5 ms·

I very much take a mercenary approach to my jobs. At my very first software job I remember seeing a let go employee walking sadly through the office with a box

I very much take a mercenary approach to my jobs. At my very first software job I remember seeing a let go employee walking sadly through the office with a box of his possessions under one arm and a potted plant in the other. Since then I have brought nothing personal into work. If I'm let go I just have to grab my keys and I'm out. Work is something I do to earn money. If companies can replace people for less or cut them they do. Why be loyal in that kind of environment? I will work hard for the money they pay me though. At one point I got a job offer for 25% more than I currently made. I told my current director at the time that I got a job offer for 40% more. The director matched the imaginary 40% and I stayed for another year. This company habitually fired people for the most minor of productivity drop offs. They had just recently promoted me without providing a raise. You reap what you sow. I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that. Remote work makes that even harder to find now.

darkstar_16 4y ago
Are you me ?
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Probably
kungito 4y ago
At my first job our manager was fired around the time his partner died of cancer and he was left with 2 little kids. He was slacking but also they knew about the whole situation. He was there for over 10 years. That changed me forever
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  That's really harsh. At the job I mentioned in the above they pip'd me because I delivered 8 points per week instead of 10 for 2 weeks right when COVID lockdown hit. They couldn't understand why the world melting down and my kids suddenly home schooling would have any affect on my productivity. Companies treat us as replaceable widgets. If widget A is broken just throw it away and use widget B. No reason to be loyal in that environment.
  - _vbnz 4y ago
    To the suits we're just a translation layer between the business requirements to deployed code. And they'll be happy to reduce the work to story points and neo-Taylorism, so they can try to treat each person as an interchangeable unit of production, and then minimise costs. In an era of trillon-dollar megacorps and multi-billionaire CEOs, Marx was ahead of his time: > He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. [...] As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself
    - flashgordon 4y ago
      Ooh ooh ooh. I am unable to hold myself back but I'll try. The pipping system in most companies (especially "new age" faangs) is very very similar to the credit rating scheme. You are always captured, nay reduced, to a metric. All context is ignored/forgotten. And even worse it is a lot easier to drop on a metric than to rise back up again because when you drop it is purely objective but when you try to make up it is rarely ever objective. Only thing the faangs have done differently is lasted a bit longer in hiding their shadiness than their wall st counter parts! This unveiling could actually good be great for innovation again?
- malfist 4y ago
  I have a friend who spent 30 years working for a factory building aircraft for the military. One year, a new lead manager comes in and decides he wants everyone on the floor to have a college degree and fires my friend and the six other people there without college degrees. It really messed up my friend, he was really close to a comfortable retirement, but had to borrow against his 401k to make it through until he could get another job. He was the safety officer for the entire factory, 15+ years of experience doing that. Now he's too close to retirement age and no one will hire him, even though he's personally a long way from retirement. So now he's working a physically demanding job on the line making cars. All that experience and skills with safety? Junk. No company has loyalty to their employees. It's all about the next quarter.
  - mooreds 4y ago
    Wow, that is a heart-wrenching story. What a shame. > It's all about the next quarter. Not sure that follows from your friend's story. In that particular case, it seems to have been about bad management, unless having only college-degreed folks on the floor improved short term financials. Definitely an example of a short sighted decision, though.
  - flashgordon 4y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if the manager who came in with this edict was specifically brought in to "weed" out those who could "escape" into a comfortable retirement just to extract more labor out of them!
goostavos 4y ago
>I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that CAN that even exist? The mercenary approach seems to me the only one that doesn't fall prey to living in a fantasy about how things "Should" be -- there is only the way they are: it's a business relationship. Younger me thought otherwise. I was big into startup culture, enjoyed the comradery of working long hours, taking pride in this thing we were building together. Management was great. Hierarchy was minimal. I felt "valued"... And then we were all let go with a phone call. I remember just being like "...Ohhhhh. Right." It's a business relationship. That's as far as it goes. Anything else is an illusion.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Not just a business relationship. A fundamentally adversarial business relationship. Every dollar paid to me is a dollar less for the founder/VCs.