The very essence of this website is not amenable to workers coming together to discuss things like the propriety of employment-tied healthcare, or what we should expect from our managers, but mostly for aspiring and current startup leaders to, probably, discuss everything but that stuff. It is a forum attached to a startup incubator after all, and I can't imagine much VC money goes to those companies that are worried about their own labor related issues/externalities, at least those that they don't need to legally be worried about.
I don't think anything is lost here, there is no problem per se, discussions are of course not being diminished by this ultimately demographic point; but just... if you come to these threads and feel a little disappointed that there is not a more universal solidarity towards the basic decency of the worker, just remember it is because not everyone here is a worker!
I've been reading HN for years and I would assume 90% of the comment section or more is people who only want to be employees.
I hate to say it, but HN isn't a great place for genuine startup, management, or operation advice. At all. Even product discussions are very customer-centric rather than company-centric, and companies will get roasted here for making good business decisions that don't directly benefit the users.
For example, years ago the common refrain on HN was "charge more" and encouraged businesses to raise prices, fire problematic customers that weren't contributing value, and otherwise focus on the company's bottom line. Now whenever a company pulls a "charge more" and raises prices, reduces the free plan, or discontinues services for non-paying customers it's nothing but rage and pitchforks in the comment section.
HN comments can still be useful, but it's definitely not a friendly place for actual founders and business owners making tough decisions.
That is correct, I've also noticed over the years. I'm sure the public of HN broadened over the years.
I use HN as a more selective/to the point source of tech news without all the karma-whoring that's present on reddit.
I'm delighted to read the comments of really smart people around here, mostly more than the article itself.
This seems rather pro-worker to me.
Though he is of course very pro-business as well. Maybe the difference is that some people think you can be both?
Say what you want about lawyers, they will say "not my area of expertise immma shut my mouth" at the drop of a hat.
I'm pretty sure they are really a minority.
I wonder to what extent this is true. I've been on HN several years without even knowing that it has anything to do with start up. A lot of contributors don't even work in tech.
A good point. And I think the reason this article is so fraught is that the writer is basically arguing even that if you met all of their demands and tried to make the world a better place, they will fundamentally remain hostile to you.
I do think the “the company doesn’t care about you” type advice does require some nuance.
Different companies make different choices and just because someone moves from mega corporation to mega corp doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust anyone…
There’s space in between giving your entire self to a company and imagining everyone is out to get you.
I’ve worked with folks who are absolutely obsessed with protecting themselves from being stomped on by a company, and nobody wanted to work with people who ooze cynicism like that / talk about taking a better job all the time . They of course interpret the results (not being put on some team or another) that as being punished because they “know” / are willing to express what they thin the truth is…
Probably something like: The company doesn't care about you regardless of the individuals at the company who might care about you. (Unless one of those individuals is the CEO, I guess. More nuance!)
1st experience: Told my boss I am leaving. My boss’s boss calls me in a room , tells me he has some great projects for me and that we will work together on them. I agree. Turns out it was his last day!
2nd experience: Similar situation, told my boss I am going to a startup. Boss’s boss calls me and gives me a lecture about how it is a bad idea to go to a startup. I leave. A few weeks later I find out he also left for a startup.
Some time later I met the boss from the 1st experience and he told me “sorry, but it was not personal. I was just doing my job”
If you are in a megacorp your job should be to extract as much money as possible while doing as little work as possible. Because your boss's job is exactly the opposite.
Your coworkers are not out to get you but your managers are. Don’t fucking ever trust them.
My impression is that in the modern world, most workers consider their personal network to be of much greater value than any ways that their current employer could reward them for "loyalty". Having been a manager and had people quit on me, my response has always been pretty candid and along the lines of, "yeah, obviously this is tough for me as I've really valued your contributions over the time we've worked together. However, you've been clear about your expectations as far as comp/projects/tech/mentorship/career/whatever, and although we've tried to do what we can, I can understand that the role is no longer a great fit for you, so the decision to move on makes perfect sense. Best wishes with your next gig."
I got an offer for a lot more (+60%). My company immediately matched. Don't trust management.
Point being not all management is like this and I hope you've found somewhere that respects you.
I think collectively too many of us are too willing to ignore red flags and it let's people/companies like this succeed.
I know because I am one of them. In my experience, the people who don’t understand are the ones who don’t create anything and are generally mediocre. Most employees do not design new ideas, programs or strategies. They act bewildered when their colleagues do create novel innovations and then seem to want to “own / run them.” Your reaction signals you are probably not in the creative sector, which is typical.
