19 ms·

Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation

420 points by ck45 3y ago

scrozier 3y ago
It's amazing to me how much can be written (and published, and rewarded) about something so obvious. Parents, this is why your kids' tuition is so high.
- acuozzo 3y ago
  An optimistic take: (Paper → … → Scientific Consensus) → Discourse → Popular Media → Management → Improvement?
  - scrozier 3y ago
    I appreciate your optimistic take.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It is nice to have some citeable source for a commonly-believed thing. And it is only one paper, probably most of the writing was gone by some low paid grad students. If you want to see why tuition is high, look at administrators and construction I think.
  - dogleash 3y ago
    > It is nice to have some citeable source for a commonly-believed thing. Not every claim requires peer reviewed academia before you can have the courage of your convictions. The people telling you to overwork are conmen and their useful idiots. They play the "your claims require peer revised sources, my claims are the bland common wisdom" game expertly. When they ask for sources, they're just hoping you don't have any, but if you do there's a slick dismissal up their sleeve.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Sure, I don’t need a peer reviewed paper to believe that, but now any researcher who wants to make the claim can just cite the paper, not worry about nitpicking or anything like that, and move on. The cost is probably like a couple megabytes on spread across a bunch of servers and, I suspect, a semester or so of work. Plus maybe somebody learned how to run this kind of experiment. It just seems like a non-problem.
Workaccount2 3y ago
There is a saying "The strongest horse gets whipped the hardest", the object of the phrase should give away how long people have known this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- acuozzo 3y ago
  Given the state of the world today, the quote seems almost prescient when you realize that no horse has ever the option to become the coachman no matter how hard he tries.
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    "The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but it never became the kolkhoz's chairman".
  - xerox13ster 3y ago
    All farm animals are equal. Some are just more equal than others.
  - ozr 3y ago
    A supermajority of the wealthiest people on the planet came from middle or upper middle class backgrounds.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      So what? Still one in a million horses go on to be the coachman or so. Its not a guarantee you are able to climb like you are implying.
      - esafak 3y ago
        This is a quantifiably studied subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
michaelteter 3y ago
This seems obvious. If a person is asked to do something, and they do as requested, they will be asked to do more things.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  While others do less or nothing but have all the time in the world to dress their nothing into fabulous powerpoints and buzzwords.
  - michaelteter 3y ago
    Those are the managers (and some execs) pushing for return-to-office. They need to be seen as looking busy and important by many others to justify their position/salary.
- francisofascii 3y ago
  Sure, but what's not obvious is, doing more does not automatically translate to more reward.
  - michaelteter 3y ago
    Very true. And if you were raised in a family that believed in hard, honest work (with the implication that there would be a reward someday), it can take many, many years to discover that one's own personal satisfaction is the only real reward from dedication and toil on behalf of a company.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    It usually translates into some more reward, but it's a bad math problem. If you crunch 60 hour weeks for two months to get a release out and you get rewarded with a pizza party and a starbucks gift card, you are being exploited. Your salary is being devalued by the extra time you are putting in and your reward is insultingly cheap. That's also the norm. Anecdote time: My wife was once talking with an old boss, who was trying to find out what kinds of things people wanted as rewards for good work. He was thinking about things like "you won employee of the month so you get a trophy and your photo on the wall" Now, I wasn't in the room, but she insists that he was stunned when she just said she wanted more money or more time off. Like he couldn't understand why someone would prefer $50 in cash over a $50 desk trophy or plaque or something. Keep in mind he's probably making $250k a year and she was making $60k. It's entirely possible he had never once in his whole career made "as little" as 60k per year (adjusted for inflation)
Spivak 3y ago
Ya know, I guess someone has to say the obvious. Hopefully it reaches its target audience of "company men" who don't realize they're getting shafted in exchange for Bamboo kudos and Chipotle gift cards. If you want a depiction of this dynamic that's just uncanny enough that it might break the haze and is just those guys who are wasting their youth because "one day they'll make partner" watch What We Do in The Shadows.
- kldavis4 3y ago
  oh poor Guillermo! XD
- bloomingeek 3y ago
  I agree, I've seen good, loyal workers exploited so as to become a company squealer or someone to "get things" done. I resisted this early in my career because I knew I wouldn't be able to look my co-workers in the eyes. So, I did my job as well as I could, kept my head down, and then listened to the exploited ones after they were discarded by management.
- arkitaip 3y ago
  Maybe it's not about the research being obvious but having research that you can point to when you need to have The Talk about your boss. It raises everyone's awareness and makes it a bit easier to create policy that can combat psychologically unsafe work places.
reedf1 3y ago
I was fiercly loyal to a manager I had in the past - I now view him as a viscous (EDIT: viscious!!) psychopath. The upside is that the enormous pressure I was under was character building for me, and has helped me further my career once I was away from that situation. Now my loyalty is hard won and entirely transactional, and I'm much happier for it.
- finnh 3y ago
  that's a delightful autocorrect for "vicious"
  - reedf1 3y ago
    Haha, I certainly would describe him as thick.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  You’re lucky to have escaped, enough time there and you’d have been crushed into a zombie worker. In IT we have some mobility to eschew these toxic managers but think of places where there isn’t such a mobility…
acuozzo 3y ago
I worked many different blue collar jobs in New Jersey as a teenager¹ in the early 2000s and I learned that every blue collar workplace has one or more of these "go-to" persons. They're always there early AND late. They never, ever turn down requests for MORE X even if they're salaried and even if it makes their lives unnecessarily difficult. They're often the ones most visibly damaged by the job, but they also irrationally defend their abusers. Perhaps they think that they'll be promoted one day, but why would a manager promote their best underling, especially if they've shown that they'll never be a flight risk? [1] Seriously, I started at fourteen and job-hopped ~2x/year: a "schoolyear job" and a "summer job".
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I've been this person at every job until recently Capitalism doesn't reward virtue
  - p1esk 3y ago
    But you did alright looking at your profile.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Capitalism does not reward virtue. Also, loyalty is not a virtue. Loyalty is for henchmen playing at zero-sum games. The idea that it is a virtue is a psyop by the people out there who would have us as their henchmen. If your work is solving a problem that needs to be solved, you don't need loyalty, you can be on the team you're on because it's the best way to attack that problem. And when the power goes to your leader's head and they try to make you into a henchman, you can go find a different team with which to attack the same problem. Otherwise the problems don't get solved and we all end up working for marketing in some way or another.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      I think you're equating political intrigue with loyalty, whereas for many people it just means relatively selfless identification with the goals of your employer, ie diligence.
belligeront 3y ago
Seems similar to what Venkatesh Rao has written about "The Clueless" in his "The Gervais Principle" article. It is a really great read: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
xyzelement 3y ago
