Have a bad day? Fuck you, you're fired. Doesn't matter that you saved the company tens or hundreds or even millions of dollars last year. That was last year. What have you done for the bottom line today, peon?
But where does that leave us as a society?
I just feel this cynical statement is as silly as a blanket statement as one that would say the opposite, something like "companies provide value and jobs and take care of employees"
I would argue though, that the way you describe companies is definitely more true of larger companies because people just aren't invested/attached to each other and that enables that kind of thinking (employees just lines on a spreadsheet).
Many small businesses (and small business owners like myself) do want to build a team and take care of the team and hope the team also invests back into the company. That doesn't mean they can't lay people off if they can't afford to keep them. But things are more likely to be human at a smaller size anyway.
Still, I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush.
Many small businesses (and small business owners like myself) do want to build a team and take care of the team
Sure such places exist, but are they the majority? Some people get lucky to work for such companies, I'd guess most of humanity is just not that lucky.
I will agree strongly that in my interactions with dozens of small businesses, the way we do (and want to do) business is in the minority. There was once a phone call with a small business to explore a partnership and I messaged my exec team on slack "I don't like how ___ lied about something as small as ____, don't really want to get into a partnership with businesses that have such red flags" – but that is sadly too common. Call me naive, but I have to feel satisfied at the end of the day that we tried our best to do the right thing in our little corner, even if that limited our growth (and it certainly has).
IMO because financial systems are so much more robust we should be moving to either a daily pay or even a prepay model. But likely that would take regulation because it doesn't benefit the decision makers.
Additionally the status quo is such that the employer is earning interest on a pay period worth of capital, while the employee is eating the inflation on it. A spread of about 4 interest + 4 inflation = 8%
Not our problem. exec + mgmt creates the incentives set and reaps nearly all the rewards for it. Don't take personal loss for something you do not have meaningful equity in (ie you will not participate in the rewards). And btw the vast majority of equity plans are not meaningful equity. Compare your compensation to exec layer and decide if you're getting a proportional share, I'd argue unless your C suite compensation is around 10x the lower paid folks (it's usually closer to 100x) then no, you're not equitably participating.
Now, if you own a meaningful part of the rewards, go HAM.
Pretty much every single issue that we face as humanity will have a business component in the solution. Even larger government-funded solutions will have to fund private contractors to carry out whatever actions, and in many cases, make a difference whether some companies go above and beyond. Take public transit. The buses and trains are manufactured by private industry. So would you like to ride in a train manufactured or driven by people that every step of the way had a "not our problem" attitude?
How about the concept of having pride in your work? I'm honestly not trying to make excuses for predatory and greedy management. I'm not. I am arguing that having a "not our problem" makes you just as bad as the evil management. In both cases, the consumer (you) suffers.
I wasn't aware there was even a question about fairness regarding equity. Sure, some places would be even more cutthroat in their negotiations, but if you want more equity, usually you have to take more risks. Has that calculation changed in any fundamental way?
The reality is that we do ride in those trains.
It is not up to random employees to decide that today is a great day to go above and beyond. It is up to leadership to create a company that make that an easy and rewarding decision every day.
If you want a better system, you're going to have to replace the existing systems.
Well the gov't bit is a trick cause they have a monopoly[1], of course I want them to do their best work with what boils down to a forced purchase. (ie when I pay my taxes, I'm forced to purchase a basket of goods decided by politicians and lobbyists) .
However, when it comes to private businesses? Let em die, I spend my money at the companies that give me the best value for my dollar. (yes sometimes premium, not always frugally).
> of having pride in your work?
Totally agree, find an employer that has that culture, then give them your absolute best. My point was do not throw your pearls to swine, do not martyr yourself at a company that does not value those things.
[1]: not that I'm automatically advocating for ending all gov't monopolies, I don't have a good alternate solution at hand for some cases, but still can recognize one of the properties of the choice
Some of us work in roles that are essential to society. When essential workers choose the "not my problem" mentality, it literally becomes the problem of everyone in society.
Working more than 40 hour weeks? Agreeing to less base compensation for more equity?
Something like sacrifice beyond what is required to stay employed or beyond what would be marginally valuable to the person making the sacrifices.
If you'll be fired for not coming in on Saturday, well then you gotta do that. But if you'll not be neither fired, nor sufficiently rewarded (IMO the most common case), then it's personal loss to sacrifice saturday for a reward that will almost entirely be reaped by C suite and Shareholders. Even if equity is part of your comp package, it's likely you'll own less than .01% of the company & your productivity.
If I am (and my coworkers are) are having fun, and we're collectively moving the business forward, then great. Things are low stress, with a pile of money coming (and I avoid places that expect unsustainable hours, so that is not an issue).
If that's not how things are going, then, well, the tech gold rush probably has a few more decades in it (minimum), and there are other plenty of other companies that do offer those things.
So go ahead and take care of me, but put it in writing. In my experience its pretty common for small businesses to have wishful thinking and have a desire to take care of the team, but for one reason or another, be unable or unwilling to actually follow through once they get into the details of it.
Socialism, being a system where the workers collectively own the business, has a lot more credit if they wanted workers to feel invested.
Capitalism, being a system where workers produce the value but see a small portion of it, basically incentivizes dehumanizing the workers. The greater system creates a society where almost every interaction one has in their day to day life is a transaction. Jobs are like renting a space. Why would you make improvements to a space when a landlord can evict you and benefit from your extra effort.
Small businesses are often, in a sense, infantilized. They're not like the big nameless corp, they're your neighbor, they're a smol bean who can't hurt. The reality is small businesses can get away with a lot more BS. IMO I'd be far more alert working at a small business waiting for the CEO to do something dumb or damaging than a large corp.
