[0]: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg
Treating employees like humans; getting to know each one as an individual, and sincerely working to help each of them to achieve their personal goals. Treating their work with Respect is also really important.
I was a manager at a company that paid "competitive" (i.e. "low") salaries, and had to motivate with "softer" rewards.
I've always been a "carrot" person, as opposed to a "stick" person. I find that it's better (but not easier) to lead folks with rewards, than it is to drive them with threats. I also found that money is a fickle motivator. It works well, if you want transient, highly-capable people that will not stick around, and will not be there, when the fecal matter hits the air circulation device.
But I have also found that I'm an outlier, and that my style of management is not only ignored, but attacked and despised.
I'm pretty happy to be out of the Rotten Management Rat Race.
You say this, but money is also part of respect. Many employers do not index raises to inflation, so you're literally working for less each year you stay with that employer. Yes, you absolutely need to treat employees like humans and not numbers, but compensation is part of the respect you show employees. Ignore it at your peril.
> It works well, if you want transient, highly-capable people that will not stick around, and will not be there, when the fecal matter hits the air circulation device.
Anecdotally, the most capable people I have worked with are there to solve problems, and if they run into a problem that can't be solved (mostly because of organisation politics/culture) then they recognise the futility of trying and move on.
Not being there when the excrement hits the fan is just a byproduct of not sticking around in a dysfunctional environment.
Agreed. Many companies push non-monetary HR stuff, in an effort to keep salaries low. That's usually pretty transparent, though.
In the end, there's absolutely nothing that can fix broken management; especially the first- and second-line managers.
I found management to be a very difficult and humbling experience. The variable was usually me; not the employee. I had to be constantly reviewing my own motivations and whatnot.
> Anecdotally, the most capable people I have worked with are there to solve problems, and if they run into a problem that can't be solved (mostly because of organisation politics/culture) then they recognise the futility of trying and move on.
One of my jobs, as a first-line manager, was to shield my employees from the corporate culture. I managed highly experienced C++ engineers, working on pretty advanced image processing pipeline stuff. Not exactly your "bootcamp leetcode master" type. When they finally rolled up our department, the engineer with the least tenure, had ten years, and we were never really paid that well.
But I have had many folks, on this very forum, tell me what a terrible manager I must have been.
Hum... The GP is talking about your superiors. What you just confirmed when you said you had to shield your people from them.
That is, unless you were the one deciding to reduce people's salaries every year.
But I had to fight like crazy to get them raises and promotions. I have to admit that I sometimes did less than I would have liked.
I was often instructed to reduce the positive scores of my employees. It was infuriating. They did good, they deserved praise, even with the best score possible, their raise would not have been that great.
I almost never got a good score, myself, but they also kept me for almost 27 years.
Very few people would show up to work without the money. Let’s stop pretending they would.
You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with me then. No big deal. We find the environment that motivates us.
This is pointedly true for employees who hop between low-wage jobs.
One of the ways that I've learned to practice respect is actually not really getting to know people personally too much. I've been manipulated before by "leaders" who try to use personal information like family needs or other goals as a fake carrot that is not in their power to exchange. As a result I have a pretty "no questions asked" policy on the privacy rights of my direct reports when it comes to approving any time off or facilitating whatever it is they want to do with their careers, and it doesn't require "getting to know them" beyond their own voluntary sharing in private. Sometimes it will grow into a closer relationship but it totally doesn't have to.
Maybe it's an extreme reaction to the bad taste from interacting with folks who like to pretend that work is a family. I just don't trust workplaces enough to be fully vulnerable anymore, and by extension would never demand that another employee be unconditionally trusting with their full humanity, because it is never a two-way street. When the company wants to mess with livelihoods it does not need to seek permission, so it is unfair to ask for the disclosure of personal information beyond what is necessary to carry out the work.
For just one more recent example, I fell for the advertised inclusive corporate culture by putting my pronouns on my Slack profile (having never been publicly out as a queer person at work before), I experienced weird behaviours from people that made it harder to do my job normally. So I ended up going back into the workplace closet because it's just easier to project what "regular" folks want to see in order to solve problems efficiently.
