What happens when all of your co-workers quit?
thecut.com
thecut.com
> They weren’t surprised, since the starting pay can be as low as $11 an hour, while “you could go to any of the fast-food places and get at least $4 more,” Marcus says.
So… mystery solved. The company is forced to pay higher wages and the market corrects itself.
The more interesting discussion would be around what happens in these circumstances where low pay isn’t an obvious issue. A few jobs ago we had an employee exodus despite above-average compensation. Many people were leaving to jobs that paid less and they didn’t care. They just wanted out. I stuck around for a while under the foolish thought that maybe management would see the exodus as a wake-up call and reverse course on some obviously bad decisions, but instead they doubled down on the bad choices. Eventually they switched to laying off remaining employees and opening a new office somewhere else because the remaining staff was too demoralized to do much.
Strangely, there were a few die-hard employees who sided with management on every move, no matter how obviously bad the outcome. These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies.
In some cases, they were right. One of the more combative but inexperienced coworkers I had is now running his own department. He capitalized on the turmoil to advance his own career. However, the department’s progress has ground to a halt and they haven’t had a good software release in years now. Doesn’t matter much for him, because he can now pivot to another company and show a track record of rapid advancement.
The only mystery is why this guy acknowledged he could earn more money by switching jobs, yet chose to harm his body for his underpaying employer, which he himself acknowledged.
He feels “almost” betrayed after that. Wonder what it takes to convince him he is being betrayed.
If most people are making the obvious move to better compensated jobs with better working conditions, what’s driving some people to stay in the underpaid, overworked jobs? It’s not hard to switch jobs in 2021.
And cleaning 40 rooms in a day is disgusting, no way a hotel room gets properly cleaned in 15 min or less and laundry gets properly washed or protocols are followed.
Edit: nevermind, I read more of the article and Marcus is a $15 per hour employee, not a salaried “manager”.
> While Marcus used to complete “every single step” while cleaning rooms, they now sometimes skip dusting and mopping. But they worry that slacking off too much will only backfire on their colleagues, who would be the ones left to clean up the mess. “That’s the only thing that holds me back,” they say.
You get good at it.
Different people did different parts of the job, with only one in a room at a time. For example, one person removed all the bedsheets, cleaned surfaces, polished mirrors, replaced toilet rolls etc and tidied things that were out of place including the resident's items. Another brought in and fitted clean bedsheets and placed clean towels. Another went around with a vacuum cleaner after them.
The total time per room when you count each person probably exceeded 20 minutes.
When not cleaning rooms I worked in the kitchen.
I was 17 at the time, and this job helped pay my living expenses subsequently at university, because the government grant was sufficient for rent, but no food.
On the other hand, there are lots of motels and franchised hotel operators trying to squeeze 20min per room from housekeepers at low pay, and I would not believe they can keep that pace up and delivery a quality product for 13+ hours in a day.
I think there's a real perception of "better the devil you know" for some people that factors into it, even when there's evidence of friends and coworkers doing better. To some degree it's hard to tell if the market is just good or if you just have a sample size of people that got "lucky", and no matter what there's some risk and luck involved in switching jobs. It's even harder if you have little in the way of savings. Having a family relying on you and your income and living mostly month is not a situation amenable to trying to trying new jobs on the market. Stability is prioritized, and even if you secure a new job before quitting the old one, there's always the risk that they'll tell you it's not working our after a couple weeks and then you're in a bad spot.
I am in a state where I am encouraging someone else to move away from their toxic workplace and they still don't do it because they are too afraid and not very confident of their own capabilities (even though they are very talented and financially very secure). Imagine how difficult it would be if you have other barriers on top of the mental one.
I've never seen that happen. I find momentum almost always wins the day and few people really ever 'reverse course' at the same job. Just a human thing.
> These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies.
That's absolutely true and a good opportunity. I know some folks who did that and it worked out great. When you're Jr. you can take chances like that (and IMO should) and it can pay off. If it doesn't, move on... no harm no foul.
Heck when I got my first job in a new industry I joined a small company, wasn't paid a lot, they had old tech / tech debt. It wasn't one of the larger / well known companies in town.
But at that place I could make real changes / whole applications from top to bottom that went into production. Pay went up fast.
Other folks I know who went to the big company and are doing well, but are also kind of amazed "you get to do all that". It's not hard to do, but they don't get those opportunities to do it all themself at big company.
