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Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

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Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#201

Post by jagged-chisel »

compiler-guy wrote: post #105
tavavex wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. What is 'unlimited' PTO? And if it's so unlimited, why can't you use any of it? I've only had jobs with very specifically defined PTO that had no ambiguity in whether I could ever use it.

"Unlimited PTO" is a fiction created by accountants that sounds good on paper. When you need or want time off, you work it out with your manager. No debate about how many days you have left this year, or how many you have accumulated. It's undefined and technically you are supposed to work together and away you go. Accountants like it because guaranteed time-off is a liability that appears on the company's books as a…

Never quite understood the “negotiation” bit. I, the employee, am offering you, the employer, the courtesy of letting you know I am unavailable for work on $DATERANGE.

Of course, it’s well in advance, and nearly always avoids big company plans.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#202

Post by jerhewet »

ptero wrote: post #81

The fact that 1 in 4 white collar workers are not getting raises or promotions might not be a bad thing. As white collar workers get older they frequently stop optimizing for money and start optimizing for time, flexibility and other things and be totally OK with no promotions as the trade-off. I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange. Even w…

> now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore

I'm going to be 70 in November, and I can't wait to retire ... hopefully in 6 months, but chances are I'll keep working until I'm put out to pasture by the company I'm currently working for.

Throwing code hasn't lost its appeal, and I'm still learning new stuff every day, but the landscape has changed too much for my tastes since the early 2010's.

Nowadays we're doing "devops" instead of actual programming, the cloud has become the new mainframe, web browsers are just thin clients, buy-once-use-forever is long gone and replaced by monthly rent-seeking services and forced updates, and the sixth (seventh? eighth?) iteration of spicy autocomplete (as in "You no longer have to know how to write code!") is pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I started writing code in the early 70's, and became a paid developer in 1975. I still love programming, but I'm completely fed up with everything else that has ruined the experience in the past 10 to 15 years. I'm sure I'll still be throwing code after I retire, but it will be for my own enjoyment, and it won't be using any of the latest fads and dead ends (pretty sure we're on the eighth iteration) from the past couple of years.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#204

Post by deathanatos »

jvanderbot wrote: post #69

If I can just hold at this role for 6 more years, I'm happy. I chased promotions for a decade and regretted all but the first two, which brought me to this level. There's a larger issue with that though: At some point, successful engineers _need_ to become examples or leaders if we are to continue exponential growth. If you are happy discontinuing exponential growth, then that's fine.

> There's a larger issue with that though: At some point, successful engineers _need_ to become examples or leaders

Why? Why should I become an example, or a leader? To be blunt: why do companies think I should do that additional work, without additional pay?

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#205

Post by stringfood »

aksss wrote: post #190
stringfood wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this could be because the business have all the power in the relationship, especially in bad job markets like today. When they hold all the cards they can make us dance for them and they never dance for us

If you have desirable skills, why does the business have all the power? If you don’t have desirable skills and yet remain employed, how could you expect otherwise?

well personally I think the people you hear complaining about being abused by their employer are more unskilled, otherwise they would leave for greener pastures as you said. But unskilled people are people too! And they have rights and should be treated fairly

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#206

Post by superfrank »

compiler-guy wrote: post #175
superfrank wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system > Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem. That me! Except I don't think it has anything to do with my manager or company. I'…

Some people do like it, and I'm glad it's working out for them--I really am. But adding all that manager and corporate discretion sets one up for abuse when things go wrong at either the manager or corporate level. For some, I suppose the benefit is worth it--but if "unlimited vs set days has almost no bearing on how many PTO days someone will actually take", then people are giving up a lot of guarantees for very lit…

> But adding all that manager and corporate discretion sets one up for abuse when things go wrong at either the manager or corporate level

I have never worked at a place where I didn't need manager approval for my PTO. That includes places where I had a set PTO balance.

In my experience, having banked PTO days doesn't actually give you any real protection from abuse. A manager can still deny every single PTO request or load you up with so much work that taking any PTO will result in you falling behind. The only difference is that the company then needs to pay you out for those days, which isn't nothing, but it's also not a ton of protection from abuse.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#207

Post by superfrank »

cortesoft wrote: post #195
superfrank wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system > Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem. That me! Except I don't think it has anything to do with my manager or company. I'…

> Looking at my teams, the amount of PTO people take has almost no correlation to whether they have unlimited PTO or a set number of days. If the number of PTO days taken is the same between the groups, isn't it CLEARLY superior from an employee perspective to have a set amount? That way, you get paid out if you leave or are fired. I know quite a few people who use their PTO as a sort of emergency fund if they are la…

> If the number of PTO days taken is the same between the groups, isn't it CLEARLY superior from an employee perspective to have a set amount

For me, no. I take more PTO than most companies with limited PTO offer. Most big tech companies offer 20-25 days and I'm taking 30 minimum. I take 6-8 weeks a year and the year I got married, I took 10. A normal year of PTO for me is 2 weeks during the summer for a vacation, a week at Thanksgiving, a week in April or May since my family has multiple birthdays in that window, 2-3 weeks in the Christmas/NYE period, and then random days here and there for the rest of the year.

For my team, for the people on the low end banked PTO is probably better. For the people on the high end they often take more than the allotment for CA employees, so no.

Everyone's experience will be different, but in my career I've always found that unlimited PTO often means no one cares how much PTO you take as long as you're getting your work done. I value that freedom. I know it's not for everyone and I'm not saying that every company should be unlimited PTO, but I just hate this narrative that it's a scam.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#208

Post by qsxfthnkp2322 »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #118
qsxfthnkp2322 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These companies are making more money than they ever have. I’m tired of all the excuses for shit leadership. They all can go to h** when they die.

you mispelled 'every circle of hell'. out of curiosity, why would you censor that word?

Kids. Habit.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#209

Post by smallmancontrov »

b112 wrote: post #122
TheRoque wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about the end of the Bretton-Woods agreement? https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ I mean, it's cherry picked, but still funny to see all those charts.

When I looked at this, the first thing which popped into my mind came from the 95th percentile graph... third one I think. If you're a CTO, CEO, CxO, you have direct, in depth knowledge to how the company is doing. You also likely have insight into how that translates into free capital to spend on wages. Many companies are not public, and even when companies are, earning reports aren't easy for a line worker to fully…

Income Statements didn't change in the 70s.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#210

Post by senectus1 »

Increasingly exhausted GenX'er here... I'm just happy to come into work these days. I no longer have any desire to push for promotion and early retirement is a very tempting goal right now.

My eldest is now 18 and starting to to into the workforce and my youngest is still about 3 years from that.

if (and thats a big if) we dont have a GFC part 2 in the next 10 years I'll be fine I think... but jeez Trump/AI is making it hard to get there.

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