Being emotionally detached from really stupid leadership decisions is harder than it seems
Took me a lot of years to not think it’s my company that is being run into the ground. I should not - and nowadays could not - care any less.
my company
You mean “my responsibility”, right?
Reading about it, it seems they are in fact all the same. Even the white haribo mice. TIL.
Yeah, in a way. As in, I don’t feel like I have any responsibility in things in the company going to shits (which I would if it were, well, my company).
The book The Responsibility Virus helped me a lot with this. Most people are over-responsible for the choices of others, specifically ones they can’t reasonably influence, anyway.
I found out that https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ explains a lot of the dysfunctions that one finds in an office / corporate environment.
Yes. This lies among the reasons I find it easier not to blame enterprises for their dysfunctions. The unsustained growth imperative of our economic systems makes the Gervais Principle behavior the path of least resistance. Indeed, the only way to stop it seems to come down to the heroism of one key influential person who chooses differently.
This also accounts for why I stopped trying to fix enterprises and instead focus on helping the well-meaning people who otherwise would need to fend for themselves.
That hit hard 😶
I’m determined to ever only work in public, state-owned companies. I believe in a causal connection between being a private, profit-oriented business and the daily “wtf” moments, the only true measure of quality.
Edit: fixed the link.
I stopped giving a shit a long time ago. I do my best to consult and warn and if they don’t listen it’s not my problem.
The company doesn’t care about you. The company doesn’t care about you. The company doesn’t care about you.
My uncle spent years preaching to me about the need to be loyal to a company. I never drank the Kool-Aid. He spent 21 years working for an investment banking company in their IT department. 4 years before he was set to retire with a full pension, etc. his company was acquired by a larger bank. He lost everything except his 401k. He then spent the next 12 years working to get his time back so he’d be able to retire. He died 2 years ago and the company sent a bouquet of flowers.
THE COMPANY DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU!!
The company cares about you in the same way a beef farmer cares about his cattle.
Not even if you do valuable or efficent stuff for the company. You’re disposable.
The company is always on the lookout for ways to replace you with somebody who will do more for less.
And in the meantime, they will squeeze you for every drop of effort they think they can get away with.
They refer to you as … HUMAN RESOURCES
You aren’t a person, you are an instrument the company uses to make more money for itself. If you die or can no longer work, you will be replaced by another human resource.
The people on the top of the company don’t care, either… Even if it seems like the really like you alot.
The most important traits for doing well at work (in this order):
- clear, effective, and efficient communication
- taking ownership of problems
- having your boss and team members like you on a personal level
- competence at your tasks
I’m halfway through scrolling this long thread, and this is the first comment I’ve seen that isn’t overly cynical. It’s also correct.
I’ve been working for 38 years, and I’ve been someone who makes promotion decisions for 15 of them. The third one is helpful, not essential, but the others are super important. The people who rise to leadership positions aren’t necessarily the top technical people, they’re the ones who do those things with a good attitude.
The other thing I’d add is that they’re people who are able to see the big picture and how the details relate to it, which is part of strategic thinking.
I was taught that my job is “to make sure all my bosses surprises are pleasant ones”. 15 years of working as an engineer and that never changed. Now I have my own business and that’s the thing I look for employees… someone I can leave on their own to do a job. It they have problems they can always ask me. If they screw up I expect them to tell me immediately and to have a plan of action to fix it and to prevent it happening again. And I never ever get cross if someone does come to me and say they screwed up. Far better that we tell the client about a problem than wait until the client finds the problem themselves.
Reading all these comments makes me realize how lucky I’ve been in my career. I’ve always had great bosses who defended me and backed me up.
I’m not sure if the competence is really in the last place. I’d say it’s on the equal level. Great communication and ownership of the problems means little if you can’t really solve the problems.
People have those things in spectrums, not all or nothing. You have to have at least some of all of them, but I’d argue that mediocre competency with really good communication and accountability is a better combination that really good competency with one of the others being mediocre.
I still kinda disagree. We’re talking here about engineering role after all. I have a colleague who is a code wizard, but has kinda problem with (under)communicating. He’s still widely respected as a very good engineer, people know his communication style and adapt to it.
But if you’re a mediocre problem solver, you can’t really make up for it with communication skills. That kinda moves you into non-engineering role like PO, SM or perhaps support engineer.
But I would say this - once you reach a certain high level of competence, then the communication skills, leadership, ownership can become the real differentiating factors. But you can’t really get there without the high level of competence first.