I see a lot of folks who want to land at 'best company' but sometimes I think a variety of companies or even 'not best company' teaches you important things / opportunity.
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity." - Sun-Tzu
Have you tried paying more?
Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". In effect, polyglot engineers that work on infrastructure-y applications make the same as someone who only works on a web app backend. Infrastructure teams have tried to fix this by promoting quickly or hiring ultra-senior only positions, but then that breaks the promotion model, which has some specific steps and outcomes to it.
It worked at NeXT. But unless you have a world class founder and are hiring in a top tier market, good luck.
The real question you need to ask yourself is: is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company?
In my software we deal with complexities in OSI layers 4-8, in multiple languages, with multiple protocols. As long as I've been working in core infrastructure software it's always been this way, and I think that's why I stay in the domain. The challenges are always new and this space sees a lot of constant iteration, but it's usually iteration down in the stack. We deal in systems technology all the way up to HTTP. There's a big variance to the nature of work you'll take on is my point. Additionally, this team seems to benefit from fundamental knowledge in math, systems, and software engineering.
When I worked strictly on web backends the most amount of Layer 4 I ever touched was a load balancer. I dealt in a few protocols but they were all fairly predictable. The system was not really something that we touched, improved, or even really relied on. It was more a consequence of development, so patch solutions were okay. I don't see the kind of fundamental knowledge on my team being required when I filled these kinds of positions, but maybe it could.
The thing I have trouble reconciling is whether I judge web backend development more harshly (and thus think, this is not the same work) purely because it wasn't interesting to me, or because my company doesn't mandate that kind of attention to detail (or tries to provide broad solutions and discourages individual problem solving), etc... It's hard for me to tell on an individual level.
That's a genius move. He can also use his new position at the company to pivot their tech stack to mimic the one used at the place he'll be applying soon.
It's tough on consumers too because we're used to a certain level of customer service, so we get frustrated when that's not what we receive for the same/more money than pre-pandemic -- perfectly human responses in the circumstances. Of course it's not on the actual workers, they're exhausted and giving all they have -- perfectly human responses in the circumstances. These are just symptoms of a more broken systemic environment.
[1]:imo there should be employment assurance, not insurance-- that is if you cannot find a job we'll give you one. instead of if you dont have money will give you some. Part of why I hold this idea is that if you have more money chasing the same goods you get inflation. At least if someone is working there is a chance they'll contribute to the collection of goods produced after which money will follow.
Raising the minimum wage is unlikely to have much of that kind of effect, since most people make more than minimum wage. What it does do is reduce the buying power of people making $30/hour because they now have to compete more often for things with someone making $15 instead of $10/hour. But even then, that isn't enough to put pressure on cars, houses, or even rent.
But what raising the minimum wage really does is put people at the bottom on a more equal footing with people not at the bottom. The people on the bottom can buy more, the people not at the bottom can buy a bit less.
All there hotels and restaurants and service sector businesses used to paying bottom tier wages to desperate workers are now relying on their “managers” to fill in the gaps, and the pay their “managers” $36k per year to work more than 40 hours per week.
People accept it because it is a more reliable wage than hourly which can go up and down, but it usually means you are working 50, 60, 70 hours a week for extremely low pay.
If you bump that exempt min wage to $100k or $200k per year, then the employer is forced to hire more people and reduce reliance on these desperate “managers”.
Unless those people's jobs evaporate because they become uneconomical for the employer.
The janitor in an NYC suburb who was formerly making say $14/hr will benefit from a $15/hr minimum wage. The guy who pushes a broom and delivers parts for $12/hr at a tractor dealership in the middle of nowhere will be in the unemployment line.
Minimum wage is a cudgel. It should be set at the city or county level (for a variety of reasons, the above being one), not the state or federal level.
Minimum wage is set at the state and city levels. The federal minimum wage is probably obsolete in about 90% of the country right now, perhaps close to 100% now.
That’s a separate issue. Minimum wage increases won’t fix businesses that pay less than competitors while demanding more from employees.
If minimum wage is raised to $15, the better competitors will simply raise their wages to $18-20. This won’t come free, though, as prices will increase somewhat to compensate. Maybe not 1:1 with wage increases, but the second-order effects can’t be ignored.
