Being emotionally detached from really stupid leadership decisions is harder than it seems
Took me a lot of years to not think it’s my company that is being run into the ground. I should not - and nowadays could not - care any less.
my company
You mean “my responsibility”, right?
Reading about it, it seems they are in fact all the same. Even the white haribo mice. TIL.
Yeah, in a way. As in, I don’t feel like I have any responsibility in things in the company going to shits (which I would if it were, well, my company).
The book The Responsibility Virus helped me a lot with this. Most people are over-responsible for the choices of others, specifically ones they can’t reasonably influence, anyway.
I found out that https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ explains a lot of the dysfunctions that one finds in an office / corporate environment.
Yes. This lies among the reasons I find it easier not to blame enterprises for their dysfunctions. The unsustained growth imperative of our economic systems makes the Gervais Principle behavior the path of least resistance. Indeed, the only way to stop it seems to come down to the heroism of one key influential person who chooses differently.
This also accounts for why I stopped trying to fix enterprises and instead focus on helping the well-meaning people who otherwise would need to fend for themselves.
That hit hard 😶
I’m determined to ever only work in public, state-owned companies. I believe in a causal connection between being a private, profit-oriented business and the daily “wtf” moments, the only true measure of quality.
Edit: fixed the link.
I’m afraid I’d be even more depressed by the wtf moments in a public organisation, but I am also considering it.
I stopped giving a shit a long time ago. I do my best to consult and warn and if they don’t listen it’s not my problem.
The company doesn’t care about you. The company doesn’t care about you. The company doesn’t care about you.
My uncle spent years preaching to me about the need to be loyal to a company. I never drank the Kool-Aid. He spent 21 years working for an investment banking company in their IT department. 4 years before he was set to retire with a full pension, etc. his company was acquired by a larger bank. He lost everything except his 401k. He then spent the next 12 years working to get his time back so he’d be able to retire. He died 2 years ago and the company sent a bouquet of flowers.
THE COMPANY DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU!!
How do you lose a pension? It doesn’t matter where you work or if a company gets bought.
So the way he explained it to me was that essentially when the company was purchased all your accruals were reset and the pension was tied to years of service, which he hadn’t reached yet, then with the merger you were essentially a new employee. There was also a lot tied to retirement plans linked to corporate stocks that were basically useless after they merged. Either way, beyond working for the same company forever, his eggs were (mostly) in one basket.
The company cares about you in the same way a beef farmer cares about his cattle.
Not even if you do valuable or efficent stuff for the company. You’re disposable.
The company is always on the lookout for ways to replace you with somebody who will do more for less.
And in the meantime, they will squeeze you for every drop of effort they think they can get away with.
They refer to you as … HUMAN RESOURCES
You aren’t a person, you are an instrument the company uses to make more money for itself. If you die or can no longer work, you will be replaced by another human resource.
The people on the top of the company don’t care, either… Even if it seems like the really like you alot.
The most important traits for doing well at work (in this order):
- clear, effective, and efficient communication
- taking ownership of problems
- having your boss and team members like you on a personal level
- competence at your tasks
I’m halfway through scrolling this long thread, and this is the first comment I’ve seen that isn’t overly cynical. It’s also correct.
I’ve been working for 38 years, and I’ve been someone who makes promotion decisions for 15 of them. The third one is helpful, not essential, but the others are super important. The people who rise to leadership positions aren’t necessarily the top technical people, they’re the ones who do those things with a good attitude.
The other thing I’d add is that they’re people who are able to see the big picture and how the details relate to it, which is part of strategic thinking.
I was taught that my job is “to make sure all my bosses surprises are pleasant ones”. 15 years of working as an engineer and that never changed. Now I have my own business and that’s the thing I look for employees… someone I can leave on their own to do a job. It they have problems they can always ask me. If they screw up I expect them to tell me immediately and to have a plan of action to fix it and to prevent it happening again. And I never ever get cross if someone does come to me and say they screwed up. Far better that we tell the client about a problem than wait until the client finds the problem themselves.
