> people who've dialled the give-a-shit down so low
In the age of stock buy-backs, cyclical lay-offs, and record-high executive compensation I sympathize with these folks. It might even be morally correct thing to do.
In the age of stock buy-backs, cyclical lay-offs, and record-high executive compensation I sympathize with these folks. It might even be morally correct thing to do.
I get exactly what is asked of me to do and nothing more, no longer respond to things outside of work hours and collect my paychecks. I still enjoy learning new tech and whatever the next thing is, but my interest in applying myself to my day job is at an all time low.
Oh forgot to mention our execs bonuses and stock went up despite everyone hating it here now.
I’d say you’re relatively lucky. I found it soul-crushing when my work changed from something in which I took pride to something where I just wanted to coast and no longer cared. Management sucked and I was depressed at my lot in life. I didn’t have much energy to look for and apply to other positions.
Layoffs came twice and getting let go was the biggest favor they could have done for me.
My next (current) job is rewarding, and I’m again having fun learning new things in my downtime instead of vegging out on streaming content after work.
I care about my work because it's my work and I don't want to just collect paychecks. If you're not happy and can leave, just leave. Go do something productive with your life that makes you proud of. Life is too short to play by others' rules.
And not everyone simply has the choice to just find another job when they are unhappy. I know you caveated that with the "if you can" but I'd say the vast majority of people can't.
That and the fact that most peoples work is not actually theirs as you say. Everything you do is part of the company, and managers/execs take credit for the work all the time at many companies.
Most people have a lot more agency than they give themselves credit for. It just doesn’t hurt enough yet to face the cost of making a change.
What’s really the worst that’s gonna happen? You have to do some interviewing while putting in the bear minimum at current job? Oh no.
I've also had a job that I left because I wasn't enjoying because of a lack of challenge and lack of management backing for the projects I was working on.
Life isn't purely black and white and my reasoning is pretty simplistic. There are vastly more complex situations than just my wife went to grad school.
Are you sure? My GF’s company went through two rounds of layoffs this year and she now has such a heavy workload that she works most evenings and some weekends as well, and her stress level has gone through the roof.
Im in maintenance as an industrial electrician.
New plants came to town paying current market rate and snagged most of the top talent.
Then the company started quiet-firing to avoid layoffs. It killed all motivation.
Then they froze hiring as we kept losing people. We are now short on HVAC, mechanics, and electricians.
Lucky me I'm the only guy who can do all three so im running ragged all day.
We have response times we have to meet but our vehicle (an electric GEM) had the charger die, it's only $2k but they won't let me order it so we all walk everywhere. Huge plant I easily bust 30k+ steps and 20+ stories climbed via stairs.
We then had a mechanic and an electrician take paternity leave so we are even more shorthanded. Still wont let us hire.
We lost the maintenance manager and cant get another one for what we pay and the condition the business is in now.
I love my job andy co-workers but I'm sending out resumes and interviewing because I can't take all the extra workload with no extra pay while our administration keeps getting more money and bonuses.
How do companies keep making the same mistakes over and over expecting different results? They don't, they know what's going on and are getting theirs before the bottom falls out.
* needs HVAC, mechanics, and electricians to function and deliver revenue
* your company cannot afford to hire new people, only maintain their current payroll, or are unwilling to raise wages to be able to hire more (not enough talent)
* you are able to do all three, but are being asked to do more than want or are able to do
then there's a simple outcome that to me it seems like you're missing.
you can just say "I can't", or "no, I'm going home at 6" or "cool, that's a great plan but I only have time to do the first half of the tasks you just described today", and most importantly - your company simply won't be able to afford to do anything about it.
What are they gonna do? Fire you and be even more fucked? Seems like if you set firmer boundaries on how much you can work, their best decision is going to just be accepting it. Because their only alternative is to even stupider which would be to fire you and have no work get done at all.
When I brought up I have yet to get my float (4x10s considered the 'easy' shift) I was told there was nothing they could do. All I could think was well how will you handle it when I leave?
Management really is that dense.
They care not one whit about objections nor people leaving.
Imho it's merely a matter of time but the younger guys all hold out hope. I've none left.
You mentioned upthread:
> New plants came to town paying current market rate and snagged most of the top talent.
You should totally get a job at one of those plants and let them hang.
