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Comment by epicgiga | Hacker News Reader

A lot of companies are actively factoring this into their HR model.

Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out.

Increasingly this is the direction western corporations are moving. Their ideal model is: place performance quotas above long term sustainability, people then burn themselves out, you then fire them for performance reasons, and you have them on an aggressive noncompete and threaten them with it when they try to work elsewhere after. Totally consume them. Basically institutionalised "f--k you", gleefully chewing up other human beings.

In some ways we're moving to something worse than slavery. At least with slaves they were seen as "assets" rather than "temporary rentals". They had to take care of them out of necessity, so their evil had that limit on it.

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If you're talking about US chattel slavery, your comparison is way off base and you should probably edit your post. Instead of firing an "underperforming" slave they could be legally murdered. Because all descendants were owned by the master indefinitely they could freely breed and rape "top performers" like animals in order to produce more slaves. When we end up with a corporate system that allows for that level of control of life or death in normal circumstances then maybe you can make your comparison. Institutionalized burn out is not it though.

Yes but slaves were expensive. You'd go broke if you just murdered all of them.

Ok torture them into submission then. Still significantly worse than burning someone out in a modern corporate job.

> Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out.

When I was at Amazon, this was the feeling with some employees around me: The stack-ranking meant they were made to a rat-race every year.

I can't seem to recall who, but someone higher-up let it slip when quizzed about higher attrition rate (back in 2010s) that Amazon believed in evolution, and that that meant the slow would eventually give the way for the fast and new. Someone even quipped in an internal email-list that employees were about 8th most important resource to Amazon right after the 7th most important resource: The paper-clips.

Interestingly, and in my observation, the managers got more leeway than individual contributors in terms of evolving slowly. I've also seen rest and vest among managers, but rarely among the engineers. Strange power imbalances, if you ask me, existed and could be felt across every organization I worked for.

I was wondering if/when Amazon would get mentioned in this thread, lol.

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Cop-out rationalization: conventional wisdom holds that IT/CS folks should jump every 2-3 years or they're leaving money on the table -- and turnover rates reflect that. They're going in 2 years anyway, so get what you want out of them before they go. Most of them can't write fizzbuzz anyway, and it's easy to poach better talent by throwing money at them.

> Interestingly, and in my observation, the managers got more leeway than individual contributors in terms of evolving slowly

Managers run the system, so the system evolves to support them and their needs, like a more reasonable pace. Another way to look at it is if you've made it through the burnout phase then you're going to hang around longer, so it makes sense to hold on to proven performers who have much longer employment horizons.

In my first job back in the 80's a VP sent out a memo to everyone about the importance of reusing paperclips.

Naturally it had the opposite effect of us dumping boxes of them in the trash.

That seems a bit odd. Maybe he’s not an effective manager, but why would you go out of your way to not do what he asked?

Defense Contractor.

I don't find that strange at all. People in power protect their power and cushy life while exploiting others.

There is a difference between being a slave i.e. being owned and being a "wage slave" i.e. operating under significant coercion. We are all coerced to some degree; that's part of being an organism (coerced by nature) and living in a society (coerced by the crushing weight of social interactions). But we aren't owned.

Though it's not your intention, this blurring of categories justifies real slavery. If everyone is a slave then no one is a slave. If "bourgeois freedom" is an illusion then every kind of repression can be justified by the claim that it will bring about "real freedom".

Actually, the freedoms that we have are real and they matter.

In Byung-Hul Chan's book, "Burnout Society," he lists this self-delusion of freedom as a foundational component of the emergence of burnout.

It's a good book, I'd recommend it, and you can draw your own conclusions from reading it. It's like 80 pages, too.

> But we aren't owned.

This is a weird subjective/objective thing. While people may not be chattel slaves to a slaveowner, there is a case to be made of bonded/indentured labor for many. The view of chattel slavery seems to fit well into dominant narratives, as it relies on there being a subject who is enslaving another. Modern conceptions of indentured labor, however, are under an objective threat of violence, and this doesn't fit well into dominant narratives of how exploitation works.

> If everyone is a slave then no one is a slave.

There's nothing indicating that the parent comment believes that everyone is a slave. In fact, there's nothing indicating in the parent comment that he believes we are enslaved.

Minor correction: The author’s name appears as Byung-Chul Han in the English translations of his books.

