7 ms·

American workers' enthusiasm for their jobs falls to a 10-year low

125 points by fortran77 2y ago

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Zirp... Never heard that before, but I can see the relation. If you combine regulator/access control with central bank zero rate, it is a guaranteed giveaway for the rich. By definition you are giving the powerful unlimited free money. Because of course Joe blow on the street can't get a zero or negative loan. He has to get it from the bank who gets to pocket the free money. And a free loan can be fractionally scaled by a bank I would imagine.
- gruez 2y ago
  What does this have to do with job engagement? ZIRP was coming to an end in the years prior to 2020, and that was associated with rising job engagement, but there was a huge interest rate spike in 2022 but that was associated with falling job engagement.
dfxm12 2y ago
I know what is expected from me at work: anything and everything. This is especially true shortly after our seemingly annual round of layoffs (right before the holiday season!). This increase in responsibilities has not come along with an increase pay, but our CEO got to double his total compensation package compared last year. I'd look for something else, but seeing this report, talking to friends and reading some comments in various threads on HN, it's clear the grass isn't greener anywhere else.
- princevegeta89 2y ago
  As a staff engineer at my company, my stupid manager expects me to do his work all the time. I'm hardly building things but just managing jira, talking to other teams, managing shit, writing docs, dealing with politics etc. I never signed up for this crap. But sadly this is where many companies are going
  - whynotminot 2y ago
    I’m not sure the C Suite realizes that their efficiency drives — getting rid of managers — often means their engineers now aren’t as free to focus on engineering things.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Clubber 2y ago
      They don't care, their goal is to hit the numbers for their bonuses. Once dev collapses, they've moved on to make another company "efficient."
  - flatline 2y ago
    “Staff engineer” varies by employer but this is generally exactly what I expect it to be. There are times I do technical work and times my entire job is putting out fires and making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like. Any developer can write code. This stuff requires a different set of executive functions, and engineers that can do both are generally promoted.
    - js8 2y ago
      > making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations What you're describing is a manager, not an engineer. Do you have any managers in your company? What is their job?
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        No, what he is describing is a well-rounded staff level engineer. As you get more senior and take on more responsibilities, you start having to think about everyone's work and how it all fits together, you think about how the project fits into a product that meets the customer's need (unless you have a dedicated PM, which is becoming rare), you have to think about deadlines and how the project is tracking towards it, you have to think about other teams and how their work intersects and how their dependencies are timed to ship in time for yours, you need to communicate up the totem pole to actual managers. And, yes, you have to hold your nose and open up Jira. I don't know where these "pure" perfectly spherical software engineers work who are super-senior staff level, but still do nothing but type in code. I've never seen them. As soon as you advance beyond the entry-level, you need to broaden your scope and be more of an actual engineer rather than just someone who writes code. The manager's job is (among others) to make sure the team is working well together, solve any inter-personnel issues, work with each of their directs on career development, sometimes provide direction of what to work on, sometimes actually assign individual tasks, pass down announcements and direction from the higher-ups, help to manage the team members' performance, and work with HR when needed. They're not there to do all the stinky non-code-typing things in your project.
- asoneth 2y ago
  > the grass isn't greener anywhere else That may be true, but even the act of looking can provide some measure of hope, which can make everything more bearable.
- strict9 2y ago
  The added bonus of replacing laid off tech staff with overseas contractors is another morale booster. The ball is squarely in the employer's court and they are maximizing their position accordingly.
  - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
    > The added bonus of replacing laid off tech staff with overseas contractors is another morale booster. Woah, woah, they're not overseas, they're "Virtual Employees" now. You're not supposed to look behind the curtain.
- eli_gottlieb 2y ago
  Damn that sucks. Wanna seize the means of production?
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    I remember my sophomore year of college.
  - randycupertino 2y ago
    Reminds me of an oldie but a goodie- The Onion Weather Report - Revolt Forecasted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJwHZVl5Buk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJwHZVl5Buk
  - yoyohello13 2y ago
    I assume you're joking, but I do think wealth inequality is a major driver of this.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    The thing is: you've already got the means of production. You have a computer, your brain (the real core of software production), and the whole universe of open source / Free software out there. What people actually want is VC money salaries without having to pay the VC piper's price, which is more of a problem. (AI has changed this somewhat, because it's so energy-intensive that it's become a capital asset. And of course we have to consider the monopolistic nature of software markets.)
    - janderson215 2y ago
      Most people don’t have this, but engineers do and we should be the last people complaining. We get paid well enough to save up and start a small company and take on the risk. The Borg can buy you out, but don’t give them your soul. The world is a better place with more entrepreneurs and new businesses. That part is on us.
    - eli_gottlieb 2y ago
      How is going into business for oneself supposed to shorten your workday and decrease the number of fires you're putting out?
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
- whateveracct 2y ago
  I've been having to do stuff "as soon as possible" for over a year now. I'm at a mid sized company and in many ways the nagging to deliver ASAP is beyond even when I founded my own company. And if something is gonna take a few days or a week, all the managers do is ask me five times if I can instead divide the work and farm it out to other engineers. If it isn't taking on the order of hours, they want to throw people at it to go faster. Parallelism is clearly a manager KPI.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- weisnobody 2y ago
  Grass! You have grass on your side? Lucky you. :P
toomuchtodo 2y ago
Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc. Edit: This appears to be covered thoroughly in the thread ChrisArchitect links to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697779
- gruez 2y ago
  >Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc. Quits rate (ie. the opposite of "trapped and has nowhere to go") saw a spike in 2022-2023, but that associated with lower job satisfaction rating compared to 2020. There was also a huge dip in the quits rate after 2008, but engagement barely moved. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    My mental model around these indicators: High quits rate + low engagement = workers leaving for greener pastures. Low quits rate + low engagement = no greener pastures to go to. Low quit rates + high engagement = "professional/career/work potential" sentiment high, happy workers staying put and grinding because they choose to. (imho, n=1, scholar of the macro and the human, I am an internet rando trying to read the room and could be wrong)
gruez 2y ago
Looks like the "10-year low" is vaguely in line with long term trends. The more interesting observation is that engagement spiked between 2012-2020, for seemingly no reason. What gives?
- jddj 2y ago
  According to TFA: corporate management improved and leaders realized the importance of culture
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    Based on their actions since, this does not seem to be true.
- 9rx 2y ago
