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What I've always been taught is when you go into work, you cease to be a person, and become a thing. You have no dreams, desires, wants, emotions, or needs (Yo
by twoquestions 9y ago
What I've always been taught is when you go into work, you cease to be a person, and become a thing. You have no dreams, desires, wants, emotions, or needs (You may be hired to project an emotion, but you're not to have any authentic emotions yourself). Your sole reason for existence is to provide the labor your employer is buying.
Your own loneliness is your sole responsibility. If you don't have the information you need to do your job that is your manager's responsibility to remedy, but their job stops the instant you have the tools you need to do yours.
- JeremyBanks 9y agoThat's wonderful philosophizing, but if you RTFA the entire point is that it affects productivity and so it would be negligent for employers to ignore it.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoWhat does "RTFA" mean?
- stevenwoo 9y agoRead the f(obscene gerund) article.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoRead the featured article.
- ABCLAW 9y agoRTFA = Read the [Expletive] Article.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- twoquestions 9y agoI mean the fact that it does is the problem, and it shouldn't be on managers to fix it. You're lonely, your problem. At every job I've ever worked, you're paid for your output, not to socialize.
- geofft 9y agoA manager's job is to deliver business value. A manager's job is not to hypothetically deliver business value if their employees were less emotional. If the manager chooses to deliver business value by hiring humans instead of robots, the manager is obligated to care about the fact they are human and help them improve their productivity, to ensure that effort the company spends training the employee is not wasted if they lose morale and leave, and so forth. A manager who ignores these responsibilities might be great at pursuing an ideal, but their job is not pursuing an ideal. Their job is delivering business value. If the human you hire needs to socialize to be productive, that's no different from the printer you bought needing toner to be productive. Telling a printer without toner "You're paid for your output" is shirking your responsibilities. (There are certainly a lot of managers—and a lot of businesses—that are more interested in pursuing some philosophy of how business should be run than effectively delivering business value. They are objectively wrong.)
- wtetzner 9y ago> You're lonely, your problem. If it causes lower productivity, then it's the company's problem. Unless they're skilled at hiring people who don't have this problem. > At every job I've ever worked, you're paid for your output, not to socialize. Of course, but if socializing increases output, then aren't they the same thing?
- sgift 9y agoCorrect. Which is one of the reasons many people who transition to management from tech suck at it: Humans are not machines. If they have problems outside their work those problems will leak into the work and will influence it. So, you better try to help them if you expect them to work at their best capacity. Or you ignore it, bleed people out and then cry that no one there does good work, everyone quits all the time and you are such a misunderstood poor manager. The idea that you can just hire people who will never feel lonely (or have some other problems in their life) is in itself quite amusing.
- dbecker 9y agoI haven't worked for an employer that's held that view since high school (when I bagged groceries). I'm skeptical any successful business treats high-skilled employees that way.
- poulsbohemian 9y agoThis was every company I've ever worked at or consulted to, which is in large part at the root of why I went freelance. Are there really great companies with culture that treats highly-paid, highly-skilled professionals as professionals? Yes, I'm sure there are, but they are rare.
- exelius 9y agoGo work for a big 4 as a consultant in your specialty? Sure you’ll work 80 hours a week and travel basically all the time, but you get a lot of latitude and professionalism in exchange for that.
- p0ints 9y agoMy (anecdotal) observation is that this big4 "professionalism" is mostly a self-imporant delusion (probably imprinted into people by years of company culture and trainings), and that a lot of senior people in there are insufferable wankers. That's from my experience with senior managers from Deloitte and PwC.
- exelius 9y agoHaha, completely true, but you get a lot of latitude and you are actually valued as an employee — unlike most salaried jobs, there is a direct correlation between your paycheck and the company’s revenue. There is also a high incentive for the company to pay to keep your skills up-to-date. The culture in consulting has its problems, but things are getting better and we’re seeing a lot more women entering senior roles which is starting to fix some of the bad behavior that has traditionally gone on. As for acting self-important? It takes a fucking ego to have a 27 year old kid tell a 50 year old SVP how to do his job. But as a result, people in consulting generally respect each others large egos, which gets you some degree of professionalism.
- draw_down 9y agoYikes. That is bleak.
- copper_think 9y agoThere may be an expectation at work for you to have the desire to advance within the organization, i.e. career ambition.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- maxaf 9y agoYour point of view is considered scandalous by the local audience, but I'm inclined to agree. I was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in 1990s Russia after history threw a few sucker punches in our direction. I can say from watching my parents and other adults that "shut up & do your job no matter what" was a common enough sentiment that to me it might as well be the only possible truth. Here and now, in late capitalism, we seem to be aspiring to some other arrangement, which is commendable in itself, but I observe it with healthy skepticism. It is my responsibility to make myself happy. I'm lucky to have a boss who cares about my well-being, but I see his efforts as secondary and something to be leveraged in order to improve the company as a whole, not somehow make me happier as a person. I'll take care of that last part myself. Edit: a late-breaking thought I would like to include. He who externalizes happiness is bound to be disappointed, as the incentive is simply missing to make others happy without asking for anything is return. Better learn to DIY happiness.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoI was born in US midwest, and am in my mid 30s. I do not go to work to make friends or to be social. I will be polite, but I am there to get paid. I provide labor, and in return I receive money. Socializing is for outside my 40 hours/week, with those I chose, not those my employer chooses. The touchy feely family feeling isn't for me.
- maxaf 9y agoExactly! That's why we have separate words for "family" and "colleagues".
- rootusrootus 9y agoThat seems healthy. I am a newly minted manager and maybe I'm going about this the wrong way, but I try to ensure the people reporting to me are happy at work. Within the bounds of meeting the needs of the company, of course, since we are professionals. I try to encourage my people to have a healthy relationship with the office and their peers, be realistic, etc, partly because I like them as people but a certain aspect of it is that I want us all to be successful and productive as a team. As to their personal happiness it really isn't my place nor within my skills to work on. I'm not a therapist.