(Not OP but) I know it’s an unreasonable and probably inappropriate comparison, but I’m also old enough to have watched the demographics of professional computer programming shift from mostly white guys managing mostly other white guys to mostly white guys managing mostly brown people. I really don’t think it’s my imagination that at least some of the mostly white guys doing the managing have adopted more and more of a plantation-driver mentality.

This IS an unreasonable and inappropriate comparison. Anecdotally I've been overworked by a diverse group of shitty bosses of a variety of races, nationalities, and genders over the years. Nobody has a monopoly on shitty management. Singling out white men as uniquely shitty managers and then slapping on "plantation driver" is super racist!

Actually I meant I agreed that OP's comparison was (somewhat) unreasonable and inappropriate.

HN does have diverse commenters. In a single day, I managed to see 5 distinct comparison that I wouldn't have anywhere else.

Note - this is only just an observation.

Really amusing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs for fresh graduates with an up or out structure like I-Banking, management consisting or law. People know what they’re getting into when they start these jobs. The hours and workload are not a secret. Most people do their two years and get out. A lot of it amounts to pointless hazing but no one is deceived into thinking Goldman Sachs has a great work life balance.

The huge majority of companies operate on nothing like this model. Either they aim to build up a workforce for the long haul and as such care about having a sustainable workload, with occasional spikes and lulls, or they’re just jobs that are hard, that suck and that as a result have a high turnover and pay relatively well for low standards in hiring. See working in an Amazon warehouse.

The companies that do follow this model suck, like EA, but again that’s not a secret. There’s an inexhaustible supply of suckers for every industry that people really, really want to get into and whether it’s film or video games they’re always awful, though at least film pays better.

> People know what they’re getting into when they start these jobs.

Fresh graduates absolutely do not know what they are getting into when they start their first job.

No one actually knows what their first job will be like. But trying to hide that you expect 60-100 hours a week is stupidly counterproductive. Banking, law, consulting are pretty straight up about the hours. People would quit halfway through their first month, their first week of you tried to pull 100 hours on those who didn’t know they’d be working those hours.

A fresh college graduate at age 22 does not understand what 60-100 hours mean. The closest frame of reference they have is pulling an all nighter before an exam or to get a term project done. They can't contemplate their romantic relationship falling apart, the lack of feedback resulting in continuous self doubt keeping them up at night when they're supposed to be resting or how shallow friendships between colleagues are compared to friendships between students (especially when their colleagues have families).

They understand what it means to soldier on despite being tired. They don't understand how much they've taken for granted all that support and feedback that was able to let them cope with the stress, and that now they're on their own.

From my friends who recently graduated and took these jobs in nyc, this wasnt so suprising. They expected to work 10-12 hour days. The familial stuff sucks if you were planning on shacking up at 23, but most people just work their day then drink aggresively in midtown before ubering back to whatever 2k/mo studio tenement they managed to find in brooklyn. Take a boozy trip to the hamptons a couple times in the summer, take your LA trip, go to europe. Suddenly working 12 hour days doesnt seem so bad when you have a rolex on your wrist and a high concentration of adderal in your veins.

I expect in a couple years it will get old, but people are waiting to settle down well into their 30s these days to extend these years of pure adult independence for as long as they can.

That’s the thing about burnout; it feels great because you’re so productive and respected ... until one day your energy is gone. It might take years, it depends on how much support you get from people around at managing your stress, and of course it depends on your own ability to manage it too. I’m skeptical of how effective toys like a Rolex and booze is long term at easing the stress.

My ex-wife felt like she was on top of the world until she was burnt out and it developed into full fledged depression at age 27. I’m not saying everyone will end up like her, everyone won’t develop lung cancer from smoking either.

> Fresh graduates absolutely do not know what they are getting into when they start their first job.

Are you saying that doctors entering their first residency have no idea it's going to be a long 2-4 years? When a friend of mine gradated law school and landed her choice job, her comment was 'the next 2 years are going to suck, but then I'll be set'. Years later she was right.

We are not talking about starting any random job, but those jobs that everyone knows have an initial hazing type of culture. The large majority of jobs are not like this, but big law and finance are and those graduates going into those industries are fully aware.

Knowing in theory and living it for years on end are two very different things

> Companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs for fresh graduates with an up or out structure like I-Banking, management consisting or law.

