5 ms·

You don't appreciate office cultures involving alcohol or dog-friendliness, and you roll your eyes and put up with them. Some people do value those things, and

by jholman 11y ago

You don't appreciate office cultures involving alcohol or dog-friendliness, and you roll your eyes and put up with them. Some people do value those things, and they also value having coworkers who value those things, which isn't a surprise because most humans value community (though of course different humans have different ideas about what constitutes community). So when you flat-out lie to your coworkers about your feelings, you're undermining the social fabric, for your pecuniary gain (e.g. because you don't want to be correctly labelled a "bad culture fit", because you like the salary). That deceit is straight-up unethical. It's also disrespectful to assume that your coworkers don't know what's actually valuable to them. Some people prefer an extra $5k in salary, some people prefer $4k of free meals. Or $6k of free meals that costs the company $3k because of scale. Or whatever. Some people are investing in their long-term growth by deeply immersing themselves in their careers (and perhaps working non-long-term-sustainable hours), and if the company provide some cheap bennies that make that easier to do, so much the better. Yes, the company profits, and no the employee isn't maximizing short-term earnings, but maybe it's still win-win. If employees really can't afford recreating or adequate living space, then of course that's a problem. I'm skeptical that's a real problem in software, though. And if that problem does exist, btw, then I think the best solution is those employees going and finding careers/lifestyles that fit better. I want to add that I found this comment particularly startling because most of the comments I most agreed with on this page were also by you, p4wnc6.

sheepmullet 11y ago
> You don't appreciate office cultures involving alcohol or dog-friendliness, and you roll your eyes and put up with them. I think the OP is complaining about this "culture" being used as a weapon to trick, mislead, and bully people. > So when you flat-out lie to your coworkers about your feelings, you're undermining the social fabric, for your pecuniary gain Any company that forces you to lie about your personal non-work related opinions in order to keep your job is incredibly toxic. > It's also disrespectful to assume that your coworkers don't know what's actually valuable to them. The problem is non-monetary benefits are misleadingly marketed to prospective employees and are thus very hard to evaluate. For example I've worked at companies that provide free dinner to employees. In reality if you took advantage of these "free" dinners you were expected to work late. Likewise I've worked at a couple of places that advertise unlimited vacation days. At all of my previous jobs in tech I have had 4-5 weeks vacation per year. So naturally I'm assuming that unlimited is at least as good. In other words taking 5 weeks off over the year shouldn't be a problem at all. Bzzzzt! Wrong. Likewise many companies say they offer great career progression and training and very few deliver. It is false advertising. Plain and simple. Actual free dinner is easily worth $5k/year to me. The ability to take extra vacation days here and there when I feel I need a break is easily worth $10k/year to me. A serious focus on career progression and a focus on training is worth another $10k/year to me. Naive sheepmullet used to get tricked into giving up $15k in salary thinking he was going to get $25k in benefits (that only cost the company $5k) and everybody would win. Jaded sheepmullet realises there is a huge asterisk next to most of these benefits and refuses to compromise on salary unless the benefits are written into his contract. For example I'd love to take a lower salary for a job that offered serious training and skills development. Lets write into my contract that you will provide me 20 days off work for self-study + 100 hours of 1 on 1 mentoring by my manager + a conference budget + a 10% pay increase at the end of each year.

by jholman 11y ago

sheepmullet 11y ago

> You don't appreciate office cultures involving alcohol or dog-friendliness, and you roll your eyes and put up with them. I think the OP is complaining about this "culture" being used as a weapon to trick, mislead, and bully people. > So when you flat-out lie to your coworkers about your feelings, you're undermining the social fabric, for your pecuniary gain Any company that forces you to lie about your personal non-work related opinions in order to keep your job is incredibly toxic. > It's also disrespectful to assume that your coworkers don't know what's actually valuable to them. The problem is non-monetary benefits are misleadingly marketed to prospective employees and are thus very hard to evaluate. For example I've worked at companies that provide free dinner to employees. In reality if you took advantage of these "free" dinners you were expected to work late. Likewise I've worked at a couple of places that advertise unlimited vacation days. At all of my previous jobs in tech I have had 4-5 weeks vacation per year. So naturally I'm assuming that unlimited is at least as good. In other words taking 5 weeks off over the year shouldn't be a problem at all. Bzzzzt! Wrong. Likewise many companies say they offer great career progression and training and very few deliver. It is false advertising. Plain and simple. Actual free dinner is easily worth $5k/year to me. The ability to take extra vacation days here and there when I feel I need a break is easily worth $10k/year to me. A serious focus on career progression and a focus on training is worth another $10k/year to me. Naive sheepmullet used to get tricked into giving up $15k in salary thinking he was going to get $25k in benefits (that only cost the company $5k) and everybody would win. Jaded sheepmullet realises there is a huge asterisk next to most of these benefits and refuses to compromise on salary unless the benefits are written into his contract. For example I'd love to take a lower salary for a job that offered serious training and skills development. Lets write into my contract that you will provide me 20 days off work for self-study + 100 hours of 1 on 1 mentoring by my manager + a conference budget + a 10% pay increase at the end of each year.