Specifically: task shedding when they exceed available hours
If you're the last one keeping the lights on for a 4 person team, it seems reasonable to let some lower priority things go undone and communicate to your boss that "You don't have time for that."
Trying to ratrace to keep up with an unreasonable amount of work is just rewarding a company for overworking you, by avoiding sending it the hard signal of "too much work."
For a lot of people work isn't a passion project, it's literally the only way to have a roof over your head and food on your table. If you happen to enjoy it that's a bonus and not a requirement.
> If you happen to enjoy it that's a bonus and not a requirement.
I know a few people for who this used to be true. One of them got laid off and went back studying, the other changed jobs but is still ill half of the days.
My point being, passionless job is not a sustainable thing.
They did not give one f for, “the company,” but they were steady and reliable co-workers.
I’ve also worked with passionate “try hards,” that will get upset if they’re not using the latest-and-greatest languages and tools. They’d throw tantrums over architectural decisions. And if they didn’t settle down they’d move on to the next job in a year. Hope they found what they were looking for.
* Professional reliability
* People who don't care about what type of job they do
* Hobbies
* Parenting
* People who don't care about the company, but cared about their job
* Tryhards
* People chasing the latest fad
* People that have opinions about software architecture
* Job hoppers
My initial comment was about people caring about THEIR work, not the company or anything else. It was about people not doing something they dreaded for >8h straight and thinking that's what life has for them.
For me, when I say I care about my work, it implies caring about the company at least to some degree. The mix of caring for other things easily emerges. If I review a peer's code, I care about them, about the code quality, about customer satisfaction, and hence about the reputation of the company I work for. This can be selfish in a way as well, since that mix has some reflection towards how I am perceived and how I am judged as a person.
I think you're hijacking this thread to make your point regardless if its related or not to it.
People building software are often in a position to directly impact significant numbers of people: not giving a shit leads to severe software vulnerabilities, data leaks leading to identity theft, compromised systems, etc. Real disruption to the lives of normal people.
And actively not giving a shit gradually changes the person doing so. I’ve seen this mindset become corrosive and has changed people who I previously respected in ways that I really don’t think could be beneficial or “good” regardless of what the company does or does not deserve.
Not giving a shit is why our industry is increasingly under scrutiny by regulators - for good reason.
I question a moral calculus that only accounts for the problematic business practices of an employer while ignoring the many potential downstream impacts that are unrelated to those practices.
There’s a needle to thread in terms of how one handles their emotional state while working and finding a healthy balance between doing good work and not dedicating one’s life to their employer (which I’m not advocating btw). But I’m increasingly skeptical of the idgaf mindset and frustrated by people who don’t take seriously the privileged position they’re in and the world changing impact of the work they do.
The only truly moral option in many cases may be to quit (if the alternative is not giving a shit). But people want/need that paycheck.
In most cases people _need_ that paycheck. You can talk about morality all you want if you have the privilege to not need a paycheck, but you can't know everything about everyone's lives. You mostly only ever know about the choice someone else makes. You hardly ever know what options they had to choose from or the tradeoffs they need to think about.
None of this affects me. The only way to make an employee care about this kind of thing is to pay them, and treat them, well enough to care.
You also need enough free time to care, which isn't nearly as common now that every team at every company is running on a skeleton crew.
Frankly, that’s a huge problem.
> The only way to make an employee care about this kind of thing is to pay them, and treat them, well enough to care.
The workforce is absolutely full of people who value their work and its impact on other people above all else regardless of how poorly they’re paid or treated. This is not an endorsement or acceptance of the status quo, but a recognition of the importance of one’s actions.
If you’re a teacher, bus driver, emergency responder, nurse, transit operator, power/gas workers etc. you’re most likely not getting paid much or nearly enough, but would never dream of bringing this “idgaf, pay me” attitude to work.
I suspect it’s because software is so abstract and the people building it are so far removed from its impact, but our industry seems uniquely disconnected, complacent, and entitled when discussing the impact of an individual’s actions.
They're called juniors, and haven't yet been broken by the system.
> If you’re a teacher, bus driver, emergency responder, nurse, transit operator, power/gas workers etc. you’re most likely not getting paid much or nearly enough, but would never dream of bringing this “idgaf, pay me” attitude to work.
Have you seen the state of these professions? That's the prevailing attitude at the moment, and the reasons are obvious.
