The Age of the Crisis of Work
harpers.org
harpers.org
Life isn't fair, it never will be fair and it never was fair. But the degree of unfairness has changed, for the worse, and it means for most of us, there is no point in trying.
I used to be a lot more interested in working on "interesting projects", over time I realised it's not that worth it most of times. I might have some more fun and challenge for a while when it's a greenfield but after that it all devolves to the same-same: it's maintenance, it's an ever expanding scope to gobble more features, it's redesign, it's management deciding the project is not worth it. Rinse and repeat, after 20+ years you really get jaded, why bother if it all eventually devolves to the same state?
As a Catholic, I believe in the dignity of work.[1] We should attempt to do the best jobs we can in our work. I'm not saying we should work super long hours, but we should find out how many hours are expected for the role, and do the best job we can during those hours. If our boss gives us more work than we can do in those hours, we should be up front and say "Hey, I'm working as hard as I can during these x hours, and you're giving me more work than fits into the hours." If difficulties in our personal lives prevent us from working those x hours, we should be honest and say "Hey, due to constraints from my personal life, I can only work y hours currently, but I'll do the best possible job I can during those y hours."
We're dependent on the work of others for nearly every aspect of our lives. These 2 fairly similar quotes illustrate that:
>Man must work out of regard for others, especially his own family, but also for the society he belongs to, the country of which he is a child, and the whole human family of which he is a member, since he is the heir to the work of generations and at the same time a sharer in building the future of those who will come after him in the succession of history.
-- St. John Paul II [1]
> I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
> I do not make any of my own clothing.
> ...
> I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
> I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
-- Steve Jobs [2]
We could look at the Steve Jobs quote and say "Sure I'm benefiting from all the work those other people do. But I'm just going to sit back and enjoy it, and not contribute back." But when we look at it from a theological point of view, taking into account the purpose for our existence, why we were created, we see the problem. We were created to know, love, and serve God. Serving one another is part of serving God, since we were created in the image and likeness of God. If we're not serving God and one another, we're not fulling our purpose for existence, and thus we're not going to find fulfillment in this life or the next.
From the lowest employee to the highest, from the janitor to the CEO, each person can do the best they can with the talents and opportunities they have. And work encompasses more than just employment; we can work by caring for a sick relative or sick stranger (a la Mother Theresa), raising children, volunteering at a charity, or contributing to society in some other way.
I haven't talked to all my friends and family about this topic, but when the topic has come up generally they share this point of view.
[1] https://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/...
This is increasingly less true though.
People are seeing that they can produce high value for years and never get rewarded, and eventually get laid off when cuts need to happen.
At that point, why try?
Ever work at a failing company? That's a worse tradeoff.
Because it's unpredictable how and when you'll be rewarded, so why not put yourself in a position to capitalize when you can?
One might put effort into learning how to do their job better but I would argue that it's folly to put effort into doing everything one's employer tells them to. I will challenge myself to do a job "right" but if it's a lot of effort (read: anything akin to "staying late") then I'm not afraid to say "it will be done eventually" or "here are the steps we'll need to take".
Some amount of stress is something we need to be able to deal with, not avoid altogether. It's not cyanide. There are workplaces toxic enough to be worth leaving, but not giving immediate rewards for doing more than the bare minimum isn't toxicity.
At a certain point, if you need a salary and benefits, doesn't it become stressful if you don't distinguish yourself over others such that you're less likely to be one of the first who'd be laid off if/when it came to that?
Not being laid-off is still a hope which doesn't do anything to alleviate the unpredictability of a return for my effort. But I can make my own return. I will do my job well enough that I can tell someone with a straight face that I can do what they need me to do. I can predict that return. That is my security for the potential that I need to find a new job.
Only if you are clinically insane. Otherwise ones perception is influenced by the reality of the world around you.
Mental health is on the decline as more and more people go to mental health specialists to help them change their perceptions, yet their lives get worse, and their mental health declines, because they live in more and more adverse circumstances. The parenting movement to make children successful by raising their self-esteem similarly failed. The idea that if you changed your Childs self-perception that they would be wonderfully successful in the future did not work.
If a situation is futile, and you tell yourself it is not so, you will only injure yourself in wasted effort and quiet desperation and end up greatly embarrassed. Changing your perception in an attempt to cheer yourself up will only result in your abuse and exploitation, and a later harrowing realisation you want to deny that you played the fool. What "quiet quitters" do is direct their optimism is a more realistic and grounded direction, the optimism they can maintain the same salary with less effort, which improves their quality of life much more than just changing their perception and waiting for the universe to deliver a fat paycheque and a big promotion.