Unless the small business gives employees a sense of ownership(actual stake, cooperatively owned) why should they feel invested? They're in the same precarious spot as any other employee. The power balance is greatly weighed against them.
> But where does that leave us as a society?
The problem is the structural incentives, not the fact that workers respond rationally to them.
To fix the problem, fix the incentives, don’t try to guilt trip workers to ignore them to give unrewarded gifts to their employers in an upward transfer of wealth. Because, if we encourage people to do that, where does that leave us as a society?
I'll worry about that once we address what it does to us as a society that CEOs outearn workers by 400:1 while oddly almost never being affected by layoffs.
Same goes for smaller businesses: Campaign for worker protections, and then we'll talk. (Some small businesses do in fact bend over backwards to protect their employees - and they usually get fierce loyalty as a reward. But the average business cares very little about long-term impact on workers)
In practice, these are the smells I look for, but sadly, it’s not always visible in the interview process:
* Each of the organizations of the business produce more evidence of their worth than actual value they bring
* Blame is deflected causing everyone from C-level to individual contributors speaking with the passive voice within internal communication
* Yes-men/women bubble up to the top and those who pose contrary opinions are not welcome
Unfortunately, most companies have some degree of these, but there are some that are worse than others. I’ve just found that starting my own thing is going to be better long term for my mental health even if it puts me in a more precarious financial situation.
Think about probabilities. Does doing good and relevant work increase your chances of promotion and better pay? Yes. Does it decrease your chances of being laid off? Yes.
So it seems like doing good work is your best chance at doing well, although nothing is guaranteed.
Now obviously if you're doing the minimum at work because you're growing your own business - that could be the superior strategy. But if you're doing the minimum so you can just waste time doing nothing - seems worse.
In my opinion the optimised outcome is a good life, not good employment.
This entirely depends on the work culture, and projects. Optimize for next employer (or side hustle, startup, contract etc) ... The primary negotiation point (initial offer) has already lapsed once you work for someone, so you will not be able to reap benefits from your "good work" under that employers definition.
MBAs have game theoried the f--- out of the workplace and the only suitable defense is to do so back. Tailor your response to how aggressive this has been done (eg if you work for a family business, or a culture that clearly is going above and beyond to not be that...)
This is so hilariously false.
Being in that cohort obviously hurts you - though obviously nothing is guaranteed.
I think here she has fallen foul of the old “you are as good as your last result” during a costs downsizing period.
But, assuming they save a company orders of magnitude more than their entire salary for the rest of your career, it’s probably worth it to keep such people around indefinitely assuming they continue to actually work. If for no other reason but to incentivize other people to go above and beyond.
I’ve seen the other side of this where employees decided not to save the company 10’s of millions because it would be a hassle and they wouldn’t be rewarded for it. Nobody wins when you fail to reward people.
Also, think about this, these people were promoted multiple times for going "above & beyond". They just weren't an optimal fit for their last roles.
Please explain to me exactly how it was that one director's fault that the movie lost $100M.
Because in reality, it's going to be a lot more than one person's fault that a movie was a dud. Especially when there are so many moving pieces behind a piece of content's popularity.
It was a bad idea from the start, and was never given a chance to correct.
Steve McConnell was a big proponent of the worst bugs start in the Requirements Phase.
Same goes for almost any project.
The people that greenlight garbage are frequently fired, too, but that usually means they need to delay buying that second private island.
People further down the food chain, might actually end up having to put their kids to work at McDonald's, instead of sending them to college.
It's impossible for you to say with certainty that a single decision caused the movie to flop and it's disingenuous to think so. Especially disingenuous to say it's one person's fault that an entire movie was pitched, greenlit, made, and then flopped. There are literally thousands of people who made decisions along the way, starting from the initial greenlight which would have been given by multiple people.
That's a rather bold statement (mine was equally rash).
I suspect the reality comes in, somewhere between.
In any case, I am not into excusing the top management, when it comes to these failures. I think that lower-echelon bus-fodder hunts can be symptoms of terrible, unaccountable, higher-level managers.
Even if someone lower down the chain made the error, it can often be determined that the environment (maybe even the reason they have the ability to screw things up), was because of top management.
When I was a manager, successes were owned by my team, and the failures were 100% mine.
Managers are critical, and I have come to learn that the vast majority of them are ... shall we say ... works in progress?
Perhaps part of the problem here is new leadership rushing things out the door or succumbing to sunk cost fallacy.
Yes, it would require extreme buy-in from senior management.
Yes, there are companies that are extreme in their mercurial attitudes towards employees. But so are there people like that.
Do you similarly say, I don't do anything above and beyond for other people because that one time some boy/girl/friend left me because I had a bad day?
No, you find the people who value you. And because there needs to be balance, you show that you value them by sometimes going above and beyond.
And besides that, you should be tying everything you do for a company to some self-oriented goal. Like these folks laid off from Pixar, do you think they are now at a net negative in life for having been laid off?
Their lives have been enriched through skills, relationships, income, savings, experiences, etc.
Does it suck to be laid off? Definitely.
But if you come away from a 20 year career at a company feeling empty and used then I'd say that's more on you than on the employer.
If you think to yourself, "I could have given so much more time to my family but the company forced me to work." No, you did that to yourself.
You work for an abusive employer? Plan your escape.
Yeah, they should employ you forever if you, out of luck, not work, had some hard drives at home in 1998.
you also hear this from customers, but of course generally nobody wants to be a customer of a smaller unknown company either. same thing - they're happy to get a quote and use it as leverage against a big competitor.
as long as you want that upside of security or a big paycheck or prestige or "never got fired for choosing" or whatever imaginary thing you've convinced yourself of, you're also going to get a corresponding downside when the going gets tough.
live by the sword, die by the sword. if you're unhappy about the dynamics of big companies, maybe consider a change.