As an Employee, You Are Disposable (2023)
nelson.cloud
nelson.cloud
If you are loyal to your employer and do not own a significant part of the organization, then you should take a good hard look at why you're loyal -- and whether or not your employer is loyal to you in return.
Hint: in most companies, they aren't. It's exceedingly rare.
Base your decisions accordingly.
I will note, however, that there is also more to the story than simply "being disposable." An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain.
The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.
Of course, this is just the random off-the-cuff thoughts of someone who is currently far too alcoholated, so YMMV, and--
Look! A boulder of salt!
And on that note, I'm going to bed. Tootles!
For the vast majority of employment situations, it is simply a transaction. There needn't be any talk of "loyalty", which in my mind is usually just manipulation.
Given the chance, both parties would expect the other party be loyal while they optimize for something better than what they have.
> Given the chance, both parties would expect the other party be loyal while they optimize for something better than what they have.
Peachy.
Marriage was just an example that points out the absurd nature of the "loyalty" the user described.
You can't say "well, I am loyal as long as I don't have any other options"... that's not how loyalty works.
But cultural norms are really powerful and can absolutely overcome natural game theory / self interest dynamics. If everyone you know would think less of you after you quit a job when it is known that employers are loyal, you won't do it. Same goes for the reverse.
The most common error I see in employment is the employees not understanding this basic truth. That leads to situations such as people thinking that an employer is doing them a favor in some way by hiring them, which leads to people giving up some of their power.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
If anything, it is a perverse expression of US 'fuck you, got mine' system.
What one party perceives as a fair wage is nothing but profit dilution for the other side.
Remember, the only purpose of a business is - given money - to make more money. If you can't help them with that, either by being dirt cheap or have some marketable skill, you're literally useless and part of the Capitalist overpopulation... a class people who serve no use in the accumulation process.
When every company that has any mind share is beholden to a bunch of external shareholders, it's no wonder "profit as much as possible" is the only reason for being anyone thinks of.
But it didn't used to be this way and it doesn't have to be this way. It's still possible for people to do well by doing good, providing, for example, quality housing at non-exploitative prices, or reliable and safe plumbing to handle their neighbors' water and sewer needs. And it still is being done.
Most of us just spend so much of our time online that we only ever hear about the companies with social media/marketing teams, so we get used to that way of thinking.
If every plumber in your area had a subscription to your software that was specifically tailored to your codes and the nuances of your area? Estimating costs based on actual local prices for things? Could you support the number of people it would take to keep such a thing running? Could you sell insights from the data to the local hardware store to help them figure out what kinds of changes (weather, construction, whatever) lead to what kinds of demand for products?
It doesn't have to be "you could walk to it" local, but if you really created the tool your area's local businesses couldn't live without, could you really not support yourself?
Today we talk of globalization, but the mid to late twenteith century was the heyday of nationalization, of small local and regional businesses like the ones you describe -- businesses that were linked to and cared about their local communities or regions -- getting bought up and consolidated into large national businesses -- local owners getting replaced with hourly shift managers with less autonomy and incentive to care.
Today's American may wake up in their Toll Brothers built house, take a morning poop on their American Standard toilet, brush their teeth with Proctor & Gamble products, walk down the stairs built with wood from the Home Depot, pour themselves a bowl of Kellog's cereal into dishes and on a table bought from Ikea, read the news a bit on their Apple device, step into their Ford car sitting on their driveway built of asphalt made by Koch Industrial, then drive to work, stopping for gas at an ExxonMobil gas station, pulling in to their job as shift manager at a TGI Friday's, where they spend their day serving food made from ingredients bought from Sysco, the national distributor, ultimately bought from a few large processed food companies like whoever owns Kraft / Philip Morris these days.... finally after a long day they drive home, stopping at Wal*Mart for some essentials, finishing off the day with the refreshing taste of a Bud Lite.
It's frankly amazing small business still managed to produce 40% of our GDP, but make no mistake, it has been and is being driven to the least profitable margins and corners of every industry. Small business gets to operate the restaurant while big business owns the real estate. Small business gets to owner-operate tractor trailers while big business gets the lions' share of the actual retail profits. Etc, etc -- small business is increasingly stuck with the left over pieces that are too unprofitable for big business.
Unintentional or not, squeezing out small business owners from their share of the pie has been the process for big capital for decades. We talk a lot about how big capital has been trying to squeeze down the piece of the pie labor gets since the 70s, but we forget that small capital has also been the victim of this.
I live next to a Target. It's run by a handful of minimum wage high school kids and a couple of managers who probably earn $40k and have no standing in the community, no share in the success of the business, no way to grow along with it, and no discretion to change their store's behavior to accomodate any local community interest other than distant, distant shareholders getting more profits.
A few decades ago instead there would have been multiple stores, each with an OWNER who had all those things -- standing in the community, ownership over the profits, and the discretion to make decisions not purely on profit but also caring about the community they're indelibly tied up with. And this owner could pass the business to their kids, which the Target manager can't do either.
That's overstating it. Making money is certainly a very important purpose in business, but it's not usually the only purpose.
Reality is that neither has to be loyal. Employees leave all the time for better pay/perks etc. You are judging employers too harshly in this respect.
But I know of examples where a manager has said things like "you need to decide if you are loyal to the company" etc. I really dislike this.
I.e. if your resume shows too much job hopping then that can hurt your ability to get a new job. However, a corporation is not nearly a badly hurt by repeatedly overhiring and laying off employees.
Which only unions have the power to equalize.
It's only about shareholder value, thus about growing growth. Which is so stupidly unsustainable, the inevitable crash always happens.
And it's normal people who will foot the bill for this system.
That argument falls flat on its face as soon as you look at the balance sheet of these companies. They are exceeding expectations and still laying people off.
But then again, I never expected the ruling class to be empathetic.
E.g. here’s what it looks like in my locale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_funds_in_Sweden
The upside of having a system like that is that the burden to ”care for” the employee’s economical safety is not put solely on their current employer, but not solely on the employee either. In order to be eligible for payouts the employee has to pay in to the fund every month (something like ~14 USD) – and all companies are mandated to contribute pay in to this system.
Personally, I see few downsides with this system.
It’s important for the general economy that companies can be flexible and change direction, e.g. when the economy cools off or in the face of competition. Therefore I believe layoffs are sometimes necessary for the company to survive. But it’s also important – both for ethical and economical reasons – that layoffs doesn’t wreak havoc with the personal finances of the people being let go.
Regarding healthcare: To me it does not seem like a good idea to tie a person’s health insurance to their current employer. AFAICT this is a remnant of the US war economy during WW2. But that doesn’t mean that a system like UK’s NIH is superior. To me, the German model looks very reasonable where citizens are required to sign up for insurance but the benefits are not tied to the person’s employment. One can read more about it here: https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/life/health-in-germany-h... I think Singapore has a similar system.
Once you are not under them you are completely on your own, at least here in Eastern Europe.
That's more or less how it's best described. Once you are not an employee you need an accountant, or you need to be very well versed in the laws and the monthly payments to the country's budget yourself. If neither, some 6-12 months later you get persecuted and called in court, with the possibility to have some of your property confiscated.
They don't like small businesses very much.
I thought it was a discussion about generic companies, but it seems to be a discussion about specific ones?
I had a coworker who was actively hostile to the practice of writing documentation, for instance. He wasn't up front about it but he was plainly doing it to reduce his disposability. I think it probably worked because they kept him around longer than they clearly wanted to in spite of his very prickly personality.
As a strategy I thought it actually made a decent amount of sense given his circumstances - lots of debt/outgoings, he couldn't hop jobs easily and the company treated employees as extra disposable.
As the developer who came after him I was perplexed at the cries online people would make that "this practice only hurts the developer who comes after you" or "if the company does well you'll do well" (which I think is bullshit).
It definitely made me a LOT slower, but I still got paid the same.
Starting any topic with kind/evil dichotomy is never a way to bring a rational perspective on the table, indeed.
Over-hiring can happen through different situation. One is bad luck: market evolution removed the the ground under the feet of a sound projection assuming a reasonably stable context.
An other possibility is incompetence: acting in reckless attitude with the business strategy as if it was a past time board game without considering it will have concrete impact on real people that will engage in its progression.
Yet an other one is draining all skills in the market to gain dominance on its segment. Thus endowed, it will be easy to kill any possibility of fair concurrence. Then later, drop the monopolized workforce out of the train, that was known to be superfluous to achieve production goals. Of course, this drop should occur only once there is no credible chance these employees could find a decent job in this sector anymore. That is after they contributed to the hegemonic position of the organization.
In short, over-hiring is not necessarily an error.
Same as when you are taking your vows, if you later come across a hotter, younger chick with your exact set if kinks, you do not just drop your wife and go looking for a new gimp suit.