The people in the very upper 1% of the talent pool are most disadvantaged by corporate systems. If you create some new program that gets a lot of attention, management often can’t wait to divide the credit between you and others who didn’t do anything and then say it was “team work.” The one who produces all the inventions and ideas knows otherwise.
I have been burned so many times I am now deeply cynical and refuse to create anything new for anyone other than myself.
Example: I designed a program which got $20 million in funding (this is not a made up number). The project was then given to a lifelong veteran of the company. He got to “do the strategy.” That meant he took my exact slides and reformatted them. Then he was put to “manage” me because I was only allowed to be “an execution person” due to my seniority.
He got all the credit, I got all the work. That is one example of the benefits of being creative in these environments. Learned my lesson several times: Don’t create IP for corporations. Ever.
Best case scenario is they take it away from you Later rather than Sooner.
The cynical approach does seem to lead people to … the places that make them cynical.
I really think this is a large part of the trend towards overt ruthlessness in the USA, no one has their back so they have no ones back, as people age and experience medical bankruptcy (or narrowly avoid it at great cost) they are realizing this ruthlessness in our system.
What employers do have is the ability to sell you health insurance with pre tax dollars, which is also available to self employed individuals. But the people who are screwed are those who are employed by employers that do not offer health insurance. They have to buy insurance with post tax dollars.
There is similar bullshit with retirement funding, where employer sponsored retirement account limits are drastically more than individual ones (401k vs IRA), and especially if you are a married couple with 1 spouse with 401k access and one spouse without.
Out of curiosity, I went and looked up the plans in NJ for a 32 year old person(56k salary). This is someone in a lower risk pool. The bronze plans are in the upper ~280$/month and include a $6000 deductible. There are three plans out of 36 that are ~380 a month that have a $2500 deductible. Everything else is more. This is NJ, one of the better states and definitely not a shitty state. These plans are garbage. Every time someone on HN extols the virtues of Healthcare.gov, I recheck my options and they always come back much worse than what I get working for a private employer (typical S&P 500 corp). I wish people would look up their possible plans on Healthcare.gov before tossing it out as something other than a scam.
Furthermore you cannot use the exchanges if your employer offers plans IIRC. So your employer can control which plans you have access to.
The subsidies should just be given directly to the person who needs healthcare. There is no need to involve a third party. It just complicates the situation for no gain.
Also, note that you can buy your own health insurance in the US. You are not required to use health insurance provided by an employer.
Now, there's a whole administrative system that drives up prices and puts a ceiling on availability and quality of care; with most Americans being (relatively) ill-traveled, ill-read, and fed a news product that beneath the packaging is some combination of entertainment and fear-mongering, it's easy for one to believe there's just something in the air that makes an NHS-style or even a German-style system impossible here.
Then, if you were around for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections, you'd have seen presidential candidates arguing about whether someone should have to pay for someone else's well-being. And it's not a debate along the lines of class—it's tied up with identity politics and a broader debate around the welfare state. Advantaged and disadvantaged communities alike are full of people who see how things are, and, knowing that it takes a lottery win to move up the economic ladder and a bad week to fall down, are skeptical that next time it'll be different.
Doesn't help that most Americans will never have the opportunity to get even an hour of education in macroeconomics, unless it's buried in disconnected lessons about individual economic downturns, nor that education on probability doesn't happen until second-year calculus (which is similarly rare in high schools), nor that most Americans don't learn about the mechanics of Medicare until their fifties or sixties
Companies had to include extra benefits beyond wages to compete on hiring. One of those extras was health care.
That's the original "design."
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/469739-the-employer-h...
...and obedient to corporations.
Such mechanism give corporations the power to decide who gets terminated and loses health insurance. It's very effective at discouraging people from doing anything that goes again the grain, like getting into an union.
Maybe don't generalize from a few personal anecdotes to the functioning of the entire 4 million employee federal government?
See this plan for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_Americans_Act
It would transition away from employer-provided health insurance, to employer-subsidized insurance, having instead individuals choose their health care plan from state-approved private insurers. It sought to make the cost of health insurance more transparent to consumers, with the expectation being that this would increase market pressures to drive health insurance costs down.
Health insurance is one of the least concerning things for the government to get involved in with healthcare, really. Worst thing that happens is they don't insure you or the procedure, and you have to pay for it yourself somehow.
I would question the viability of government for handling many things, but collecting taxes and distributing funds is one of the things they usually are pretty good at. Some of the leanest health insurers in the US in terms of overhead are public enterprises, e.g. the VA and various state assistance programs.
I think "annoying" is a better description. It's not shocking at all, it was a fairly predictable outcome given the situation. It is really annoying that we haven't managed to walk it back to something more reasonable since then.
