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At my first job our manager was fired around the time his partner died of cancer and he was left with 2 little kids. He was slacking but also they knew about the whole situation. He was there for over 10 years. That changed me forever

I have a friend who spent 30 years working for a factory building aircraft for the military. One year, a new lead manager comes in and decides he wants everyone on the floor to have a college degree and fires my friend and the six other people there without college degrees.

It really messed up my friend, he was really close to a comfortable retirement, but had to borrow against his 401k to make it through until he could get another job. He was the safety officer for the entire factory, 15+ years of experience doing that. Now he's too close to retirement age and no one will hire him, even though he's personally a long way from retirement.

So now he's working a physically demanding job on the line making cars. All that experience and skills with safety? Junk.

No company has loyalty to their employees. It's all about the next quarter.

Wow, that is a heart-wrenching story. What a shame.

> It's all about the next quarter.

Not sure that follows from your friend's story. In that particular case, it seems to have been about bad management, unless having only college-degreed folks on the floor improved short term financials.

Definitely an example of a short sighted decision, though.

I wouldn't be surprised if the manager who came in with this edict was specifically brought in to "weed" out those who could "escape" into a comfortable retirement just to extract more labor out of them!

That's really harsh. At the job I mentioned in the above they pip'd me because I delivered 8 points per week instead of 10 for 2 weeks right when COVID lockdown hit. They couldn't understand why the world melting down and my kids suddenly home schooling would have any affect on my productivity.

Companies treat us as replaceable widgets. If widget A is broken just throw it away and use widget B. No reason to be loyal in that environment.

To the suits we're just a translation layer between the business requirements to deployed code. And they'll be happy to reduce the work to story points and neo-Taylorism, so they can try to treat each person as an interchangeable unit of production, and then minimise costs.

In an era of trillon-dollar megacorps and multi-billionaire CEOs, Marx was ahead of his time:

> He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. [...] As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself

Ooh ooh ooh. I am unable to hold myself back but I'll try. The pipping system in most companies (especially "new age" faangs) is very very similar to the credit rating scheme. You are always captured, nay reduced, to a metric. All context is ignored/forgotten. And even worse it is a lot easier to drop on a metric than to rise back up again because when you drop it is purely objective but when you try to make up it is rarely ever objective. Only thing the faangs have done differently is lasted a bit longer in hiding their shadiness than their wall st counter parts! This unveiling could actually good be great for innovation again?

>I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that

CAN that even exist? The mercenary approach seems to me the only one that doesn't fall prey to living in a fantasy about how things "Should" be -- there is only the way they are: it's a business relationship.

Younger me thought otherwise. I was big into startup culture, enjoyed the comradery of working long hours, taking pride in this thing we were building together. Management was great. Hierarchy was minimal. I felt "valued"... And then we were all let go with a phone call. I remember just being like "...Ohhhhh. Right." It's a business relationship. That's as far as it goes. Anything else is an illusion.

    > > I would love to work in an environment where 
    > > I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that

    > CAN that even exist?

Theoretically, yes. Practically... it's always going to be insanely rare.

I would be very loyal to a place that helped me grow as a person with continuing education opportunities.

I would also be very loyal to a place that had a solid balance of feature delivery versus vs. technical debt management. (I feel this benefits the company in the medium to long run as well, even moreso than the engineers)

Those things would not necessarily be hard to achieve and would pay for themselves.

Yet nobody actually seems to run their company that way.

I guess the fundamental roadblock is that so many things in capitalism force you to think only about the short game. Thinking even 12 months ahead is often viewed as sheer insanity.

As an engineer, I understand (at least at a high level) the pressures faced by higher-ups. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Investors want results sooner or later. I wish that product managers and executives expended a fraction of the effort to understand what makes good engineering. Higher-ups often don't have the engineering chops to understand why good engineering processes can be such force multipliers enabling faster delivery in 18, 24, 72, whatever months... and that's okay, but they are also aggressively disinterested in actually understanding the processes that produce the product they are selling.

Depressing.

Sometimes it's not even about the short game of capitalism. I've seen multiple times undesired meaningless features being highly-prioritized without rhyme or reason because of hunches from some PO, because it was politically good internally for some product manager, or because the designer decided to do some redesign, and no higher-up wanted to intervene and check how important it was. When I saw that happening and I was "the higher up", I had to burn a lot of political capital to get the message from the team across. Modern software development is highly dysfunctional but we somehow refuse to tackle it.

    Modern software development is highly dysfunctional 
    but we somehow refuse to tackle it.

And it's just unreasonably difficult.

