Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Your shields are officially down.

What's this bizarro metaphor about shields? Considering another job is not "putting your shields down". Yes, people will start doing calculations whether to do so or not, when they have another offer/chance/invite from a friend at another company or not. The bizarro part is describing this as "shields down". As if their existing job is something the person should "protect" against new offers / opportunities.

>To find and understand this shields-down moment, I ask, “When did you start looking?” Often the answers are a vague, “It kind’a just happened. I wasn’t really looking. I’m really happy here.” Bullshit. (...) It didn’t just happen. You chose. Maybe you weren’t looking, but once your shields dropped, you started looking.

So, not bullshit after all.

I don't get the defensive pose of the author. As the manager/HR person, he sounds like a slave owner, where he expects people to fight ("keep shields up") to keep working for them, and he feels betrayed if they do leave. The article sounds like trying to guilt people.

>Happy people don’t leave jobs they love.

Yes they do, if they'll be equally happy elsewhere and the pay is better, or the location more convenient, or they simply want to try something new. You don't need to be unhappy in your job to be tempted by those things.

Some people, might also perform perfectly rational calculations about the benefits of jumping job, whether they're happy with the current one or not. They don't just stick to a job just because they're happy there. E.g. to advance their career. The best moment to get a new job is when you already have one...

I'd argue there's no "shield" to begin with. The "shield" was thrown away when a real employer/employee relationship ceased to exist. When, regardless of slightly better offers, employees would stay due to such relationships. When businesses had downturns, they sheltered their dedicated employees by shielding with resources from past successes.

Today, pretty much every medium- to large-scale employer I've anecdotally interacted with is focused only on efficiency and ROI. You're a tool to drive business success and if you're not doing so or a slightly better tool is available: you're gone.

This culture shift means people really don't care about any sort of culture propoganda your business spews to them. They nod, smile, and play along because everyone involved knows it's merely a facade.

It's no longer true that happy employees don't leave jobs. Employees will seek their maximum ROI in the same fashion as businesses do and that culture was established by business practices.

As far as "loving" a job, very few people get paid and get paid well to do things they truly love. This alignment happens but it's not all that common. The fact is, survival in modern life is expensive and people will do whatever they need to do to pay their expenses. They'll do their best to find something enjoyable in that process but the vast majority will settle for something that doesn't make them miserable. The pigeonhole principle almost assures this (IMHO).

The bizarre shield metaphor is part of the never-ending push you see from HR trying to reestablish the illusion of a real employee/employer relationship. Maybe the people in HR really are decent human beings and do care, so they take the defensive position. What they need to realize is they're not really in charge and really just the face of business propoganda from upper management and investors.

> I'd argue there's no "shield" to begin with. The "shield" was thrown away when a real employer/employee relationship ceased to exist

I agree. I feel privileged that I realized this fact very early, right when I started my career in the middle of a recession. I got the most pragmatic and down-to-earth education about how the employee/employer relationship works when people I sent code reviews in the morning were not working there anymore by noon.

Employers show zero loyalty towards their employees the world over so to have any form of loyalty back is to misunderstand the situation entirely. Money exchanges hands for time working. It is a contract just as the company wants it.

Anybody who thinks there is more to it than that has misunderstood the way any medium to large company operates. Small businesses however can and do show employee loyalty but that is due to the owner's inexperience, it will likely get beat out of them when the reality of a very fluid workplace kicks in. Jobs for life have been gone for a good while.

I completely agree with you, but looking at this from the perspective of a middle manager, especially a lower ranking one, rather than a shareholder or senior leadership view, it starts to make sense and isn't quite as cynical. A single IC or low ranking manager leaving a large or middle sized company will probably have no effect on the company ROI, but could seriously affect that managers goals. Outside of that the manager has a personal relationship and perhaps sees themself as a mentor to the employee that leaves, so they might take it as a personal loss even if they entirely understand the reason for departure.

I copied this from another submission/comment a while back, I wish I'd preserved the source. It's been my touchstone for my daily emotional rollercoaster of working at any job, and has helped me do a lot of this BS cutting.

> Loyalty in business has not been a thing for a long time. Where there's no loyalty, there's no betrayal. You're right to be angry about being lied to, but lies like this are so commonplace in the business world that I simply assume management is lying to me and do my own assessment of the situation.

> Take stock of your entire work situation. Don't just look at pay and benefits, but also intangibles like flexibility, do you like your coworkers, do you like what you're doing, commute time, etc. etc. Once you've done that, decide if the whole package still makes sense or if you're better off elsewhere.

> Most importantly IMO, let the anger go and coldly decide what's best for you and what you care about. This wasn't personal. This is simply a result of the political, economic, and cultural system we live in.

It's an odd metaphor, but I think it is acknowledging that a good leader retains people voluntarily and it's his job to do that:

> The reason this reads cranky is because I, the leader of the humans, screwed up. Often you’ve forgotten this original thought in your subsequent intense job deliberations, but when I ask, when I dig, I usually find a basic values violation that dug in, stuck, and festered. Sometimes it’s a major values violation from months ago. Sometimes it’s a small violation that occurred at the worst possible time. In either case, your expectations of your company and your job were not met and when faced with opportunity elsewhere, you engaged.

The underlying idea is to retain people by making sure they have what they want. Asking the question "why can't we just effectively counteroffer everyone who wants to leave?" And the answer is that often it's extremely hard to know the true reason, or that the improvement is something that cannot be achieved through "managing upwards".

Once they have hit the point where they hand in a resignation you can't do much about it the time to have done something was before when they complained about something. The failure to fix the problem is where the problem lies and now it isn't just about the problem(s) but also how they were handled which has meant there is little trust. Maybe a higher pay offer retains them for 6 months but the wound is still there and its likely never going away.

I think you over-read the metaphor. The point is that when people are extremely content in their current job, they're likely to 'bounce' people who are asking them to coffee since it's usually seen as a waste of time. It seems legit to me to consider that there is a tipping point in a person's current job where those inbound requests start being responded to, since the person's mind is open to the idea of some kind of transition, however unlikely.

> >Your shields are officially down.

> What's this bizarro metaphor about shields?

I think it's a reference to Star Trek shields, which were typically let down when a ship trusted another ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shields_(Star_Trek)

Shields aren't a particularly strange metaphor because changing jobs is about job security. One usually clings to the security of the current job until security of the next job suddenly removes the barriers to exit.

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