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People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

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Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#71
post #62
post #12

I've worked jobs where I loved that exact job and I was willing to compromise and make less money than I otherwise might elsewhere to stay in that situation. Everyone understood that to be the case, me, employer. I don't think the employer was taking advantage of me, they were creating the exact environment that I really enjoyed.... that was the trade. I was also involved in a situation where we had some inters we hi…

> Sitting in your cube and convincing yourself you're being taken advantage of doesn't mean you are. This is a condescending attitude verging on gaslighting. "Just because you believe it, doesn't make it true." A low-power truism used to dismiss real pain.

I don't think I understand what you mean.

I've known plenty of people who imagine they're being taken advantage of, but aren't working with their employer on it, and don't know the lay of the land.

I'm not convinced many people really know their value in the market / what their employer really thinks / is doing, but you'd have to know those things to really know if you're being taken advantage of.

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#72
post #2

If I love my job, then I'm not being taken advantage of (from my perspective). If I'm being taken advantage of, that is a strong force to get me to hate my job. Whether or not my supervisors think they're taking advantage of me is a different matter, and one that is largely irrelevant to me.

I used to think the same way when I was passionate about my job in my previous company. However now I feel I was exploited and may be got burnt out due to that. Also I was not working on any altruist project so my passion probably didn't help make this world better. I think it is important to balance passion with your personal and social commitments. I hope you are doing that.

> I think it is important to balance passion with your personal and social commitments. I hope you are doing that.

If I'm not, then that's the fault of my own behavior and isn't related to whether or not my employer is taking advantage of me. If my employer actively prevents me from being able to live a healthy life, that's a different matter entirely -- but I wouldn't be working there for long.

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#73

This seems to be regularly happening in "passion" fields like human space flight, or bleeding edge tech spaces like self driving cars, medical technology, etc. For an example, just look at salaries between places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic where total comp for a software engineer is between ~100-140K vs any FAANG company where equivalent experience will pull in upwards of ~200K TC. The disparity is…

You've mentioned fields that are more to do with hardware and physical/scientific innovation, like SDC's using all sorts of different sensors/predictive modeling, rockets that use physics/materials science/sensors, medical tech which draws heavily from many diff STEM fields. R&D in these fields is expensive and riskier than FAANG companies who use advertising/privacy exploitation to squeeze profits from the masses of users.

IMO, we need to create an economic/regulatory environment which more heavily penalizes/taxes those negative aspects of ads/social media while pouring more into R&D in the sciences.

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#74

Since nobody is actually reading the article, let me sum it up: In a survey of regular people (not EvilCorp CEOs), "people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description." "This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and…

So that’s why companies want “passionate” workers, so the non passionate ones have someone to offload problems to...

I rue this era when HR mimics the tactics of marketing... we want passionate “ninjas,” (whatever the term of the day is) who “share our vision” “to make a better world”. You know what. Hire people to do the job description you post. All the other frills are just image marketing.

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#75
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you love your job, you could be getting paid less. Clearly you are taking advantage of your employer. If you hate your job, clearly you've stayed because they are offering more than any place that is better and you're taking advantage of your employer.

If you hate your job you're automatically paying yourself less in stress offset. IMO stress and meaninglessness at work is not worth any $ at all

The parent comment to mine was facetiously showing how the employer is always taking advantage of the employee. I'm showing that it's "clearly" the other way around.

It's almost like it is an exchange of services and goods negotiated along a variety of criteria.

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#76
I don’t think this study means much. It’s not “it’s ok to make passionate people endure bad conditions”, but rather “it’s more ok to make passionate people endure bad conditions than non-passionate people”.

I don’t particularly agree with this, but if I was asked if it’s ok to ask for overtime from people who hate their jobs and then people who love their jobs, I wouldn’t be surprised if I answered slightly better for those who love their jobs.

Survey design imo. Or perhaps more retroactive Protestant work ethic bias.

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#77

Labor is the source of value. The managerial and owner class is paid and gets rich through the surplus of your labor. If your boss stops working, value is still created. If you stop working, everything grinds to a halt. You are being taken advantage of.

Labor is only one of many sources of value. Some other sources are technology, machinery, relationships, capital, education, experience, reputation, and efficient organization of resources. A business, by necessity, brings much more to table than the mere sum of the labor.

The managerial class is paid to efficiently organize human resources (hiring, motivating, growing, conflict resolution, scheduling, removing obstacles to labor) and non-human resources (budgeting, purchasing, etc).

The owner is paid for making sure a company is aligned with a vision, investing resources, securing funding, assuming liability, and taking risks.

Labor is worth very little without the above mentioned things. This is why people often work for others rather than themselves.

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#78
post #5

If you hate your job, someone may be taking advantage of you. If you love your job, someone may be taking advantage of you. Someone may be taking advantage of you. Or not. Who knows?

In capitalism, by definition you are compensated less than the work you put in. The leftover is called "Surplus". And that is divvied up between the board,C levels, and shareholders (sometimes). The surplus is never split up to the ones who actually do the work. I'm sure the complaint will be that I'm calling for state socialism. Nope. I'm calling for worker coops, and worker owned businesses. That way, we the worker…

> "to the ones who actually do the work"

who gets to define what constitutes work?

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes zero-sum, and one-time transactions. Two parties can have a transaction where both go away happy, neither was taken advantage of, and both would like to do it again. If you push to have a transaction that's to your advantage, you might get one, and you might also make someone less inclined to do business with you again.

Not really! It even pertains to long-term relationship. If you are not hard enough on your clients, they perceive you as cheap labor. And you become cheap labor.

I'm not suggesting letting yourself get cheated. I'm suggesting not pushing so hard that the person you're dealing with feels cheated, either. You shouldn't feel guilty about making a good deal, and neither should the person you're dealing with.

Re: People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

#80
post #5

If you hate your job, someone may be taking advantage of you. If you love your job, someone may be taking advantage of you. Someone may be taking advantage of you. Or not. Who knows?

Exploitation of labour is one of the basic concepts in capitalism. It is a social relationship based on an asymmetry in a power relationship between workers and their employers. Therefor it is independent of the fact if you love or hate your job.
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