Seen from this perspective, it is clear that businesses tend to have very little loyalty. The ethos of most of the business world at the moment is short term bean-counting optimization. If employees can be fired and replaced by cheaper foreign workers, they will be. The only rationale allowable is one that balances costs and benefits, in the bean-counting sense, and it is not an accounting that includes any weight for loyalty. You could imagine a spreadsheet where the company said "hey I'm gonna put a hurdle of $100k per employee on the 'stay in America' side, and I'll only move the factory if it's still in favor of moving abroad". But when has this ever happened?
On the other hand, employees probably have more loyalty than zero. Almost everyone has a story about they were approached by a recruiter offering a higher salary, but they didn't take it. Part of this is explicable by risk, offsetting the higher salary with a chance of not settling at the new work, that kind of thing. But if you were to count the bean again, almost every knows a bunch of people who could have jumped ship for a higher salary but didn't, even when you count that risk.
As someone who works at a 2 person company (my boss and me), it's the good relationship with him along with the relaxed work environment. Sure, we have to be profitable, but not exceedingly so.
> I will note, however, that there is also more to the story than simply "being disposable." An argument can be made that laying off however many employees also helps to preserve the ongoing livelihood of the employees who remain.
> The error is often not in the layoff. It's in over-hiring in the first place. And that changes the "how evil are these people?" equation rather drastically IMO.
Those are mostly a problem at larger companies, IME.
I was exceedingly lucky with most of my jobs so far, in the sense that I mostly got good work environments where employees are actually valued beyond mere numbers. I wish others would be as lucky as I was.
Isn’t this the point of the article? That even when you feel this way that you are still disposable?
They really tried hard to find a way to keep me on, so while I was disposable in the end, they truly did try to keep me on, and to me, that indicates them valuing me beyond the mere numbers.
My understanding of your messages indicates to me that you think I was saying that the company doesn't care about numbers. While I was meaning that the company treated me as an actual valued human and did well to me.
This is an underappreciated aspect of psychopathic corporate life and "Human resource" thinking, I think. It's hard to avoid the feeling that companies -- particularly big tech -- feel empowered to hire lots of people quickly precisely because firing people has become so easy.
Such that when one big company has a round of layoffs, competitors genuinely feel some pressure to follow suit almost arbitrarily, because it's an expected part of a cycle; a numbers game, a way to appear "lean", etc.
It doesn't mean that you have to hate your job. Just stop and reflect from time to time, and make sure you are being compensated for what you do. If not, you need to change something (ask for a raise, look for another job, work less, ...).
As developers, IMHO you should always push for open sourcing as much as you can, ideally with a copyleft license and no CLA. Because it is beneficial for you personally: it means that you can reuse your code after you leave, and if you manage to make it copyleft and accept external contributions, it will force your employer to keep distributing the sources after you leave.
I really don't get why developers sometimes go out of their way to help their employer keep their code proprietary, it should be the other way round.
How many people have had this work? Am I unusual in working at places that take an extremely restrictive attitude to their IP?
No.
Statistically, almost nobody.
My buddy Slim seems capable of it and has built up quite a portfolio of "ready to go" solutions for common problems over the years.
It's a matter of degree, obviously, but every time you do this it's likely to count as IP infringement. Generic libraries? Probably nobody will ever notice or care. But if they do, it could be expensive for you.
Most code written by most companies has been written a thousand times already, and there is nothing illegal about recreating a library which behaves the same as something you wrote at a company.
Your employer allows you to open source something? Push for a copyleft license and no CLA.
Your manager says that "we could consider open sourcing it"? Take this as a yes.
Learn about licenses, what they mean, and think about IP at work. Many times the employer does not get anything from not open sourcing the code. It's just that they don't care. If you do, you can push them towards doing it.
I am not saying that it will be bad for the employer! It may actually be good. I am just saying that it is better for you as a developer, so you should push for it.
I would say that getting to a point where this sort of thing is possible requires a huge amount of out-of-bounds culture and technical work though. Probably outside of the commitment range of folks who just want to work as an employee and not think about work outside of your paid hours
Because you open source it does not mean, AT ALL, that you need to spend time on it. I like Cap'n Proto as an example: it is a great open source project, but don't think of contributing to it: you will probably be ignored (unless you find and fix a very important bug, but good luck to find that there). And that's fine: the fact that it is open source is already great! Who would I be to expect the maintainers to work for free on top of open sourcing great work?
The fact that the parent comment is so upvoted is a reflection of what people dream of, not reality.
I can see that being the case among software developers. On the other hand, the organization I work for is so far removed from that world that my employer doesn't make any claims on most IP. If I decide to write a program to automate a task, the source is mine to do with as I please. They don't even lay claims on much non-software IP, stuff that ordinary businesses would lay claim to, since the attitude is more akin to the IP being "carpenter's tools" than the product of the job itself. (Granted, working in the education system helps on this front. The definition of restricted IP is rather narrow when the expected outcome is to share knowledge.)
Only if you understand it as "open source everything", it is a dream. But that is not what I say. What I say is that as a developer, you should try to open source as much as you can. Many times that's not nothing.
It's really mostly a matter of thinking about it and seizing the opportunities.
Related is also: don't be afraid to depend on copyleft libraries! As an employee, it's beneficial: it means that you have to contribute back (actually not exactly, but managers usually don't get the details so you can get away with it :-) ).
I thought that was a pretty cool thing. My job is essentially subsidizing some open source projects without ever getting the credit for it (or the potentially negative publicity, from their perspective, I guess)
And I don't think anyone really would have benefited from open sourcing the application either. The code wasn't all that brilliant, it was hard to run, had a lot of assumptions that would only ever be true for us, and we didn't really want to spend the time fixing/optimising that. Tons of other things to do. Practically we would also have to scrub the commit history, do an audit to make sure we really don't have anything sensitive in there, and stuff like that.
One reason I open sourced this stuff was just enlightened self-interest by the way: it enforces "clean" library-oriented programming with clean separations. When I joined there was stuff like "email parser module" which in principle would parse RFC2822 messages, but then would also call models to do a few database things, and nonsense like that. It was all pretty messy, and this hugely improved things.
I don't do it because I am helpful, but because I'm paid to do so.
I was merely noting that they are not paid for that. They are paid to [solve problems] (which I expressed as "write code").
Maybe that's true for your employer. But it's bold to generalize. Certainly not true for the company where I work. And a quite sad view.
It's true for all employers. Your job as a business owner is not to provide jobs to your employees, it's to keep the business afloat and maintain your income. There are limits to how much of a good person you can be, those limits are set by the economic system we exist in. Ignoring these limits will cause your business to fail.
It's a sad view and it's not entirely accurate but it has better predictive power than the rose-tinted glasses you and possibly your employer may be wearing. Profitability is the baseline requirement, all else comes after. That's how a market economy works. If you remain at a stable net-zero that's great as long as nothing ever changes but it means you're extremely vulnerable to any disruption.
To be clear: I'm not even talking about shareholders. This is true for private businesses too, maybe even more so. Profit means reserves, reserves mean being able to survive dips and downturns. But when the market changes you need to adjust and adjustment means the value of an employee can change drastically and it may be better to replace someone who was a great fit for the old market with someone who's a better fit for the new market. Sentimentality is a competitive disadvantage.
You can balk at the morality and decency of this and I'd agree with you but you shouldn't be upset about the persons, you should be upset about the system that is requiring those persons to act this way in order to stay afloat.
It's just how it is: your employer is not your friend. It's a contract.
"In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee’s lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price."
Likewise, when someone owns a factory, they don't just own the physical tools and material inputs of production (which they would rent to workers), but they own (control) the whole social structure that is needed to produce, all the human relationships (workers - management - owners - customers) required for the factory to work.
That was Marx's main point, and that's why sane countries have labor laws that regulate this relationship. (But even if everybody was truly selling a service, "free market" would quickly collapse into oligopolies, as it usually does.)
Ayup. That's why when you run a small business an early lesson is that your competitive advantage isn't your intellectual property (because any larger company can come along and find a way to copy that legally) but your business relations and reputation.
This quote completely ignores real-world power dynamics and distribution of resources. The employer has capital, the employee does not. The employer can be a Fortune 500 or a mom and pop shop. Even the most highly paid employee can not exert as much political or economical power as Jeff Bezos. At a certain point wealth stops being about what you can buy and starts becoming about what decisions you can influence.
This is the reason unions exist. A Fortune 500 company's board members already engage in collective bargaining. It's only fair for its employees to do the same. And this works at almost any scale, even if at the mom and pop shop the employees may not need to formally unionize because there's few enough of them that they can organize directly.
> you should be upset about the system that is requiring those persons to act this way in order to stay afloat.
How would you change the system or modify the current situation in order to define new limits that are more, let's say, humane?
In the article, there is an example of an ex-Google employee that got fired via email, he couldn't say "Bye" to his colleagues after 20 years of working with them. That doesn't seem like a system with reasonable limits.
The economic forces as painted here are very real but cruelty is optional. It is not very expensive to give an employee the time to say goodbye to colleagues.
