Ask HN: Do you feel psychological safety at your job?
And if not, what’s your plan? I’m currently at a FAANG, and been in tech for almost two decades, and I’ve never felt such a huge loss of camaraderie and safety.
If you want material substance and human connection you have to take the lie of corporate life out of the equation, the lie of scarce seniority, the lie of compensation for merit, the lie of peer respect, the lie of all the various attachments and see reality for what it is. You may still keep doing the lies, I do, because they’re functionally useful and I’ve got financial commitments and need their money. But I know what it all is now, and my life is much richer for it.
If you seek that realizing you’ve been deceived by a massive shared illusion, you will find what you thought you had.
Literally just look at all the blockchain crap.
This is a concise and accurate summary.
Do it well and you can leave any time you want for something else. You’re not forced to work for 300k lol. Just hop ship and make 400k.
You’re working for a capitalist machination. You want something deeper start your own company or do something else. These companies don’t care about you. The “cool tech” you build is just an icing on the cake to do what? Sell more ads? Exploit labor laws in poor countries? Exploit your own communities? Have teens harm themselves with awful programming and doom scrolling?
Wow really changing the world there.
Just my $0.02 as someone who lives in the real world.
Also pro tip you can make a lot of money not working in big tech. My job involves making sure people are safe and productive, not doing anything fucked up morally questionable that will make me lose my sleep at night. I make a bit less than what I’d make if I sold my soul to work at Meta or something.
Btw I’m sure people thought it was “cool” to work on the Death Star too.
Watch the documentary "The Corporation". It explains perfectly what is going on.
More about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)
So no, I don't feel safe. I smile and say polite things when they mention how great the company is or how the sales are, or what a great year it will be!(how will any of this benefit me, besides more work) I consider this performative act part of what they pay me for, even if it is very painful. I'm not in a FAANG though, just slumming it.
We are subject to their desires as they are bound, by law, to choose profit for shareholders over employees.
We are their subjects. “Ain’t no war but class war” applies to us in tech as much as it does to the miners a mile underground in PA.
I don’t feel anxious. I feel comfortable.
I don’t accept as little as possible. I negotiate with the knowledge that I have options.
I don’t toil in the mines for 80 hours a week to barely afford to feed myself. I spend 40-50 hours a week doing something I rather enjoy, and for that, I’m paid a salary that affords a lifestyle few could have imagined even fifty years ago.
I understand that my employer would pay me less if they could. Then again, if I could find a plumber who could fix my shower for $200 instead of $250, I’d patronize the former, all else equal. Does that make the plumber my “subject”? I don’t think so.
What you describe demonstrates a lack of honesty and integrity. All I can say is I’m glad you are not on my team.
I mostly feel secure because (a) my ratings have been good, and more importantly (b) I don't think my team is going to get axed because we maintain a pretty core feature.
I think if you're in the bottom 6-8% or whatever they set the low ratings at, you're in danger. And if you're on a team that doesn't generate money/keep users on the app longer, you're in danger.
Neither of those apply to me, so I feel only very mild danger. Also, I just got my green card, so at least I won't get booted out of the country if they fire me now.
Downside is that there isn't much promo opportunity on my team either. If I want to be promoted based on technical ability instead of leadership/management (which I very much don't want, I'd have to switch to a more algorithm-heavy team but then (b) above might apply, and also I like my current team.
No camaraderie though. People don't properly communicate in general. A crapton of meetings, but no one goes out of their way to actually help eachother.
Speaking up about technical problems is mostly fine though. Might not accomplish anything but it's fine.
Rule #1: Have enough savings in your bank account to pay all your living expenses for at least one year. (Obviously easier said than done.)
Rule #2: Follow Rule #1. (If you do, you'll have time to figure everything else out. That might mean finding a new job.)
But for those reading this who are "crying in bathrooms", what does it say about your lifestyle thst you likely made 2-3x my salary, and yet i walked away from tech for years while youre somehow fearful of making ends meet?
I eat what i want, i have money for more weed and booze and casual friendships than i can dream of. I am fucking disgusted with this "trying to make it seem like fired tech workers are as pitiable as average americans".
No. No more. You want me to cry for your lost Google salary, i wanna see numbers.
This entire shit conversation is privileged and absurd and ignorant of what the left has advocated for for decades ... to a point i pull at my hair.
