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The future of work is not threatening your employees

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Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#51

Post by FFRefresh »

> "The original headline of the piece was itself an unsubtle threat: “As a CEO, I want my employees to understand the risks of not returning to work in the office.” (Over email, Washington Post Opinion editor Fred Hiatt told me that Merrill did not write the headline. “I asked our team to change it early this morning to something I thought better captured the piece,” he said.)"

As an aside, this unethical practice in the media irks me. It's really despicable for the Washington Post to write a headline from the perspective of the CEO, which the CEO never said themselves.

Does anyone know of any good non-partisan orgs that attempt to quantify and track these unethical practices across the media landscape?

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#52

Post by antisthenes »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #42
jay_kyburz wrote: post #39

I think one of the consequences of work from home culture will be less of an emphasis on how many hours you work, and more focus on what you produce, and how that can be monetized. What this means is that a good manager will farm work out all over the place finding the right mix of quality / quantity / price. People will not be paid salaries, they will be paid per unit of work. Rather than interviewing people to join…

The future is apparently going to be impossible for new grads and people who would thrive with mentorship.

It's already near impossible for people not from top tech schools.

I don't know what generation you are, but for millenials, the 2008 crisis was a real doozy. Anecdotally, only maybe 20-30% of my cohort found stable, well paying full-time jobs in the 10-12 years since that recession.

Many of them put their life plans on hold due to not being able afford things that a family generally requires.

So the "future" is already here. And has been for about a decade.

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#53

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

rconti wrote: post #34
davesque wrote: post #5

Seems like there are a lot of ways that employers are effectively blaming their employees for COVID. Some of the anecdotes in this article really resonated with me. It does feel "super shitty" when you feel as though you've been barely holding it together during what has undoubtedly been one of the most difficult years of the previous century and yet your employer seems to feel entitled to hold you to the usual stand…

I work in tech, and my company has bent over backwards to help us. Dozens of extra days off I'm having a hard time even using, an extra 4 days off a year (one per quarter) where the whole company is off, constantly reminding us ourselves and our families come first, and encouraging others to be understanding that our coworkers might be working unusual schedules as they juggle remote-learning kids, childcare, elder ca…

Wow, yeah, our company started emphatically asking us to take our days off piecemeal because we all went heads down in work and our days off became a financial liability. We spent the last year with benefits cut and idea that worry that we'd be having layoffs after the first round of furloughed employees weren't rehired.

So some different realities for sure.

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#54

Post by rconti »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #53
rconti wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in tech, and my company has bent over backwards to help us. Dozens of extra days off I'm having a hard time even using, an extra 4 days off a year (one per quarter) where the whole company is off, constantly reminding us ourselves and our families come first, and encouraging others to be understanding that our coworkers might be working unusual schedules as they juggle remote-learning kids, childcare, elder ca…

Wow, yeah, our company started emphatically asking us to take our days off piecemeal because we all went heads down in work and our days off became a financial liability. We spent the last year with benefits cut and idea that worry that we'd be having layoffs after the first round of furloughed employees weren't rehired. So some different realities for sure.

To be fair, there's a very real difference between companies that are thriving or at least doing as well as ever during the pandemic, and those that are seriously hurting. I don't blame the latter for tightening purse strings, but one would hope they're at least not assholes about it.

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#55

Post by kbelder »

rickspencer3 wrote: post #36
paleotrope wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"during what has undoubtedly been one of the most difficult years of the previous century" That seems a bit hyperbolic.

It's been a pretty rough year for DC residents to be fair. Between BLM protests, the gangs that drove to the city literally to fight with them, then a literal insurrection, I think it's possible that for this group, it's up there in terms of difficult years in the last 100. Oh, and then there was the pandemic on top of that.

I was going to argue a bit about the scale of some of those issues, but then I saw that you said "for DC residents", and... yeah, I'll buy that.