  The chart in the article is essentially the inverse of the US unemployment rate chart. What gives, no doubt, is that workers are more enthused about their job when they have more leverage. Chances are you will find that people are more enthusiastic about all aspects of life when they have more leverage.
rusty_venture 2y ago
Yikes. I am very, very lucky to do fulfilling and meaningful work at a place that values me, with people who are a pleasure to work with. But from what I hear this is the exception and not the rule. Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at. For me the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition and the endless feature churn, corporate ladder climbing, disruptive managerial edicts to change horses midstream, ridiculous metrics to meet, and the inevitable burnout that environment seems to create. Has anyone else had similar (or contradictory) experiences?
- the_real_cher 2y ago
  Yeah, thats the dream hut hard to find it seems like.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Out of curiosity: what do you do?
- memhole 2y ago
  Idk if it’s better. I’ve been trying to get into the university. I taught a class recently. It’s pretty much yours to reign over. It made me never want to go back to corporate drudgery. It’s definitely not for everyone. Even into high schools teachers talk about being bullied by students. I don’t know what it’s like there, but some of it’s probably the schools not supporting the teachers with managing a classroom. Classroom management is really hard ime.
  - ajdude 2y ago
    University IT, here. It doesn't pay anything close to what the private sector pays, but I've seen firsthand the good in the community and to society that my university does, and I feel like I'm actually making a difference and an impact. Feels so much less soulless than working enriching a faceless corporation. Benefits are nice too.
suraci 2y ago
A saying explains this as it's because the market keeps surging, is it true?
- ktallett 2y ago
  More money being made but the workers not seeing the benefits of that is of course going to lead to low morale.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    What's keeping the workers out of the market?
    - ktallett 2y ago
      The issue should be less focused on why aren't the workers doing more, but more on who has let the few have so much power over others without being challenged. Society as a concept fails without workers.
    - dyauspitr 2y ago
      The products generating revenue just don’t need many workers to keep going.
    - ternnoburn 2y ago
      Capital claims the rewards. Company gets twice as productive, there's no reason to pay workers more unless they organize to demand it. So the bosses keep more and more of the surplus.
- dfxm12 2y ago
  It's more about unemployment & wages, but these things are connected in many ways. With more unemployment, employers have more power (since the supply of labor is higher) so employees have to grin and bear more abuse, including lower wages. Back in March '23, Powell talked about enacting monetary policy specifically to raise unemployment. Labor was too strong, wages were too high. He felt that this was contributing to inflation. A lot of economists, like Jeremy Siegel, said there was too much low hanging fruit for the fed to be so focused on increasing unemployment, which would cause a lot of disruption to the working class for minimal gain. The fed will generally side with capital though.
dcchambers 2y ago
It certainly doesn't help that we're being told every day that AI is coming for our jobs and, by-and-large, it appears that is true. Even if AI isn't technically capable of completely replacing us, CEOs are making it true by refusing to hire[^1] and reducing workforces as much as possible. Despite that the companies we are working for are recording record profits. UBI is a nonstarter and the entire country is unprepared for this new future we're creating. What exactly is there to be excited about? [^1]: https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/ https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
- itsathrowaway2 2y ago
  > by-and-large, it appears that is true [citation needed] and not from an AI company's marketing materials.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - dcchambers 2y ago
    You don't have to look far. I am NOT saying that AI is actually 100% capable of replacing us, but I am saying that many CEOs are already treating it that way. - https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/ai-job-losses-by-2030-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/ai-job-losses-by-203... - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/klarna-stopped-all-hiring-a-year-ago-to-replace-workers-with-ai https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/klarna-st... - https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/ https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s... - https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-will-stop-hiring-humans-for-jobs-ai-can-do-report-says/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-... In the age of AI, no human job is a profit center any more. EVERY job is a cost center and it's the duty of CEOs to reduce those expenses.
    - cle 2y ago
pluc 2y ago
When you look for work for months and have no choice but to accept the first offer you get, it tends not to be your dream job.
ktallett 2y ago
Is it the actual task they dislike or the fact there is no care or consideration for workers as human beings? I imagine many would enjoy their jobs a lot more if you had less focus on what is seemingly productive behaviour, aka coming into an office for no reason, working more hours than paid for, doing exactly what your boss says, not taking holiday and so on, and actually started being allowed to take care of themselves to allow themselves the opportunity to be more fulfilled across their whole life. Get rid of those staff who believe doing everything you can for the company is all that matters, and you will see more enthusiastic workers with better output.
- itsathrowaway2 2y ago
  > Get rid of those staff who believe doing everything you can for the company is all that matters Typically this is impossible, because those staff are the top management. (I'd say "leadership" if they were actually that.)
  - ktallett 2y ago
    Of course, high enough up that is true, however there are always those middle management evangelists who have believed the word from the CEO and chosen that their workers should follow their lead.
    - itsathrowaway2 2y ago
      Sure, and if the top management changed their approach, so would this middle layer. A fish rots from the head down.
      - ktallett 2y ago
        Someone who won't say no and follows orders blindly is harder to work with than someone with unrealistic expectations and ideas. The latter is easier to deal with than the former in my view.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42694932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42694932
jumpman500 2y ago
The return to office mandate at my company has definitely made most people at my company unhappy. Especially because it's obviously being done as a way to encourage people to quit. As a senior developer I've stopped caring about the company plan. If upper management doesn't care about employees, I don't care about deliverables. As the person that does most the technical interviewing anyways I know they won't be able to find any replacements in a reasonable time.
- lnsru 2y ago
  My buddy senior engineer left recently. And you know what happened? Nothing! His salary was a nice saving for a company. And his work was divided on the shoulders of those who didn’t quit. Management showed the priorities.
macNchz 2y ago
A refrain I’ve heard from real life friends and people on the internet alike is that employees are being asked to come back to the office where they wind up just sitting on video calls much of the day. This seems like an absolute worst case for job satisfaction to me. I’m lucky enough to work wherever I want and accept Zoom meetings as a prerequisite to that, but find them tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation. If I were asked to come to an office every day and deal with the commute and the stupidity of most modern office designs and still had the majority of meetings happen over video, I’d be pretty dissatisfied with my job.
- grajaganDev 2y ago
  Plus there is often no good room to take Zoom meetings so people do so at their desks in an open office plan.
- bluedino 2y ago
  On the other hand, some people are stuck at home all day, no in-person interaction, management is possibly out of touch and ignoring remote people, less tasks, less achievements, less recognition...
  - OptionOfT 2y ago