Seriously, this fucking website is gonna cry over fired tech workers when hundreds of thousands of americans who make less than 5% of google salary experience this, regularly, without severance, health care and a halfway decent shot at findinf a new job. Really? Ive seen the attitudes that are popular here. BUT GOD FORBID SOMEONE QUESTION THE SPENDING HABITS OF THE SELF-IMAGINED-AS-WEALTHY TECH CLASS?!
But maybe I should be more careful in how I speak. Class consciousness is key and I didnt know any better until I did.
But also I know whats it like to live in a nice, newly built 2br apt in the second most expensive tech city. And I know how to make that work, coasting, on ~60k/yr, without free meals, without free orca cards, without free shuttles across town. So when i see 5year xooglers that i know made 300k+ the entire time, my head starts to pulsate.
When I think about how i can draw what i draw off my (big tech co) stock, and then I think about those same xooglers, and their stock benefits...
It just feels like these conversations are borderline dishonest with the handwaving and intentional lack of discussion of specifics, and any consideration of the meta of how this tragic, unthinkable event is discussed here compared to other topics related to labor.
Maybe you can’t our little Johny in the private school, max out your 401K, save enough so he doesn’t have to demean himself and go to a cheaper state school, etc. if you work for BigTech and you haven’t been saving, it’s because of your own life choices that people who make less than half of what you do don’t make and they aren’t homeless or hungry.
No this isn’t jealous. I work for $BigTech.
But I had six months worth of living expenses in the bank by the time I had been working for a year and a half in the 90s. I made $11/hour as a computer operator. But they needed someone to build a data entry system and do some other development for their second site they were trying to build. I saved every penny of my after tax overtime.
I’ve made sure I’ve had six months worth of expenses saved from the time I was 22. I am now 49. Anytime I took on a new fixed expense, I made sure I had six times that amount in the bank shortly thereafter.
That mindset kept me off the hedonic treadmill. I work for $BigTech remotely. Until last year I was driving a 2011 Ford Fusion that I got from CarMax in 2012 for $14K.
I won’t get started about how we gave up everything to live out of three suitcases and fly around the US half the year and stay in our own vacation home/rental property the other half.
Hi, welcome to the left, or class solidarity if thats more palatable. Every time yall rolled your eyes at unions and labor protections?
Protip, a buncha people need to really internalize this -- your boss and management don't give a shit about you (certainly not in any tangible, meaningful way). You're not family and never were any more than my deadbeat dad was family because he made me do yardwork.
Yo, your boss totally is gonna "value you" more if you downvote me to satiate the cognitive dissonance! Lol I can't, I really can't.)
> Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
> Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
> Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
> Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
I know reality often does not match, but if we are talking about rights, surely this document is relevant.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
An individual's right to work and earn a meaningful living ends where others' rights begin. No one is obligated to do anything for you outside of relevant laws. It's on the individual to pursue work and a meaningful living.
I suspected the focus would be on the first paragraph, but nobody focused on the last paragraph
> Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
This seems to contradict, at least partly, the man-eats-man attitude of no right for work that OP was expressing.
1. I have no right to a job. I should earn one myself, or make my own thing. Pull myself up by my bootstraps. Etc.
2. Business owners and landlords are the ruling class. They have an obligation to support us in the form of jobs or housing. Etc.
> Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In teams, it refers to team members believing that they can take risks without being shamed by other team members. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected. It is also the most studied enabling condition in group dynamics and team learning research.
People aren’t being cancelled for speaking their minds. They’re being cancelled when speaking their minds is literally offensive to small and large groups of people.
Almost every time someone is complaining about cancel culture, what they’re really complaining about is being held accountable for the dumb shit they say or want to say.
Also, “shifting social norms”, lol, from what to what, if you don’t mind me asking?!
Edit: you can downvote me but you can’t produce a single example.
Or more aplty: the problem is we have a deep divide in what constitutes bigotry. A significant portion of Americans oppose gay marriage, and a roughly equal portion would consider that bigotry.
You cannot run a society that way.
Im not necessarily trying to say you're wrong. Rather, I am trying to infuse some humility and shades of grey into a situation that I think you're portraying as black-and-white.
Frankly, I'm not interested in examples that weave their way through your maze of exceptions for what you deem to be acceptable dissent. I care about the people spouting "dangerous rhetoric", whatever that is, getting cancelled.
Job security comes from career capital. You are seen as a key contributor and the company does its best to retain you. If you leave or are left, you can pick up a new job quickly.