Tying your personal health and that of your loved ones to your employer gives your boss unduly leverage over yourself, particularly when there are life and death decisions to be made.
Then one of two things happened, the owner died with no capable heirs and the company was sold. Or after NAFTA the company wasn't competitive with low priced foreign labor and folded. If the company was sold a couple of MBA's came in to run the store and ruthlessly ran it exporting all the profits. Eventually the jobs would go overseas or to another part of America with lower wages like the South.
Either way the people eventually lost their jobs and entire towns would collapse. I have seen it here in Michigan happen over the past forty years again and again.
Require employees be paid and treated fairly. Require companies pay their taxes. Tax employees on those fair wages. Use those taxes to pay for community needs. That's the goal. That's our responsibility as citizens of a democracy. Relinquishing these responsibilities to others because it seems easier is how we got where we are. Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones, so take away their ability to be abusive.
If you relinquish your power to another, you should expect to be unhappy when their goals conflict with your own. Don't relinquish your power.
1) Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary. It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner.
2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule.
One big observations:
This is what US government spending has done in the last 2 centuries: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...
That is a pretty solid contender for why people are less generous. I too would be investing more money in my community if I had more control of it. There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.
It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. People took control away from businesses and the businesses stopped being in control.
The problem is this isn't well defined. Somewhere maybe in the 1980s greed became good and the responsibilities of corporations shifted from being a fictional person that could benefit society to a thing that was in it for shareholders only. This is a cultural shift borne by MBAs and thinktanks, not something that can be pinned down to a specific incident.
As usual sunlight is the best disinfectant. It needs to be clear who owns what and who did what, and journalists need to go and look at cases where things are not in the interest of the community. There need to be records of whose interests are represented, who owns what, and who knows who.
Forgive me for being sentimentalist a bit, but I think that nowadays we underestimate the weight that feelings of duty, loyalty, and trust had on rulers of times past. They were raised from the day they were born to be leaders, to care deeply about their family honor, to feel obliged to their subjects. Certainly, they were ultimately fallen men like the rest of us, and hereditary succession is not great at picking the best of each generation.
Which is exactly what happened in their situation! They "hoped" that the company would just remain nice out of the goodness of their hearts, and did not make sure that those benefits were built into the system. Surprise: when ownership changed hands, the gravy train was over and the people had no actual infrastructure to sustain themselves.
The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. A time where societies had much higher levels of trust.
OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.
I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. And it's hard to totally escape any form of hierarchy when you live in a society.
You are always going to rely on a few people, to do the right thing, which will become the wrong thing as life goes on, which will require a few more people, to do the right thing again, ad infinitum.
That's just how this human thing works.
Sometimes it's laws, other times it's breaking laws. Other times something else. It varies, there is no right answer forevermore, sorry.
You can't solve hard problems of coordinating, pleasing and doing right by many people with conflicting interests by 'requiring' it.
That's just childish thinking, sorry.
Today its a footnote in a merger, place is closing down.
The companies I know who are still benevolent make money hand over fist. Management, employee, shareholders are all happy as peas in a pod.
It’s when the money stops flowing that hard decisions are made.
The problem with these advice columns is that they aren't saying "don't give your all to a company".
They end up saying "your company is the enemy". The original article that this blog refers to was titled "Exit interviews are a trap", which many pointed out was a gross exaggeration. It assumes that every company performing an exit interview is doing something malicious, which is a ridiculous claim.
Yes, it's possible that some companies somewhere are using exit interviews as some sort of trap to get dirt or leverage over employees, and it's also true that you shouldn't rush in and use it as an opportunity to complain about everyone you hated at the company. However, it's unreasonable to assume that it's a trap and that the company is interested in nothing more than revenge.
That's the problem with these advice blogs. They cater to an idea that managers and HR are "the other", and once someone crosses the line to management or HR, they become evil and incapable of doing anything other than abusing you for no good reason.
We should warn young people about abusive employers, but it's not helpful to teach them that employers are universally malicious.
Loyalty ties are still important, but not something you will find in most employer-employee relationships. Better to have a more "extractive" vision of companies and build loyalty ties somewhere else.
No one says they're evil. Corporate leadership, like corporations themselves, are amoral, which means they have no compunctions to actions that to them, are without intention, but for translates to the recipient as maliciousness.
I read the article and I disagree. It does not say it either explicitly or implicitly. The article only urges the reader to think of the benefits to themselves first.. like a company would.
I don't think it is an unreasonable approach.