    I'm looking for a new job, and one of the pre-requisites is that it is fully remote. When parts are remote (or if teams are split in 2 locations) you run the risk of excluding people who are remote. In fully remote situations even water-cooler chats are deliberate.
- yks 2y ago
  In the last few decades workers got the impression that there is some sort of a utilitarian reason or rationale behind the workplace practices or management approaches. After all there is research! Business schools! This facade has started to crack in many places, and RTO is just a very obvious example, it's almost absurd how the companies prizing themselves for being "data-driven" descended into "we're doing this because bossman says so". But it follows the spirit of times anyway, people will quickly adjust.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mupuff1234 2y ago
The answer is cost of living, make it cheaper to live and you solve almost everything.
- rockyj 2y ago
  Agree, and the biggest chunk of this is housing and healthcare. Can you imagine a world where there is guaranteed basic housing and healthcare. Yet, all governments will do everything and anything but not ensure these two things. No matter how much money or taxes they are sitting on.
  - davidw 2y ago
    Housing is something you can do something about at a local level: https://yimbyaction.org/ https://yimbyaction.org/ or https://welcomingneighbors.us/ https://welcomingneighbors.us/ It's fulfilling to see stuff built that you advocated for! Or policies enacted that get more housing built.
- tjpnz 2y ago
  There are countries which can still offer this, but Americans recoil in horror when they convert the salaries back into USD. Even if they would technically be better off.
i_love_retros 2y ago
Why don't we all organize then?
- ktallett 2y ago
  It is an interesting question. In many situations, the majority organising would produce significant change, however as a society we very rarely do it. Why not?
  - 9rx 2y ago
    It is hard and time consuming work so until things become intolerably bad people would rather do something else that they find more enjoyable, like complain on the internet.
  - yoyohello13 2y ago
    I think it's a combination of things not being bad enough to actually motivate change, and the anti-union propoganda/union-busting from the entities in power.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Someone posted a great answer to this on Reddit today: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1i10xjh/why_we_dont_unionize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1i10xjh/... (summary: "we" don't tend to think like a "we")
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20250114151644/https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1i10xjh/why_we_dont_unionize/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250114151644/https://old.reddi...
- itsathrowaway2 2y ago
  Decades of anti-union propaganda, combined with the fecklessness and corruption of existing large labor unions.
deepsquirrelnet 2y ago
> Emily's thought bubble: It seems more than coincidental that workplaces became more focused on good management and culture when interest rates were very low and they could afford such luxuries as making sure employees feel valued. Maybe it’s me who is out of touch, but how is that the author’s honest take away? That low interest rates make people better managers? I’m not buying it. It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers. At which point, you’re probably not concerned about employee satisfaction to begin with.
- endtime 2y ago
  With low rates, there was a lot of hiring, and the supply demand curve for SWE jobs was in favor of employees. So companies had to compete more for employees, leading to perks like remote work. In an era of hiring freezes and layoffs (including stealth layoffs via RTO), not so much. Does that make line managers better or worse at being line managers? Probably not. But it may affect the experience of being managed if your manager is more or less stressed about fighting for headcount, figuring out who to lay off, fitting performance review ratings to a curve, etc.
- cle 2y ago
  Making sure employees feel valued does have a cost though. Managers spend a lot of time on this, and they have a high salary. Career growth, 1:1's, conflict resolution, comp adjustments, etc. When managers' own heads are also on the chopping block in a tough job market, they're going to prioritize looking out for their own ass. If "leadership" is saying "boil the frogs or you're gone", they're probably going to do it. Even if they don't want to.
- sonzohan 2y ago
  > It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers But it does. Even something as simple as writing a thank you email has an opportunity cost. In that time a sales person could initiate a new call, or an engineer could write another paragraph on a design doc. It's why engineers having free coffee, or even BYO coffee, is such a bellweather. When the free coffee goes, the good times go with it. It costs the company nothing to let engineers BYO coffee, yet my friends and I have been with many a company that eventually set up a small coffee shop or a pay-per-cup coffee machine and go around confiscating employee-brought coffee machines. Historically they cite a "fire hazard" or some similar safety issue. > That low interest rates make people better managers? It's not entirely wrong. Higher interest rates reduce investment frequency and amount because it increases the risk and opportunity cost. When interest rates are low it's easier to justify to investors/board members that diverting some capital to employee value and satisfaction. When interest rates are high, things like the aforementioned thank you email becomes an inefficiency, reducing your attractiveness to investors. An extra 2% on a 10MM loan is 200k, and someone's gotta provide that additional revenue. Suddenly free coffee, unsupervised/unmonitored work (like remote), and thank you letters don't provide direct increased revenue while a sales call or design doc could.
ternnoburn 2y ago
American workers are starting to develop class consciousness and realize who is doing the work (the workers) and who is getting paid (the bosses). As bosses continue to treat workers worse and worse, the more we're starting to go, "wait a second, all this culture war bullshit it's just a distraction meant to keep us from banding together."
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
Forcing me to come into the office spending more of my energy, time, and money, not to mention socializing with people I don't want to socialize with, is miserable and unnnecessary. Not to mention I'm far less productive in such a distracting environment. So it just makes no sense why this is even happening in the first place. Most of my team is in a different city! Meanwhile—I can't even expect regular keeping-up-with-inflation raises, let alone a reasonable promotion schedule. Fuck the current job market I'm moving to china.
- p_j_w 2y ago
  >Fuck the current job market I'm moving to china. I hope you enjoy a 6 day work week.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    It would not be my first time! Worst three months of my life. Regardless, my friends in china seem to work hours that roughly align with 40-50 hours a week, similar to you'd see here.
rudolftheone 2y ago
Plot twist: The real 'Great Resignation' was top managers resigning from their responsibility to build good workplace culture.
anthk 2y ago
40 working hours per week it's an anachronism. We should have been doing far less hours. We are in the computing era (plus robotics), not in the 19th century.
- bnetd 2y ago
  This is a shrill take in the same platitudinal vein as saying there should be world peace by now. You're regurgitating techno-optimist fantasies you've read from someone else and have come to mistake them for reality or desirability. The median individual is not going to be working less than 40 hours a week. The system has found a balancing point and people will compete with each other for the money, resources and status as much as their sanity can endure it. There is nothing anachronistic about it, because it has been the case long before 19th century and will remain the case long after 19th century.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    In a world of structural demographic compression and labor shortages popping up, I'm unsure if this assertion is accurate. As labor supply contracts while demand remains constant (or increases, due to aging non prime workers who consume without producing), labor leverage to move to a 4 day week increases. Today, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers, for example. https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/world-depopulation-prospects-and-implications/ https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/world-de... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/us-faces-a-deficit-of-6-million-workers-in-less-than-a-decade https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/us-faces-... | https://archive.today/Lyr5t https://archive.today/Lyr5t https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-workers https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-wor... https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26633/w26633.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26633/w266... https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/01/rise-of-4-day-workweek https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/01/rise-of-4-day-workweek https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=labor+shortages&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - somewhereoutth 2y ago
