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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

Seems like there are a lot of ways that employers are effectively blaming their employees for COVID. Some of the anecdotes in this article really resonated with me. It does feel "super shitty" when you feel as though you've been barely holding it together during what has undoubtedly been one of the most difficult years of the previous century and yet your employer seems to feel entitled to hold you to the usual standards. The tech industry (well, the "business" industry really) lately seems just so utterly inhuman that I've seriously considered getting out of it for good and becoming something like a technological hermit. But I can't be a "business" hermit so I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Afterword: I feel like this post is a good litmus test for identifying which respondents are in the C suite lol.

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> so utterly inhuman t I worked for a company once that moved offices-- literally, there was no workplace to go to for 2 weeks (keep in mind this company made hardware).

The C level management sends out a company wide e-mail saying "the move will not be tolerated as an excuse for missing deadlines."

God I wish I had a copy of that e-mail.

tbh that's probably not all that unfair -- whoever created the timelines should have already accounted for it, and if the timeline was created long enough ago (because the project is sufficiently long) before the move was known, there should be significantly more than two weeks buffer included for issues exactly like this. Of course, it's also that person who should inevitably be held accountable for the fuck-up (unless the move was sudden, in which case it's the fault of whoever initiated the move.. perhaps the C*O :)

At least in my mind the only time its the fault of the employee himself only when they slip their own agreed-upon schedules, without warning or reason

In a rational world yes... The company scheduled 8hrs/day of work on a project in its schedules-- no time taken out for breaks, mandatory trainings, meetings, etc. They wouldn't even account for things like vacation time, holidays, or even pregnancy. I remember one engineer became pregnant, and she still had a development schedule of 8/hrs a day in the estimates. This problem was pretty obvious 6 months out or so.

You'd say it is just bad management-- and it is-- but its a control technique.

I’m not sure how much control it really creates... it seems more like a recipe for slipping milestones

Well then let me elaborate... it's a gaslighting technique.

It creates a no-win scenario for the workers where the employee/team/etc is always blamed for managerial incompetence.

I work in tech, and my company has bent over backwards to help us. Dozens of extra days off I'm having a hard time even using, an extra 4 days off a year (one per quarter) where the whole company is off, constantly reminding us ourselves and our families come first, and encouraging others to be understanding that our coworkers might be working unusual schedules as they juggle remote-learning kids, childcare, elder care, and other life priorities during such a difficult period.

It's not everywhere, and maybe it's not even the norm, but surely other companies are supportive of their employees as well.

Wow, yeah, our company started emphatically asking us to take our days off piecemeal because we all went heads down in work and our days off became a financial liability. We spent the last year with benefits cut and idea that worry that we'd be having layoffs after the first round of furloughed employees weren't rehired.

So some different realities for sure.

To be fair, there's a very real difference between companies that are thriving or at least doing as well as ever during the pandemic, and those that are seriously hurting. I don't blame the latter for tightening purse strings, but one would hope they're at least not assholes about it.

You would hope. My employer froze raises and retirement contributions when they expected things were about to get tight. At the time we pointed to the billion+ dollar strategic fund and asked why they couldn’t dip into that, and we were told that money was untouchable because of the strategy.

Now a year later, things have worked out better than they expected and there is a huge surplus due to the freeze o. Wages and stopping contributions to retirement funds. Instead of giving some of that money back to us, want to guess where it’s going? That’s right, the strategic fund.

My manager has been very active to push sick says when needed, maybe partially as it's hard to gauge how functional someone is when you can't see them at their desk. They've always been awesome but it has shown through this past year.

"during what has undoubtedly been one of the most difficult years of the previous century"

That seems a bit hyperbolic.

It's been a pretty rough year for DC residents to be fair. Between BLM protests, the gangs that drove to the city literally to fight with them, then a literal insurrection, I think it's possible that for this group, it's up there in terms of difficult years in the last 100. Oh, and then there was the pandemic on top of that.

