No Time to Be Nice at Work

Post by rasur » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:32 AM UTC

mikerichards wrote: post #47

comrade1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's only one that I'm comfortable talking about since it was long ago and the people involved have all moved on from their parent companies. Louis Vuitton was relaunching their public-facing website, which was tightly integrated with their back-end systems - inventory, manufacturing, etc. IOW, it wasn't just a regular website. They hired a consulting company here in Europe who sold them a solution that wa…

Just curious about that "american, swiss, and german consultants". Did you all speak english? Did the swiss and french speak french sometimes? Interesting dynamics.

Post by omegaham » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 12:23 PM UTC

jf22 wrote: post #68

wpietri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're conflating the difficulty of the work (coal mining is hard, dangerous work) with the way people treat each other at work (like the shitty bosses in the article). When I read books about other times and places, my main impression is that the work may have been harder, but that the people were much kinder to one another. Given that I've worked at some places that were horrible and some that…

Which other times and places? I have the exact opposite impression. Human life and dignity weren't valued until the last 200 years or so. There were no worker protections until very recently you were treated like shit if you weren't a member of the ruling class/race/religion. Much kinder? Not giving a shit if a chinese laborer was killed was building a railroad isn't exactly kind...

Post by clebio » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 1:17 PM UTC

codeonfire wrote: post #41

spotman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share the opinion of the parent comment, pretty much exactly. Some of my comrades call this a layer-8 problem. (hint: there is only 7 technology levels, 8 is the human one). One story in particular my firm was hired to come into a startup that had failed to scale, both technology wise, and personnel wise. They had hired up to 25 engineers, hoping to fix their stability issues, and almost going bankrupt doing it. I…

>you don't even know where to find credentials to log into its production systems since it was setup by some employee in the middle of the night a year ago that is no longer there. Recently I was searching for some report generating code that my team had been voluntold to maintain. I spent a day trying to find the code that generated and uploaded the report. Once I finally was able to get in contact with the last per…

Post by douche » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 1:18 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #98

JohnyLy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. Working in a nice/friendly environment makes you more motivated and therefore more efficient.

This is a personal anecdote - my dad used to run a company that sorted second hand clothing. He had a huge warehouse, where people would stand in one place and literally pick clothes out of one basket and then sort them into several smaller ones, by colour or type. The atmosphere in the warehouse wasn't exactly perfect,but employees could talk to each other and they had a radio playing music. Based on some observatio…

Post by jessaustin » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 1:45 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #104

johnchristopher wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they get a raise as a consequence of the higher output ? Since we are social animals then preventing talking between us make things harder for us at some points, ie the job gets harder, so that could be an argument for higher wage.

He stated that for every employee his father could find 50 other people to do the job. So I guess they didn't get a raise :/