I take it you've never worked in a call center? When I did, anything under a `10` (out of 10) on the random surveys they sent out was considered a failure.

> they’re just jobs that are hard, that suck and that as a result have a high turnover and pay relatively well for low standards in hiring.

I have worked in a call centre.

I did the call center thing for a major bank during university. It was brutal work. But I learned a lot about shameless selling which is pretty useful.

> Companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs for fresh graduates with an up or out structure like I-Banking, management consisting or law.

I'm not sure, I see a lot of companies moving to this model and they are not well paying. They copy startup environments but only in appearance (like a ping pong table for decoration that you are not allowed to play), because of that they justify that you must be passionate and work long hours for a low pay.

> companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs

wasn't my experience at all, I did get "well paid jobs" in startups, but in the end, combining 3 jobs in one and doing 80 hours a week isn't worth it even if your salary looks pretty high.

How and why someone will work 80 hours a week? Don't they have families, friends, sport, or a hobby? Why is it necessary?

In startups that's usually how they trick you: they hire you even if you don't have much experience, they give you a decent salary, then they make you feel like you have to work more in order to "prove" their choice was the right one.

I've also seen this "culture" of "we're one big family" in startups, which just feels weird and forced.

One startup I interviewed at, as an experienced developer, told me (paraphrasing here) "you'll be paid a salary lower than what you probably expect, and your first few months you'll need to work overtime to get used to our trendy tech stack, we don't offer health insurance but we do offer...not quite shares, but, sort of ownership interests. You could become a millionaire!"

Yeah no thanks.

Because of OKRs. Management is setting it so that no-one can reach the objectives. Then there is some speech that OKRs are not really meant to be completed fully but they will still hold it against you if it's not 100%

No, because these kinds of places suck the blood out of people in their early 20s. Usually after they have moved to a new area and left behind all their social connections.

When you're 25 and have no ties and no responsibilities, working 12-15 hours a day isn't the impossibility that it is when you are 35 and have a wife, kids, your own house, and social obligations.

> Companies that expect people to work this hard are almost exclusively very well paying entry level jobs for fresh graduates with an up or out structure

I'm friends with accountants for the big 4 firms - they are in no way, shape, or form, high paying initial positions.

If you would only take a look at europe ... oh the horrors you will see.

Be clearer. I worked a ton of crap jobs in Ireland and always got out at the end of my shift unless someone didn’t show up and I agreed to work longer because I wanted more money. I have a number of relatives in medicine and professional services and long, hard hours describes their jobs well but it’s not chew them up and spit them out; If you want the big bucks you work the long hours.

Its hard to be clear, without betraying too much. i only have me and my experience and how i see others, and what ive been told.

Maybe the downvotes are meritted, though i didnt mean the hard work, i did actually mean that myself and many i know feel its a grind, and not in a good way.

You somehow make it sound as if i have something against hard work, but its quiet the opposite. It may very well be that my job is a single case of good ol toxic work environment.

<quote>In some ways we're moving to something worse than slavery. At least with slaves they were seen as "assets" rather than "temporary rentals". They had to take care of them out of necessity, so their evil had that limit on it.</quote>

Some of us prefer burnout at reasonable pay than being raped, beaten, and denied all freedoms.

> raped, beaten, and denied all freedoms.

Towards the later stages of slavery, the first 2 were outright illegal, and the third is somewhere on par with wage slavery today.

It sounds like a hot take on the surface, but modern wage slavery is objectively worse than late-stage actual slavery in some regards. We have not really progressed as society. The only thing that has really advanced is the availability of entertainment to placate the masses and prevent most of them from realising that they are in fact little better off than slaves. More than half of all Americans are less than 1 paycheck away from homelessness and subsequent incarceration. There is only illusion of freedom, the reality is they're chained to their jobs.

Fun fact: medieval serfs had about 4 months of 'free' time each year. Of course it still included housekeeping and various chores, but it was nothing compared to the load of full time employment that everyone experiences today almost all year round.

'Late-stage' slavery, if it has a meaningful referent at all, refers to chattel slavery in the United States, which is commonly regarded as one of the worst forms of slavery ever devised, much worse than the forms of bondage recorded in (e.g.)classical antiquity and the system of medieval serfdom.