How committed to be to one's job is a dynamic topic. To me, the ideal dynamic is finding a place that will recognize and reward you for working hard and "owning it" - and to work hard and "own it" in that environment. In contrast, working hard in a place that doesn't reward you is sad. Slacking in a place where you can succeed more if you try harder is also sad. I find that some people will perceive themselves to be exploited and orient their life around avoiding it, regardless of the situation (vs, reserving that feeling for avoiding actually exploitive situations.) For example, it's common to see HN posts describing someone as "subjecting themselves to unpaid overtime" when they work hard - meanwhile the person saying it is making $60K while the person being talked about is making $600K. There are some cases where working hard/loyalty/etc can lead to outsized rewards - but you need to be smart and keep your eyes open for that kind of space. And then, assuming you are in the right kind of environment - allowing yourself to care and be engaged makes your work days much more fun. I think commonly in the example I described, the person that's proud of inoculating themselves from exploitation not only make 10% of what they can, but the exactly 8 hours of work they put in is a miserable drag for them. The guy working harder for 10X the comp might also be having more fun.
- epups 3y ago
  I really like your formulation of the issue. I am currently in a tough spot where I'm not recognised and rewarded, and after some reflection I had two choices: either I slow down to the level of everyone else, or I find somewhere else to work. I chose the latter, based on the perspective you describe here. For me, life is too short to waste it at half-power most of the day, and I actually feel bad when not working hard. Working only enough to pay the bills is probably more sane, but I cannot do it. The challenge now, of course, is to find somewhere where this attitude is adaptive.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    (I am the person you're responding to.) I think your attitude is right and will pay you in the medium or long term if not immediately. You can't control what you can't control but you CAN control a lot - how you work, how you look for job, etc. You'll be fine!
stmblast 3y ago
No surprise there. Companies are built with the purpose of making money, not caring about peoples' welfare.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  except, that is not always true. More like, investor-backed and aggressive user companies will do that. Adults with a some money can start a business.. but, you know Walmart etc.. its not black and white. Its overly-simplified to simply blame "business" though what you say is not uncommon. What are the alternatives?
  - tivert 3y ago
    >> No surprise there. Companies are built with the purpose of making money, not caring about peoples' welfare. > except, that is not always true. More like, investor-backed and aggressive user companies will do that.... Its overly-simplified to simply blame "business" though what you say is not uncommon. It's not overly-simplified. In its purest form, business is for making money, not caring about people's welfare. The examples where that's not always true are essentially stories about something else contaminating the pure business ethic, and such contaminates are hard to maintain the larger a business gets and the longer it operates.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      no, I am explicitly disagreeing with that.. I think there are many forms of "business" that far outdate modern economics. I believe that some places and some markets did have an "enlightenment" and provided for plural forms of business explicitly. Meanwhile, some individuals, groups or families took and kept power to run their own business. Now looking at 30x more people and economies on the scale of nations, it is easy to forget the "micro economics" that we all must live, and that can power "business." Lastly, I claim that speaking in nation-wide generalities can only be wrong because it only takes one counter-example to spoil a generalized statement.
  - chongli 3y ago
ericfrazier 3y ago
Commission based pay is where it's at.
yieldcrv 3y ago
1 job where an unpaid job title change to something higher results in exploitation to prove its worth it 1 job where a 5% raise occurs results in exploitation to prove its worth it, after exploitation for the 5% raise 1 job where a counteroffer results in a 10-20% raise results in exploitation to prove its worth it 2 jobs with zero ambition results in 100% raise and no exploitation and a manageable workload I think companies should just embrace this and attract talent specifically for this. YC could just spearhead this with their portfolio companies. “hey, our candidates are overemployed, its cool, everyone knows. They’ll join your standups on the east coast, and join their other companies standup on the west coast 2-3 hours later, let them allocate tasks and deliver them. if performance isn’t good enough then they’re let go, like any other employee” employees get to vest in two options/equity based lotteries, instead of just one at a time for years of their life employees make $300k-$500k/yr (2x $150k - 2x $250k base salaries) without worrying about what Big Tech is currently doing win for everyone
neilv 3y ago
Consider the large companies with hiring processes intended to try to acquire each employee at the minimum compensation each individual will accept. I suppose it shouldn't be any surprise if the company (or a manager within the culture of that company) also tries to get the maximum value out of each employee according to what each individual will endure. Now consider closer to home for HN. Typical pre-seed/seed startups, where the first couple engineering hires might be offered 0.5% to 2% in ISOs, although critical to getting to MVP. While the founders, who started months earlier, get an order of magnitude more equity, and under better terms. Not because that's fair or fosters an environment that deserves much loyalty, but because they're trying to get the employee at the minimum cost they'll accept, even to the employee's disadvantage.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  This is a good comment. In my years I’ve easily had the worst experience with startup founders (as compared to managers at BigCo). I think with BigCo managers they are more focused on getting performance — they have somewhat limited control over budget. But founders tend to give the energy that they want to make sure they don’t give away too much. They act much more like it’s theirs personally to lose.
- ghodith 3y ago
  > Consider the large companies with hiring processes intended to try to acquire each employee at the minimum compensation each individual will accept. Not always the case. When interviewing for my first FAANG job (coming from defense) I requested what I thought was a reasonable salary, but turned out to be a low-ball offer. The recruiter came back and told me that I wasn't asking for enough and that they wouldn't pay someone so below the average for their level.
  - armada651 3y ago
    This is not the company being generous to you. This is a recruiter who knows that if they accepted such a low ball offer you would quit as soon as you googled the average salary for your role. They still want you to make a low-ball offer, but something closer to the average.
Spooky23 3y ago
I'd go further and say that emotional attachment in business is always a net negative that gets exploited. As a consumer, you often see guilt or other attachment with car and home purchases. I'm definitely guilty at work. I really enjoyed the work at some jobs that were objectively awful. The customers, mission or colleagues were great in some way, but the company gleefully exploited that emotional attachment. In my case, I attribute that inappropriate attachment to work to my own failure to deal with conflict or emotional issues in my personal life. It's really the only regret that I have in life, as it's a problem caused by my own stubbornness. Time is the enemy -- age, death and other events make it impossible to take back or fix. Whenever you find yourself thinking "we can do <X> next time, I have this <important project/task> to do", stop. The kids will grow up, your partner will get sick, your parents will die. Someday there won't be a future, and you'll find that you don't care about or remember the "important" things you did, but you will regret that things you didn't
- abootstrapper 3y ago
  I feel this, but also my family needs money and health insurance. So, yeah, live life now, because it’s short. But, also we have to do the things necessary to keep our jobs and keep food on the table.
adventured 3y ago
It's an aspect of human nature. If you've been in at least a few relationships for example, you will have witnessed up close and personal how being taken for granted works. People tend to do that to those that are loyal to them, at some point or another, intentionally or not. All workers being exploited in regards to loyalty are being specifically exploited by a person that is doing the exploiting. It's not a faceless corporation (a robotic entity in imagery) doing it, it's a specific person (or people) that is doing it to them. Why does that matter? Because you're dealing with a dark facet of human nature in action. If you understand what you're dealing with in actuality, you'll be better situated to deal with it, control how you react to it, pre-empt it, et al.
xwdv 3y ago
There is some survivorship bias. Loyal workers get worked harder, but disloyal and lazy ones either leave or get fired, leaving the loyal ones to be selected more.
protoman3000 3y ago
