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Why wouldn't people do this? Employees are there to: - Collect a paycheck - Enjoy their job as much as the employer will let them - Progress in their career

by blagie 3y ago

Why wouldn't people do this? Employees are there to: - Collect a paycheck - Enjoy their job as much as the employer will let them - Progress in their career In 2023, there is usually zero loyalty in either direction. Much of management is about how you get people who fundamentally don't care about you (beyond the above) to do something in your interest. This goes all the way up to most CEOs, so "your interest" means the CEO's interest (while not being fired by the Board).

TonyTrapp 3y ago
What a bleak view. This is not my experience at all and doesn't match that of most of my friends either. Many have been loyal to their employer for years, and it goes the other way around as well.
- relativeadv 3y ago
  I was loyal until I was laid-off. Never again.
  - mikecoles 3y ago
    Did you stop dating after the first time you were dumped?
    - doubled112 3y ago
      If I read too far into the comments on topics like this, I can’t help but imagine some did. First sign of BS, give up and never try again.
    - lapser 3y ago
      This is inherently not the same, though. Sure, companies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but a company's first and foremost interest is profit for the shareholder. For a person in a relationship, it's about finding a partner that makes them happy. In addition, you are expendable to a company, whereas people build a relationship and become more and more invested over time. Way more than a company becomes invested in an employee.
      - blagie 3y ago
        No, a company's first and foremost interest is not profit for the shareholder. Corporations don't have interests. They're abstractions -- ways of organizing people to be productive members of society. Individuals within those corporations have interests. If you look at a company as if it were a sentient human, you'll get to the wrong conclusions. There is no moral imperative for a company to survive. There's a moral imperative to make sure everyone has gainful, productive employment, healthy levels of stress, etc. If you're at Google, and you can work on: (1) an advertising user-profiling technology with no social benefit but contribution to Google's bottom line (2) a civics-focused open-source project with no benefit to shareholder value, but significant value to society Which would you pick? If you're at Enron pre-scandal, and can either: (1) successfully cover up evidence to prevent the scandal; or (2) blow the whistle Which do you pick? That's where the moral imperative sits. These things are much more complex with a partner. There's a moral imperative not to betray your partner, as well as one to not support immoral actions, and some balance. With corporations, there is no such moral imperative. If an unethically-organized corporation dies, and resources move into ethically-organized ones, the world is better off.
    - blagie 3y ago
      I think the key, in both cases, is to learn more about relationships, and in the later case, about the nature of corporations. It's perfectly reasonable to make a commitment to "not be evil," and to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the founding mission of Google. That's very different from loyalty to a colorful logo, a set of incorporation documents, and an abstraction.
- cm2012 3y ago
  People are loyal to people. In any org your boss could be replaced tomorrow with someone who doesn't give a shit about you.
  - TonyTrapp 3y ago
    True. And it does happen. But I don't think it happens at the scale the post I replied to seems to suggest. I hear about it sometimes, but not so often that it would be an endemic thing that has to be assumed to be the default in 2023.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - galleywest200 3y ago
      I wonder which jobs you are thinking about here. Quite a lot of people work in a retail or food service position and I can assure you this feeling of "nobody caring" is absolutely present at that level. I assume people on this forum immediately picture high paying engineering jobs and not the average worker's job.
      - TonyTrapp 3y ago
        I'm assuming the kind of jobs where asking ChatGPT (which was the context) could be in any way relevant to the job at hand, and I don't think retail is a particularly practical fit here. Yes, I'm talking about engineering jobs and the like.
maximus-decimus 3y ago
Because of work ethics? In a world where everybody thinks like that, your plumber will map your house and sell the plans to burglars.
- nicenewtemp84 3y ago
  Actively assisting a crime is very different than passively doing something a little wreckless. Do you think contractors shred plans of your house after you hire them for a remodel? Or do they just throw them away in a dumpster, with your address on them, behind their offices.
- blagie 3y ago
  Work ethics dictate a duty to other humans, not to corporations. The two are sometimes the same, and sometimes very different. To the plumber point, if you work for a plumbing corporation which requires you to up-sell unneeded repairs, you have no ethical obligation to do so, and indeed, you have an ethical obligation to subvert that particular requirement. On the other hand, you do have a duty to do plumbing right. Capisce?
faitswulff 3y ago
Yeah, that’s why it’s funny to me!
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Ethically speaking, you owe your employer the labor you promised for the wages agreed on. If they ask you to care about a data policy, and they're paying you to care, and you took the money, then you should care. Morally speaking, you can decide that the employer doesn't have loyalty to you, so you won't have loyalty to the employer. But if that's your morality, then there is no rationale for being either loyal or disloyal, because you'll just mirror what someone else does. This makes the decision less meaningful than tossing a coin; it's a morality of randomness, which is dysfunctional and anti-social. It's better to live your own principles (such as loyalty) regardless of whether someone gives you the same back. Practically speaking, doing your job the way your job wants you to do it (caring about data privacy) helps you in your career and improves the business, and improving the business keeps you in a job and again helps your career. It's also a quarter of your life. Don't you want to do your job as well as you can, so that all that time wasn't a waste?
- blagie 3y ago
  Your employer is a corporation, not a human. Corporations are an abstraction. There are two ethical perspectives one can take: 1) Mutual loyalty. This changed in the eighties, as jobs became transactional. Typical SWE tenure is three years today, and human resources are treated as just that, resources. 2) Improving the world. Would you rather individuals act in the interests of Shell Oil, Phillip Morris, Microsoft, Lockheed-Martin, or in the interests of society as a whole? Why do you care that a particular corporation survives or dies, rather than everyone being better off? If Google is replaced by DuckDuckGo or Bing, and customers / investors / employees switch over, what's the moral value of that? It makes rational sense to do your job as well as you can, but "as well as you can" isn't defined the same as "to the benefit of maximizing shareholder value." Most people I know switch viewpoints after a decade or two in industry. It takes an event or understanding the internals of corporations well enough. As a footnote, "doing your job the way your job wants you to do it" doesn't even make sense. A corporation doesn't want anything. It's a collection of individuals. Your boss might want something, the CEO might want something different, yet a different thing might be in the interests of shareholder value, something completely different in the interests of customers, and a policy document stored on the intranet might dictate something yet different.

