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Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

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Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#191

Post by noasaservice »

altabrams wrote: post #182

I agree a toxic culture is probably driving the great resignation. I don't believe it is lack of money. I do believe and have experienced toxic work relationships and environments. I've had a career as a software engineer -15+ years-, and then shifted to security. Developers reflect their environment and are largely toxic individuals or the object of toxic teams. There is a love/hate relationship with Execs and Tech…

> I don't believe it is lack of money.

We are definitely in a IT bubble. It is DEFINITELY about the money.

We have dunkin donuts and plenty other places saying you can make "Up to $20/hr - including tips (but in 1/4 the font size)".

Or person is paid $20/hr for the work of 2 humans, and the management says to do these roles too without extra compensation.

Or you negotiate for 40h/week average, and management expects 50-60h/week. Or benefits are slashed. Or you get your 3% "raise" which is 1/2 inflation.

> The best advice I can give is to enjoy your work and don't get hung up on a $$ track as your measure of success.

Really? Ive heard management saying this kind of garbage before. I have better advice: get paid closer to your surplus value's worth. And then when you HAVE capital, you can decide how you want to live your life.

And there really is no stability in our system, no matter how pretty things are. We employees/workers have low to no representation in companies. We don't see how the C-suite does stuff, and it's too late when they do.

(All of this is primarily US focused, since we take caveat emptor to living and working and everything. It's sickening, but we have to play in this sham system until we can subvert it.)

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#192

Post by rdtwo »

Nihilartikel wrote: post #118
skrebbel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand the American thirst for money for the sake of it. If HN comments are to be believed, top performer at your average FAANG easily earn $500k per year. At that point, aren't you well past the point where more money brings more happiness, even in high cost-of-living places? What's the point? Why not find a job that's fun and fulfilling?

I think that the American thirst for money is perhaps sometimes greed, but most often it's a gnawing psychological side effect of our relative lack of personal security in our society. A person can have $100k in the bank and still be bankrupted and left literally living on the streets if they have the audacity to get cancer, lose their job, and have unlucky circumstances. (edit) This insecurity is a 'feature', not a…

To add to that since public institutions are failed or failing you keep having to buy your way out of get stuck.

2-3 Cars to buy out of failing public transport

Private school to make up for failing schools or at least a house in a rich school district enclave

Private senior caretaker because there are no good adult homes for any price

Gated community for failed policing

Etc etc and you get stuck in this cycle of having to buy your way out of society’s problems that’s really hard to stop but also hard to maintain if you loose your job.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#193

Post by xiphias2 »

mellavora wrote: post #149
xiphias2 wrote: post #124

There's nothing black swan in an inflationary environment that leads to hyperinflation, even if it's for a country with a reserve currency. Every empire hyperinflated itself in the past, people just ignore history and how returning to sound money is inevitable. The only black swan part is that now we have a better alternative to gold.

"better alternative to gold" as in tech stocks? (just kidding, I know you mean crypto, but its superiority to gold is a bit debatable).

Bitcoin, not crypto, but sure, you can try gold, the basic economics are the same (money that can't be printed to infinity)

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#194

Post by jrockway »

kamaal wrote: post #154
ui4jd73bdj wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reasonable enough for a fresh grad. For example 50k->300k. I doubt every engineer could prove to be so valuable in the end spectrum but might work for some companies. Of course if the company fired people the model would lose it's appeal, since you are leaving money on the table on the early spectrum but have no security to reach the end. Would you leave a company where you got a guaranteed 30% raise every year…

Getting a 30% raise yoy, is something even the most optimistic entrepreneur starting up out there would salivate at. Even going from 50 -> 300k, is no easy joke. Its not even worth starting a company if you can make these kind of 6x increase in fortunes in years. Imagine going to the stock market and claiming to have 30% return yoy. I'd like to believe even at FAANGs these mad salaries aren't common. And I would be v…

It does happen to people. In 2004, I worked at the University of Chicago making web apps for internal users, and got paid $45,000 a year. In 2017, I was a senior software engineer at Google making around $300,000 a year (that's salary + bonus + stock).

This is probably an anomaly because I was massively underpaid at my first job, but you've got to start somewhere. (The first three years of my career was basically job hopping. I started at UofC, went to a part of Doubleclick in Chicago, then went to a bank. UofC -> Performics doubled my salary. Bank -> Google doubled my salary.)