We’re talking here about engineering role after all.
where? seemed like general advice.
Even then, thee aren’t mutually exclusive. your competence will affect how people see you on a personal level, at least at work. And your competence affects your ability to be given problems to own. You’re not gonna give the nice but still inexperienced employee to own an important problem domain. they might be able to work under the owner and gain experience, though.
Documentation and presentation are highly undervalued, and your ability to understand and spread that knowledge can overcome that lack of experience to actually handle the task yourself.
Your employer does not care about you. You are not important or irreplaceable
Take your time and energy and put it into your life, not their business
I have had coworkers die (not work related) and by the time you hear about it (like the next day) they have already worked out who will get the work done so the machine doesn’t have to stop
I had a workmate develop a chronic illness after an infection of COVID, and he had to leave under hardship. People that hung out with him as best mates for years stopped talking to him in a matter of days.
Did you? 🥺
I sent him
a few3 message to see how he was doing. NGL we weren’t super tight before COVID, we never hung out outside of work, and people not masking around me really drove a wedge between us. I’m trying hard not to justify what happened, but who knows maybe I am a little bit.
I don’t think taking action to fill a hole is indicative of not caring.
I’m all for filling holes!
Hole filling action, even!
True but there’s also absolutely no reason to think they care. Even if someone dies. Because they really don’t. So it feels extra soulless when they send out the email redistributing tasks right after the generic condolences email that goes out to the whole floor
This depends. I’ve had easily 100 shit jobs where nobody cared. I’m now a software developer for a small business <10 employees and they do care.
I am aware I am living the dream now and this can’t be the case for most.
There is no ideal place to work where they “do it right”, whatever kind of “right” you care about right now. When you change jobs, you merely exchange one set of problems for another.
Having worked 7 different jobs that all were in the same field made me have some backbone of standards that nobody else could have built without going through that, though. It’s a blessing and a curse, so be warned. The things I picked up on that I never realized I would care so much about in the healthcare field is good office administration and Director of Care leadership. The morale is just as important as the pay rate.
As a consultant, I now feel grateful to the variety of dysfunctions that I experienced, because they provided me with some of the credibility that I use in advising others. That’s the blessing part.
That, and comedy equals tragedy plus distance.
That said some companies do it more right than others. The problems at the current company are ones I can live with. Which is why I’m still there after way more years than expected.
Indeed, that’s what I mean: you’re always exchanging one set of problems for another, until you find the set of problems that you can accept (enough (for now)).
Is this still true if you’re self-employed?
Absolutely. There is no business yet in which you invent money from nothing. Everyone works for someone else. It might be a capitalist boss, it might be a client, it might even be constituents or donors, but no one truly works for themselves. The only winning move is to not play, and the ones fortunate enough to not have to play were born rich. Being self-employed and/or owning your own business is just trading one boss for another.
Source: Was in private practice for a decade; now I’m a corporate attorney, and it’s just a different set of people making my job hard.
I feel better about the things I do wrong, because at least I made the decisions and I can only blame myself. I can also choose which things I especially care about doing well instead of being subject to someone else’s preferences. It feels better, but still yes.
And, as CEO of a tiny company, I have to interact with bureaucracies more than I did as an employee, so becoming my own boss didn’t mean escaping that nonsense, anyway.
The longer you work anywhere – and I mean ANYWHERE – the more you see the bullshit and corruption and crappy rules or policies and inequality all over.
For me it has been about the 3 year mark anywhere I’ve worked: once you get past that, you fade away from “damn I’m glad to have a job and be making money!” and towards “this is absolute bulls#!t that [boss] did [thing] and hurt the workers in the process!” or similarSometimes it’s better if your employer doesn’t know everything you can do. If you’re not careful you’ll end up Inventory Controller/shipper/IT services/reception/Safety officer, and you’ll only ever be paid for whatever your initial position was.
I wanted to be a system engineer, I got hired as a devops, I started doing a bit of system engineer, called hr and said that I’m working on infrastructure and I need my title changed or else I won’t be able to continue my work, my title was changed, no I do system engineer stuff and less of devops, this was a very rare occasion but it can happen from time to time.
Wouldn’t DevOps pay a lot more than Infra in general? Seems to be the more in demand skillset at the moment.
Well it depends, I had gotten offers double and triple my yearly pay to move to the capital or go outside of my country for a system engineer position. Devops pays more in the US, for around 20-30k MORE per year, but other salaries in the US and other salaries in EU.
