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The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

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Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#301

Post by gambiting »

tuukkah wrote: post #290
some_account wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article criticizes American work culture for very good reasons. Of course we should work and have jobs, but that doesn't mean work needs to be like it is in America. Do you guys in America even know how it is in Sweden for example? We don't have this competitive culture, and companies are trying hard to make their employees feel good at work. Nobody really works full 8 hours at big companies and nobody is stresse…

Plus the month-long paid summer vacations! EDIT: To be more precise: typically ~20 days in the summer and additional ~5-15 days in the winter. Averages by country, Sweden 26 days: https://www.europeandataportal.eu/en/highlights/which-countr... 34 days (minimum?) when you include the 16 paid public holidays such as Christmas, New Year, Easter, Midsummer: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-...

Everyone in EU gets at least 21 paid days off a year + unlimited paid sick leave, no matter if you're a surgeon or a cleaner. But yes, for bigger companies it's usually closer to 30 paid days off than 20.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#302

Post by antonkm »

tuukkah wrote: post #290
some_account wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article criticizes American work culture for very good reasons. Of course we should work and have jobs, but that doesn't mean work needs to be like it is in America. Do you guys in America even know how it is in Sweden for example? We don't have this competitive culture, and companies are trying hard to make their employees feel good at work. Nobody really works full 8 hours at big companies and nobody is stresse…

Plus the month-long paid summer vacations! EDIT: To be more precise: typically ~20 days in the summer and additional ~5-15 days in the winter. Averages by country, Sweden 26 days: https://www.europeandataportal.eu/en/highlights/which-countr... 34 days (minimum?) when you include the 16 paid public holidays such as Christmas, New Year, Easter, Midsummer: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-...

It's more often 5-6 weeks. As a Swede I always feel alien to the hours Americans seem to put in.

I'm a consultant and work roughly 35h/w in Sweden. I often find this a bit too much, given that the work I do is disconnected from anything "real". Sure, my clients are always happy and I do fun things, but my family and friends is what's real.

I truly believe we should automate everything and let humans decide by themselves if they feel like working. If not, something like UBI should exist.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#303

Post by dmurthy »

bambax wrote: post #284
jdtang13 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's a very good point. Work has always been part of the human condition, and middle class people in the first world are enjoying much, much more comfortable working conditions than their ancestors did. I think we should all be very grateful for that. But it's also a very modern thing for people to suffer from alienating, despair-inducing work. I think this alienation, which Marx speaks of in much detail, is t…

There's no doubt that working outside is infinitely better than working in an office. In my street, garbage collectors, arguably, for some people, one of the least attractive and least qualified jobs in the world, sing every morning. They're happy and they're singing! If you hear someone sing in an office it's because they're either crazy or have been fired. But there is also something to be said in favor of repetiti…

Well said.

Often people forget the mental stress modern work places on us. I remember my Dad working hours but he was tired from physical exhaustion and not mental. He didn't have email or messaging that would distract him from a weekend of relaxation.

I was addicted to checking my email every once in a while and found my mind switching to thinking about work instead of enjoying the moment. Thankfully I broke that habit.

Today, I try and impress this upon other people who do this.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#304

Post by verylittlemeat »

mieseratte wrote: post #282
jasonkester wrote: post #278

There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere. I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach. To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10…

> There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere. You can. Get rid of your phone. Most of us don't have a job that actually requires a phone, and it's really as matter of your work willing to take advantage of the fact that most of you won't push back when pressed. You can take advantage of the fact that they won't pay for you to carry a phone. I finally g…

No phone? We need team players at this company. /s

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#305

Post by jasonkester »

pi-squared wrote: post #297
jasonkester wrote: post #278

There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere. I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach. To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10…

> 20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. Maybe I am sort of fresh in the workforce (3 yrs) but I just don't allow this - if I am not in the office I don't work. I don't have slack on my phone or whatever and I have strict boundaries working 9-5. Does it become worse when I have more exp?

This is the correct attitude. My comment comes from observing the 20-something crowd at this current gig. As near as I can tell, I'm the only one there who leaves work completely behind at any point during the week.

It's painful to watch. Glad to hear you're not falling for it.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#306

Post by some_account »

gambiting wrote: post #300
some_account wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being sarcastic? The game industry is the hardest and most miserable. Surely you haven't missed that.

I guess, if you pick badly then it probably is. I've been working in video games for 4 years now(as a C++ engine programmer) and I'm still enjoying it a lot. We ship a project, millions of people enjoy it, it feels great. The last time I had to do overtime was 2 years ago I think, I'm usually home by 5pm and get to do other stuff I really enjoy. The pay could be a bit better, but seriously, the superb job satisfactio…

Alright, nice to hear there are still decent companies out there. Its easy to get the image that the entire industry is really bad.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#307

Post by slphil »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #276
slphil wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some degree, yes, peasants worked less than modern humans, but also had to extend large amounts of effort to prepare food, attain wood for fires and light, build their own structures, etc. I slightly romanticize medieval life so I won't convince you that their lives were hellish and awful, but we take for granted the amount of work our society does for us. Also, the idea of the high-leisure hunter gatherer is fals…

While the hunter-gatherer had been romanticized, basing your data on currently living groups is also flawed. They have all been in contact with modern society, which probably has influenced them in multiple ways. From taking over customs to limiting the area they can move in to the impact on the climate from factories, which all might be factors influencing their entire way of living. So the only way to actually stud…

Yes, but there are still plenty of things we can objectively know. For example, skewed reproductive success is obvious in the genes themselves, and the increase in reproductive success for most people is a major benefit of a civilized society. (Also living in groups of people larger than 50 or so rules.)