The de-facto inability to draw boundaries, especially towards people that one perceives to be dependent on, is one of the common symptoms of the large majority of mental health disorders. People have massive difficulties to defend themselves against this kind of workplace abuse, their ability to say “No” is impeded to a point where any reasonable person with understanding of the situation would deem it deeply unjust. Meanwhile, it is known that people with dark triad personality traits - so people which fall more into the direction of very severe personality disorders such as ASPD or NPD, which have huge internalizing and externalizing costs and damage to society - are due to perverse incentives more often promoted into leading positions, from where they can further cause harm to the sick people below them. But they also get themselves further damaged as their promotions and monetary rewards don’t incentivize them to seek treatment, aggravating their pathology for decades, robbing them of meaningful and healthy lives. Any person with understanding of pathologies of mental health knows that their ability to simply stop abusing others is massively impeded to a point where objectively it appears like a perverse and cruel game to everybody involved. Both sick-abuser and the sick-abused are the victims in these dynamics and suffer massively. I hope that we as society will eventually reach a point, where the exploitation of sick people is not normalized anymore. There can be alternatives once we collectively incentivize compassion and empathy, but I dream - even Jesus tried to tell people this and look where we are today.
- lazide 3y ago
  The issue is, the wheel keeps turning. And these dynamics exists because they self-replicate. It sucks, but realistically we don’t even really understand what causes NPD for instance (or BPD), and since one of the core things with NPD is they will never admit they have a real problem, and are really good at manipulating people and hiding their problems….
  - protoman3000 3y ago
    > but realistically we don’t even really understand what causes NPD for instance (or BPD) We actually do have much more insight on this than you might think, it's far from the black box that it used to be. If you look at how the new classification for personality disorders in the ICD11 was developed, they understand that one could for laymen say "Childhood neglect and abuse cause personality disorders". Of course risk there are many risk factors such as the environment, other traumatizations, epigenetics, temperament, toxins etc. and nobody can expect the common mother to be able to fend for herself and her child against this. But we know with large precision what they are. And still allow wars to happen.
satisfice 3y ago
Could they have studied a more obvious thing? Doesn’t this result completely fit intuition? When I think about loyalty I immediately think about people who would do things for me that are uncomfortable. Haven’t they seen the documentary “Pulp Fiction?”
frankbreetz 3y ago
Me and Dwight Schrute are on the same page: "Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most."
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
In other news, water is wet. I am an exceptionally loyal worker, but it's been very important to enforce my boundaries. Part of being loyal, is finding a company worth being loyal to. Not so simple.
omneity 3y ago
People in power who are aware of this and still make these decisions are the worst. I’ve seen abject examples in my career. And what happens when you complain about burnout, repeatedly? - “Yeah it happens. Why not take a vacation?”, but dropping last minute work on you or calling you when traveling - “Yeah but we’re all under so much pressure. It’s a team effort and we need to all pull through”, and again dropping more work on you when teammates who don’t care don’t have to work half as hard - “Oh yeah? Maybe you should focus more on your work life balance” and then calling you in the weekend for that “super important customer call on Monday we need to prepare for” I came to realize 1-1 meetings with management are designed to manipulate and keep you under control, just how HR’s real objective is to protect the company. This and other instances left a lot of scars and tainted my perspective about salaried work. I can’t drink the Kool-Aid anymore and even as a founder this is among my top priorities in how I treat people working with me.
- anotherhue 3y ago
  Every day they keep you there is more profit. Words are free, raises are not.
  - omneity 3y ago
    It takes time to wake up to it, by which point they got what they wanted and have a new sucker lined up.
- Ancalagon 3y ago
  Regarding the "calling you when traveling point" - I always make a point of leaving leaving my laptop at home while on vacation, and deleting slack/pagerduty of my phone. Some companies offer separate work phones so if that is the case, leave that at home as well.
- somsak2 3y ago
  I never understood the stuff of calling you on weekends or during vacation. Just don't pick up? If confronted, you can claim you didn't see it because unknown numbers are automatically silenced. I've never seen a business that would actually fire you for this. And if they do, good riddance.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
All charity has some likelihood for exploitation. This is often used as an excuse not to be charitable. It’s not.
recursivedoubts 3y ago
daily reminder: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
gumballindie 3y ago
You should never be loyal to a company more than you need to perform your job well. Similarly you should never be loyal to a company as a customer. What makes people not understand these two principles? The need to belong? I just don't get it. It's like those people that demand to work in offices, at the cost of personal and family lives, mental health, and great financial cost, simply to please a boss.
thepasswordis 3y ago
One of the most depressing, nihilistic realizations I have had in my 30s is: * People don't care about the work you do, they care about how you make them feel. * People will steal the work that you do, or imply that they were a part of it, when they weren't. * Those people will employ what I had though were high school tier manipulative tactics by sidechanneling communications, or in the way they talk in meetings to imply that they are more useful they than actually or, or to imply they had a involvement in things they didn't. * "Middle managers" love this stuff, and will promote and hire people who also play this stupid game. I have seen people share into our slack channels, or start meetings out by playing the most absolutely useless, tik-tok-level, linkedn-level garbage fake bizbro videos as if they are important useful business information that we need to incorporate into our philosophy. I've seen companies then go to hire these absolutely useless borderline pyramid-scheme bizbros, incorporate their useless vocabulary cancer, and bring them into our meetings and make us defer to them on things. This stuff is incredibly demoralizing. Loyal, good workers get exploited by these parasitic people because they care about the company, they care about their good coworkers, and they take pride in making good products. Obviously this stuff is all easily exploitable by the people I'm describing.
- lambdasquirrel 3y ago
  It’s not just work. It’s social scenes and people in general. It’s an uncommon person who does right by other people.
- anotherhue 3y ago
  Been there, seen that. I feel like culturally we're told that this behaviour is unusual so we are constantly surprised. Some scepticism and school-of-life in our earlier education might be for the best, no matter how disappointing it would be to hear.
- turtledragonfly 3y ago
  I see your "People X..., People Y..." language, and I just want to note that over-generalization can be a path towards depression[1]. I don't mean this directed at you specifically, but it's fairly common for people to take their bad experiences in a handful of places and extrapolate that to all places everywhere, and end up feeling depressed/nihilistic, as you mention. I find myself doing it too, from time to time. So, maybe this is more directed at other readers who might see your comment and take it as validation of their "everyone sucks" suspicions — grain of salt, and all that. But I agree that what you describe is genuinely demoralizing and a crap way to be treated (: I hope you get to experience a good work life, if you haven't already. [1] There's a good amount of research on this topic (search for "depression, over-generalization"), in addition to my personal experiences.
amelius 3y ago
I'm going to print out this paper and put it on the wall near the coffee machine.
krunck 3y ago
Loyalty is a great characteristic to have in a dog. Humans should put a bit more thought and skepticism into their devotion to employer, country, party, religion, etc.
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  partners, family, children, etc
- armada651 3y ago
  I feel this is a variant of victim blaming, shouldn't we put more blame on the ones who freely exploit loyal workers? Exploiting loyal people seems to be accepted in society and we simply blame those individuals for being gullible. Whereas the exploiters get rewarded for their successful exploitation and learn that exploiting others is the best way to get ahead in life.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    What does blaming the exploiters solve? Educating the exploited or potential exploited seems like a more impactful action if the goal is to reduce the number of exploited.
