Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation

I really like your formulation of the issue. I am currently in a tough spot where I'm not recognised and rewarded, and after some reflection I had two choices: either I slow down to the level of everyone else, or I find somewhere else to work. I chose the latter, based on the perspective you describe here. For me, life is too short to waste it at half-power most of the day, and I actually feel bad when not working hard. Working only enough to pay the bills is probably more sane, but I cannot do it. The challenge now, of course, is to find somewhere where this attitude is adaptive.

>There are some cases where working hard/loyalty/etc can lead to outsized rewards

People are so disillusioned to "hard work == comfortable life" that they might not even recognize it when it's real, or be incredibly suspicious.

There is also a separate, much bigger lesson in that if you make friends and/or play politics, you also don't have to work as hard and still get rewarded (sometimes massively).

When you layer all of these facts, it's really hard to sign up to be a hard worker. It feels more like punishment once you learn how easy the rich people have it.

I totally agree. This is very on point

My last job was a corporate hellscape. I worked really hard to move up to assistant manager, then corporate put me in a failing store on the other side of the state and just left me to rot. I had zero employees, just me and the manager. We constantly got berated for not meeting sales targets, which meant corporate sent us less product to sell, so our numbers got worse...

Then there was the mandatory unpaid overtime, the 12 hour days running the entire store solo. It nearly put me in the hospital, and I'm not exaggerating.

Then I got an unbelievable offer for a tech job ten minutes from my house. It was "only" twice my corporate salary, and I'm definitely being way underpaid for essentially being the senior R&D engineer. But it pays enough that my husband doesn't have to work and we don't want for anything. My job is so much fun, and my dedication is definitely noticed and appreciated. They've already given me a raise unprompted, and once we have enough revenue, I expect I'll get a much bigger one. Not that I really care about the money, I feel respected here, and I get to use all of my talents instead of cold-calling people to sell more crap.

I'll never go back to that corporate life. It was absolutely soul crushing for someone who has a lot of initiative and a lot of skills. This is where I was meant to be.

You make very good points and I personally agree with you fundamentally, however your example is a bit exaggerated: there are very few jobs where just "working harder" will lead to a 10× jump in compensation. Making 600K$pa would put someone in the top 1% of earners in the US, obviously not something generalizable to the entire population.

I do agree one must stay on the lookout for opportunities where working harder is rewarded, and also that one should try finding some joy in work. But also that one must stay realistic in their expectations, and that much joy is to be found outside of work (relationships, hobbies, discovery, leisure, etc).

I'm curious how the rewards in the "best places" to work look like. There was a famous study that found that developers are happy when they get enough money not to care, but in real life this doesn't seem to be the case. Whenever I speak with my management buddies, they always lament about engineers who complain they're not being appreciated enough. When asked what proper appreciation would look like, they always give various answers which always boil down to money (i.e. "you could praise me in front of everyone for the great job I did, but actually want a raise / more money than the guy I perceive to be a slacker").

If we're being honest, one is employed by the company to make them money, so it will always more or less boil down to this. Would anyone be satisfied that they made their boss a million more, while getting a pat on the back and the same salary?

Yeah it’s funny, I’ve generally always worked hard and been rewarded. Occasionally I’ve had a bad job or a bad boss and I’ve moved on quickly. I do have an anti-authoritarian streak (got me in trouble in school), but I’ve never felt exploited in the workplace.

A big part of this is the privilege of working in software where my skills are highly valued. But even here I see people with a victim complex all the time. The whole “the only reward for getting done early is more work” indicates a deep misunderstanding of both the problem-solving leverage we have as software engineers as well as how to have your value be recognized by your employer. It’s not about working more hours, it’s about understanding the business and making your own work effective. This is completely orthogonal from maintaining clear work/life boundaries, which you should also do, and most reasonable places don’t have a problem with.