Reading all these comments makes me realize how lucky I’ve been in my career. I’ve always had great bosses who defended me and backed me up.
I’m not sure if the competence is really in the last place. I’d say it’s on the equal level. Great communication and ownership of the problems means little if you can’t really solve the problems.
People have those things in spectrums, not all or nothing. You have to have at least some of all of them, but I’d argue that mediocre competency with really good communication and accountability is a better combination that really good competency with one of the others being mediocre.
I still kinda disagree. We’re talking here about engineering role after all. I have a colleague who is a code wizard, but has kinda problem with (under)communicating. He’s still widely respected as a very good engineer, people know his communication style and adapt to it.
But if you’re a mediocre problem solver, you can’t really make up for it with communication skills. That kinda moves you into non-engineering role like PO, SM or perhaps support engineer.
But I would say this - once you reach a certain high level of competence, then the communication skills, leadership, ownership can become the real differentiating factors. But you can’t really get there without the high level of competence first.
I think we might be agreeing, it’s just that “mediocre” means different things to each of us. My team supports human spaceflight, and no one we have is crummy. The “mediocre” people have pretty decent technical skills if you’re looking across all software development domains.
Personally, I’ve found the decent technical skills to be easier to come by than the other ones, and having all of them in one package is a real discriminator.
We’re talking here about engineering role after all.
where? seemed like general advice.
Even then, thee aren’t mutually exclusive. your competence will affect how people see you on a personal level, at least at work. And your competence affects your ability to be given problems to own. You’re not gonna give the nice but still inexperienced employee to own an important problem domain. they might be able to work under the owner and gain experience, though.
Documentation and presentation are highly undervalued, and your ability to understand and spread that knowledge can overcome that lack of experience to actually handle the task yourself.
There is no ideal place to work where they “do it right”, whatever kind of “right” you care about right now. When you change jobs, you merely exchange one set of problems for another.
Having worked 7 different jobs that all were in the same field made me have some backbone of standards that nobody else could have built without going through that, though. It’s a blessing and a curse, so be warned. The things I picked up on that I never realized I would care so much about in the healthcare field is good office administration and Director of Care leadership. The morale is just as important as the pay rate.
i worked at all the pizza chains delivering ---- the absolute shittiest ones were a nightmare, for the same 3 reasons:
-
not letting employees make food themselves. it’s a restaurant, you have abundant food, it’s cheap, we all know it’s cheap, we work long shifts, come on. the cobbler’s son should have good shoes.
-
overemphasis on dress code – if you genuinely give a shit if the pizza guy has his hat backwards, you should literally be sent to the gulags.
-
being overworked for low pay, especially being made to drive when exhausted [literally dangerous and life threatening!!]
-
As a consultant, I now feel grateful to the variety of dysfunctions that I experienced, because they provided me with some of the credibility that I use in advising others. That’s the blessing part.
That, and comedy equals tragedy plus distance.
That said some companies do it more right than others. The problems at the current company are ones I can live with. Which is why I’m still there after way more years than expected.
Indeed, that’s what I mean: you’re always exchanging one set of problems for another, until you find the set of problems that you can accept (enough (for now)).
Is this still true if you’re self-employed?
Absolutely. There is no business yet in which you invent money from nothing. Everyone works for someone else. It might be a capitalist boss, it might be a client, it might even be constituents or donors, but no one truly works for themselves. The only winning move is to not play, and the ones fortunate enough to not have to play were born rich. Being self-employed and/or owning your own business is just trading one boss for another.
Source: Was in private practice for a decade; now I’m a corporate attorney, and it’s just a different set of people making my job hard.
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I feel better about the things I do wrong, because at least I made the decisions and I can only blame myself. I can also choose which things I especially care about doing well instead of being subject to someone else’s preferences. It feels better, but still yes.