amarcheschi 2y ago
It comes to no surprise to me when just today i had to deal with developers on reddit being surgically implanted that unions are bad, when they have an effect on wealth inequality. this was just a rant only partially related to the post
Havoc 2y ago
Aside from AI zirp and pandemic I think gen z has also made a big difference. Even though everyone is rolling their eyes at what they’re saying / doing it does seem to have shifted the equivalent of the Overton window. It’s made it more socially acceptable to speak up about the pointlessness of corporate life
davidw 2y ago
I suspect things are going to get worse before they get better as the oligarchs really start to ramp up their policies.
karaterobot 2y ago
I'm extremely skeptical of surveys like this, and more skeptical about how they're reported. A person's answer can vary from one hour to the next, and an entire cohort's answer can vary based on what's in the news today. Then, when it gets reported, the article focuses on what gets the most attention. It reports on America, even though if you look at the survey's own data you find that American workers' engagement is higher than most of the world. It reports on a 10-year low, even though the overall trend is that engagement has gotten higher over time, and the current dip isn't very pronounced. Because if they didn't do that, there wouldn't be much to report on. The truth is that there isn't. But, Gallup is selling this survey methodology, so.
- deleted 2y ago
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neilv 2y ago
> Only 39% of workers feel strongly that someone cares about them as a person at work, That's not as bad a self-reported perception as I would've guessed.
- deleted 2y ago
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ajkjk 2y ago
Sometimes people say that the fix is unionizing workers -- which, yeah, probably, eventually -- but I suspect the first step is just organizing their thoughts, so that people can get collectively outraged. It's way too easy at the moment for everyone to go along with injustices (like the CEO getting a double bonus while laying a bunch of other people off, like one of the top comments atm describes) just because it's hard to coordinate frustrations around them. Society needs new morals for this new age. Even though capitalistically this kind of behavior is incentivized / almost required, humanistically it is not. Giving one person money for fucking over a lot of other people is actually NOT okay. But if the only metric by which it is judged is economic, then it seems fine. Organizing to fix things like this requires, basically, a collective consciousness (something like the "class consciousness" of yore, but that feels like an antiquated phrase from an antique age). It is the same role that "freedom of the press" is supposed to fill (in a world where press is less dominated by strategic PR campaigns/subliminal advertisements like it is today). If people can't align their thoughts together, they can't rebel, or revolt, and the way things are today definitely merits a revolution -- hence the entrenched powers are very interested in suppressing the alignment of thoughts. (Certainly China's censorship is the best example of this, but it happens on Western internet too, in a more subtle way. Keeping everyone outraged over the other villainous political party is a great way to keep them from realizing that the daily apparatus of their life is designed to loot them.) The other way people align their thoughts is finding a leader willing to voice them. That is, basically, what Trump has been doing, for a class of folks who are pissed about some other stuff (some of it real, but much of it deeply contorted by tricks of propaganda). Well, there are a lot of other folks without those kinds of leaders right now. Most of the people on here for instance. If anyone reading is thinking about dropping the follow-the-rules mentality and becoming an outspoken revolutionary, please do, but be sure you're attacking the real problem, not just the least-likable people who it's easiest to bandwagon against.
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  This is really it. It gets so frustrating reading HN sometimes because such a huge swath of commenters just seem ok with this stuff. You have companies doing evil shit and the sentiment is basically if it's not illegal, then it's fine. There seems to be a large subset of people in this world that are still on the Medieval moral framework of "Might makes Right." With the modern definition of "Might" being money. And unfortunately, those are the people that seem to make it into power.
yoyohello13 2y ago
More and more of the labor value is captured by fewer and fewer people. People are starting to ask why we are working so hard if all it does is enrich a handful of people. The fact that one person is worth 1% of the entire US GDP is a sign of an unhealthy society.
code_for_monkey 2y ago
I got sent back to the office where I work in an open floor plan cramped next to people and were all on our own video meetings. Its awful.
deleted_account 2y ago
This seems to be fueling everyone's confirmation bias. The Gallup poll[1] shows a four year decline since 2020. I mean, I don't know what would have happened in 2020 to precipitate this /s. Preceding that was a decade of improvement in employee engagement. What's a little more interesting (and not at all mentioned in the Axios article) is there is a parallel increase in /active disengagement/. There's clearly a significant minority who consistently feels disconnected from work, but this is back on the rise. We're also reading a summary of a summary of a Gallup poll by Jim Harter, Ph.D. who posted 5 months ago [2] that "U.S. Employee Engagement Inches Up Slightly After 11-Year Low" [3], so I'm not sure what conclusions to draw. Unrelated to the links, DOE immediately stop as soon as they realize they're reading derivative commentary and immediately search for whatever source material is being referenced? Unless you have access to the survey information[4] everyone in this thread is already at least two degrees removed from the data (Jim Harter -> Emily Peck -> HN). [1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-sinks-year-low.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jkharter_after-us-employee-engagement-hit-an-11-activity-7226313108837777408-QqN5/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jkharter_after-us-employee-en... [3] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/647564/employee-engagement-inches-slightly-year-low.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/647564/employee-engagement-... [4] https://www.gallup.com/q12/ https://www.gallup.com/q12/
- ericmcer 2y ago
  It seems like covid let corporations do in 4 years what would normally take 20+. They usually have to slowly boil the frog, but with Covid they had a great excuse to take large actions without consequence. Layoffs, inflating prices, cutting perks are normally things that need to be eased into, but they all jumped on the covid/covid economy excuse to do these things overnight.
geor9e 2y ago
Those of us with our net worth in index funds are, on average, +50% in 2 years. That security can make the pull of early retirement or career change stronger.
isk517 2y ago
Data is all wrong. As a Millennial I've been told my entire life that my generation lazy and we don't care about our jobs. Yet somehow this article would have me believe that work enthusiasm has only gone up since we've entered the job market, or at least it did up until the pandemic exposed just how much contempt the ruling class holds for the working class.
- 9rx 2y ago
  The natural conclusion is that Boomer job enthusiasm rose during the period when the lazy millennials offered additional job entertainment, and once the pandemic came around we understand that they started retiring.

