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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

Let them squirm. Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives. Take it even to starting a union if needed.

You don't give your time to an employer, you trade it, and in our modern society we have a gap in the market power of labor. Only way to get it is to reclaim it.

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> Let them squirm.

The risk here isn't that your snooping boss feels a bit uncomfortable.

The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.

> success could get you promoted

"Could" is such a big word. It means nothing, but it is intended to be very valuable. Get that promotion in writing. Otherwise it's a carrot to dangle upon you.

> they'd better not send you on that expensive training course

You know what's worse than training people and then these people leaving? Not training them and then these people staying.

You insist on giving me reasons to stay away from that company.

You don't necessarily realize that you work for this company.

Some people will talk about ideals all day without even realizing that they too live in the real world. So many things could be great, it’s just not the reality that we are in.

Those are naive arguments. Most people need employment, and most people want to get better wages by climbing the ladder.

Get it in writting? When in the history of the mankind it ever happened? Not to anyone I know, and I would never make such promises as well. Promotion depends on a lot of things, and promising something like that in writing is stupid.

And once you're tagged as someone who might be leaving, some employers really may prefer no to invest in you. Why should they? You might leave.

The whole argument of "the risk of training and they staying" depends entirely on how you gauge risk. In this case, if you have positive evidence that they are unhappy, then you know that the risk of leaving higher than staying.

Or it guarantees you’re in the next round of layoffs. You’re now a liability and they’ll be looking for a replacement with better loyalty signals.

You will be on the next round of layoffs regardless of your loyalty. "You were updating linkedin" is the excuse. It could be anything else. But the reality is that they found someone cheaper.

I heard non-squeaky wheel look more loyal and are kept around.

"Loyalty" has been dead for decades, just look at that many accounts of successful teams and people that have been laid off in the last year alone. The same exact stories of hard working and dedicated people being laid off on a whim can be found going back decades.

There's a reason that so many people now get prompted by moving "horizontally" between companies, very few companies today properly reward loyalty, if anything most actively incentivize individualism and disloyalty.

Staying with one company made sense when pensions were prevalent and unions were strong. Tech actively disincentives people from staying in one place too long, and instead of changing that they seek to limit mobility via NDA's, collusion, etc. It is a grossly atavistic world they've built, and the whole idea is to keep wages as low as they can.

Definitely. But also expensive non-squeaky wheels get replaced with cheaper wheels if upper management is in the mood of cost cutting.

Is there always a cheaper wheel to replace cheap non-squeaky wheels ? Asking for a (n-already-too-)cheap(-to-their-liking) non-squeaky wheel friend of mine.

There is always perceived cost cutting of outsourcing.

There is always "we fired 20% of the people, now their workload is on your shoulders or you will also be fired".

There is always "here is a book titled 'use agile to deliver twice as fast' now the deadline is in 3 months instead of 6 or else".

The only defense against that is having more options.

Yeah, in the end it's about always having a plan B at any time.

Wheels gotta move I guess, it's in their nature after all.

Avoidant attachment at its best.

Or they spare you, betting you'll leave on your own terms and they won't need to pay you a severance.

You can wait for others to promote you as a carrot or you can promote yourself. With more power on the labor side, you can more easily promote yourself.

Big Tech started with a lot of power in labor due to the knowledge economy, and is losing a lot of their core power. Thus wages will start slipping more and more and converge to general market rate for talent. Reclaim that power!

> The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.

What a great reason to encourage employees at the margin to job hop! Better pay, negotiation of those expensive training courses and/or big important projects.

What's the downside here, exactly, to a more fluid labor supply/supplier's market?

> Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives.

If you're working for a company that actively monitors this sort of thing, I don't think that management's response will be "let's make our employees; lives better."

Managers want prisoners. Tradespeople don't fall for this shjt, white collar employees shouldn't.

I think a better mental model is that managers want _control_. If you are known for keeping your word and being frank in your goals, you are forecastable in how you will act and management steps back from trying to control and maybe even trusts you. If you aren't this way (and most folks aren't), then you become a pawn in a lot of manager headgames.

Some managers are just a--holes, granted.

All of that is reasonable, but none of it works unless you can get ~everyone in your org to do it.

Conservatively, only takes about 15%.

Some findings show as low as 3.5%

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...

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