231–240 of 279 posts
And helpful employees are priceless.
Goes around, comes around.
Bad news for all the a-holes out there who've built careers out of bullying others to do mediocre work.
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That sucks. The following is unsolicited stuff you probably already know - feel free to ignore. I would heavily suggest speaking frankly about this with your manager or even going above their head if needed to ensure someone hears and acknowledges this. With your review in hand and any other additional info that can help back you up. Ask what you need to focus on to secure a substantial Y raise/promotion and bonus et…
Thanks and appreciate it. I did try that last year but it honestly went no where. I work on a financial system at a fintech company but I am on the finance side and my managers and above have never even logged into the system so they don't understand, appreciate, or really have interest in it. All they hear about are breaks in data, or some trivial error (99% caused by the bank or employee inputting a payment incorre…
Good luck either way!
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Well, to many it seemed that an obvious cause-and-effect fact that should have come from empathy and introspection--that workers are just like you and I don't like being slighted--and didn't need to be written about. Yet when of the top comments used dog training to explain manager-worker relations--something that empathy and introspection could tell you was a bit off (would you feel slighted if I make our interactio…
Again, the comparison was between a dog and a manager. There's zero insinuation that a manager is like an owner and an employee like a dog. It does feel like you're looking for a pretext to feel slighted here. That aside, I completely agree with you that managers should engage in empathy and introspection. I still think it's helpful, even for those that do, to have some empirical confirmation of how strongly employee…
There are a million other ways to illustrate the point without being a creep.
That sounds about right from my experience. There's nothing worse than feeling excluded or manipulated by management or coworkers.
> There's nothing worse than feeling excluded or manipulated by management or coworkers. What people call "social skills" is nearly always manipulating other people into liking you. People of who its is said that they "lack social skills" are often more honest and much less manipulative.
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I have an example of this that happened to me: I received a referral bonus and where the company payroll made an error and accidentally gave me a higher bonus per the level of employee my referral reward was (they set it to the bonus level for a VP and she was a Sr. Director). So unbeknownst to me they gave me $5000 extra in my bonus that should have been only $3000, not $8k. Accounting figured this out next tax seas…
I love that example. It’s a basic exercise in “for how little money can you break any amount of trust”. Not sure how they could avoid that (besides being competent in the first place..)
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I'm happy buying groceries at the grocery store without having to pretend that the checkout clerk loves me. I also feel that the emotional attachment to one's source of income could cause people to compromise their morality for them, as if they were family e.g. I don't think one child should be favored over another, but I'm happy when my child is favored over others. > I believe such should be the default. It's delus…
Maybe my knowledge of the English language is subpar but what you describe looks more like _transactional_?
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> If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries I find this funny because it suggests an equilibrium point where 75% of management must be adversarial by definition. Adversarial is a loaded word. In my experience, the management I’d call most adversarial occurred at companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying emp…
> companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company Well, yes in a way. Criticis…
I didn’t mention criticism, though.
The abuse I was talking about was more like: “VP so-and-so mentioned this in a meeting so I need you to work nights and weekends until it’s done” for trivial features or bugs.
In one case we had a CEO who would do surprise visits to offices and demand an on-the-spot demo of what he thought the team should have been working on, often without prior communication that he wanted it to be our top priority. If you didn’t have something highly polished to demo or any bugs occurred during the impromptu demo, you could expect hours of verbal lashing and insults.
When he left, the top manager would run around trying to explain that it’s just part of the job operating at this pay grade.
I’m not talking about whiny or unproductive employees being pushed out. This is about managerial dysfunction being justified by high compensation. When people’s hands feel tied by any job change coming with a step down in compensation, a lot of toxicities can thrive. Not all highly paid companies are like this, but at big companies that pay well you can find pockets of managers who use the high pay as a weapon.
I received a title bump without pay increase to Senior after doing senior work for 4 years because our senior bracket is capped by lifers waiting to retire (I like them as people but they are checked out, professionally). It just left a bad taste in my mouth that it took so long to be recognized officially . To put things into context, I'm basically operating as an engineering consultant to the rest of our senior sta…
I have been SWE for 30 years now and this is one of the most boggling things I’ve seen over the years. I hope my daughter never has to do the work I did in my career but if she actually has an office job I will tell her to quit immediately if this was offered to her (leave the job immediately without any notice, just pack up and go). This is not a promotion but an insult.