4 ms·

The dog analogy is terrible. You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your em

by jwr 4y ago

The dog analogy is terrible. You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer. I really dislike the whole "let's build the team spirit and be a great family together" approach. It's dishonest, and often done with the (explicit or implicit) intention of brainwashing. Also, this goes both ways: I was an employer for the majority of my professional life. I had the best intentions and tried to be "good" and a friend to my employees, only to get screwed over many times in various ways by people later on. I learned that a professional relationship is different from a family relationship, and while you should try to be fair, you should never confuse the two.

uxcolumbo 4y ago
Interesting to see it from a (smaller) employers point of view. Can you give some examples, ie how did you do things before getting screwed and what have you changed after? What are your top lessons you learned?
- jwr 4y ago
  I don't want to talk about specifics, because these stories involve real people. But some examples from the bad side: I've seen employees quit right after an extensive training period, disappear without a word, fake being ill for many months to get social security money, fake an illness to avoid a difficult assignment, and sue the employer for (imagined, not real) theft from a company that was going bankrupt. I've also seen people steal equipment from the company to pay for their drug addiction. All of this behavior was seen in people that the company previously worked with for months to years, and believe me when I say the companies involved were really doing their best to "be good" to employees. We're not talking Amazon warehouse jobs here. More generally, I learned to treat the relationship as a professional one. I strive to be fair and play by the book, but no longer have any expectations of people acting "fairly" or "nicely" towards their employer. Similarly, I don't think anybody should expect their employer to be their family — business decisions are made differently from family decisions. I should probably also mention that my disillusionment led me to starting a bootstrapped business where I have no investors and no employees, so that I don't have to depend on anyone. All this doesn't mean that we all have to be mean or evil to each other. Everything can still be fair. But an employee should not expect a company to be "good to them", nor should a company expect an employee to be "good to them". There are business boundaries to how far "good" can go on the company side, and on the employee side there are people who err on the side of treating a company like family (wrong) and who treat the company as the devil incarnate (wrong too).
nextaccountic 4y ago
> You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer. I will add that their interests are often in conflict with the interests of the employees, and as such, in those matters the employer is best viewed as an adversary.

by jwr 4y ago

uxcolumbo 4y ago

Interesting to see it from a (smaller) employers point of view. Can you give some examples, ie how did you do things before getting screwed and what have you changed after? What are your top lessons you learned?

jwr 4y ago
I don't want to talk about specifics, because these stories involve real people. But some examples from the bad side: I've seen employees quit right after an extensive training period, disappear without a word, fake being ill for many months to get social security money, fake an illness to avoid a difficult assignment, and sue the employer for (imagined, not real) theft from a company that was going bankrupt. I've also seen people steal equipment from the company to pay for their drug addiction. All of this behavior was seen in people that the company previously worked with for months to years, and believe me when I say the companies involved were really doing their best to "be good" to employees. We're not talking Amazon warehouse jobs here. More generally, I learned to treat the relationship as a professional one. I strive to be fair and play by the book, but no longer have any expectations of people acting "fairly" or "nicely" towards their employer. Similarly, I don't think anybody should expect their employer to be their family — business decisions are made differently from family decisions. I should probably also mention that my disillusionment led me to starting a bootstrapped business where I have no investors and no employees, so that I don't have to depend on anyone. All this doesn't mean that we all have to be mean or evil to each other. Everything can still be fair. But an employee should not expect a company to be "good to them", nor should a company expect an employee to be "good to them". There are business boundaries to how far "good" can go on the company side, and on the employee side there are people who err on the side of treating a company like family (wrong) and who treat the company as the devil incarnate (wrong too).

nextaccountic 4y ago

> You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer. I will add that their interests are often in conflict with the interests of the employees, and as such, in those matters the employer is best viewed as an adversary.