I wonder if large companies recognise they are shitting in the pond they are floating in.
As somebody with over quarter of century of experience managing and hiring people I notice how candidates change over time (trying to adjust for how I change myself). I notice people care less about the company they work for and, honestly, it is more and more difficult to find arguments against.
This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life.
When more and more people started changing jobs every year just to get an incremental raise without even bothering to get the raise at the company I worked for I thought this is shortsighted and it will backfire on them and it will teach them. Well, did not happen. It just became a new normal.
I wonder what new things are going to pass as acceptable.
Any company needs some people who care about what they do. But these are in shorter and shorter supply every year, it seems.
When you run a query on LinkedIn it will show you a list of candidates with their three last jobs. I noticed page after page after page everybody has their third last job starting 2020/2021. Meaning almost all seem to be spending less than a year on each of their jobs in past couple years. And these are all supposed to be senior candidates.
It is no way to have a productive employee base.
You can pay people more to keep them at your company for a while longer, but there is very little you can do to overcome their inherent cynicism.
I very much take a mercenary approach to my jobs. At my very first software job I remember seeing a let go employee walking sadly through the office with a box of his possessions under one arm and a potted plant in the other. Since then I have brought nothing personal into work. If I'm let go I just have to grab my keys and I'm out.
Work is something I do to earn money. If companies can replace people for less or cut them they do. Why be loyal in that kind of environment? I will work hard for the money they pay me though.
At one point I got a job offer for 25% more than I currently made. I told my current director at the time that I got a job offer for 40% more. The director matched the imaginary 40% and I stayed for another year. This company habitually fired people for the most minor of productivity drop offs. They had just recently promoted me without providing a raise. You reap what you sow.
I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that. Remote work makes that even harder to find now.
At my first job our manager was fired around the time his partner died of cancer and he was left with 2 little kids. He was slacking but also they knew about the whole situation. He was there for over 10 years. That changed me forever
I have a friend who spent 30 years working for a factory building aircraft for the military. One year, a new lead manager comes in and decides he wants everyone on the floor to have a college degree and fires my friend and the six other people there without college degrees.
It really messed up my friend, he was really close to a comfortable retirement, but had to borrow against his 401k to make it through until he could get another job. He was the safety officer for the entire factory, 15+ years of experience doing that. Now he's too close to retirement age and no one will hire him, even though he's personally a long way from retirement.
So now he's working a physically demanding job on the line making cars. All that experience and skills with safety? Junk.
No company has loyalty to their employees. It's all about the next quarter.
Wow, that is a heart-wrenching story. What a shame.
> It's all about the next quarter.
Not sure that follows from your friend's story. In that particular case, it seems to have been about bad management, unless having only college-degreed folks on the floor improved short term financials.
Definitely an example of a short sighted decision, though.
I wouldn't be surprised if the manager who came in with this edict was specifically brought in to "weed" out those who could "escape" into a comfortable retirement just to extract more labor out of them!
That's really harsh. At the job I mentioned in the above they pip'd me because I delivered 8 points per week instead of 10 for 2 weeks right when COVID lockdown hit. They couldn't understand why the world melting down and my kids suddenly home schooling would have any affect on my productivity.
Companies treat us as replaceable widgets. If widget A is broken just throw it away and use widget B. No reason to be loyal in that environment.
To the suits we're just a translation layer between the business requirements to deployed code. And they'll be happy to reduce the work to story points and neo-Taylorism, so they can try to treat each person as an interchangeable unit of production, and then minimise costs.
In an era of trillon-dollar megacorps and multi-billionaire CEOs, Marx was ahead of his time:
> He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. [...] As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself
Ooh ooh ooh. I am unable to hold myself back but I'll try. The pipping system in most companies (especially "new age" faangs) is very very similar to the credit rating scheme. You are always captured, nay reduced, to a metric. All context is ignored/forgotten. And even worse it is a lot easier to drop on a metric than to rise back up again because when you drop it is purely objective but when you try to make up it is rarely ever objective. Only thing the faangs have done differently is lasted a bit longer in hiding their shadiness than their wall st counter parts! This unveiling could actually good be great for innovation again?
>I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that
CAN that even exist? The mercenary approach seems to me the only one that doesn't fall prey to living in a fantasy about how things "Should" be -- there is only the way they are: it's a business relationship.
Younger me thought otherwise. I was big into startup culture, enjoyed the comradery of working long hours, taking pride in this thing we were building together. Management was great. Hierarchy was minimal. I felt "valued"... And then we were all let go with a phone call. I remember just being like "...Ohhhhh. Right." It's a business relationship. That's as far as it goes. Anything else is an illusion.
> > I would love to work in an environment where
> > I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that
> CAN that even exist?
Theoretically, yes. Practically... it's always going to be insanely rare.
I would be very loyal to a place that helped me grow as a person with continuing education opportunities.