125 points by fortran77 2y ago

Zirp... Never heard that before, but I can see the relation. If you combine regulator/access control with central bank zero rate, it is a guaranteed giveaway for the rich. By definition you are giving the powerful unlimited free money. Because of course Joe blow on the street can't get a zero or negative loan. He has to get it from the bank who gets to pocket the free money. And a free loan can be fractionally scaled by a bank I would imagine.

gruez 2y ago
What does this have to do with job engagement? ZIRP was coming to an end in the years prior to 2020, and that was associated with rising job engagement, but there was a huge interest rate spike in 2022 but that was associated with falling job engagement.

dfxm12 2y ago

I know what is expected from me at work: anything and everything. This is especially true shortly after our seemingly annual round of layoffs (right before the holiday season!). This increase in responsibilities has not come along with an increase pay, but our CEO got to double his total compensation package compared last year. I'd look for something else, but seeing this report, talking to friends and reading some comments in various threads on HN, it's clear the grass isn't greener anywhere else.

princevegeta89 2y ago
As a staff engineer at my company, my stupid manager expects me to do his work all the time. I'm hardly building things but just managing jira, talking to other teams, managing shit, writing docs, dealing with politics etc. I never signed up for this crap. But sadly this is where many companies are going
- whynotminot 2y ago
  I’m not sure the C Suite realizes that their efficiency drives — getting rid of managers — often means their engineers now aren’t as free to focus on engineering things.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Clubber 2y ago
    They don't care, their goal is to hit the numbers for their bonuses. Once dev collapses, they've moved on to make another company "efficient."
- flatline 2y ago
  “Staff engineer” varies by employer but this is generally exactly what I expect it to be. There are times I do technical work and times my entire job is putting out fires and making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like. Any developer can write code. This stuff requires a different set of executive functions, and engineers that can do both are generally promoted.
  - js8 2y ago
    > making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations What you're describing is a manager, not an engineer. Do you have any managers in your company? What is their job?
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      No, what he is describing is a well-rounded staff level engineer. As you get more senior and take on more responsibilities, you start having to think about everyone's work and how it all fits together, you think about how the project fits into a product that meets the customer's need (unless you have a dedicated PM, which is becoming rare), you have to think about deadlines and how the project is tracking towards it, you have to think about other teams and how their work intersects and how their dependencies are timed to ship in time for yours, you need to communicate up the totem pole to actual managers. And, yes, you have to hold your nose and open up Jira. I don't know where these "pure" perfectly spherical software engineers work who are super-senior staff level, but still do nothing but type in code. I've never seen them. As soon as you advance beyond the entry-level, you need to broaden your scope and be more of an actual engineer rather than just someone who writes code. The manager's job is (among others) to make sure the team is working well together, solve any inter-personnel issues, work with each of their directs on career development, sometimes provide direction of what to work on, sometimes actually assign individual tasks, pass down announcements and direction from the higher-ups, help to manage the team members' performance, and work with HR when needed. They're not there to do all the stinky non-code-typing things in your project.
asoneth 2y ago
> the grass isn't greener anywhere else That may be true, but even the act of looking can provide some measure of hope, which can make everything more bearable.
strict9 2y ago
The added bonus of replacing laid off tech staff with overseas contractors is another morale booster. The ball is squarely in the employer's court and they are maximizing their position accordingly.
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  > The added bonus of replacing laid off tech staff with overseas contractors is another morale booster. Woah, woah, they're not overseas, they're "Virtual Employees" now. You're not supposed to look behind the curtain.
eli_gottlieb 2y ago
Damn that sucks. Wanna seize the means of production?
- psunavy03 2y ago
  I remember my sophomore year of college.
- randycupertino 2y ago
  Reminds me of an oldie but a goodie- The Onion Weather Report - Revolt Forecasted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJwHZVl5Buk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJwHZVl5Buk
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  I assume you're joking, but I do think wealth inequality is a major driver of this.
- pjc50 2y ago
  The thing is: you've already got the means of production. You have a computer, your brain (the real core of software production), and the whole universe of open source / Free software out there. What people actually want is VC money salaries without having to pay the VC piper's price, which is more of a problem. (AI has changed this somewhat, because it's so energy-intensive that it's become a capital asset. And of course we have to consider the monopolistic nature of software markets.)
  - janderson215 2y ago
    Most people don’t have this, but engineers do and we should be the last people complaining. We get paid well enough to save up and start a small company and take on the risk. The Borg can buy you out, but don’t give them your soul. The world is a better place with more entrepreneurs and new businesses. That part is on us.
  - eli_gottlieb 2y ago
    How is going into business for oneself supposed to shorten your workday and decrease the number of fires you're putting out?
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
whateveracct 2y ago
I've been having to do stuff "as soon as possible" for over a year now. I'm at a mid sized company and in many ways the nagging to deliver ASAP is beyond even when I founded my own company. And if something is gonna take a few days or a week, all the managers do is ask me five times if I can instead divide the work and farm it out to other engineers. If it isn't taking on the order of hours, they want to throw people at it to go faster. Parallelism is clearly a manager KPI.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
weisnobody 2y ago
Grass! You have grass on your side? Lucky you. :P

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc. Edit: This appears to be covered thoroughly in the thread ChrisArchitect links to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697779

gruez 2y ago
>Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc. Quits rate (ie. the opposite of "trapped and has nowhere to go") saw a spike in 2022-2023, but that associated with lower job satisfaction rating compared to 2020. There was also a huge dip in the quits rate after 2008, but engagement barely moved. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  My mental model around these indicators: High quits rate + low engagement = workers leaving for greener pastures. Low quits rate + low engagement = no greener pastures to go to. Low quit rates + high engagement = "professional/career/work potential" sentiment high, happy workers staying put and grinding because they choose to. (imho, n=1, scholar of the macro and the human, I am an internet rando trying to read the room and could be wrong)

gruez 2y ago

Looks like the "10-year low" is vaguely in line with long term trends. The more interesting observation is that engagement spiked between 2012-2020, for seemingly no reason. What gives?

jddj 2y ago
According to TFA: corporate management improved and leaders realized the importance of culture
- psunavy03 2y ago
  Based on their actions since, this does not seem to be true.
9rx 2y ago
The chart in the article is essentially the inverse of the US unemployment rate chart. What gives, no doubt, is that workers are more enthused about their job when they have more leverage. Chances are you will find that people are more enthusiastic about all aspects of life when they have more leverage.