> Fun fact: medieval serfs had about 4 months of 'free' time each year. Of course it still included housekeeping and various chores, but it was nothing compared to the load of full time employment that everyone experiences today almost all year round.

I can only speak for myself here, but I work a full-time job as an SWE.

There are 52 weeks in a year, I have weekends off - that there is 104 days, or (roughly) 3 months of "free time" each year.

Factor in my PTO allowances, plus the fact that I only work 8 hour days, factor out the commute time (about 1-1.5 hours each day), and sleep time...

I'm pretty sure I have at least 4 months of "free time" available each year.

Ultimately, though, it's not the amount - it's what you do with that free time that matters.

The following is entirely my opinion, and not based on empirical evidence, with that said...

I think the issue is that a lot of people don't believe they have a choice. When you are getting hired, make a point that you are not willing to work more than 40 hours a week (unless as completely necessary such as an actual emergency which requires your intervention), but for the hours you do work, you will put in your best effort. You're signing a mutual contract, not indentured servitude, serfdom, being "sold", etc.

It would be plain foolish not to hire someone like that (if they did in fact put in their best work). For some reason everyone thinks they have to be a slave to their company, but any company that recognizes their employees wishes will be able to reduce turnover (which can be very expensive) and in-turn have a higher morale which can improve performance.

I also think that parents are not teaching their kids good skills. I don't recall my parents saying anything other than "work hard" and "do your homework". They didn't tell me how to navigate the real world after school, I figured it out on my own. I learned how to find a company that not only wants me to work for them, but that I'd like to work for them as well. What questions to ask in the interviews, what signs to look out for that raise red flags on how employees are treated, how to research companies to see what the employees say about it and what benefits they may provide.

As a result I probably don't make as much as I could be, or I'm not as far in my career as I could be. But that's okay, because I get to go home at night and not worry about work, and spend time with my family. I also have the option to move jobs at will at any time, for any reason. I was in a job once that wasn't the perfect fit, and found an even better job as a result of the experience I gained working there for a fairly short time.

I love my job now, and I don't know what I would do without it. I'm very lucky that someone has put in the thousands (or hundred thousands, millions, tens of millions?) of dollars to create a business that is able to take advantage of the skill I have without me owning my own business.

Lastly, people are easy to be bitter and resentful. I'd hate to look back and feel like I was taken advantage of for the majority of my life, or missed out on important life events for a job that didn't matter.

I'm in favour of making slavery legal again for the sole purpose of making people like this slaves for a year just so they figure out how fucking stupid they are.

Could you please not post like this here? We're trying for a different sort of forum than, let's say, internet default.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Yeah, pretty sure they had to work long hours with little vacation too; the pay wasn't great either... WTF is wrong with people

The idiocy in viewing these as the two possible options is staggering.

I don't think raegis was suggesting there are only two options, but simply had qualms with the way it was compared to slavery.

Comparing modern day burnout to slavery is a gross exaggeration and it's honestly shocking that this is the top comment in the thread.

There also seems to be some kind of institutionalized Stockholm Syndrome for this. People are led to believe that:

- if they don't accept a job like this, they won't get a job anywhere else - this is the only way to make good money - there is no other way to rise up the ranks - loyalty is rewarded - this is a just sacrifice - they're invincible due to their youth

What they're doing however is working / giving away their life for free. It's cheaper for companies to hire people that give away an extra 10-20 free hours a week instead of hiring somebody to work for those extra hours. Even they say "we'll pay you x1.5", they're still making money because they aren't paying x2 for the second person on the payroll.

Unfortunately employees will vehemently defend these practices and even pride themselves on working 10 hours a day. They wear it like a badge of accomplishment and even look down others who don't do the same.

Serfdom is a better metaphor. Microserfs was published in 1994:

“The plot of the novel has two distinct movements: the events at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and the move to Silicon Valley and the "Oop!" project.”

”The novel begins in Redmond as the characters are working on different projects at Microsoft's main campus. Life at the campus feels like a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the lord, and the employees the serfs. The majority of the main characters...are living together in a "geek house", and their lives are dedicated to their projects and the company. Daniel's foundations are shaken when his father, a longtime employee of IBM, is laid off. The lifespan of a Microsoft coder weighs heavily on Daniel's mind.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs

Turns out the author was onto something:

”When Microserfs first came out, most people thought it was a tightly focused anthropological look at a tiny group of historically transient information workers in the American Pacific Northwest. It turns out they were forming a template of the way everyone else in the world works in and around information. As time went on it became a lot broader, instead of a lot narrower, which is what happened with Generation X.”