Sure but he had a good reason to conflate all forms of democracy as if there were no difference between them or ways to give more power to the people in, say, UK's form of democracy. Replacing first-past-the-post voting for example wouldn't require abandoning the entire system of government.
> The same for capitalism.
Sure but again there are important differences between laissez faire capitalism and a social market economy and yet this is used to justify reforming the latter into closer and closer approximations of the former. This also ignores that while the economy at large is clearly some form of "capitalism", communities otherwise operate on more non-capitalist patterns of behavior (e.g. buying rounds at the bar among friends, borrowing tools to your neighbors, BYOBs/potlucks).
Even interactions involving currency (remember markets and currency alone don't define capitalism) don't have to be transactional or profit optimized or be defined in terms of ownership and servitude. Of course things like the gig economy, consumerism and "hustle culture" are built around "capitalism"-ifying those non-capitalist interactions by reframing them as transactional or business opportunities - the most blatant example probably being the widely ridiculed genre of blog post a la "what breaking up with my partner taught me about being a hiring manager".
Until there is a system to easily weed out the people that go ballistic when being laid off, cutting off access is completely fine.
If you want to keep in touch with people outside of work, exchange personal emails.
Until there is a system to easily weed out the people who carry dynamite in their asses, anal cavity checks are completely fine.
There’s literally whole continents where this isn’t an issue. If it is an issue in yours the problem is not the layoffs.
Output and effectiveness towards market needs has to matter or eventually the system collapses under its own weight. Churn has to happen, or ‘deadwood’ builds up through inertia.
And when the system collapses, it’s like a forest fire with a massive amount of dead wood - it burns everything to the ground, not to grow again for a generation. As compared to periodic wildfires that may suck, but for which sprouts pop back up again in the spring.
Currently "the market" is literally just a betting shop for shareholders, which seems an odd way to be making important strategic decisions.
I’m not talking about the stock market (which is built on top), I’m talking the actual economy.
Of course, command economies exist (and may again), and those tend to shortcut many of the niceties eh?
Command economies like corporations?
Other command economy examples - gov’t, the USSR, the US during wartime, Russia right now, etc.
Aka when someone in a position of authority says ‘money gets spent here and this way’, regardless of any natural market tendencies (and sometimes with little regard to solvency or pesky things like quality of life).
Obviously the caveat here is that the "market tendencies" aren't defined democractically. It's very much "voting with your dollar" where the voting itself is limited to what options the market provides and the dollar is limited to how much money each market participant has. In that sense monopolization is very much a natural market tendency although most people in favor of "letting the market decide" over government control/intervention would argue that monopolization is bad and actively harmful to a free market.
There are some clear examples like wartime economies, planned economies, ‘chaotic flea market’ like many Chinese markets, US food markets, etc.
That's literally begging the question. There's no intrinsic need for a system to allow for the centralization of wealth to the same extent our present system does, nor for such widespread commodification. It's entirely possible to imagine a system with a different conceptualization of property rights for example -- because we know that property rights have changed over time and were different in different societies. Copyright alone is a great example for how arbitrary property rights are given how drastically it has changed over time.
I’m talking about all economic systems, including the USSR, China, US, European markets, etc.
Fundamentally, for an economy to exist it connects those who produce/have with those who consume/want, mediated by some exchange of value (though in command economies that last part can be remarkably performative).
And fundamentally, if there is no connection to people’s actual needs, and no clearing of old/non-competitive ways to meet those needs there is going to be a very, very bad time. Eventually.
Using FAANG as the example for all jobs is not useful even though this is HN.
Employee here. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it is healthy for both the employer and the employee to recognize this as a base of a good professional relationship.
Why would you agree? A business is people voluntarily getting together trying to make money. If it fails to do so, why should other people have to step in and pay?
Sooner or later we're going to have to take a look at that definition because the evidence strongly suggests it's doing more harm than good.
There have been other more humane models, even in corporate America.
My understanding is that there are a lot of very similar economic systems. There are pros and cons to each of these systems. I don't believe one system or government as truly figured it out.
Folks on HN and reddit like to use other systems as a better system, but they always have some subjective negatives that are pushed aside.
Interested in your opinion about the following: Should employees get their salaries adjusted by inflation once per year?
Why yearly, not monthly? Also what if there is deflation, do people get pay cuts?
A lot of these issues are very easy to criticize on the surface, I don't think many here have ever tried to employee people and work on profit margins.
can be monthly, should be put in a contract.
> Also what if there is deflation, do people get pay cuts?
Yes, put it written form in a contract too.
What I suggest (employer and employee explicitly negotiating inflation/deflation terms) could be better than the standard song and dance we all are used to suffer.
1. They expect the company to be not profitable in near future and they are taking advance steps.
2. They think the workers add nothing to the top line or bottom line and cannot think of anything else that would gainfully make use of their talents.
3. They think the market would like it if they lay people off and hence it is in their selfish motive to keep laying people off.
1 requires a crystal ball and 2 is just incompetence. 3 seems the most likely answer for these layoffs.
If you were running a company at a loss to pay people, you are not running a business, you are a charity. At the same time, if your profitable company wants to move the payoff from labor to shareholders in increasing percentages, your company is detrimental to the society.
Joking aside I know, personally, business owners who have consistently acted with integrity and managed to maintain a successful, profitable business over the course of 30+ years, adjacent to the real estate market, surviving 2008, etc. so it's not like they've never faced had time or tough competitors. In that time they have never had layoffs. They've had to cut pay and reduce benefits in lean times, but providing gainful employment is a core value (above profit!!) and it has worked.
How do you know that? Even if so, how do you know that it won't change in future?
"it's profitable" hides a world of problem though. "it's profitable" over what timeline - just because an employee isn't doing something profitable this week, doesn't mean they won't be next week. It costs a lot to fire someone even in "at will" countries where you literally just tell them to F-Off
Contrast this with the presumably US situation of a reported Google firing by email, instantly gone forever, can’t even say goodbye to colleagues.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944098
The (nation-)state you work in matters a lot.
Unless they consider that it is still profitable because they will stop paying him after those 2-3 months. Which would not be stupid.
It's a job offer, not a marriage vow.
It's great if there can be rapport in a public company (as opposed to private) but that culture is a luxury trim at best.
I'm old enough to have heard this about a very large number of companies and it's always wrong in the long term.
Like all aspects of work/life balance, it is a risk/reward balance that you need to monitor and adjust as circumstances develop.
In reality, the power dynamic inherently favors the employer. Once an employee has invested their time and energy, the company holds all the leverage. There's little incentive for the company to uphold their end of this unspoken "deal."
Leadership changes, company priorities shift, and the "family" narrative can quickly fade when faced with financial realities or strategic decisions.
I'd say this is true for all for-profit companies, by definition.
Perhaps there is extra cost that makes it not worth it - laws, contract rules, etc. All the more reason to have that in place.
If the company is not privately owned without investors, it doesn't really have control over the actions.
In the 2 decades I have worked as a Software Engineer, I met numerous people, in numerous different companies, that said those words, exactly.
All of them were eventually proven wrong. No exceptions.
I live and work in EU (and lived in other places) and I'm pretty sure corporate culture in EU, Japan, Russia is very different from that. There are pros- and cons- sure, but this easy-in/easy-out seems like a very US/Anglophone thing from my POV.
The former is still fairly easy, and just has some process involved, the latter much harder unless gross misconduct can be demonstrated.
It's absolutely true the the UK/EU/etc. have much better rights than the US in this regard, but perhaps the higher pay in the US (at least in tech) pays for that.
What a coincidence. Me too :)
I'd be interesting to see over long periods of time and many people who leave first, the employee quitting or employer firing/laying-off.
My anecdotes tell me more people leave than get fired, especially the ones with options.
Sure, but that's not the original point. The original point is that the company won't make you any favour if they get a better deal by firing you. So you should do the same and leave if you find a better deal somewhere else.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a business person, so I have no idea what the correct fancy terms are for any of these things.)
If the company had to choose between survival thanks to firing someone ("recovery to positive" predicted after all legal unemployment stuff has been paid), vs loyalty keeping people on payroll risking bankruptcy[1] if the current trend continues, then I would expect them to choose fire-now-and-secure-survival, rather than don't-fire-because-i'm-sure-it-will-all-work-out-somehow-if-i-stay-loyal.
After all, as an employee, I would also choose assured survival (moving companies) over loyalty (staying in the same company) the second I realize staying at the current company isn't beneficial for me (i.e. what the company pays me vs cost of living, not enough for savings, too little time to spend with family, always way too tired, etc).
If your company would choose loyalty over being profitable, then that's interesting for sure. (EDIT: Though there's some companies that just run at a loss off the founder's savings, so it could be possible. I'm not denying your claims, just find them unusual.)
[1]: Either because company is already on negative profit ("debt"? no idea if that is the correct word), or because current profit isn't enough to please VC and risks losing their support which would then put them on a negative profit situation.