rusty_venture 2y ago

Yikes. I am very, very lucky to do fulfilling and meaningful work at a place that values me, with people who are a pleasure to work with. But from what I hear this is the exception and not the rule. Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at. For me the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition and the endless feature churn, corporate ladder climbing, disruptive managerial edicts to change horses midstream, ridiculous metrics to meet, and the inevitable burnout that environment seems to create. Has anyone else had similar (or contradictory) experiences?

the_real_cher 2y ago
Yeah, thats the dream hut hard to find it seems like.
andrepd 2y ago
Out of curiosity: what do you do?
memhole 2y ago
Idk if it’s better. I’ve been trying to get into the university. I taught a class recently. It’s pretty much yours to reign over. It made me never want to go back to corporate drudgery. It’s definitely not for everyone. Even into high schools teachers talk about being bullied by students. I don’t know what it’s like there, but some of it’s probably the schools not supporting the teachers with managing a classroom. Classroom management is really hard ime.
- ajdude 2y ago
  University IT, here. It doesn't pay anything close to what the private sector pays, but I've seen firsthand the good in the community and to society that my university does, and I feel like I'm actually making a difference and an impact. Feels so much less soulless than working enriching a faceless corporation. Benefits are nice too.

suraci 2y ago

A saying explains this as it's because the market keeps surging, is it true?

ktallett 2y ago
More money being made but the workers not seeing the benefits of that is of course going to lead to low morale.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  What's keeping the workers out of the market?
  - ktallett 2y ago
    The issue should be less focused on why aren't the workers doing more, but more on who has let the few have so much power over others without being challenged. Society as a concept fails without workers.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    The products generating revenue just don’t need many workers to keep going.
  - ternnoburn 2y ago
    Capital claims the rewards. Company gets twice as productive, there's no reason to pay workers more unless they organize to demand it. So the bosses keep more and more of the surplus.
dfxm12 2y ago
It's more about unemployment & wages, but these things are connected in many ways. With more unemployment, employers have more power (since the supply of labor is higher) so employees have to grin and bear more abuse, including lower wages. Back in March '23, Powell talked about enacting monetary policy specifically to raise unemployment. Labor was too strong, wages were too high. He felt that this was contributing to inflation. A lot of economists, like Jeremy Siegel, said there was too much low hanging fruit for the fed to be so focused on increasing unemployment, which would cause a lot of disruption to the working class for minimal gain. The fed will generally side with capital though.

dcchambers 2y ago

It certainly doesn't help that we're being told every day that AI is coming for our jobs and, by-and-large, it appears that is true. Even if AI isn't technically capable of completely replacing us, CEOs are making it true by refusing to hire[^1] and reducing workforces as much as possible. Despite that the companies we are working for are recording record profits. UBI is a nonstarter and the entire country is unprepared for this new future we're creating. What exactly is there to be excited about? [^1]: https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/ https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...

itsathrowaway2 2y ago
> by-and-large, it appears that is true [citation needed] and not from an AI company's marketing materials.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dcchambers 2y ago
  You don't have to look far. I am NOT saying that AI is actually 100% capable of replacing us, but I am saying that many CEOs are already treating it that way. - https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/ai-job-losses-by-2030-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/ai-job-losses-by-203... - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/klarna-stopped-all-hiring-a-year-ago-to-replace-workers-with-ai https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/klarna-st... - https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/ https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s... - https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-will-stop-hiring-humans-for-jobs-ai-can-do-report-says/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-... In the age of AI, no human job is a profit center any more. EVERY job is a cost center and it's the duty of CEOs to reduce those expenses.
  - cle 2y ago

pluc 2y ago

When you look for work for months and have no choice but to accept the first offer you get, it tends not to be your dream job.

ktallett 2y ago

Is it the actual task they dislike or the fact there is no care or consideration for workers as human beings? I imagine many would enjoy their jobs a lot more if you had less focus on what is seemingly productive behaviour, aka coming into an office for no reason, working more hours than paid for, doing exactly what your boss says, not taking holiday and so on, and actually started being allowed to take care of themselves to allow themselves the opportunity to be more fulfilled across their whole life. Get rid of those staff who believe doing everything you can for the company is all that matters, and you will see more enthusiastic workers with better output.

itsathrowaway2 2y ago
> Get rid of those staff who believe doing everything you can for the company is all that matters Typically this is impossible, because those staff are the top management. (I'd say "leadership" if they were actually that.)
- ktallett 2y ago
  Of course, high enough up that is true, however there are always those middle management evangelists who have believed the word from the CEO and chosen that their workers should follow their lead.
  - itsathrowaway2 2y ago
    Sure, and if the top management changed their approach, so would this middle layer. A fish rots from the head down.
    - ktallett 2y ago
      Someone who won't say no and follows orders blindly is harder to work with than someone with unrealistic expectations and ideas. The latter is easier to deal with than the former in my view.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42694932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42694932

jumpman500 2y ago

The return to office mandate at my company has definitely made most people at my company unhappy. Especially because it's obviously being done as a way to encourage people to quit. As a senior developer I've stopped caring about the company plan. If upper management doesn't care about employees, I don't care about deliverables. As the person that does most the technical interviewing anyways I know they won't be able to find any replacements in a reasonable time.

lnsru 2y ago
My buddy senior engineer left recently. And you know what happened? Nothing! His salary was a nice saving for a company. And his work was divided on the shoulders of those who didn’t quit. Management showed the priorities.

macNchz 2y ago

A refrain I’ve heard from real life friends and people on the internet alike is that employees are being asked to come back to the office where they wind up just sitting on video calls much of the day. This seems like an absolute worst case for job satisfaction to me. I’m lucky enough to work wherever I want and accept Zoom meetings as a prerequisite to that, but find them tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation. If I were asked to come to an office every day and deal with the commute and the stupidity of most modern office designs and still had the majority of meetings happen over video, I’d be pretty dissatisfied with my job.