I would also be very loyal to a place that had a solid balance of feature delivery versus vs. technical debt management. (I feel this benefits the company in the medium to long run as well, even moreso than the engineers)
Those things would not necessarily be hard to achieve and would pay for themselves.
Yet nobody actually seems to run their company that way.
I guess the fundamental roadblock is that so many things in capitalism force you to think only about the short game. Thinking even 12 months ahead is often viewed as sheer insanity.
As an engineer, I understand (at least at a high level) the pressures faced by higher-ups. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Investors want results sooner or later. I wish that product managers and executives expended a fraction of the effort to understand what makes good engineering. Higher-ups often don't have the engineering chops to understand why good engineering processes can be such force multipliers enabling faster delivery in 18, 24, 72, whatever months... and that's okay, but they are also aggressively disinterested in actually understanding the processes that produce the product they are selling.
Sometimes it's not even about the short game of capitalism. I've seen multiple times undesired meaningless features being highly-prioritized without rhyme or reason because of hunches from some PO, because it was politically good internally for some product manager, or because the designer decided to do some redesign, and no higher-up wanted to intervene and check how important it was. When I saw that happening and I was "the higher up", I had to burn a lot of political capital to get the message from the team across. Modern software development is highly dysfunctional but we somehow refuse to tackle it.
Modern software development is highly dysfunctional
but we somehow refuse to tackle it.
And it's just unreasonably difficult.
Climbing mountains is hard, but not unreasonably hard. We don't intentionally cut people's safety lines and roll boulders down the f'ing mountain at them while they're trying to climb. We don't make them carry bowling balls in their backpacks.
Sure, it's pretty rare to hear from anybody that their particular field runs smoothly.
But our field. Man oh man. We know what tech debt is, and we know how it affects the time+effort required to achieve a certain velocity. And yet we spend more time shooting ourselves in the feet than doing anything else.
Quite honestly I feel that the problem has become massively worse in the last decade, with everybody cargo-culting the highly complex architectures of FAANG companies when in reality much simpler alternatives would be an order of magnitude better.
Fully remote lifestyle business where everyone's workload is around 12-24 hours a week with $100k+ salaries. Everyone in the company makes around the same amount (CEO to junior). Full transparency for the accounting books. Excess profits get evenly distributed to everyone. No investors to answer to. A job that gives enough time and money to do what you want in life.
This is really only for people who are already good at something though.
Here's a very controversial and bitter take. Aiming for maximum downvotes.
It's only when you get fired, you start to see clearly and are able to come out of that flowery lala land of "we're a team", "we're a family" and all that misplaced rather abused analogies.
It's just a commercial relationship rooted in generating profit (nothing wrong with that) for which have to collaborate with others. There's no team, there's no family.
Any prose and poetry beides that is also about squeezing every ounce of profit. It is a for profit activity so at least be direct and honest about it and refrain from borrowing analogies from other social constructs.
> that flowery lala land of "we're a team", "we're a family"
IMO "in a team" is actually achievable if you conceptualize it like a pro sports team where you can get laid off for under-performing, change in overall strategy, injuries etc. The players are still part of a team though.
My current company did layoffs and I don't think anyone is feeling "loyal" but I certainly feel like a member of a team because my coworkers and I work collaboratively towards shared goals and step in to support each other. We don't do this out of any loyalty to the company but because this behavior helps us work better together in a way that is more pleasant and is rewarded by the company.
I've never been fired but pretty much realized this from job one. I do agree though that for the people who don't understand this and look at the company as a place where they work with friends towards a common goal getting fired is likely the best way for them to understand that they are all just cogs in a heartless machine.
I had a team member fired the other day (he probably deserved it) and no one even bothered to tell me. I figured he quit and reached out wishing him well. I felt pretty awkward when I found out he was let go. The problem was they aren't even back filling his role, I just have to pick up the slack. He does a job totally different than mine that I really have no experience doing. I'm just winging it and not really caring about it. If they don't replace the guy I'm not putting in extra hours to ensure what he was doing gets done. Give me half his salary and I'll care.
Maybe I disagree about the part about "only when you get fired". To me it was enough seeing people getting fired, or having promotions postponed multiple times for no reason, or seeing a co-worker getting a verbal offers of a raise getting rescinded after they denied a job offer from another company, or having a C-level give me silent treatment when I disagreed with stupid release deadlines.
You just described with incredible precision my approach to jobs and career.
The only difference is that I make a point of leaving my current job in 18 to 24 months. That is the sweet spot. No matter how good or bad I think the job is. Always get a raise in the switch. Rinse and repeat. I actually avoid getting promotions in whatever is my current job, those are detrimental, seldom the raise is compatible with the increase in responsibility.
I worked for companies I liked and for companies I personally hated, the procedure is always the same. Has been working wonders for me in the past 2 decades.
I have friends who did that. They built a consulting company where they get to build the culture they want.
Those kinds of companies (the examples I know of are small, < 200 folks) actually have a chance of maintaining a coherent, caring culture. Not to say that folks don't get laid off or tough decisions made, but humanity is still present.
