3 ms·

It's equally plausible that employers treat people with particular trait cluster poorly, and that eventually they give up on getting abused.

robomc 2y ago
[flagged]
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  Probably more likely TBH
portn0y 2y ago
[flagged]
WalterBright 2y ago
Employees abuse their employers, too.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Not systematically. The power dynamic isn't there.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - kelnos 2y ago
      I spent a little bit of time responding to each of your questions with why I think they're much less harmful to an employer than pretty much anything an employer can do to their employees. But I realized none of that point-by-point stuff really matters, and deleted it all. An employer can systematically destroy an employee's life and finances if they pull the right levers. In places like the US, employees are often terrified of getting fired or laid off because they'll lose their (and often their entire family's) health insurance. Companies use this (and other leverage) to give crap raises, make employees jump through ridiculous hoops to get promoted (and then deny those promotions anyway), "encourage" employees to take the bare minimum (or no) time off, etc. And employees have to eat it all, or risk losing their livelihoods. Let's think about that phrase, "losing your livelihood". The fact that it's a common saying really tells us all we need to know. Employers hold the power. If they're caught doing bad things, usually there little to no penalty. Employees sometimes do sneaky things (all those things that you mention) and eventually get fired and/or sent to prison.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        [flagged]
        ororroro 2y ago
        For the past 50 years western society has been transitioning from a high-trust, long-term model of employment to a low-trust, immediate payout model. Once that transition starts everyone involved frequently (rightfully) feels betrayed as the sliding trust-reality falls short of their trust-expectation. This presents as abuse and leads everyone to feel justified to commit further abuses. It takes a rarely strong leader to punch through that and re-establish a higher trust baseline and as society continues to move towards zero-trust the strength requirement to maintain that baseline increases. As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust. Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it. I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        My point is that the abuse goes two ways. I do not believe this is a recent phenomenon. One of my historical interests is crime, and there's nothing, nothing new about that under the sun. My default tendency is to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. It goes back to my experience with Caltech's honor system, which is a high trust system and influenced me a great deal. BTW, the cash register was invented to stop the catastrophic levels of embezzling done by bartenders. A friend of mine who works at a large store told me recently that management decided to have a look at their surveillance cameras, and discovered a number of employees were filching merchandise. They were all promptly fired.
    - anticensor 2y ago
      > Having more than one "full time" remote job? Not your business policing that unless they actively causes reduced output or conflict in the work they do for your business.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Yeah, I've seen this debated at length numerous times here. If that is your opinion, you shouldn't object to productivity monitoring software installed on your work laptop. After all, you're being paid for your time.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        You’re being paid for your labor. Your time is a proxy for that labor. If an employee can do two jobs at once, then let them without intrusive monitoring. If the intrusive monitoring is the only means of determining their output, then fine, but I’m gonna go ahead and guess that there’s less orwellian metrics, and that the primary motive for their introduction is to force more work out of already productive employees by making them self-police, panopticon style.
        em-bee 2y ago
        If an employee can do two jobs at once nobody can work 16 hours a day and be focused all the time. heck, most people can't even do 8 hours of focused work. i am not paying you to sit on a chair, but to actually pay attention. if you do two full time jobs, you are not doing the work at the required focus. sure, there may be jobs where that doesn't matter, and there are jobs that are paid full time but aren't actually full time jobs. like a sysadmin in a small company, where our boss told him that his job was to keep the servers running. if he has nothing to do he is welcome to goof off. and in such a job he could also have used the free time to do side jobs, or a second job. but for most jobs it does matter that you are focused working for the whole time, and if i find out that an employee is doing a second full time job then i will be very much concerned at that persons effectiveness.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      Your loss is an expense, and an employee’s loss is the threat of homelessness. That’s the reason I find your perspective difficult to agree with. You’re holding the cards in these interactions.
      - nec4b 2y ago
        He said he nearly lost his business, that means his and his employees livelihood. How is this difficult to see.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        I mean small business (under like 20 employees) owners are more precarious, but my point still stands honestly. Do you really think business owners are under the same threat of homelessness as their employees?
- kelnos 2y ago
  Not in ways that generally matter. If someone is embezzling large amounts of cash to the point that it's causing the business to fail, sure. But that sort of thing is fairly rare; most "abuse" toward employers is low-stakes stuff like stealing office supplies or only pretending to work. Sure, the company is harmed, but not materially. When an employer abuses an employee, we're usually talking about life-altering things like overwork, withholding pay, denying promised benefits, canceling promised time off, up to the truly awful stuff like firing for biased and discriminatory reasons. I don't think you can really compare these two directions of abuse at all. The power imbalance is staggering.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    It's pretty even. Workers at all levels quit all the time. I've been both employee and employer. > but not materially One employee of mine stole $70,000 (about $200,000 today). It very nearly wiped the company out. (If you can't make payroll, you are forced to close.)
    - consteval 2y ago
      > Workers at all levels quit all the time Yes, and that's allowed. If anything workers are much more gracious in this regard - typically termination happens quickly, with no two week notice. Workers typically at least give that, which they're not required to at all in the US. It's purely goodwill and generosity, so you're welcome. > One employee of mine stole $70,000 Okay? And Bayer Pharmaceuticals gave thousands of people HIV/AIDS. What's your point here? We gotta look at the big picture, not your experience.

robomc 2y ago

[flagged]

ericjmorey 2y ago
Probably more likely TBH

portn0y 2y ago

[flagged]

WalterBright 2y ago

Employees abuse their employers, too.

HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
Not systematically. The power dynamic isn't there.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I spent a little bit of time responding to each of your questions with why I think they're much less harmful to an employer than pretty much anything an employer can do to their employees. But I realized none of that point-by-point stuff really matters, and deleted it all. An employer can systematically destroy an employee's life and finances if they pull the right levers. In places like the US, employees are often terrified of getting fired or laid off because they'll lose their (and often their entire family's) health insurance. Companies use this (and other leverage) to give crap raises, make employees jump through ridiculous hoops to get promoted (and then deny those promotions anyway), "encourage" employees to take the bare minimum (or no) time off, etc. And employees have to eat it all, or risk losing their livelihoods. Let's think about that phrase, "losing your livelihood". The fact that it's a common saying really tells us all we need to know. Employers hold the power. If they're caught doing bad things, usually there little to no penalty. Employees sometimes do sneaky things (all those things that you mention) and eventually get fired and/or sent to prison.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - ororroro 2y ago
        For the past 50 years western society has been transitioning from a high-trust, long-term model of employment to a low-trust, immediate payout model. Once that transition starts everyone involved frequently (rightfully) feels betrayed as the sliding trust-reality falls short of their trust-expectation. This presents as abuse and leads everyone to feel justified to commit further abuses. It takes a rarely strong leader to punch through that and re-establish a higher trust baseline and as society continues to move towards zero-trust the strength requirement to maintain that baseline increases. As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust. Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it. I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        My point is that the abuse goes two ways. I do not believe this is a recent phenomenon. One of my historical interests is crime, and there's nothing, nothing new about that under the sun. My default tendency is to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. It goes back to my experience with Caltech's honor system, which is a high trust system and influenced me a great deal. BTW, the cash register was invented to stop the catastrophic levels of embezzling done by bartenders. A friend of mine who works at a large store told me recently that management decided to have a look at their surveillance cameras, and discovered a number of employees were filching merchandise. They were all promptly fired.
  - anticensor 2y ago
    > Having more than one "full time" remote job? Not your business policing that unless they actively causes reduced output or conflict in the work they do for your business.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Yeah, I've seen this debated at length numerous times here. If that is your opinion, you shouldn't object to productivity monitoring software installed on your work laptop. After all, you're being paid for your time.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        You’re being paid for your labor. Your time is a proxy for that labor. If an employee can do two jobs at once, then let them without intrusive monitoring. If the intrusive monitoring is the only means of determining their output, then fine, but I’m gonna go ahead and guess that there’s less orwellian metrics, and that the primary motive for their introduction is to force more work out of already productive employees by making them self-police, panopticon style.
        em-bee 2y ago
        If an employee can do two jobs at once nobody can work 16 hours a day and be focused all the time. heck, most people can't even do 8 hours of focused work. i am not paying you to sit on a chair, but to actually pay attention. if you do two full time jobs, you are not doing the work at the required focus. sure, there may be jobs where that doesn't matter, and there are jobs that are paid full time but aren't actually full time jobs. like a sysadmin in a small company, where our boss told him that his job was to keep the servers running. if he has nothing to do he is welcome to goof off. and in such a job he could also have used the free time to do side jobs, or a second job. but for most jobs it does matter that you are focused working for the whole time, and if i find out that an employee is doing a second full time job then i will be very much concerned at that persons effectiveness.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Your loss is an expense, and an employee’s loss is the threat of homelessness. That’s the reason I find your perspective difficult to agree with. You’re holding the cards in these interactions.
    - nec4b 2y ago
      He said he nearly lost his business, that means his and his employees livelihood. How is this difficult to see.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        I mean small business (under like 20 employees) owners are more precarious, but my point still stands honestly. Do you really think business owners are under the same threat of homelessness as their employees?
kelnos 2y ago
Not in ways that generally matter. If someone is embezzling large amounts of cash to the point that it's causing the business to fail, sure. But that sort of thing is fairly rare; most "abuse" toward employers is low-stakes stuff like stealing office supplies or only pretending to work. Sure, the company is harmed, but not materially. When an employer abuses an employee, we're usually talking about life-altering things like overwork, withholding pay, denying promised benefits, canceling promised time off, up to the truly awful stuff like firing for biased and discriminatory reasons. I don't think you can really compare these two directions of abuse at all. The power imbalance is staggering.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  It's pretty even. Workers at all levels quit all the time. I've been both employee and employer. > but not materially One employee of mine stole $70,000 (about $200,000 today). It very nearly wiped the company out. (If you can't make payroll, you are forced to close.)
  - consteval 2y ago
    > Workers at all levels quit all the time Yes, and that's allowed. If anything workers are much more gracious in this regard - typically termination happens quickly, with no two week notice. Workers typically at least give that, which they're not required to at all in the US. It's purely goodwill and generosity, so you're welcome. > One employee of mine stole $70,000 Okay? And Bayer Pharmaceuticals gave thousands of people HIV/AIDS. What's your point here? We gotta look at the big picture, not your experience.