As for job hopping, you can have whatever weird criteria you want, but the average engineering tenure these days is about a year, so if you want someone who has 20 years of experience you probably shouldn't be surprised by 20 jobs. If you don't want people to leave to get more money, give them a raise. Why should people take less than market compensation because of your odd idea that they should be "loyal"? People stopped being loyal to companies in approximately 1950. The market for software engineers is ridiculously competitive on the buy side. That's just the reality.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#195

Post by ramphastidae »

pembrook wrote: post #172
UncleMeat wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pretty hard" is an understatement. In ten years, somebody receiving a 30% raise each year sees their pay go up by a factor of nearly 14. Over a 30 year career it is a factor of 2600. Somebody starting at 50k would end their career making 130,000,000 annually.

Thank you for hilariously illustrating how bubble-y the current moment feels. If you think dramatically increasing compensation is going to continue in the next decade like it has in the last one, I think you might be disappointed. Now that companies are comfortable with remote, HR departments are eventually going to realize that services like Deel exist, and that its not actually that hard to hire employees overseas…

Nope. Cheap, outsourced labor has been available for decades. If what you’re saying was true, the shift would have already happened. The reality is that the vast majority of outsourced labor is significantly lower quality than the onshore talent. Mix that with poor communication and a ten hour time zone difference … it’s usually net negative.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#196

Post by drewcoo »

rkangel wrote: post #87

This article does accidentally capture one of the major corporate problems pretty well. The conclude from their data that Toxic Workplace Culture is the biggest cause of resignation, and then they immediately suggest 4 short term things to try that don't relate to culture at all . If you have a toxic workplace culture, the very first thing you should do is to start fixing your culture. This is very hard and not fast…

Everyone agrees that toxic culture is bad.

Take any room full of people and had them secretly write down what toxic culture means. Then reveal. Even though post-reveal some people will try to form consensus, I bet none of the answers are the same.

What I don't like is bad. And the root of corporate problems everywhere.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#197

Post by bArray »

> We also analyzed the free text of more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, using the Natural Employee Language Understanding platform developed by CultureX, a company two of us (Donald and Charles) cofounded.

People go to a complaints website to complain, don't be surprised if you find complaints. The fact that large numbers of people are moving jobs means that large numbers of people suddenly feel empowered to complain. It's not necessarily cause and effect.

The word 'toxic' itself is not really well defined. It just means polluted or poisoned - it offers no incite as to what the unexpected addition is. If you crawl the reviews and find the word 'bad', is 'badness' a leading cause of employees leaving? How can 'badness' be addressed?

The article then pushes their interpretation of what they believe toxicity to be. In my opinion, toxicity is not usually something that can be well defined, hence the use of the word. Generally though it appears to be the feeling that other colleagues make the day-to-day experience worse. This could be a boss that gives you a hard time all the time, colleagues that talk behind about each other in negative ways, the feeling that your colleagues are your opposition and not your allies, etc. It appears to be bad inter-colleague relationships.

If you want to build up better inter-colleague relationships, the solution is not to introduce remote work where they simply avoid each other. Whilst initially it may work (less conflicts), it only serves to isolate staff and strengthen cliques. You need to build up morale, get them working together, have positive work-based experiences together, social events, etc. Go back to basics.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#198

Post by Redoubts »

Areading314 wrote: post #34

A huge problem with this industry is the inflexibility to pay current engineers LARGELY increasing comp each year. The thought is that there is a market rate for an engineer and that pay can increase with the market rate, but this is a fallacy. An engineer that has been at a largish company for 1 year is worth 20-30% more than the year they were hired because they have specific knowledge of the tech stack. Yet that e…

The problem is that, yeah companies are reluctant to give more than a 10% raise because that’s considered a “good” raise. To do better, you now need to convince both your management chain and HR.

To do the latter, you need objective & independent proof of value, like an outside offer.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#199

Post by pc86 »

Retric wrote: post #156
UncleMeat wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pretty hard" is an understatement. In ten years, somebody receiving a 30% raise each year sees their pay go up by a factor of nearly 14. Over a 30 year career it is a factor of 2600. Somebody starting at 50k would end their career making 130,000,000 annually.

Some people do actually end up at that kind of a multiple of their initial salary. It’s not that such growth is impossible it’s just really really uncommon and generally takes regularly changing roles.

"Some people" are also born in poverty and become billionaires. Not nearly enough to make it worth talking about like it's anything but a statistical aberration.

Re: Toxic culture is driving the great resignation

#200

Post by pw262 »

I work as a consultant at a company that has had their entire programming/system staff resign over the last year. Most of the replacement staff have now also resigned. The reason is toxic management. When people are facing life/death consequences from Covid it puts shit at work into perspective. Enough already!
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