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I keep seeing this sentiment everywhere. I think it's just two continental plates continuing to rub together: 1. Employment is purely transactional. Time is ex

I keep seeing this sentiment everywhere. I think it's just two continental plates continuing to rub together: 1. Employment is purely transactional. Time is exchanged for money and money-equivalents. Full stop. 2. Your work is an act of self-expression. You derive meaning from your work, take pride in it, and feel a sense of ownership and responsibility in it. The work and its output bears the indelible mark of the mind and hands that crafted it. To try to separate the self from the fruit its hands bore is not only futile, but an act of alienation of human nature. (I don't know if I'm a Marxist yet, but everything he wrote about alienation makes a lot of sense to me.) (And I'm not saying 1 and 2 are the only 2 positions to take - I'm just saying they're the two opposing distilled ideas that are butting heads.) Combine these with the fact that (in the US): - you have ~no protections against being dismissed. - there is a tremendous power imbalance between the company (which is a fictitious entity composed of many sub-units, and can just be dissolved or restructured etc) and the employee (which is O(1) human organisms and prone to starvation) - employment isn't just the simple money and money-equivalents outlined in 1). It's access to affordable, competent healthcare. If I go without health insurance, I do not simply exchange some amortized payment plan for paying per-service. I incur a huge amount of risk if anything major happens to me or my family. - etc it's just a recipe for disaster and nobody being happy. We're left in this quagmire of everyone wanting to eat their cake and have it too. Personally, I think we should create a strong social safety net at the government/societal level (guaranteed income/guaranteed basics, healthcare, education, etc) and then make employment the sellsword's dream that companies seem to want it to be (they seem to enjoy being able to fire at-will more than they enjoy employees acting like family, afaict). Japan seems to have tried out the other extreme (where the company becomes a quasi-government and acts like your paternal-feudal lord) and is now having some problems with it. Just my analysis and 2c though.

luckylion 4y ago
"I switch jobs every 2 years for a raise" vs "my employer laid me off, this should be illegal". You get the good with the bad. It's easier to get hired if it's easy to get fired. I'd buy your point about power imbalance if it was about blue collar workers. But not for IT, where jobs are plentiful and compensation is through the roof. Why not start a coop with likeminded folks and give yourselves the protection from being laid off?
- gusgus01 4y ago
  "I switched jobs" lets you plan, eg a small gap in unemployment to reduce missed paychecks or to minimize chance of needing COBRA. "My employer laid me off" doesn't and adds on the implications of a lay off in your field of work, so you get to start your search after being unemployed and possibly in a field with many others looking for jobs.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    What I meant was: especially in IT employees feel zero loyalty to their employer. On the other side, they expect their employers to be loyal to them. The same is true in reverse, too, companies don't care about their employees but feel betrayed when the employees leave for greener pastures. Everyone plays the same game. If you want to work in a stable environment where you don't get fired and your promotions and raises are few and far between and planned years in advance, you go and find a job in some bureaucracy. If you want the benefits of fast-moving high-compensation private economy, it feels weird to complain that this also includes quick termination on occasion.
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  A lot of us don’t switch jobs every two years. The only reason I left my last employer after 5 years was because they were bought and shut down. I’d love to find somewhere I could just spend the next 20 years, but that’s hard to find. There’s no job security no matter how good you are.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
You call a company of fictitious entity, but What entity is not fictitious? A company is just an organized collection of humans, sometimes outnumbering the employees. Is a group of employees a fictitious entity? Is a union a fictitious entity? A family or a marriage? I don't see anything fictitious about it. If your point is that a company is not a human, of course it isn't. Nothing but a human is a human.
- ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
  I mainly meant that it's not a durable physical entity. It's fictitious in that it only exists as thought-stuff in all of our heads.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I'm not trying to argue but genuinely curious what you think that conveys because I have seen this point or a variation brought up multiple times by different people and it always goes over my head
    - ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
      I think it's an interesting philosophical question, like how it's presented in Sapiens [1]. But concretely what I mainly mean is, if a company "fails" (and while there's lots of different definitions of failing, let's here take the most extreme one, where the company runs out of money and just has to fold) then it's not like a person is dying. Debt will be restructured, employees can be laid off, it can be bought/assets sold off, and most notably the actual people who profit most off these companies are substantially protected since the incorporation protects their personal assets from liability. Their biggest threat is the loss of stock price they presumably own, and that's a risk profile they've very clearly accepted. So when a company "dies", it's typically not really death in nearly the same sense that we normally think of the word. And it's slow, with (typically) no one person being a big load-bearing point, and tons of options and exit strategies and protections for people's personal affairs. This resiliency, flexibility, and non-corporealness means companies almost always have more power in negotiations. Compared to a human of mortal flesh, who typically have somewhere between 0 and a few months of runway before cobra payments and lack of income start to strain spousal relationships, mortgage payments come in danger, etc. And the 1-2 breadwinners, either of whose income loss is an existential risk to the family, are single points of failure if you're laid off or fired. Are typically scrambling to lock in employment again.

