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> Companies are becoming increasingly aware that they can get away with de facto 50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits If job hopping is a

> Companies are becoming increasingly aware that they can get away with de facto 50+ hour weeks while offering the bare minimum in benefits If job hopping is a viable strategy (which it certainly is in some sectors), then that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this. That’s not to say that every company out there is actually going to figure out the source of their staff retention problems, but the fact that those problems exist for employers is really the only way such conditions will improve.

newswasboring 7y ago
The existence of job hopping does not negate existence of abuse. Because the baseline is, and in my understanding, will remain low. You will get some extra money but that 50 hour will turn to 55. People are so crushed by their loans that they will just see the dollar amount because at some point sadness over amount of work saturates. I am just as depressed at 50 hours a week as I am at 55 hours a week. Of course eventually it creeps up to no weekends and 80 hours. But people don't feel it because it happens gradually and they have by that point acquired more debt for a house and maybe they have kids. Also for the lower end jobs there is an infinite supply of people when the current lot eventually burns out.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > The existence of job hopping does not negate existence of abuse It (at least to some extent) negates your assertion that employers can get away with it. Employee churn is literally employers failing to get away with it. If a bad employer cares about employee churn, then it’s something they’ll have to address eventually by solving the problems they’ve created that led to employee churn in the first place. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will though. Having contracted/consulted for a lot of companies, I’ve come to the conclusion that most companies are bad at most things, and that a company really only needs to be good at a select few things to be viable in the market. But if there’s competition for labor (which there is in a lot of software engineering sectors), then failing at employee retention will put them at a competitive disadvantage, and companies that succeed at it at a competitive advantage.
  - newswasboring 7y ago
    Yeah but they don't care about employee churn at all. That's the whole point. There is almost an infinite supply of replacements. Did you not read my post?
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      The only way for a company to not care about churn is if they literally don’t care about the quality of their product or services. There are very few businesses where this is the case (in software engineering at least), so if you’re trying to suggest that such businesses are a common problem, then you’re delusional.
      - newswasboring 7y ago
        > The only way for a company to not care about churn is if they literally don’t care about the quality of their product or service. I disagree. There are plenty of jobs which are basically about qualified warm bodies. It doesn't matter who is doing it, it will get done. Even in high tech there are plenty of jobs like this. Not all companies have a heavily customized set of libraries. Most use off the shelf fairly famous things. It costs less to hire someone new and let them ramp up than to give someone a raise.
        AmericanChopper 7y ago
        You’re really talking about two different things here, but you’re wrong on both of them. For starters, your typical software engineer hire will cost you more than the value they provide for at least their first six months. If they stay for less than 18 months, then you’ll never get a return on that investment. Realistically you need them to stay longer. Secondly, even if your just a vanilla web dev shop, using the most basic set of frameworks available, if the average tenure of your staff is too low, then the quality of your product/service will massively suffer. Ask anybody who’s had the analyze this in a management position (like I have for instance, many times). To make this work (and I have seen it work), you need an incredibly atypical set of circumstances. For starters, you need to be in a position where quality absolutely does not matter at all. This sounds ridiculous but there are some cases where this can be true (for some period of time at least, but maybe you don’t care about it lasting forever...). Companies that have built themselves an unassailable position in the procurement pipelines of government or large enterprise can exploit such dynamics, on a limited term basis, for example. Secondly, you need to have eliminated any quality control in your recruitment pipeline. Naturally, this will result in hiring a lot of very low quality labor, but as above, maybe that’s fine. Finally, you need to have completely eliminated any onboarding or training. You need people to turn up to work, and almost immediately start producing low quality work. Such companies do actually exist, but they are very, very uncommon. If you happen to find yourself working for one, though you may be underpaid and treated poorly, you can at least know that your employer is likely extracting very little value from you at all, regardless of how personally talented you might be.
VRay 7y ago
> that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this ?? What if the company saves a lot of money, and only lose a tiny percentage of employees every year? I think it's pretty safe to say that most salaried employees will just keep trucking along happily so long as their bills are paid and they don't feel horribly oppressed or stressed out. If there's a mandatory 5 minute daily meeting at 10 AM and free dinner at 7 PM, it's pretty easy to get everyone to put in 9 hours a day along with the occasional hour of e-mail at home or chunk of crunch time. So long as everybody gets a 2-4% raise every year and feels like there's another job title to strive for, they'll just keep falling farther and farther behind the market rate.
- honestoHeminway 7y ago
  At some point, those companys themselves are going to get poached- not for the value they are worth, but for the value they hold back for the market. Sort of a gold hoarders house bought.
mcv 7y ago
Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work. Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it. Assertive workers hop jobs when the situation demands it, less assertive ones suffer.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work. Pay and hours worked is really only one part of the equation, but this is pretty much right. Complaining won’t do anything to solve retention problems though. > Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it. This really depends on your definition of “getting away with it”. If continuing to perpetuate the problems that cause it, at great expense to the business is “getting away with it”, then I guess your right. You could “get away with” never going to work again, if you were prepared to accept the costs of being destitute for the rest of your life. However I think you’ll find there’s a large number of companies that have been forced to improve their practices in order to remain competitive. Anecdotally speaking, it’s why I personally won’t get out of bed for less than 4 figures after tax per day, and why I’d be incredibly reluctant to work in an office that didn’t provide me with free food, coffee and other drinks.