I think the right strategy is to try and select for a place that rewards you properly for hard work in interviews. If you're in a place that doesn't slacking is generally bad for your career so my advice is mostly to move on rather than slack. It's very hard to keep your career on an upward trajectory if you put in two years of slacking somewhere. At some point that's going to hurt you in terms of the sharpness of your knowledge and what you can demo/talk about on your successful projects when interviewing.

The employee side of it is to become the "de facto" owner of something important, and making the calculated move to "big salary raise or I'm leaving". Obviously you need to be backed up with another offer and be prepared to leave.

You can't use that often, but doing it at the right time, it works. Worked for me at least :)

> I find that some people will perceive themselves to be exploited and orient their life around avoiding it, regardless of the situation...

Right it works both ways; some people will be blind to being exploited. It really makes me doubt that I have anything even remotely close to an objective view of things that are close to me.

An example I have from work is: We all have the idea that we're working 40 hours a week, on Monday to Friday, averaged across two weeks. This sets the normal pace, but I have no problem pulling one or two 12 hours days to put out some massive production fires. It just has to be clear: This means at least 1 day of me not working, usually - if you add in overtime rates - much rather 2. Weekend work is handled in a similar way. 3-4 hours on a weekend are 1 weekday off.

If a company respects this and cooperates this way, I'm perfectly fine pulling long hours if necessary, or weekend work if the criticality explains it.

But at the same time, if you start micro-managing my hours and start being picky if I organize my hours on a day around some long-running tasks I just need to wait for... I mean be happy I'm doing laundry off the clock or counting reduced time while the archive system is shoveling data towards servers, which requires minimal monitoring. And I have a phone notification setup if it does something weird.

> In contrast, working hard in a place that doesn't reward you is sad. Slacking in a place where you can succeed more if you try harder is also sad.

I understand the place where this comes from, but I don't agree. I think this is a very personal thing and there cannot be a single approach that works for everyone.

But for me, if I'm not trying my very best I can't continue doing the job. I'm internally motivated, I know that I'm doing a great job and can be proud of the work, I don't need others to tell me.

I can think of two jobs I left over these sorts of issues.

One was abusive -- VP told my manager to write me up over an email I sent out asking a question about software they were using. That was on a Thursday, I was gone the following Monday. I was later told that VP was removed because she regularly made people cry (she was just mean).

One because I realized the politics meant I couldn't do a good job. I had stepped into a fight between a manager and a CISO and the CISO made sure we were setup for failure. 2-3 months after I left they moved the manager directly under the CISO and he quit.

but in general I've not found myself getting exploited. That doesn't mean I always agree with what management is doing but it's generally been well-meaning by earnest people and I sometimes think if people feel they're constantly running into management like this they might be mis-interpreting. Oddly enough, I've found the larger companies (multi-billion dollar companies) to be more pleasant than smaller companies where it seems tribalism is much more rampant.

How do you determine if a situation is "actually" exploitive? On one hand, you could say that no employment arrangement is exploitative if the employee agreed to the terms. On the other hand, you could argue that every employment arrangement is exploitative if the employer is making profit and thus could may employees more than they are.

I suspect almost everyone on HN isn't legally bound to their employer, so I also reject the "exploitation" bit.

But I do want to challenge the compensation argument:

> For example, it's common to see HN posts describing someone as "subjecting themselves to unpaid overtime" when they work hard - meanwhile the person saying it is making $60K while the person being talked about is making $600K.

Higher paying jobs naturally have higher expectations. OTOH, I've also had managers/ employers who used "we pay you well" an excuse for all kinds of garbage treatment, specifically _avoidable_ garbage treatment: short notice evenings, weekends, _holidays_; denying vacation to compensate for staffing; pressuring folks to return from (legally protected) medical or family leave; required to do work completely out of the job's scope; and so on.

Now, some jobs are inherently like that. If the expectations are set up front and adhered to, then it's a free choice on each side. IME, lots of jobs don't have to be that way, the expectations aren't set up front, and expectations change. It takes only one jerk with a title to ruin things.