The regime I'm currently under genuinely seems to value me and the others around. I've been afforded quite a lot of understanding with regard to unplanned time off (and sometimes missed deadlines) due to dealing with some personal issues and looking after ill family (damn near lost the old man a couple of weeks ago, scariest day of my existence thus far). Admittedly there are some things that I have a very low bus count on, so they can't just easily kick me out or risk irritating me to the point where I chose to go, but it is more than just that.
Of course if it came down to me or the whole company I'd be dropped quickly as is only sensible, so there is a limit to how much I can count on such loyalty (or if it _isn't_ loyalty, their feeling that they need to keep me around).
Previous regime¹ was quite different. I wouldn't have trusted some of them enough to lend them a fiver³, and when I got news of the current lot coming in I was very close to telling them to fuck off⁴ in most unprofessional terms even though I didn't have anywhere lined up to jump directly to.
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[1] I've effectively worked for that same entity for many years², though there have been a couple of complete changes of ownership & company name, the usual staff turnover overall, and changes to the product line-up.
[2] due in part to a shocking lack of ambition :)
[3] At one point I found out my line manager was leaving the day he did, via an email to the whole company about leaving drinks, management had known for at least weeks. Also working piles of unpaid overtime on a project then being bitched about by the CEO for not being present at 0900 on the dot one morning, was a good indication of how much my efforts were respected (I started working to rule at that point, in at 0859, out at 1731, no overtime without agreement up-front it would be paid for).
[4] What had stopped me some days earlier was the brexit vote: that implied potential economic uncertainty which, to my many risk-averse personality segments, demanded I be a little more cautious for a time.
It benefits the coder, it benefits society, and the company gets that sweet temporary window of profitability over their competitors as they always have since time immemorial.
It depends on the codebase obviously, but you would have to prove that. On the other hand, if you open source it properly you may get contributions, which is valuable for the company.
Of course, if the open sourced project becomes wildly popular it's great for your CV, but that doesn't typically happen.
Also, just flinging the code out in the open isn't enough. The company needs to be a good steward of your open sourced contributions. At my last job I left a few reusable open source Django components which I thought were very nice (and others are using it), but nobody felt responsible to take care of the project, so it languished. Now it is several Django versions behind and has bug reports which aren't being fixed. This was rather disappointing to me. I had really expected better because my colleagues in general were typically pro open source. I'm not using Django anymore, and I'm not inclined to put any personal time into it to keep the project alive.
What's the worst case? The code just gets unmaintained and dies. That's not a problem at all.
Why would your colleagues want to maintain your pet project instead of making their own? Most open source projects live or die with their main contributors, if you expected the company to spend money maintaining your project then that’s the wrong expectation in my opinion.
The projects in question were Django model field types, which I used in the larger projects I was working on. I made them available on PyPi so they're re-usable by others, and for easier installation. Maintaining these should be in their own interest, as the projects in which they are used are mission-critical systems for their customers.
Presumably they haven't upgraded their Django in ages, so they didn't need to do any maintenance on these packages. But still, a) they may hit these bugs themselves sooner or later and b) the projects exist under the company's GitHub profile, so it makes them look bad.
The problem is that employers make this process as toxic as it possibly can be, using every trick in the book of emotional manipulation, making you feel like you're blackmailing them and literally destroying their life. Adds a lot of resentment on both sides every time regardless of outcome and it just accumulates.
1. The employee was a vain troublemaker who had over-value what they were worth in the market. Firing them would not only remove an inefficiency from the system (as they were likely not to work as hard if they believed that they were underpaid), but it would also helpfully remind the other developers that they were all expendable.
2. The employee was a 10x developer who was vital to the company processes and could command a much higher salary somewhere else. Even if you gave them a raise today, they could be hit by a bus tomorrow. The best course of action was to simply rip off the band aid. Fire the employee, have security immediately escort them from the building, and begin triage to ensure that the critical systems that they wrote/managed could be handled by the next resume in HR's pile.
The line I will always remember is: Developer are like eggs. They are heavily undervalued, but also will crack under too much pressure. Thankfully, like eggs, you can buy them for cheap in packs of twelve, so it doesn't matter if you break a few.
1) This policy is known and communicated to current and future hires.
2) The company has found a way to pay each person the current market rate and makes efforts to adjust accordingly.
Otherwise why would anyone stay?
The founder was very public with other companies in the area about both his policy of firing 10x developers and hiring any warm body that could put a resume in his hand. He told stories at local business meetings of the various people he hired who couldn't find a computer and were fired on the same day. So, when you found out what the corporate culture was like after about a month on the job, you had two options.
1. Stay on for a year. This cemented to every hiring manager that you were a 1x developer (because you kept the job), but absolutely not a 10x developer. You might get a junior developer position somewhere else, but never more than that. 2. Immediately quit the job. You now had a one month stint at the firm on your resume. Every hiring manager in town knew that 5% of people with a short stint were good developers and the remaining 95% were people who just finished "COBOL for Dummies". You'd best just leave the gap in your resume if you didn't want your resume in the trash.
Agree with the rest of your message but this is really dumb and will hurt your career. You need to think about what you’re writing and determine if there is any reason the employer would be supportive of this.
Ive been in SWE management for roughly 20 years now and if you get labeled as “the person who wants everything open source”, you get put in a very limiting box. You advertise that your interests aren’t really aligned with the company and you’ll be treated as a mercenary.
This seems okay on the surface, but it will exclude you from working on critical business code that would be ridiculous to open source.
Totally agree with avoiding labeling yourself more generically, but having spent enough time in the sun... I just want shade.
I work to get paid, not get acclaim or friends. At a certain point your professional development stops being at work. Being a mercenary is an interesting way to consider that, actually. For yourself, nobody else will.
I'm not even a developer. I do SRE which kind of requires I play one while not being on the friendliest terms with the real devs: "oh, that guy again"
I guess my point is this: don't subject yourself to whims... but do be amenable. Just not too much.
It's easy to become the sucker. Don't accept working on business critical code without business critical pay. It's just a weird way to look at things.
Not if you do it right. Don't be "the person who complains about stuff not being open source".
I believe I have been pretty successful at open sourcing a lot of my code. Sometimes by convincing my management that it was good for the company, sometimes by manipulating them (I guess it would mean I manipulated people in your position :-) ). Not in a way that hurt the company at all: I never open sourced anything where it actually mattered for the company.
I see it like this: when given the choice between not open sourcing (no work needed) and open sourcing (some work needed), every rational manager will go for the former ("I don't care about it, so don't wait my resources for it"). I just adapt my narrative to make it sound like it is cheaper to open source, and everybody is happy!
If you're always banging on about it, then yeah, that will happen. But that is of course a bad idea, because always banging on about any topic is almost always a bad idea in almost any context.
I think it’s more that we hate dealing with any kind of bureaucracy?
I managed to open source a lot of code just by convincing managers (sometimes in a manipulative way, but that's the game: they do that, too). It did not imply any bureaucracy.
Thinking that you should stay in a company even after it stops being beneficial for you will not lead to anything good.
I had a worker do some good work for low pay, because they believed in the idea. Situations changed and I need someone else for the position.
I have so much guilt and I must do something for this worker.
One suggestion, perhaps the most obvious: identify the likely pay/compensation of the person who will replace them, and then pay them the difference (or as much of it as you can) in severance over and above what you're required to offer.
Second suggestion: help find this person a new job at the kind of pay they should actually have been earning for the quality of work they were doing.
But don't feel guilt: it's more like a moral obligation. It's a good thing, not a negative emotion. It means you're thinking like a complete person in a world where it is common to pretend that isn't necessary.
What's your definition of guilt then? Just curious. Thanks.
What I am describing above is just discomfort. Unless the parent poster deliberately sought to underpay the person, they should have no guilt merely from that scenario. Discomfort is real enough.
Guilt might attach if they do not or choose not to act on that discomfort, or if the person is materially disadvantaged by not doing the ongoing work, or if a promise of better pay/longer employment was attached to asking for that work to be done at a low pay.
If you have a moral obligation you can’t fulfill because of the rules of the human system you operate in, how exactly do you propose avoiding a negative emotion?
I don't, but that negative emotion shouldn't necessarily be guilt.
First off, we don't know the obligation can't be fulfilled in this case. No reason to feel guilty if it can be. Things change.
Second, if there is genuinely nothing you can do to fulfil a moral obligation because of systemic issues, there is no value in guilt; it's literally not your fault. There might be negative emotions but it's better to consider them sadness or helplessness, and push away guilt.
Negative emotions happen. But taking on guilt for things you did not do and cannot fix for reasons outside your control is significantly emotionally damaging.
Yes, I agree with everything you've written here.