+1 on this, I'd add if you ever do try to do it in a non-technical industry/business and use your technology/software experience as a means to create more efficiency for the business.
I feel like there’s something weird going on in most companies above a certain size. I’ve worked at small companies with a wonderful culture and people put in lots of work to get a beautiful product shipped. But then when the company grows something changes and pushes those original passionate people out. Everyone else sees the passionate people get treated bad and react appropriately. Suddenly the large company carved its own soul out, and then wonders why its workers come empty.
I would do all I could for a job that respected me as a human being. But it’s gotten to the point where you can’t trust anyone above you, no matter what they say. Doing well in a growing company means you have to get more and more cutthroat, so you’re incentivized to try less and less.
When the company is smaller you get managers that are genuinely interested in growing the company – because that's what they grow too. Forget the 'mission' and such nonsense, noone truly cares about that. And the people that are highly visible early on tend to keep on growing their influence, organically.
However, at a certain size, they don't grow all that much if at all. Sure, the company might still be growing on sales numbers, but it's still mostly static. Some new divisions may pop up but they are usually satellite operations that may or may not matter in the long run. The next best alternative is to fight to move up the reporting chain. That means company growth or wellbeing no longer matters; in fact, cannibalizing existing products or whole divisions or bringing them under you is how managers grow. They do not care who or what they have to step on to make that happen.
It's definitely noticeable beyond a certain number. I like to say it's partly a human nature thing. There's some theory/law/term for this where the minority (whether negative or positive) ends up operating as majority and influencing business decisions.
I'm only 25 and have had 6 jobs. The longest I've stayed at a company was a year. Just the way we have grown up in the industry, all the smart people giving advice on the internet say to not bother getting raises or promotions, just go and interview and it'll be much more efficient. And it has, I've gotten massive pay bumps every time. How can you for stay loyal to a company when they give a measly 3% raise? And make promotions ridiculously hard? Especially when that company will lay you off after years and escort you from the building with security?
Each to their own, but I wouldn't hire you - I wouldn't even interview you. You do get to a point where you earn enough and can't be bothered to prove yourself at a new place yet again. It does get tired and boring as you realize that working life isn't really a pursuit that is your most important life goal.
> This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life.
While I get where you're coming from, it's a pretty big leap to go from what's happening now to "optimizing everything to the max". Twilio tripled in size since the pandemic, and wasn't/isn't profitable.
The same arguments can be applied to most large tech companies. Things got insane, and lean times were inevitable. Given your 25+ years in the industry, you must realize that a huge number of younger engineers have never seen anything other than boom years.
What are you referring to? We've gone through multiple cold cycles already. 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Some engineers may have gone through these cycles without issue, but everyone was acutely aware of the layoffs when they were occurring and if you graduated during those times it was especially hard to find a job until the job market resumed.
> 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
Everything is relative, I suppose, but those are the sorts of things a person might say if they've never actually seen a downturn.
When I say "downturn", I mean: 2001. 2008. Compared to that, 2012 was boom times. I was running a startup then, and hiring was a brutal competition. Maybe not compared to 2020, but again...that's not normal.
In 2008 we were hiring Ivy-league grads into hourly customer support roles. Circa 2000, programmers with decades of experience were going on unemployment.
I mean, 2001 and 2008 are all 'boom times' compared to the great depression and other periods of severe economic downturns if we want to be relative. I'm not sure that really matters though to a new grad that took 6+ months to find a job during one of the period of lean times I mentioned in my prior post however.
It can always be worse, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.
The point is, I lived through the times you're citing as "a time of large layoffs". I was hiring in at least one of them (actually, all of them, in different contexts). It was very hard to find engineers. By no even semi-objective measurement were 2012, 2016 and 2017 lean times for the industry. Virtually every tech company was hiring like crazy.
Maybe they were bad for someone, but that's always true. I'm sure a brand-new coding school grad has a hard time in most markets, for example.
In many positions, and at many points in your career, job hopping or the threat of it is the only real way to get any noticeable raise in actual compensation.
Most companies just don't really reward loyalty anymore.
Which actually illustrates the "no loyalty" point. A year is nothing. Staying that long doesn't demonstrate anything.
But nobody should be "loyal" to companies. Companies are certainly not "loyal" to them. To be clear, when I'm on the clock at a company, I'm all in -- they're paying me to be.
But off the clock, no. And I have no problem leaving a position when it's no longer beneficial to me. And employer-employee relationship is a business deal, nothing more.
We're seeing the consequences of this stuff. Productivity is going down and you have a bunch of your typical CEO-favored sites going on about quiet quitting, ghosted interviews, unthankful employees etc. To counter this issue rather than improving the workplace they're deciding to try and enforce productivity through spying on workers and forcing people back into the office.
