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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

#231

Post by therealpygon »

marcuskane2 wrote: post #229
mk_stjames wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this little insight into PTO that I keep saved, from the book "Algorithms to Live By" by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths (a nice read). I think of it often when hearing about people and their work schedules in modern salaried positions and these 'unlimited PTO' offers: >All employees want, in theory, to take as much vacation as possible. But they also all want to take just slightly less vacation than each othe…

> hence more promotion-worthy Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions. But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.

“But you can be lucky to get a lower-than-cost-of-living adjustment each year if you stay and don’t move jobs! Wait, why are you leaving??”

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

#232

Post by codegeek »

LiquidSky wrote: post #221
codegeek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of these shitty corporate companies that don't give a shit about their employees, the well is now poisoned for companies that do care especially smaller ones. Employees don't want to give their best anymore because they are burnt elsewhere and they become unemployable at smaller companies. It is a sad state of affairs.

>the well is now poisoned for companies that do care Because there's no such thing. Or rather, there are until it's unprofitable enough that caring seriously threatens the bottom line, or the nice owners sell off to someone less nice.

Sure but thats a very cynical way of seeing things. A company cannot exist without making a profit but there are plenty of companies that try and take care of their people. At least the ones that don't have investor or board pressure (smaller private companies).

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

#233

Post by smallmancontrov »

b112 wrote: post #227
smallmancontrov wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Income Statements didn't change in the 70s.

Not sure what you're talking about. Whose income statement? And why would that matter, in reference to what I said?

We were talking about the 1970 inflection point in wages vs productivity. The inability of line workers to understand corporate finance does not seem to be a likely explanation for the 1970 inflection because it did not inflect in 1970.

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

#234

Post by 9rx »

bwestergard wrote: post #174
9rx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in the industry for 30 years. "UNIONIZE" has always been the suggested answer. Always. But nobody ever steps up and actually does it, even despite the people being already socially united through platforms like HN, making formalization about as easy as can be possible.

My coworkers and I organized a union five years ago. We're about to enter bargaining for our second contract. https://code-cwa.org/

To the greatest degree of our understanding, the mid-career slump happens to some people because priorities can shift mid-career. Kids/family starts to grab more attention, seeing life as more than a job and wanting to live it to the fullest becomes more prevalent as one becomes more aware of the clock ticking, for professionals they've likely started to build a bit of a nest egg so money doesn't seem as important before, etc. They slump because they just don't care about work like they used to.

How does your union keep people focused on the job? Or is it simply that the union self-selects those who are already focused on job-related matters and wouldn't end up in the slump anyway?

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

#235

Post by marssaxman »

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…

I have worked for quite a few companies with unlimited-PTO policies, with quite a few different managers, and it's always been fine. I've never had any manager at any company give me any trouble about any time I wanted to take off, ever.

Different people have different temperaments. Unlimited PTO works great for me because I am more likely to actually take time off when I don't have to meter it. When vacation days are limited, they feel scarce and precious, so I avoid using them if at all possible - what if something more important were to come up later in the year, after I'd run out? It's stressful. There are never enough PTO days.

When I don't have to count days or worry about whether I have enough left, I'll just take time off, whenever the occasion arises. Taking all the time I want doesn't actually end up being much more than I'd be allowed if I had to ration it out.

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

#236

Post by b112 »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #233
b112 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're talking about. Whose income statement? And why would that matter, in reference to what I said?

We were talking about the 1970 inflection point in wages vs productivity. The inability of line workers to understand corporate finance does not seem to be a likely explanation for the 1970 inflection because it did not inflect in 1970.

I... guess you're saying, simply, that there was no inflection point. Fair enough I guess, but my comments need not be date specific.

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

#237

Post by mullingitover »

sitkack wrote: post #148
mullingitover wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation. Until we have sentient robots, all that automation is simply a lever with a human laborer at the end of it.

What limits the length of the lever? The agricultural lever is already crazy long, the manufacturing lever, same. We could be doing the same with less, not more with the same. When do we stop?

> The agricultural lever is already crazy long

Depends on where in the world you're looking. In India, something like 50% of the population works in agriculture. At the scale of India's population that's a significant fraction of the population of the planet, it's more than twice the population of the entire US.

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

#239

Post by Frieren »

9rx wrote: post #34
darth_avocado wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big tech owns a big chunk of the job market Big tech employs less than 1% of the people in the country.

To be fair to the parent, jobs require capital, and big tech owns a big chunk of the capital, and thus do own a big chunk of the job market even if they aren't putting it to work. Which is part of the underlying problem. Those with capital don't really need workers and the areas of the economy who could put workers to work in a bigger way don't have the capital to do so.

That seems the definition of bad resource allocation. I totally agree with you.

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

#240

Post by NoLinkToMe »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #78
NoLinkToMe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say work hard. But if you keep contributing what you already contributed previously and nothing changes, your salary likely also doesn't change. Changing that doesn't necessarily require working hard, I haven't made any such claim. In fact my salary inversely correlated with my effort. But I do recognize that when I stopped changing things (i.e. my role in the company became stagnant), my salary also remaine…

Your reasoning implies that specific people within an org are not getting raises, but in practice it is entire orgs going without raises or promotions, regardless of what any individual is doing.

It's obviously both in different circumstances. I've had plenty of raises while the rest of my team didn't, and when I stopped doing what I was doing, I joined them.
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