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

That may be true, but even the act of looking can provide some measure of hope, which can make everything more bearable.

The ball is squarely in the employer's court and they are maximizing their position accordingly.

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.

Lucky you. :P

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.

After working remotely for 8 years, I find video conferencing to be preferable.

* I am more physically comfortable. I can control the thermostat, the humidity, the lighting level. My preference on these three things are very different than standard office. In addition I have better control over items such as the food I am digesting, the office chair I am sitting in, the smells in the room, etc. One concrete example, I am often cold in offices. If I am cold my muscles tend to be tense, and my mind reads that signal and makes me more anxious/alert. I can concentrate better and think more clearly if my body/mind is relaxed.

* Reduction of information to only the most relevant. Do you know how much data you receive when sitting next to another human. Significantly more than the 1000mb/s my home internet connection provides. During a critical negotiation or an intimate moment you might want that extra volume. During engineering it's a distraction. I don't want to smell my co-workers lunch while paired programming. All of the conversations are more focused.

* Consent. I choose to connect. I can choose to disconnect at anytime. I'm never stuck in a conversation while waiting in line for coffee, and if someone virtually decides to drop by my desk, I have more flexibility in dealing with the urgent need.

I’d rather move most of this stuff into slack or confluence. It’s more egalitarian, and it has the added benefit that I can search and find the past conversations to reference them later.

There are two kickers to this. First the employees have to hot-desk, which means they do not have an assigned desk and have to find a spot each day. Funnily enough, they all had desks before the pandemic...

Secondly, there is a second office essentially just for executives that is elsewhere and not connected to the main one. If Salesforce wants to complain about the cost of owning buildings and getting people to RTO maybe close the superfluous executive office first...

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.

Checking back in with my friends who I left behind I made the right decision.

Knowing what qualities to look for, them still existing, and being able to find them... are 3 different things. :)

I spent a decade in FAANG, then burned out and left. I’m at an early-stage startup now and couldn’t be happier.

The pressures are very different. My most stressful episodes at this startup have been related to technical problems, where I ultimately feel that I’m in control. My most stressful episodes in FAANG were ones in which I fundamentally had little to no control, but had “accountability” (i.e. blame) for the outcome.

For example, I vividly remember being on a flight to visit my ailing grandmother, and having chest pains from stress due to a parallel team throwing up a red flag weeks before the launch of a years-long project. They were a team of specialists whose work I could not personally do, and I had gotten their sign off on the project months prior. Team members changed, and a new person took issue with a fundamental aspect of the project.

I still believe there was nothing I could have reasonably done differently, as I didn’t have the domain knowledge to get sign-off in this area, and had done my due diligence of engaging the team and getting their sign off. Both my manager and their manager agreed, saying that there was nothing more I could have done, and even going so far as to say that I had been set up to fail.

However, this was of course treated as a significant failure on my part, and was held against me as the reason for lack of promotion. Way up my management chain, people were congratulated for the eventual launch of this project which was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.

That’s about the time I left.

> the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition

In my experience there are still healthy corporations out there. The signals I now look for are: profitable, privately held, not pursuing IPOs or buyers, grow headcount slowly (if at all), have never needed layoffs, promote engineers into positions of authority, and have high average employee tenure.

It's refreshing to work in an organization where people feel secure enough to make long-term investments in infrastructure, people, and projects that may not pay dividends for many years. (And to be the beneficiary of decades of prior long-term investments.)

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

[citation needed] and not from an AI company's marketing materials.

Typically this is impossible, because those staff are the top management. (I'd say "leadership" if they were actually that.)

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.

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.

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.

I hope you enjoy a 6 day work week.

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.

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.

(summary: "we" don't tend to think like a "we")

1. Not all workers are of the same mind. And minds haven't changed much. The decline in engagement is only few percentage points, and appears to be a return to the norm. If there was a catastrophic decline, things might be different.

2. Making waves requires work. You have to do things like talk to your representative, while most people would rather use that time to talk to their friends/family/random internet strangers instead.

Things like illegal immigration, offshoring and H1B take this a step further. With the incoming admin pushing for more H1Bs, how could we hope to organize when they’ll just import replacements?

We need to stop measuring GDP and start measuring things like the Gini coefficient as an indicator of how healthy our economy is.

Nobody falls for the "we" scam anymore.

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.