I believe the phrasing should be "had to give your all to a company." This is the time period when you would retire from the same company you started at, right? And if you had more than a few jobs on your resume (or the infamous missing time), you would have a hard time being hired because you were unreliable.
You have a very rose-tinted view of the historical business world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_strikes#Twentieth_cent...
Indeed. We're only a few generations removed from a time when we had companies enlisting private armed security forces and militias to violently break strikes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
People in general just aren't community or socially minded in the way they used to be[1], and the bosses of companies or leaders of government are all people too.
[1] To be specific, people are still charitable, but we don't have the same culture/institutions where everyone gives and takes in the same way we used to. Things like working bees, community sport, or even just general behaviours like helping out friends/family/neighbours are all getting rarer by the day.
That said, before that happened the place was kind of a "company town" and the big manufacturers with all the money essentially ran the place. Only good news if you were in their favor. Lots of stories about being harassed by police if you were on their bad side. They were the kind of people that would have still been using child labor if it weren't outlawed.
Allow me to remind you the manner in which child labor was outlawed:
Industrialization progressed to a point where it was no longer economically viable except in a few tiny niches. It was then outlawed, to much back patting.
Sure, some people would probably use it if it was viable, but don't pretend like it was some great accomplishment to outlaw it. It was basically a case of writing law after the market had made a decision.
Also, the products they made were kind of crappy and expensive. It's very easy for a company like the one the GP described to stagnate and rot. Especially when unions get thrown into the mix.
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
The idea that power was only used exploitatively after financialization of industry seems incredibly naive to me, or just an extreme warping of history and reality to fit a rose-tinted, romantic worldview.
Letting that level of power and resources consolidate to a few people at the top and crossing your fingers that they'll be "benevolent" is foolish. Historically speaking the % of times these rulers would graciously cover a health crisis out of pocket, or meaningfully donate to democratically chosen local causes was slim to none. Better to distribute the fruits more equally in the first place, but I'm guessing these kind and benevolent leaders would not have happily allowed their workforces to unionize. That expectation of trust only seems to go one way.
Not that this didn't happen. But I should add that it wasn't any benevolent plan on the part of the owners that made things that way. It was a combination of the presence of New Deal, Unions, the threat of so-called-communism, etc and the lack of hyperdeveloped capital and commodity markets, that pushed things in that direction from the 1930s to the 1970s. And then what you describe pushed things the other way.
The point is that same owner probably supported all the innovations, because they were about the owner having more flexibility. And by the token, you can't get back to this point, probably not ever but certainly not without outside intervention.
I do agree it isn't good to rely on the beneficence of overlords in general though, since they aren't obligated to continue to be beneficent.
It works both ways: if you're leaving in hopes that it'll be a wake-up call to management that a valuable person left, then it probably won't be. And, if you leave your workplace to improve your own life, you've also necessarily chosen not to try and improve the workplace. Leaving means giving up on trying to improve them.
With that in mind, the exit interview isn't a trap so much as pointless: all you can do is hurt yourself here, you can have them remember you fondly or not, but you can't get them to change things in the exit interview.
If I didnt make issues clear while I was at a company then it was a failing on my part. If they didnt care or make any change when I shared about issues than its their fault.
-- "So and so is toxic." Maybe they are. But this is the last sort of thing I'm going to get into during an exit interview because this is the sort of thing that could actually come back to bite you.
-- "The company has gotten so big and bureaucratic/isn't doing well/etc." Don't you think they probably know?
-- "I don't agree with the strategy any longer." Well, this might be a data point for some higher up you know well over a beer or whatever but probably isn't going to help anything in an exit interview.
My impression is that the FAANG companies have a relatively small part of the company that makes them insane amounts of money (e.g. search ads) and then the rest of the company is just soaking up a lot of that money. In this model of the universe FAANG companies are just over paying software developers and the other companies out there without their own infinite money machine shouldn't actually be learning the lesson that they need to pay their developers more because maybe, as a business priority, they shouldn't be.
Apparently all the staff that actually knew how to layout the magazine, run the online content, and print the publications were important. A sales staff with no ad-space to sell can't do much.
This reminds me of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirshchman [0]. The gist is that you have two options Voice or Exit. Voice means staying and fighting for things to change. It having any effect is predicated on the ability to Exit, to opt out of the situation and leave. Staying and fighting means you may push for change. But quitting and bringing others with you means that you may force change.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit%2C_Voice%2C_and_Loyalty
If anything, removing yourself from its workforce it's one of the most impactful things you can do!
I worked in academia for quite some time, and you would think, "Well, this ought to be less of the kind of horror you can get in the private sector," but no. It was everything you could expect from any other environment.