Minimum wage isn’t really the issue (in this article). These people aren’t choosing to quit so they can sit home for $0/hour instead of $11/hour. They’re leaving for other jobs that already pay $15/hour.
I think we need to get more comfortable with the idea of market rate in action. It’s a good thing if employees are leaving underpaid, overworked jobs for better jobs. That’s the market in action, and the employees are winning. I don’t think government intervention would help, other than to maybe re-trap people into bad jobs if the bad jobs and good jobs are forced to pay the same and the market rate incentive for switching jobs is eroded away.
It depends on the scale of the 2nd order effects, and which 2nd order effects we look at.
Here these 2nd order effects are far lower than the effects of massive segments of the population living in poverty working full time jobs. The proportion of the pie going to labor vs capital has never been lower. Push that ratio back to rates more resembling the postwar multi-decade boom, and we'll see similar effects.
IOW, the inflation resulting from forcing non-poverty wages will still keep the market intact, good employers will still offer more and employees will move, but employees will also have funds to buy stuff and generate demand, which has been lacking.
Employees in the 1st to 3rd decile will have funds to buy stuff and generate demand. The 4th to 6th decile of income will have to cut consumption, however.
The deciles are of course made up, but my point is someone will have to cut down on consumption if others that were not getting a piece of the pie start getting it (unless the size of the pie gets larger at the same rate, but it will not in this case due to demographic reasons and the type of work not being able to be automated).
TLDR Fatter middle class, thinner lower and upper classes.
The minimum wage was originally designed in the 50s specifically to keep workers above the poverty level. It was often reset so that a 40-hour work week would keep a family out of poverty. This linkage was broken in the 1970s and the minimum wage stagnated for generations.
There were no such ill effects when the minimum wage was above the poverty level. In fact, there was decades of growth at all levels of the economy. One might also note that this was a time when the franchise restaurant industry first grew and thrived - with minimum wages above poverty levels.
Sure, wages might cause prices to go up, but it is nowhere near a 1:1 ratio, at the first order because front-line labor is simply only one component of the costs, among other major cost categories including capital expense, real estate costs, cost of goods sold, administration, sales & marketing, etc.. Even assuming that costs are evenly allocated across those 6 categories, doubling front-line wages would result in only a 16% increase in overall costs, much of which would not be passed on to the consumer, and which often results in a higher quality product or service from better paid workers.
The lower 3-4 deciles wiuld now have double the income, and multiples of that in increased disposable income, yet prices might rise 5-10% over the intervening years. The 5-7 deciles would barely reduce their consumption with a 10% inflation, likely far less than the 1-4 deciles increased and upgraded consumption, and the top deciles DGAF.
And aside from the beneficial economic effects, it is just the right thing to do, even if there are some minor costs. The idea that "you can't impose even a cent of costs on me to better everyone" is truly ugly. We live in a complex society, not some solipsistic universe solely for the benefit of "#1". Don't be that "#1".
I mentioned demographic reasons in my comment because of the decreasing birthrate. The birthrate in the 50s was much different than today, and the sheer momentum of demand caused by new, young people enter society can be a cause of economic growth (the "pie" increasing in size that I was referring to).
With the new parameters of an aging population, I think the situation may very well be different, and already has had an effect over the past 2 decades.
>And aside from the beneficial economic effects, it is just the right thing to do, even if there are some minor costs. The idea that "you can't impose even a cent of costs on me to better everyone" is truly ugly. We live in a complex society, not some solipsistic universe solely for the benefit of "#1". Don't be that "#1".
I also welcome a reduction in wealth/income inequality. I simply think a large part of the reduction will come at the expense of other deciles, which matters because it then affects politics. I actually think it is at the root of the political tension and tribalism in the country, because certain tribes are moving down the socioeconomic ladder relative to others.
I think it should be at least $100k if not far more, since a lot of employers rely on a couple of $36k to $50k employees who do not have better options in life to work 60 to 80 hours per week and on call to fill in the gaps caused by having a rotating, underpaid staff. They are “managers” only in the sense that they are on call and liable for jumping into work for whatever position is missing. They do not actually manage anything.
I think what is more likely here is that businesses are betting that people will eventually burn through their savings and pandemic money and come back. It is a competition to see who remains solvent longer.
If the people and government really wanted to play hardball, we'd do something like a basic income. Then businesses would have to provide a working environment that people are actually willing to voluntarily show up to.