It's all a symptom of what you mentioned where CEOs, upper level management etc are all so thoroughly disconnected from the workforce that they make boneheaded and bad business decisions that destroy the business 3-5 years out. Though none of them get punished for it because of golden parachutes ensuring even the most failing CEO gets rewarded for destroying the company they were running.
This always gets me. It's as if they think they're doing people a favor by hiring them -- or at least expect people to think they're doing them a favor.
It just ain't so. The reason companies hire people is because they'll make more money by doing so. It's not a favor, it's just cold business. Employees should not feel "thankful", they should feel as if they entered into a business relationship.
While I think you are right along I'd like to offer a different perspective of what's happening. A lot of what you've said is true-- candidates have changed over time, people are caring less about the company, and the general conscience has definitely shifted towards lesser company loyalty.
We, especially Hacker News's readers, workers in tech and tech-adjacent roles are very much a small percentage. If you've read older books, especially autobiographies, biographies, and journal-like books you'll likely see that the following:
> This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life.
already existed even before during the great industrial revolution. It's very much related to human nature I think. On another point:
> Any company needs some people who care about what they do. But these are in shorter and shorter supply every year, it seems.
Surprisingly, there ARE a lot of people like this, the biggest problem I've found (having been in the hiring seat) is their competence and skills do not match what the companies need and are looking for. This is also correlated to why outsourcing has become such a big part of large companies today. Not just the cost benefits. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't invest into training and investment and likely if they already are, they cannot get employees to commit because of wages (financials for both the company and employee).
> It is no way to have a productive employee base.
We are still largely far away from this and likely why cities will still be playing a big part of greater economic change even amidst remote work. I even might venture to write that we have yet to truly see one besides what currently exists akin to Silicon Valley, MIC, and adjacent employee bases.
Anyway, I lost my train of thought now. Feel free to discuss
I don't understand how Twilio could need 8500 employees? Atlassian reports 8100 and I'd say they have a much larger and diverse body of work than Twilio. Am I being crass in thinking that this could have been avoided had they not grown headcount "like a rocket ship: straight up and to the right"?
It is the same old story, really. First hires are careful and frugal decisions. But at some point when there is money laying around that needed to be spent people will hire almost anybody just for the sake of being able to report progress on the hiring they were supposed to do or to grow their kingdom or to jumpstart a new potential product that wasn't really thought through very well or a lot other reasons.
> You can pay people more to keep them at your company for a while longer, but there is very little you can do to overcome their inherent cynicism.
Exactly, after 2 decades in this industry I've learned to let myself go with the flow of my build-up of cynicism.
I hate interviewing, from both sides, so I tend to stay longer than what most other tech workers do (my stints vary between 2-4 years in general) but it's absurd how the pattern always repeat: I start a new job with a lot of motivation to learn the business, learn how I can have good impact in the product, foster discussions; just to eventually get jaded by management, start being cynical and working with the mindset "it's just a job, do what's expected, take the cash" until eventually I overcome my hatred of interviews and start looking for something else.
What surprises me is how long I can keep the game of doing the bare minimum after getting cynical, I don't stop delivering but I know for sure if I was more motivated/less jaded I could deliver more, hell, I've done it at multiple places but it's extremely hard to not get affected by seemingly stupid decisions from upper management. I do my job well because I care about my colleagues and don't want them to have extra work, I don't do my job well for the companies sake or bottom line, not for the past 10-15 years at least. I simply don't care about the business at some point.
> I notice people care less about the company they work for
I learned, several decades back, that it's always a mistake to actually, really care about the company you work for. Care about your work, absolutely. Care about your professionalism. Care about your coworkers.
But not about the company. No company cares in the slightest about you (and especially not companies who make a big show about how much they care). Caring about them is simply dysfunctional, opens you up to being taken advantage of, and sooner or later, will harm you.
Spoken like a manager trying to conserve what remains.
That "shit in the pond" is just fertilizer. Enough senior-ish people from big-ish companies are being let go that there are bound to be some startups forming. And likely bootstrapped startups given how frightened VCs seem.
They know enough to eat the parent companies' lunches. But that's not the real threat. The real threat is that they know what those companies could have done and exactly how except that those companies were too frightened or conservative to do it. Those people can not just eat their parent companies' lunches, but all tomorrows' lunches. Nom nom nom.
All you recently laid off: find one another, band together, turn that spite into progress and kick some ass!
No they don't. Look anywhere else besides tech and you'll see. How people were so naive for so long is amazing. High salaries, RSU, whatever plush perks, blah, blah are just love bombing without the romance.
I don’t see a reason to even report money being literally wasted in my current jobs.
There is an unused cloud service burning money at one of my jobs. Tens of thousands kind of money. Make a case for me even bothering to tell someone about it.
If management discover that you knew about the wastage, and did nothing, then it can be said that you aren't acting in the best interest of the company. Possibly the opposite, meaning you'd be fired. So there's that.
If there is a culture of apathy and zero oversight and you are 100% sure no will ever care to show that you knew about it, then I pity your situation. Not bothering to tell someone about the wastage it is perpetuating that culture. Eventually company will fail or at best struggle.
