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Your employer doesn’t care about you the same way your parents would. Good employers care about enabling you to do your job effectively and efficiently. But it’

by f6v 4y ago

Your employer doesn’t care about you the same way your parents would. Good employers care about enabling you to do your job effectively and efficiently. But it’s all transactional. Doesn’t mean that you can’t find an arrangement that’s good for both you and employer. But don’t ever think it’s like a family. Saves you a lot of frustration. See it for what it is.

m0llusk 4y ago
This can happen, but Paul "Kinko" Orfalea's book "Copy This!" goes into a lot of detail about how it makes sense to care about employees as people and doing so actually contributes greatly to the bottom line. His company "Kinko's Copies" is not the greatest tech leader ever, but it provided basic services to ordinary people using low paid labor and managed to have employee morale and retention far above other companies in this class, fast food companies being perhaps notable for bad employee morale and turnover so extreme that at times it threatens operations.
- r0p3 4y ago
  This example illustrates the first comment's point: it is fundamentally a transactional relationship. "Caring contributes greatly to the bottom line" means the goal of "caring" is increased productivity.
  - m0llusk 4y ago
    Not to belabor the point, but if I understand the book correctly Paul did things this way because he believed it was the right thing to do and it was the best fit for him and his personality. Relating this way to employees allowed him to live with himself and humanized the business. So the increased productivity was a happy coincidence of his insistence on positive human interaction being a foundational element of business operations. He never really expected to be successful or anything like the great success which unfolded. The entire business was basically winging it in order to make money because he had trouble following more common paths.
don-code 4y ago
It feels easy to think that it's the case that your employer and coworkers are a family. In my case, I stayed six years in my first job out of college - as did most of my coworkers (the company was pretty stable up until the very end, when I left). I made a lateral shift within the company, and also made it to senior, under their wing. The illusion started to come apart after a layoff (35% company-wide, 45% in my department, 60% of my team). I started looking for another employer at that point, because it was pretty obvious I'd only been retained to keep the lights on. When I gave my resignation, I wasn't met with any attempt at retention like higher pay. I _was_ told that it'd be personally detrimental for me to leave, because the company was my family (they knew I'd had some unrelated domestic issues that year), and without them, I'd be lost. And of course, I agreed with them - for one week, after which I shook my head, said "what on earth am I thinking?", and resigned again. It took some time to realize that it was mostly a manipulative attempt on their part.
- f6v 4y ago
  > It took some time to realize that it was mostly a manipulative attempt on their part. Then again, there’re people that manipulate their family members. So I get why it’s confusing for some.

by f6v 4y ago

m0llusk 4y ago

This can happen, but Paul "Kinko" Orfalea's book "Copy This!" goes into a lot of detail about how it makes sense to care about employees as people and doing so actually contributes greatly to the bottom line. His company "Kinko's Copies" is not the greatest tech leader ever, but it provided basic services to ordinary people using low paid labor and managed to have employee morale and retention far above other companies in this class, fast food companies being perhaps notable for bad employee morale and turnover so extreme that at times it threatens operations.

r0p3 4y ago
This example illustrates the first comment's point: it is fundamentally a transactional relationship. "Caring contributes greatly to the bottom line" means the goal of "caring" is increased productivity.
- m0llusk 4y ago
  Not to belabor the point, but if I understand the book correctly Paul did things this way because he believed it was the right thing to do and it was the best fit for him and his personality. Relating this way to employees allowed him to live with himself and humanized the business. So the increased productivity was a happy coincidence of his insistence on positive human interaction being a foundational element of business operations. He never really expected to be successful or anything like the great success which unfolded. The entire business was basically winging it in order to make money because he had trouble following more common paths.

don-code 4y ago

It feels easy to think that it's the case that your employer and coworkers are a family. In my case, I stayed six years in my first job out of college - as did most of my coworkers (the company was pretty stable up until the very end, when I left). I made a lateral shift within the company, and also made it to senior, under their wing. The illusion started to come apart after a layoff (35% company-wide, 45% in my department, 60% of my team). I started looking for another employer at that point, because it was pretty obvious I'd only been retained to keep the lights on. When I gave my resignation, I wasn't met with any attempt at retention like higher pay. I _was_ told that it'd be personally detrimental for me to leave, because the company was my family (they knew I'd had some unrelated domestic issues that year), and without them, I'd be lost. And of course, I agreed with them - for one week, after which I shook my head, said "what on earth am I thinking?", and resigned again. It took some time to realize that it was mostly a manipulative attempt on their part.

f6v 4y ago
> It took some time to realize that it was mostly a manipulative attempt on their part. Then again, there’re people that manipulate their family members. So I get why it’s confusing for some.