I didn't comment in the exit interview thread, but I absolutely chortled inside when my direct manager was present for my last exit interview -- kind of a big no-no -- but these folks just lack any kind of shame. You will hear the same "A five is given for outstanding performance ... WORDS ... but we will never give fives ... MORE WORDS ... it is expected that everyone try for outstanding performance" doublethink. Watching a sixty-three year old employee get shuffled off despite decades of loyal work, well ...
Working for family? Even worse.
Currently, I expect any employer to sell me to the knackers for a Jell-O cup later on and not feel the least bit bad about it. Assume that at least the first couple levels of management are dead-eyed lizard people wearing human costumes and you'll probably be safer.
Honestly, start gathering dirt on day number one. It goes bad after a while (but doesn't decay with the rapidity that gratitude does), so make sure to update your map of where the bodies are buried. Keep your resume fresh. Make sure you can put the hurt on someone if you suddenly get the boot, fairly or not. You don't have to use any of this, but it is nice to have on hand when you find a knife in your back.
I see this at my company sometimes. Mid level engineer will switch from Stream to Google and be surprised that the comp is higher. Of course it's higher, what you're sacrificing is career growth. Early on in your career thats usually not the right move. (of course some people crush it at google. google is probably not the best example, while slower than a fast growing startup its still doing well. Someone else joined the FT or some public companies that literally don't grow.
https://www.saastr.com/why-if-you-quit-every-year-you-wont-m...
If you care about total comp the best options are.A. Grow your expertise so that you can join a FAANG company at a director level. B. Join a series A/B company and hope you can impact it enough to reach a good outcome.
The other thing people dont get it is that you're not negotiating salary once. You have to continue to deliver that value to the company. So if you sell yourself really well, get a massive salary, at some point the company will notice that you're not driving that much value. As an example see the people who joined Fast. I'd look for companies that share their revenue numbers with their team and are transparent.
Sometimes companies that pay the best are also under water in their stock options since they raised at a 200x revenue valuation. It gives them a lot of resources to pay top dollar, but its also more similar to joining a company where you don't get upside.
Not to be misunderstood, in general it's good to take the higher salary. Some people just don't negotiate well and some companies take advantage of that. (Still many engineers in the EU at <40k). You just want to make sure you understand the full picture and not focus only on salary.
I heard that a lot early in my career, having started out in startups. To some extent it's true for the first ~4 years: you gain a lot more background knowledge, problem solving ability, and confidence by wearing lots of hats and owning lots of problems end-to-end.
But I think you have to be realistic about how experience transfers. FAANG-level companies typically discount basically all experience in startups and small businesses they haven't heard of. You might be a senior developer in a small startup, but you'll get downleveled to an L3 new grad level at a FAANG. And you'll make more money, so they figure you'll take it. Or you might be a C-suite founder and (assuming you still have your technical chops) end up as a L6 eng manager (again, probably with better comp, assuming your founder stock isn't going up).
I've never once seen a Director hired from the outside without a.) coming from a Director position at a peer company, eg. Facebook -> Google or b.) having enough money that they don't need to work ever again. By far most Directors at FAANGs are promoted from within after delivering a big win for the company; the next largest category is founders whose startup is acquired; following that are Directors jumping from a peer company; and finally there are former founders and executives that are retired or hanging out as an EIR at a VC firm waiting for their next gig.
After that I think you have a point. I work at a FAANG as a SWE (15 YOE) and want to move into management, but it requires a SWE promotion first to staff engineer I don't think I'm capable of getting at this company. (I've been a staff engineer at a previous firm though).
I could switch to a lower tier company and definitely find a way to move into management and develop my career on that ladder but I would likely have to take a big pay cut. I think the trouble is people with 10+ years of experience are like me and have families and a mortgage. It's just not an option to make less for me even if the future was bright.
EDIT: As someone pointed out, 10 years entirely in FAANG is probably not as good as a varied career that includes FAANG.
Working for a smaller, fast-growing company will give you faster feedback loops, and a closer connection to the business that will give you a broader perspective on what is truly necessary vs FAANG best practices for scale. Ironically this makes you more fit for leadership because you can then see patterns which repeat themselves in all companies, but are obfuscated by specialization and huge org sizes. By contrast, if you join a big company you'll get better at the corporate jargon and cultural games, but you won't have the same visceral understanding of what really matters and why.
Today's world offers so many more paths for talented builders, beyond joining the currently hot company as a cog in the giant ad-tech machine and hoping for the best. As a data point, go read last week's article on how Sidekiq has made $13 million for a solo developer.