And, as CEO of a tiny company, I have to interact with bureaucracies more than I did as an employee, so becoming my own boss didn’t mean escaping that nonsense, anyway.
You don’t have to run the rat race to get promoted. You don’t have to be at your desk at 7am and leave at 7pm to put on a show. Just be competent. Most people are not. You’ll eventually get promoted once you are old and white enough.
Getting promoted isn’t a race. It’s a marketing campaign. The squeaky wheel gets the grease sadly. I hate it but that’s the game. You can be great but if the right people don’t hear about it it won’t bring a reward.
The funny thing is it’s a loss for the employer since it means people spend time self-promoting themselves and their achievements instead of just doing things well.
Some leadership will actively not promote you, even block attempts by you, if you’re at the top of your role and consistently outperforming peers, why would they let you move up? You make them look good right here.
Had a sup that did that to me. It sucked. Glad I’m not working for her anymore.
Getting promotions and raises is rare. Haven’t seen that happen very many times. However, many people have told me that the best way to get a raise is to switch to another company.
I worked at “AT&T wireless” back in the day when dirt was new. This guy would say “ squeaky wheel gets the grease.” One day after he said that our team lead said “Or gets replaced.” Then they walked his ass out.
Yeah. I always tell newbies “nobody ever got a promotion for work their boss didn’t know they did.” Sadly if you produce 100 units of value and the boss only knows about 10 of them the guy who did 20 units but won’t shut up about it looks 2x as valuable even though he’s actually doing 1/5 the work. Trick is to be doing the most work and have people see it
If we take it from the other side, it’s difficult for management to understand how well you’re doing if you’re not communicating it properly, especially if your job is highly technical but they aren’t. Technical experts who would understand your work alone don’t necessarily make good managers.
I must not be old enough because I’ve never been promoted even though I’m practically white as a ghost. Every promotion I have ever received is from getting a new job at a new company and ending up making significantly more money that way.
How long do you work for the same employer though? What field are you in?
I’ve worked for the same employer for 12 years and never got a promotion because there was only one way up and a pool of over 1000 employees to pick from, then switched to another job and got a promotion under a year…
Around 3 years per employer, so it’s a bit on the shorter end, but not too far from the average for my field.
I’m a programmer. Not a ton of competition per team, especially when I usually work on smaller teams.
Oh yeah if you’re “just” a programmer (in the sense that you don’t have other formations) you might have to do management courses on the side, that’s what my friend had to do to land a permanent promotion…
It’s true management would likely get me promoted faster but honestly I always wanna stick with the programming side of things. As I get more experienced I will keep getting larger salary bumps, but it’s almost definitely not gonna be from promotions but rather from switching jobs lol
May I ask, what is the most important thing to show in a programmer CV?
Im a junior programmer. I would say im good at the job. I can easily create new software and also find problems in other codes and fix them. However I have no idea what I would say in an interview. Its not like I learn code by memory.
Unfortunately in your case, the most important thing is experience. You just need the years for employers to want to hire you, and with this year in particular, the competition for jobs is insane because of all the layoffs. Make some cool personal projects, that sort of thing can help.
in rough order of important:
- experience
- personal projects or project you contribute to (e.g. a decent sized code base in Github). if you’re early on, this can be school projects.
- ability to answer programming concepts in an interview settings
- school/grade prestige.
I have no idea what I would say in an interview.
if you have no previous job, then yea. It’s rough. The first job is always rough, and even in software that’s no exception. You will want to talk about decisions and features you worked on in personal projects for that stuff. And of course, really nail down your fundamentals; they really drill you with those interview questions as a junior.
If you have a job, then talk about that. Maybe there’s some NDA, but you can talk about some problem in general terms and what you needed to do to solve it. You’re not expected to do anything crazy as a junior, so your answer relies more on you knowing how to work in a team than novel architectual decisions.