If you have a good opportunity for advancement and extra pay if you work hard, by all means work hard, but many people are not in such a position.
Economic rents are taking a larger % of western economies every year.
"describes a dystopian society in a future United Kingdom in which intelligence and merit have become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited."[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
Or for a more specific example, I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job hopping where I am) and I won't see a penny of that waste reduction as a bonus, so it is not worth it to even write a ticket for it.
I invite you to convince me otherwise.
People are finally coming to realize that as an employee, 95% of the pay is had from showing up and not getting fired.
Nowadays, of course, most of that money disappears overseas so you're right.
Now... Doesn't matter if your employer succeeds or fails. You just go somewhere else and do the same thing for a similar salary, and some numbers go up or down in wealthy people's portfolios. Not sure if that's freeing or depressing.
Did they? As good as the capitalists company owners life?
Or have they just been told that „this is the good life“?
I think the problem today is that a lot of work is actually not needed anymore. It’s just there to make a small elite richer and keep people under control.
A high trust, cohesive populace is the minimum for any societal progress. And that starts with rulers who work to ensure they’re doing right by their people. America, instead, has rulers on both sides working to ensure the populace hates one another.
Typing this out made me realise that it's exactly the kind of metric that is hidden, all the bean-counting and MBAs cannot put a value into the engagement of an individual towards their employer when they feel safe and cared for. It does not have value on the next quarter or next year, it has value over 10-20 years, and given climate change and other issues that devolve over a long term it seems that late-stage capitalism simply does not care about 10-20 years spans, at all. There's no incentive and no punishment for caring or not caring, it's all in the now.
This immeadiatism will be the bane of the whole system, it's not sustainable.
I don‘t see a fundamental difference here.
Edit: Here's a simple math calculation that illustrates my point. Let's say you increase your company's stock price by 10% which is enormous for an established company, and 60% of your TC is stock. Congratulations, you got yourself a 6% pay raise, which is checks notes an inflation adjusted raise.
at least where I work in BigTech, your bonuses are more or less pre-baked based on:
- company prospects (they do well, you do well)
- seniority (your "level")
- tenure
I've not seen anyone get outsized bonuses based on individual merit
You call it imposter syndrome or cPTSD or ADHD but the truth is you've just had people screaming expectations in your ear your whole life. It's not a question of you vs. your employer but of you vs. not-you. And you always pick not-you because that's all you know how to do.
Work is supposed to be fun too. Some people get a rush from working on hard problems. There's at least some joy when you debug a heisenbug for a day or two and finally solve it or take on an impossible project and succeed. Having a team that you gel with where everyone is high flow state makes you look forward to doing work things too.
When you look at it economically as a 8 hours in $$$ out, you're looking at the short-term and discounting your long-term personal growth. If you aren't growing in your job, leave and find a place where you can build your skills and work on things that you find enjoyable.
There are probably some software jobs that would be fun to do. Why not go for a fun job doing something you love if you're currently stuck?
A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan).
B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense.
The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.
Do you compensate these people? Why should I be this person if you don't pay me for it?
So the job of management is to weed out people who aren’t having as high as possible impact when convenient.
I don’t like it, but it’s often what’s going on
"Market dynamics" force you to pay your highest performers barely more than your lowest performers?
How exactly does that work?
Disparity between executive salaries and worker salaries are astronomical, but when it comes time to reward your highest performing workers you can't find any possible way to increase their take home? Between salary, bonuses, stock grants, retirement plan matching or any other possible methods of compensation, your hands are absolutely tied? Because of "Market Dynamics and Pay Equity"?
Come on.
If you hire someone to solve problem X but they get sidetracked and spend all their time on problem Z instead... they can be excelling at driving solutions and still be doing the wrong thing in the eyes of the company.
Caring about completely different things than your boss can get you in trouble even if you excel at everything you do.
That said managing a large organization is extremely hard. I don’t think most companies have the overall business dynamics to sustain a large company where teams can do things that don’t matter. Usually those companies, which there are a lot in the tech world, have something else going on (no product market fit and too much cash) that leads to those symptoms
I mean, it's worse, IME, it usually slows down the rest of the org.
