7 ms·

What happens when all of your co-workers quit?

66 points by rustoo 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This question could be very interesting, but they took the straw-man argument route and interviewed people who were clearly underpaid: > They weren’t surprised, since the starting pay can be as low as $11 an hour, while “you could go to any of the fast-food places and get at least $4 more,” Marcus says. So… mystery solved. The company is forced to pay higher wages and the market corrects itself. The more interesting discussion would be around what happens in these circumstances where low pay isn’t an obvious issue. A few jobs ago we had an employee exodus despite above-average compensation. Many people were leaving to jobs that paid less and they didn’t care. They just wanted out. I stuck around for a while under the foolish thought that maybe management would see the exodus as a wake-up call and reverse course on some obviously bad decisions, but instead they doubled down on the bad choices. Eventually they switched to laying off remaining employees and opening a new office somewhere else because the remaining staff was too demoralized to do much. Strangely, there were a few die-hard employees who sided with management on every move, no matter how obviously bad the outcome. These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies. In some cases, they were right. One of the more combative but inexperienced coworkers I had is now running his own department. He capitalized on the turmoil to advance his own career. However, the department’s progress has ground to a halt and they haven’t had a good software release in years now. Doesn’t matter much for him, because he can now pivot to another company and show a track record of rapid advancement.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > I feel almost betrayed,” they say. “Why aren’t they taking care of us?” The only mystery is why this guy acknowledged he could earn more money by switching jobs, yet chose to harm his body for his underpaying employer, which he himself acknowledged. He feels “almost” betrayed after that. Wonder what it takes to convince him he is being betrayed.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Exactly. Maybe the real story here is why some employees aren’t responding to market rate incentives. If most people are making the obvious move to better compensated jobs with better working conditions, what’s driving some people to stay in the underpaid, overworked jobs? It’s not hard to switch jobs in 2021.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I am assuming Marcus is a “housekeeping manager” getting paid $36k to $50k per year, and he cannot easily quit and find another job that pays a steady wage of that much for a 8am to 5pm type position. The other jobs might pay more, but they might be evening/night jobs, and/or he does not trust they will reliably get sufficient hours. And cleaning 40 rooms in a day is disgusting, no way a hotel room gets properly cleaned in 15 min or less and laundry gets properly washed or protocols are followed. Edit: nevermind, I read more of the article and Marcus is a $15 per hour employee, not a salaried “manager”. > While Marcus used to complete “every single step” while cleaning rooms, they now sometimes skip dusting and mopping. But they worry that slacking off too much will only backfire on their colleagues, who would be the ones left to clean up the mess. “That’s the only thing that holds me back,” they say.
      - rjsw 5y ago
        I wouldn't expect the time taken do do laundry to be included in that 15 minutes.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I meant that as a separate item since they are probably understaffed in all departments. The 15 min is just made up by me assuming they are working 10 hours.
      - jlokier 5y ago
        I've cleaned hotel rooms. I think we had 20 minutes a room (it was a long time ago). You get good at it. Different people did different parts of the job, with only one in a room at a time. For example, one person removed all the bedsheets, cleaned surfaces, polished mirrors, replaced toilet rolls etc and tidied things that were out of place including the resident's items. Another brought in and fitted clean bedsheets and placed clean towels. Another went around with a vacuum cleaner after them. The total time per room when you count each person probably exceeded 20 minutes. When not cleaning rooms I worked in the kitchen. I was 17 at the time, and this job helped pay my living expenses subsequently at university, because the government grant was sufficient for rent, but no food.
- duxup 5y ago
  >I stuck around for a while under the foolish thought that maybe management would see the exodus as a wake-up call and reverse course on some obviously bad decisions I've never seen that happen. I find momentum almost always wins the day and few people really ever 'reverse course' at the same job. Just a human thing. > These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies. That's absolutely true and a good opportunity. I know some folks who did that and it worked out great. When you're Jr. you can take chances like that (and IMO should) and it can pay off. If it doesn't, move on... no harm no foul. Heck when I got my first job in a new industry I joined a small company, wasn't paid a lot, they had old tech / tech debt. It wasn't one of the larger / well known companies in town. But at that place I could make real changes / whole applications from top to bottom that went into production. Pay went up fast. Other folks I know who went to the big company and are doing well, but are also kind of amazed "you get to do all that". It's not hard to do, but they don't get those opportunities to do it all themself at big company. I see a lot of folks who want to land at 'best company' but sometimes I think a variety of companies or even 'not best company' teaches you important things / opportunity.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  > These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies. "In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity." - Sun-Tzu
- kodah 5y ago
  I was about to raise, "they're over-focusing on low pay jobs" because this happened on my team. It's incredibly hard to hire for my team because we require polyglot programmers at a minimum. I do know that it wasn't "me" or anything that I had control over on the team (mostly technical things).