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#56

Post by kbelder »

username90 wrote: post #29
davesque wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I think I can objectively say that a year in which a global pandemic occurred that took millions of lives and completely upended normal life for the majority of people counts as one of the worst years since 1920. The fact that anyone would question that in this forum is, I think, extremely telling.

Are you just ignoring all the wars with more than a million casualties, all the famines with many millions of casualties etc, during the past 100 years? 2020 doesn't even make it to the top 10 possibly not even top 20. Maybe it was one of the worst for USA, but not if you take the world overall.

I think that the last several decades... maybe the last 5-6 decades... have been so GOOD compared to what came before, and to the bulk of human history, that when a bad year comes around it's especially shocking. The window has shifted.

I'm not arguing that 2020 wasn't a really bad year, but just that a hundred years ago this wouldn't have seemed such an outlier.

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#57

Post by setr »

oceanghost wrote: post #20
davesque wrote: post #5

Seems like there are a lot of ways that employers are effectively blaming their employees for COVID. Some of the anecdotes in this article really resonated with me. It does feel "super shitty" when you feel as though you've been barely holding it together during what has undoubtedly been one of the most difficult years of the previous century and yet your employer seems to feel entitled to hold you to the usual stand…

> so utterly inhuman t I worked for a company once that moved offices-- literally, there was no workplace to go to for 2 weeks (keep in mind this company made hardware). The C level management sends out a company wide e-mail saying "the move will not be tolerated as an excuse for missing deadlines." God I wish I had a copy of that e-mail.

tbh that's probably not all that unfair -- whoever created the timelines should have already accounted for it, and if the timeline was created long enough ago (because the project is sufficiently long) before the move was known, there should be significantly more than two weeks buffer included for issues exactly like this. Of course, it's also that person who should inevitably be held accountable for the fuck-up (unless the move was sudden, in which case it's the fault of whoever initiated the move.. perhaps the C*O :)

At least in my mind the only time its the fault of the employee himself only when they slip their own agreed-upon schedules, without warning or reason

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#58

Post by sleepybrett »

davesque wrote: post #8
paleotrope wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"during what has undoubtedly been one of the most difficult years of the previous century" That seems a bit hyperbolic.

Lol, really? A pandemic doesn't count?

Compared to two world wars both of which lasting longer than a year and change?

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#59

Post by sleepybrett »

antisthenes wrote: post #52
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is apparently going to be impossible for new grads and people who would thrive with mentorship.

It's already near impossible for people not from top tech schools. I don't know what generation you are, but for millenials, the 2008 crisis was a real doozy. Anecdotally, only maybe 20-30% of my cohort found stable, well paying full-time jobs in the 10-12 years since that recession. Many of them put their life plans on hold due to not being able afford things that a family generally requires. So the "future" is alre…

I think you are in a hell of a bubble. I've worked at several large companies over the years and would have to say that many of the engineers i've worked with have all come from vastly different backgrounds. I've certainly worked with some people with very impressive academic credentials but the majority do not.. and that could mean an engineering degree from a run of the mill school, a degree in an unrelated field or no academic credentials at all.

Re: The future of work is not threatening your employees

#60

Post by ModernMech »

rconti wrote: post #54
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, yeah, our company started emphatically asking us to take our days off piecemeal because we all went heads down in work and our days off became a financial liability. We spent the last year with benefits cut and idea that worry that we'd be having layoffs after the first round of furloughed employees weren't rehired. So some different realities for sure.

To be fair, there's a very real difference between companies that are thriving or at least doing as well as ever during the pandemic, and those that are seriously hurting. I don't blame the latter for tightening purse strings, but one would hope they're at least not assholes about it.

You would hope. My employer froze raises and retirement contributions when they expected things were about to get tight. At the time we pointed to the billion+ dollar strategic fund and asked why they couldn’t dip into that, and we were told that money was untouchable because of the strategy.

Now a year later, things have worked out better than they expected and there is a huge surplus due to the freeze o. Wages and stopping contributions to retirement funds. Instead of giving some of that money back to us, want to guess where it’s going? That’s right, the strategic fund.

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