    - armada651 3y ago
      There is a smaller number of exploiters than people who are loyal. Loyalty comes naturally to people because being loyal to your tribe was evolutionarily beneficial. Whereas continuously exploiting others requires a mental illness such as narcissism. Perhaps by focusing on the exploiters we can reduce the damage they do to others.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        These seem like big assertions, especially with the difficulty in even defining exploitation, and that the same person is capable of sometimes exploiting and sometimes not exploiting.
dragonwriter 3y ago
“ironically”? Loyalty is an obviously exploitable trait, so if you assume capitalist firms want to exploit labor as much as efficient, and there is a subset of labor more exploitable (better payoff for same effort at exploitation), its not ironic that they are particularly targeted for exploitation, it is expected.
RecycledEle 3y ago
It's the prisoner's dilemma. If both employers and employees are loyal, everyone wins. If both are disloyal, everyone looses. If one is loyal, the disloyal one screws them badly. If I were to be able to time travel, I might write a commandment to burn anyone at the stake who tried to work in HR.
kindatrue 3y ago
Not surprising at all. It was also taught at B-School that loyal customers are the ones you should hike prices on. They're loyal after all.
thenerdhead 3y ago
There is an importance of knowing your worth and weight if you are loyal and subject to exploitation. Just because you can get shit done does not mean it is okay for managers to dump work on you where others are failing to pull their weight. You will burn out and you will be resentful of those exploiting you. Also with regards to monetary value, ask for the raises regularly and prove that your work leads to said results. You should be getting the maximum rewards and having your salary adjusted based on the competitive market rate. Apply regularly to remind your employer who you want to remain "loyal" to that they can lose you if they aren't keeping up monetarily. There are very few people in the world who look out for your wellbeing if you are "loyal". They will not help make space for when you need to take time off, they will not advocate for your promotions/career growth if you're in a crucial role, they will not see the disparity of how much value you bring versus how much you're rewarded. You have to advocate for all this yourself. Be loyal to yourself first.
- armada651 3y ago
  This is fine if a big focus in life is your career path, but many people just want to live a comfortable life and maximizing compensation is not their priority. These people are sensitive to exploitation too, it's not just the unreasonably loyal workaholics. When you just want to live a comfortable life your priority isn't maximizing your compensation, your priority is not getting fired. You can exploit these people by putting them in a position where not doing overtime results in failure and possible dismissal. They will keep doing overtime until their ability to live a comfortable life is so negatively impacted by the overtime that it outweighs the pain of being fired. As an extra bonus the overtime they have to do ensures they have no time to search for a new employer until they get fired or resign.
jasfi 3y ago
If you read up on narcissism, you'll see why this is no surprise.
hintymad 3y ago
Someone inside Amazon created a slack channel for employees to publish their compensation. The results are consistent: the longer a person stays with Amazon, the lower their compensation is compared to their peers, so much so that a L6 could earn 50% less than a fresh L5. Of course, there was not enough data points for L7 and above and people who got promoted fast wouldn't suffer the slow growth of their compensation.
WillAdams 3y ago
Remember, the reward for a job well done here is the same as at a whorehouse --- you get screwed more thoroughly and more often.
encoderer 3y ago
In my experience, company loyalty was useless but personal loyalty was valuable. In tech, in good companies, most managers are helpful and thoughtful and ambitious themselves and my career was greatly accelerated by developing those personal relationships and playing the long game.
droptablemain 3y ago
This conclusion shouldn't be shocking to anyone. The entire foundation of the employer-employee relationship is built upon exploitation of labor value. So when an employee signals loyalty what he's truly signalling is that he's open to a higher level of exploitation.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  That is very US-centric, or perhaps Anglo-centric, view. it isn't necessarily the case and not my experience here in Norway. But companies here are subject to stricter controls and there is a cooperative relationship between employers, unions, employees, and the state. It does happen here too of course but I don't think it is the norm.
  - llbeansandrice 3y ago
    It's the logical conclusion when workers' rights are continuously squashed, healthcare is tied to employment, and there is no social safety net. The worker is left with little bargaining power except in very specific and individual cases. I'd consider being more loyal to companies if it meant I'd be compensated properly for my work and time. But I've never gotten less than a 40% TC raise changing companies, plus other/better benefits.
  - droptablemain 3y ago
    It's not an Anglo or US-centric view, it's the standard internationalist Marxist view of the perpetual class struggle within capitalism for centuries now. In your country, the balance-of-power is slightly shifted toward the working class (at least compared to the US, as well as most of the developing world). Unions, for example, serve as a buffer to prevent the worst of the exploitation, but the foundational exploitation of labor remains. Labor laws, minimum wage, also exist for this reason, but do not change the fundamental nature of the relationship. Their mere existence and lack of inverse mechanics (i.e. maximum wage, for example) should tell you all you need to know.
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
denton-scratch 3y ago
So prisoner's dilemma? Loyalty is not the best strategy. Too bad for us loyal folk.
paulus_magnus2 3y ago
Could this be the real reason women are paid less than men?
tamimio 3y ago
In any tech work environment, per my observation, you have mainly two teams: - The technical folks: those are usually the engineers but not necessarily, those dedicate their time (heck, their lives) in mastering the skills they do, as a result, they lack the political skills to engage and avoid other work politics. - The non-technical folks: Usually of biz backgrounds and usually mid-managers, they severely lack the technical side, and as a result, they often use work politics to make that up by manipulation, credit taking, etc. The first team, once they realize what the other team is doing, they either fight back by escalating (this is rare since it will add up to their stress of what they are already dealing with by building stuff), or switch jobs, which is the common one. The second team will keep doing it until they find the perfect candidate, the ones who do most of the job while being underpaid and “sharing” all credits. Which is why a lot of companies they barely produce anything productive and the real work usually get outsourced to contractors. I personally the first question I ask in any interview is how flat the management style.
sandstrom 3y ago
Based on the comments, there are obviously many people who have had bad experiences of this. I agree with the general sentiment, I think this is a common behavior in many organisations. But at least anecdotally, I'd just like to mention it's not always true. For example, a friend who had loyally had worked at the same company for several years. He was going through some tough times personally (family) and was basically not doing anything useful for half a year or more. Since he had been there for a while, they knew him well and didn't try to force him to get more things done, or anything else. They were basically fine with him doing nothing for many months. About half a year later, things were looking better for him on the personal front, and he would be back to speed (mostly). If he hadn't worked there for several years [been loyal], I doubt they would have treated it the same.
oldbbsnickname 3y ago
Being a worker is being underpaid, to varying degrees. Another way to put it is "the most valuable employee makes the most impact for their salary", so the tendency is to maximize the former and minimize the latter. "Loyalty" is a manipulation game. The only true loyalty is to #1, but most honest people don't even do that. One primary way to get ahead is be in-demand, court many offers, and play offers off each other in an ego-respecting manner within whatever the market will bear. Raises rarely happen, so it's usually better to switch jobs every 1.5-3 years. At some point in a high-income career path, switching jobs doesn't have to be as necessary or desirable, and a lawyer and a TC negotiator can help them get more $$$. Furthermore, anyone good will have lots of options and should always be open to other homes if only to window shop. (Never be stuck somewhere miserable or without options.)