Edit: 100% support a focus on archaeology. There's some really cool stuff waiting to be uncovered, like the new LIDAR findings in South America. Still, it's absurd to think that ancient hunter-gatherers lived in bliss, except when natural conditions were exceptionally good (not worth the consequences of droughts).

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#308

Post by biztos »

pi-squared wrote: post #297
jasonkester wrote: post #278

There is no downtime anymore. You can never truly get away from work in an age of 4g connectivity everywhere. I'm doing a bit of consulting with a startup at the moment, and one of our team members recently disappeared off on vacation. Good for him, I thought. Two days later, he popped back up on the company slack, working away from his tropical beach. To be clear, this is not a case of digital nomadding. This is 10…

> 20 years ago, there was an expectation that when you left the office, you were unreachable except in an emergency. Maybe I am sort of fresh in the workforce (3 yrs) but I just don't allow this - if I am not in the office I don't work. I don't have slack on my phone or whatever and I have strict boundaries working 9-5. Does it become worse when I have more exp?

I think it's mostly a combination of the work culture at any given employer or even within a team, and the habits/expectations of the people doing the work.

I keep weird hours due to working remotely and across time zones, and I do encourage people to contact me by phone for anything time-sensitive when I'm offline. But that almost never happens, people are usually OK with waiting until I get back online to answer their queries.

Some form of this is more the rule than the exception on my team, because the people who don't work remotely still have lives (pick up the kids, avoid the rush-hour traffic, whatever) -- and also have to be flexible about their hours due to the multiple time zones.

This includes people with 1 to 25+ years experience FWIW. So I wouldn't worry about it, if you want to have a strict 9-5 boundary you can find good places to work (just not on anything mission-critical). If you prefer to work 40 hours a week on some other reasonable schedule, you can also find good places to work.

I once had a colleague who worked a very strict 9-5 and could have been called in an emergency but we all understood it would have to be a REAL emergency before we bothered that guy. He did a great job and everyone respected him, despite his being probably the only guy in the building keeping such a rigid schedule.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#309

Post by Applejinx »

some_account wrote: post #277
DeusExMachina wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this idea bizarre. It's like humans enjoyed their time for millennia and only now we have to work. For all human history, the conditions of people were dire. Today people might be stuck in an office in their "best year", but people in the past had to toil all day to barely scrape by and didn't even have that many years to live. It's only now that we live these comfortable lives with houses, heating, electricit…

The article criticizes American work culture for very good reasons. Of course we should work and have jobs, but that doesn't mean work needs to be like it is in America. Do you guys in America even know how it is in Sweden for example? We don't have this competitive culture, and companies are trying hard to make their employees feel good at work. Nobody really works full 8 hours at big companies and nobody is stresse…

I'm pretty sure the idea is that we're supposed to be killing you, so the people in Sweden end up out of a job and only the frantic, stressed American workers survive. This, for the purpose of making just a few American capital holders impossibly more wealthy for the virtue of holding the reins on the madly charging American workers.

I think you're quite correct that it's insane, but you can also view it through the lens of class war. There are some people in charge who have an unthinkable amount of capital, and they would like it to be this way everywhere.

'Culture' is led by leaders. Company culture comes from the top down. If you had a company leader who earnestly thought hunting down and murdering workers in rival companies was the best way to be a company, AND he was allowed to pursue that unregulated and unrestrained, you'd see a 'culture' straight out of the darkest cyberpunk because others would play copycat and it'd become the new normal. You'd have to deal with it on its own terms.

Of course it's insane, and of course it's killing people: in a sense that's a feature. This is the operating system on which we run. There's only workarounds, or changing the OS out from under the 'culture' it produces.

Re: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

#310

Post by dolzenko »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #62
osrec wrote: post #24

Work 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…

I find this idea bizarre. It's like humans enjoyed their time for millennia and only now we have to work. For all human history, the conditions of people were dire. Today people might be stuck in an office in their "best year", but people in the past had to toil all day to barely scrape by and didn't even have that many years to live. It's only now that we live these comfortable lives with houses, heating, electricit…

Work surely was universal, but 2 things are very different now

1. Working outside (as mentioned) just doesn't compare with office job, i.e. it provides physical exercise, fresh air, being close to nature/animals. Now we're simulating all these things with gyms/vacations/zoos (I think the quality of such simulation is out of question?)

2. Work had to be done with your family, now there is no simulation for this in our society at all. And I would guess it was much better option than running as fast as we can (as most corporate people do) at 6:00PM, away from these annoying faces :)

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