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The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

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Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#201

Post by cratermoon »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #156
cratermoon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When something critical comes up The problem: everything looks 'critical' to folks with a greedy and selfish streak who rise high in management and have their pay tied to the quarterly stock price. That's how we ended up with 24/7 support and "five nines" availability. I'm old enough to remember that banks opened late and closed early, didn't operate on weekends or holidays, and if you didn't get your paycheck cash…

>The problem: everything looks 'critical' to folks with a greedy and selfish streak who rise high in management and have their pay tied to the quarterly stock price. That's how we ended up with 24/7 support and "five nines" availability. I think it was because customers preferred to patronize banks and stores that were open longer hours, and so they won business by selling something customers wanted. Similarly, I tho…

> customers preferred to patronize banks and stores that were open longer hours

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-tyranny-of-ch...

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#202

Post by cratermoon »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #170
cratermoon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When something critical comes up The problem: everything looks 'critical' to folks with a greedy and selfish streak who rise high in management and have their pay tied to the quarterly stock price. That's how we ended up with 24/7 support and "five nines" availability. I'm old enough to remember that banks opened late and closed early, didn't operate on weekends or holidays, and if you didn't get your paycheck cash…

It's a really good thing for banks and grocery stores to be open more, though. There's a big difference between trying to squeeze more hours out of a salaried worker vs. hiring more people to cover more shifts. For support, it depends on whether you're hiring more people (good), offering optional on-call time for extra money or reduced hours (probably fine), or forcing people to be on-call on top of a normal work wee…

> It's a really good thing for banks and grocery stores to be open more, though

Is it? Why? What has the average person gained from being able to shop and bank 24/7? Are you sure they aren't just being given more incentive to spend money and support greedy management and investors?

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#203

Post by rowanG077 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #195
rowanG077 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you go to High School with the rampant bullying? Popularity is not linked at all with personality traits that make someone a good leader afaik. Traditional hierarchy at least tries to keep people who are a competent in power.

"Did you go to High School with the rampant bullying" Do adults have judgement of pre-pubernecent 14 year olds? I mean, maybe some do, but...

High school age is generally 14 to 18. And I wouldn't be so confident adults in unchecked power are better then high schoolers on morality and decency.

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#204

Post by [deleted] »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #174
ithkuil wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP's point is precisely that once you normalize something that used to be a special case requiring extra compensation, it's hard to make the case that you need to get paid extra for your extra work, since it's, well, no longer extra?

It depends how the labor supply and demand curves are moving. The case for extra compensation is that you will stop working there if you do not get extra compensation.

[deleted]

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#205

Post by nine_zeros »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #35
MattGaiser wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if employees are commodities and companies can get away with thinking that way, that number is either inaccurate or everyone is getting it wrong.

I mean, I'm not these companies and I don't know the exact formula, but you'd be looking at things like the attrition rate, the cost of hiring, the cost of raises but also the value of wages across the whole market. There's some low-key collusion going on for sure (not necessarily outright collusion although some firms have been caught doing that too, but multiple firms all employing the same strategy keeps wages low…

> If it truly were more expensive to hire than to give raises, more firms would be giving raises.

I don't disagree but the real world is more complex. Recruiting is an entire department in most companies that have a vested interest in hiring from outside. They will pull all strings to keep getting money for hiring.

Corporate structures are really inefficient

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#206

Post by irrational »

iammisc wrote: post #94
irrational wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting how different people are. All those things you list are reasons I would want to quit a job. I don’t ever want to work in an office ever again.

You must understand that this attitude is the minority. Most people like their workplace because they like the people there. My dad worked in pharma sales for 30 years. Do you think he cared to sell the drugs? I mean... in that the drugs were helping people, he was happy. But his reason for going to work everyday was talking to his colleagues. To this day, he and his old colleagues still visit each other, still party…

I don't believe you are right. Literally everyone I've talked to the past year and a half has said how much they enjoy working remotely and that they never want to go back to an office. Both of our experiences are anecdotal, but from my perspective, those wanting to go back to the office are in the tiny minority, so much so that you are the first one I've heard express that view.

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#207

Post by ClumsyPilot »

hinkley wrote: post #39
bartread wrote: post #20

> because the highest quit rate is among not engaged and actively disengaged workers. As opposed to what, exactly? What are you expecting to see? Highly engaged employees mass quitting? The situation described in this piece sounds fairly normal to me. People who aren't that fussed about their jobs, or actually dislike them, are always much more likely to quit. The real question is whether there has been an increase i…

I have some highly engaged coworkers who are in the process of burning out. I think they’re only still here because the entire company would crumble if they stopped. Coworkers have commented that if we lose these people we are fucked, and I just keep thinking: can’t you see that they are already gone? You better make plans, because as soon as they go I’m splitting too.

"they’re only still here because the entire company would crumble if they stopped."

Honestly thats a terrible reason to stay - unless you work at a charity.

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#208

Post by planet-and-halo »

flavius29663 wrote: post #189
planet-and-halo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all relative, though. If you increase salaries for retention, it has to come out of some other pot. Maybe that isn't your new hire pool, but you're going to see a negative metric of some kind somewhere. Now don't get me wrong, I still think it's better in the long term. But my point is that you'll get some kind of negative signal by pulling back funds elsewhere, and a firm at that point has to have the disciplin…

If you're correct, and it costs more money to keep people, then we are wrong: it's not cheaper to go for stability. Maybe it's like in the prisoner dilemma: you can't go lower than the market peak because no-one will come to you, even if you offer more on average than the industry average. This way, we reward the job hoppers with the peak salaries. Peak salaries means over time the average goes up too. I guess it's h…

It depends on how retention interacts with other variables. I would argue that you can make exponential gains in things like product quality over the long term by retaining a critical mass of experienced personnel, which translates to higher earnings etc. But yes if you view personnel costs as a line item in isolation and on a quarterly basis, you might not see those effects.

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#209

Post by ClumsyPilot »

rowanG077 wrote: post #203
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Did you go to High School with the rampant bullying" Do adults have judgement of pre-pubernecent 14 year olds? I mean, maybe some do, but...

High school age is generally 14 to 18. And I wouldn't be so confident adults in unchecked power are better then high schoolers on morality and decency.

So the concept of "well adjusted adult' is a myth?

Re: The 'Great Resignation' is really the 'Great Discontent'

#210

Post by jrs235 »

laurent92 wrote: post #129
kodah wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen our internal surveys go like this as well. They'll be critical on themselves with easy-to-solve issues but if it's something substantive then the polling will be very obtuse.

In my company (a famous company which builds trucks) they introduced those bullshit happiness surveys during Covid. So we coordinated so that the average of our marks were 1, 3, 4, 10, 5, 5, 10, 4, 3, 1, which is a Batman graph. Fortunately the “1” matches the first lockdown, but the managers are still wondering why the spikes at 10.

Reminds me about a cohort of colleagues at a place I worked that would have some fun conspiring similarly to this. Seemed HR and the company wanted everyone to fall in line. We called ourselves "the loose ends".
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