420 points by ck45 3y ago

It's amazing to me how much can be written (and published, and rewarded) about something so obvious. Parents, this is why your kids' tuition is so high.

acuozzo 3y ago
An optimistic take: (Paper → … → Scientific Consensus) → Discourse → Popular Media → Management → Improvement?
- scrozier 3y ago
  I appreciate your optimistic take.
bee_rider 3y ago
It is nice to have some citeable source for a commonly-believed thing. And it is only one paper, probably most of the writing was gone by some low paid grad students. If you want to see why tuition is high, look at administrators and construction I think.
- dogleash 3y ago
  > It is nice to have some citeable source for a commonly-believed thing. Not every claim requires peer reviewed academia before you can have the courage of your convictions. The people telling you to overwork are conmen and their useful idiots. They play the "your claims require peer revised sources, my claims are the bland common wisdom" game expertly. When they ask for sources, they're just hoping you don't have any, but if you do there's a slick dismissal up their sleeve.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Sure, I don’t need a peer reviewed paper to believe that, but now any researcher who wants to make the claim can just cite the paper, not worry about nitpicking or anything like that, and move on. The cost is probably like a couple megabytes on spread across a bunch of servers and, I suspect, a semester or so of work. Plus maybe somebody learned how to run this kind of experiment. It just seems like a non-problem.

Workaccount2 3y ago

There is a saying "The strongest horse gets whipped the hardest", the object of the phrase should give away how long people have known this.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
acuozzo 3y ago
Given the state of the world today, the quote seems almost prescient when you realize that no horse has ever the option to become the coachman no matter how hard he tries.
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  "The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but it never became the kolkhoz's chairman".
- xerox13ster 3y ago
  All farm animals are equal. Some are just more equal than others.
- ozr 3y ago
  A supermajority of the wealthiest people on the planet came from middle or upper middle class backgrounds.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    So what? Still one in a million horses go on to be the coachman or so. Its not a guarantee you are able to climb like you are implying.
    - esafak 3y ago
      This is a quantifiably studied subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

michaelteter 3y ago

This seems obvious. If a person is asked to do something, and they do as requested, they will be asked to do more things.

lacrimacida 3y ago
While others do less or nothing but have all the time in the world to dress their nothing into fabulous powerpoints and buzzwords.
- michaelteter 3y ago
  Those are the managers (and some execs) pushing for return-to-office. They need to be seen as looking busy and important by many others to justify their position/salary.
francisofascii 3y ago
Sure, but what's not obvious is, doing more does not automatically translate to more reward.
- michaelteter 3y ago
  Very true. And if you were raised in a family that believed in hard, honest work (with the implication that there would be a reward someday), it can take many, many years to discover that one's own personal satisfaction is the only real reward from dedication and toil on behalf of a company.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  It usually translates into some more reward, but it's a bad math problem. If you crunch 60 hour weeks for two months to get a release out and you get rewarded with a pizza party and a starbucks gift card, you are being exploited. Your salary is being devalued by the extra time you are putting in and your reward is insultingly cheap. That's also the norm. Anecdote time: My wife was once talking with an old boss, who was trying to find out what kinds of things people wanted as rewards for good work. He was thinking about things like "you won employee of the month so you get a trophy and your photo on the wall" Now, I wasn't in the room, but she insists that he was stunned when she just said she wanted more money or more time off. Like he couldn't understand why someone would prefer $50 in cash over a $50 desk trophy or plaque or something. Keep in mind he's probably making $250k a year and she was making $60k. It's entirely possible he had never once in his whole career made "as little" as 60k per year (adjusted for inflation)

Spivak 3y ago

Ya know, I guess someone has to say the obvious. Hopefully it reaches its target audience of "company men" who don't realize they're getting shafted in exchange for Bamboo kudos and Chipotle gift cards. If you want a depiction of this dynamic that's just uncanny enough that it might break the haze and is just those guys who are wasting their youth because "one day they'll make partner" watch What We Do in The Shadows.

kldavis4 3y ago
oh poor Guillermo! XD
bloomingeek 3y ago
I agree, I've seen good, loyal workers exploited so as to become a company squealer or someone to "get things" done. I resisted this early in my career because I knew I wouldn't be able to look my co-workers in the eyes. So, I did my job as well as I could, kept my head down, and then listened to the exploited ones after they were discarded by management.
arkitaip 3y ago
Maybe it's not about the research being obvious but having research that you can point to when you need to have The Talk about your boss. It raises everyone's awareness and makes it a bit easier to create policy that can combat psychologically unsafe work places.

reedf1 3y ago

I was fiercly loyal to a manager I had in the past - I now view him as a viscous (EDIT: viscious!!) psychopath. The upside is that the enormous pressure I was under was character building for me, and has helped me further my career once I was away from that situation. Now my loyalty is hard won and entirely transactional, and I'm much happier for it.

finnh 3y ago
that's a delightful autocorrect for "vicious"
- reedf1 3y ago
  Haha, I certainly would describe him as thick.
lacrimacida 3y ago
You’re lucky to have escaped, enough time there and you’d have been crushed into a zombie worker. In IT we have some mobility to eschew these toxic managers but think of places where there isn’t such a mobility…

acuozzo 3y ago

I worked many different blue collar jobs in New Jersey as a teenager¹ in the early 2000s and I learned that every blue collar workplace has one or more of these "go-to" persons. They're always there early AND late. They never, ever turn down requests for MORE X even if they're salaried and even if it makes their lives unnecessarily difficult. They're often the ones most visibly damaged by the job, but they also irrationally defend their abusers. Perhaps they think that they'll be promoted one day, but why would a manager promote their best underling, especially if they've shown that they'll never be a flight risk? [1] Seriously, I started at fourteen and job-hopped ~2x/year: a "schoolyear job" and a "summer job".

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I've been this person at every job until recently Capitalism doesn't reward virtue
- p1esk 3y ago
  But you did alright looking at your profile.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Capitalism does not reward virtue. Also, loyalty is not a virtue. Loyalty is for henchmen playing at zero-sum games. The idea that it is a virtue is a psyop by the people out there who would have us as their henchmen. If your work is solving a problem that needs to be solved, you don't need loyalty, you can be on the team you're on because it's the best way to attack that problem. And when the power goes to your leader's head and they try to make you into a henchman, you can go find a different team with which to attack the same problem. Otherwise the problems don't get solved and we all end up working for marketing in some way or another.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    I think you're equating political intrigue with loyalty, whereas for many people it just means relatively selfless identification with the goals of your employer, ie diligence.

belligeront 3y ago

Seems similar to what Venkatesh Rao has written about "The Clueless" in his "The Gervais Principle" article. It is a really great read: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

xyzelement 3y ago

How committed to be to one's job is a dynamic topic. To me, the ideal dynamic is finding a place that will recognize and reward you for working hard and "owning it" - and to work hard and "own it" in that environment. In contrast, working hard in a place that doesn't reward you is sad. Slacking in a place where you can succeed more if you try harder is also sad. I find that some people will perceive themselves to be exploited and orient their life around avoiding it, regardless of the situation (vs, reserving that feeling for avoiding actually exploitive situations.) For example, it's common to see HN posts describing someone as "subjecting themselves to unpaid overtime" when they work hard - meanwhile the person saying it is making $60K while the person being talked about is making $600K. There are some cases where working hard/loyalty/etc can lead to outsized rewards - but you need to be smart and keep your eyes open for that kind of space. And then, assuming you are in the right kind of environment - allowing yourself to care and be engaged makes your work days much more fun. I think commonly in the example I described, the person that's proud of inoculating themselves from exploitation not only make 10% of what they can, but the exactly 8 hours of work they put in is a miserable drag for them. The guy working harder for 10X the comp might also be having more fun.