I was going to argue a bit about the scale of some of those issues, but then I saw that you said "for DC residents", and... yeah, I'll buy that.

I think that would vary by person and location. Some people have had a terrible time losing friends and family without the option to even say goodbye, which is genuinely awful. Then people who have lost their livelihood and even become homeless.

On the other hand, I got the best job I've ever had and I don't even know a single person who got covid. Restricted travel has only been a minor inconvenience because I live in such an incredibly beautiful and temperate place. In the most selfish perspective, this seems like a great year for me. There are probably many like me, and also in between.

All that is to say I don't think we can truly evaluate how difficult this has really been until we see the full consequence revealed in several years. Some people speculate that we will collectively bounce back in a roaring 20s kind of way, others suspect this has kneecapped our global economy and we haven't seen the worst yet.

Only 3 millions dead worldwide in about a year - not as many as WWII's 50M in 6 or 8 years but on the order. So yes, one of the most difficult.

Lol, really? A pandemic doesn't count?

"The previous century" includes the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, a bunch of nuclear war close calls, and 9/11. Also if you include the whole 20th century, WWI and the Spanish Flu.

And those are just of the top of my head, I'm sure I've missed some.

Personally, I'm not sure this pandemic qualifies as "one of the most difficult"...

It's almost as though you're responding to a different statement than the one that I made. What about what I said would have denied that any of those things you mentioned were not also terrible things that are among the worst things in the past century?

In terms of death toll for my family, more people died in the last year due to Covid than all of those events combined. So yeah, I would put Covid right up there at the top.

I think the issue is that, as has been widely reported, the pandemic effects have been so vastly different from person to person.

I'll volunteer myself. I work for a tech company, stuff was hard for me originally when pretty much everything shut down (e.g. office, my gym, school where I took evening classes, etc.), but beyond that I don't have kids so I don't have to worry about home school, things actually opened up for the most part many months ago, I still have a good paying job, etc.

Compare that with someone that lost family to Covid, or who was working in the ICU throughout, or who was working in a grocery store and got sick, etc.

Yes, the pandemic has been a huge, gargantuan event, but I'm not about to pretend that my typing from home on my couch in my underwear is remotely comparable to a relative who had to worry about how to home school her kids while she worked in a hospital the past year.

Perhaps that should say "this century" because the 21st century has got nothing on the 20th.

Sorry, but I think I can objectively say that a year in which a global pandemic occurred that took millions of lives and completely upended normal life for the majority of people counts as one of the worst years since 1920. The fact that anyone would question that in this forum is, I think, extremely telling.

Are you just ignoring all the wars with more than a million casualties, all the famines with many millions of casualties etc, during the past 100 years? 2020 doesn't even make it to the top 10 possibly not even top 20. Maybe it was one of the worst for USA, but not if you take the world overall.

I think that the last several decades... maybe the last 5-6 decades... have been so GOOD compared to what came before, and to the bulk of human history, that when a bad year comes around it's especially shocking. The window has shifted.

I'm not arguing that 2020 wasn't a really bad year, but just that a hundred years ago this wouldn't have seemed such an outlier.

...knock on wood!!

Compared to two world wars both of which lasting longer than a year and change?

One could argue that being shut off from in-person interaction is not as big of a challenge, as escaping a genocide or being drafted into an army to fight $ideology on the other side of the globe.

Pandemic is sure bad, but not "half of all men in your country being killed in war" bad.

One could also argue that the reduction of in-person interaction is in some ways worse, if not as heinous, because of the long term harm that it will cause.

Does something really have to be equal to or greater than WWII in damage to qualify as a bad year or two? That's quite a high bar to set.

I had two family members die of COVID, moved house 3 times (including several months couch surfing) and burned out at work while having daily panic attacks due to being locked indoors and isolated for months alone.

I don't think elements of this experience were uncommon.

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