It's not something you can read and gain.
But you can be aware of shitty posture when you're using your phone by looking down at it - a HUGE cause of neck pain. At first glance this site isn't bad for a starting point.[2].
1 - http://www.computer-posture.co.uk/shoulder-pain-computer/
2 - https://www.spine-health.com/blog/modern-spine-ailment-text-...
I was scouring the net and ran across a developer who swore that The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain by Sarno fixed his issues. I looked him up, proved to myself he was a dev and then basically said, fuck it, let's try it despite it seeming woo-woo to the extreme.
Little to no pain to this day. This was after MONTHS of PT and ergonomic changes that didn't solve the problem.
Anyway. Just my two cents.
*EDIT - one of these was the article (perhaps both), https://blog.evanweaver.com/2012/09/05/a-programmers-guide-t... and http://aaroniba.net/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain
I also think that my issues were at least in part due to muscle tension which was coming not due to physical issues but due to emotional issues. Keep an open mind and read "The Great Pain Deception" and see if it applies to your life.
I really think that in addition to the physical benefits of rock climbing helping me, it was also the realization that if I could climb rocks then there wasn't anything really wrong with my hands, and that pain when using the computer was a conditioned response.
* Hand, forearm, shoulder and neck massage. Weekly if need be. Don't discount problems in your shoulders causing issues in your wrists.
* Stopped using a single hand mouse, learned keyboard shortcuts. My RSI was worse on my mouse hand. The constant moving right hand off keyboard at 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock to click with mouse was a killer. Keeping hands centered and relatively immobile over keyboard helped.
* Bought my own office chair that fit me. I am short through the torso and chairs could never lift me high enough for me to avoid lifting elbows.
* Bought an ergonomic keyboard and mouse.
* Bought an ergonomic keyboard augment (kind of a tray that the keyboard sat upon, that had padded extensions under either side of my wrists) that kept my wrists off the edge of desk, edge of laptop, etc.)
* Every job I got, I brought my own chair and equipment and tossed whatever my employer provided.
* I had an ergonomics consultant come in and check my posture, desk, and chair set up.
As a heavy traveler, I'd really try the massage because you can get a massage in lots of locations. My shoulders were a great part of the problem.
Good luck.
Edit: I think I should also explain some of the difficulties I had with employers. Occasionally I got crap because I created an extra chair by bringing my own. I explained that I spent more time in my office chair than I did in my own bed, and I didn't purchase my bed by finding the cheapest mattress. Since I was in my chair more than my bed, I had even higher expectation of fit and comfort. If they had a problem with my asset being on their premise, they were free to buy the chair from me at my cost. Please see copies of medical bills which I'd be happy to claim as an expense.
The other issue I had was with IT. They would see all the nonstandard equipment and then say "we can't support X because of specialized keyboard or mouse". My response would be "I completely understand the needs of IT for support-ability. Please see copies of my medical bills for RSI and massage treatment. Please have IT procurement buy replacement equipment under IT's procurement control to ensure support-ability."
Both of these strategies proved successful with employers and the IT staff.
Or we can develop or dictation programming skills like John Siracusa.
COLEMAK keyboard layout
Contour RollerMouse Pro3
Regular wrist stretching
Apple keyboard*
*instead of Mechnical keyboards that require more force and vertical movement to depress a key
Edit: formatting
Anyway, if it is tennis elbow, you can buy a strap that alleviates ALL of the pain. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=tennis+elbow+strap My mate couldn't life 1kg with a bicep curl, put the strap on and did 10KG. It is like a miracle!
Longer term, you need to loosen out your bicep and upper traps. But really, just try that strap and see!
* first, switching between using L and R hands for mouse
* eventually, purchased a new mouse: Evoluent VerticalMouse 4 Right - neutralizes your wrist on mouse hand
* software that forces you to take breaks instead of just sitting and typing for hours straight. Workrave is what I use (http://www.workrave.org/) - freeware and lightweight. I take 12 second micro-breaks every 4.5 minutes and a 4 minute break ever 25. Get up, stretch around, wiggle your arms. Staring at a far away corner of the room helps w/ eye strain too
* for plane rides - small, wireless trackball has worked wonders. I can't use a laptop touchpad worth a damn
I ask because at my current job, a lot of work is explicitly motivated by the threat of getting yelled at or publicly shamed in some way. I often wonder if these stressful interactions could just be handled politely but in a way that doesn't automatically turn into work that gets handled invisibly or passed down the chain to some other poor sap.
On the part of people being trained, as I mentioned in another comment, I've seemed to notice that a lot of my Indian and Chinese coworkers, for probably cultural reasons, seem to have this sort of "respect the decisions of 'elders'" mentality and see it as extremely confrontational to disagree with decisions even if in their personal experience they know or have faith that it won't work.
My personal issue was always that I didn't actually know enough about my domain (distributed systems/"backend") to sometimes refute decisions that I had a gut feeling were bad (for example, never had seen anything like a proposed solution being done that way in the open source community or outside of our team -> red flags starting to go off), or that the people who were in my management chain or even more senior coworkers, would refuse to teach/mentor me or even point me toward the correct learning resources.
I ended up spending about 3 years of my free time outside of work learning as much as I could about these subjects (operating system internals, database engines, learning the network stack inside and out, distributed systems primitives, etc etc).
What did I find once I actually started questioning people based on this new knowledge I had? Not a lot of them actually knew what they were talking about. They either couldn't teach me because they themselves didn't know, or they were just afraid to say that they didn't know these things and didn't want to look "stupid".
Long story short, this was the "process" that personally made me extremely confident in being able to call people out on their bullshit since I actually had the means to defend myself objectively.
