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At this company, we are family

pboyd.io

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Re: At this company, we are family

#241

Post by JohnFen »

aae42 wrote: post #216
Brusco_RF wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look I'm not saying you need to stay out drinking until 10pm but team-building is important to any job, especially if you're a leader, and much of that team cohesiveness happens outside of work hours. It's not too surprising if skipping all team-building events results in... not being a part of the team

> much of that team cohesiveness happens outside of work hours whaaaa? is this a common view? doing team building on personal time seems... off. To me. remember taking my small IT team out for lunches on the company dime, and even to the movies... we even went to an escape room once... but this was all during the work day...

I think there's a large cultural component here. I've never worked at a place where any significant "team building" took place outside of work hours, but I know many devs (mostly outside the US) who told me that it does.

Re: At this company, we are family

#242

Post by shafoshaf »

majormajor wrote: post #232
kirse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the sports team concept in terms of being a sieve for performance. Similar to HS->College->NFL athletes, elite military SOF groups, etc. You get binned and sometimes that's hard to accept, but that's the point of the filter. It's interesting that despite the high-performance culture though, Netflix is still slowly degrading. This past year I finally realized I could cancel Netflix and not feel like I lost anyt…

Netflix was unlikely to ever be able to forever remain an aggregator of content from other distribution shops. They would've gotten squeezed to death from all sides. So now they have tons of content and tons of viewership (and tons of profits the last several years) but they've changed from being "the biggest streaming hub for all your favorites" to "one of many producers and distributors." They might on the whole ha…

THe low cost of a single song vs. an entire episode I suspect also plays a factor. A lot of artists are one or two song wonders, so once you take out a Taylor Swift, there's no incentive for artists to limit their songs to a single platform, no platform will pay enough for the exclusivity to make the artist think it is worth it.

Re: At this company, we are family

#243

Post by JohnFen »

hdivider wrote: post #70
systemvoltage wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, my father ran a small business (physical goods) and the people in his company were almost like a family. They felt as such, we treated them as such, it was amazing...brings a tear. I cannot emphasize this enough: It was far better relationship than resentful people on HN who are constantly complaining about work. They were happier as a whole.

Yes, sadly HN does seem to have a high proportion of folks who don't seem to understand the value of human connection. Everything is about technology. But not all mission statements are meaningless, and not all attempts by executives to create a family-like culture come from a bad place. Much of it comes from a good place, and it often works. But people who experience this I think are less likely to write on HN.

The reason I consider an employer saying "we are a family here" problematic is because it's obviously untrue.

My family will support me no matter what. My family will never fire me. My family actually loves me.

None of those things are true with an employer.

Re: At this company, we are family

#244

Post by JohnFen »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #25

The problem with this and many companies trying to be family etc, is that they completely misunderstand what a family is. Most think a family is a group where people love each other and care for each other. This is wrong, love and affections are symptoms of a healthy family, you can love and care for your friends, you don’t have a family with them. You can actually not really like spending time with many people in yo…

> you can love and care for your friends, you don’t have a family with them.

I'm not so sure. My set of friends have been friends for over 35 years. We're as much family as our blood relations, in pretty much every way I can think of.

Re: At this company, we are family

#245

Post by halostatue »

FredPret wrote: post #99
tambourine_man wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an often repeated mantra: “sure you'll lose some rights, but it will be way easier to find higher paying jobs in a more dynamic market”. I've lived in two countries that went through this transition in labor laws to follow the neoliberal playbook. Guess what happened. See also “less regulation will mean more agile and competitive market which will auto regulate itself”, etc.

Depends on which regulations you remove. It's against the law to steal money. That's a regulation we need to keep. It's also against the law to build a house if the existing homeowners vote that you can't. That's a regulation that makes the market less efficient, though I can see the reasoning behind it.

Did you know that the most common sort of theft in the US and Canada is wage theft? It doesn’t happen nearly as often in countries with stronger labour laws.

It doesn’t get prosecuted nearly as much as other types of theft.

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

Re: At this company, we are family

#246

Post by JohnFen »

froggertoaster wrote: post #5

Mildly amusing, and yes - the whole "this company is a family" schtick is overplayed by companies. I never say that at my company - instead the employees often say it back to me, which I feel is much more culturally "real" than me saying it. At one company party, the employees were going around the room telling me how nice it was to work for me (which is very kind of them). The last guy sheepishly shrugged and said,…

> instead the employees often say it back to me, which I feel is much more culturally "real" than me saying it.