I'm my experience it's nicer working at profitable companies where everyone is doing their best to help the company to profit. That doesn't mean your income is less important than company income. But you agree on the former, then do everything in your capability to help with the latter.
If your still not convinced please consider the environment. Cloud services consume not insignificant physical resources.
I always mention the waste because it feels like the right thing to do. I explain that we can reduce costs, but it will require some amount of engineering effort. Many times I get "it's not costing enough to worry about, focus on features." Of course, when the shit hit the fan like in 2020, they wanted all that cost reduced as fast as possible...
If it's something simple like an unused service, I'll just shut it off.
I figure that one of the things a company is paying me for is my expertise. I would be negligent in withholding that from them, so I'll always say something. Whether or not they listen isn't my problem -- I've done my duty.
I think it's awesome that some people enjoy their work and love their jobs.
That said, if you aren't an owner of the company then I think it's unhealthy to be emotionally invested.
In my last job, I had received a competing offer and informed my boss that I would rather not leave but that this other offer was too financially good for me to ignore. My boss responded by beating the other offer and I stayed there for about five more years.
I later admitted to him that I felt guilt about leveraging an offer in this way. He said something that really stuck with me: "You've got to put yourself first".
In retrospect, the thing that actually stuck with me is that I'd gleamed into the mind of upper management. That is, they are putting themselves first, and so should you.
This is one of those things that makes sense in the airless vacuum of a message board that has no connection to ordinary life; the mythical "touchless grass" as the tweeters say. In reality, people in all walks of life form deep emotional attachments to their jobs. Plant closures disrupt the identities of entire cities. People are emotionally attached to jobs as checkout clerks. Hit songs have been written about the phenomenon. You can't just tell people not to have human connections to their work. It's like telling Glen Campbell that the Wichita Lineman doesn't own enough of Southwestern Bell to be identifying himself as such.
> You can't just tell people not to have human connections to their work.
In my case, it has been required.
I'm very fortunate, to have worked for 27 years, for a company that had many, many faults, but always treated their workers as if their career at the company was a critical factor.
That's because it was a "classic" Japanese company.
The best managers that I had, were Japanese (including one that eventually because the Chairman of the Board). The worst ones -by a large margin- were the Americans.
The Americans had very little Integrity. They also tended to be casually dishonest, in a jaw-dropping way.
Eventually, my team was dissolved, and I was laid off. I got a year's severance (It was capped -by the Americans, otherwise, it would have been more). My manager flew in from Japan, to tell me. He was next on the chopping block, himself.
Integrity is important, and very, very rare.
I like to feel as if I demonstrated it, in my own management. My employees seemed to agree.
If I talk about it here, I tend to be met with some fairly sneering, insulting responses.
In his autobiography Akio Morita (founder at Sony) tells a story in the 1960s, they'd hired an American salesman, who had done very well for them for many years, but then the guy thought he could make better money elsewhere, so he changed jobs. The next year they were all at a big electronics conference in Las Vegas, and Akio Morita was there talking up Sony's latest products, and this American sales guy walks up to them to say hello. Akio Morita, and the rest of the Japanese team, thought perhaps the American would have a sense of shame and so would try to avoid them, but instead the guy walked up and was very friendly and chatted with them awhile. Afterwards Akio Morita realized that the American saw nothing shameful in leaving Sony for some other company that was paying better. It was a bit of a shock for Akio Morita. He had initially thought of America as a paradise for managers, because they could fire a worker whenever they wanted to, but that incident with the salesman caused Akio Morita to see the other side of it, that a worker could quit at any time, and so Akio Morita developed doubts about the American system.
I remember when a color scientist that we worked with (she was Japanese), left the company, and joined a direct competitor.
Her name was struck from the lists. It's as if she was never there.
Damn good at her job. I suspect that the "classic Japanese" culture of our company didn't give her the opportunities that the more modern company she joined, would.
I'm deliberately being vague, but both companies are household names.
If you wander around the Diamond District, in NYC, you'll see all these skinny little guys, in rumpled suits, walking around; very often, accompanied by a much larger guy, in a more fitted suit.
These chaps can have millions of dollars' worth of diamonds in their pockets, and they routinely exchange them on a handshake basis.
Integrity has worked for them for a long, long time.
It's not dead. It's just resting. Probably pining for the Fjords.
Integrity is as important as it has always been. While you can certainly have a successful career or business that is lacking it, how much integrity you are perceived as having has an enormous influence on it.
If you are viewed as lacking, you will largely be restricted to doing business with people and companies who are also lacking because others won't give you the time of day.
I'd agree with what you're saying, although I think it highly is dependent upon the personality and independence level of the individual. Even at jobs where I found the work interesting, I've never had the slightest emotional attachment to the company. I'm vastly more interested in working on my own projects and hobbies and after putting in the requisite 7-8 hours in a day I completely switch off.
