181–190 of 198 posts
>Because you do not have power. Remember that, always. When you get promoted, when you enter management, when you get a stellar performance review, you are simply fulfilling the whims of someone else. I hope the author learns about labor unions some day, hopefully soon.
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Even Steve Jobs is disposable. How many here remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard Steve Jobs passed away? Almost like being able to recall where you were when 9/11 happened. When I heard of his death I was shocked, I wondered how Apple would survive, how the world for that matter would move on? But sure enough the next day the sun still rose and and the earth still rotated. Today Apple is…
> Almost like being able to recall where you were when 9/11 happened. Is this sarcasm that I'm not picking up on? I literally can't remember what year SJ died. I can't even remember what generation iPhone was his last.
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> Well, of course working for a single hot company at 22 doesn't mean your career is set for life. What, did he think he was going to retire at Snap? Isn't that the promise of silicon valley? That there's so much money to be made that it turns engineers into entrepreneurs in their 20's? Or has silicon valley now gone the way the rest of society has where huge corporate profits no longer get passed to the people who m…
Technically, Snap is in LA, not SV. And engineers still get much more equity in SV than is true elsewhere, and so have a shot at becoming wealthy.
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Even Steve Jobs is disposable. How many here remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard Steve Jobs passed away? Almost like being able to recall where you were when 9/11 happened. When I heard of his death I was shocked, I wondered how Apple would survive, how the world for that matter would move on? But sure enough the next day the sun still rose and and the earth still rotated. Today Apple is…
> Almost like being able to recall where you were when 9/11 happened. Is this sarcasm that I'm not picking up on? I literally can't remember what year SJ died. I can't even remember what generation iPhone was his last.
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The problem is that unless I'm interpreting it completely incorrectly, your descriptions are comic book renditions based on common prejudices that don't really map to reality, which makes me question whether this is based on experience and exposure to people in the middle and upper class or just an amalgamation of memes you've been exposed to online and have taken as evidence. Doctors and lawyers typically work incre…
I consider professionals to be middle and not upper middle class.
Who do you consider to be upper middle class, if not them? You mention middle management, most of whom make less than financially successful doctors/lawyers.
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Technically, Snap is in LA, not SV. And engineers still get much more equity in SV than is true elsewhere, and so have a shot at becoming wealthy.
Are you saying he would have been better accepting a job in SV instead of LA? Is the culture difference between the two places that big?
But the reason I mentioned it was that you were talking about SV in the context of this article, and I just wanted to make sure that you knew he wasn't actually in SV. But yeah, I guess that's mostly relevant because they're very different areas.
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Are you saying he would have been better accepting a job in SV instead of LA? Is the culture difference between the two places that big?
The culture difference is huge. I would venture to say that Silicon Valley is probably closer to NYC culturally (at least nowadays) than it is to LA. But the reason I mentioned it was that you were talking about SV in the context of this article, and I just wanted to make sure that you knew he wasn't actually in SV. But yeah, I guess that's mostly relevant because they're very different areas.
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They still have the power and the money to employ other people. Which is a different situation that needing to be employed to put food on the table.
To put this in a slightly different perspective. Let's say you had hired a babysitter so you could go out for the evening. At the last minute, the babysitter cancels, and it is too late to get another one. Now you are either scrambling (calling relatives, etc) or you cancel your evening plans. Now let's add to this that your kids really like this particular babysitter, who has quit the babysitting business permanentl…
And then you get sudden medical bills or more months unemployment or some other sudden expense :-(
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Not sure it works like that. If there's a surge of work, slackers go on slacking and you have to hire/rent people.
But it consumes time and effort to hire/rent people and creates unnecessary churn to have people all running at 100%. The machine version of this is nicely discussed in a book written by Eli Goldratt called The Goal with a more people & project based take on it called Critical Chain. They're in novel form (there are more serious treatments available of the general Theory of Constraints), but it discusses why running…
And sure, people typically don't run on 100% capacity. What however seems to happen in many bigger orgs with vague performance metrics (as much of IT work is), some people do solid 60-80% productive work throughout the day, while some barely hover over 0%. So you have a kernel of workers pushing the cart and a bigger cohort of watercooler crowd. When peak load time comes the latter don't ramp up their productivity to 100%, but instead it's expected the employer should expand the staff.
Nothing short of impending layoff rounds seem to affect this dynamic.
Having been laid off due to downsizing, I think everyone should go through it at least once. Sure, the first time will leave you panic stricken, but you'll come out the other side with a lot more clarity about the employee-employer relationship. You are disposable. Even the CEO is disposable (as I've seen many times). Once you realize that, you'll stop the BS about loyalty to your company. It's a business arrangement…
I remind myself and others that they wouldn't have a "Human Resources" department if companies didn't believe that humans were resources. It's not "feelings management" or "people support", it is HR for a reason.
But of course, it's function, to protect the firm from it's employees, won't change.