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Comment by hypeatei | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm a bit jaded, and corporate environments have taken their toll, but I see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default. Whether my boss wishes me happy birthday or not doesn't move the needle much. I'm there to contribute as an individual and he's there to answer to his boss about staffing, budgeting, and performance.

Although, I do feel slighted when a manager acknowledges the absurdity of all the corporatisms we hear everyday then proceeds to preach them to everyone and waste time anyway. Like, please, I thought we just agreed this is all fluff.

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Maybe I'm a bit childish, but I feel neglected when I am asked to sign an work anniversary card for a colleague and next week my manager doesn't even acknowledge my work anniversary. It happened for the last 4 years and, yes, it affects my productivity in the day.

Some time ago I had my 10 year anniversary forgotten once in a company (where I had written almost the entire codebase for their core product myself) and I did feel slighted. I had felt invested in the company, to me this day was a big deal and my company was completely unaware. It felt like a disorienting mismatch of unreciprocated commitment and made me feel a bit sick in the pit of my stomach. I started looking for a new job the next day.

My company gave out nice plaques for ten year anniversaries. As my anniversary neared I frankly got really excited to receive mine.

My manager started a couple months before myself, and a colleague started a couple months later. We still work together all our anniversaries in a line.

My manager got his plaque and showed it off. I patiently awaited mine.

When my 10 year anniversary came around we were in the middle of being acquired. It seemingly got lost in the fuss. My anniversary came and went. Zero acknowledgement beyond an automated email and some points towards the company store. No plaque.

When my colleague's 10 year anniversary came around a few months later and he got an even nicer plaque than my manager AND a small celebration...

I'm not one to usually express anger or disappointment, but I got salty and maybe said some things I shouldn't have. I'm frankly still salty and it's five years later.

I feel a little childish but I just wanted a plaque. I waited ten years for my plaque. My wife had offered to make me one.

My fifteen year anniversary is coming in a few months. We'll see if anything comes of it.

The little things are more important than they seem.

Oof.

I was the second person to not get a plaque after they stopped the 10-years at work. Instead I got an email.

I knew one of the last people to get one, so was expecting mine two weeks later.

And I knew Sarah, who started a week before me, and had printed out her 10-year email and a picture of the clock. I found mine at a thrift store. When I left I set it on her desk on the way out. Hope she liked it.

Sounds like you are extremely valuable in the product you built.

In your experience it’s not just the manager direct report relationship that’s adversarial, it’s you against the whole company for the mismatched value they place in you.

You should use that as leverage. This comes with an mindset of looking out for yourself and not any loyalty to the company (I really wish that we could all find companies loyal and nice to their employees, in reality they are few and far between).

Something along the lines of “Hey I built our product. We’re making X in profit. I deserve Y in comp. I’ll give you a week to decide. If you reject I quit and build my own product or join another company.” Obviously add some fluff to reduce harshness.

The basic problem there was that salespeople were viewed as the ones who actually made things happen, engineering and building the actual product was just an inconvenient necessity.

Does your company have a culture of recognizing work anniversaries? To me it feels very arbitrary. Maybe I’m jaded by big tech.

> see the employee-manager relationship as adversarial by default.

I don't see how anyone can be happy in their job if that were the default. Maybe I am naive or lucky, but I have a very goed relation with my boss, as well as with the boss above.

When that condition is not fulfilled, i definitely tend to slack off and I will eventually leave. I believe such should be the default.

The relationship between owners and workers has always been extractive. The adversarial relationship is built in. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a good relationship with your employer, but there is always a conflict of interest, so to speak.

I’ve had great relationships with my bosses, but they’re always under pressure to extract more work from the workers. In turn, their bosses are also pressured to do the same.

So yes, it’s not the default and you and I have both been lucky.

Classifying a relationship as adversarial presumes a competitive context. I don't believe we are in competition with our employer but in a cooperative relationship, so we're talking game theory. A good employer cooperates with their employees to achieve business goals, a bad manager defects and prioritizes their personal goals/desires above the shared business goals. Your relationship falls out of this behavior (assuming no personal issues).

Isn't there competition for your own time? I'm thinking of crunches, or justifying a schedule despite workhour efficiency varying way too much (what are you going to achieve if you finish your last task at 16:40 on a Friday?)

What about a farm worker who tills the land? Is every farmer/farm worker achieving business goals through _cooperation_? What about seasonal farm workers? I guess the farmer can set up incentive payments, but even so, are you saying there no adversarial component to the relationship?