It is!

My problem is when companies feel the need to say it. If it's actually true, they wouldn't have to.

Re: At this company, we are family

#247

Post by RajT88 »

Aurornis wrote: post #224

When I was young I worked at a company that said things like "we are family" and kind of meant it. It wasn't really a good thing unless you were a low performer. We had some people who were hired into jobs they couldn't do well, but they got to keep those jobs because it was like their role in the family. People basically never got fired, including the couple guys in the corner who barely did any work but had been th…

I contracted at a company once which operated like a family.

Once you got hired, it was really difficult to get fired. So much so, most people there hadn't heard about anyone ever getting fired. Eventually, someone heard through the grapevine what a firing offense was: Getting caught having sex on the company campus with a coworker. But! The first time was a warning.

That company had soooo much money to burn. Lots of people did not like to work, they just kind of screwed around all day. Family members of the founders got to use the private jets (of which there was a fleet of a dozen) to do whatever they liked.

I won't name names, but the company name rhymed with "Spamway".

Re: At this company, we are family

#248

Post by monknomo »

mgaunard wrote: post #143
agloe_dreams wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US income tax inclusive of state taxes rolls to something like 33%...but then you have health insurance that, for many is FAR greater than 12%. If you include the cost of what your taxes get you, it is far greater than in the US. Keep in mind that even with health insurance people still get multi-hundred dollar medical bills. Broken bones? Min of $1500.

A private consultation is typically 200 GBP in London, any minor injury would easily cost you around the amount you say. Or you can go to A&E and wait 8 hours, and have it be free.

here you get the wait and you get to pay the private price, on top of your insurance.

At least for me, regular medical care needs scheduled out some months, doctors have poor availbility. I get one freebie a year via insurance, everything else is about $50.

For minor injuries, or medical stuff that needs same-day eyes, but not a full emergency department, there is urgent care. You wait as long as it takes, in my area, usually 30-90 minutes, pay $100 and they may or may not be able to help. Minor prescriptions and stitches they can usually do

For major stuff, such as broken bones, heart attack, psychosis, whatever, there is the ER. You wait as long as you wait, and it's about $300 for the initial visit, though this can climb rapidly if you need to stay.

That's about it for your insured options.

Your uninsured options are similar, but more expensive. If you are extremely poor, or old, or both you may have a semi-free option with medicare and medicaid, but that is more complicated than I care to type out.

Re: At this company, we are family

#249

Post by chinchilla2020 »

Aurornis wrote: post #224

When I was young I worked at a company that said things like "we are family" and kind of meant it. It wasn't really a good thing unless you were a low performer. We had some people who were hired into jobs they couldn't do well, but they got to keep those jobs because it was like their role in the family. People basically never got fired, including the couple guys in the corner who barely did any work but had been th…

It depends on how you choose to cut headcount.

Cutting low performers is something we can all agree on, with exceptions to long-tenured employees who are in a temporary low-performance state (divorce, health issues, etc).

At many modern companies, headcount is cut often to increase the stock price for the next earnings report, so leadership can offload shares. Even if the company performance suffers in the long term, they were able to sell their bags at a high price.

An example of a 'family' style company is Kiewit and it isn't anything like the one you described. They are famously aggressive about low-performers. Every employee has ownership shares in the company. You are expected to pick up and move when the company tells you to move. They've never had a negative earnings quarter in the entire history the company... which is notable.

Re: At this company, we are family

#250

Post by halostatue »

yCombLinks wrote: post #41
FredPret wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you so sarcastically point out, Americans give up many employment rights such as these. But it's not a one-way street. Being easier to fire makes American employees easier to hire, which is at least in part responsible for much higher pay in the USA compared to employee havens such as Europe. Furthermore, Americans tend to pay less tax. This isn't usually thought of as an employee rights issue, but in my mind, kee…

We pay less tax, but pay for health insurance rather than having taxes pay for healthcare.

It’s often not even true that Americans pay a lower tax amount or rate, unless you’re at the richest ends of the scale. (~25 years ago, my wife and I both made about $50–55k; she ended up paying a lower total amount of tax in Canada than I did in the US, and I had the shitty American healthcare system with $15 copays. Needless to say, I emigrated.)

There are regressive taxes (e.g., sales taxes / VAT) which are certainly lower in America than most of the rest of the world, and some American states deliberately starve their government of income so that they cannot be obligated to provide basic services and instead shift things to user fees.

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