It's the same for the ostensible loyalty towards ones hometown. I've been just as comfortable living in China as I have back in the states.
I have no loyalty to abstractions like symbols, countries or companies. Loyalty is reserved for friends and my family.
> You can't just tell people not to have human connections to their work.
Human connections are great and important. But feeling an attachment to the company is neither of those things. Have connections with people, not with instruments of economic production.
I've always been impressed with upper management at my current company, and I don't believe any of them have that mindset. My wife broke her leg a couple weeks ago, and we have a 3 month old baby and a 4 year old. I had just started working again after taking paternity leave. I've been a rather poor employee the last several weeks, and will continue to be for a while. Middle management is stressed out about schedules and stressing me out, while the word from upper management has been consistently clear: you've always gone the extra mile for the company, so let the company do the same for you. Focus on taking care of your family and don't worry about work.
I used to agree with this, but I've changed my tune recently. Working 8 hours a day on something you're not emotionally invested in for years is incredibly depressing and puts you at risk of burn out. My more nuanced opinion is that you need to find the right pieces of the company to be invested in. I can take pride in the quality of the code, in trying to help out my co-workers, etc.
This and investment in self development through the work for the company. I don't earn just money but I gain experience. When the second one doesn't go up, it's time to go.
While I totally agree, I can't blame people for getting emotionally invested because today's companies hammer that corporate propaganda into everyone's heads all the time. There are good intentions, but it's manipulative in the same way that a flaky boyfriend or girlfriend can lead you on even though they're not truly serious or committed. In the cast of corporatism, the sentimentality is directed toward a group of disparate individuals with an overlapping albeit replaceable goal. The best thing for everyone is to see it for what it is, not assume malice, and keep a safe distance.
I see it like this: it is my work. It is my name that goes on the CR, on the commit, on the documentation, etc. Why shouldn’t I take as much pride and genuinely care about it as much as I can? At the end of it all, it is my effort, and I will give he best effort I can.
I know I’m speaking about effort, and you’re speaking about becoming emotionally invested, but the latter is a natural manifestation of of the former; the emotional investment arises because of the effort I put forth.
You can be invested in your work, in your professionalism, and in the people you get to know. All of those things are very different from being emotionally invested in the company itself.
This doesn't mean "take the highest offer", it means putting yourself first. In your situation, going back to your boss was clearly an ask to stay because that was what you wanted. It's possible to be comfortable and content with your work and your job, and to prioritize that over chasing more money too.
Story time: many moons ago i was in the sane situation, and decided to stay because i loved the team and had a very good work relationship with my boss/team leader… despite the company being kind of a circus on fire.
What I didn’t know was that the company that was trying to hire me was also in contact with my boss/team leader, which actually accepted the offer and left.
We still have a good relationship and I still consider him a friend (hope it’s the same for him) and we meet from time to time for a beer with other former colleagues.
Needless to say, that was a very formative experience.
One thing I recommend in this situation is forming alumni groups if they don't already exist. Regardless of whether it's layoffs or through just reaching the end of your journey it's a great time to form and/or retain your community.
I'm part of several alumni groups on slack and they continue to be one of the most important networks for all kinds of opportunities. Way way better than Linked In.
Essentially all the trust benefits and social capital of being part of the corporate tribe continue beyond the end of employment.
Yeah, this is a good idea. There's one guy at my previous job that invites all former coworkers to hang out at a bar a couple times a year, and we get together and catch up. Not too many, just about 10 people end up showing up, but it's enough. I haven't used it for a new job yet, although it did get me an interview.
Reading the responses to some of these posts it feels like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction in the "the company is not your family" discussion.
Yes, if you expect corporate America to always treat you fairly you're going to end up disappointed. But spending 9 years at a place and not even giving a little bit of yourself to the company seems even worse.
It's OK to think that your boss cares about you as a person, it's OK to make friends at work, and it's OK to believe in the company mission, as long as you don't overdo it.
I think the broader point is, giving 40+ hours per week to a company is already giving enough of yourself to the company. I think it's great for people to put in extra effort and time, if you're inspired to do it. Of course, you should care about your boss and co-worker as people and become friends with them. But never forget they're co-workers, not family. At the end of the day, labor demands change and if it's in the company's best interest to let people go then that's what's going to happen.
It means you need to be cognizant of the fact that if it's in the company's best interest to let you go, they will. And this is not unusual or peculiar. This passage stood out to me:
> The email said we'd lose access at 12:30pm. At 12:28 I decided, "I'll break up with you before you can dump me." I signed out and closed my work machine for the last time.
> And then I started to cry.
> I cried despite the generous severance package. I cried despite emotionally preparing for the moment. I cried despite being genuinely excited for what comes next. For nine years, so much of my identity has been wrapped up in my relationship with Twilio, and that relationship ended today.