epups 3y ago
I really like your formulation of the issue. I am currently in a tough spot where I'm not recognised and rewarded, and after some reflection I had two choices: either I slow down to the level of everyone else, or I find somewhere else to work. I chose the latter, based on the perspective you describe here. For me, life is too short to waste it at half-power most of the day, and I actually feel bad when not working hard. Working only enough to pay the bills is probably more sane, but I cannot do it. The challenge now, of course, is to find somewhere where this attitude is adaptive.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  (I am the person you're responding to.) I think your attitude is right and will pay you in the medium or long term if not immediately. You can't control what you can't control but you CAN control a lot - how you work, how you look for job, etc. You'll be fine!

stmblast 3y ago

No surprise there. Companies are built with the purpose of making money, not caring about peoples' welfare.

mistrial9 3y ago
except, that is not always true. More like, investor-backed and aggressive user companies will do that. Adults with a some money can start a business.. but, you know Walmart etc.. its not black and white. Its overly-simplified to simply blame "business" though what you say is not uncommon. What are the alternatives?
- tivert 3y ago
  >> No surprise there. Companies are built with the purpose of making money, not caring about peoples' welfare. > except, that is not always true. More like, investor-backed and aggressive user companies will do that.... Its overly-simplified to simply blame "business" though what you say is not uncommon. It's not overly-simplified. In its purest form, business is for making money, not caring about people's welfare. The examples where that's not always true are essentially stories about something else contaminating the pure business ethic, and such contaminates are hard to maintain the larger a business gets and the longer it operates.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    no, I am explicitly disagreeing with that.. I think there are many forms of "business" that far outdate modern economics. I believe that some places and some markets did have an "enlightenment" and provided for plural forms of business explicitly. Meanwhile, some individuals, groups or families took and kept power to run their own business. Now looking at 30x more people and economies on the scale of nations, it is easy to forget the "micro economics" that we all must live, and that can power "business." Lastly, I claim that speaking in nation-wide generalities can only be wrong because it only takes one counter-example to spoil a generalized statement.
- chongli 3y ago

ericfrazier 3y ago

Commission based pay is where it's at.

yieldcrv 3y ago

1 job where an unpaid job title change to something higher results in exploitation to prove its worth it 1 job where a 5% raise occurs results in exploitation to prove its worth it, after exploitation for the 5% raise 1 job where a counteroffer results in a 10-20% raise results in exploitation to prove its worth it 2 jobs with zero ambition results in 100% raise and no exploitation and a manageable workload I think companies should just embrace this and attract talent specifically for this. YC could just spearhead this with their portfolio companies. “hey, our candidates are overemployed, its cool, everyone knows. They’ll join your standups on the east coast, and join their other companies standup on the west coast 2-3 hours later, let them allocate tasks and deliver them. if performance isn’t good enough then they’re let go, like any other employee” employees get to vest in two options/equity based lotteries, instead of just one at a time for years of their life employees make $300k-$500k/yr (2x $150k - 2x $250k base salaries) without worrying about what Big Tech is currently doing win for everyone

neilv 3y ago

Consider the large companies with hiring processes intended to try to acquire each employee at the minimum compensation each individual will accept. I suppose it shouldn't be any surprise if the company (or a manager within the culture of that company) also tries to get the maximum value out of each employee according to what each individual will endure. Now consider closer to home for HN. Typical pre-seed/seed startups, where the first couple engineering hires might be offered 0.5% to 2% in ISOs, although critical to getting to MVP. While the founders, who started months earlier, get an order of magnitude more equity, and under better terms. Not because that's fair or fosters an environment that deserves much loyalty, but because they're trying to get the employee at the minimum cost they'll accept, even to the employee's disadvantage.

kenjackson 3y ago
This is a good comment. In my years I’ve easily had the worst experience with startup founders (as compared to managers at BigCo). I think with BigCo managers they are more focused on getting performance — they have somewhat limited control over budget. But founders tend to give the energy that they want to make sure they don’t give away too much. They act much more like it’s theirs personally to lose.
ghodith 3y ago
> Consider the large companies with hiring processes intended to try to acquire each employee at the minimum compensation each individual will accept. Not always the case. When interviewing for my first FAANG job (coming from defense) I requested what I thought was a reasonable salary, but turned out to be a low-ball offer. The recruiter came back and told me that I wasn't asking for enough and that they wouldn't pay someone so below the average for their level.
- armada651 3y ago
  This is not the company being generous to you. This is a recruiter who knows that if they accepted such a low ball offer you would quit as soon as you googled the average salary for your role. They still want you to make a low-ball offer, but something closer to the average.

Spooky23 3y ago

I'd go further and say that emotional attachment in business is always a net negative that gets exploited. As a consumer, you often see guilt or other attachment with car and home purchases. I'm definitely guilty at work. I really enjoyed the work at some jobs that were objectively awful. The customers, mission or colleagues were great in some way, but the company gleefully exploited that emotional attachment. In my case, I attribute that inappropriate attachment to work to my own failure to deal with conflict or emotional issues in my personal life. It's really the only regret that I have in life, as it's a problem caused by my own stubbornness. Time is the enemy -- age, death and other events make it impossible to take back or fix. Whenever you find yourself thinking "we can do <X> next time, I have this <important project/task> to do", stop. The kids will grow up, your partner will get sick, your parents will die. Someday there won't be a future, and you'll find that you don't care about or remember the "important" things you did, but you will regret that things you didn't

abootstrapper 3y ago
I feel this, but also my family needs money and health insurance. So, yeah, live life now, because it’s short. But, also we have to do the things necessary to keep our jobs and keep food on the table.

adventured 3y ago

It's an aspect of human nature. If you've been in at least a few relationships for example, you will have witnessed up close and personal how being taken for granted works. People tend to do that to those that are loyal to them, at some point or another, intentionally or not. All workers being exploited in regards to loyalty are being specifically exploited by a person that is doing the exploiting. It's not a faceless corporation (a robotic entity in imagery) doing it, it's a specific person (or people) that is doing it to them. Why does that matter? Because you're dealing with a dark facet of human nature in action. If you understand what you're dealing with in actuality, you'll be better situated to deal with it, control how you react to it, pre-empt it, et al.

xwdv 3y ago

There is some survivorship bias. Loyal workers get worked harder, but disloyal and lazy ones either leave or get fired, leaving the loyal ones to be selected more.