The only nuance I'd add is that feeling guilt (or sadness, or helplessness) is not necessarily bad—emotions are valuable signals that can be mined for insight. I think the problem comes when we start to dwell on negative emotions and then internalize them as somehow representative of the state of the universe. Don't try to suppress or change the emotion, feel it, acknowledge it, then take a breath and decide on a course of action that you think will lead to the best outcome.
And yes -- I think to some extent my determination to push myself not to accept guilt for things that aren't my fault comes from realising that guilt for imagined misdeeds is the most potent fuel for OCD, which has wrecked the pattern of my life; it is a thief of joy.
When I explained one of my OCD obsessions/compulsions to a friend, they said "I can understand why that affected you but you understand it is literally absurd to have guilt from that?", and it was one of the most empowering things I've ever heard.
Guilt is a burden that good people willingly shoulder and bad people willingly shirk (if they are capable of it at all).
Internalising that there are more productive negative emotions to feel than unearned, secondhand guilt is a life's work for me.
Let's not quibble. English is too imprecise for this kind of argument.
Basically preying on someone's low self-esteem and impostor syndrome. It's a vile thing to do, but unfortunately businesses keep exploit workers this way.
Did they believe in the idea to make shareholders buy themselves another yacht?
Imagine you built a big sandcastle and asked a friend to help. Your friend helped a lot but you only gave them a tiny cookie as a thank you because they liked your idea so much. This is very mean and unfair because you're taking advantage of your friend’s feelings and hard work without giving them what they really deserve. This kind of behaviour is called exploitation and it's not nice at all.
Unfortunately I don't have crayons to make it more visual.
> This is very mean and unfair because you're taking advantage of your friend’s feelings and hard work without giving them what they really deserve.
The motivation for the friend's altruism is, in fact, not in evidence. Nor is there evidence that they didn't know they were being underpaid, or didn't know the situation was unclear.
There are many reasons why it might be rational for a developer with full knowledge of the situation to accept low pay to make sure something happens, when it otherwise might not happen for no pay.
And there are situations where something has a truly unexpected upside.
The nasty accusations are that:
1) this is, specifically, "preying on low self-esteem". Where is this in evidence?
2) the developer has "impostor syndrome". Again, where is that in evidence?
You can use your big words if you like. But you are making an accusation that is supported only by your projection (perhaps of your own bad experiences?) onto it.
(I've done this kind of work. Once or twice when younger I would suggest impostor syndrome may have played a part, for sure. But in recent years I have done great work for low pay simply because one specific outcome was a social good I wanted to see happen, and I couldn't have done the work without some compensation. Had that work produced an additional financial windfall or escaped the MVP stage, I would have been there to profit from it. It didn't, for reasons I have learned from. But the social good exists nonetheless.)
Sorry you don't have crayons; they are an underrated device for the development of your evidently-pre-adult brain, and they are just plain fun! Put them on your wish list for Father Christmas.
That the developer has been paid low is a fact.
The accusation is that they were paid low because they were exploitable due to their low self-esteem.
This is projected onto this fact without evidence. Perhaps from bitter personal experience, but projected nevertheless.
It's not the legal entity which represents your employer that tells you that you're part of a family to try and manipulate you into working for a lower salary. That's done by the hiring manager and your bosses because a) presumably the lie works often enough that it's still worth using, and b) because they are paid a little bit more when they can get away with paying you a little bit less.
It's also one or more people who decide that despite being a loyal, hard-working employee for X years that it's time to let you go so you can be replaced by a fresh grad, an overseas hire, or simply to close your position to pad the yearly bonuses of those higher up the chain.
The entire concept of a corporation is to act as a shield for blame to prevent any landing on the individuals within - don't fall into that trap. Every decision made by a business, no matter how amoral, immoral, or even illegal it is, was ultimately made by people.
When it comes to employee disposability, companies are run by their ultimate decision makers, which is usually the board or direct owners. Even the C-suite is relatively powerless if given direct orders from the board/owners to trim head count.
- My code is disposable, and I should not become overly attached to it
- Loyalty should be mutual and based on a healthy relationship where both parties are willing to invest
- A literal supermajority of software developers
People who own companies are not known for being nice but the best way to get the full force and fury of a billion dollars arrayed against you is to suggest unionization.
Even if you didn’t personally think it’d be useful for you, that should make you reconsider?
But titles aside - only some software developers are highly paid; some aren't. And we are not "special people" - that's just company propaganda. There are millions and millions of us around the world. And in most of our companies, there are a lot. And our employment conditions are not "special", they are like the other SW developers, and - guess what? Pretty much like those of most of the other non-manual-labor workers, even if the salaries differ by profession.
Most employers, and the media, do a lot to inculcate us with this belief in distancing ourselves from each other, emphasizing differences and supposed uniqueness, so that our interactions go through them; and that we not think of doing things - professionally and otherwise - by direct coordination and collaboration, but rather through the mediation of management.
But if there's anyone who has the capacity to imagine things operating differently than they do today, surely it must be us SW devs - if we don't limit our critical scrutiny to just the computers we work on but direct it also towards surrounding social structures.
Disintermediation also makes a difference. It's possible - very unlikely for any one person, but possible, and keeps happening - to just bootstrap a product out of pure labour and very little capital. At which point they get to keep a lot of the returns. It doesn't at all fit a nineteenth-century economic model, so you can't apply the M word.
The "10x" phenomenon also makes a difference. Whether it's real or not, I think enough programmers believe it's real and want to be part of the 10x and somehow get a 10x reward. This is the exact opposite of a factory line or mass farmworker situation.
(there's lots of interesting business anthropology research on piecework vs hourly rate work, I believe)
Unions are neither a good nor a bad thing. It's a price cartel, which is rent-seeking in its nature, but so are the employers. Thus effects of unions depend on competitiveness of the particular market. In low-paying markets they are clearly beneficial and counterbalance the monopsony.
Programmers exist in a competitive market tho. Average programmer has a great bargaining abilities and most people know it. If you are a senior you wont get much from union, it's just a hustle. If you are a junior/immigrant unions will harm you by raising the bar.
You reached reductio ad absurdum in two tiny steps. So unions are seeking rent by virtue of legal ownership of the motion physical bodies, just as property owners seek rent by virtue of ownership of real estate.
That calculus might change if demand for developers cools down as a long term trend but it's not going to be anytime soon.
So workers are prosecuted for withholding labor in negotiations with management, these are moderately union-hostile laws. I'm told Henry Clay Frick was somewhat disinclined in his opinion of unions as well.
_American_ software developers. Many in Europe don't fall for this way of thinking.
I'm not even kidding, this is almost verbatim the attitude of plenty of (white, male, able-bodied tho at times mildly autistic) developers I've talked to throughout my career and at meetups and conferences, though few would be bold enough to spell it out this explicitly. Of course in those cases where they did end up having bad luck (be it health or otherwise) their employers did not in fact have their back, at least not longer than possible without harming profitability. If anything, developers working at smaller tech companies or in technical roles at non-technical companies were worse because they'd often see unions as only relevant for jobs that were "beneath them".
Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
> Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
Could have something to do with these countries having experienced full blown communism not too long ago.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur if you have any idea of how the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence treated unions. Just look at modern China if you need a refresher on what authoritrian states think about workers unionizing.
Also unions are not communism and neither did any of those countries ever experience "communism". The USSR never claimed to have "achieved communism", in fact the expression "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") was coined by these governments to denounce critics who demanded steps towards communism as "utopian" idealists. China today even has a full roadmap towards communism with different labeled steps to justify why it hasn't achieved communism yet and needs to be authoritarian for just a little while longer because the state will wither away eventually really soon trust me bro.
> If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
Not with that attitude they won't. Do you think we got legally mandated 40 hour work weeks, paid sick leave and mandatory rest periods out of the goodness of the hearts of business owners?
Many in Europe leave for the US because EU salaries are ridiculously lower.
This is just a survey but it's in line with my perception, salaries on avg are 2-3 times lower in rich EU countries than in the US (after taxes).
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/demographics/
I'll take higher taxes, healthcare through general taxation and relatively strong job security over a fixed dollar amount any day. Everyone is different though.
That combined doesn't even remotely cost that gap of 60k per year (plus strictly speaking this is not true since many employers would provide IT people with insurance).
> I'll take higher taxes,
It's not higher taxes. It's much lower salaries + much higher taxes combined. 60k a year in savings will provide you far more security and bargaining power than any strictest EU trade code would (and this is IMO one of the reasons for higher salaries in the US).
Specifically on insurance: how much is that worth if it’s bound to your employer? What if you get laid off and don’t find a job in time, then get sick? What if your father is laid off at 55, nobody wants to hire him anymore due to his age and he develops cancer? I can tell you what happens in Germany: nothing. Both of you go to the MD and get treated as appropriate.
You’ll never get me to trade all of this for a bit more money that I need to spend on health care, ridiculous tips, and overpriced apartments anyway.
One benefit the union members have over the non-union ones, though, is that you get insurance for legal counsel, for example. Other than that, union members don't have that many benefits, tbh. I still chose to be a member, because IMO it's the right thing to do.