Psychological safety comes from mutual respect. You don’t make fun of people for making suggestions you disagree with, they don’t think you’re dumb for making a mistake. That sort of thing. Having each other’s backs basically. While management can work on promoting psychological safety, they do not have direct power to implement it (outside of firing/coaching toxic people), you and your team have to do the implementation.
Funnily, your job security may come at the cost of psychological safety to the team, if you’re the problem, but also a critical high performer.
“My non immediate relatives” can’t be my burden to bare. You have to put your own life jacket on first - my wife and my children
I think it would behoove you to think more generally: not everybody has the same familial structure as you. Some people live with their distant relatives because they act as (or need) caretakers, or come from cultures where a single familial household is the norm. "I only care about my and mine" is not an attitude that "works" for billions of people on this planet.
By the way, I’m not unsympathetic to people with long term medical conditions. While my situation isn’t serious, I was born with cerebral palsy and my parents put me through every type of therapy that you can imagine - speech, physical and occupational therapy and I went to all types of doctors on the salary of a teacher and a factory worker.
They also retired at 53 and 55 and are now 78 and 80 living in the same house they bought in 1978 in South Georgia. My dad owned three cars his entire life and my mom owned 5. They didn’t try to keep up with the Jones
This is not a sympathy post. By the time I was in high school I was winning speaking competitions, and I spent a decade as an adult as fitness instructor and a runner up to half marathons. It really only affects my left hand.
I don't know how old you are, but it sounds like your parents benefited from a substantially more worker-friendly economy than most people in my generation do. Put another way: it's fantastic that your family was able to get you the help you needed, but I don't think that you experience is repeatable in 2023 ("keeping up with the Joneses" or not).
Having worked with lots of people with over 20 years experience, a lot of them stuck with a single company their entire career and are making nowhere near FAANG.
There is not a day since then that I have lost sleep about losing my job. I’ve always found jobs quickly.
My expenses starting next year should be lower than they were when I was making less than half as much in 2016. I’m voluntarily helping my younger son out in some ways until he turns 22
(No silverspoon here, stock matches and living conservatively)
0 is the only properly reasonable value when you're considering potentially have 0 income. Don't make any commitments
Combine that idea with a bit of overconfidence, and you’ll find all sorts of expensive ways to improve the lives of yourself and your family.
I'm self-employed, but I've battled that feeling on longer jobs where I started to feel immense anxiety and almost a depression-like state when a job was coming to a close and I was just going to have to find something out.
Socializing with people helps, getting involved at my church and back when I was younger I would do things with my neighbors and that sort of thing.
Unless you're completely devoted to some mission at the corp you work for, always remember that you bring that money home to your family first, and everything else about work is secondary to that. It's likely you're not saving the world at work, and it's also likely (statistically, not based on you personally) that the company would survive if you were to disappear or quit.
It's tough though. It takes a distinct effort to acknowledge this and counteract it, but it is worth doing precisely because of what you're feeling now. It's scary to have your habits and routines and comforts threatened with change.
Not every change is good, not ever change is bad, not ever proposed change will always come to, and not every change is announced prior. What is certain, is that you must find a way forward in a world that changes every day, whether you like it or not.
Have you been at the same company for your entire career? Sometimes moving companies helps develop resilience because you learn that your skills are still valued and transferrable.
It improves your self-esteem and your psychological safety to focus on things you control. And the only thing you control is you. This will help you accept uncertainty and go on living.
Outside of your self work the only thing you and your coworkers could unionize to help improve things for everyone.
Facts on the ground change all of the time. Never get complacent or fall for the “we are family” bullshit.
When you're in either of those two bands, you're a layoff target.
Yeah, it's hard and unless I am critical to operations or revenue I'm worried.
or 2 - what do you mean? Its work, nbd. Why should I.
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the latter seems like the kind of person who probably will be let go imo.
Gap health insurance (COBRA) is also absurdly expensive.
By comparison, I live in Canada now and I'm covered by provincial healthcare no matter what, and I had "transit insurance" aka COBRA Canada through the same provider who did our healthcare and dental stuff which was billed at the same rate I paid before, albeit with slightly less benefits. Maybe $110/month CAD.
Was also eligible for COVID AID just by having any sort of job impact. Covered my half of the rent for 3 months.
Do you mean "Do you feel like you're going to be fired?"
No, not at the moment...
Otherwise, please be more specific...