It is abundantly clear that the author invested too much emotion and too much of his identity into his employer. Your relationship is not one of family. You can't fire your brother or child [1], but company can and do fire their employees. The fact that he had such a profound reaction means he needed to invest less emotion in his employer and adopt a more mercenary attitude. I've been laid off before, it happened to me when my previous employer was heavily impacted by COVID. I didn't cry, my attitude was "yep, makes sense - I'd probably do the same in their shoes." I don't want to sound mean or belittling, but it's just not healthy to have the author's reaction to being laid off.
I find it funny how people talk about a "mercenary" attitude in the workforce with a negative connotation. What's not ethical is when people treat military service like picking up jobs off LinkedIn, and apply the same attitude of the civilian workforce towards the profession of arms. It's totally normal to have a "mercenary" attitude in the civilian workforce. It doesn't mean don't be friends with your co-workers - I'm sure the dudes at Blackwater and Executive Outcomes are friends with their co-workers - but it does mean you need to be prepared for the day that the company decides your employment is no longer necessary.
1. to be pedantic, people do cut off family members, but usually for reasons far more serious than maximizing profit
It's not abundantly clear to me. The author probably enjoyed those nine years a lot more than someone who adopts a mercenary attitude would have. Human beings love belonging places.
What did this emotional investment cost him? Slightly more pain when the relationship ended (and it seems like they're already excited for what's next)?
The emotional investment may have made him miss out on more interesting, better compensated, or otherwise more desirable jobs. And the pain at its end does not correspond to more enjoyment. I don't think a mercenary attitude diminishes the enjoyment of working at all. Like I said earlier, the Blackwater and Executive Outcomes guys probably enjoy their jobs just as much as typical soldiers - possibly even more. I don't this this is a trade off between more enjoyment and greater emotional damage at the end. It's just as much enjoyment, better impact on his life situation, and less pain when his job ends. A strictly better set of outcomes.
…why? Sorry I’m not being flippant here I mean it. Why would this be okay? What is the reason that I would want someone to be able to intentionally take advantage of me as a person in a way that benefits them but not me when I have no personal connection to them?
Moreover, why would I let a corporation or other business do that?
Im genuinely curious where your thinking is at with this and hope you’ll elaborate beyond this short reply you gave.
This is not pure cynicism though: had they decided to leave after the first round of layoff they would probably be in a better position when negotiating the next job (something that sadly now they have to do anyway, but as someone currently unemployed).
Greg’s “Devs and Depression” talk many years back was a light in the middle of a very dark period of time in my life.
Having followed some of Greg’s work when I was doing developer relations, this particular post hit me closer to home than most, and is just another reminder of the caliber of people impacted by these cuts.
When I voluntarily left my job last year to refocus on my mental health for awhile, it was one of the harder decisions to make and I was an emotional wreck throughout the process. Having this happen suddenly is something I'm grateful I haven't yet experienced. Posts like this are a good reminder of just how personal many of these layoffs are for people, and I have nothing but empathy for everyone going through this right now.
That’s also why some companies underline at every possible occasion that they are bootstrapped (ie: they’ve grown organically without investments from vc firms or similar).
Because companies aren't family, and they aren't welfare programs. Continuing to retain these employees would require increasing prices to pay for this glut of labor, and shift the burden on customers. And if customers drop because of increased prices, they might have to lay people off anyway. There is no "sacred company".
I can't imagine working for so long at a place burning huge piles of cash every quarter. Looking for the exit is something I'd have done at least 5 years ago.
There's a reason it's called human "resources". You better believe that if MBAs could kill or renice employees the way you might do computer processes, they would.
I wonder if we created the companies that we deserve? I worked at IBM a long time ago and they spent a ton of time and money developing employees. I was there when there was still a concept of “lifetime” employment. IBM was expensive but we smothered customers with support. Price was a factor but we still could compete on quality, support, service and I hesitate to say it, an actual relationship with our customer. We laugh at the joke now when someone says “if it was $2 cheaper I’d fly on a kite!” Ha, ha, LOL. Something about just caring about price and returns on investment has made it harder for companies to invest in their own people. Now that employees will jump for $$ the companies can also ask “why invest if the employee will just leave us in a second for more money?” There are still organizations out there that care but I think they are fewer and fewer. And none can probably be public. Like IBM in the 1980’s I think Twilio hired and spent like a drunken sailor because they could get away with it. IBM fired around 25K people at the beginning of the downsizing in 1988 or so and we didn’t even notice. Then another 25K or 50K and still, no difference. I think they topped out at 450K people. There were 100K people who basically didn’t do anything productive.
This happened to me. Was the sole developer on a certain service. Other engineers would use the service at the company, but no one else really wanted to get into it and work on it.
Was working on fixing an issue one morning, got roped into a meeting, and escorted from the building. Next week, saw an email from a coworker asking how to do something with the service. Told him, politely (don't burn bridges) that I didn't work there anymore and wasn't interested in helping that company without payment. Yeah, it might be thought of that I hung him out to dry, but that wasn't my intent. I just won't work for free, particularly when I was booted without much chance to get my affairs sorted
This happens all the time and the downstream effects of hazardous layoffs are often not seen or felt until Jim the resident container expert isn't around to restart the critical containers that all of your other services need, so you start losing a lot of money and time as John the replacement scrambles to figure out how the system works and what to do.