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > It's incredibly hard to hire for my team because we require polyglot programmers at a minimum. I do know that it wasn't "me" or anything that I had control over on the team (mostly technical things). Have you tried paying more?
    - kodah 5y ago
      Heh, well, no. Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". In effect, polyglot engineers that work on infrastructure-y applications make the same as someone who only works on a web app backend. Infrastructure teams have tried to fix this by promoting quickly or hiring ultra-senior only positions, but then that breaks the promotion model, which has some specific steps and outcomes to it.
      - 908B64B197 5y ago
        > Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". It worked at NeXT. But unless you have a world class founder and are hiring in a top tier market, good luck. The real question you need to ask yourself is: is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company?
        kodah 5y ago
        > is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company? In my software we deal with complexities in OSI layers 4-8, in multiple languages, with multiple protocols. As long as I've been working in core infrastructure software it's always been this way, and I think that's why I stay in the domain. The challenges are always new and this space sees a lot of constant iteration, but it's usually iteration down in the stack. We deal in systems technology all the way up to HTTP. There's a big variance to the nature of work you'll take on is my point. Additionally, this team seems to benefit from fundamental knowledge in math, systems, and software engineering. When I worked strictly on web backends the most amount of Layer 4 I ever touched was a load balancer. I dealt in a few protocols but they were all fairly predictable. The system was not really something that we touched, improved, or even really relied on. It was more a consequence of development, so patch solutions were okay. I don't see the kind of fundamental knowledge on my team being required when I filled these kinds of positions, but maybe it could. The thing I have trouble reconciling is whether I judge web backend development more harshly (and thus think, this is not the same work) purely because it wasn't interesting to me, or because my company doesn't mandate that kind of attention to detail (or tries to provide broad solutions and discourages individual problem solving), etc... It's hard for me to tell on an individual level.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > He capitalized on the turmoil to advance his own career. However, the department’s progress has ground to a halt and they haven’t had a good software release in years now. Doesn’t matter much for him, because he can now pivot to another company and show a track record of rapid advancement. That's a genius move. He can also use his new position at the company to pivot their tech stack to mimic the one used at the place he'll be applying soon.
warent 5y ago
Yeah I have no idea why the government is this spineless that they cannot raise the minimum wage. Income gap is so disgusting, I'm tired of dealing with the reality that most people I meet are basically living in poverty and have very little freedom. Great, I'm comparatively rich, and this aspect of it is awful. I can barely connect with the average person because businesses are allowed to engorge their monstrous bellies on greed while paying peanuts.
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  I believe it's a mix of trying to curb inflation (if everyone makes more they will bid up the things they buy) and the broken incentives of free money[1] . It's tough on consumers too because we're used to a certain level of customer service, so we get frustrated when that's not what we receive for the same/more money than pre-pandemic -- perfectly human responses in the circumstances. Of course it's not on the actual workers, they're exhausted and giving all they have -- perfectly human responses in the circumstances. These are just symptoms of a more broken systemic environment. [1]:imo there should be employment assurance, not insurance-- that is if you cannot find a job we'll give you one. instead of if you dont have money will give you some. Part of why I hold this idea is that if you have more money chasing the same goods you get inflation. At least if someone is working there is a chance they'll contribute to the collection of goods produced after which money will follow.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > if everyone makes more they will bid up the things they buy Raising the minimum wage is unlikely to have much of that kind of effect, since most people make more than minimum wage. What it does do is reduce the buying power of people making $30/hour because they now have to compete more often for things with someone making $15 instead of $10/hour. But even then, that isn't enough to put pressure on cars, houses, or even rent. But what raising the minimum wage really does is put people at the bottom on a more equal footing with people not at the bottom. The people on the bottom can buy more, the people not at the bottom can buy a bit less.
    - 5y ago
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.md/YqKQx https://archive.md/YqKQx
- oenetan 5y ago
  beat me to it. Thanks
s1artibartfast 5y ago
I think there are a hundred and one ways that companies can handle labor incentives but I'd like to highlight one that is my personal favorite: Institute some level of profit sharing. This gives workers skin in the game but there's much more flexible and responsive then simple wage hikes. It's also closer to cooperative voluntary collaboration
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  I usually agree, but the implementation can have crazy side effects -- Short term thinking being the most immediately obvious. Tips are a very similar program (they % off total sales), and a tip based system has been disastrous for food service workers. even at my own $EMPLOYER there have been issues with the stock price variability such that people have a hard time knowing what their actual income is and if they're overspending/committing. ie it's very risky to take on a fixed monthly bill like a mortgage if your income is tied to something variable.
