Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

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> Nothing employers do today comes close to that.

Today's employers do similar things in subtler ways. After all, it's been 100+ years, things have changed. Lots of things have changed including the average quality of life, and the Sociological Department has kept up and changed with the times too.

You pointed some of this out yourself. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class. I bet upwards of 90% of corporate workers today would agree with a statement that Ford was such a champion. This convincing by way of constant Ford-praising literate is a first step in itself.

Sociological Departmentalism now manifests itself in subtler ways, like superiors throwing out casual questions about your personal lives, "team dinners" where people bring their spouses, and the ever so lightly dropped "see you early in the office tomorrow!" at the end (never "you must be tired – don't come to the office tomorrow, take some time off!").

I would invite you to consider the possibility that the intents of such practices have not changed since Ford's time, the methods have.

If I don’t bring my SO or spouse to a team dinner, my pay is not docked. If I don’t want to answer a personal question, I can decline without fearing it will show up on my performance review or pay slip.

The central theme of my comment was "it has become subtler". I...don't see a conflict between this and your statements?

To take your examples concretely – sure, you won't see your pay docked, but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises that you don't.

Or at least, this used to happen routinely prior to the pandemic making it impractical to conduct such affairs unnecessarily blending work and life. Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".

I was told bringing a spouse to a work event meant you wouldn't get raises because family people are less willing to work late. So which is it?

It's on a case by case basis, but try saying "I do not wish to discuss my personal life at work" in response to any questions about your personal life, and see how it goes :)

Caveat: You have to be in a large company with a lot of managers.

>> try saying "I do not wish to discuss my personal life at work" in response to any questions about your personal life, and see how it goes

No one will bat an eye at that answer. There are some managers / employees / peers where I know their personal life well and there are some I don't know at all. It has never been relevant.

You have to play the social game.

Saying "It's none of your business and you can't force me to answer" send a very different message than "It's going alright. Did you watch the game last night? Pretty cool, huh?"

It means that you need a new job.

>> but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises ... Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".

I am curious what the basis of your world view is. I worked as a manager in some pretty big companies and this doesn't resonate with how I or anyone I knew acted, nor does it make sense to structure things this way from an incentive point of view.

I would say there's an angle there where people that like their work and co-workers more are generally more productive than those who punch the clock. So I could see that there could be some (mild) correlation - not causation - between better performance/higher team cohesion and interest in work social events, it would be silly to pay people based on the later because we can just pay them on the former.

It seems pretty noncontroversial to me that managers are more likely to promote people they like, and that this effect magnifies at higher ranks where performance metrics are less objective. Obviously a worker who only focuses on politics is going to be seen as redundant pretty quickly, but I've seen some very good workers who didn't get the promotions they should have because they didn't engage with politics at all.

I agree with that - people need to know who you are. It's very different than the "you didn't bring your wife to the party so we won't promote you" nonsense (frankly) that I am responding to.

Or up until last year, you could have been fired based exclusively off the gender of your SO.

Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.

I have no idea about your personal position, but the GPs point is that it's more subtle and you're not refuting that. There is not a box on your pay about these things (or any other form of orthodoxy, I'm not necessarily suggesting those examples are the main problem), but that in no way means they dont relate to your career trajectory. Sorry for the double negatives

your performance is adequate but it's clear now you're just not a good culture fit here

I should hope that at least some of the intents have changed, since Ford was an award-winning white supremacist.

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