But it is worth mentioning in the discussion of "why should I care if my employer does great or not when there's no direct reward in it for me" - otherwise you could just wave that whole question away with "that's just bad management" more generally. Yet it's mathematically implausible to suggest that everyone can escape bad management; some number of managers are going to be subpar, so the situation remains relevant to people.
To your other point, I wasn’t trying to be as hand wavy as that came across.
There will always be people who make mistakes or are not good fits for their job (engineers, management, execs, investors, etc).
Maybe a better way to say it is that low impact work happens at the tail end of bad management. It’s usually a luxury problem (pet projects from a company that makes too much money but has too little maturity) or a symptom of terrible management (no clue what is valuable or worse unable to actually get team to work on what is valuable)
And what is the company doing in exchange for these people? Extra Compensation? Extra promos? Extra Vacation time?
Or is the company just subjugating people with bullshit performance reviews, PIPs, canceled bonuses, dangling promos?
If you aren’t actually and truly in the A group then your company is thinking about how to pay you less, replace you eventually, or invest in other people who likely will become part of the A group.
How can management guarantee that an A player is evaluated and rewarded correctly? What controls does the company have to prevent B-level management from hurting A-level workers?
And why does he think that A employees will continue to be around if this is the game?
If your company doesn't care about 50K I don't think there's a need for me to convince you to care about it. If they have no mechanism for either raising those savings opportunities to leadership and prioritizing fixes, or rewarding someone for saving them 50k on their own, they pretty clearly don't care.
So if you're in a company where nothing that you could do from your own initiative would matter to the company (maybe you can save them 50k but they are spending 400 million a year so it's a drop in the bucket), you can still care about success for job security, any sort of bonus or stock compensation, etc. But how much you should care maybe should be proportional to how much you can influence.
Maybe the company is being irrational to not care, maybe they aren't, but you also choosing not to care about the things they don't care about seems healthy to me.
(It's good to remember that while "Quiet Quitting" is the buzzword of the day, this is also literally the premise of a 25 year old movie, Office Space. Literally down to the level of "it's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I don't care" and "Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ")
Gotta put it in my fortune file.
we all know we could rebuild or refactor systems to improve them, but all we would be doing is spending time and money to earn no more money, because the "improved" product/service wouldn't appear different to the outside world
my new attitude is to not even both with tech debt unless the product will be enhanced or improved in some user-obvious way
This movie really spoke to me during the pandemic and I'm guessing it has for many others as well.
That being said... I do think it's more about who you work with that makes work more enjoyable. I find extra motivation at work for mundane things like working on tech debt if it means making my colleague's job easier and such.
You are an employee, but if you would like to explore consultancy and possibly earn 2X or more, then fix this, document it, and start a side hustle doing ONLY this. I suspect if you can do it for one, you can do it for hundreds. If you do not fix it, it will be harder to sell. If you do, you have proof.
Ultimately society is the result of our collective effort. If I'm employed and assigned to a task, I do my best to finish it well, within reason - no overtime, not working on weekends, etc. I think this attitude leads to much better outcomes personally and socially than the one you describe.
Are you empowered to fix it instead of just reporting it? How much effort to fix it? Sometimes the effort to do the fix is smaller than the work of selling the problem and jockeying for priority in the issue reporting process. Especially if going through those processes won't lead to anything meaningful getting done besides extra bureaucratic work.
Or if you have skip-level meetings with your manager's manager, get their opinion. Or even finance's opinion. It may be unclear how to reallocate that savings to other projects or budgets. Or if people are penalized for unplanned savings by having to over-explain it, there may be misaligned incentives that someone higher up might want to improve. For example if 10, 100, or however many other employees each find 50k savings that turns into real money quickly.
This has always been a warning sign for me; I've had cases where I was admonished for spotting a 1-line, very obvious bug (that either -would- happen, or was an as-yet-unfiled/unprioritized support request/ticket.) Never mind I'm already in that part of the code base and fixing/testing it would be trivial; The bug -must- be tracked separately, which means it must be prioritized and wait for proper resources to again be allocated before work can be done. These work places tend to be pretty toxic in other ways FWIW.
the remaining 20% will replace all of their workers with fresh blood from college and for a time, everyone will feel vital
Under that framing, who wants to be seen as a means to an end? The Kantians in the room find the arrangement morally impermissible. Besides, when the pandemic revealed that most of the work we do isn't even under the guise of a common good to the betterment of society, the moral plausible deniability vanishes and leaves us exposed to the harsh reality of being used as a means to an end.
