221–224 of 224 posts
Alot of young people are being influenced by stupid trends on reddit (like /r/antiwork) or this 'quiet quitting' nonsense. Alot of young people also believe that meritocracy doesn't exist in the modern workplace, which is dangerous, because we all know it 100% exists.
> because we all know it 100% exists. I don't know that.
I worked 200% for over 15 years in Silicon Valley. You know how many raises I got without changing jobs? Zero. You know how many promotions I got? Zero. You know how many bonuses I got? Zero. You know how much more work I got assigned? A TON. Hard work only begets hard work these days and not further compensation. The old paths to higher compensation and career growth are dead, and employers killed them. There's no r…
What seems to happen is your manager's manager gets approval from finance to offer 2-5% raises per report. If your manager thinks that is unfair he/she needs to complain (spending their own political capital on someone other than themselves). Your manager gets told to figure out raises and thinks there is no reason not to just give everyone the max raise. I then get told I'm getting 5% and it feels woefully inadequate because I do the majority of the work. Knowing that my buddy makes much more than me, I start looking for a job.
What was anyone supposed to do here? If my manager could give 20% per employee he/she would (maybe the company really can't afford it). If my manager was told they had a pool of money to distribute that then turns into stacking (also something people are really unhappy about).
The employee with the least amount of power (me) requires someone above me to advocate on my behalf. Because your manager has to pick-and-chose their battles, it always seems to happen when I threaten to quit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't demand that. But (for a small one-off home installation job) we do expect carpenters to finish with a broom-clean workspace, even if that's not explicitly in the contract. It's a basic professional standard and "common sense." That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.
Except for some reason once people become employees, that "broom-clean workspace" turns into "spotless deep house clean" expectation. Hence why you get "quitely quitting" as just doing the job you were hired to do.
Among the reasons this can happen is a variant of race-to-the-bottom cost / value creep due to competition. If some other carpenter is offering complementary deep-clean, then everyone else in the space has to offer it too (or risk losing work).
Now, they should of course ideally pay their staff to do the thing that has become the new norm. But it's easy for a frog-boil to cause something to creep into the new norm without corresponding compensation increasing (especially if the guy offering the deep-cleans originally has some kind of economic advantage the competition doesn't that allows him to offer it for free... Maybe his partner is co-owner and does the deep cleans, or they have kids who work for them for free).
There's a lot of power imbalances that I think become obvious if one asks the question "Why would the employees not care if this company went belly-up tomorrow?" The kids / partner circumstance, for example, involves employees working for below-market rate but they do care if the company goes belly-up tomorrow.
There has been an erosion and change in the nature of the employee-employer relationship. Back in the day that the author initially started working, the nature of the relationship was probably much more balanced: the employee got a decent wage, was trusted to fulfil their duties with reasonable concessions and freedom (sometimes possibly doing overtime if necessary, but also being able to leave early on days when the…