This is more a reflection of the growing class-based conflict in the United States and less a reflection of how income is distributed. The reality is that many people - especially tech workers - have insanely large impact compared to someone working a simple, local job. Pay will reflect this.
Institute some level of profit sharing. This gives workers skin in the game but there's much more flexible and responsive then simple wage hikes. It's also closer to cooperative voluntary collaboration
even at my own $EMPLOYER there have been issues with the stock price variability such that people have a hard time knowing what their actual income is and if they're overspending/committing. ie it's very risky to take on a fixed monthly bill like a mortgage if your income is tied to something variable.
Make the data about what multiplier of base pay you paid out in the company performance variable component in the past few years and the upper and lower bounds of employee performance variable component and one gets the idea of how much they can make for sure and how much more they can potentially make it all goes well.
It might also be true that a lot of the products and services of those businesses simply are not valuable enough to be viable without extremely low labor costs.
Amazon caught a lot of bad press for their wages a while ago despite giving warehouse employees equity-based compensation. They got a lot of good press by ditching the stock-based comp and simply raising cash wages, because that’s what headlines wanted to see. The workers may have lost out in the process, but the wage number is higher now.
My colleague regaled me with this, and how he'd rewritten it after learning how slow it was. Got it down to, IIRC, probably 15 minutes - all data imported, cleaned, logged, etc. This was normal, basic SQL stuff - nothing fancy. It was regarded as black magic, and "this can't be right, you're missing something, etc" that went on for more weeks.
This was one of a dozen stories like this. BUT... the company was established, and with enough people "doing" stuff, they would still grow (if only by brute force and adding people).
I suggested "perhaps if people had more motivation to improve their skills - like... maybe some profit sharing?"
"THEY HAVE THAT ALREADY!" he laughed back. It caused a lot of friction between the 2-3 competent engineers and the ... ~10-12 others - because the competent ones all just looked at the 'profits' being wasted by the others on the team. And, FWIW, it wasn't a lot anyway. I think an average 'profit sharing' for most rank and file was perhaps... $2-$3k/year. Might have been more had they been able to execute faster and grow market share with faster turnaround time, but... even $5k 'bonus' - it's nice, but for someone already making $80k+, this isn't really going to move the needle enough to motivate people to get remarkably better at their jobs.
It may (and possibly) does work in some situations, but that was the most recent one I had some connection with. It seemed a de-motivator for the few competent people on the team.
In my experience, initiative in even its most short-sighted forms (such as 'encounter problem, see straightforward way to prevent problem from recurring, take action to implement this solution') is quite unusual. True 'long range' initiative, where someone spontaneously identifies desirable but as-yet unreached goals and invents and implements non-obvious plans to attain them, is incredibly rare. No matter how you try to incentivize it most people just don't work like that.
What companies need to do (IMHO) is to recognize this aptitude when it does show up, and give these individuals the freedom to implement their improvements. This will matter more to them than any normal amount of money.
This was really sort of spread around the org. The PM in charge could have clarified up front "average workload is 30k records, and expected turnaround time is 4hr". The dev(s) involved could have recognized there was missing clarity, and asked. This is less about "you have to go learn SQL" specifically, and more just recognizing communication gaps in general, and working to address.
My colleague who implemented the "faster ingest" process was viewed by PM and others as interfering and threatening to others. He'd only been there 18 months, how could he possibly know better than DevX, who's been with the company 5 years, and knows the problem space so well??
With respect to the 'rare' part, it feels relatively natural to me, and to some others I know. It's at least partially the nature of doing 'problem solving' across multiple disciplines for decades. Having the political ability to get those 'long range' fixes/changes past the vetting of others, who will end up having some of their plans challenged, is the much harder part. But... I've not had a good fit in traditional/normal corporate orgs for many years either.
Profit sharing won't achieve anything if you are bad at filtering bad hires.
The point of profit sharing/stock comp is to get a better pipeline of applicants. It's them up to the company to filter adequately (remember: everyone whose mother told them they were "good at computers" because they play videogames all day applied at Google). A company that doesn't do stock comp is not serious in my book.
"A players hire A players, B players hire C players. Do you get it?" [0]
[0] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=How_to_Hire_Insa...
A friend of mine tried to implement profit sharing to reward employees and to stop theft at his restaurant. Basically paying out a monthly bonuses based on how well the restaurant did that month, but which would go down by the amount of theft.
