My Bosses at McKinsey Made Us Get on 2 A.m. Zoom Calls
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
Don't get me wrong. I certainly don't want to be on any 2 AM Zoom calls. But I also don't aspire to be a member of the elite. And if I did, I would probably be willing to endure hardship in order to achieve that goal.
But there's another level to this. At one point, the left advocated for the working class, and a leftist rag like Mother Jones wouldn't be caught dead publishing entitled whining from members of the soft-handed elite class complaining about how difficult their lives are. But now, for some reason, the McKinsey class has managed to co-opt the left and cast themselves as the victims.
It is okay to wake up McKinsey employees at 2AM, because hey, they make more money than most of us.
It is okay to make software developers work 60 hours a week, because hey, they make more money than most of us (from the perspective of someone outside the Hacker News audience).
It is okay to... mistreat people in some sweatshop, because hey, they make slightly more money than... people working in some other sweatshop.
How about instead adopting the rule "40 hours a week, not a second more, full stop, no exception". Yeah, some rich kids would benefit from that, too. But you wouldn't have to worry that the lack of empathy will trickle down to you, so maybe it's a smarter strategy in long term. (Especially for the Hacker News readers, who are often not that far from the top.)
If it were up to me, I would abolish the aristocracy and dissolve aristocratic institutions such as McKinsey that don't appear to contribute anything to society.
But if we're going to have an elite, let's at least hope they have the decency to shut the fuck up about how hard it is being a member of the hereditary upper class.
Its odd that’s people have such an easy time having sympathy towards the mistreated, but immediately lose that sympathy once they realize that the affected make more a month than they do.
Tell me, exactly what actual expertise does some 20-something kid fresh out of college have in terms of business management? If that kid actually started their own business and became a successful entrepreneur, I might believe they'd know what they were doing, but then they'd probably be rich enough that they wouldn't have time for McKinsey. (Money is not equivalent to social class.)
So instead of those kids, McKinsey ends up with the kids whose life strategy is to leverage their class status to navigate their way through existing institutions. Which makes them a fairly strong parallel to the old European aristocrats who managed to gain commissions as army and navy officers without any particular demonstrated expertise in military or naval affairs.
Though it's unfair of me to pin this entirely on the old European aristocracy. Our aristocracy also has their way of gaining undeserved naval commissions:
> A direct commission officer (DCO) is a United States uniformed officer who has received an appointed commission without the typical prerequisites for achieving a commission, such as attending a four-year service academy, a four-year or two-year college ROTC program, or one of the officer candidate school or officer training school programs, the latter OCS/OTS programs typically slightly over three months in length.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_commission_officer
> After earning his Oxford degree, in 2007 Buttigieg became a consultant at the Chicago office of McKinsey & Company....Buttigieg joined the U.S. Navy Reserve through the direct commission officer (DCO) program and was sworn in as an ensign in naval intelligence in September 2009.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Buttigieg
> [Hunter] Biden received an age-related waiver and a waiver due to a past drug-related incident; he was sworn in as a direct commission officer.... The following month, Biden tested positive for cocaine during a urinalysis test and was subsequently discharged administratively.
Turns out, that the next day, he mentioned he had simply called up at the unearthly hour to ask about details that I had already mailed him the previous evening. His lame excuse - 'Sorry dude, I don't read mails'
I'm not sure if I should feel proud or ashamed (or maybe both) that I was able to pull off 60-80 hour weeks and weekend work far too long for my corporate overlords without resorting to exotic stuff that the interviewee in this article used for staying up late/battling stress.
As long as people are enamored by such workplaces (including 24 year old past 'me'), not much will change - at least not soon.
Edit: Forgot to mention that the manager showed no remorse for a situation that was never an emergency. Guess I should simply be grateful that he didn't reprimand me for failing to be his 24 hour little helper/Verbal Email reader. :)
Regards,
~Burned out Corporate Slave
While it never happened to me, but apparently one of my colleague's manager got a direct phone call from his manager because "he was not responding to slack messages fast enough."
I suspect places that house managers like yours and mine has no interest in dis-incentivizing these behavior and will stay that way for the foreseeable future.
1. (Nature) Some of them were just tuned that way since childhood.
2. (Nurture) When these managers were junior employees, some/all of their past managers micro-managed them similarly, which built up resentment inside them and instead of rejecting these traits & becoming a better human, these junior employees decided to 'Pay it forward' in the worst way possible and ergo, continue the vicious cycle.
edit: downvoted for truth — witness the medical resident physician reply below confirming exactly what I observed. To clarify, I support raising the standards for all junior people and do not advocate abusive employment and training practices.
Not that they have it great, but I just have difficulty feeling too much empathy.
Ok, I’m going to go back to trying not to kill anyone today.
It was merely an honest observation that society writ large, and especially of note young physicians, will find it hard to sympathize with Ivy League grads making double their salary at a younger age with far less responsibility.
If you decide to enter a tournament, fine, but adjust your expectations accordingly. This author sounds naive and self-pitying.
I was once part of an oncall rotation at work. We got 100% overtime, and a minimum of 2 hours regardless of how time consuming the actual issue was. Answer an email? Two hours overtime pay.
The idea that an individual stands a chance against a company, and that unions somehow don't change this dynamic for the better of the workers is so detached from reality, that I'm almost impressed at how effective propaganda campaigns must have been in the US.
The last epoch US workers had decent working conditions was in a time when unions were a lot more common. People fought and died for this. They didn't piss off and go golfing for a day.
This is also just.. History. It shouldn't be hard to look this up,so here is one of the first websearches that seemed to cover the trends: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/union-membership-mi...
Also, PPP probably also matters little unless you take into account the cost of living? And doesn't capture polarized inequality.
The point of PPP vs raw GDP is to take cost of living into account. Without knowing the country you're referring to, I can't really compare or discuss further.
> And doesn't capture polarized inequality
The Gini coefficient does.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-environment-an...
[0] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#cite_ref-127
But if instead of yes-or-no we take it as a scale, I'd say we moved a lot on this scale during the last hundred years. So, how about reducing the work-week to 30 hours? Or perhaps keep it at 40 hours, but after each two years of work you get one year of vacation?