I think I agree with everything you've said here, but I want to offer a caution to those who pursue hard work that is fun.

I've worked in all permutations of your descriptions. If I believe in a project and can get good results on it, and much moreso if I'm having fun, I will work very hard. If I don't believe in it or have trouble getting good results or no one cares, then it's very hard for me to motivate myself.

Obviously, I prefer the situations where I'm highly motivated, and in fact I've worked very hard on some projects. Too hard, in fact.

The fact that a project is something you believe in, that you're highly motivated, that you can make a difference with it, or that you're having a lot of fun, doesn't make overwork healthy.

I've overworked myself a couple of times in my life. I hesitate to describe the worst case; I don't think readers will believe my description of what I did. Suffice to say that I worked on a new system project at Apple and was highly motivated to make it succeed (it didn't). I owned a small non-tech business at the same time.

I worked way too hard for a while. I didn't mind it. On the contrary, I was deliriously happy to do it. Nobody had to ask me to work hard. But it still did me harm.

I don't know for sure that working like that caused or contributed to the chronic illnesses I now have, but I do know that the literature on one of them says that it's correlated with excessive hours worked and excessive exercise. I did both. (My side business involved a lot of intense exercise.)

Oh, and if the overwork did cause or contribute to my chronic illness, then it may also have cost me a fortune. I went bankrupt in the process of getting one of those illnesses properly diagnosed and treated. So even if hard work does happen to pay really well, that doesn't necessarily make it worthwhile--not even necessarily financially worthwhile.

Again, nobody made me work like that. I did it because I was motivated and having fun. It was nevertheless very bad for me. That became clear over the months after I did it, and I may still be paying for it.

You might think that I would have learned my lesson from that episode, and that's true to some extent. I've never worked that hard again. I have worked too hard since then, though. It's a consequence of personality traits, I think. It's a trap I can too easily fall into, even though I know better. So I have to keep watch and listen to my loved ones and my doctors when they warn me that I'm trending that way.

In short: don't think that fun and motivation make you immune to the ill effects of overwork. They don't.

Trouble is that it is really hard to find these places and the place might be like that when you join and stop being it as it grows, so there's never a good solution other than continuing to go other places and see if they're better.

Been there, seen that. I feel like culturally we're told that this behaviour is unusual so we are constantly surprised. Some scepticism and school-of-life in our earlier education might be for the best, no matter how disappointing it would be to hear.

It’s not just work. It’s social scenes and people in general. It’s an uncommon person who does right by other people.

I see your "People X..., People Y..." language, and I just want to note that over-generalization can be a path towards depression[1].

I don't mean this directed at you specifically, but it's fairly common for people to take their bad experiences in a handful of places and extrapolate that to all places everywhere, and end up feeling depressed/nihilistic, as you mention. I find myself doing it too, from time to time.

So, maybe this is more directed at other readers who might see your comment and take it as validation of their "everyone sucks" suspicions — grain of salt, and all that.

But I agree that what you describe is genuinely demoralizing and a crap way to be treated (: I hope you get to experience a good work life, if you haven't already.

[1] There's a good amount of research on this topic (search for "depression, over-generalization"), in addition to my personal experiences.

> People don't care about the work you do, they care about how you make them feel.

this is true, but also keep in mind having a project that delivers engenders a lot of good feelings.

it sounds to me like the parent poster doesn't get that politics and maneuvering is everywhere, from restaraunts to FAANGs. Some places are definitely worse than others, for sure, but it's an inevitable facet of human nature, and you can't ignore it.

Not playing the game or picking a side still means you're picking a side, and side that is one that will often has less say.

I worked for a large consulting company and this sort of behavior wasn't just present, it was actively sought out and rewarded. I was part of an acquisition that was slightly removed from it, but watching these absolutely toxic dynamics take place was really eye opening.