Personally I like system engineer/architect jobs more, DevOps is nice but lacks creativity.
HR protect the company first, the employees second.
Just remember what hr stands for. You are a resource. No more than a stapler, that can be replaced at any time
Well, sure. Unless you’re talking about a red Swingline. I can’t compete with that.
100%. The rebranding of some HR departments as “People Officers” or “People Team” drives me bonkers. When push comes to shove, they will always protect the interests of the business before the interests of the employee. Full stop.
You are right, but to be fair. “Human Ressources” was an awful name to begin with.
Yeah, neither is great. Needs to be called something like “Employee Business Relations” maybe?
Liability Protection
Company interest workers?
Hello fellow resource, uh i mean human.
There’s a reason they’re called “Human Resources” and not Human Relations.
Success is mainly about sucking up to the right people. No matter how good you are at your job, you have to know how to play work politics. Most bosses don’t know how to evaluate actual ability, and they’re much less objective than they think. Usually they favor more likeable employees over capable ones if forced to choose. Human life is a popularity contest, always has been, always will be. That’s the side effect of being a highly social species…
There’s no such thing as quiet quitting. I prefer acting your wage.
My company laid off a few very efficient workers, who sacrificed a lot of time and mental health for the company, because people working remotely in India are cheaper.
Sounds like a company I worked for. I saw the writing on the wall and got out. A lot of good people were laid off and a second office in India was opened…
People in your workplace don’t know shit. There are a few who know stuff but the majority is dumb, careless or the combination of the two. Surprisingly the higher you go the more dumb and careless there are. We are designing monster billion dollar construction projects and some of my colleagues have problems with understanding written english. Others cannot learn a software that has literally 3 buttons in them they have to press. I don’t even know sometimes why I am trying.
I learnt meritocracy is a joke long before I discovered that it was literally invented to be a joke.
Efficient workers get more work if you’re in the office. I work from home, and that allows me to work efficiently until my work is done, set up scheduled emails to go out at the time I would’ve otherwise been done, then do what I want until then.
I see your work doesn’t have invasive programs that check idle mouse and idle keyboard behaviors.
this is an old one but i can’t help thinking, what if they installed it without my knowledge, after all, my work laptop was given to me already pre prepared by our IT department.
Yeah, they’re pretty behind the times, and I’m happy for that. They gave me a work laptop, but since they didn’t block me from just using my home computer instead, I just do that so that I’ve got an excuse if they ever bring up any strange data they might be skimming from the laptop. It’s been a couple years now without any word from them about it, though, so I think I’m in the clear.
Fyi. If your IT department is remotely on top of things - they know. They just might have larger fish to fry.
We can see all kinds of things about any devices that log on to check email, connect to the VPN, etc.
Yeah, I figured they’re aware I’m not using the laptop - I’m not on the VPN most of the time as a result. I’m still able to do all my work in my own copy of excel, though, so I’m hoping I can continue pretending I’m unaware that I’m not following the correct avenues to get my work done, at least until they force me to use the laptop.
wow really glad you have that power
unless the it department tell your manager that wouldn’t matter.
There is an entire department at my work that employs thousands of moderators to review desktop screenshots of all employees every 5 minutes to make sure no one is “idle”.
Makes me want to scream when I think about it.
Luckily I work in a jurisdiction that would tear the whole C-team a new one if that happened.
It’s a double edged sword. I was very efficient, and did get more work, which got me noticed and eventually promoted out of a doing position into a leading position
It’s a nice change, the work is light, the people side of the work is easy. I have higher pay and much more free time
You you’re writing up more time that it actually took you. That is fraud.
I’m not writing up anything. I clock in when my shift starts, I complete the work designated for me for that shift, send it out by the time it needs to be sent out, and clock out at the end of my shift.
I’m not writing up anything. I clock in
… same fucking thing, Einstein.
The non-fraudulant thing would be to clock out when you’re done.
Nope. They pay me for my availability, not how much of it they utilize.
If that is clearly state in your contract that way, sure.
No, that is literally how employment works.
That’s not fraud, that’s called “working smarter”. Not giving us a raise to account for inflation, now that’s fraud.
I’m not stealing, I’m just “shopping smarter”.
Damn that boot must be so far down your throat it’s comng out your ass
Maybe it’s meant to be, but my parents taught me about deliberate ignorance, and I intend to use it.