by blagie 3y ago

TonyTrapp 3y ago

What a bleak view. This is not my experience at all and doesn't match that of most of my friends either. Many have been loyal to their employer for years, and it goes the other way around as well.

relativeadv 3y ago
I was loyal until I was laid-off. Never again.
- mikecoles 3y ago
  Did you stop dating after the first time you were dumped?
  - doubled112 3y ago
    If I read too far into the comments on topics like this, I can’t help but imagine some did. First sign of BS, give up and never try again.
  - lapser 3y ago
    This is inherently not the same, though. Sure, companies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but a company's first and foremost interest is profit for the shareholder. For a person in a relationship, it's about finding a partner that makes them happy. In addition, you are expendable to a company, whereas people build a relationship and become more and more invested over time. Way more than a company becomes invested in an employee.
    - blagie 3y ago
      No, a company's first and foremost interest is not profit for the shareholder. Corporations don't have interests. They're abstractions -- ways of organizing people to be productive members of society. Individuals within those corporations have interests. If you look at a company as if it were a sentient human, you'll get to the wrong conclusions. There is no moral imperative for a company to survive. There's a moral imperative to make sure everyone has gainful, productive employment, healthy levels of stress, etc. If you're at Google, and you can work on: (1) an advertising user-profiling technology with no social benefit but contribution to Google's bottom line (2) a civics-focused open-source project with no benefit to shareholder value, but significant value to society Which would you pick? If you're at Enron pre-scandal, and can either: (1) successfully cover up evidence to prevent the scandal; or (2) blow the whistle Which do you pick? That's where the moral imperative sits. These things are much more complex with a partner. There's a moral imperative not to betray your partner, as well as one to not support immoral actions, and some balance. With corporations, there is no such moral imperative. If an unethically-organized corporation dies, and resources move into ethically-organized ones, the world is better off.
  - blagie 3y ago
    I think the key, in both cases, is to learn more about relationships, and in the later case, about the nature of corporations. It's perfectly reasonable to make a commitment to "not be evil," and to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the founding mission of Google. That's very different from loyalty to a colorful logo, a set of incorporation documents, and an abstraction.
cm2012 3y ago
People are loyal to people. In any org your boss could be replaced tomorrow with someone who doesn't give a shit about you.
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  True. And it does happen. But I don't think it happens at the scale the post I replied to seems to suggest. I hear about it sometimes, but not so often that it would be an endemic thing that has to be assumed to be the default in 2023.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - galleywest200 3y ago
    I wonder which jobs you are thinking about here. Quite a lot of people work in a retail or food service position and I can assure you this feeling of "nobody caring" is absolutely present at that level. I assume people on this forum immediately picture high paying engineering jobs and not the average worker's job.
    - TonyTrapp 3y ago
      I'm assuming the kind of jobs where asking ChatGPT (which was the context) could be in any way relevant to the job at hand, and I don't think retail is a particularly practical fit here. Yes, I'm talking about engineering jobs and the like.