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  > > I would love to work in an environment where > > I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that > CAN that even exist? Theoretically, yes. Practically... it's always going to be insanely rare. I would be very loyal to a place that helped me grow as a person with continuing education opportunities. I would also be very loyal to a place that had a solid balance of feature delivery versus vs. technical debt management. (I feel this benefits the company in the medium to long run as well, even moreso than the engineers) Those things would not necessarily be hard to achieve and would pay for themselves. Yet nobody actually seems to run their company that way. I guess the fundamental roadblock is that so many things in capitalism force you to think only about the short game. Thinking even 12 months ahead is often viewed as sheer insanity. As an engineer, I understand (at least at a high level) the pressures faced by higher-ups. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Investors want results sooner or later. I wish that product managers and executives expended a fraction of the effort to understand what makes good engineering. Higher-ups often don't have the engineering chops to understand why good engineering processes can be such force multipliers enabling faster delivery in 18, 24, 72, whatever months... and that's okay, but they are also aggressively disinterested in actually understanding the processes that produce the product they are selling. Depressing.
wg0 4y ago
Here's a very controversial and bitter take. Aiming for maximum downvotes. It's only when you get fired, you start to see clearly and are able to come out of that flowery lala land of "we're a team", "we're a family" and all that misplaced rather abused analogies. It's just a commercial relationship rooted in generating profit (nothing wrong with that) for which have to collaborate with others. There's no team, there's no family. Any prose and poetry beides that is also about squeezing every ounce of profit. It is a for profit activity so at least be direct and honest about it and refrain from borrowing analogies from other social constructs.
- whstl 4y ago
  I don't think it's controversial. Or bitter. Maybe I disagree about the part about "only when you get fired". To me it was enough seeing people getting fired, or having promotions postponed multiple times for no reason, or seeing a co-worker getting a verbal offers of a raise getting rescinded after they denied a job offer from another company, or having a C-level give me silent treatment when I disagreed with stupid release deadlines.
- soundsgoodtome 4y ago
  Can you even downvote on HN? E: For reference, I wouldn’t downvote this because it ain’t wrong.
  - buggy6257 4y ago
    Once you have enough karma (I forget the threshold several hundred but less than 1000) the downvote button is available to you yes.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  I've never been fired but pretty much realized this from job one. I do agree though that for the people who don't understand this and look at the company as a place where they work with friends towards a common goal getting fired is likely the best way for them to understand that they are all just cogs in a heartless machine. I had a team member fired the other day (he probably deserved it) and no one even bothered to tell me. I figured he quit and reached out wishing him well. I felt pretty awkward when I found out he was let go. The problem was they aren't even back filling his role, I just have to pick up the slack. He does a job totally different than mine that I really have no experience doing. I'm just winging it and not really caring about it. If they don't replace the guy I'm not putting in extra hours to ensure what he was doing gets done. Give me half his salary and I'll care.
JohnFen 4y ago
> I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that. Start your own business.
- mooreds 4y ago
  I have friends who did that. They built a consulting company where they get to build the culture they want. Those kinds of companies (the examples I know of are small, < 200 folks) actually have a chance of maintaining a coherent, caring culture. Not to say that folks don't get laid off or tough decisions made, but humanity is still present. I enjoyed Small Giants for more profiles of these kinds of companies: https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-Anniversary/dp/014310960X https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-A...
- ravagat 4y ago
  +1 on this, I'd add if you ever do try to do it in a non-technical industry/business and use your technology/software experience as a means to create more efficiency for the business.
throwawaycopter 4y ago
You just described with incredible precision my approach to jobs and career. The only difference is that I make a point of leaving my current job in 18 to 24 months. That is the sweet spot. No matter how good or bad I think the job is. Always get a raise in the switch. Rinse and repeat. I actually avoid getting promotions in whatever is my current job, those are detrimental, seldom the raise is compatible with the increase in responsibility. I worked for companies I liked and for companies I personally hated, the procedure is always the same. Has been working wonders for me in the past 2 decades.
- itbeho 4y ago
  I follow a similar pattern. A current employer almost never raises salary commensurate with market rates after 2 or more years.

