31–40 of 191 posts
> “you know the world outside is hostile to job seekers and a steady paycheck beats the unemployment line”
You can search for a new job while employed. Unless you are stuck on an underwater submarine playing hide-and-seek you can always fire off a few inquiries.
> The pink slip comes as a total surprise. It always comes as a surprise. You did everything you were told, even waited patiently like you were asked. You trusted the organization to reward you in turn - and now you've lost your job. Your reward is your paycheck. On Friday night, the balance anyone owes anyone is zero. You didn’t “trust” them at all. They had no further obligations to you, nor you to them. You seem t…
The fact that so many companies operate this way is really depressing. I want to work with people I trust to have some genuine respect for my future, personally or career wise. There is nothing more destructive than talking to people daily, having a good working relationship with them, and then randomly getting laid off with no warning or explanation. Years of positive interactions go up in smoke overnight, because t…
> The pink slip comes as a total surprise. It always comes as a surprise. You did everything you were told, even waited patiently like you were asked. You trusted the organization to reward you in turn - and now you've lost your job. Your reward is your paycheck. On Friday night, the balance anyone owes anyone is zero. You didn’t “trust” them at all. They had no further obligations to you, nor you to them. You seem t…
1. Trust - When an employer tells the employee something and then ignores it - then a truth based culture gives in to cynicism. Communications in the company become suspect. Even when there are win-win situations, where cooperation could lead to positive outcomes for both management and workers, a lack of trust means the company cant execute.
Also, this will affect communications with customers and shareholders.
2. Regardless of being right, the author is helping others in similar situations, who can adjust their expectations.
3. The post isn't so much about company vs employee, but competing factions within the company, who are invested in alternative tools/proposals. Promotion is used as a means of making one's faction stronger. This need not be for the benefit of the company or customers. Lobbying will also, of course, affect truth.
Factions might be inevitable (and there can even be good reasons - people genuinely have differences of opinion). But, if the company has good leaders, they will prevent this from erupting into a strong zero-sum conflicts which drown other goals - company's profits, promoting competent people, a culture of trust.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is a cold attitude and it’s also not somehow inherent to business. It’s a reflection of the decaying social fabric of American business culture. Wanting to work in a place with some civility and decency isn’t passive aggressive. Having that opinion 50 years ago would get you fired from any company immediately. Because social mores were less eroded then. When Aunt Judy gives me a gift, I try to get her one…
Pretending that there aren’t unwritten social rules around gift giving and obligation is disingenuous. There ARE rules and there are consequences for not following them. It isn’t about a transaction, it’s about the expectations placed on participants by others in the system. It’s not depressing at all, it’s how our society works. Most people have no problem intuiting most of these unwritten rules, or are quietly taug…
In fact, acting in the way you’re describing is itself a negative social rule that will lose someone business opportunities. Because people with value that don’t want to operate in a coldly transactional environment will be turned off by it.
“I don’t owe you anything other than money for the task you’re doing,” is a good way to eliminate a sizable portion of potential high-quality employees.
The further up the economic chain you get, and the more relationship or service oriented the work is, the more important this becomes.
It doesn’t make you seem professional, it just makes you seem like a difficult person to deal with, and thus someone to avoid.
The current economy and AI have turned the tables. Even today, waiting for three years is pushing it for most folks, but understandable. Career growth is being decimated across the industry, and opportunities simply aren't there anymore like they used to be. You can be dedicated and above average, but you are still stuck in the same industry as everyone else.
Theres some false dichotomies here. Not getting a promotion might not be as intentional as the author seems to believe. Often orgs are slow to change and headcount is one of those hard to challenge issues. 100% agree with the timing point, often the promotion has very little to do with what is within your control.
You've got the causality a bit off here. A promotion is always intentional: somebody with power has to actively decide that getting you promoted will advance their interests. Not getting promoted, on the other hand, is the default state of affairs. Are they doing work above their level? Will they keep doing it even if they don't get the promotion ? Great, then there's no need to promote, move onto the next thing or p…
> On your way out the door, you hear the rumors: someone else did your thing years after you showed yours off. They got the credit, the bonus, the promotion, the recognition. They're a Senior now, or a Lead, or a Director, or a VP. If it actually went down like this, that's pretty horrible, and that someone else is a grifter. Very harmful for any organization in the long run, because that behavior will be applied to…
For most people, this is wonderful. Knowing what you will be valued for is very useful. It says "do the things that are useful to us" and "stop doing the things that are useless to us" and tells you "these are the things that are useful and those are the things that are not useful". At their scale, rare errors in the process will inevitably show up, but smaller companies often have these errors at higher rates. All that to say, success often comes from identifying what is useful to the organization and what is not, and then what is useful and what is not to the person who has control over one's role in the organization.
In mechanized organizations, this should be easier. In unmechanized organizations, one's skill at this will dominate one's technical skill at determining success. But it's just a skill, and if you cannot find a way to train it, the easiest workaround is to ask the person making the decision: "if I wanted it in 3 months, what would I have to do?".
You may get an answer that was untrue 3 months later, but you just shrank your timeline in a way that is much more meaningful, and perhaps more likely is that you'll either get an unrealistic timeline (which is useful signal), or you will hit it and get what you wanted (which is also desirable).
0: A classic example of this is that no one can "get you into Google/Facebook/whatever". This reveals the other non-obvious purpose of their interview process besides quality-control of hires: quality-control and rules compliance on interviewers.
there r companies that scale 100x in 3 years If you aren't scaling yourself as much then you're moving too slow
> rawness is an excellent time to reflect on what went right and what I could've done better, before the brain starts coping with the trauma of the event in question.
But that isn’t what he’s done in the essay. I don’t think he’s doing an honest assessment of what he could have done better. Rather there’s a thin patina of “I should have realized . . .” and then a litany of complaints about the company. And the complaints about the company are the same usual ones that everyone makes. I HAVE BEEN THERE. I HAVE MADE THEM TOO.
But I would advise, in six months in a year when you’re in a new job, to take a HARD look at yourself. Try not to cast people as villains and thus can be a learning experience.