protoman3000 3y ago

The de-facto inability to draw boundaries, especially towards people that one perceives to be dependent on, is one of the common symptoms of the large majority of mental health disorders. People have massive difficulties to defend themselves against this kind of workplace abuse, their ability to say “No” is impeded to a point where any reasonable person with understanding of the situation would deem it deeply unjust. Meanwhile, it is known that people with dark triad personality traits - so people which fall more into the direction of very severe personality disorders such as ASPD or NPD, which have huge internalizing and externalizing costs and damage to society - are due to perverse incentives more often promoted into leading positions, from where they can further cause harm to the sick people below them. But they also get themselves further damaged as their promotions and monetary rewards don’t incentivize them to seek treatment, aggravating their pathology for decades, robbing them of meaningful and healthy lives. Any person with understanding of pathologies of mental health knows that their ability to simply stop abusing others is massively impeded to a point where objectively it appears like a perverse and cruel game to everybody involved. Both sick-abuser and the sick-abused are the victims in these dynamics and suffer massively. I hope that we as society will eventually reach a point, where the exploitation of sick people is not normalized anymore. There can be alternatives once we collectively incentivize compassion and empathy, but I dream - even Jesus tried to tell people this and look where we are today.

lazide 3y ago
The issue is, the wheel keeps turning. And these dynamics exists because they self-replicate. It sucks, but realistically we don’t even really understand what causes NPD for instance (or BPD), and since one of the core things with NPD is they will never admit they have a real problem, and are really good at manipulating people and hiding their problems….
- protoman3000 3y ago
  > but realistically we don’t even really understand what causes NPD for instance (or BPD) We actually do have much more insight on this than you might think, it's far from the black box that it used to be. If you look at how the new classification for personality disorders in the ICD11 was developed, they understand that one could for laymen say "Childhood neglect and abuse cause personality disorders". Of course risk there are many risk factors such as the environment, other traumatizations, epigenetics, temperament, toxins etc. and nobody can expect the common mother to be able to fend for herself and her child against this. But we know with large precision what they are. And still allow wars to happen.

satisfice 3y ago

Could they have studied a more obvious thing? Doesn’t this result completely fit intuition? When I think about loyalty I immediately think about people who would do things for me that are uncomfortable. Haven’t they seen the documentary “Pulp Fiction?”

frankbreetz 3y ago

Me and Dwight Schrute are on the same page: "Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most."

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

In other news, water is wet. I am an exceptionally loyal worker, but it's been very important to enforce my boundaries. Part of being loyal, is finding a company worth being loyal to. Not so simple.

omneity 3y ago

People in power who are aware of this and still make these decisions are the worst. I’ve seen abject examples in my career. And what happens when you complain about burnout, repeatedly? - “Yeah it happens. Why not take a vacation?”, but dropping last minute work on you or calling you when traveling - “Yeah but we’re all under so much pressure. It’s a team effort and we need to all pull through”, and again dropping more work on you when teammates who don’t care don’t have to work half as hard - “Oh yeah? Maybe you should focus more on your work life balance” and then calling you in the weekend for that “super important customer call on Monday we need to prepare for” I came to realize 1-1 meetings with management are designed to manipulate and keep you under control, just how HR’s real objective is to protect the company. This and other instances left a lot of scars and tainted my perspective about salaried work. I can’t drink the Kool-Aid anymore and even as a founder this is among my top priorities in how I treat people working with me.

anotherhue 3y ago
Every day they keep you there is more profit. Words are free, raises are not.
- omneity 3y ago
  It takes time to wake up to it, by which point they got what they wanted and have a new sucker lined up.
Ancalagon 3y ago
Regarding the "calling you when traveling point" - I always make a point of leaving leaving my laptop at home while on vacation, and deleting slack/pagerduty of my phone. Some companies offer separate work phones so if that is the case, leave that at home as well.
somsak2 3y ago
I never understood the stuff of calling you on weekends or during vacation. Just don't pick up? If confronted, you can claim you didn't see it because unknown numbers are automatically silenced. I've never seen a business that would actually fire you for this. And if they do, good riddance.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

All charity has some likelihood for exploitation. This is often used as an excuse not to be charitable. It’s not.

recursivedoubts 3y ago

daily reminder: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

gumballindie 3y ago

You should never be loyal to a company more than you need to perform your job well. Similarly you should never be loyal to a company as a customer. What makes people not understand these two principles? The need to belong? I just don't get it. It's like those people that demand to work in offices, at the cost of personal and family lives, mental health, and great financial cost, simply to please a boss.

thepasswordis 3y ago

One of the most depressing, nihilistic realizations I have had in my 30s is: * People don't care about the work you do, they care about how you make them feel. * People will steal the work that you do, or imply that they were a part of it, when they weren't. * Those people will employ what I had though were high school tier manipulative tactics by sidechanneling communications, or in the way they talk in meetings to imply that they are more useful they than actually or, or to imply they had a involvement in things they didn't. * "Middle managers" love this stuff, and will promote and hire people who also play this stupid game. I have seen people share into our slack channels, or start meetings out by playing the most absolutely useless, tik-tok-level, linkedn-level garbage fake bizbro videos as if they are important useful business information that we need to incorporate into our philosophy. I've seen companies then go to hire these absolutely useless borderline pyramid-scheme bizbros, incorporate their useless vocabulary cancer, and bring them into our meetings and make us defer to them on things. This stuff is incredibly demoralizing. Loyal, good workers get exploited by these parasitic people because they care about the company, they care about their good coworkers, and they take pride in making good products. Obviously this stuff is all easily exploitable by the people I'm describing.

lambdasquirrel 3y ago
It’s not just work. It’s social scenes and people in general. It’s an uncommon person who does right by other people.
anotherhue 3y ago
Been there, seen that. I feel like culturally we're told that this behaviour is unusual so we are constantly surprised. Some scepticism and school-of-life in our earlier education might be for the best, no matter how disappointing it would be to hear.
turtledragonfly 3y ago
I see your "People X..., People Y..." language, and I just want to note that over-generalization can be a path towards depression[1]. I don't mean this directed at you specifically, but it's fairly common for people to take their bad experiences in a handful of places and extrapolate that to all places everywhere, and end up feeling depressed/nihilistic, as you mention. I find myself doing it too, from time to time. So, maybe this is more directed at other readers who might see your comment and take it as validation of their "everyone sucks" suspicions — grain of salt, and all that. But I agree that what you describe is genuinely demoralizing and a crap way to be treated (: I hope you get to experience a good work life, if you haven't already. [1] There's a good amount of research on this topic (search for "depression, over-generalization"), in addition to my personal experiences.

amelius 3y ago

I'm going to print out this paper and put it on the wall near the coffee machine.

krunck 3y ago

Loyalty is a great characteristic to have in a dog. Humans should put a bit more thought and skepticism into their devotion to employer, country, party, religion, etc.

sdfghswe 3y ago
partners, family, children, etc
armada651 3y ago
I feel this is a variant of victim blaming, shouldn't we put more blame on the ones who freely exploit loyal workers? Exploiting loyal people seems to be accepted in society and we simply blame those individuals for being gullible. Whereas the exploiters get rewarded for their successful exploitation and learn that exploiting others is the best way to get ahead in life.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  What does blaming the exploiters solve? Educating the exploited or potential exploited seems like a more impactful action if the goal is to reduce the number of exploited.
  - armada651 3y ago
    There is a smaller number of exploiters than people who are loyal. Loyalty comes naturally to people because being loyal to your tribe was evolutionarily beneficial. Whereas continuously exploiting others requires a mental illness such as narcissism. Perhaps by focusing on the exploiters we can reduce the damage they do to others.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      These seem like big assertions, especially with the difficulty in even defining exploitation, and that the same person is capable of sometimes exploiting and sometimes not exploiting.

dragonwriter 3y ago

“ironically”? Loyalty is an obviously exploitable trait, so if you assume capitalist firms want to exploit labor as much as efficient, and there is a subset of labor more exploitable (better payoff for same effort at exploitation), its not ironic that they are particularly targeted for exploitation, it is expected.

