[deleted]
The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
51–60 of 448 posts
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#52Dealing w/ RSI has been an eye opener for me. What makes it worse: working on a laptop, working on the plane, having to do long hours in poor ergonomic conditions. What do I have to do to be good at my job? Basically, that. What happens if it gets worse and I can no longer use a computer for at least eight hours a day? That is my livelihood
It WILL become a problem. The biggest issue with RSI and other repetive-use injuries (which happens in many professions and even athletics, especially with bad form) is that it happens slowly, then suddenly. It's so slow that it's discomfort. And you ignore that discomfort, especially as your concentration is on a computer monitor with important stuff to worry about being displayed on it. Also, sometimes inflammation…
Yup suddenly you can't walk and they find your spine has decomposed and you're facing major spinal surgery and partial or full disability. That happened to a friend of mine a major retail manager for 10 years then her back literally gave out and she had to have steel implants then was on opiates for 7 years coping with the chronic pain.
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#53[deleted]
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#54I think the familial boundaries defined within most societies promotes us-vs-them mindsets and a more inclusive, integrated framework is needed for peaceful coevolution within within sectors of life.
> Dying for a Paycheck, published by HarperBusiness and released on March 20, maps a range of ills in the modern workplace — from the disappearance of good health insurance to the psychological effects of long hours and work-family conflict — and how these are killing people.
Thought experiment: How can the world be different if we changed the understood definition of family from "home life" or "family of current origin" to "family of choice"? What then happens if the majority chooses humanity as its family, followed by collectively choosing to meet the needs of all in the family?
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#55Work has become a strange thing. I see people foregoing their best years stuck in an office, in the hope they can enjoy their later years. What utter nonsense. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but society has got something very wrong, as our work culture seems to surgically remove the wonder and enjoyment from our days. Hardly surprising that it drives people to ill health. Glad I broke out of that cycle a long…
Please tell us more. How does the stress compare? How does the pay compare?
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#56Dealing w/ RSI has been an eye opener for me. What makes it worse: working on a laptop, working on the plane, having to do long hours in poor ergonomic conditions. What do I have to do to be good at my job? Basically, that. What happens if it gets worse and I can no longer use a computer for at least eight hours a day? That is my livelihood
I suffered from significant pain from 2012 through 2015 and finally I made the below changes to solve my RSI. Each one provided additional comfort.
COLEMAK keyboard layout
Contour RollerMouse Pro3
Regular wrist stretching
Apple keyboard*
*instead of Mechnical keyboards that require more force and vertical movement to depress a key
Edit: formatting
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#57> I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane. A thousand times this. Very few of the lessons my parents taught me apply in the corporate world. Be honest and straight with people, assume good intent, take responsibility, etc. All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane eve…
You get to choose your actions. All actions are allowed, though you may not like the consequences.
> "It kills me every time, but I NEED my paycheck more than I prefer to help my fellow human."
What's killing you here? "It" is your decision to comply. A more active phrasing might be "I kill me every time I choose to comply with management's requests..."
Also, it sounds like you chose to believe, if only by accident, that money is a human need. This is false...we simply have cultures around the world where asking our community for support is not considered acceptable. Again, this is a lie. If you ask enough people for help, you'll eventually find someone willing. There's more than enough of everything to go around, especially money.
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#58> I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane. A thousand times this. Very few of the lessons my parents taught me apply in the corporate world. Be honest and straight with people, assume good intent, take responsibility, etc. All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane eve…
It sounds less like workplaces are broken, and more that you're working at a broken workplace. Go somewhere better - don't give your best efforts to the place you're at. There are workplaces where being honest and straight, assuming good intent, taking responsibility etc will move you UP.
Comments like these are naive, if well-intentioned. Work cultures permeate industries, cities and more. Moreover, for most people, even in the lucrative tech industry such as ourselves, don't have the luxury to peacefully and calmly pick and choose the ideal job: rent is due, mortgage is due, savings go down, or anxiety goes up and we take what comes up.
The myth of equal contactual relationship between employer/employee is painful to see turned into a helpful platitude of the genre "if you don't like it, find somewhere else."
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#59Honest question. How much of this is cultural or psychological? Can people be trained not to take so much shit from bosses or automatically make the company's problems their problems? I ask because at my current job, a lot of work is explicitly motivated by the threat of getting yelled at or publicly shamed in some way. I often wonder if these stressful interactions could just be handled politely but in a way that do…
"Not take shit from your boss" = "get fired by boss for 'insubordination' "
I disagree, from most of my experience, toxic managers take advantage of the people they feel they CAN take advantage of.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's spiteful managers like you're hinting at, but from my experience at two major tech companies, a healthy two-way respect is earned by pushing back on management when they're out of line, as I think they know a lot of the time that they're being out of line but they can get away with it.
Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees
#60Work has become a strange thing. I see people foregoing their best years stuck in an office, in the hope they can enjoy their later years. What utter nonsense. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but society has got something very wrong, as our work culture seems to surgically remove the wonder and enjoyment from our days. Hardly surprising that it drives people to ill health. Glad I broke out of that cycle a long…
Please tell us more. How does the stress compare? How does the pay compare?
I'm not the person you replied to, but in early 2015, after a company went down from under me three months after I started, I figured out that maybe it was a bad idea to go join another one. I've been consulting, between twenty and thirty billable hours a week, ever since.
Pay: A little less. But I'm working about half the hours. I've had time to start a little side company and to work on another I'm most of the way through, as well as explore other maybe-careers (photography, videography, audio) without impacting my cash flow. I spend a little less money, but some of that is willing: I'm not at work, I don't have to pay $10 for lunch, I can make a small salad. I've had no trouble keeping up my retirement accounts. If I retire.
Stress: much lighter overall, but the occasional terror-spike. Finding work is challenging, and there have been dry spots that made me very antsy, but I enjoy it, and the company I do most of my work through is good at keeping me busy without having to spend my time on sales. I'm moving in with my girlfriend, and that'll just about halve my expenses while placing me in a much more convenient/walkable area, so this should go down further. (She is sometimes a little miffed that I work so little. But I cook, and I cook pretty well, and I'm paying rent, so.)
If you have an in-demand skillset, you can do very well. For me, it's devops, but it's devops informed with the way that I've done everything else in a tech group, from web and mobile to databases, so I'm not approaching it either from a sysadmin point of view or some dogmatic Agile-esque one, and I can help in a lot of ways.
Also, shameless plug: i'm always willing to chat with new prospective clients. ;) Email's in my profile.