Employers, Employees and Loyalty
blogs.lessthandot.com
blogs.lessthandot.com
The Employer/Employee relationship is a business relationship. You may enjoy good personal relationships with individuals, but the relationship documented by your paycheck is a purely business relationship.
What you owe your employer, and your employees, is professionalism, the same as your plumber or pharmacist.
As an employee that means show up most of the time, do the best work you're capable of, improve yourself, play well with the other children.
As an employer that means don't exploit the asymmetric power relationship, for example by not making death marches the norm, maintain a safe and pleasant workplace, pay reasonably well with reasonably good benefits, support employees' self-improvement efforts, and be an ethical member of the community.
A business has no "loyalty" to any employee when business doesn't work out and they need to shed workers. Loyalty in this sense would be when a family goes above and beyond to house a family member even when it results in economic damage. I would never expect that from an employer.
So an employer should never expect loyalty beyond good work and a two week notice.
Were things different back in the day? Maybe, due to certain structural differences. There were pensions, which tied employees to the long term futures of their companies. There was investment in training new recruits. There was promotion from within. Today, by and large none of those things exist. Companies, even ones who have the resources and should no better, are more interested in finding someone already trained (and griping about how they can't find them) than investing in training new people (and of course they fail to realize the correlation between the two phenomenon). They prefer to bring outside people into management/executive functions instead of promoting from within.
This 'loyalty' seems like a burden to employers from my American perspective. After living here, I've noticed a few things about Dutch employee loyalty.
* Removing the fear of possible instant dismissal seems to orient employees toward long term improvement instead of maintaining status-quo.
* Defined intervals of contract negotiation do the same, they give both parties a goal.
* Employees want that 'permanent' contract, it gives them even more stability. Once obtained, employees are hesitant to give up their luxurious position (true loyalty). My initial fear of a productivity drop doesn't seem to be valid, if I look at the 'perms' around me.
* Children do start to appear around this time, though. Good for loyalty, bad for midnight coding, good for efficiency.
I don't know how this system would play out back in the valley, but I feel that it beats the anarchy of at-will.
Actually, after three years you are REQUIRED to either be let go or get a permanent contract.
My current employer gave me a permanent contract right away (after just a 3 hour chat, is that normal for someone with 1.5 years experience?). Now I don't have to worry about losing my job after 6 or 12 months, and my employer has fewer worries about me looking around.
After so many contracts in succession your considered a permanent employee its the same in the at will USA Microsoft got caught by this a few years ago.
One could offer a contract with, say, a 1 year intro period during which both sides were effectively at-will, followed by 3 year renewals contingent on acceptable performance by the employee and acceptable compensation and working conditions from the employer. Everything can be negotiated.
I suspect that this would be viewed more favorably if it was proposed by the potential employer than by the employee, though it should be to both sides advantage to have such a degree of predictability.
In my experience, many prefer to shirk the responsibility for hiring/training entirely by contracting out wherever possible.
After some number of prime/sub contracting shops have taken their cut the employer likely ends up with exactly the kind of unqualified body that one should expect for 50% of the base rate they're paying.
The reasoning is negotiating with the current .biz really means re-negotiating the original deal. That obviously means someone screwed up the original negotiations and we don't employ screwups. Therefore intense pressure not to rock the boat, up to and including termination. Even worse a lot of decisions are made by group now at hiring time, so who do you even blame for the original mistake? Easiest to just blame the employee.
If you lose, you have to leave anyway. If you win, they know you're looking and don't trust you anymore, so you have to leave anyway. Never bite the hand that feeds you, never negotiate with your current employer.
Internal promotions are about as bad as salary re-negotiations.
If however an employer wants a business-only relationship with me that is fine. It should expect that my loyalty will be guided solely with my best interests in mind on all time-scales and without regard for how this may impact the employer/business.
I used to work for a company that had an enormous bimodal age distribution - maybe 45% over 50, 45% under 30, and the last 10% between 30-50. The age gap gave an interesting perspective into generational differences because it was so well defined.
Very few of the "old timers" we spoke candidly with were loyal in any meaningful sense, and many truly wanted to leave. However, they were stuck simply because of the pension plan - they couldn't afford to. Very few "millennials" have any lock-in like that.
At least now we get those foregone wages in current USD instead of fake pension money.
Great Grandpa fought in WWII and then worked for the same megacorp his whole life until he retired in the 70s, but that doesn't matter because he died before the millennial was born. Loyal to the core. They had his back, he had theirs.
Gramps statistically did not go to woodstock but knows a friend of a friend who did and he started with the plan of working for the same company until he retired but toward the end they were downsizing or moving to Mexico (later China). He may have had a forced early retirement in the 80s because of that or have just made it till the 90s. Gramps was still loyal-ish but could tell the times they are a changing. Maybe stuck as a walmart greeter now, when you visit, to pay his medical bills. Gramps says stuff like "I had it lucky but they sure screwed over a lot of my friends"
Dad has never had a stable long term job because every time an exec needs to boost the stock price to cash in his options they fire a semi-random 5% of the company. Also endless economic upswings and downswings, bubbles and fads. He knows what loyalty is from hearing great grandpa and gramps talking about it when he was young, but he surely never experienced any of it. Why be loyal to a system designed to screw you? Get yours, as long as you can, because it'll be a lot worse soon enough.