As a side note, going through this process of intense learning also made me realize that _most_ people don't know any of these things but like to talk as if they do, rather than just admit that they're not experts or unfamiliar with it...
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's spiteful managers like you're hinting at, but from my experience at two major tech companies, a healthy two-way respect is earned by pushing back on management when they're out of line, as I think they know a lot of the time that they're being out of line but they can get away with it.
Anyways, while teaching resilience could be interesting, imo we should also make the world a place where we need less of it, for both moral and practical reasons : not everyone may be able to develop enough resilience to deal with it.
I got the opportunity to apply for my current job yesterday. I expect an offer letter and threats to sign within two days or lose the job I have next week. My future company is a lowest bidder and was selected from around thirty applicants.
This won't happen as long as the worst offenders can push individual arbitration agreements. The Supreme Court heard arguments about them recently, and a decision on whether they are legal is expected soon.
On the other hand, electronic health records should make it easy to show with statistics if a workplace causes chronic disease, relative its peers. We just need to add employer information to the standard information that hospitals collect. Certainly a group of university hospitals would be interested in seeing this data, and could organize an initiative to collect it.
Edit: Actually, a way to link massive amounts of healthcare data to patients' employers might already be available. Medical records often store insurance information, which can be used to figure out a patient's employer if they are the subscriber.
It doesn't have to be like this, and we will find our way out one day, be it through UBI, AI or other post-capitalist mechanism. Might take a few hundred years though, mind you. Once Trump has been flushed through at least.
> Dying for a Paycheck, published by HarperBusiness and released on March 20, maps a range of ills in the modern workplace — from the disappearance of good health insurance to the psychological effects of long hours and work-family conflict — and how these are killing people.
Thought experiment: How can the world be different if we changed the understood definition of family from "home life" or "family of current origin" to "family of choice"? What then happens if the majority chooses humanity as its family, followed by collectively choosing to meet the needs of all in the family?
Compare the working conditions of those jobs to those of current white-collar work.
You could reframe as underemployment a lot of the extent to which jobs in the past were less stressful (if they actually were). Trading stress for fantastic material wealth is a highly popular option afforded by technology.
The numbers say you're wrong: http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/summer04/w10466.html
You show me a graph that ends two decades ago. About poverty.
Of course it is still valid to ask how a healthier workplace could be created. Just the notion that things were better in the past seems very unlikely to me.
America seems to be trending towards the Asian model of work.
I honestly had managers at the Kmart retail store I worked at who struck me as smarter (and certainly more humble) than at least one software manager I've had
20 years ago, before the lax in regulations made the whole world a competitive nightmare for most workers.
And if you feel with your limited resources that you need to push your work environment to an unhealthy point to survive, you'd better be sure that you're doing that only after exerting the same shrewd force to get the unreasonably good pricing from your vendors, squeezing your investors for as much money as they'll give you, cut-throating your competition to the same ethically-questionable level, and red-teaming your model and roadmap to be sure you're not wasting one breath on anything superfluous.
Beyond that, if you have truly arrived at a point where you are asking things of your employees that could jeopardize their physical and mental health, be honest and open with your people about it. Candor goes a long way. And then, identify the exact things that are taking a toll on physical and mental health, and address them one at a time.
Unreal. Literally the best feeling ever, no stress at all. The job was hard too but that extra degree of control and self direction made a difference.
People are not rats.
I personally think the biggest thing we could do is to just add a reasonable safety net. I get treated well because my employer knows I have a choice of jobs; if we gave the people on the bottom some minimal safety net so they wouldn't go homeless or starve without working, then employers would have to treat them well enough that working was better than living off the minimal government benefits. And that's a good thing, though it would need to be balanced with how much wealth we have as a society. Certainly, though, we can afford public housing and food for everyone right now, and we should. "Work or starve" is only morally justifiable when society has so little that someone must starve.
But... on the other hand, I do think that in some ways a lot of us (especially a lot of us on hn who are in the top half of computer technicians and software engineers) have it pretty good. For me? I know I had a lot of negative feelings about management when I was younger. I thought they were stupid and evil. I became a lot happier as an employee after I blew a whole lot of time and money trying to run a business myself.
And it was ramen profitable, but god damn did I work hard for that ramen. I'd be most of the way to retirement if I had lived on what I lived on and worked for someone else, investing the difference in index funds. But I think running that business really helped me be a happier employee; I mean, I am not saying I understand the business bullshit... I don't know what to do about all the moral dilemmas at that level, about negotiation, about hiding information, etc... some of it still does seem kind of stupid and evil. But I understand that business bullshit exists, and that I don't understand it - I ran the experiment, and the data showed that I really had no idea what management and business development was all about.
Because of my time running the company, I'm much more laid back about letting management manage than I was before I ran my own company, because I tried. I gave it my best shot, and I'm just not very good at it. I'm a pretty good technician, though, and I really appreciate that I'm in a world where that means I get a well-paying and comfortable job where all I have to do is be that good technician, and not be too rude to anyone else. I don't have to worry about not saying this or that or the other (well, with some exceptions. As a general rule, I can tell my boss anything with the door closed... if that's not true, I get another job, because clearly they want someone with a different skillset.)
It can also be better.
Exercise is about priorities and it's far easier to not do it and create excuses than it is to find the time.
Eating right however in the usa is perverse it's costs more to eat healthy and it's worse if you travel for work.
I don't have anything against saving the environment nor saving ourselves from toxic work practices. I just don't think we need to stoop to mountebankery to demonstrate the need for awareness and change. Such consequentialism undermines good causes, I think.
https://www.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263...
All you have to do with an office job is actually use your gym membership and not eat take out every day.
And here I was, thinking it's not so simple as to just tell people what to do and everything will fall into place...
Edit: I mean the title of this post here. The title of the linked article is, of course, very easy to read.