darkstar_16 4y ago

Are you me ?

wonderwonder 4y ago
Probably

kungito 4y ago

At my first job our manager was fired around the time his partner died of cancer and he was left with 2 little kids. He was slacking but also they knew about the whole situation. He was there for over 10 years. That changed me forever

wonderwonder 4y ago
That's really harsh. At the job I mentioned in the above they pip'd me because I delivered 8 points per week instead of 10 for 2 weeks right when COVID lockdown hit. They couldn't understand why the world melting down and my kids suddenly home schooling would have any affect on my productivity. Companies treat us as replaceable widgets. If widget A is broken just throw it away and use widget B. No reason to be loyal in that environment.
- _vbnz 4y ago
  To the suits we're just a translation layer between the business requirements to deployed code. And they'll be happy to reduce the work to story points and neo-Taylorism, so they can try to treat each person as an interchangeable unit of production, and then minimise costs. In an era of trillon-dollar megacorps and multi-billionaire CEOs, Marx was ahead of his time: > He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. [...] As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself
  - flashgordon 4y ago
    Ooh ooh ooh. I am unable to hold myself back but I'll try. The pipping system in most companies (especially "new age" faangs) is very very similar to the credit rating scheme. You are always captured, nay reduced, to a metric. All context is ignored/forgotten. And even worse it is a lot easier to drop on a metric than to rise back up again because when you drop it is purely objective but when you try to make up it is rarely ever objective. Only thing the faangs have done differently is lasted a bit longer in hiding their shadiness than their wall st counter parts! This unveiling could actually good be great for innovation again?
malfist 4y ago
I have a friend who spent 30 years working for a factory building aircraft for the military. One year, a new lead manager comes in and decides he wants everyone on the floor to have a college degree and fires my friend and the six other people there without college degrees. It really messed up my friend, he was really close to a comfortable retirement, but had to borrow against his 401k to make it through until he could get another job. He was the safety officer for the entire factory, 15+ years of experience doing that. Now he's too close to retirement age and no one will hire him, even though he's personally a long way from retirement. So now he's working a physically demanding job on the line making cars. All that experience and skills with safety? Junk. No company has loyalty to their employees. It's all about the next quarter.
- mooreds 4y ago
  Wow, that is a heart-wrenching story. What a shame. > It's all about the next quarter. Not sure that follows from your friend's story. In that particular case, it seems to have been about bad management, unless having only college-degreed folks on the floor improved short term financials. Definitely an example of a short sighted decision, though.
- flashgordon 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the manager who came in with this edict was specifically brought in to "weed" out those who could "escape" into a comfortable retirement just to extract more labor out of them!

goostavos 4y ago

>I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that CAN that even exist? The mercenary approach seems to me the only one that doesn't fall prey to living in a fantasy about how things "Should" be -- there is only the way they are: it's a business relationship. Younger me thought otherwise. I was big into startup culture, enjoyed the comradery of working long hours, taking pride in this thing we were building together. Management was great. Hierarchy was minimal. I felt "valued"... And then we were all let go with a phone call. I remember just being like "...Ohhhhh. Right." It's a business relationship. That's as far as it goes. Anything else is an illusion.