  - CgmCxFN0mG 5y ago
    Well there are solutions out there already for this, a base pay of x but a variable pay tied to employee performance (whatever metric they use e.g. tables waited on etc.) and a variable component tied to the company performance (profit sharing), perhaps even add an element of how long the employee worked there into this. Make the data about what multiplier of base pay you paid out in the company performance variable component in the past few years and the upper and lower bounds of employee performance variable component and one gets the idea of how much they can make for sure and how much more they can potentially make it all goes well.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Min wage workers for hotels and restaurants other service sector employees have been in sufficient supply that those businesses have not had to consider that. It might also be true that a lot of the products and services of those businesses simply are not valuable enough to be viable without extremely low labor costs.
aluminussoma 5y ago
This is happening on my team, with a stark difference being that we are all paid dizzying tech salaries. Money only motivates people to an extent.
- echelon 5y ago
  Much of tech pays well enough that you can quit and live comfortably for awhile. Given the stressful pandemic, it's no wonder that many would rather take some extended time off. Or start new ventures. The assumption is that there will always be demand for these jobs, so there's little risk in leaving.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Pay is one factor but rarely is so misaligned across all coworkers. My last job(MSP) had about 30 employees. I received my job entirely because 3 people quit at the same time freeing up some spots. In the job interview they talked about how they only expect 60% of my time to be billed. That they have work-life balance meetings and if you ever have an idea pose it. Those meetings lasted about a couple months and contributed no changes. Many months went by and it was certainly a 'beating continue until morale improvements." Personally I just stayed out of the office as much as possible and avoided a truckload of office drama. Long story short, the first head to leave was another senior guy. He took this job because he thought it was an upgrade. Except one night he was on-call and when the phone went off. He slept through it and missed it. It was one of my clients, large international enterprise that operates 24x7. The client demanded that he be fired and my boss told them he would fire him. Except he went around telling most people that we were only pretending to fire him. Except said boss now made his life hell and basically forced him to get a new job. Nothing surprising there. He got his old job back with an excellent raise and far better benefits. He went around telling EVERYONE. They couldn't just send him home neither. We were booked weeks in advanced and nobody documented anything. So when you give 2 weeks you are expected to worker harder than ever. Then another senior guy finds out he's severely underpaid. He was getting like $22/hour, minimum wage is $15/hr as a senior sysadmin with a decade of experience. He had home problems as well. He often worked 60-80 weeks. So he went and got a new job. Mind you we are now down 2 senior staff... their workload didnt disappear. It got piled onto everyone else. Then another senior guy, best friends with previous guy, and he was planning to stick it out. He didn't care about extra workload, he worked at his pace. Except working at his pace meant the scheduling folks badmouthed him regularly for not getting work done. He overheard that one. Then one day he was assigned a new client. They had like 3 employees, not a priority. They were nothing but they had an issue that a junior tech was taking hours to fix. Which should have been a 15 minute fix. The client complained to our boss. The boss then proceeded to chew out me and this other senior guy because we were dropping the ball. Mind you. I had only ever done 1 ticket for these folks many months before, they werent my client. Whereas this other senior guy never met them, never talked to them, and wasn't responsible for the ticket he was getting chewed out about. He held his tongue and went and got a new job that night. We're now 3 senior staff down. Mind you, I'm working 60hour weeks and capped it there. It was now performance review day for me. I'm in the office and I have 1 coworker on sick leave for 2 months because his blood pressure while sitting was 200/150. He was on the verge of heart attack. I go into performance review expecting a very nice raise. What I got was absolutely nothing. I got no praise. I was told I was late to work >40 times. Which broke my mind. I was never late, I was one of the first people in the office. He shows me my lates. Oh wait... all >40 times were me signing in on the weekend. I wasnt on call or on duty. I was responding to emergencies on weekends. But because I signed in after 9am. It counted as a late. So I was pretty angry naturally. I leave performance review feeling like I was smacked around. I go back to work and I'm talking to our contact at the same large enterprise above. They then tell me that $coworker was bad mouthing me. Saying an outage was caused by me. Except for one thing. It was caused by him. A router/firewall that I configured that had been stable and untouched for months. He decided needed to be modified to his standard and when he made the changes to his way. He took them down. I'd never really interacted with this coworker. We were the only 2 network guys, so we very very rarely cross paths in any way. I mentioned this to another coworker and apparently this coworker was constantly bad mouthing me. People volunteered and forwarded stuff that was absolutely absurd. Whatever, I move on. Cant be friends with everyone. Then this same guy comes into my office one day and is talking about how he's so angry with everyone and he's going to kill our manager. I'm just so baffled by this ridiculousness. I report this death threat and harassment to one of the bosses. I get fired the next day. Over the next 6 months or so, literally over 25 people were no longer working there. I had people from the community who knew me contacting me on linkedin to find out what happened there for months.