grajaganDev 2y ago
Plus there is often no good room to take Zoom meetings so people do so at their desks in an open office plan.
bluedino 2y ago
On the other hand, some people are stuck at home all day, no in-person interaction, management is possibly out of touch and ignoring remote people, less tasks, less achievements, less recognition...
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  I'm looking for a new job, and one of the pre-requisites is that it is fully remote. When parts are remote (or if teams are split in 2 locations) you run the risk of excluding people who are remote. In fully remote situations even water-cooler chats are deliberate.
yks 2y ago
In the last few decades workers got the impression that there is some sort of a utilitarian reason or rationale behind the workplace practices or management approaches. After all there is research! Business schools! This facade has started to crack in many places, and RTO is just a very obvious example, it's almost absurd how the companies prizing themselves for being "data-driven" descended into "we're doing this because bossman says so". But it follows the spirit of times anyway, people will quickly adjust.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mupuff1234 2y ago

The answer is cost of living, make it cheaper to live and you solve almost everything.

rockyj 2y ago
Agree, and the biggest chunk of this is housing and healthcare. Can you imagine a world where there is guaranteed basic housing and healthcare. Yet, all governments will do everything and anything but not ensure these two things. No matter how much money or taxes they are sitting on.
- davidw 2y ago
  Housing is something you can do something about at a local level: https://yimbyaction.org/ https://yimbyaction.org/ or https://welcomingneighbors.us/ https://welcomingneighbors.us/ It's fulfilling to see stuff built that you advocated for! Or policies enacted that get more housing built.
tjpnz 2y ago
There are countries which can still offer this, but Americans recoil in horror when they convert the salaries back into USD. Even if they would technically be better off.

i_love_retros 2y ago

Why don't we all organize then?

ktallett 2y ago
It is an interesting question. In many situations, the majority organising would produce significant change, however as a society we very rarely do it. Why not?
- 9rx 2y ago
  It is hard and time consuming work so until things become intolerably bad people would rather do something else that they find more enjoyable, like complain on the internet.
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  I think it's a combination of things not being bad enough to actually motivate change, and the anti-union propoganda/union-busting from the entities in power.
pjc50 2y ago
Someone posted a great answer to this on Reddit today: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1i10xjh/why_we_dont_unionize/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1i10xjh/... (summary: "we" don't tend to think like a "we")
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20250114151644/https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1i10xjh/why_we_dont_unionize/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250114151644/https://old.reddi...
itsathrowaway2 2y ago
Decades of anti-union propaganda, combined with the fecklessness and corruption of existing large labor unions.

deepsquirrelnet 2y ago

> Emily's thought bubble: It seems more than coincidental that workplaces became more focused on good management and culture when interest rates were very low and they could afford such luxuries as making sure employees feel valued. Maybe it’s me who is out of touch, but how is that the author’s honest take away? That low interest rates make people better managers? I’m not buying it. It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers. At which point, you’re probably not concerned about employee satisfaction to begin with.

endtime 2y ago
With low rates, there was a lot of hiring, and the supply demand curve for SWE jobs was in favor of employees. So companies had to compete more for employees, leading to perks like remote work. In an era of hiring freezes and layoffs (including stealth layoffs via RTO), not so much. Does that make line managers better or worse at being line managers? Probably not. But it may affect the experience of being managed if your manager is more or less stressed about fighting for headcount, figuring out who to lay off, fitting performance review ratings to a curve, etc.
cle 2y ago
Making sure employees feel valued does have a cost though. Managers spend a lot of time on this, and they have a high salary. Career growth, 1:1's, conflict resolution, comp adjustments, etc. When managers' own heads are also on the chopping block in a tough job market, they're going to prioritize looking out for their own ass. If "leadership" is saying "boil the frogs or you're gone", they're probably going to do it. Even if they don't want to.
sonzohan 2y ago
> It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers But it does. Even something as simple as writing a thank you email has an opportunity cost. In that time a sales person could initiate a new call, or an engineer could write another paragraph on a design doc. It's why engineers having free coffee, or even BYO coffee, is such a bellweather. When the free coffee goes, the good times go with it. It costs the company nothing to let engineers BYO coffee, yet my friends and I have been with many a company that eventually set up a small coffee shop or a pay-per-cup coffee machine and go around confiscating employee-brought coffee machines. Historically they cite a "fire hazard" or some similar safety issue. > That low interest rates make people better managers? It's not entirely wrong. Higher interest rates reduce investment frequency and amount because it increases the risk and opportunity cost. When interest rates are low it's easier to justify to investors/board members that diverting some capital to employee value and satisfaction. When interest rates are high, things like the aforementioned thank you email becomes an inefficiency, reducing your attractiveness to investors. An extra 2% on a 10MM loan is 200k, and someone's gotta provide that additional revenue. Suddenly free coffee, unsupervised/unmonitored work (like remote), and thank you letters don't provide direct increased revenue while a sales call or design doc could.

ternnoburn 2y ago

American workers are starting to develop class consciousness and realize who is doing the work (the workers) and who is getting paid (the bosses). As bosses continue to treat workers worse and worse, the more we're starting to go, "wait a second, all this culture war bullshit it's just a distraction meant to keep us from banding together."

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

Forcing me to come into the office spending more of my energy, time, and money, not to mention socializing with people I don't want to socialize with, is miserable and unnnecessary. Not to mention I'm far less productive in such a distracting environment. So it just makes no sense why this is even happening in the first place. Most of my team is in a different city! Meanwhile—I can't even expect regular keeping-up-with-inflation raises, let alone a reasonable promotion schedule. Fuck the current job market I'm moving to china.

p_j_w 2y ago
>Fuck the current job market I'm moving to china. I hope you enjoy a 6 day work week.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  It would not be my first time! Worst three months of my life. Regardless, my friends in china seem to work hours that roughly align with 40-50 hours a week, similar to you'd see here.

rudolftheone 2y ago

Plot twist: The real 'Great Resignation' was top managers resigning from their responsibility to build good workplace culture.

anthk 2y ago

40 working hours per week it's an anachronism. We should have been doing far less hours. We are in the computing era (plus robotics), not in the 19th century.

bnetd 2y ago
This is a shrill take in the same platitudinal vein as saying there should be world peace by now. You're regurgitating techno-optimist fantasies you've read from someone else and have come to mistake them for reality or desirability. The median individual is not going to be working less than 40 hours a week. The system has found a balancing point and people will compete with each other for the money, resources and status as much as their sanity can endure it. There is nothing anachronistic about it, because it has been the case long before 19th century and will remain the case long after 19th century.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  In a world of structural demographic compression and labor shortages popping up, I'm unsure if this assertion is accurate. As labor supply contracts while demand remains constant (or increases, due to aging non prime workers who consume without producing), labor leverage to move to a 4 day week increases. Today, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers, for example. https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/world-depopulation-prospects-and-implications/ https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/world-de... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/us-faces-a-deficit-of-6-million-workers-in-less-than-a-decade https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/us-faces-... | https://archive.today/Lyr5t https://archive.today/Lyr5t https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-workers https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-wor... https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26633/w26633.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26633/w266... https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/01/rise-of-4-day-workweek https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/01/rise-of-4-day-workweek https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=labor+shortages&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- somewhereoutth 2y ago

amarcheschi 2y ago

It comes to no surprise to me when just today i had to deal with developers on reddit being surgically implanted that unions are bad, when they have an effect on wealth inequality. this was just a rant only partially related to the post