throwawaysleep 4y ago
Not just a business relationship. A fundamentally adversarial business relationship. Every dollar paid to me is a dollar less for the founder/VCs.
JohnBooty 4y ago
> > I would love to work in an environment where > > I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that > CAN that even exist? Theoretically, yes. Practically... it's always going to be insanely rare. I would be very loyal to a place that helped me grow as a person with continuing education opportunities. I would also be very loyal to a place that had a solid balance of feature delivery versus vs. technical debt management. (I feel this benefits the company in the medium to long run as well, even moreso than the engineers) Those things would not necessarily be hard to achieve and would pay for themselves. Yet nobody actually seems to run their company that way. I guess the fundamental roadblock is that so many things in capitalism force you to think only about the short game. Thinking even 12 months ahead is often viewed as sheer insanity. As an engineer, I understand (at least at a high level) the pressures faced by higher-ups. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Investors want results sooner or later. I wish that product managers and executives expended a fraction of the effort to understand what makes good engineering. Higher-ups often don't have the engineering chops to understand why good engineering processes can be such force multipliers enabling faster delivery in 18, 24, 72, whatever months... and that's okay, but they are also aggressively disinterested in actually understanding the processes that produce the product they are selling. Depressing.

wg0 4y ago

Here's a very controversial and bitter take. Aiming for maximum downvotes. It's only when you get fired, you start to see clearly and are able to come out of that flowery lala land of "we're a team", "we're a family" and all that misplaced rather abused analogies. It's just a commercial relationship rooted in generating profit (nothing wrong with that) for which have to collaborate with others. There's no team, there's no family. Any prose and poetry beides that is also about squeezing every ounce of profit. It is a for profit activity so at least be direct and honest about it and refrain from borrowing analogies from other social constructs.

whstl 4y ago
I don't think it's controversial. Or bitter. Maybe I disagree about the part about "only when you get fired". To me it was enough seeing people getting fired, or having promotions postponed multiple times for no reason, or seeing a co-worker getting a verbal offers of a raise getting rescinded after they denied a job offer from another company, or having a C-level give me silent treatment when I disagreed with stupid release deadlines.
soundsgoodtome 4y ago
Can you even downvote on HN? E: For reference, I wouldn’t downvote this because it ain’t wrong.
- buggy6257 4y ago
  Once you have enough karma (I forget the threshold several hundred but less than 1000) the downvote button is available to you yes.
wonderwonder 4y ago
I've never been fired but pretty much realized this from job one. I do agree though that for the people who don't understand this and look at the company as a place where they work with friends towards a common goal getting fired is likely the best way for them to understand that they are all just cogs in a heartless machine. I had a team member fired the other day (he probably deserved it) and no one even bothered to tell me. I figured he quit and reached out wishing him well. I felt pretty awkward when I found out he was let go. The problem was they aren't even back filling his role, I just have to pick up the slack. He does a job totally different than mine that I really have no experience doing. I'm just winging it and not really caring about it. If they don't replace the guy I'm not putting in extra hours to ensure what he was doing gets done. Give me half his salary and I'll care.

JohnFen 4y ago

> I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that. Start your own business.

mooreds 4y ago
I have friends who did that. They built a consulting company where they get to build the culture they want. Those kinds of companies (the examples I know of are small, < 200 folks) actually have a chance of maintaining a coherent, caring culture. Not to say that folks don't get laid off or tough decisions made, but humanity is still present. I enjoyed Small Giants for more profiles of these kinds of companies: https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-Anniversary/dp/014310960X https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-A...
ravagat 4y ago
+1 on this, I'd add if you ever do try to do it in a non-technical industry/business and use your technology/software experience as a means to create more efficiency for the business.

throwawaycopter 4y ago

You just described with incredible precision my approach to jobs and career. The only difference is that I make a point of leaving my current job in 18 to 24 months. That is the sweet spot. No matter how good or bad I think the job is. Always get a raise in the switch. Rinse and repeat. I actually avoid getting promotions in whatever is my current job, those are detrimental, seldom the raise is compatible with the increase in responsibility. I worked for companies I liked and for companies I personally hated, the procedure is always the same. Has been working wonders for me in the past 2 decades.

itbeho 4y ago
I follow a similar pattern. A current employer almost never raises salary commensurate with market rates after 2 or more years.