66 points by rustoo 5y ago

This question could be very interesting, but they took the straw-man argument route and interviewed people who were clearly underpaid: > They weren’t surprised, since the starting pay can be as low as $11 an hour, while “you could go to any of the fast-food places and get at least $4 more,” Marcus says. So… mystery solved. The company is forced to pay higher wages and the market corrects itself. The more interesting discussion would be around what happens in these circumstances where low pay isn’t an obvious issue. A few jobs ago we had an employee exodus despite above-average compensation. Many people were leaving to jobs that paid less and they didn’t care. They just wanted out. I stuck around for a while under the foolish thought that maybe management would see the exodus as a wake-up call and reverse course on some obviously bad decisions, but instead they doubled down on the bad choices. Eventually they switched to laying off remaining employees and opening a new office somewhere else because the remaining staff was too demoralized to do much. Strangely, there were a few die-hard employees who sided with management on every move, no matter how obviously bad the outcome. These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies. In some cases, they were right. One of the more combative but inexperienced coworkers I had is now running his own department. He capitalized on the turmoil to advance his own career. However, the department’s progress has ground to a halt and they haven’t had a good software release in years now. Doesn’t matter much for him, because he can now pivot to another company and show a track record of rapid advancement.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> I feel almost betrayed,” they say. “Why aren’t they taking care of us?” The only mystery is why this guy acknowledged he could earn more money by switching jobs, yet chose to harm his body for his underpaying employer, which he himself acknowledged. He feels “almost” betrayed after that. Wonder what it takes to convince him he is being betrayed.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Exactly. Maybe the real story here is why some employees aren’t responding to market rate incentives. If most people are making the obvious move to better compensated jobs with better working conditions, what’s driving some people to stay in the underpaid, overworked jobs? It’s not hard to switch jobs in 2021.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I am assuming Marcus is a “housekeeping manager” getting paid $36k to $50k per year, and he cannot easily quit and find another job that pays a steady wage of that much for a 8am to 5pm type position. The other jobs might pay more, but they might be evening/night jobs, and/or he does not trust they will reliably get sufficient hours. And cleaning 40 rooms in a day is disgusting, no way a hotel room gets properly cleaned in 15 min or less and laundry gets properly washed or protocols are followed. Edit: nevermind, I read more of the article and Marcus is a $15 per hour employee, not a salaried “manager”. > While Marcus used to complete “every single step” while cleaning rooms, they now sometimes skip dusting and mopping. But they worry that slacking off too much will only backfire on their colleagues, who would be the ones left to clean up the mess. “That’s the only thing that holds me back,” they say.
    - rjsw 5y ago
      I wouldn't expect the time taken do do laundry to be included in that 15 minutes.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I meant that as a separate item since they are probably understaffed in all departments. The 15 min is just made up by me assuming they are working 10 hours.
    - jlokier 5y ago
      I've cleaned hotel rooms. I think we had 20 minutes a room (it was a long time ago). You get good at it. Different people did different parts of the job, with only one in a room at a time. For example, one person removed all the bedsheets, cleaned surfaces, polished mirrors, replaced toilet rolls etc and tidied things that were out of place including the resident's items. Another brought in and fitted clean bedsheets and placed clean towels. Another went around with a vacuum cleaner after them. The total time per room when you count each person probably exceeded 20 minutes. When not cleaning rooms I worked in the kitchen. I was 17 at the time, and this job helped pay my living expenses subsequently at university, because the government grant was sufficient for rent, but no food.
duxup 5y ago