Aaaah yes, middle management. The successes are always of their own making, but the failures are always blamed on the devs. Shit rolls downhill. The worst is the situation when there's no buffer between IT and Business (ideally a person well aware of the constraints and requirements of both) and the person you report to is a "bizbro".

I once had such a manager, who managed our small dev team, but he was not a coder, he didn't have any IT background, he was a dude with business background... and the depth of which he was able to understand the business logic of our systems was on the "typical user" level (i.e. he used the systems, but had no idea what amount of work would additions and changes in these systems require). This person reported directly to our CEO. So of course we would spend obscene amounts of time on trash features which were complex to incorporate into the existing structures and most of which provided questionable business value in the end (i.e. a feature took 6 "man months" to develop and integrate, but its added monetary value to the business was probably similar or lower than that). Because of these bs jobs coming from the top, we were swamped with questionable work and our core systems and features stagnated. At the same time, hiring more people - adding to the IT team - was out of the question because we were already "so expensive". And so this person came up with a genius idea of offloading one of our core systems to an external entity (so we have more time to spend on his questionable tasks). I mean, fair enough if you do that while being well aware of all the business logic and make a calculated decision, but this person (and I don't want to be too specific here) basically went behind our backs, told the ceo something along the lines of "hey, we're gonna offload system X to entity Y for Z amount of money, so our IT has more time for other important stuff" and then, once everything was a done deal, came to us that we're going to integrate Y. Long story short, we spent about 2 years (on/off) on replacing our X to work with Y, tightly integrating it with Y's api (and that company in general), having around a dozen of 2-5 hour meetings, Y updating their system like 10 times so it even does what our system X did 5 years ago and spent a crap ton of money on all of this (easily more than new hires would cost). Why would it take two years, why wouldn't we cut our losses? Because sunk cost fallacy and because the manager couldn't admit fault to the ceo. We were going to do this because it was his idea.

> I have seen people share into our slack channels

lol I had to do this at my last job. My manager would say I need more visibility, share it with X team since it touches on their work.

Then I'd have to be like "Hey we just launched this project/feature, look at it!" And nobody in that team's channel would comment on it.

I felt the exact way you're describing - I'm sharing something into a channel just to seem important.

I'm not sure how to reconcile the need for visibility, there's probably more subtle ways. Or alternatively being in the channel for a while and being part of discussions there rather than popping in just to give myself visibility when there's something worth showing.

toxicity starts at the top.

upper management hire bull-shitters who tell them what they want to hear or who will execute the unpopular things they don't want to do....and so on down the chain.

I'm not sure if this is avoidable in a big enough company when the density of talent keeps diluting. It looks the only exception is when the CEO was so strong that he hires only sharp managers, like in the early days of those explosive startups. On the other hand, individuals can avoid the trap by joining small enough companies when each person's scope and contribution is clearly visible and measurable.

Holy shit, my wife is working for a mega corp and is currently experiencing EXACTLY this.

This is the reason why I will never join a company that has more than 100 employees. Once they get big, they all turn into cancer.

> This stuff is incredibly demoralizing.

> Loyal, good workers get exploited by these parasitic people because they care about the company, they care about their good coworkers, and they take pride in making good products. Obviously this stuff is all easily exploitable by the people I'm describing.

Imo if you frame things like "the bizbros are the problem", you're defining it in a way where the solution falls outside of your control. Ofc the bizbros are the problem, but there isn't much we can do about them. That sort of defines them, right? They can be stupid, because no one is requiring them to be smart. They aren't required to make any sense. So they don't. Not having to make sense is a privilege

Personally, if the stuff is demoralizing, I let myself get demoralized! If the culture is fucked, why should I care? Let it crash.

But a broader point here: the bizbros and their behavior, it isn't just limited to the corporate sphere. That personality is a sign of rot

I was this person at my old job. It was never about a promotion for me but some misplaced sense of a work ethic that was somewhat drilled into my brain. I've turned around since then and still do a lot but not too much.