maximus-decimus 3y ago

Because of work ethics? In a world where everybody thinks like that, your plumber will map your house and sell the plans to burglars.

nicenewtemp84 3y ago
Actively assisting a crime is very different than passively doing something a little wreckless. Do you think contractors shred plans of your house after you hire them for a remodel? Or do they just throw them away in a dumpster, with your address on them, behind their offices.
blagie 3y ago
Work ethics dictate a duty to other humans, not to corporations. The two are sometimes the same, and sometimes very different. To the plumber point, if you work for a plumbing corporation which requires you to up-sell unneeded repairs, you have no ethical obligation to do so, and indeed, you have an ethical obligation to subvert that particular requirement. On the other hand, you do have a duty to do plumbing right. Capisce?

faitswulff 3y ago

Yeah, that’s why it’s funny to me!

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

Ethically speaking, you owe your employer the labor you promised for the wages agreed on. If they ask you to care about a data policy, and they're paying you to care, and you took the money, then you should care. Morally speaking, you can decide that the employer doesn't have loyalty to you, so you won't have loyalty to the employer. But if that's your morality, then there is no rationale for being either loyal or disloyal, because you'll just mirror what someone else does. This makes the decision less meaningful than tossing a coin; it's a morality of randomness, which is dysfunctional and anti-social. It's better to live your own principles (such as loyalty) regardless of whether someone gives you the same back. Practically speaking, doing your job the way your job wants you to do it (caring about data privacy) helps you in your career and improves the business, and improving the business keeps you in a job and again helps your career. It's also a quarter of your life. Don't you want to do your job as well as you can, so that all that time wasn't a waste?

blagie 3y ago
Your employer is a corporation, not a human. Corporations are an abstraction. There are two ethical perspectives one can take: 1) Mutual loyalty. This changed in the eighties, as jobs became transactional. Typical SWE tenure is three years today, and human resources are treated as just that, resources. 2) Improving the world. Would you rather individuals act in the interests of Shell Oil, Phillip Morris, Microsoft, Lockheed-Martin, or in the interests of society as a whole? Why do you care that a particular corporation survives or dies, rather than everyone being better off? If Google is replaced by DuckDuckGo or Bing, and customers / investors / employees switch over, what's the moral value of that? It makes rational sense to do your job as well as you can, but "as well as you can" isn't defined the same as "to the benefit of maximizing shareholder value." Most people I know switch viewpoints after a decade or two in industry. It takes an event or understanding the internals of corporations well enough. As a footnote, "doing your job the way your job wants you to do it" doesn't even make sense. A corporation doesn't want anything. It's a collection of individuals. Your boss might want something, the CEO might want something different, yet a different thing might be in the interests of shareholder value, something completely different in the interests of customers, and a policy document stored on the intranet might dictate something yet different.