>I stuck around for a while under the foolish thought that maybe management would see the exodus as a wake-up call and reverse course on some obviously bad decisions I've never seen that happen. I find momentum almost always wins the day and few people really ever 'reverse course' at the same job. Just a human thing. > These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies. That's absolutely true and a good opportunity. I know some folks who did that and it worked out great. When you're Jr. you can take chances like that (and IMO should) and it can pay off. If it doesn't, move on... no harm no foul. Heck when I got my first job in a new industry I joined a small company, wasn't paid a lot, they had old tech / tech debt. It wasn't one of the larger / well known companies in town. But at that place I could make real changes / whole applications from top to bottom that went into production. Pay went up fast. Other folks I know who went to the big company and are doing well, but are also kind of amazed "you get to do all that". It's not hard to do, but they don't get those opportunities to do it all themself at big company. I see a lot of folks who want to land at 'best company' but sometimes I think a variety of companies or even 'not best company' teaches you important things / opportunity.
willcipriano 5y ago
> These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies. "In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity." - Sun-Tzu
kodah 5y ago
I was about to raise, "they're over-focusing on low pay jobs" because this happened on my team. It's incredibly hard to hire for my team because we require polyglot programmers at a minimum. I do know that it wasn't "me" or anything that I had control over on the team (mostly technical things).
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > It's incredibly hard to hire for my team because we require polyglot programmers at a minimum. I do know that it wasn't "me" or anything that I had control over on the team (mostly technical things). Have you tried paying more?
  - kodah 5y ago
    Heh, well, no. Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". In effect, polyglot engineers that work on infrastructure-y applications make the same as someone who only works on a web app backend. Infrastructure teams have tried to fix this by promoting quickly or hiring ultra-senior only positions, but then that breaks the promotion model, which has some specific steps and outcomes to it.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". It worked at NeXT. But unless you have a world class founder and are hiring in a top tier market, good luck. The real question you need to ask yourself is: is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company?
      - kodah 5y ago
        > is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company? In my software we deal with complexities in OSI layers 4-8, in multiple languages, with multiple protocols. As long as I've been working in core infrastructure software it's always been this way, and I think that's why I stay in the domain. The challenges are always new and this space sees a lot of constant iteration, but it's usually iteration down in the stack. We deal in systems technology all the way up to HTTP. There's a big variance to the nature of work you'll take on is my point. Additionally, this team seems to benefit from fundamental knowledge in math, systems, and software engineering. When I worked strictly on web backends the most amount of Layer 4 I ever touched was a load balancer. I dealt in a few protocols but they were all fairly predictable. The system was not really something that we touched, improved, or even really relied on. It was more a consequence of development, so patch solutions were okay. I don't see the kind of fundamental knowledge on my team being required when I filled these kinds of positions, but maybe it could. The thing I have trouble reconciling is whether I judge web backend development more harshly (and thus think, this is not the same work) purely because it wasn't interesting to me, or because my company doesn't mandate that kind of attention to detail (or tries to provide broad solutions and discourages individual problem solving), etc... It's hard for me to tell on an individual level.
908B64B197 5y ago
> He capitalized on the turmoil to advance his own career. However, the department’s progress has ground to a halt and they haven’t had a good software release in years now. Doesn’t matter much for him, because he can now pivot to another company and show a track record of rapid advancement. That's a genius move. He can also use his new position at the company to pivot their tech stack to mimic the one used at the place he'll be applying soon.