Any relationship can be framed however in different ways that embody different ideals. What one person views through an adversarial lens, another can view through a cooperative lens. All (above board) worker/employer relationships can be seen as cooperative. Neither entered into the agreement by force and each is getting something out of it.

Yeah the framing is just a tool to do different analysis. Both can be useful simultaneously.

This has almost never been my experience in ~20 years of working. Other than a few fleeting assholes, all of my work relationships have essentially been collegial, with all parties, regardless of position, looking at how we can best get the work done that’s in front of us. I’ve never felt exploited or used and never felt I was exploiting those I managed.

I think if one sees their work this way, maybe it comes true? It’s a very cynical way of looking at things.

You’ve never worked in retail or service industries, have you?

I have, and your reply is a pretty weak fallback from

  The relationship between owners and workers has always been extractive. The adversarial relationship is built in.

I’m sure extractive relationships exist, but it’s certainly not an iron law of work, and I’m not even sure it’s that common in most modern workplaces.

Why is this a weak fallback?

Since we’re speaking anecdotally: I’ve also worked in service industry, and I have personally observed employers/managers abusing their power to elevate themselves at the expense of their employees. Does that make you reconsider? I would hazard to guess it doesn’t.

My point being that anecdotal evidence isn’t particularly useful.

> I’m not even sure it’s that common in most modern workplaces.

I don’t know what to tell you honestly. This is an incredibly naive take

Edit:

I feel I’ve been uncharitable in responding to you. I think we are likely talking past each other and what an “extractive” relationship is. I don’t think people are malicious. Most people (IMO) are essentially good and maliciousness is relatively rare. That said, if you work for an employer, you will always be resisting pressure from above to do more work for less pay. Maybe you’re lucky and you have an excellent middle manager (I have had some) who are skilled at preventing shit from rolling downhill. The fact remains the pressure exists and eventually, someone breaks. Maybe they have a bad day, or fall into financial distress, or the economy sucks. It doesn’t really matter. The people who pay the highest cost are the people at closer to the bottom of that hierarchy.

This is an oversimplificstion. The relationship between the person holding the scarce resource, and the person holding the common resource, has always been adversarial.

As labor becomes more skilled and less common this dynamic changes.

I’m looking at the status quo. Which still puts vastly more negotiating power in the hands owners of capital in most economies today. I agree it’s an oversimplification and there are some markets where this is not the case.

If I consider my experience it’s clearly still in the minority, so I still consider myself fortunate.

Yeah we're on the same page.

I figured it was worth mentioning since the status quo among HN users, skews closer to markets where this does not apply, than the status quo of the general population.

First, you're certainly lucky. Secondly, the emphasis should be on "by default"; managers can, and some easily and quickly do, prove that they aren't adversarial. But companies (especially tech companies with high stress on unsustainable growth) don't often incentivize that, and sometimes disincentivize it whether they mean to or not.

I'm happy buying groceries at the grocery store without having to pretend that the checkout clerk loves me.

I also feel that the emotional attachment to one's source of income could cause people to compromise their morality for them, as if they were family e.g. I don't think one child should be favored over another, but I'm happy when my child is favored over others.

> I believe such should be the default.

It's delusional. Your boss is trying to pay you as little as possible for as much work as possible, and you are trying to get him to pay as much as possible for as little work as possible. You've both examined your leverage and have come to a temporary accord which may change a year from now (or a day from now if you get another offer.) The relationship is adversarial. It's not a matter of opinion.

Maybe my knowledge of the English language is subpar but what you describe looks more like _transactional_?

> then proceeds to preach them to everyone and waste time anyway

This has happened to me, but it's important to distinguish when boss is speaking for himself, and when he is just forwarding orders from above. These two cases can happen literally in the same sentence.

Just last week I was tasked with configuring an automated happy birthday email.

It feels worse to know that it's just an automatic message and that the person who supposedly signed it doesn't even know who you are.

Work is just work, don't expect anything more than that.

Yeah, I am always going to interpret that sort of thing as performative. There seems to be whole corporate mythology that is absolutely sure there are a bunch of cheap, low-effort things managers can do to raise morale and get more productivity out of employees, like office birthday parties. I propose a name for adherents to this philosophy: the Pizza Party Cult.

Your boss is playing a role, same as you.

I've always worked in smaller companies where my boss is either the company owner/founder, or someone very very close to them. It makes things very different (and more difficult).

Employee is a resource to be mined at as little cost as possible. Employment is designed to take advantage of you in every way possible. Never go above and beyond, always work enough to piss off your manager, but not enough to get you fired.

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