Millennial has a girlfriend with an education degree who waits tables, a lifelong grad student type friend who dreams of tenure but there's 100 more qualified applicants, maybe he has a good job sometimes, maybe not. Some of his friends have real jobs, some don't. He may as well have a tee shirt "I was promised a $75K/yr job but all I got was these lousy $100K of student loan debt." Loyalty? What does that word even mean anymore? Isn't that what bosses say right before they screw you over? Loyalty is a dirty word, thats what they used as a tool to screw Dad over. Never again.
"Those of the older generations view themselves as loyal to a company in the vain hope that such a perspective will be reciprocated by the company. "
The result? He was forced into retirement, and the executives plundered the retirement fund. They were able to successfully sue the executives for the act, but they didn't get all that money back.
That's not a form of loyalty I'm willing to give any employer.
Add to that "when you hear 'here at Initech, we're like a family', don't take the job unless you want to be the family dog."
So much for the loyalty of older generations. They knew how fast a company will screw you just as much as we do.
But, does anyone think it's a big deal if the chief architect of Google would leave to go work at some startup? Would anyone flinch if a cashier at Wal-Mart left to be a cashier at the local grocery store? Heck, does our skepticism even change when a politician changes party affiliations?
In the end, I believe it is employers who are on the wrong side of the loyalty equation going forward. In a mobile workforce where skills are valued, the ability for employees to find other options for employment has never been greater. This places companies at a major disadvantage, relative to the past.
-A company spending more on a junior employee than the value they initially provide, in exchange for the employee continuing to work at the company after they're profitable
-An employee staying at a job even when they have a better offer elsewhere in exchange for job security
-The recognition that an employee with company-specific knowledge is generally more valuable than an equally competent employee without that company's knowledge, and compensation/training/benefits/promotions to match
-The expectation of extra work/effort during critical moments for the company
-Employees being intrinsically motivated to create value for the company. This is frequently what companies want from their employees, but they often have a hard time articulating it.
Either way, it's helpful for employers and employees to identify exactly what they mean by loyalty, which aspects of it they want to improve, and what they're willing to change to get it. For example, I've taken learning & interesting projects in place of higher short-term compensation, but I wouldn't accept boring work for the sake of job security.
In 2013, we face a world where management (rarely with competent training in anything other than not getting the company sued) blatantly plays favorites, "teams" sometimes turn on their strongest members, investment in junior peoples' careers is almost nonexistent, and firing is more likely to involve one of those humiliating, dishonest, and impossible "performance improvement plans" than a decent severance check. Imagine what high school would be like if the popular kids graded exams. That's what corporate work is like for most people.
If someone transfers through 5 colleges in 8 years before finally getting a degree, it's pretty clear that something unusual happened. That's a red flag. Colleges make a lot of effort not to be dysfunctional and to make evaluation fair, so it's a real warning sign if someone passes through 3 or 4 and can't succeed. Companies don't. They'd rather sacrifice fairness, decency, and protocol under the belief (perhaps mistaken?) that it makes them more efficient at delivering on projects. That volatile culture would be fine, if they weren't so stuck up about "job hoppers" in the hiring process.
We're not disloyal. We're just honest. Instead of sticking around and sabotaging a company that betrays us (out of fear of a job-hopper stigma, like what our parents faced) we leave. That's better for us and the companies.
This is, sadly, very true. The track to reward and recognition in a corporation crosses the popularity track over and over, even in corporate IT. I saw a very senior engineer buck this whole setup once he used it to get to near the top. He was immediately quarantined and shipped off to another, less popular team. He still has strong leadership qualities, so they won't hellban him, but he's not in line for a promotion any time soon.
At most F500+ corporations, the higher up the ladder you go, the more political your job becomes, and consequently, the less directly functional or operative it is. At the highest rungs of the big corporate ladder, you are essentially a politician. And little more. You are tasked with "legislation" the way a Congressman is tasked with such. But you're spending 99% of your time pandering to the base, setting up and maintaining alliances, cheerleading, politicking, and kissing babies.
These skills are derided by those who hate corporate politics, as most of us probably do. But to get to the top, and to manage effectively from the top, you need to play the game and be damned good at it. If not, you'll be out in 6 months -- and even if not, you'll be a lame duck, unable to get a coalition to advance your agenda. This is why, at each rung up the ladder, political skill, social capital, and favor become increasingly important criteria for advancement.
You're expected to get great results, of course -- but the number of people that stand in the way of your input --> your output increases exponentially the higher you climb. Ergo, your job is more about people than it is about the input itself.
This equation isn't going to change so long as the current structure of the public corporation doesn't change. For those of us who dislike it, we need: a) to cultivate specialties or skills we bring to the table that permit us freedom from "the game," or b) to work for startups and smaller companies.