I also have nationally strong’ish labor laws.
Because they’ve given me reason to believe they will? But mostly because the law makes it really hard to let go of employees when your company is doing well enough to keep them.
The battle is never over. In the US labor unions reached a zenith and have been undercut and dismantled as a multi-decade project.
The incentives are clear. Our systems drives ever onward toward slavery, the only remedy is pushing back through the generations.
I've worked at both, and the efficiency, friendliness, experience were all absurdly better without unions. With unions, everyone was trying to get each other written up, seniority mattered more than performance, politics were half the conversations at work.
Engineering would be miserable with a union, you'd be basically locked into an employer climbing the totem pole.
I don't want to work for a union not because I'm a rising star. It's because I know I'm on the right of a normal distribution. I don't want to revert to median pay. No thanks.
If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
I live in NY, and I can tell you that unions are very much a “thing,” hereabouts.
The unions in NYC protect the union. They care about little else.
That's their fiat. They're supposed to be like that.
I'm really hoping that unions are learning a bit of humility from the last few years. We'll see.
Japan (and Germany, I hear), has unions that are stakeholders (and, often board members) of corporations. They seem to work quite well, and are very powerful.
This doesn’t automatically mean you have a mandatory tariff for everyone, just that there is an organisation in your workplace that you can turn to, which will have your interests in mind, without you having to be a member. They can protect you from overreaching managers, baseless accusations, or unwarranted layoffs. And of course, they usually negotiate on behalf of the entire staff, especially on HR topics.
While this isn’t always working perfectly, it’s still a big achievement in terms of equality and worker rights.
It’s unfortunate, I think, that the US has such an awful history in terms of unions. There are far more nuances than discussions on HN make it seem, and virtually nobody looses if employees have strong protections against their employers.
True, but those "good salaries" are only but a fraction of the total salaries in the countries you mention. Methinks a country should prioritize the welfare and well being of the entire country's people and the average worker instead of focusing on the top 1% SW devs while letting everyone else sink.
Maybe keeping public services running for the bottom half of society is more important for society than creating the top SW companies in the world. After all you can't eat software, but we do need garbage men, doctors, pilots, sailors, nurses, handymen, architects, oil & gas and construction workers, farmers, car mechanics, barbers etc. a lot more to survive and run a modern society, than we need web devs to write yet another food delivery, ride sharing or crypto trading app designed just to skirt the laws and scam VCs and clueless investors while the interest rates are low.
If your toilets breaks, you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix it since he can't push an OTA fix remotely from home, otherwise you'll be rooting in your own shit no matter how advanced your knowledge of K8s and ML-Ops is. Who cares if you're a well paid SW dev in London, NYC or San Fran but you can't walk alone at night because you're surrounded by poor minimum wage struggling and homeless people on substances or mental illness from wealth inequality, lack of welfare/social care and societal collapse due to decades of poor political and financial policies designed only to favor the wealthy?
This is just my biased opinion, don't treat it as gospel ground truth.
Consumer software doesn't run the world. I think your negative examples of software scams and hucksters are consumer based.
> just to skirt the laws and scam VCs
VCs are not generally seen as victims!
> you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix
And that plumber depends directly or indirectly on plenty of software to get their job done, from the basics of getting paid to the more complex of sourcing parts. And they use a mobile phone, which is 99.9% software with a little bit of hardware.
I never said they were.
If everyone is paid the same, who sets these salaries, unions? Then who sets the non union pay? Or does everyone work for the union or government?
Yeah, what I said is not a solution to such problems, just an observation to the Original grandparent comment who tried to point out a few cities that have the best SW compensation as if that should be the end goal for every country.
You already are - by your employer. Mostly equalized at the absolute bottom of every situation where you disagree with your superiors or need to rely on the company for something.
> I'm happy to negotiate my own terms.
And your employer is even happier for you to believe you are actually negotiating your own terms.
> In my experience the union leaders negotiate better terms for themselves than for the people they represent.
That is certainly a potential problem. But think about the distribution of status, benefits and compensation of owners, managers, and employees - that's even more extreme, and prevalent, than misdeeds by union leaders.
This sounds like a bit of a "democracy can have corruption so let's support the monarchy" kind of an argument.
> The company prefers to have a good "shepherd" for the flock - the union leader.
What companies prefer is to shepherd the flock themselves. Failing that, getting a collaborative shepherd. The challenge in unionization is disrupting the shepherding and allowing for conscious collective reflection and action.
> in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.
The US is the center of the major world empire right now, and is not really comparable with most other places. However, even if you took the US - it's pretty much a hellscape, socially. Large tech companies are swimming in their ill-gotten gains while a huge number of people are homeless, many can only access contaminated water, students are in massive debt, infrastructure is in poor repair, public facilities and systems are under-developed...
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At my dad job their leaders of unions are literally paid as "leaders" xd No conflict of interest and the fact they always get so well with CEO and never with workers is not suspicious.
I think, according to the comments I see on HN, it is a bit too much, on both sides. Employees get laid off for no good reason, we already know that part, but many employees don't hesitate to quit when the company needs them the most.
I think the system would benefit from a bit more loyalty, on both sides. You don't have to get married to your employer, but I have the feeling that with a bit more loyalty, both employees and employers could make more beneficial long term plans.
Noone claims otherwise, but the difference is power dynamics and economic output of the state - if the unemployment is super low (like 1-2%) then it's super easy to jump jobs. But in regular, healthy market (3-5% unemployment) employer always have upper hand...
Boss drove to his house in a Bentley and gave him the keys.
Of course the dude was making far more than a Bentley for the company, in a role where your value is pretty much visible on the screen at any time.
These days I run a solo business. I do not want to have any employees. I've been burned too many times in the past — and my experience (generalizing horribly) is that most programmers think they are the cream of the crop, superstars that deserve salary, benefits, perks, bonuses, vacations, and fantastic treatment. But then it turns out that a) they don't perform as superstars, and b) the company deserves absolutely nothing in return, so people leave suddenly and without warning.
In the businesses I've seen, the relationship was very asymmetric, heavily biased towards the comfort of employees.
But you are being too weird in your generalization that usually the table is tilted in favor of the employees. For 22 years of career I've never once seen it.
If you make yourself a niche consultant and can command insane fees then nice, but for everybody else they are just cogs that can and are replaced on a whim.
I don’t have that experience. Nobody in my circle has ever been let go. Meanwhile many of them have gone through 4 or 5 employers in the past 15 years.
In the last 27 years, I've worked for more than 20 companies. Maybe 5 as a contractor that didn't go FT. Many startups, some name brands. I have been let go (or ongoing contract not renewed) ~6 times - hard to know with contracting when it's sometimes a factor of budgeting. Suffice to say, I have quit far more positions than removed by the actions of my employers. I have been at my current position ~7 years with 1 promotion. I fully expect that I will be let go out of the blue one day.
To prepare for this, I save aggressively. I do interviews with other companies from time to time for practice. Meta, Indeed, Nintendo, whatever. I work on the weekends from time to time, trying new technologies and picking at the low-hanging fruit that might make me more robust in the job market.
This is the state of the industry and will be for the foreseeable future. Losing a job involuntarily sucks. Interviewing sucks. Looking for jobs sucks. All that being said, it's still the best way to get a better job (whatever that means to you). I'm an old man and I'm at the peak of my ability. I do wonder when it will go upside down for me.
That's very generously assuming somebody above you actually has a clue who's valuable and who is not, which I have to tell you that I have witnessed, yes, but rarely.
But yes, technically correct.
EDIT: It is also true that too frequent switching jobs will have negative consequences for your employability; and high attrition, even if it becomes a public fact, would have little consequences for desirability of the job.
Most people view this sort of employment pattern as being risky. It certainly has it's ups and downs but it does also mean you are never tied to an employer or really that vulnerable to layoffs or similar. I have had contracts cut short because of organisational crisis but moving on is usually trivial.
People make choices and trade-offs when they choose their employer/how they are employed.
I don't understand why people think a large or even middling organisation is going to consider individual employees over other likely more pressing factors like short and long term survival. I do understand why it would be painful and stressful.
Contractors get paid a lot more than FTEs in the same position, employers save on lots of overhead for healthcare and stuff. At least for younger people without chronic illness, this is often a way better deal. Employers can not only have the truly elastic work force that they seem want, but they can also actually remove staff where it's not working out without facing some kind of lawsuit. And without waiting for huge rounds of general layoffs while they keep useless/ignorant folks for years and task more productive people with trying to minimize the damage they cause. And yet.. if you want part-time or contract work, it's crickets when it comes to find/filter. The increasingly monolithic staffing empires at big websites like Indeed apparently have so few of these jobs listed that they just ignore the filter and show all the full-time positions anyway.