Even funnier is when it's not a money issue, some middle manager just thought they could find better or wanted to make room for some of their own hires.
In all of these cases, the company held "exit interviews", in some of these cases myself being one of the few or many others, and I have to say, there's nothing you can tell them that will benefit anyone, even your old co-workers who you're not trying to actively harm.
Not telling the entire truth during the very last phase of employment, the exit interview, is but a drip in a bucket of lies that is called employment.
You lied to get in. By emphasizing your strengths and hiding your weaknesses. The employer did the same thing.
You lie constantly about the work or its conditions being fine, as complaining about it is kind of a taboo. You lie to your peers and superiors all the time when they do or say things you disagree with, especially when the cost of conflict is too high.
You lie about the company drink being so much fun, whilst you really don't want to go. You lie about how much effort that task really costs, as you want to build in some security. You lie about how much time you're not really working.
You lie about being a well behaved human being whilst the minute you arrive home, you burp, fart and swear all over the place.
...yet you won't at your mother-in-law.
Conclusion: any human relation that is involuntary (you do not directly pick your manager, colleagues or mother-in-law) is diplomatic, which is a fancy word for not genuine. You keep up appearances and tell people what they want to hear, because the downside of the truth is too large.
So silence or lying is fine. Unless some massive humanitarian thing is at stake based on your input, which I figure to be rare. Alternatively, one can learn how to criticize in a non-damaging way.
One of the most powerful tools I use when interviewing senior candidates is being brutally honest about the company's weaknesses. Implicit in the act of hiring is the reality that you have a problem you need an employee to solve for you. Pretending those problems don't exist is bizarre.
Other than anxiously hiding weaknesses, the other bizarre thing in business is the idea that any and all weaknesses must be addressed.
To use the sports analogy: one can conclude that the star attack player is terrible at defense, but it really makes zero sense to invest a lot in defensive skills.
One I did with BigCo I was leaving was all just box checking yes/no questions like, Are you leaving because you felt discriminated against, are you leaving because you were harassed, etc.
During another one the HR person asks me, "At what point did you realize you had no future here?"
And at my most recent one I was asked if the client I was assigned to had anything to do with it, and I said yes. They were actually working on ending the relationship as far as I know.
Don't waste your time trying to be collectivist in an inherently individualistic system. You need to play the game by its rules if you want any results. And less stress.
But I think it's still the advice people need to hear despite that. I agree with your article that people have rose-colored glasses on when going into those meetings and speaking their mind.
On a personal note: Jacob and I worked at a company that to me fits the description of the one in the article. I'm very curious if it's the same one.
I 100% agree you should be a mercenary at work. Look out for number 1, HR isn't your friend, etc. But being so paranoid you can't even speak your mind in a nearly zero stakes situation of talking to your company before you leave speaks to a very negative outlook on work that seems honestly exhausting.
And more to point, if you are a good mercenary, unionization only harms you.
There is so much interesting critique to make of our current system, sad to see people going for these lazy, of the moment, arguments.
It just turns out that getting mine involves helping others
He also lost me at `late-stage Capitalist` as if that were a real thing.
FWIW I'm intentional & clear to my peers about priorities.
Exit interviews are a trap...because everything you say and do at your company has little landmines built into it because they are constantly trying to use humans like cogs in a clock and when you wear out you are no longer helpful to the clock maker or the people who use the clock everyday...then you get removed from the clock and replaced quickly.
While that article mentions game theory, and describes one situation where it seemed safe to provide feedback, it then focuses on that feedback being unproductive. The author could have offered advice on /how/ to provide feedback. If enough people leave for the same reasons it may start to turn the ship - so let's consider why the feedback was not well received.
Providing negative feedback to the company follows similar patterns to the company providing negative feedback to employees. We're still talking about humans communicating with each other - emotional, flawed, egotistical (aka fairly normal) humans. Decide which one or two points are most important to communicate. Offer genuine positive feedback to make it easier to accept the negative feedback, and try not to present other topics in a negative manner. Let the 1-2 negative points stand out among other positive language.
Some companies care. Some bosses care. Some don't. Some are combative, dysfunctional, or selfish. Some care but are misguided. Rather than blanket "never do this" advice, let's focus on learning when to offer vs withhold feedback, and how to offer negative feedback when it is warranted.
Taking all questions of labor law fairness aside (you won't solve them alone in a workplace anyway), reality is what it is and while it's still imperfect, hedge yourself against those imperfections to your own benefit as well as you can, legally.