I’m 20 years into this, not a junior. And the people I’m talking about certainly aren’t juniors.
I’m not questioning the existence of people who stop caring. I’m saying that this is a choice, and one that many people can’t bring themselves to make.
> That's the prevailing attitude at the moment
Attitudes and actions are two different things. If people in many of those professions were acting like many do in the tech world, people die as a result.
I’d be careful not to project your own view of this matter on the broader workforce.
Ye turning into a cynic is not nice. You can rationalize all you want but the corp is eating your soul, more or less.
A problem I observed is when cynics from bad places move to hardly OK places, and overestimate the amount of badness. People that think the corporation is rotten seems easier to make do rotten things, while others that "don't get it" might protest.
Not that the regulators are competent… but for opt in software it’s user beware
Meh, I'd question how much that is actually true. Generally, when people talk about "not giving a shit", it's not literally about half-assing everything. Instead, it's about only doing what you have capacity to do while balancing work with the rest of life....
Boss give's you 60 hours worth of info-sec tasks to complete this week.
You have a social engagement Friday night through Sunday (siblings wedding, and you put it on the on-call calendar months ago).
You remind boss "I can do 2/3 of that list, the rest needs to go to someone else, because 5pm Friday, I'm offline for the weekend".
You do the 40 hours worth of stuff, do it properly, and go to the wedding.
If your boss drops the ball, that's his problem. You did everything properly. Working through your sibling's wedding only justified your boss's under-resourcing of work.
But I've worked with a frustratingly large number of people who do literally half-ass everything, and clearly work hard to find the line where they can just barely get away with it. Usually this involves other team members picking up the slack.
The "quiet quitting" movement is a prime example, with people regaling each other with stories of their efforts to do just enough not to get fired, which is something entirely different than finding a proper balance with one's boss and setting reasonable boundaries.
Quiet quitting reminds me of "greve du zele" (zeal strike) where workers do exactly what their contract requires / work by the book. It is nothing new. Often to protest employers lack of flexibility, to show that the book is absurd or to highlight that all that extra work should be compensated appropriately. I guess the main difference is one is an organised protest while the other is individual decisions.
That said, everything I've read about quiet quitting sounds to me like a marketing ploy to give setting healthy boundaries a bad rep.
I'm sure there is a range from folks who simply stop being proactive to people who put more work into doing the least amount of work they can get away with than they would if they just worked. And sure, that may already mean others need to pick up the slack, but really it means there's probably a systemic issue with that employer.
If quiet quitting is a pain in the workplace, it probably means employers rely too much on employee zeal. Employers fully count on teams picking up each other's slack. Toyota (iirc) first figured out that bonding between team members improved productivity via slack pickupery and peer pressure. (Also that teams could find their own efficiencies and felt more motivated to work if they came up with or were involved in their own exploitation optimizations).
I'd love to see a proper study done to identify causes of quiet quitting, if it is linked to burnout, I wouldn't be surprised.
A simple solution to quiet quitting would be improving the workplace or giving out employment insurance when people quit, so they don't feel trapped in a bad situation. Not everyone can simply move to another job at will.
Aside from that, they're value neutral to the company. They're not spending money, any more than you buying stocks is.
Especially when your entire team gets lower bonuses after a successful product launch, while the company spends $8B profit in buybacks with minimal impact on share price. Large funds and executives get rewarded (10% of millions is a nice amount), employees get shafted.
Well, there must have been an impact of $8B, so it depends what the counterfactual was. It could've been going down at the time.
> Large funds
Generally speaking large funds are passive index funds, so that doesn't mean someone actually owns a lot of them - they're just in average people's retirement accounts. But it gets reported as if BlackRock (iShares) or Vanguard own the company, which leads to conspiracy theories.
Buybacks don’t linearly increase share price, the stock is simply exchanging hands. If the company already has a 100B market cap, that amount is not making any huge waves, especially spread around a full year.
Replace “large funds” with “large shareholders”, the point is that employees receiving relatively tiny stock compensation do not benefit much.
Sure they do. Each repurchased share no longer exists, unless they're issuing new ones at the same time. The total value of the company stays the same, or something else might happen to change the price afterwards, but it should indeed be a linear increase.
Under capitalist and corporate morals, it's a sin for a worker to fail to give the best part of his efforts to the shareholders.