I think there is a lot of us vs them in the world. We seem to have forgotten how to collaborate and cooperate. Unless you are in our tribe and you can only join the tribe after a trial by hazing. Then if you leave the tribe you are back to you and them again. Maybe that's the spirited world of capitalist competition but the reason we have companies and endeavor to solve humanity's problems.
Is my advice too mercenary?
261–270 of 390 posts
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#262>It seems to me the healthiest behavior falls somewhere in between. “Put your own mask on first, before helping others”: look to help others, but do it from a place of safety. That’s the general tone I aim for. You absolutely should try to look out for your colleagues – but not when it comes at great personal expense.
Excellent advice. I also read the linked article about exit interviews and I concur they're a trap. I've dealt with vindictive former employers like that. Frankly, the easiest way to get over it is to pretend you never worked there and forget the place exists. When asked to explain the gap in my employment I just partially lie and say it was health related. Because of HIPAA in the US they can't pry too much, and as long as I can prove I'm healthy now and otherwise qualified they legally aren't supposed to deny me the job because of it.
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is still a headache to have to register for a plan after losing your job and possibly transfer/link your information to a new account. COBRA is better than nothing, but it is often more expensive than makes sense. Furthermore you cannot use the exchanges if your employer offers plans IIRC. So your employer can control which plans you have access to. The subsidies should just be given directly to the person who nee…
> Furthermore you cannot use the exchanges if your employer offers plans IIRC. So your employer can control which plans you have access to. I do not think this is true. Everyone can sign up on healthcare.gov. Employers will want you to opt into the subsidized plans they offer, especially if you are a lower compensated employee, in order to pass their non discrimination testing requirements, but they have to make the…
Hmm you're right on that first part. I don't know where I got that from. I seemed to remember playing around on CoveredCA and it said I couldn't get a plan because my employer offered plans, but I can't reproduce that now.
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
You cannot meaningfully change any organization without being one of the ~10 most powerful people in it.
Then if you really want them to change, you should try to become one of those powerful people... Not leave, and give up all power you have over them, is my point.
Yes, but the chance of becoming one of the ~10 most powerful people at Apple or Goldman Sachs is extraordinarily small, and you pretty much know if you even have a shot at it after you've been working at the company for a year. If you've been there three years and haven't been promoted twice you have zero chance of ever being in the top 10.
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extremely true and it happened all over, my dad worked for a place for 40 years and the last 10 the MBAs moved in, they were profitable, had profit sharing, and a great company. Today its a footnote in a merger, place is closing down.
NAFTA really destroyed the middle class and middle america.
I argue that there is a larger effect: Bill Clinton making the decision that the Democratic Party turn its back on blue collar workers and the middle of the country because just having Wall Street support would be sufficient to win elections. He was not wrong, but it has had a bad effect because the republicans also started to ignore the working class in favor of the financial class.
Nationalism, something to be avoided, occurs when the underclass is not represented in a political system.
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the implication that conservatives supported NAFTA because it would reduce poverty around the world? It's probably better to assess peoples motivations as they were at the time, not by what happened. A liberal would say they were focusing on the needs of the citizens of their own country and the problem in front of them. In any case, making this a case of liberals vs conservatives is silly, and to my view reductiv…
There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens. They (at least used to) have considerable purchase among conservatives. As a category I think it’s also generally correct to say they’d argue for not yielding such power to any sort of decision makers, corporate or government, at all. Instead at…
> There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens.
And there are liberal policy makers that look to increase protections for US citizens because they believe in negotiating from a position of moral authority, because without being able to practice what you preach you're easy to point out as hypocritical and ignore, or at a minimum it's easy to convince others to discount your position.
The important thing is that neither side, as a whole, is choosing a position with the intention of hurting local or remote peoples, and to various degrees both succeed and fail on various metrics. Neither side is inconsistent or hypocritical, they're entirely consistent within their own ideology for the most part, it's just that when not within that ideology, it's easy to point at specifics and explain them in terms of someone else's ideology in a way that makes them seem inconsistent.
The first thing I do when I see something lambasting a groups actions as hypocritical or stupid is to try to look into that group's own messaging on what they're doing and why. Sometimes I think their reasoning is flawed, but far more often than not there's a core of truth and consistency and truth to what they're attempting, even in those cases where I think they're working on flawed information.
Before I was willing to call a large group of people hypocritical or inconsistent, I would try very hard to understand their reasoning and how that action it is being presented/sold within that group. The risk of my own biases affecting my judgement is far too high otherwise.
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#267In my view, it's mercenary if you're exploiting a power or trust relationship. In the case of exit interviews, if businesses want to benefit from access to that kind of information, they can lobby for statutory protections for workers who disclose it. Or, they
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that any different than some fiefdom ruled over by some noble? The whole point of democracy and elective government is that you can't rely on a system like that to be consistently good, whether it's the Duke's son squandering all the wealth and not listening to the people or a shift in management at the company. Just because sometimes there were benevolent companies that decided to contribute to their communit…
The two main differences: 1) Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary. It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner. 2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule. One big observations: This is what US govern…
> It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy.
Do you actually believe that? That all these business owners were running their factories out of the goodness of their hearts and that they only stopped because the government took all the money they had to give out as charity?
If that is the case why do we see ultra profitable businesses returning to this form instead of trying to carve out any section of their work base that they can, ex. The FAANGs turning most job positions into contractor filled roles like the janitorial staff?
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#269There was a time in America a generation or two ago when you could give your all to a company. Here in Michigan there were a number of small towns where a single employer would dominate. If the town needed something, like a baseball park the owner would simply write a check. If a loyal employee had a health crisis that insurance didn't cover the company owner would write a check. When there were tough economic times…
> There was a time in America a generation or two ago when you could give your all to a company. The problem with these advice columns is that they aren't saying "don't give your all to a company". They end up saying "your company is the enemy ". The original article that this blog refers to was titled "Exit interviews are a trap", which many pointed out was a gross exaggeration. It assumes that every company perform…
> They cater to an idea that managers and HR are "the other", and once someone crosses the line to management or HR, they become evil and incapable of doing anything other than abusing you for no good reason.
No one says they're evil. Corporate leadership, like corporations themselves, are amoral, which means they have no compunctions to actions that to them, are without intention, but for translates to the recipient as maliciousness.
Re: Is my advice too mercenary?
#270Small aside, reading all these conversations: I just think a lot of static gets injected into these discussions about wage/employers/comp on HN because a large majority of the commenters here are either currently business owners, or founders, or trying to be either of those. But there is also a huge contingent of people who do regular waged labor here, whether FAANG or freelance. Beyond any political differences, I t…
> I just think a lot of static gets injected into these discussions about wage/employers/comp on HN because a large majority of the commenters here are either currently business owners, or founders, or trying to be either of those I've been reading HN for years and I would assume 90% of the comment section or more is people who only want to be employees. I hate to say it, but HN isn't a great place for genuine startu…
Don't you think that change in sentiment is connected to macroeconomic trends that go beyond the world of startups?