I'd love to hear your take on healthy boundaries, because sometimes I wish there could be more connection with people in the workplace besides the naturally occurring camaraderie that arises through direct collaboration and the inevitable small handful of friends with similar values. Is it possible to have a deeper connection with everyone as a general approach?
I saw my employees through a lot of life's challenges, like cancer, marriage, divorce, child issues, elder issues, whatever. I made sure that we could keep working as a team, even if it meant that one of the members may have had to opt out for a while.
I also withheld information from HR, that they would have liked to have had, because, quite frankly, it was none of their damn business. It did not always endear me to them. I kept secrets, and never used anything I learned to manipulate, but I did use it to optimize.
For example, I had one engineer that is "on the spectrum." He Just. Could. Not. Come. In. Before. Noon. to save his life, but often worked until 2AM.
Also, the code he wrote was nothing short of miraculous. He's possibly the best coder I've ever worked with.
HR wanted me to bully him into submission. I did not, and they were un-thrilled with me. But Japan loved him, and they held the upper hand.
It wasn't for everyone, but we made it work.
I feel that "one size fits all" solutions may be necessary for large organizations, but I had the luxury of managing a small team (never more than 10 people). Everyone involved was serious about the work, had pride in the company, and appreciated the leeway I gave them. My LI profile has a number of testimonials, and some are from former employees. To this day, we still keep in touch.
Because of the nature of the work we did, there was no way for "slackers" to hide. Everyone's work was just too visible.
As a manager, my #1 priority was always to represent what was best for the corporation. In some cases, that meant preventing the corporation from engaging in self-destructive behavior. Now, that is a classic "slippery slope," and it could have easily turned into self-will run riot, but it didn't; because I'm who I am.
Managers aren't cookies, and they can't be formed from cookie-cutters, no matter what the "HR Consultants" say.
I did my best. I do tend to expect top-shelf results (as opposed to "effort"), though, which does not always win me fans (but the company I worked for, expected nothing less).
It’s easier to manage when all you do is assign work, reward with money and blame silent quiting, millennials, or whatever the latest cause of people “just not working enough”.
As opposed to actually caring about your staff, making sure the work is fulfilling and that the team are bought into what they are doing at an individual level.
Leading shouldn’t be about what makes it easier for the manager.
However, it is clear that the cat is out of the bag now - and people look at those working their asses off like they're suckers, not like they're role models.
I wonder if compensation & promotion is going to change, or if the future is just going to be a race to the bottom for worker productivity.
A family friend of mine operates a couple small businesses in a rural community. They’ve tried to bootstrap or acquire a couple companies over time, operating them at a loss for a while as they try to make them efficient enough to work.
It’s surprisingly hard to make a break-even business. There’s a common misconception that business owners are all raking in cash at the expensive of their employees, but that’s not easy or common. A lot of small businesses close because it costs more to pay employees than the business can actually bring in (minus operating expenses).
Even many big companies like Uber are operating at a loss, contrary to the public perception that these companies are a rip-off that exploit everyone to the max.
Ironically, in software I’ve seen a lot of people getting compensated far above their output for many years before the company finally catches on. This is one field where people who interview well can get a foot in the door and then coast on organizational inefficiencies at a lot of places while doing very little work. Obviously this doesn’t apply at all companies, but it’s weirdly common to hear engineers bragging here on HN about how few hours they work each week, or even people expressing disbelief that anyone can do more than an hour or two of work each day.
And I waste a lot of time here and did not seen much bragging about working too little.
To state the obvious, operating at a loss is not contrary to exploiting your workers.
Because workers aren't productive, because you get paid by the lowest common denominator, because that's all businesses expect - and anyone doing more - unless to gain skills for the benefit of themselves - is a fool.
Many small businesses are completely family owned and operated and only employ 1 or 2 people (the family).
So this statistic that everyone spouts out that most people "work for" small businesses - I'm curious how accurate that statement actually is to what people think it means.
Most of their workers had their own LLCs that only employed themselves. A lot of companies force people to subcontract to get out of paying benefits. The statistic is a shameful one because it is not an indicator of a society that values gumption, tenacity, and entrepreneurship - it’s an indicator of the exploration of labour and crushing one’s fellow man underfoot in the eternal march for lower margins and higher profits.
