Workers are competing for their own jobs
bbc.com
bbc.com
Most often, a company's competent people are (at the very least) slightly underpaid and going along out of a sense of inertia. The day to day routine is comforting and interviewing is a real pain, and while I'd take a good pay bump, it's definitely not worth going through the entire process for a couple thousand dollars a year.
I've had teams just shattered when the first person left because it reminds everyone else that leaving is an option.
Forcing your most competent people, the ones that preform the day to day work, to get their resumes updated and practice interviewing seems like it's going to make jumping ship a realistic option for all the people you're relying on.
Now, maybe half the staff or something is dead weight, and you can afford to offer the competent ones a ~20% pay bump to the new market rate (as opposed to the market rate when you first hired them) while cutting 50% of payroll, but that doesn't seem like what these companies are going to do. It seems like they're going to make everyone interview for the same salary they currently have, and I'd be rather shocked if that was the best deal most people with skills could get. This seems like it's going to backfire hard.
This attrition biz makes a lot of sense as our entire economy is geared towards showing short term improvements by sociopaths who will jump ship before any of the long term impact comes into play or can be attributed to them. Why else would wall st be rewarding these crazy layoff numbers?
Take meta. They reduced costs by Culling about 25% of the workforce. While a great short term financial gain, how has that changed the long term outlook re productivity to merit a stock doubling in a good few months (or was it a tripping?). Is anyone seriously beleiving this culling, stack ranking and doubling of workload and stress and infighting is actually going to attract missionaries? Or is it that just warm bodies would do?
They mention that employees have to do things like project how much revenue their position can bring in. That seems... insane. That's not the job of an individual contributor. Assuming this article isn't bait, then the management are very incompetent.
If you can’t articulate your value to the company maybe your company cannot either and that is a bad place to be as an employee…
That's really hard for me to buy. In a world where knowledge workers are specialists, why force everyone to learn the financial side?
By the same logic - Why not ask sales people to estimate how long a new software feature would take?
Also, comparing sales to any other role in this context is disingenuous. Sales already know how much revenue they generate based on each sale. Projecting that out according to some percentage becomes trivial. I.e., "I sold 100 this year, and think I can do 105 next year". It's barely an "exercise".
For nearly every other role, the effort is so abstract that it's virtually useless. How does a QA/PM/Agile Lead measure their revenue impact?
The answer is they don't. Because the work they do is part of a larger organism that generates revenue. It's the managements job to know how much revenue the organism will generate.
If your senior management doesn't understand how your team, as a large unit working together, impacts revenue, then that's kind of the fault of that management.
Let's be more blunt. Then that management needs to go. Repeat at each level all the way up.
I am sure they do, but this isn’t about their understanding of your impact on revenue, it’s about your understanding of your impact on the company revenue. If you dont understand your value, you cannot argue your value from a position of strength.
For what it’s worth, every position in a company from bottom to the top has an impact on revenue.
Even in a small company such as a startup, people have specialisations that only when put together will create some value. It is practically impossible for a lowly dev to estimate how much his work this week have contributed to the company bottom line.
I was talking revenue and if you really want to be able to argue your value a position of strength, you really should know the difference between revenue and a P&L.
I’m a PM and I know exactly how much revenue my product generated for the company. I also can break it down to the amount of revenue features i have devised and added have brought in.
The point of all of this is the following: If I am a key component of a team company product that generates $100 a year in revenue my value is dramatically different to the organization than the person who is a minor player in a team product that brings $1B in revenue. My value is very high within my own product, but my product’s value is not very high to the organization. Understanding my impact on company revenue can tell me “am I safe in this role?” Or “I need to find another role because my little project is ripe for plucking”.
The point of this is if you understand your value and your place within the company revenue mix, you can protect yourself better against being blindsided by a layoff.
Scenario 1-My product brings in $0 and I cost the company $100k.
Scenario 2-My product brings in $1B and I cost the company $100k.
When the company belt tightening happens, which of those two scenarios has the greatest danger of layoff and disruption? If I know I am in scenario 1…I might start looking for a new gig because some portion* of $0 is $0, but scenario 2’s some portion* of $1B is certainly not $0.
All the capable people will use the opportunity to look around at other opportunities, especially as the whole process is going to be pretty damaging to employee trust.
Many people are in positions where they would struggle to find another job that doesn‘t pay less, if they can find one at all.
Bah. It's spoken from a place of valuing yourself. We can choose to be a victims of "the system" or we can choose to be powerful people and place boundaries on how we want to be treated. It might take some time to locate a job that treats us well, but contrary to the Marxist view of business, not all businesses are exploitative.
> Many people are in positions where they would struggle to find another job that doesn‘t pay less, if they can find one at all.
That's convenient rhetoric, but who exactly are these people? It sounds like these are just abstract "people" based on an assumption that almost all businesses are exploitative, and that the few unexploitative ones actually pay less (my observation is that the exploitative ones pay less and the unexploitative ones both have a better work environment and pay more).
Depending on the industry, it might take some hunting to find good management, but there's no reason you have to quit your current job while you're looking. And you might need to gain some skills if you are working in a low skill industry, but even there, you could apply to Trader Joe's instead of Walmart, for instance.
You can value yourself all you want, if the market doesn't value your skills, your domain within your job sector, or your job sector in general, it's meaningless.
What's meaningless is to expect a company to help you transition, or not realise they conveniently benefit from your lack of fitness for a position. They say they care but it's too much to handle, easier to just hire someone who even just seem qualified.