The negative form of politics is when a manager's best interests are misaligned with the company or their direct reports. For example, John may not want to promote Bill, his star employee, if it means that Bill will join a different department and Bill's successes will no longer contribute to John's success. So John is incentivized to give his best employees moderate, but not great performance ratings. This is clearly negative for Bill and for the company as a whole.
For those under your management the relationship is more similar to a military command structure.
Luckily corporate officers can't order you to kill or die. But corporate underlings don't elect their managers. There are many more people being managed, than there are peers.
Yes, but. The higher up you go, the higher up a lot of your underlings are, and the more they start to become power brokers in their own right. They report to you, and they will follow orders, but they have their own (strong) agendas, personal and political. Some of them are even rivals, waiting in the wings.
There's a command-and-control structure on a broad level, but the higher you go, the more the pyramid underneath you becomes something like a constituency. (They don't elect you, but they can rebel, they can become unproductive, etc. If you lose their respect, you lose them -- often literally).
I work/part-owner in small firm were we have employees that have been with us since the company was founded (in 1997).
I think it's all about job atmosphere. I'm not saying pay and benefits don't matter. They do. But a few of our longer term employees get offers from much bigger firms all the time, and all of them stay.
We offer a competitive wage, vacation, sick days, medical, retirement plans, etc, - like all the rest. But a small company also offers something that enterprise can't. And that's valuable.
You know, come to think of it, we haven't had anyone quit in like two years. We've fired a couple though. But that's another thread.
I've hopped more jobs than anyone I know, and I've never had a single word mentioned about my average time of employment. I don't understand this notion that companies give a damn how long you've been at places, and I know I'm not so lucky as to have avoided it in the last 3 or 4 jobs I've applied for (and gotten).
I've interviewed and hired dozens of other developers and never met one that knew the first thing about the industry we're in. We have a complex suite of products and to get someone up to speed will take investing a not insignificant amount of time. So when I see a large succession of sub-year stints I'm going to ask. I've hired many people who were contractors in the past, or who had issues with past employers, but I'm certainly going to want to know what the issues were so I can be sure they aren't going to have them at our company.
Both employer and employee want to minimize the risk of a quick exit as the hiring/job-seeking cycle is financially and emotionally expensive.
I.e. how can you know this, unless you get jobs entirely through networking, in which case you're probably bypassing that sort of gatekeeping to begin with?
Some colleges just filter people through too many too large classes, and then reduce the curriculum when people aren't doing well. On top of that, most college students are in their late teens/very early 20s and may need to make changes.
In any case, there are bad college programs and nurturing work places. There is nothing wrong with leaving a bad workplace, but there is also nothing wrong at staying at a great one for many many years.
Shouldn't all projects have code stability? I can't imagine software instability being a good thing ever.
There is nothing wrong with leaving a bad workplace, but there is also nothing wrong at staying at a great one for many many years.
Absolute agreement on that one. I don't want to change jobs every 6 months-- or even every 5 years. I'm sick of that shit. However, I've observed that a large number of employers treat their employee badly and those deserve no loyalty.
Can you write some more about this?
It's much harder for the scientists and inventors here, their knowledge is so specialized they might have mixed feelings about their employer, on the one hand feeling more attachment and loyalty to the company but also getting more frustrated when things don't work out well.
“Gimme eat.”
Instead of eat, Corporal Snark gave Major —— de Coverley a loyalty oath to sign. Major —— de Coverley swept it away with mighty displeasure the moment he recognized what it was, his good eye flaring up blindingly with fiery disdain and his enormous old corrugated face darkening in mountainous wrath.
“Gimme eat, I said,” he ordered loudly in harsh tones that rumbled ominously through the silent tent like claps of distant thunder.
Corporal Snark turned pale and began to tremble. He glanced toward Milo pleadingly for guidance. For several terrible seconds there was not a sound. Then Milo nodded.
“Give him eat,” he said.
Corporal Snark began giving Major —— de Coverley eat. Major —— de Coverley turned from the counter with his tray full and came to a stop. His eyes fell on the groups of other officers gazing at him in mute appeal, and, with righteous belligerence, he roared:
“Give everybody eat!”
“Give everybody eat!” Milo echoed with joyful relief, and the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade came to an end.
Here's a 1949 song about it: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/loyalty-oath-ditt...
And a timeline/summary: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/loya...
I think that's how government jobs are.
As I see it, companies try to get the most from you with the least from them, and your job is to try to get the most from them for the least from you. If you go beyond the minimum that you have to do, then you're setting yourself up to be taken advantage of.
If you think working harder's going to get your more money, then you should totally do it if you want more money, same for job security, same for you just find it an interesting problem, but morally you don't seem to owe them your best - they set out to screw you in the first place. That's their job, that's how people who own companies get rich: By not sharing the wealth equitably.
Now with companies like Google you see what happens when the pendulum swings toward the workers' favor. Google employees are top-notch. They are much harder to replace, so the company offers amazing things on top of great pay to keep them. Again, it appears to be loyalty but it's always in their own interest. Keeping and taking care of these amazing employees is how they create great things.
It seems that the best option as an employee is to find an industry/position that requires a unique, hard-to-replace set of skills and dominate that position.