newswasboring 7y ago

The existence of job hopping does not negate existence of abuse. Because the baseline is, and in my understanding, will remain low. You will get some extra money but that 50 hour will turn to 55. People are so crushed by their loans that they will just see the dollar amount because at some point sadness over amount of work saturates. I am just as depressed at 50 hours a week as I am at 55 hours a week. Of course eventually it creeps up to no weekends and 80 hours. But people don't feel it because it happens gradually and they have by that point acquired more debt for a house and maybe they have kids. Also for the lower end jobs there is an infinite supply of people when the current lot eventually burns out.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
> The existence of job hopping does not negate existence of abuse It (at least to some extent) negates your assertion that employers can get away with it. Employee churn is literally employers failing to get away with it. If a bad employer cares about employee churn, then it’s something they’ll have to address eventually by solving the problems they’ve created that led to employee churn in the first place. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will though. Having contracted/consulted for a lot of companies, I’ve come to the conclusion that most companies are bad at most things, and that a company really only needs to be good at a select few things to be viable in the market. But if there’s competition for labor (which there is in a lot of software engineering sectors), then failing at employee retention will put them at a competitive disadvantage, and companies that succeed at it at a competitive advantage.
- newswasboring 7y ago
  Yeah but they don't care about employee churn at all. That's the whole point. There is almost an infinite supply of replacements. Did you not read my post?
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    The only way for a company to not care about churn is if they literally don’t care about the quality of their product or services. There are very few businesses where this is the case (in software engineering at least), so if you’re trying to suggest that such businesses are a common problem, then you’re delusional.
    - newswasboring 7y ago
      > The only way for a company to not care about churn is if they literally don’t care about the quality of their product or service. I disagree. There are plenty of jobs which are basically about qualified warm bodies. It doesn't matter who is doing it, it will get done. Even in high tech there are plenty of jobs like this. Not all companies have a heavily customized set of libraries. Most use off the shelf fairly famous things. It costs less to hire someone new and let them ramp up than to give someone a raise.
      - AmericanChopper 7y ago
        You’re really talking about two different things here, but you’re wrong on both of them. For starters, your typical software engineer hire will cost you more than the value they provide for at least their first six months. If they stay for less than 18 months, then you’ll never get a return on that investment. Realistically you need them to stay longer. Secondly, even if your just a vanilla web dev shop, using the most basic set of frameworks available, if the average tenure of your staff is too low, then the quality of your product/service will massively suffer. Ask anybody who’s had the analyze this in a management position (like I have for instance, many times). To make this work (and I have seen it work), you need an incredibly atypical set of circumstances. For starters, you need to be in a position where quality absolutely does not matter at all. This sounds ridiculous but there are some cases where this can be true (for some period of time at least, but maybe you don’t care about it lasting forever...). Companies that have built themselves an unassailable position in the procurement pipelines of government or large enterprise can exploit such dynamics, on a limited term basis, for example. Secondly, you need to have eliminated any quality control in your recruitment pipeline. Naturally, this will result in hiring a lot of very low quality labor, but as above, maybe that’s fine. Finally, you need to have completely eliminated any onboarding or training. You need people to turn up to work, and almost immediately start producing low quality work. Such companies do actually exist, but they are very, very uncommon. If you happen to find yourself working for one, though you may be underpaid and treated poorly, you can at least know that your employer is likely extracting very little value from you at all, regardless of how personally talented you might be.

VRay 7y ago

> that is literally proof that they can’t get away with this ?? What if the company saves a lot of money, and only lose a tiny percentage of employees every year? I think it's pretty safe to say that most salaried employees will just keep trucking along happily so long as their bills are paid and they don't feel horribly oppressed or stressed out. If there's a mandatory 5 minute daily meeting at 10 AM and free dinner at 7 PM, it's pretty easy to get everyone to put in 9 hours a day along with the occasional hour of e-mail at home or chunk of crunch time. So long as everybody gets a 2-4% raise every year and feels like there's another job title to strive for, they'll just keep falling farther and farther behind the market rate.

honestoHeminway 7y ago
At some point, those companys themselves are going to get poached- not for the value they are worth, but for the value they hold back for the market. Sort of a gold hoarders house bought.

mcv 7y ago

Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work. Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it. Assertive workers hop jobs when the situation demands it, less assertive ones suffer.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
> Companies complaining about job hopping are basically complaining that they can't get away with paying their employees too little for too much work. Pay and hours worked is really only one part of the equation, but this is pretty much right. Complaining won’t do anything to solve retention problems though. > Then again, every employee who's overworked and underpaid is proof that they are getting away with it. This really depends on your definition of “getting away with it”. If continuing to perpetuate the problems that cause it, at great expense to the business is “getting away with it”, then I guess your right. You could “get away with” never going to work again, if you were prepared to accept the costs of being destitute for the rest of your life. However I think you’ll find there’s a large number of companies that have been forced to improve their practices in order to remain competitive. Anecdotally speaking, it’s why I personally won’t get out of bed for less than 4 figures after tax per day, and why I’d be incredibly reluctant to work in an office that didn’t provide me with free food, coffee and other drinks.