luckylion 4y ago

"I switch jobs every 2 years for a raise" vs "my employer laid me off, this should be illegal". You get the good with the bad. It's easier to get hired if it's easy to get fired. I'd buy your point about power imbalance if it was about blue collar workers. But not for IT, where jobs are plentiful and compensation is through the roof. Why not start a coop with likeminded folks and give yourselves the protection from being laid off?

gusgus01 4y ago
"I switched jobs" lets you plan, eg a small gap in unemployment to reduce missed paychecks or to minimize chance of needing COBRA. "My employer laid me off" doesn't and adds on the implications of a lay off in your field of work, so you get to start your search after being unemployed and possibly in a field with many others looking for jobs.
- luckylion 4y ago
  What I meant was: especially in IT employees feel zero loyalty to their employer. On the other side, they expect their employers to be loyal to them. The same is true in reverse, too, companies don't care about their employees but feel betrayed when the employees leave for greener pastures. Everyone plays the same game. If you want to work in a stable environment where you don't get fired and your promotions and raises are few and far between and planned years in advance, you go and find a job in some bureaucracy. If you want the benefits of fast-moving high-compensation private economy, it feels weird to complain that this also includes quick termination on occasion.
BizarreByte 4y ago
A lot of us don’t switch jobs every two years. The only reason I left my last employer after 5 years was because they were bought and shut down. I’d love to find somewhere I could just spend the next 20 years, but that’s hard to find. There’s no job security no matter how good you are.

s1artibartfast 4y ago

You call a company of fictitious entity, but What entity is not fictitious? A company is just an organized collection of humans, sometimes outnumbering the employees. Is a group of employees a fictitious entity? Is a union a fictitious entity? A family or a marriage? I don't see anything fictitious about it. If your point is that a company is not a human, of course it isn't. Nothing but a human is a human.

ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
I mainly meant that it's not a durable physical entity. It's fictitious in that it only exists as thought-stuff in all of our heads.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I'm not trying to argue but genuinely curious what you think that conveys because I have seen this point or a variation brought up multiple times by different people and it always goes over my head
  - ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
    I think it's an interesting philosophical question, like how it's presented in Sapiens [1]. But concretely what I mainly mean is, if a company "fails" (and while there's lots of different definitions of failing, let's here take the most extreme one, where the company runs out of money and just has to fold) then it's not like a person is dying. Debt will be restructured, employees can be laid off, it can be bought/assets sold off, and most notably the actual people who profit most off these companies are substantially protected since the incorporation protects their personal assets from liability. Their biggest threat is the loss of stock price they presumably own, and that's a risk profile they've very clearly accepted. So when a company "dies", it's typically not really death in nearly the same sense that we normally think of the word. And it's slow, with (typically) no one person being a big load-bearing point, and tons of options and exit strategies and protections for people's personal affairs. This resiliency, flexibility, and non-corporealness means companies almost always have more power in negotiations. Compared to a human of mortal flesh, who typically have somewhere between 0 and a few months of runway before cobra payments and lack of income start to strain spousal relationships, mortgage payments come in danger, etc. And the 1-2 breadwinners, either of whose income loss is an existential risk to the family, are single points of failure if you're laid off or fired. Are typically scrambling to lock in employment again.