But saying that they "work for a small business" seems strange.
This seems true for most contractors, tbh.
It's not a new problem. 150y ago Marx called this exploitation of laborers the extraction of surplus value. Slavery is of course a very ancient evil.
There is notably one group who are at minimum compensated for the work they do: billionaires, some of whom "earn" a million dollars per hour.
When I was in my mid 20ties I was writing code in C almost non-stop, they replaced me with 7 people and a scrum master. Apparently, cheaper than giving me 12% raise I demanded (around 2015).
Look at it from business point of view, they are the only ones who see the money and if they don't feed you requirements you are blind. If they give you a 12% raise today then who's to say you won't just come back tomorrow and request another and another and another, there's really no end. Newsflash, asking for a raise everyday is an exponential growth (did you even know that your incessant raises would lead to your cost ballooning 30x within a month?), while 7-8 highly skilled consultants is a one time 7-8x bargain relative to your exponential growth demands wherein you will consume all the earths resources within the year. How selfish can one person be? MY GOD!
Twentyties?
Serious comment: some managers are addicted to empire-building and their status derives from the number of people they manage. Not how productive they actually are...
That's really approaching "effectively zero time to do things that are important to me". You only have one life to live and while money enables some things, free time is much more precious. It's really hard to see a justification for giving up that much capacity for self determination.
some IT companies I worked for in a past life paid for overtime. it was a lot more than what you would get regularly and lots of coworkers did it. is this not a general experience? are companies not paying for overtime?
Additionally those sacrifices won't count anything when it comes to select who's going away in the next layoffs round.
The guy doing 40h is getting the same as the overworked ones doing 60h plus. Plus in Germany it is illegal to do more than 10h per day anyway.
Always remember that the Mortgage Bankers Association defaulted on their mortgage.
Only buy what one can afford, subscriptions only for infrastructure, credits only those that one can afford to pay from saving and no longer than 3 years.
I have been doing this for quite a while, no need to get rich, not even money can cure everything, only make it less painful.
The important part is that the mortgage was backed by an asset - I could have decided to sell the flat and pay back the debt at any time.
Not everyone needs or wants to live on the west coast.
Debt, as long as it’s backed by a sufficiently good asset can be a good option.
Right now you need a pretty good rate of return just to keep pace with inflation if you're saving.
Meanwhile that same inflation is reducing the value you the debt you've taken on to buy a house and you get to live in the house as it pays off.
That’s just not worth it for many people. I too wouldn’t give away a weekend for that money, considering I’ll be in a zombie state for the next two weeks and would probably straight get sick and waste many more days in paid leave depending on the timing. Even the money I’d spend to compensate for the stress could burn through the surplus.
It would of course be a different proposition if I was someone who could work for weeks without any impact, I know some people fit the bill, just not me.
PS: Forgot one of the most important aspect when you have family: is your overtime pay worth the time you’re not spending with them, especially on weekends ?
Cashiers where I live have those terms. And young people without children benefit alot from the deal.
ime for most white collar contracts: no
maybe because time tracking (esp. with remote work) is trust based and hence essentially just a formality where noone expects the employee to report under-time.
But there seems to be a lot of “time in lieu”, work extra take the time off.
But that’s only a 1 to 1 ratio, not 1.5 or 2.0, and.
> I get paid because of my expertise.
Agree.
> You cant’s compensate me enough to put in more than 40-45 hours a week
Disagree. (There’s probably a speed to results + pay that has value here) The assumption is that there’s way more work to do than possible to finish.
There is a limit to how long you can focus on a single task for longer periods of time before you need to rest up properly to recharge your batteries. Everything beyond that will lower your productivity, up to a point where you will end up negative due to the mistakes being made. If you are lightweight on useless processes and stuff, a 30 hour week would be way more optimal for a lot of people. Crunch time should be very short and if stuff cannot be "crunched" in a single week it is useless to continue on like that, because everyone involved will be like 50% as effective as someone just working 30h per week (who can focus on the actual work).
However, the data is never available until mid-day the day before (it’s all news based). The deadline is next trading day. You have 16hrs to make the new model and data work.
The upside is that you’d be compensated a percentage of the trades. Positive is good(if you’re good, make millions), negative you get nothing.