Theft actually increased because no one really understood the bonus program (even though the bonuses would have paid more than the theft!)
I guess what I am saying, there are no easy answers and a lot of the most 'logical' incentives are only really incentivizing to a certain demographic.
Concern trolls fussing about all the pitfalls ignore that no system is perfect, you can't satisfy everyone (clearly!), and any and all efforts to decrease today's ridiculous CEO-to-grunt compensation ratio are to be applauded.
Thanks
Given the stressful pandemic, it's no wonder that many would rather take some extended time off. Or start new ventures.
The assumption is that there will always be demand for these jobs, so there's little risk in leaving.
My last job(MSP) had about 30 employees. I received my job entirely because 3 people quit at the same time freeing up some spots. In the job interview they talked about how they only expect 60% of my time to be billed. That they have work-life balance meetings and if you ever have an idea pose it.
Those meetings lasted about a couple months and contributed no changes. Many months went by and it was certainly a 'beating continue until morale improvements." Personally I just stayed out of the office as much as possible and avoided a truckload of office drama.
Long story short, the first head to leave was another senior guy. He took this job because he thought it was an upgrade. Except one night he was on-call and when the phone went off. He slept through it and missed it. It was one of my clients, large international enterprise that operates 24x7.
The client demanded that he be fired and my boss told them he would fire him. Except he went around telling most people that we were only pretending to fire him. Except said boss now made his life hell and basically forced him to get a new job. Nothing surprising there. He got his old job back with an excellent raise and far better benefits. He went around telling EVERYONE. They couldn't just send him home neither. We were booked weeks in advanced and nobody documented anything. So when you give 2 weeks you are expected to worker harder than ever.
Then another senior guy finds out he's severely underpaid. He was getting like $22/hour, minimum wage is $15/hr as a senior sysadmin with a decade of experience. He had home problems as well. He often worked 60-80 weeks. So he went and got a new job.
Mind you we are now down 2 senior staff... their workload didnt disappear. It got piled onto everyone else.
Then another senior guy, best friends with previous guy, and he was planning to stick it out. He didn't care about extra workload, he worked at his pace. Except working at his pace meant the scheduling folks badmouthed him regularly for not getting work done. He overheard that one.
Then one day he was assigned a new client. They had like 3 employees, not a priority. They were nothing but they had an issue that a junior tech was taking hours to fix. Which should have been a 15 minute fix. The client complained to our boss. The boss then proceeded to chew out me and this other senior guy because we were dropping the ball. Mind you. I had only ever done 1 ticket for these folks many months before, they werent my client. Whereas this other senior guy never met them, never talked to them, and wasn't responsible for the ticket he was getting chewed out about. He held his tongue and went and got a new job that night.
We're now 3 senior staff down. Mind you, I'm working 60hour weeks and capped it there.
It was now performance review day for me. I'm in the office and I have 1 coworker on sick leave for 2 months because his blood pressure while sitting was 200/150. He was on the verge of heart attack.
I go into performance review expecting a very nice raise. What I got was absolutely nothing. I got no praise. I was told I was late to work >40 times. Which broke my mind. I was never late, I was one of the first people in the office. He shows me my lates. Oh wait... all >40 times were me signing in on the weekend. I wasnt on call or on duty. I was responding to emergencies on weekends. But because I signed in after 9am. It counted as a late.
So I was pretty angry naturally. I leave performance review feeling like I was smacked around. I go back to work and I'm talking to our contact at the same large enterprise above. They then tell me that $coworker was bad mouthing me. Saying an outage was caused by me. Except for one thing. It was caused by him. A router/firewall that I configured that had been stable and untouched for months. He decided needed to be modified to his standard and when he made the changes to his way. He took them down.
I'd never really interacted with this coworker. We were the only 2 network guys, so we very very rarely cross paths in any way. I mentioned this to another coworker and apparently this coworker was constantly bad mouthing me. People volunteered and forwarded stuff that was absolutely absurd. Whatever, I move on. Cant be friends with everyone.
Then this same guy comes into my office one day and is talking about how he's so angry with everyone and he's going to kill our manager. I'm just so baffled by this ridiculousness. I report this death threat and harassment to one of the bosses. I get fired the next day.
Over the next 6 months or so, literally over 25 people were no longer working there. I had people from the community who knew me contacting me on linkedin to find out what happened there for months.