I don't have a great theory about why. Could be the economy in general, could be AI removing the 1% of actually thoughtful recruiters from the loop recently, or changing tax laws, or employers just enjoying leverage while they use the classic healthcare/employment situation in the US as a cudgel in negotiations, or it could be the perverse incentives to engage in arbitrary hiring/firing to manipulate hype and stock-prices. If anyone can speak to this from the perspective of an employer (or better yet an economist..) it's probably an interesting story.
Whatever the reason, this is all so stupid. Why vacuum up huge numbers of people who are actually looking for stability and disappoint them, and refuse to engage with people who are looking for more casual employment? I will probably live to regret this, but I have wished there was a actually functioning market for gig-work in tech. More and more small/boutique consultancies are shutting down, staffing agencies still barely understand the domain they try to serve, companies usually don't want to talk to people angling for contracts showing up to FTE positions, and the scammy little ecosystem for temp-work in tech is probably little better than hustling on craigslist in the early 2000's. What's up with that?
For large scale organisations or government organisations navigating these sort policies just isn't worth it so they simplify it and apply the same policy to everyone, which means the risk/reward isn't quite as balanced as it used to be.
Ironically, for me at least this has increased what I make as I have years of navigating the landscape, but for others it's definitely less attractive.
The more insidious side of contracting is that there has been an enormous expansion in "outsourcing" contracts that are entirely about lowering organisational costs and employer responsibilities and are exploitative without any real benefits to those employed. The majority of those contracted in these cases are almost certainly made up of outsourced ex-employees or those that would in the past have been recruited directly by organisations. In the UK and local government departments are one of the worst, having been forced to make cuts to cope with diminishing budgets.
To be fair, the pre IR35 situation was super dodgy.
To counterpoint that, I live in Ireland where there's absolutely no tax advantage to being a contractor (slightly less NI equivalent, way less benefits and a special dividend tax to prevent those kinds of shenanigans) and yet there appears to be a thriving contractor market, so it feels like there's more going on here.
Now a bunch of those contract positions are far too low in terms of day rate, so maybe it's just an attempt to cut costs while giving naive people what looks like a good deal, because they don't account for all the costs.
> I think the system would benefit from a bit more loyalty, on both sides
Prisoner's dilemma, innit. The win condition is more loyalty from both sides, but each individual side benefits more from defecting.
When an employer lays off an employee, the result is immediate financial distress and the urgent need to secure new employment.
The power differential is substantial and cannot be overlooked.
I'm tired...
What? You want your salary to match inflation? On the list you go.
We dont have the money for that; we just hired a junior for your team that interned at a FAANG and had to pay them 2x your salary.
So yet again, I feel the pressure to look for a new company. I am so so tired.
Previously I'd tell them I need to raise my rate for one reason or another but I'd also temporarily reduce it when they were struggling with the market during COVID or suspend raising it. When I finally told them I needed to raise it because of inflation and nothing else, they kept hiding behind their own bureaucracy and eventually insisted on finalizing the adjusted contract as part of a round of "pay raises" in the company. I wasn't "asking for a raise", I was informing them of a change in my rate. And it wouldn't have been a raise anyway as it literally barely covered the rise in inflation. When HR eventually sent me the updated contract it felt like they expected me to make a happy dance or something.
Working with a lawyer for your contract negotiations can ensure that your interests are well-protected. They can help include provisions such as inflation-adjusted rate increases and other legal protections to safeguard your position.
Ultimately, the outcome of such negotiations hinges on the power dynamics and mutual dependence between you and your client and your leverage is never higher than at the start of your employment/contract.
As a manager I've personally saved a few folks over the years from a very arbitrary sacking, and it often comes down to a few VPs scheming in some back room with little or no context on what they're planning, and pure luck that you can get to them before they make any announcements.
If employers believe you are not a mark - you are unemployable.
The difference is the amount of time each side has, to develop an understanding of what that means.
I decided against that and work in a small company. Work-life balance is nice, we are friends and we all care (at least some bit) about the company itself. That is, because "the company" is us.
The place I work at is cut-throat. The company says that we are NOT a family, we are a team (Like professional baseball). Some people are better at other teams (Aka not fit for this company and get traded).
However they pay very well (Cash and benefits) and I can handle it. The people that cannot should work at places more like USPS or smaller shops.
The part that I find most galling about managers with this attitude is that they still expect loyalty, unpaid overtime etc. from their employees.
But how do you "not" do these things?
It seems like I am doing these things automatically and I don't even know how the alternative world where I'm not doing these things looks like.
This approach allows you to avoid becoming overly dependent on a single company, unlike those who are focused solely on advancing their careers within one organization by relying on trust and loyalty. Those individuals often find themselves vulnerable, risking their positions over minor inconveniences or corporate decisions that are beyond their control.
By building your identity as an expert in the field, you create a more stable foundation for your career, regardless of the dynamics within any specific company.
I get your point that diversifying the points of external identity validation makes you less dependent and this is a better position.
My question is about another strategy, to stop identifying/attaching etc. at all with what you do. And that is not illuminated to me.
Then start doing that now. Probably can’t do it to the same extent. But you can usually approximate it some.
You’ll be surprised at how life-giving it is, and that’s because it was a real desire buried under a mountain of “should.” And how hard it can be to even figure out what you want to do, and actually follow through on it.
Also the addition of "how hard it can be to even figure out what you want to do". This is imo a huge thing.
The decision paralysis and fear of doing and being what YOU authentically want - not somebody else, not some rules, not some abstract expectation what your future partner want you to be like, not what your mother/friends/teachers/mentors wants you to be like, not some "rational person" as described below, but you and you only - brings you pain and avoidant behaviors.
The avoidant behaviors come with a compounding cost on top and you can spend so much time not actually doing what you want.
A few things that've been helpful for me:
* HealthyGamerGG's Youtube channel (the quarter life crisis vid is excellent)
* Self-Care Tips For Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (a lot of people's values were given by their parents)
* Therapy
* Mindfulness practice
I’ve made a few apps that together generate gas money every month and practice music almost every day, along with getting instruction from a very good teacher.
Next step is buying out time from my day job to build my own business further. Also learning more market research, and marketing in general.
High five for all the other recently made redundant peeps.
Run.
Normal work schedule with grunt employees doing not mandated stuff together once in a while after work? Okay, that's nice, but you should still have a social group that's not (only) coworkers.
Huge difference.
I would even openly admit that I voted your comment up to mitigate the punishment for your mistake, but then they would vote me down. So, I don't. Just so as not to be misunderstood.
At least in historical times there was the ocassional revolt against the feudal overlords, and types saying such things were stomped which kept them in some humility.
Hell, even Louis XVI saw himself guillotined when he pushed his luck too far.
More such types met their death in the guillotine, including some revolution leaders?
Count me in!
(Sorry, I'm European, we know the whole history in my parts, from Charlomagne to Robespierre, Saint-Just, all the way to De Gaulle and Macron)
you can use a generic crm, erp etc .. but most the valuable workflows are 1 of 1. hence need to be bespoke. case in point SAP implementation consultants.
however, the huge obstacle is most "software" engineers don't think like engineers or businessmen but think like scientists and tend to be dogmatic.
the huge affinity for "dick" swinging sorry ladies .... i.e showing how smart you're and coming up with the most complex contraption e.g kubernetes, react means we will never get to that level. as most engineers won't be able to deliver things solo or with a small team and hence will rely on employment.
and please don't mention A.I -- humans can't make predictable userland software as is.
As much of a tool as this guy seems to be, it's hard to say he's wrong here. I've also been noticing a surge of tech people treating companies as some kind of social service / adult daycare where it's the company's responsibility to make sure the employee and their family are living a good life. It's really bizarre.
‘the peasants should know their place’
I am not clear on this whole ‘employees want too much’ issue - we are still talking about companies like FANG that have giant profits and insane capitalisation? Why is having employees claim larger share of the pie a bad thing?
The money they pay in salaries actually gets taxes and enters the real economy. The money they stash in tax heavens does not
Ultimately that's why the person is going to work, no?
Everything seems bizarre before it becomes the new standard.
Aren’t they? I feel like that’s a healthy way of looking at it. Goes both ways though.
> “We need to remind people they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
What does this even mean? Remind how? And why isn’t mentioned that it’s supposed to be a mutually beneficial exchange?
A company has to shut down pretty much entirely if all the workers walk out.
As both a worker and a business owner (and formerly an employer) I can tell you that this will always hold true. Sure, in most companies the business owner will also be the general manager or CEO of the company and actively steer the long-term trajectory and development of the company as well as manage day-to-day regulatory compliance and other concerns of "business as usual" but all of this is literally just work and owning the company is neither necessary nor sufficient for doing this work (except when it comes to legally representing the company but that too can be delegated to a person who doesn't have to be the owner).
What a business owner brings to the table, like a landlord, is capital. It doesn't matter if this capital was accumulated through hard work, exploitative business practices, bank loans, inheritance or anything else. At the end of the day the difference is a business owner has capital, a worker only has their own labor to sell.