Is 40hr a hard limit to work now?
My point is if someone was paid high enough, they’d bust that 40hr limit easy. It’s not really a hard limit of any sort. There’s a price for it, that’s for sure.
Thing is, it will damage you, and no amount of money can save your rear end from an early exit out of this world through the accumulated damages.
I asked in another reply would someone work for Twitter at twice their current compensation. Both of the replies were that wouldn’t.
If I had an opportunity to make twice my current compensation but I had to give up my current lifestyle - working remotely, traveling six months a year, never being on call, doing the work I enjoy, I would say no without thinking twice.
In exceptional circumstances this would be true, but I seriously doubt many company's actually have those (as opposed to managers pushing the panic button at the last second after ignoring issues for months).
At my first tech lead job working for a company that sent home health care workers to take care of special needs kids. The field workers were making around $12-$17 hour (government reimbursement rates suck).
I was leading an integration effort based on my own designs and we were migrating off of their current payment platform. If the integration efforts didn’t get done by a cut off date around Christmas, they would have received paper checks late. The office salaried workers wouldn’t have been affected.
My management said that was an ok alternative - I vehemently disagreed. I fought for my team to get comp time and bonuses for working over time to meet the deadline.
I could also see mandated overtime at TurboTax. You have hard deadlines to meet and often the “requirements” aren’t set by the government until late.
Yes, in any given year, the specific nature and timing of the requirements may be out of their hands, but in aggregate, they absolutely bear some responsibility for that.
Furthermore, it should also be their responsibility to ensure they have enough trained staff on hand to handle the tax season rush without harming their employees.
I wish everyone had the ability to not be afraid of their employer, it's liberating.
I declined each time. Anything we couldn’t afford from my working 40 hours a week we didn’t need.
We are settling into a grove of traveling six months, flying across the US with a couple of stays in Canada and Mexico, staying in hotels and the other six months living in what would usually be considered a second home/investment property.
There is no amount of money that would make me give up my dream.
My dad is a retired factory worker and he turned down overtime opportunities a lot during the latter part of his career. My mom (teacher) and my dad retired in their mid 50s and are still going strong at 77 and 80.
They had ordinary middle class jobs and never got involved in the rat race.
Her retirement is a combination of a government pension and social security.
My dad as a factory worker just got shares of middling performing consumer goods company (Proctor and Gamble) for his retirement.
They bought a house in 1978 in southern Georgia where they still live. It only increased in value along with inflation.
And reconcile this with some companies requiring 80+ hours a week. I guess you think they are ignorantly damaging themselves.
I find very unlikely the idea that we have found the sweet spot of hours worked per week at 40. How do you know it's not 50 hours per week which maximizes production?
Pencavel, "The Productivity of Working Hours", 2014
> The conclusion from the work presented in this section is that the output-hours relation is decidedly non-linear: below 49 weekly hours, variations in output are proportional to variations in hours; for those observations corresponding to 49 or more hours, output rises with hours at a decreasing rate and a maximum of output occurs at about 63 hours. Output at 70 hours differs little from output at 56 hours and, therefore, the HMWC’s recommendations about the innocuous effects for output of hours reductions are consistent with these estimates.
Note that this is about manual labour, not knowledge work.
I guess you think they are ignorantly damaging themselves.
Not the OP, but I would think they are deliberately damaging their workers. The effect on the company itself is of no concern relative to that.
80+ week schedule is not because of output effectively. One reason for it is mismanagement - a lot of wasted time and general chaos. People posturing how much they work, but not actually being productive. And second reason is creating social buble - a group of people effectively isolated from outside relationship. That allows for generaly more abusive/controlling style of management, it allows you to shape employees opinions more. That is necessary condition for companies like Enron used to be to operate.
> I won’t work overtime
Is personal preference.
> You *can’t* pay me enough to work overtime
Is being diva, implying that there is imaginable number of money that can convince them to do so.
So not a diva. Just honest.
I made “enough” when I was making in the $150s in 2020 that we didn’t even notice the difference when I fell into my current BigTech job where the intern I mentored got a return offer that was that much.
We already had the big house in the burbs, retirement savings, etc.