Also, malicious compliance
My parents tried teaching me that, but I was ignorant of their lessons.
Is it fraudulent for a mechanic working flat rate to complete a 10 hour job in 6 hours and collect the full 10 hours of pay?
Most shops I know of these days assign a labor time to any given job. You get charged that amount whether the mechanic does it in half the time or takes five times as long.
Anymore, it’s an internal benchmark for mechanics to build on the efficiency of their own work.
In my line of work, it may take me three hours to solve a client tax issue. I will bill for that accordingly.
If another client comes along the next day with the exact same issue, but this time I know the answer because I researched it yesterday, so I can solve it instantly, should the second client get charged nothing?
It does not, or at least should not work like this. If you can do same work, with same quality in less time than average, then pay rate is higher than average.
No.
It’s literally right there in the sentence you wrote, thankfully.
flat rate
Obviously not if it’s a flat rate. But empoyment rarely is flat rate based. The contract are usually require you to work a certain amount of time per week/month.
What in the boot licking fuck is this?
Wow you’re not very intelligent
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No unequivocally, you’ve shown us you fundamentally lack intelligence. You’re all over this thread accusing people of fraud for working smart.
You are under the delusion of meritocracy, that good workers get rewarded for being more efficient than their coworkers. If you actually worked an office job ever in your life, you’d realize very quickly that this is not a dynamic that exists there.
Instead, you accuse everyone here of being a teenager. I wager you’re actually the teenager because it takes someone with exceptionally little life experience to have the opinions you have.
Hope your days as pleasant as you are!
Alright then. Good luck with your childish “bare minimum mondays” attitude in the real world. Hope you get fairly rewarded for all that “hard work” you’ll clearly be doing.
Most employers pay you to be on standby for last minute tasks. That’s what you are doing for the rest of the time. You are also planing on how to do these tasks more efficiently. That is all billable in my opinion.
Imagine caring about stealing from a thief.
They’re just stealing back a fraction of what is being stolen from them.
Stealing from a thief is still a crime.
BTW, if they’re a thief, report/sue them. Or are they just “thief” because of an ad hoc moral system you made up to justify anything you do?
Wage theft is one of the least acted upon crimes. This system is immoral, and the people who run it are immoral. Thinking you will get any justice except for what you take for yourself is naive and wrong.
This system isn’t designed for us, its literally designed for the people its named after… Capitalists. Taking anything you can back from them is perfectly fine.
I grew up in a communist country, and we had a saying “if you don’t steal from your employer, you’re stealing from your family”. And people acted accordingly.
You would love that! Or perhaps not, it actually sucked for everybody.
Wage theft (when employers don’t pay their employees what they’re owed) in the US accounts for more stolen value every year than grand theft auto, larceny, petty theft, and breaking and entering combined. Yet wage theft is not considered a crime.
It’s the same story all over the world. The real issue isn’t the economic system but rather greedy people in positions of power with no accountability.
The original comment did not suggest any wage theft happening, and the original comment from the communist commando treated all employers as thieves.
What the hell are you talking about? Are you an AI bot or just stupid?
Yes, because every single empoyeer is a thief. Capitalism bad, mkay. Fucking tankies.
Get a real job. You obviously have never had one if you think most employers don’t “steal” to some degree or pay fair wages.
Maybe you should have gotton some qualification or had a better work ethic and you wouldn’t be stacking boxes at Amazon.
Making fun of a person’s job is easily one of the most unappealing personality traits a person can have.
I didn’t even know what his job is, I invented it. And I’m pretty sure all boxes at Amazon are stacked by robots, so it’s not even a real job.
I own my own company dude lmfao
Imagine thinking capitalists deserve anything other than being kicked to the curb. Workers do everything, the sooner we control things the better.
Yeah, that’s exactly what they said… can you refute that surplus value is extracted through exploitation of labour forces? No? Didn’t think so. Much easier to insult and deride, and pretend that was a meaningful or valuable argument, than to actually make one.
Loyalty is vastly overrated. The only rational course of action is to complete exactly the tasks to which you’ve agreed for the wage they’ve determined. Your employer will demand loyalty but never reciprocate. Don’t let them manipulate you.
Also, never ever let them see you sweat. It doesn’t matter how good your employer is, at the first hint that you’re insecure, they’ll pounce and you’ll be treated like garbage. Always have your briefcase packed and a box to clear out your desk on a moment’s notice.