— Coupland, The Times, June 1998

In Sweden we have many protections against this in theory, but the fact that people are willing to take shit means it's not very effective.

A person I met who is in the video game industry talked about something that happened at one of the companies he did consulting for. A poor guy at that place completely burned himself out and had to be hospitalized to recover. A month after this guy was burned out, a 23 year old was doing the exact same tasks, with the exact same workload and the same impossible deadlines. Sure, video game development with their crunch time is extreme but it's still very scary that something like this is even legal.

Yikes, have we come so far from slavery that people have completely forgotten how atrocious it is?

To your other points, one could simply say that as a society we need to move away from short-termism and the dogma of maximizing shareholder value.

You had a really solid post up until the slavery bit. You really need to educate yourself on the history of slavery if you think we are anywhere close to moving to something worse then slavery.

Not really, I clearly stated "in some ways". As usual, people are hostile to thinking, and are far more concerned with getting their pearl clutching emotional blurts out. This thread is a classic case of that.

> A lot of companies are actively factoring this into their HR model. Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out.

That was pretty much the business model of the few startup jobs I tried

It is worse than slavery because companies found they can create an environment for motivated wage slaves constantly competing with each other, aka 'culture'. And fire those who lost motivations in order to strengthen the 'culture'.

As a comparison, traditional slavery is extremely inefficient because traditional slaves are far less motivated, the master has to spend his time or hiring people to constantly threatening and beating slaves work.

Not the first time I quote The Jungle in HN but...

"During the summer the packing houses were in full activity again, and Jurgis made more money. He did not make so much, however, as he had the previous summer, for the packers took on more hands. There were new men every week, it seemed--it was a regular system; and this number they would keep over to the next slack season, so that every one would have less than ever. Sooner or later, by this plan, they would have all the floating labor of Chicago trained to do their work. And how very cunning a trick was that! The men were to teach new hands, who would some day come and break their strike; and meantime they were kept so poor that they could not prepare for the trial!

We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!

But let no one suppose that this superfluity of employees meant easier work for any one! On the contrary, the speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time; they were continually inventing new devices to crowd the work on--it was for all the world like the thumbscrew of the medieval torture chamber. They would get new pacemakers and pay them more; they would drive the men on with new machinery--it was said that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at which the hogs moved was determined by clockwork, and that it was increased a little every day. In piecework they would reduce the time, requiring the same work in a shorter time, and paying the same wages; and then, after the workers had accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate of payment to correspond with the reduction in time! They had done this so often in the canning establishments that the girls were fairly desperate; their wages had gone down by a full third in the past two years, and a storm of discontent was brewing that was likely to break any day. Only a month after Marija had become a beef-trimmer the canning factory that she had left posted a cut that would divide the girls' earnings almost squarely in half; and so great was the indignation at this that they marched out without even a parley, and organized in the street outside. One of the girls had read somewhere that a red flag was the proper symbol for oppressed workers, and so they mounted one, and paraded all about the yards, yelling with rage. A new union was the result of this outburst, but the impromptu strike went to pieces in three days, owing to the rush of new labor. At the end of it the girl who had carried the red flag went downtown and got a position in a great department store, at a salary of two dollars and a half a week.

Jurgis and Ona heard these stories with dismay, for there was no telling when their own time might come. Once or twice there had been rumors that one of the big houses was going to cut its unskilled men to fifteen cents an hour, and Jurgis knew that if this was done, his turn would come soon. He had learned by this time that Packingtown was really not a number of firms at all, but one great firm, the Beef Trust. And every week the managers of it got together and compared notes, and there was one scale for all the workers in the yards and one standard of efficiency. Jurgis was told that they also fixed the price they would pay for beef on the hoof and the price of all dressed meat in the country; but that was something he did not understand or care about."

> We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!

I think you cut and pasted more than you meant to...

I can see hr getting cheap people, having loyal senior Engineers teach them, then having the cheap young Engineers burn out.

Cheaper than paying 6 figures, and the ones that stick around are permanently under 6 figure earners.

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