We are spending less per month now than we were when we already had “enough”.
See the story of the Mexican fisherman.
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
It's also generally accepted as a primary mechanism for determining how a company values your work, unless you hit one of those "career levels." If you're a junior person stuck at a low level for a few years, something is probably askew.
It'd be fantastic if positions had a wider salary band and you could earn raises for productivity without having to constantly climb the corporate ladder. I've not really seen that outside of union jobs and even then, you don't have a band so much as a guaranteed raise every few years. This is all based on US companies I've seen in the tech (salaried) and construction (union, hourly) sectors.
That is why promotion must be a goal for everyone, so that people who actually have a clue get to make the decisions.
There is likely a notable shortage of people donating free time to a company which should technically be described as "sensible". Wasting time was never a sensible thing to do for an ambitious person.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/productivity_class.PN...
1. Just because we're in the top 1% doesn't mean we shouldn't care about the bottom 99%.
2. That graph shows that (real) wages are basically flat for each group the last ten years of the graph while productivity has almost inexorably climbed, so I'm not sure I'd agree that it "hasn't stagnated".
Are we looking at the same graphs here? In the last 10 years of the graph, I see that both productivity gains and wages were leveling out.
Also, it's the long-term trend that matters. Is the gap between each blue line and the yellow line narrowing or widening since the start of the graph? It's the latter, so things are getting worse and not better.
Look at what people had to do in the 70s and 80s... You'd spend all your time doing math to fill out a spreadsheet, cutting and gluing construction paper to make a presentation, or re-typing a document to change a sentence. That's not the machine doing the work, it's just the machines making it easier for us to do the work. But the end result is an expectation to produce more better quality work faster than our parents or grandparents had to.
My grandparents had a summer house, they took 7-kid family vacations, and they disconnected from co-workers when they left the building... And that's what "upper middle class" in America used to look like 40 years ago. And they had unions, and pension plans. When my grandfather retired, his pension was 80% of his pay for life. Plus what he had saved up for retirement.
Anyway yes, I think we're a lot more productive.
For example, 15th-century peasant can't use a computer at the level of a teenager playing Minecraft. So clearly it's not just the machines; it's the people. And as the chart shows, the people are getting a raw deal.
e.g. https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-workers-mocked-open-le... and the replies to https://twitter.com/TheCriticalDri2/status/15921735359378554...
They just want to be able to do a job and be compensated well so that they can have a life to enjoy. VERY VERY few people want to work 80 hours a week at Twitter for a reduced salary and stock options that sit behind all other investors and the billion dollar albatross Musk put around the company's neck.
The skeleton crew at Twitter today are H1B's that literally can't leave because the tech world is burning around them... and that's sad.
> For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour – one's capacity to transform the world – is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature and it is a spiritual loss.
I live in a productive rural district with high exports; dumb people and million dollar machines don't produce anything of note.
People that know the ground, know the past variations, know their seed stock, etc. produce good returns over decadal periods, as yet machiness and AI alone don't match that.
Now, give it a few years...
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/03/05/look-agricultural...
Everywhere I have seen, machines are doing almost all work.
* produce a financial projection?
* run a PCR sequencing?
* weld a steel beam?
* determine if an electrical installation is up to code?
* teach ninth-graders about calculus?
If the answer is "no" to any of these, then machines clearly aren't doing "all the work".
The required skill level when using older tools and processes (welding and other building processes) is typically higher than with modern tools. This makes workers more replaceable today.
Modern tools make productivity less dependent on the skills of workers. It's not a moral argument, just a fact that explains the observed phenomenon.
All these complaints that productivity growth has been matched by salary growth always seems to ignore that most of the productivity gains have been the result of capital expenditure, not of workers being better at their jobs.
The execs of each company didn't personally invent every machine and write every piece of software their employees are now using to be productive. Hell, a lot of it they didn't even particularly choose—so much of the productivity gains comes from basic stuff like "personal computers" and "Microsoft Office".
They are benefiting from the labour and expertise of others, and saying that means they deserve to get more money. Why? Why should those gains not be shared equally with the people who are actually doing the work?
That is, the shareholders who own the business and paid for the machines, not the employees who merely operate them.