RecycledEle 3y ago

It's the prisoner's dilemma. If both employers and employees are loyal, everyone wins. If both are disloyal, everyone looses. If one is loyal, the disloyal one screws them badly. If I were to be able to time travel, I might write a commandment to burn anyone at the stake who tried to work in HR.

kindatrue 3y ago

Not surprising at all. It was also taught at B-School that loyal customers are the ones you should hike prices on. They're loyal after all.

thenerdhead 3y ago

There is an importance of knowing your worth and weight if you are loyal and subject to exploitation. Just because you can get shit done does not mean it is okay for managers to dump work on you where others are failing to pull their weight. You will burn out and you will be resentful of those exploiting you. Also with regards to monetary value, ask for the raises regularly and prove that your work leads to said results. You should be getting the maximum rewards and having your salary adjusted based on the competitive market rate. Apply regularly to remind your employer who you want to remain "loyal" to that they can lose you if they aren't keeping up monetarily. There are very few people in the world who look out for your wellbeing if you are "loyal". They will not help make space for when you need to take time off, they will not advocate for your promotions/career growth if you're in a crucial role, they will not see the disparity of how much value you bring versus how much you're rewarded. You have to advocate for all this yourself. Be loyal to yourself first.

armada651 3y ago
This is fine if a big focus in life is your career path, but many people just want to live a comfortable life and maximizing compensation is not their priority. These people are sensitive to exploitation too, it's not just the unreasonably loyal workaholics. When you just want to live a comfortable life your priority isn't maximizing your compensation, your priority is not getting fired. You can exploit these people by putting them in a position where not doing overtime results in failure and possible dismissal. They will keep doing overtime until their ability to live a comfortable life is so negatively impacted by the overtime that it outweighs the pain of being fired. As an extra bonus the overtime they have to do ensures they have no time to search for a new employer until they get fired or resign.

jasfi 3y ago

If you read up on narcissism, you'll see why this is no surprise.

hintymad 3y ago

Someone inside Amazon created a slack channel for employees to publish their compensation. The results are consistent: the longer a person stays with Amazon, the lower their compensation is compared to their peers, so much so that a L6 could earn 50% less than a fresh L5. Of course, there was not enough data points for L7 and above and people who got promoted fast wouldn't suffer the slow growth of their compensation.

WillAdams 3y ago

Remember, the reward for a job well done here is the same as at a whorehouse --- you get screwed more thoroughly and more often.

encoderer 3y ago

In my experience, company loyalty was useless but personal loyalty was valuable. In tech, in good companies, most managers are helpful and thoughtful and ambitious themselves and my career was greatly accelerated by developing those personal relationships and playing the long game.

droptablemain 3y ago

This conclusion shouldn't be shocking to anyone. The entire foundation of the employer-employee relationship is built upon exploitation of labor value. So when an employee signals loyalty what he's truly signalling is that he's open to a higher level of exploitation.

kwhitefoot 3y ago
That is very US-centric, or perhaps Anglo-centric, view. it isn't necessarily the case and not my experience here in Norway. But companies here are subject to stricter controls and there is a cooperative relationship between employers, unions, employees, and the state. It does happen here too of course but I don't think it is the norm.
- llbeansandrice 3y ago
  It's the logical conclusion when workers' rights are continuously squashed, healthcare is tied to employment, and there is no social safety net. The worker is left with little bargaining power except in very specific and individual cases. I'd consider being more loyal to companies if it meant I'd be compensated properly for my work and time. But I've never gotten less than a 40% TC raise changing companies, plus other/better benefits.
- droptablemain 3y ago
  It's not an Anglo or US-centric view, it's the standard internationalist Marxist view of the perpetual class struggle within capitalism for centuries now. In your country, the balance-of-power is slightly shifted toward the working class (at least compared to the US, as well as most of the developing world). Unions, for example, serve as a buffer to prevent the worst of the exploitation, but the foundational exploitation of labor remains. Labor laws, minimum wage, also exist for this reason, but do not change the fundamental nature of the relationship. Their mere existence and lack of inverse mechanics (i.e. maximum wage, for example) should tell you all you need to know.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago

denton-scratch 3y ago

So prisoner's dilemma? Loyalty is not the best strategy. Too bad for us loyal folk.

paulus_magnus2 3y ago

Could this be the real reason women are paid less than men?

tamimio 3y ago

In any tech work environment, per my observation, you have mainly two teams: - The technical folks: those are usually the engineers but not necessarily, those dedicate their time (heck, their lives) in mastering the skills they do, as a result, they lack the political skills to engage and avoid other work politics. - The non-technical folks: Usually of biz backgrounds and usually mid-managers, they severely lack the technical side, and as a result, they often use work politics to make that up by manipulation, credit taking, etc. The first team, once they realize what the other team is doing, they either fight back by escalating (this is rare since it will add up to their stress of what they are already dealing with by building stuff), or switch jobs, which is the common one. The second team will keep doing it until they find the perfect candidate, the ones who do most of the job while being underpaid and “sharing” all credits. Which is why a lot of companies they barely produce anything productive and the real work usually get outsourced to contractors. I personally the first question I ask in any interview is how flat the management style.

sandstrom 3y ago

Based on the comments, there are obviously many people who have had bad experiences of this. I agree with the general sentiment, I think this is a common behavior in many organisations. But at least anecdotally, I'd just like to mention it's not always true. For example, a friend who had loyally had worked at the same company for several years. He was going through some tough times personally (family) and was basically not doing anything useful for half a year or more. Since he had been there for a while, they knew him well and didn't try to force him to get more things done, or anything else. They were basically fine with him doing nothing for many months. About half a year later, things were looking better for him on the personal front, and he would be back to speed (mostly). If he hadn't worked there for several years [been loyal], I doubt they would have treated it the same.

oldbbsnickname 3y ago

Being a worker is being underpaid, to varying degrees. Another way to put it is "the most valuable employee makes the most impact for their salary", so the tendency is to maximize the former and minimize the latter. "Loyalty" is a manipulation game. The only true loyalty is to #1, but most honest people don't even do that. One primary way to get ahead is be in-demand, court many offers, and play offers off each other in an ego-respecting manner within whatever the market will bear. Raises rarely happen, so it's usually better to switch jobs every 1.5-3 years. At some point in a high-income career path, switching jobs doesn't have to be as necessary or desirable, and a lawyer and a TC negotiator can help them get more $$$. Furthermore, anyone good will have lots of options and should always be open to other homes if only to window shop. (Never be stuck somewhere miserable or without options.)