warent 5y ago

Yeah I have no idea why the government is this spineless that they cannot raise the minimum wage. Income gap is so disgusting, I'm tired of dealing with the reality that most people I meet are basically living in poverty and have very little freedom. Great, I'm comparatively rich, and this aspect of it is awful. I can barely connect with the average person because businesses are allowed to engorge their monstrous bellies on greed while paying peanuts.

maerF0x0 5y ago
I believe it's a mix of trying to curb inflation (if everyone makes more they will bid up the things they buy) and the broken incentives of free money[1] . It's tough on consumers too because we're used to a certain level of customer service, so we get frustrated when that's not what we receive for the same/more money than pre-pandemic -- perfectly human responses in the circumstances. Of course it's not on the actual workers, they're exhausted and giving all they have -- perfectly human responses in the circumstances. These are just symptoms of a more broken systemic environment. [1]:imo there should be employment assurance, not insurance-- that is if you cannot find a job we'll give you one. instead of if you dont have money will give you some. Part of why I hold this idea is that if you have more money chasing the same goods you get inflation. At least if someone is working there is a chance they'll contribute to the collection of goods produced after which money will follow.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > if everyone makes more they will bid up the things they buy Raising the minimum wage is unlikely to have much of that kind of effect, since most people make more than minimum wage. What it does do is reduce the buying power of people making $30/hour because they now have to compete more often for things with someone making $15 instead of $10/hour. But even then, that isn't enough to put pressure on cars, houses, or even rent. But what raising the minimum wage really does is put people at the bottom on a more equal footing with people not at the bottom. The people on the bottom can buy more, the people not at the bottom can buy a bit less.
  - 5y ago

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.md/YqKQx https://archive.md/YqKQx

oenetan 5y ago
beat me to it. Thanks

s1artibartfast 5y ago

I think there are a hundred and one ways that companies can handle labor incentives but I'd like to highlight one that is my personal favorite: Institute some level of profit sharing. This gives workers skin in the game but there's much more flexible and responsive then simple wage hikes. It's also closer to cooperative voluntary collaboration

maerF0x0 5y ago
I usually agree, but the implementation can have crazy side effects -- Short term thinking being the most immediately obvious. Tips are a very similar program (they % off total sales), and a tip based system has been disastrous for food service workers. even at my own $EMPLOYER there have been issues with the stock price variability such that people have a hard time knowing what their actual income is and if they're overspending/committing. ie it's very risky to take on a fixed monthly bill like a mortgage if your income is tied to something variable.
- CgmCxFN0mG 5y ago
  Well there are solutions out there already for this, a base pay of x but a variable pay tied to employee performance (whatever metric they use e.g. tables waited on etc.) and a variable component tied to the company performance (profit sharing), perhaps even add an element of how long the employee worked there into this. Make the data about what multiplier of base pay you paid out in the company performance variable component in the past few years and the upper and lower bounds of employee performance variable component and one gets the idea of how much they can make for sure and how much more they can potentially make it all goes well.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Min wage workers for hotels and restaurants other service sector employees have been in sufficient supply that those businesses have not had to consider that. It might also be true that a lot of the products and services of those businesses simply are not valuable enough to be viable without extremely low labor costs.