I've been this person at every job until recently

Capitalism doesn't reward virtue

I don't think some lingering hope of promotion is the likeliest motivator for people who pour themselves into relatively poorly compensated work. Many people take pride in something for its own sake, and/or for the value it provides to others. I would argue these people are a massively underappreciated force in the world, and a big reason anything works at all. For every ladder climber slashing and burning their way through the social fabric, there are dozens of people quietly going about their days cleaning up debris, providing largely unseen services, perhaps even with little awareness of the significance of their contributions.

This is of course a caricatured oversimplification, and I am in no way defending abusive arrangements, but I worry that the relative proportions of each type seem to be changing, and not in a promising direction. I also worry about the normalization of scorched earth, such that a young person might never learn, or learn only later, that the latter is not the only or the most rewarding approach to life. Finally I worry there is a similar lesson still to be learned at the species level: reciprocal partnerships with ecosystems and other living beings tend to produce better long term outcomes than opportunistic extraction

I've recently been looking into socio-economic diversity (i.e. coming from a poor/blue collar background) and how it affects progression at professional companies.

People from lower soc-ec backgrounds tend to focus on technical excellence, and wait to be noticed and promoted, rather than engaging in more overt self promotion. There is a great video on the topic by a guy called Luke Hart here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwKcjg5lPk8

Every day they keep you there is more profit. Words are free, raises are not.

Regarding the "calling you when traveling point" - I always make a point of leaving leaving my laptop at home while on vacation, and deleting slack/pagerduty of my phone. Some companies offer separate work phones so if that is the case, leave that at home as well.

I never understood the stuff of calling you on weekends or during vacation. Just don't pick up? If confronted, you can claim you didn't see it because unknown numbers are automatically silenced.

I've never seen a business that would actually fire you for this. And if they do, good riddance.

Given the state of the world today, the quote seems almost prescient when you realize that no horse has ever the option to become the coachman no matter how hard he tries.

The contrasting sentiment is "the squeaky wheel gets the oil". That is, the employee who is the most vocal will get the most attention and advantages.

I was about to say, "filing this one in the 'No S#!t, Sherlock' folder"

Maybe that's your lot in life in rigid socialist countries (USSR) but it's by no means a given in the US. If my boss pisses me off than fuck him, I quit. Yet that doesn't happen, I work harder than anybody on my team, and I stay loyal and get what I want in life (and then some) because I negotiated and cooperated. As a young "human resource", when you're starting out, you've got jack and shit so it feels like you're 100% dominated and dependent on a world to provide and think for you. That's not the case. In China -- in the 1950's -- millions of farmers starved to death while providing food for millions of Chinese. It was nuts. And that happened because people stopped acting like humans and negotiating and cooperating. They devolved into top down linear hierarchies where somebody does that for you...Be grateful that's not the case and use what you have to your advantage and don't expect every manager to be either a psychotic or a saint. And if your city is bad than move. Adventure.

The issue is, the wheel keeps turning. And these dynamics exists because they self-replicate.

It sucks, but realistically we don’t even really understand what causes NPD for instance (or BPD), and since one of the core things with NPD is they will never admit they have a real problem, and are really good at manipulating people and hiding their problems….

This is a good comment. In my years I’ve easily had the worst experience with startup founders (as compared to managers at BigCo).

I think with BigCo managers they are more focused on getting performance — they have somewhat limited control over budget.

But founders tend to give the energy that they want to make sure they don’t give away too much. They act much more like it’s theirs personally to lose.

> Consider the large companies with hiring processes intended to try to acquire each employee at the minimum compensation each individual will accept.

Not always the case. When interviewing for my first FAANG job (coming from defense) I requested what I thought was a reasonable salary, but turned out to be a low-ball offer. The recruiter came back and told me that I wasn't asking for enough and that they wouldn't pay someone so below the average for their level.

It's also important to note that pre-seed/seed start-ups tend to have far more severe funding problems than, say, the Googles or Microsofts of the world (or really any billion dollar, fully operating tech company). They typically can't afford to offer highly competitive outrageous traditional compensation.