Or they get hired back as a contractor for 3x-4x the hourly wage as you mentioned.
I got 0 hours notice -that's fairly common, in the US. Usually, you aren't even allowed to go to your desk, and collect your stuff. You have to schedule an appointment to come back, after work hours, and be escorted there by a security guard.
I (and my team) already knew it was coming. The writing was on the wall, and we had our affairs in order. My Japanese manager appreciated it. I think the American HR manager was a bit disappointed that there wasn't much of an opportunity for the casual bullying and shaming that they do, in these circumstances. The last HR manager was OK. I had zero respect for his predecessor.
HR had the highest turnover of any department in the company. I tended to have a somewhat adversarial relationship with most of the HR managers, but the one that I respected most was fired in an explosion, more than twenty years ago, and now manages a much more prestigious organization. I sincerely wish her well, and she has my respect; little as I'm sure that means to her.
In Marketing and Sales organizations, it's common for people to be walked out the door, immediately after handing in their resignation.
I have never seen a handover being very useful. Nobody has time to receive the handover and if the system is not a total mess, other people will get up to speed quickly as needed. Every time I have seen somebody leave or being laid off, things just moved on without much problem.
I've had the exact opposite experience. Referring to hand over notes that I'd taken years earlier when something unexpected came up to a system that still ran but no one actively was working on.
What the first exposure to layoffs (whether you are or not) teaches you is to never be exposed in such a circumstance again. Make sure you have an exit strategy when your current company either goes down the toilet or they bin you. Companies have zero loyalty to you just as you should have zero loyalty to them. Walk when the opportunity arises that makes sense.
Sorry to hear about this, being let go is always a demoralizing experience, but I just can't identify with this type of histrionic response towards being laid off at a company. It's not like you're losing a loved one, and if you properly built up your friendships with your coworkers, they'll still be meaningful relationships even after you're gone. All the lessons and skills that you acquired are still persistent as well.
There must be some kind of cult of personality phenomenon that applies to companies as well as people. I hope that the one good takeaway for this person is that unless you're a majority stakeholder or have ownership in the company, one should learn to be detached about where your paycheck comes from.
Often it is not individuals being directly targeted, it is whole teams. "Project Foo is not working out, let's cancel it and fire the whole team." Not saying that happened here. It is impossible to say what logic went into these decisions.
Don't be an ass. He's referring to the way in which all kids see their parents as having a particular occupation. He's not saying that he built his career at Twilio at his daughter's expense.
I also don't think he built his career at his daughter's expense, I'm saying that the over-dramatization of the post leads to this even being something to call out, even when it shouldn't be.
You can call me names all you like, but don't expect people to not question intent over a poorly-conceived sentence.
You're right: what you wrote is poorly conceived. You can probably just delete it (or edit-clear it)! I'm an ass all the time; I'm not high-horsing you, but maybe we'd all just be better off if this whole subthread vanished.
The guy worked there for 9 years. That's a really long time, longer than many posters here's entire careers (mine included), and longer than most of us will ever work at a given job. Of course he's going to be emotionally invested, and knocking him for this is a bit cruel.
Not so long ago, your kids _would_ know you as someone who drives buses for the local bus company, delivers the post, or works down the mine.
This is fair take, but I do think there is an additional difference between being emotionally attached to your job, and the content of the post.
I also think there's a big difference between a very high-visibility job like a bus-driver/mail-delivery-worker/mine-worker (where the labor is very accessible/visible to kids), and one in software engineering (my parents work with computers at some company?)
You give your kids half the random swag you get. You involve them by letting them see your job, etc. My older kid has eaten in Google cafeterias, comes to my office at cmu after school to hang out and do her homework there, etc. You _want_ them involved at some level. It's part of modeling being an adult.
As somebody with over quarter of century of experience managing and hiring people I notice how candidates change over time (trying to adjust for how I change myself). I notice people care less about the company they work for and, honestly, it is more and more difficult to find arguments against.
This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life.
When more and more people started changing jobs every year just to get an incremental raise without even bothering to get the raise at the company I worked for I thought this is shortsighted and it will backfire on them and it will teach them. Well, did not happen. It just became a new normal.
I wonder what new things are going to pass as acceptable.
Any company needs some people who care about what they do. But these are in shorter and shorter supply every year, it seems.
When you run a query on LinkedIn it will show you a list of candidates with their three last jobs. I noticed page after page after page everybody has their third last job starting 2020/2021. Meaning almost all seem to be spending less than a year on each of their jobs in past couple years. And these are all supposed to be senior candidates.
It is no way to have a productive employee base.
You can pay people more to keep them at your company for a while longer, but there is very little you can do to overcome their inherent cynicism.