Havoc 2y ago

Aside from AI zirp and pandemic I think gen z has also made a big difference. Even though everyone is rolling their eyes at what they’re saying / doing it does seem to have shifted the equivalent of the Overton window. It’s made it more socially acceptable to speak up about the pointlessness of corporate life

davidw 2y ago

I suspect things are going to get worse before they get better as the oligarchs really start to ramp up their policies.

karaterobot 2y ago

I'm extremely skeptical of surveys like this, and more skeptical about how they're reported. A person's answer can vary from one hour to the next, and an entire cohort's answer can vary based on what's in the news today. Then, when it gets reported, the article focuses on what gets the most attention. It reports on America, even though if you look at the survey's own data you find that American workers' engagement is higher than most of the world. It reports on a 10-year low, even though the overall trend is that engagement has gotten higher over time, and the current dip isn't very pronounced. Because if they didn't do that, there wouldn't be much to report on. The truth is that there isn't. But, Gallup is selling this survey methodology, so.

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neilv 2y ago

> Only 39% of workers feel strongly that someone cares about them as a person at work, That's not as bad a self-reported perception as I would've guessed.

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ajkjk 2y ago

Sometimes people say that the fix is unionizing workers -- which, yeah, probably, eventually -- but I suspect the first step is just organizing their thoughts, so that people can get collectively outraged. It's way too easy at the moment for everyone to go along with injustices (like the CEO getting a double bonus while laying a bunch of other people off, like one of the top comments atm describes) just because it's hard to coordinate frustrations around them. Society needs new morals for this new age. Even though capitalistically this kind of behavior is incentivized / almost required, humanistically it is not. Giving one person money for fucking over a lot of other people is actually NOT okay. But if the only metric by which it is judged is economic, then it seems fine. Organizing to fix things like this requires, basically, a collective consciousness (something like the "class consciousness" of yore, but that feels like an antiquated phrase from an antique age). It is the same role that "freedom of the press" is supposed to fill (in a world where press is less dominated by strategic PR campaigns/subliminal advertisements like it is today). If people can't align their thoughts together, they can't rebel, or revolt, and the way things are today definitely merits a revolution -- hence the entrenched powers are very interested in suppressing the alignment of thoughts. (Certainly China's censorship is the best example of this, but it happens on Western internet too, in a more subtle way. Keeping everyone outraged over the other villainous political party is a great way to keep them from realizing that the daily apparatus of their life is designed to loot them.) The other way people align their thoughts is finding a leader willing to voice them. That is, basically, what Trump has been doing, for a class of folks who are pissed about some other stuff (some of it real, but much of it deeply contorted by tricks of propaganda). Well, there are a lot of other folks without those kinds of leaders right now. Most of the people on here for instance. If anyone reading is thinking about dropping the follow-the-rules mentality and becoming an outspoken revolutionary, please do, but be sure you're attacking the real problem, not just the least-likable people who it's easiest to bandwagon against.

yoyohello13 2y ago
This is really it. It gets so frustrating reading HN sometimes because such a huge swath of commenters just seem ok with this stuff. You have companies doing evil shit and the sentiment is basically if it's not illegal, then it's fine. There seems to be a large subset of people in this world that are still on the Medieval moral framework of "Might makes Right." With the modern definition of "Might" being money. And unfortunately, those are the people that seem to make it into power.

yoyohello13 2y ago

More and more of the labor value is captured by fewer and fewer people. People are starting to ask why we are working so hard if all it does is enrich a handful of people. The fact that one person is worth 1% of the entire US GDP is a sign of an unhealthy society.

code_for_monkey 2y ago

I got sent back to the office where I work in an open floor plan cramped next to people and were all on our own video meetings. Its awful.

deleted_account 2y ago

This seems to be fueling everyone's confirmation bias. The Gallup poll[1] shows a four year decline since 2020. I mean, I don't know what would have happened in 2020 to precipitate this /s. Preceding that was a decade of improvement in employee engagement. What's a little more interesting (and not at all mentioned in the Axios article) is there is a parallel increase in /active disengagement/. There's clearly a significant minority who consistently feels disconnected from work, but this is back on the rise. We're also reading a summary of a summary of a Gallup poll by Jim Harter, Ph.D. who posted 5 months ago [2] that "U.S. Employee Engagement Inches Up Slightly After 11-Year Low" [3], so I'm not sure what conclusions to draw. Unrelated to the links, DOE immediately stop as soon as they realize they're reading derivative commentary and immediately search for whatever source material is being referenced? Unless you have access to the survey information[4] everyone in this thread is already at least two degrees removed from the data (Jim Harter -> Emily Peck -> HN). [1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-sinks-year-low.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jkharter_after-us-employee-engagement-hit-an-11-activity-7226313108837777408-QqN5/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jkharter_after-us-employee-en... [3] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/647564/employee-engagement-inches-slightly-year-low.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/647564/employee-engagement-... [4] https://www.gallup.com/q12/ https://www.gallup.com/q12/

ericmcer 2y ago
It seems like covid let corporations do in 4 years what would normally take 20+. They usually have to slowly boil the frog, but with Covid they had a great excuse to take large actions without consequence. Layoffs, inflating prices, cutting perks are normally things that need to be eased into, but they all jumped on the covid/covid economy excuse to do these things overnight.

geor9e 2y ago

Those of us with our net worth in index funds are, on average, +50% in 2 years. That security can make the pull of early retirement or career change stronger.

isk517 2y ago

Data is all wrong. As a Millennial I've been told my entire life that my generation lazy and we don't care about our jobs. Yet somehow this article would have me believe that work enthusiasm has only gone up since we've entered the job market, or at least it did up until the pandemic exposed just how much contempt the ruling class holds for the working class.

9rx 2y ago
The natural conclusion is that Boomer job enthusiasm rose during the period when the lazy millennials offered additional job entertainment, and once the pandemic came around we understand that they started retiring.