They're not always trying to offer as little as they can, sometimes it's all they have to offer and so that's what they put on the table. Rather than as little as they can, in that scenario it's in fact closer to the sane maximum that they can offer (without giving every employee 1/4 of the company, which is impossible).

Microsoft won't be bankrupted by paying its next 500 employees a million dollars per year. Your little pre-seed/seed company will instantly vaporize if you try to compete on the basis of salary-based compensation with already successful tech companies.

Hey look we've got $150,000 in the bank, we're still building our first product, and I'm offering you $500,000 per year in salary. What's the problem?

> While the founders, who started months earlier, get an order of magnitude more equity, and under better terms

What are these better terms you speak of? First time I hear about this.

Also first hires typically get restricted stocks (which are much better than isos bc you don’t have to exercise and they qualify for qsbs ;))

I feel this, but also my family needs money and health insurance. So, yeah, live life now, because it’s short. But, also we have to do the things necessary to keep our jobs and keep food on the table.

partners, family, children, etc

I feel this is a variant of victim blaming, shouldn't we put more blame on the ones who freely exploit loyal workers?

Exploiting loyal people seems to be accepted in society and we simply blame those individuals for being gullible. Whereas the exploiters get rewarded for their successful exploitation and learn that exploiting others is the best way to get ahead in life.

oh poor Guillermo! XD

I agree, I've seen good, loyal workers exploited so as to become a company squealer or someone to "get things" done. I resisted this early in my career because I knew I wouldn't be able to look my co-workers in the eyes. So, I did my job as well as I could, kept my head down, and then listened to the exploited ones after they were discarded by management.

Maybe it's not about the research being obvious but having research that you can point to when you need to have The Talk about your boss. It raises everyone's awareness and makes it a bit easier to create policy that can combat psychologically unsafe work places.

That is very US-centric, or perhaps Anglo-centric, view. it isn't necessarily the case and not my experience here in Norway. But companies here are subject to stricter controls and there is a cooperative relationship between employers, unions, employees, and the state.

It does happen here too of course but I don't think it is the norm.

While others do less or nothing but have all the time in the world to dress their nothing into fabulous powerpoints and buzzwords.

“The only reward for good work is more work”

Sure, but what's not obvious is, doing more does not automatically translate to more reward.

Been that person for a long time at work and I had a hard time learn how to say no. I started pushing myself for "1 no / week" (with explanations ofc), started to get used to it and saw cool improvements afterward (most people requests are not that prio).

This is fine if a big focus in life is your career path, but many people just want to live a comfortable life and maximizing compensation is not their priority. These people are sensitive to exploitation too, it's not just the unreasonably loyal workaholics.

When you just want to live a comfortable life your priority isn't maximizing your compensation, your priority is not getting fired. You can exploit these people by putting them in a position where not doing overtime results in failure and possible dismissal. They will keep doing overtime until their ability to live a comfortable life is so negatively impacted by the overtime that it outweighs the pain of being fired.

As an extra bonus the overtime they have to do ensures they have no time to search for a new employer until they get fired or resign.

that's a delightful autocorrect for "vicious"

You’re lucky to have escaped, enough time there and you’d have been crushed into a zombie worker. In IT we have some mobility to eschew these toxic managers but think of places where there isn’t such a mobility…

except, that is not always true. More like, investor-backed and aggressive user companies will do that. Adults with a some money can start a business.. but, you know Walmart etc.. its not black and white. Its overly-simplified to simply blame "business" though what you say is not uncommon. What are the alternatives?

An optimistic take:

(Paper → … → Scientific Consensus) → Discourse → Popular Media → Management → Improvement?

It is nice to have some citeable source for a commonly-believed thing. And it is only one paper, probably most of the writing was gone by some low paid grad students.

If you want to see why tuition is high, look at administrators and construction I think.