Secondly, companies that vomit platitudes about "we're all a family here" and "we look out for each other" are by default spewing lying, superficial PR bullshit. They should never be trusted for a second on such nonsense unless you've secured a written contract of provisions for how you'll be treated, have your healthcare taken care of or be compensated if dismissed for any reason. If you can't secure those things, then tread carefully and keep hedging.
edit: couple extra words.
I will work for a company and try my best as long as they provide me with good yearly raises and benefits and don't require insane hours. Fail on any of those points and I am gone. There are plenty of opportunities for a 20% raise somewhere else. I know that as soon as times get tough they will cut whatever heads are required while being sure to give the execs or in-crowd a golden parachute and the rest nothing.
I've got the impression very quickly that absolutely nobody cares about me in this company and that employees mostly don't love what they do. Specifically - There's a high turn-over - Everybody is focused on their performance, compensation and on improving evaluation metrics - Right after joining, I found the form explaining how to resign. Extremely easy. - People do get fired: including a skilled, friendly, colleague of mine (didn't meet expectations for two semesters). - Management knows how to keep the pressure high (in a friendly manner) - I can't like my project: there are too many things to do and broken things to fix, also no feeling of ownership, no incentives to refactor or redesign.
Excellent advice. I also read the linked article about exit interviews and I concur they're a trap. I've dealt with vindictive former employers like that. Frankly, the easiest way to get over it is to pretend you never worked there and forget the place exists. When asked to explain the gap in my employment I just partially lie and say it was health related. Because of HIPAA in the US they can't pry too much, and as long as I can prove I'm healthy now and otherwise qualified they legally aren't supposed to deny me the job because of it.
In my little corner of the world, a good chunk of the team quit over the past few weeks leaving a skeleton crew. I know for a fact that each and every one of those, who quit indicated very clearly why they quit ( money, benefits, limited chance of promotion ). To the best of my knowledge, nothing changed ( we didn't suddenly get a better working environment )..and, realistically, this is the best case scenario: nothing changes.
If anything,as employees we are not being mercenary enough. All the niceties employers enjoyed worked only one way..
Companies want us to make them money and we only care about the company's success when it benefits us. But in this 'arrangement' there's an alignment of values: an agreement that we both want the company to make money.
More problems arise when companies succeed but don't share the success or when employees demand high compensation but do nothing to earn it. As long as everyone's honest about their own greed it can work out.
If nothing happens, try to spearhead some change. It's your job! Sometimes the lower levels can see value that upper levels can't.
If you can't change it, cope.
If you can't cope, then leave.
Anything you want to say in an exit interview, you should have spoken up about already in step 1.
If there's something you haven't spoken up about, then it's probably for a reason. Just leave it. No need to be a martyr for your ex-colleagues, as it's only perceived. You have no idea the complexities of running a multi billion dollar tech organization.
To an extent. The key is to have a limit.
Depending on the organization and your position in it, it can take a tremendous amount of mental energy and effort to accomplish anything, having a negative effect on your mental and physical health. Is that cost worth fixing something that doesn't even belong to you?
I've learned this lesson the hard way, both successfully and unsuccessfully. Now I have a much lower threshold of what effort I am willing to exert to help a company change.
It rarely is. Not only that but it isn't wanted most of the time.
> I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are [...] I’d love to live in a world where less mercenary advice wasn’t dangerous, but that’s not our world.
If you are going to say something on exit it is best to say it to someone who has power who you trust. If you have access to a VP or CEO, for example. HR’s job is to quickly make problems go away and minimize risk to to the company. Them passing along helpful information to impact change is the opposite of making something go away, it creates a complication. No one hires HR people to create complications.
I don't want to be one of those "back in my day" types but it use to be up-or-out. You came in at the bottom and either went up the corporate ladder at the proper rate or you were fired. That was sociopathic and bread ruthlessness in the workforce. Today it is touchy feely to the point of being confusing on what the actual expectations of the job are.
We had a "leadership training" thing a few weeks back where one of the segments involved a breakout session with a random coworker who you may or may not already know, with the expectation that you share something deep and revealing you've never told anyone else.
The person I got paired up with and I were both incredulous about the exercise, specifically the "something you've never told anyone else" part, and shared a couple of surface level phobias "I'm afraid of spiders", I told him. He told me he was scared of sharks. We spent the remaining 5 minutes of our breakout talking about local sports.
Companies need to back the hell off with this stuff. I pay a therapist for those kinds of conversations.
I'm fine being friendly and even making friends with my coworkers over drinks for a little bit work before we all go home, if it happens organically and in a way where people get to choose their level of interaction and disclosure about their personal lives, but a lot of this "top down camaraderie/management facilitated team building" going around feels like a toddler smashing a Barbie and Ken doll together making smooching noises at best, at worst it feels like mommy and daddy making play dates.
