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The Age of the Crisis of Work

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Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#11

Post by whiskytango111 »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #2

Explain to me why as an employee, I should care whether my employer greatly succeeds, just slides along, or slowly crumbles? As far as I can tell, except over the very long term, I end up in the same place. Or for a more specific example, I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job hopping wh…

Not disagreeing with your perspective but as an exec here is my perspective

A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan).

B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense.

The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.

Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#12

Post by majormajor »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #2

Explain to me why as an employee, I should care whether my employer greatly succeeds, just slides along, or slowly crumbles? As far as I can tell, except over the very long term, I end up in the same place. Or for a more specific example, I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job hopping wh…

I've found nothing more frustrating in jobs than when I can't help but care about things the company doesn't care about.

If your company doesn't care about 50K I don't think there's a need for me to convince you to care about it. If they have no mechanism for either raising those savings opportunities to leadership and prioritizing fixes, or rewarding someone for saving them 50k on their own, they pretty clearly don't care.

So if you're in a company where nothing that you could do from your own initiative would matter to the company (maybe you can save them 50k but they are spending 400 million a year so it's a drop in the bucket), you can still care about success for job security, any sort of bonus or stock compensation, etc. But how much you should care maybe should be proportional to how much you can influence.

Maybe the company is being irrational to not care, maybe they aren't, but you also choosing not to care about the things they don't care about seems healthy to me.

(It's good to remember that while "Quiet Quitting" is the buzzword of the day, this is also literally the premise of a 25 year old movie, Office Space. Literally down to the level of "it's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I don't care" and "Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ")

Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#14

Post by bobsmooth »

whiskytango111 wrote: post #11
throwawaysleep wrote: post #2

Explain to me why as an employee, I should care whether my employer greatly succeeds, just slides along, or slowly crumbles? As far as I can tell, except over the very long term, I end up in the same place. Or for a more specific example, I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job hopping wh…

Not disagreeing with your perspective but as an exec here is my perspective A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan). B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense. The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.

>The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan).

Do you compensate these people? Why should I be this person if you don't pay me for it?

Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#15

Post by majormajor »

whiskytango111 wrote: post #11
throwawaysleep wrote: post #2

Explain to me why as an employee, I should care whether my employer greatly succeeds, just slides along, or slowly crumbles? As far as I can tell, except over the very long term, I end up in the same place. Or for a more specific example, I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job hopping wh…

Not disagreeing with your perspective but as an exec here is my perspective A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan). B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense. The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.

You're missing any mention of alignment and as a result I think you're leaving out a very key situation where someone can be in your group (A) but actually working against the overall company goals.

If you hire someone to solve problem X but they get sidetracked and spend all their time on problem Z instead... they can be excelling at driving solutions and still be doing the wrong thing in the eyes of the company.

Caring about completely different things than your boss can get you in trouble even if you excel at everything you do.

Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#16

Post by anotherhue »

kyleyeats wrote: post #8
throwawaysleep wrote: post #2

Explain to me why as an employee, I should care whether my employer greatly succeeds, just slides along, or slowly crumbles? As far as I can tell, except over the very long term, I end up in the same place. Or for a more specific example, I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job hopping wh…

It's easy: You're pre-selected. You've been trained for decades in one way or another to unquestioningly chase the mission . You went through five interviews and putting mission-over-self was the #1 selection criterion in each. You call it imposter syndrome or cPTSD or ADHD but the truth is you've just had people screaming expectations in your ear your whole life. It's not a question of you vs. your employer but of y…

I always enjoyed this song along these lines

https://genius.com/Lcd-soundsystem-other-voices-lyrics

Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#17

Post by whiskytango111 »

bobsmooth wrote: post #14
whiskytango111 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with your perspective but as an exec here is my perspective A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan). B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense. The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.

>The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan). Do you compensate these people? Why should I be this person if you don't pay me for it?

As an SVP of Eng: Market dynamics and pay equity mostly force me to pay everyone the same. Not everyone gets paid the same but little disparity between people of high impact and low. Ie most companies total annual comp between people is a lot smaller than you’d think.

So the job of management is to weed out people who aren’t having as high as possible impact when convenient.

I don’t like it, but it’s often what’s going on

Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#18

Post by nine_zeros »

whiskytango111 wrote: post #11
throwawaysleep wrote: post #2

Explain to me why as an employee, I should care whether my employer greatly succeeds, just slides along, or slowly crumbles? As far as I can tell, except over the very long term, I end up in the same place. Or for a more specific example, I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job hopping wh…

Not disagreeing with your perspective but as an exec here is my perspective A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan). B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense. The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.

> A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan).

And what is the company doing in exchange for these people? Extra Compensation? Extra promos? Extra Vacation time?

Or is the company just subjugating people with bullshit performance reviews, PIPs, canceled bonuses, dangling promos?

Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#19

Post by jamilton »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #3
throwawaysleep wrote: post #2

Explain to me why as an employee, I should care whether my employer greatly succeeds, just slides along, or slowly crumbles? As far as I can tell, except over the very long term, I end up in the same place. Or for a more specific example, I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job hopping wh…

I have asked people to try and convince me of this on several occasions, and the best argument so far has been about climate change and how preventing that is in my interest.

That's pretty good for the specific case, but fails in the general case. You could maybe generalize it out to altruism, if you believe your company being more efficient will be net good for other people, but that's not a given.

Re: The Age of the Crisis of Work

#20

Post by whiskytango111 »

majormajor wrote: post #15
whiskytango111 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with your perspective but as an exec here is my perspective A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan). B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense. The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.

You're missing any mention of alignment and as a result I think you're leaving out a very key situation where someone can be in your group (A) but actually working against the overall company goals. If you hire someone to solve problem X but they get sidetracked and spend all their time on problem Z instead... they can be excelling at driving solutions and still be doing the wrong thing in the eyes of the company. Ca…

That’s just bad management. High quality work that doesn’t actually move the business needle is almost the same as if people didn’t even come in at all.

That said managing a large organization is extremely hard. I don’t think most companies have the overall business dynamics to sustain a large company where teams can do things that don’t matter. Usually those companies, which there are a lot in the tech world, have something else going on (no product market fit and too much cash) that leads to those symptoms

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