Personal example: my first job was at a small game studio and my non-BS answer would be that I simply did bug fixes for a game. Nothing fancy, probably something an intern can do.
But interview spin: doing those bug fixes
- helped me learn about Unity’s UI system, I can talk about specific details if the interviewer cares (and don’t feel too bad if they don’t. Even a super experienced engineer won’t be able to talk about every sub-topic of an industry)
- I talk about where I encountered decisions and when I talked to my lead about what to do. e.g. One bug ended up coming from code that another studio owned. While it was a one line fix, I reported it to a lead who would then create an issue to pass on to that studio. Frustrating, but it shows you understand the business politics of the job, something school can’t teach.
- I never did it at that first job, but there were moments where deadlines get moved forward, and you think of a compromise for a feature due to the lack of time . That shows your ability to identify the Minimum Viable Product and to understand the problem, both the bad and good ways to solve something (sadly. in games you may have to hack solutions quite often)
Best of luck
Most probably you will never be promoted anyway.
Just be friends with the manager. That’s who I found was promoted the most in my career.
tbh its pretty common in IT to find your squad (and your squad leader) and follow ‘em everywhere.
Except it’s often a boys club with its toxic behaviors, which not all people will fit in.
Not been my experience but no doubt it exists in the field
Fully agree. You can be lazy AF, as long as you get a few key assignments done or overfulfill them. Everybody will be like ‘ooh, he so good’ and forget that you don’t do shit for 95% of the time.
It should be noted that this is advice specific to white men in Western countries 😆 but yes, it’s true.
Your employer does not care about you. You are not important or irreplaceable
Take your time and energy and put it into your life, not their business
I have had coworkers die (not work related) and by the time you hear about it (like the next day) they have already worked out who will get the work done so the machine doesn’t have to stop
I don’t think taking action to fill a hole is indicative of not caring.
I’m all for filling holes!
Hole filling action, even!
True but there’s also absolutely no reason to think they care. Even if someone dies. Because they really don’t. So it feels extra soulless when they send out the email redistributing tasks right after the generic condolences email that goes out to the whole floor
I mean, how do you gauge how much someone cares? What would make you think someone cared (either at work or anywhere else)? I think all actions by a company would make people think it’s just an unempathetic gesture. Even if it was a small company and the employee was there for very long and was actually missed.
This depends. I’ve had easily 100 shit jobs where nobody cared. I’m now a software developer for a small business <10 employees and they do care.
I am aware I am living the dream now and this can’t be the case for most.
Sometimes it’s better if your employer doesn’t know everything you can do. If you’re not careful you’ll end up Inventory Controller/shipper/IT services/reception/Safety officer, and you’ll only ever be paid for whatever your initial position was.
I wanted to be a system engineer, I got hired as a devops, I started doing a bit of system engineer, called hr and said that I’m working on infrastructure and I need my title changed or else I won’t be able to continue my work, my title was changed, no I do system engineer stuff and less of devops, this was a very rare occasion but it can happen from time to time.
Wouldn’t DevOps pay a lot more than Infra in general? Seems to be the more in demand skillset at the moment.
Well it depends, I had gotten offers double and triple my yearly pay to move to the capital or go outside of my country for a system engineer position. Devops pays more in the US, for around 20-30k MORE per year, but other salaries in the US and other salaries in EU.
Personally I like system engineer/architect jobs more, DevOps is nice but lacks creativity.
The longer you work anywhere – and I mean ANYWHERE – the more you see the bullshit and corruption and crappy rules or policies and inequality all over.
For me it has been about the 3 year mark anywhere I’ve worked: once you get past that, you fade away from “damn I’m glad to have a job and be making money!” and towards “this is absolute bulls#!t that [boss] did [thing] and hurt the workers in the process!” or similarSuccess is mainly about sucking up to the right people. No matter how good you are at your job, you have to know how to play work politics. Most bosses don’t know how to evaluate actual ability, and they’re much less objective than they think. Usually they favor more likeable employees over capable ones if forced to choose. Human life is a popularity contest, always has been, always will be. That’s the side effect of being a highly social species…
There’s no such thing as quiet quitting. I prefer acting your wage.
