Employees Suck
slideshare.net
slideshare.net
I spend 60+ hours a week on the clock as a Japanese salaryman. It kills me. It kills everyone else even more than me because a) I'm the slacker American who actually leaves after a mere 60 hours and b) I don't have a wife and kids.
And looking at my paystub, oh boy, the incentives at the margin make me weep. Monetarily and otherwise. A starting Japanese engineer makes $2,200 a month plus biannual bonuses of something like $4,000 plus benefits. I've got 4 years professional experience so I'm above that but not grossly above it and, anyhow, treble it and it wouldn't make a difference.
The incentive at the margin, on a professional level, is to spend one hour slowly working through the 473rd unit test case on a feature that will be used once a year that isn't crucial to any client anywhere. The feature exists largely to keep up the appearance that the company is working hard for their money. I love programming but I don't love this programming.
The incentive at the monetary level is, well, "less than motivational".
Now I also own a small business selling software. Its no great shakes, but I get to pick the features I implement and the marketing/etc direction I choose. And when I do stuff right, its not the 473rd bullet point on a spec that may never see the light of day, its fifteen paying customers sending me Christmas cards with pictures of their kids. Or if I kick butt and take names for two weeks, rather than getting a pat on the head from the boss, a new stack of busywork, and $60 added to my Christmas bonus (yaaaaay), my sales increase by $400 a month FOR FOREVER.
Is it easy? I don't think anything worthwhile is easy: I've been part-timing this for 2.5 years now and am just creeping into the $20k a year sales range. But someday, in the not so distant future (certainly not 5 years from now like the slideshare presentation suggests), it will be enough. (It actually would cover my burn rate at the moment but I'm a bit of a cautious type.)
And then I will calligraphy-up my resignation letter, make my bows, and walk out of the office while the sun is still shining for a change.
And, as God is my witness, that will be the last time I ever deal with a company as an employee. If they want to be business partners, we can be business partners. If they want me to live my life for them out of a sense of obligation, ho ho ho, I will be happy to introduce them to service providers who are more appropriate to their needs.
(This isn't really a Japan-only thing, incidentally. There are any number of American companies which could be my company, easily. And there are Japanese companies which are better but, really, none is ever going to be as good to me as I would be.)
For better or worse, choosing to live here (or really, anywhere) generally means you get to work nearby as a package deal. I'm working on making that more of an a la carte selection.
(Edit: Incidentally, I don't dislike my job. Parts of it are actually quite fun -- it has made me a much better engineer, I've learned quite a bit, and it has done wonders for my ability to read web application stack traces in Japanese.
Its just that, well, I have a finite number of years to live and hours in my waking day. They can have a few years and many hours. Or they can have many years and few hours. But I'm not willing to sell many years and many hours.)
Hopefully, the stack traces don't just read 'エラーが起きました。たいへん申し訳あります。' grin
Though I've tried using 申し訳あります (literally, there is an excuse) before as a joke to lighten the mood when apologizing. I'm not sure they got it.
Yeah, 大変申し訳あります sounds like something you'd see in 漫才.
So polite, the Japanese ;-)
Relatedly: Americans have been known to say one thing but believe another. Gasp! I actually had a Japanese coworker who was flummoxed when that happened to him -- he said, in as many words, "What is the world coming to?! We invented [the Japanese word for the distinction between what one says and what one actually believes] and now even the Yankees are doing it?!"
While I was interested in the topic, about 30 slides in I got tired of clicking through the "presentation" and gave up. I'm getting tired of slides with huge text and no design. Makes me almost miss bullet point monotony!
Nobody uses Google Presentations? Nobody? Or 280Slides? Sites that don't feel like absolute crud?
If he had just put his thoughts on a web page I would have read them. By putting the onus on me to waste my time clicking over a hundred times and only feeding me a sentence or two per click, he just drove me off. Unless people who like clicking a lot while reading slowly are his target audience, this is a bad thing.
1) It's more about "being an employee sucks" than "employees suck"
2) It gives the very dangerous advice that "you don't need more PR/marketing" and the follows that up with the saner "you need to get people blogging about you". Oh, so now, getting people blogging about you isn't a marketing exercise? Really? What is it then?
As oppose to a slick ad copy written by (very expensive) professionals.
The gist of it is that if your product isn't cool enough to the target audience that they want to tell all their friends about it, then it's probably not good enough to make serious money.
For an app that capitalizes on your MS in material sciences and love of python, and targets big manufacturing companies, an experienced sales team is worth quite a lot. Viral won't cut it.
I also think an overwhelming majority are downright allergic to the notion of becoming a contractor. Having to sell yourself every 6 months to 2 years, with all the uncertainty in between gigs? No thanks! The proposal to quit and sell "intellectual goods" just doesn't appeal at all to people who place the value of an extra dollar far below the value of extra stability.
Employee + ESOP = Motivation