I got fed this narrative that the corporate environment was ruthless and cutthroat, but I found it highly resistant to even profitable, labor-saving new ideas or practices in favor of ego management, image management, and non disruption.
Maybe it's a false expectation on my part, but I would have at least expected ruthless people to be pragmatic and open minded toward things which may be of benefit. That's not to say they're without fault or downside, but that's certainly not generally characteristic of the corporate environment I've experienced.
OTOH, I've found smaller employers with a more direct connection to market forces much better in this regard. I don't think those two things are unrelated.
Less ruthless and less sociopathic, my ass. If that were true, Justine Sacco would not have lost her job for making a dumb joke on Twitter.
All this touchy feely bullshit matters right up until the point where the company is even in the slightest way negatively effective monetarily, then all your happy happy joy joy horseshit goes right out the window.
If anyone wants me to believe we live in a society that actually holds the values you claim are on display, then the next time someone makes a faux pas on Twitter or Facebook or in the office, the company stands strong against public sentiment and says, "So-and-So is one of our own, and we're not going to throw them to the wolves to appease a mob. Period." And then actually back it up.
Then I'll agree that things have actually changed. And if that ever does happen, then things will actually have changed.
[1] Who knows, maybe they'll be one of the lucky few who don't get burned.
The general salary advice is also not new at all. The specifics of which tools to use is pretty helpful.
If the company treats you well, treat them well. If it treats you and others poorly, return the favor.
If you're in a hypercompetitive and/or toxic environment, you'd better be very careful about what advice you give (and everything else you say).
Please stop using this phrase unless you want to further alienate me from the position you are trying to make.
That'd be a good trick, given that there were no Nazis until 1920.
It was in a work published starting in 1902 (though the part concerning late-stage capitalism was published in 1927) by a German Marxist [0] (at the time he wrote coined the term) who became a nationalist in the Weimar era to the point that some of his writings later in the early 1930s apparently aligned to a certain extent with Nazi ideology, but who was putting out anti-Nazi writings (actively suppressed by the Nazis) by the late 1930s.
So, while “by a Nazi over 120 years ago” is not really accurate at all, it has some recognizable connection to facts.
Non-US-dweller here: isn't that system entrenched since always? - i.e. that way of treating workers has been present in the US ever since there's been an "US"? Somehow Europeans managed to make life easier on themselves like mandatory vacation, a lot of sick leave, etc., but the US just didn't sign up for that.
This was all you needed to write:
>I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are.
That is really the issue in a nutshell.
I have no sympathy for workplace advice that attempts to coddle someone who cannot psychologically operate in a world told more truthfully. “Mercenary” advice works in this environment, being more like a mercenary, a “sell sword”, is a pragmatic approach than being gaslit by the company’s “were a team” chant. This is why Netflix’s older culture document resonated with so many people, its appealing! Intruiging! Truthful! Refreshing!
Many of us can psychologically operate in a world so unforgiving and its a more effective tool for improving financial and healthcare stability, whether that includes an employer or [eventually] doesnt.
There are selective pressures towards people that can perceive reality accurately and use it to their advantage. another population relies on not perceiving reality at all to maintain a view that makes them happy enough to tolerate the mundane, and another population perceives reality accurately and it exacerbates chemical imbalances in their mind such that their chronic depression keeps them useless to society, which by definition means selective pressures against those traits.
Society improves when more people have more chances to contribute positively. There is so much underutilized talent out there. To block off those opportunities hampers the development of society writ large.
Still have an obsessive attachment to acting purely selfishly? Then think of it like this: acting to close off others' opportunities prevents them from inventing and producing things that you could benefit from. Would you act differently knowing that giving someone else a chance may lead to the development of a medicine that will save your life a few years down the road?
Also, that last paragraph makes me think you don't really interact with real human beings that often.
A counterargument to this is that I’d personally pick today over tomorrow almost every time. So yes, not gambling on the future, but doing what’s right for yourself today is +ev.
Even the Nordic so-called "socialist" countries are actually market economies, with private ownership of the means of production, and they channel the results of capitalism rather than opposing it. They channel it into a somewhat larger safety net than the USA has, but fundamentally they are doing the same thing, because they know that's the only approach that really brings prosperity to a society.
This not a zero-sum game either. Underutilized talent now has more opportunities to be recognized and contribute than ever before. One person's success does not prevent another person's success. We are not just dividing up a pie -- we are growing the pie too. Who is closing off other's opportunities by pursuing their own success?