HR protect the company first, the employees second.
Just remember what hr stands for. You are a resource. No more than a stapler, that can be replaced at any time
Well, sure. Unless you’re talking about a red Swingline. I can’t compete with that.
100%. The rebranding of some HR departments as “People Officers” or “People Team” drives me bonkers. When push comes to shove, they will always protect the interests of the business before the interests of the employee. Full stop.
You are right, but to be fair. “Human Ressources” was an awful name to begin with.
Yeah, neither is great. Needs to be called something like “Employee Business Relations” maybe?
Company interest workers?
Yeah, that sounds way better!
There’s a reason they’re called “Human Resources” and not Human Relations.
Your employer is ALWAYS looking for a way to either get more work out of you for the same compensation, or replace you with some one or some process that produces the equivalent output for less cost. The entire idea that employees should be loyal to their employers is one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever spawned by capitalism.
Loyalty is vastly overrated. The only rational course of action is to complete exactly the tasks to which you’ve agreed for the wage they’ve determined. Your employer will demand loyalty but never reciprocate. Don’t let them manipulate you.
Also, never ever let them see you sweat. It doesn’t matter how good your employer is, at the first hint that you’re insecure, they’ll pounce and you’ll be treated like garbage. Always have your briefcase packed and a box to clear out your desk on a moment’s notice.
My company laid off a few very efficient workers, who sacrificed a lot of time and mental health for the company, because people working remotely in India are cheaper.
Sounds like a company I worked for. I saw the writing on the wall and got out. A lot of good people were laid off and a second office in India was opened…
I believe the exact same thing is true.
I have yet to see an employer even attempt to prove it wrong.
Showing up and working sluggishly is the most stable pattern. Getting it done quick and then relaxing only attracts attention and criticism, and as mentioned: More work for no increase in pay.
Getting it done quick and then relaxing only attracts attention and criticism, and as mentioned
The trick is getting your task done quickly and then pretend to still be working on it while actually doing nothing.
I disagree. There’s nothing worse than having to pretend to work. I’m more drained after a day of scrolling than I am after a day of stressful 100%-work. The best imo is around 70%-work.
i think it’s the mental stress of knowing this time could be spent on something meaningful but instead because of horseshit protestant work ethic - brained boomers it must be wasted
kind of like those sick sick stores that destroy merchandise before throwing it away because god fucking forbid someone else could use it. spitting in the face of humanity.
Agree. How many hours humanity could use elsewhere. Being creative, exercising and having fun.
Behold and bask in the glory of working from home! Here, all your free time can actually be spent free! No more alt-tabbing to a random Excel spread sheet or dumbass email everytime the floor boards outside your crap ass cubicle squeak. No more desperately searching for mildly enjoyable activities that are only slightly conspicuous when viewed from over your shoulder. Revel in a world where if you bust ass and finish what you need to you are actually rewarded with the free time to cuddle your dog, take a nap, binge stardew valley, or just do absolutely nothing.
The fact that it is for this exact reason working from home is hated by old farts is so unbelievably frustrating it’s difficult to put in words. I know they like to word it differently like “lack of productivity” or “lowered team dynamic” (which have both since been repeatedly disproven by what little research we have) or some crap but we all know they just can’t stand not knowing exactly what we’re doing at all times. It honestly feels like they’re just irritated that workers are genuinely happy for once.
Learn from George Costanza.
Carry a clipboard and look angry all the time.
I can touch type at about 70 wpm. Why? Typing practice looks remarkably productive to anyone who doesn’t know what I’m actually doing. I also find doing math puzzles helpful. Making little calculations and drawing diagrams looks super impressive to clueless managers. Of course, such strategies depend on apathetic managers.