I'm not sure why you're blaming employees for treating companies like "adult daycare" when you're even saying it's something you observed the development of. If you did, you surely know the origins, most prominently Google and all of its cultural copycats. Startups having foosball tables was a cliché over the past decades for a good reason. In a market where experienced and skilled developers were rare and job openings for them were plenty, companies tried to attract and retain them at any cost.
Laundry services, on-site gyms and three warm meals at work meant less private life and more reliance on the company for everyday necessities, it also meant overtime was less visible because you're "living in the office" anyway. The "adult daycare" phenomenon existed as much to pamper high-value employees as to lock them in (psychologically at least) and to trick them into fully identifying with the company they work for (and give up their private life for it). It's functionally equivalent to any run of the mill cult. The crux here is that the companies didn't want to make sure the employee's family was living a good life, they wanted to make sure the employee didn't get distracted. Heck, companies like Google have sponsored freezing their employees' eggs to incentivize them delaying their family planning. There's a reason former Google employees still call themselves "Xooglers" because having worked at Google is still ingrained into their identity.
Also, conveniently, all these benefits and affordances ensure employees don't think they need a union or can be told that unions would actually get in the way by asking inconvient questions or demanding separation of work time and private time or fair treatment of individuals who don't want to or can't participate in "the lifestyle".
But you're free to purchase it privately. I've bought health insurance privately when unemployed easy peasy.
That hardly disconnects it from being employed, unless you are fortunate enough to have savings/inheritance/etc to fall back on.
Obviously I am not going to advocate for violence.
One may be that in their particular case they can get away with it, it works, and they can blame the victim as not having a right to keep what they took in the first place.
Having said that, you need to care, care about your work, your team. You must give it all you have and have the pride of having produced great outcome. You will learn and grow and have a great network of people.
Don't do this for others. Do it for yourselves and your mental health, because the joy of having done your best will be more rewarding in the long term.
Anyone young reading this - the only thing that you will get for doing good work is more work. Of course there are exceptions (these exceptions are usually more at team level than organization level), but they are rare.
If you don't agree, try asking for more than 2% raise and see how the conversation goes. Unless your employer is totally dependent on you or you have some rare skill, chances of you getting treated fairly are pretty low.
I used to be idealistic and look down upon people who work two remote jobs effectively getting paid twice for the same time. I don't do it myself, but I have gotten off my high horse and no longer frown on such practices. If they can make it work, more power to them. Loyalty to an employer is like loyalty to Trump, it is just a one way street
Yeah, I did, like 3 months ago.
"We'll let you know when the boss gets back."
Haven't heard a word about it since.
Always do bare minimum, just enough to not be fired but keep your managers upset. Never do more than what you are paid to do and adjust your performance based on how happy you are with the pay and how much money company makes off your work.
Seen examples when employee on £80k found a way to optimise some queries in the product. That translated to substantially lowered bills and increased sales. Talking millions in extra revenue. Did they get a bonus? Bump in the salary? No. Soon after company found a new investor who brought in their own team and that developer was let go.
Lesson - never go out of your way, never do more than you are asked to do. Save any brilliant ideas to yourself. Maybe when they let you go, you will use them at your own business and get competitive advantage.
I think there's immaturity on both sides of this. Many employees are treating employment as a kind of child-parent relationship, where as long as they're at least moderately obedient, they're entitled to be taken care of.
On the other hand, there's certain employers who feel a childish need to show how strong they are, by being ruthless, and making big dramatic "difficult" changes (not difficult for them) as a kind of theatrical performance of how action-taking they are.
If approached maturely, employers would be reticent to do layoffs like this, because they show comically poor staffing management, and cause huge waste and losses. And employees would put more effort into career defence, rather than putting all effort into working hard for an employer, who they can't guarantee will or can reciprocate their loyalty.
I.e. greater diligence is needed on both sides.
In reality they are. There may be only a handful of employees in the world who are truly irreplaceable. Without employee X the shelves will still get stacked, the reports written, the coffee made, the code written, the product sold.
Naturally this also applies to the executives too ...
Any company that claims to be a "family" should put an employment agreement in front of you that reflects that. I have yet to see anything even remotely resembling such a relationship.
Rather, ime, the nature of the relationship spelled out is one of asymmetric power, rights, and remedies.
If there's a single point of failure like that, the company is being mismanaged. NOBODY leaving, getting sick, taking a holiday or even dying, should leave the rest of the company at risk.
Companies should most certainly value employees and treat us with respect, but they should also be setup to allow for employees not being around forever.
It's not just a legal matter, it's objectively the economy. Even if you would enforce it, a company would not be able to make money in some cases.
Boards and top management care just about money anyway, so you'll get extra degrees of shit.
I wonder how many slave owners said "look, I can't leave this plantation either"?
My employer wanted to do layoffs. They had to come up with an offer that's so good that some employees accepted it (everyone who wanted to remain in the company did).
Ah, yes. Employees, who would easily switch jobs for whatever reason when it's beneficial for them, complain that they can be let go when it's beneficial for the organization.
But a company makes mistakes (over hire, product line that don't work, market expansions that don't bring the expected results, overspending etc) and never talk about this openly (the responsibility is always on the market, the situation etc) and often they have obligations towards the investors or the market (if they are public).
There's also a psychological burden in changing jobs (impostor syndrome, fear of something unknown, new domain etcetc) and companies use this to convince people to stay. Most of the job of a people manager is to convince people that they are in the best place they could be and focus them on new challenges so they don't have time to think.
Don't be fooled by any company, if they think they have to fire you because some spreadsheet calculation told them it is the best thing to do, they will.
tldr; Decide what's best for you (and your family if you have one) and never feel bad about it. Loyalty is not a thing in the workplace.
ps i have personally witnessed and went through horrible situations where managers had to openly lie about people performance and fired a bunch because the company made bad predictions over their expected revenue and had to fire people to "prove they were doing something about it" and show some cost reduction to the investors. Once a ceo literally cried on hangouts while communicating the decision to fire a whole department, and the day after (while those people were still part of the company) did a whole motivational speech about how that was going to be the best year for the company and we had a lot to look forward to.
This is a) trivial and self-evident, and b) symmetrical in the sense that company is disposable too: any employee may fire the company at any time and get to another company with a two weeks notice. So, what's the point?
We have set a game in motion that even sounds bad in theory leads to hideous results. That it quasi-works in practice is a goddamn miracle and a testament to our flexibility. I say quasi, because for it to work for the top of the pyramid it requires large swaths of our species to exist in bitter, soul-crushing poverty and, given that morality is not really an issue for us psychopaths, it remains to be seen if our recent penchant for planet-scale destruction has any long-lasting effects on our ability to survive as a species.
But more directly, I think "if you think employees are disposable, why are you still an employee" is a very naive - if obvious - question. Even as a contractor I'm functionally treated like an employee by many companies and if anything I'm more disposable this way than I would be with a salaried position and career. The question is "what else" and if there is a dichotomy, the answer is "be the employer" but that is simply not an option for most and if you find yourself being an employee you likely aren't in the position to become an employer because you don't have the funds to start a business without a significant existential risk.
The truth is not just that most business founders fail. The truth is also that most founders of the largest businesses that exist today either started when there was no competition nor regulation or they were already filthy (generationally) rich to begin with - or both. So what else is there? Not participate in the economy? You might as well insist people refuse to breathe.
If you can be disposed of, why haven't you yet? The answer is that the employer is making money off of you. If that stops happening, you're out.
This is job security: make money for your employer.
It's a lot harder harder to tell people to do this (because it's professional, it's effective for your team and company, and you'll be valued as a great engineer)... when they can look around themselves, at our industry, and see all the sociopathic execs at companies having great years... getting rid of people to make numbers look even better.
And making a liar out of me for telling people they should be thinking about our collective success, rather than hoarding information for job security, or declining to help out a colleague in what (in a sociopathic company) could be a zero-sum game.
I still believe in great engineering teams, and I will heal or smite any toxic elements within my power... but I haven't yet figured out how to reconcile my best-practice culture theories with the current reality, when we see all these prominent techbro companies revealing more of their true nature in a way that employees can't ignore.
One idea is to bootstrap a company that's better, and not get into a VC trap that eventually will probably make you be jerks even if you weren't already predisposed. (It's hard-mode, compared to just getting some VC money, hiring people, and just repeatedly trying to look like you have growth potential. Also, you have to share the equity more equitably, or you're telling people that the truth is that it's transactional, and most of the talk about focusing on the success of the whole is a swindle, to get them to do what you want to make you specifically rich.)
Another idea is to find a good company, and work within that. (But that's hard, when even the ones that profess to be more values-oriented than most are usually just a veneer over the familiar sunny-sociopath culture.)
Another idea is to hire a team with values compatible with the good culture theory, and if the company starts going bad, we idealistically or on principle still do things right. And it the company really stabs itself in the face, and we have to move on to other places, we'll have that network of a rare great team.