To any critiques, especially those who says, "but that's how things are," I respond in kind with the categorical imperative - that we should act as if they aren't because not doing so only perpetuates the using of people as a means to an end.
That's anything from overblown 'cult cultures' to 'we are a family!'
In environments, many times a company winds up not properly removing bad/misplaced[0] actors from power roles until a -lot- of damage has been done.
As we are now in some stage of the 'Information age', as some people realize that in fact their families -were- fucked up, it is easier to realize that their company 'family' is in fact, also fucked up. [2]
At that point, folks do the best they can; busting ass on a project/improvement/etc and receiving no recognition (or worse, criticism) is in some ways similar to a family member who wants to borrow your spare car to save money on gas, then returns the car to you 2 months later overdue for an oil change and an empty tank when it was given full. You don't loan a car to that family member again.
[0] - The most frequent example of 'misplaced' is when someone gets promoted to a leadership role when unprepared from either an org or 'Emotional Intelligence'[1] level.
[1] - FWIW I find the term 'Emotional Intelligence' misleading; Sometimes people who seem to lack emotional intelligence in interactions actually have a great deal of it, and are instead weaponizing that against others. Or, someone may have amazing empathy for others but not do well with responding to very specific emotional stimuli.
[2] - Another poster alluded to it, but there is definitely at least an anecdotal correlation between past trauma and tolerance of emotional abuse at the office.
US is unique in this sense because when we lose our job, we lose our health insurance, risking financial ruin. This forces us to go above and beyond so to not end up in that bottom 10% that gets regularly laid off. We overcompensate not to have a great life, but to not be completely broke.
This makes us easy marks for work abuse, this is why we respond to emails and Slack messages at 9PM, this is why we are afraid to leave at 5PM to be with our loved ones, even though we are totally spent to do any effective work (or do shit work at that point).
What we call quiet quitting may be just snapping back to what work should be, after the COVID lockdowns made people realize they were wage slaves.
That being said, there's a surprising segment of the population that is not really part of the workforce. They're not 'rich' in terms of the amount of liquid capital they have onhand, but their family owns the home they live in, and they'd rather do odd jobs from home than go and build a career. They seem happy with their lives and I don't consider them foolish for making this choice! I think as the cost of living in the city slowly rises, this lifestyle will become unsustainable with time, and maybe quiet quitting may become a thing then.
Not that this was unexpected, considering the huge demographic shift
https://smmry.com/https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/the-ag...
My own digestion:
Capitalism as a paradigm worked because wage corresponded both to economic value and identity.
It is failing because wage is still attached to economic value, but less so identity. So people feel "what's the point of work" more and more.
This trend has always been the case since the 1920s. To counteract the trend, an "entrepreneurial ethic" mindset came in the 1970s, which did bandaid it for a bit, but ultimately failed because most employees aren't doing entrepreneurial work.
The current social debate to fix it has two sides. One brings us back to the idea of meaningful work, the other envisions what a post-work society looks like. But in the meantime, we're stuck getting used to a life where "work has no meaning" and this is shaping our discourse, attitude, and outlook, ultimately our art and culture as well.
And a bit of analysis:
Whether you fall into the 1) "entrepreneurial ethic" bucket (work is meaningful if you do what you are passionate about), the 2) "restore meaning to work" bucket (make america great again, bring back our ability to create, get reconnected to what we consume and use), or the 3) "post-working world" bucket (automation will make work obsolete, let's setup UBI), the frustrating thing IMO is not current situation BUT how poorly positioned our infrastructure (government, legal and political systems) are at facing the current situation.
They seem to get in the way of solving the problem instead of solving it, which is what most people are expecting their taxes to go to (we pay good money for this!).
But seriously, these low effort ChatGPT posts add very little.
> But today it is hard not to feel that if we have been, in fact, changing the world, we have been changing it for the worse.
Really? By what metric? Similar statements are made about the tech sector, which the author equates to social media and Tesla apparently, ignoring the immense value the Internet alone has provided worldwide in the last decades.
- Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels
- Oceanic temperatures and pH
- Quantities in PFAS in the environment
- Opiate deaths (and other deaths of despair) per capita
- Percentage of children and teenagers with depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation or have attempted suicide
- Per-capita income in Africa and South America over the last two decades
- School shootings per capita and firearms related deaths in children within America
The other examples you provide are local. I don't think that everything is improving everywhere obviously, that would be ludicrous. But if you broaden your metrics a bit more fairly - gdp per capita globally, child mortality and life expectancy - our improvement is significant.