Climbing mountains is hard, but not unreasonably hard. We don't intentionally cut people's safety lines and roll boulders down the f'ing mountain at them while they're trying to climb. We don't make them carry bowling balls in their backpacks.

Sure, it's pretty rare to hear from anybody that their particular field runs smoothly.

But our field. Man oh man. We know what tech debt is, and we know how it affects the time+effort required to achieve a certain velocity. And yet we spend more time shooting ourselves in the feet than doing anything else.

Quite honestly I feel that the problem has become massively worse in the last decade, with everybody cargo-culting the highly complex architectures of FAANG companies when in reality much simpler alternatives would be an order of magnitude better.

>CAN that even exist?

Fully remote lifestyle business where everyone's workload is around 12-24 hours a week with $100k+ salaries. Everyone in the company makes around the same amount (CEO to junior). Full transparency for the accounting books. Excess profits get evenly distributed to everyone. No investors to answer to. A job that gives enough time and money to do what you want in life.

This is really only for people who are already good at something though.

Sign me up. Its essentially the co-op of software businesses.

This is the kind of place I hope to work at after I hit my retirement "number".

Not just a business relationship. A fundamentally adversarial business relationship.

Every dollar paid to me is a dollar less for the founder/VCs.

Here's a very controversial and bitter take. Aiming for maximum downvotes.

It's only when you get fired, you start to see clearly and are able to come out of that flowery lala land of "we're a team", "we're a family" and all that misplaced rather abused analogies.

It's just a commercial relationship rooted in generating profit (nothing wrong with that) for which have to collaborate with others. There's no team, there's no family.

Any prose and poetry beides that is also about squeezing every ounce of profit. It is a for profit activity so at least be direct and honest about it and refrain from borrowing analogies from other social constructs.

> that flowery lala land of "we're a team", "we're a family"

IMO "in a team" is actually achievable if you conceptualize it like a pro sports team where you can get laid off for under-performing, change in overall strategy, injuries etc. The players are still part of a team though.

My current company did layoffs and I don't think anyone is feeling "loyal" but I certainly feel like a member of a team because my coworkers and I work collaboratively towards shared goals and step in to support each other. We don't do this out of any loyalty to the company but because this behavior helps us work better together in a way that is more pleasant and is rewarded by the company.

I've never been fired but pretty much realized this from job one. I do agree though that for the people who don't understand this and look at the company as a place where they work with friends towards a common goal getting fired is likely the best way for them to understand that they are all just cogs in a heartless machine.

I had a team member fired the other day (he probably deserved it) and no one even bothered to tell me. I figured he quit and reached out wishing him well. I felt pretty awkward when I found out he was let go. The problem was they aren't even back filling his role, I just have to pick up the slack. He does a job totally different than mine that I really have no experience doing. I'm just winging it and not really caring about it. If they don't replace the guy I'm not putting in extra hours to ensure what he was doing gets done. Give me half his salary and I'll care.

I don't think it's controversial. Or bitter.

Maybe I disagree about the part about "only when you get fired". To me it was enough seeing people getting fired, or having promotions postponed multiple times for no reason, or seeing a co-worker getting a verbal offers of a raise getting rescinded after they denied a job offer from another company, or having a C-level give me silent treatment when I disagreed with stupid release deadlines.

Can you even downvote on HN?

E: For reference, I wouldn’t downvote this because it ain’t wrong.

Once you have enough karma (I forget the threshold several hundred but less than 1000) the downvote button is available to you yes.

You just described with incredible precision my approach to jobs and career.

The only difference is that I make a point of leaving my current job in 18 to 24 months. That is the sweet spot. No matter how good or bad I think the job is. Always get a raise in the switch. Rinse and repeat. I actually avoid getting promotions in whatever is my current job, those are detrimental, seldom the raise is compatible with the increase in responsibility.

I worked for companies I liked and for companies I personally hated, the procedure is always the same. Has been working wonders for me in the past 2 decades.

I follow a similar pattern. A current employer almost never raises salary commensurate with market rates after 2 or more years.

> I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that.

Start your own business.

I have friends who did that. They built a consulting company where they get to build the culture they want.

Those kinds of companies (the examples I know of are small, < 200 folks) actually have a chance of maintaining a coherent, caring culture. Not to say that folks don't get laid off or tough decisions made, but humanity is still present.

I enjoyed Small Giants for more profiles of these kinds of companies: https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-A...

+1 on this, I'd add if you ever do try to do it in a non-technical industry/business and use your technology/software experience as a means to create more efficiency for the business.

Are you me ?

Probably