I have interviewed for a role beneath my experience and skillset, and was thrown at questions and comments on my last interview just to hit my confidence and in attempt to reverse who's got leverage at offer time.
Worked there 2 days and quit. In the exact same sector, same skillset, I could be taking home 1/3 of my current income had I stayed. Not meaningless, and if more did the same, if everyone valued themselves, none of us would ever have to waste our time with exploiters.
"Just spend a year or more to get new skills or go to another sector" doesn't refute what I said, it proves it.
This advice isn't about "believing in yourself" alone changing anything, it's about taking hard, multi-year even action, and changing domains and roles.
"Believing in your self" is not changing anything here, it's just table stakes.
People who actually value themselves don't sit rotting away in a position like that.
I went from making 60k (annualized) for the last 9 months doing customer service with a side order of sales with a high school diploma and half an associates degree in computer programming working from home and recently got laid off along with all my colleagues. Now most of the similar jobs I'm looking at are paying closer to 40k and require me to move from $small-city to Seattle to do a job I'm not terribly excited about for less money than it costs to live very well in Seattle.
I was looking forward to getting out of the apartment where I have twice had to fight lunatics one who attacked my wife in the course of breaking in and another the drug dealer who assaulted a neighbor who is probably the same fellow who tried to burn the apartment building down twice by setting fires at the top of the interior stairwell when we all lost our jobs.
Now I'm going through a programming boot camp and looking forward to the fun of competing with a horde of people with actual degrees and trying to formulate a tenable fallback position. Meanwhile I'm fighting the unemployment folks for the privilege of actually getting unemployment during training as is allowed by law on the basis that since my position is considered "in demand" I ought to be required to look for work that probably wont pay enough to live and wait to be replaced by some combination of chatGPT and automation. If experience holds true they will hopefully withhold everything for months then pay out refilling my small savings partially.
More generally by any measure every workplace has people with a range of effectiveness. Every workplace has a bottom 50% in terms of actual ability or in terms of being able to sell themselves. You might have someone in the top 20% who is in the bottom 20% in ability to sell themselves and negotiate. Nobody not in a moderate to high percentile of both is thinking of such a situation as an opportunity they are shitting themselves.
Furthermore once you leave the rarefied of the well paid professional it becomes increasingly unlikely that people have a sufficient cushion to cover taking the time to find yourself an optimal environment. People are in fact going to scramble for options and the things at the forefront of their mind is going to be generalized anxiety and every bad job they've ever had and the worry about ending up stuck in a similar situation because they have to take something soon in order to keep paying rent.
My previous post wasn't intended to deny that there are people in a position such as yours. Obviously there are. But it's easy to yell a Social Justice "privilege!" slur and give some general "think of the oppressed!" statement without needing to actually engage with the situation of either group/person.
Your description is similar to what I was imagining about someone who values themself. You're actively taking steps to invest in yourself.
And she has worked in great restaurants (two starred ones, a 5 star hostel)
She hasn't worked at a non-exploitative restaurant once. Even the one where she was paid correctly, she worked overtime (so much overtime they couldn't pay her legally and had to go off the books). She destroyed her feets, her neck, and a knee over 7 years. Her doctor told her her body seems older than she is (lot of micro-fracture on her scan). One of her ex-coworkers (31) received state payment for incapacitation, because he destroyed his life working exclusively in starred restaurants for 6 years. One is now a methhead, because they drank and drug themselves to sleep every night. If you don't own the restaurant you're working at, chances are you're being exploited (or this is a small restaurant were you only heat already prepared food).
It’s hard to make money as a restaurant owner. Margins tend to be around 3-5% You have inventory that rots, rent, and overworked staff you can barely pay or keep. It’s so brutal that even some Michelin rated restaurants have to rely on donations from rich patrons and other sources of revenue like cook books and cooking classes.
Even if you love cooking and food, that’s one of the last industries you’d want to join either as an owner or employee unless you’re masochistic
Getting stuck at a job is mostly a problem for people in the middle: privileged enough to get a skilled job in the first place and to have the financial obligations that require they never take a cut in pay or time off to build a new skill.
This is just dehumanizing and humiliating. At that point you might as well strike and throw the managers into the Battle Royale pit. Also a good reminder why unionization makes sense even in well paying white collar professions, employers will pit people against one another regardless.
I always encourage my teammates to seize something critical and gatekeep the shit out of it. Do the worst possible job automating or cross-training anybody else when asked. Insist on handling everything yourself at every opportunity and quietly revoke the trainee's permissions, then deny doing so in spite of any evidence presented.
You want to fire Alice? There goes your only Exchange admin.
You want to fire Bob? Nobody else knows IAM. Good luck onboarding his replacement.
Firing Charlie? He was the PCI compliance guy.
Me? There goes security.
I don't owe my colleagues job security, but I do like and respect them. And there is strength in numbers. For every team member I lose, some aspect of the business will be disrupted.
This new technique is particularly egregious since if you're interviewing you might as well interview elsewhere as well. It's going to take as much effort. And the reality is that there is a cone of outcomes that is wider at a new place and narrower at the existing place so the new place is attractive if the cone shifts downwards here. There's no surprise that most British companies cater to the local market and that few software successes have arisen from this economy that is as large as California.
The cost is felt by the UK alone which generally just has poorer products than elsewhere. If I knew leadership of some company learned primarily in the UK, I would probably just look elsewhere. They can't even fix it because employees there expect management to transform into this at any time, and so don't feel ownership of what they're doing.
Essentially, everyone in the UK has been "quiet quitting" for 40 years.
Why isn't management interviewing and proving their worth?