aluminussoma 5y ago

This is happening on my team, with a stark difference being that we are all paid dizzying tech salaries. Money only motivates people to an extent.

echelon 5y ago
Much of tech pays well enough that you can quit and live comfortably for awhile. Given the stressful pandemic, it's no wonder that many would rather take some extended time off. Or start new ventures. The assumption is that there will always be demand for these jobs, so there's little risk in leaving.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

Pay is one factor but rarely is so misaligned across all coworkers. My last job(MSP) had about 30 employees. I received my job entirely because 3 people quit at the same time freeing up some spots. In the job interview they talked about how they only expect 60% of my time to be billed. That they have work-life balance meetings and if you ever have an idea pose it. Those meetings lasted about a couple months and contributed no changes. Many months went by and it was certainly a 'beating continue until morale improvements." Personally I just stayed out of the office as much as possible and avoided a truckload of office drama. Long story short, the first head to leave was another senior guy. He took this job because he thought it was an upgrade. Except one night he was on-call and when the phone went off. He slept through it and missed it. It was one of my clients, large international enterprise that operates 24x7. The client demanded that he be fired and my boss told them he would fire him. Except he went around telling most people that we were only pretending to fire him. Except said boss now made his life hell and basically forced him to get a new job. Nothing surprising there. He got his old job back with an excellent raise and far better benefits. He went around telling EVERYONE. They couldn't just send him home neither. We were booked weeks in advanced and nobody documented anything. So when you give 2 weeks you are expected to worker harder than ever. Then another senior guy finds out he's severely underpaid. He was getting like $22/hour, minimum wage is $15/hr as a senior sysadmin with a decade of experience. He had home problems as well. He often worked 60-80 weeks. So he went and got a new job. Mind you we are now down 2 senior staff... their workload didnt disappear. It got piled onto everyone else. Then another senior guy, best friends with previous guy, and he was planning to stick it out. He didn't care about extra workload, he worked at his pace. Except working at his pace meant the scheduling folks badmouthed him regularly for not getting work done. He overheard that one. Then one day he was assigned a new client. They had like 3 employees, not a priority. They were nothing but they had an issue that a junior tech was taking hours to fix. Which should have been a 15 minute fix. The client complained to our boss. The boss then proceeded to chew out me and this other senior guy because we were dropping the ball. Mind you. I had only ever done 1 ticket for these folks many months before, they werent my client. Whereas this other senior guy never met them, never talked to them, and wasn't responsible for the ticket he was getting chewed out about. He held his tongue and went and got a new job that night. We're now 3 senior staff down. Mind you, I'm working 60hour weeks and capped it there. It was now performance review day for me. I'm in the office and I have 1 coworker on sick leave for 2 months because his blood pressure while sitting was 200/150. He was on the verge of heart attack. I go into performance review expecting a very nice raise. What I got was absolutely nothing. I got no praise. I was told I was late to work >40 times. Which broke my mind. I was never late, I was one of the first people in the office. He shows me my lates. Oh wait... all >40 times were me signing in on the weekend. I wasnt on call or on duty. I was responding to emergencies on weekends. But because I signed in after 9am. It counted as a late. So I was pretty angry naturally. I leave performance review feeling like I was smacked around. I go back to work and I'm talking to our contact at the same large enterprise above. They then tell me that $coworker was bad mouthing me. Saying an outage was caused by me. Except for one thing. It was caused by him. A router/firewall that I configured that had been stable and untouched for months. He decided needed to be modified to his standard and when he made the changes to his way. He took them down. I'd never really interacted with this coworker. We were the only 2 network guys, so we very very rarely cross paths in any way. I mentioned this to another coworker and apparently this coworker was constantly bad mouthing me. People volunteered and forwarded stuff that was absolutely absurd. Whatever, I move on. Cant be friends with everyone. Then this same guy comes into my office one day and is talking about how he's so angry with everyone and he's going to kill our manager. I'm just so baffled by this ridiculousness. I report this death threat and harassment to one of the bosses. I get fired the next day. Over the next 6 months or so, literally over 25 people were no longer working there. I had people from the community who knew me contacting me on linkedin to find out what happened there for months.