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You are more important than the company, put you and your family first.
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If your company doesn’t provide a pension plan you have no reason to be loyal and stay.
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Telework is an excuse for minimal working. Most remote workers schedule emails, get their work done quickly than spend the work day doing personal work on the clock.
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Charisma is more important than performance for career progression.
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Favorite employees are typically the easiest to be manipulated and taken advantage of.
Most remote workers schedule emails, get their work done quickly than spend the work day doing personal work on the clock.
That’s the biggest load of bs I’ve ever read. I work just as hard as my colleagues in the office and I don’t clock out after half a day.
Then you are doing it wrong.
Or maybe I respect my boss because he respects me so I don’t have a reason to fuck with him.
That is your choice, but your coworkers are getting paid the same and doing a lot less.
Or they just do as much as I do.
Telework is an excuse for minimal working.
telework gives human beings their agency back. nobody, NOBODY needs to spend 8 hours straight doing emails
That is one of the benefits, minimal working. If you can get all your work done in half the work day, good for you.
How is doing your work quickly in remote working an excuse for minimal working? If the work is done, where’s the issue?
From an employer’s perspective, they are wasting their money if you work less than the work day. Most employees waste their workdays in the office, stretching out work. One of the reasons why telework is failing is because, after three years, employers finally figured out that their employees are not working the whole day. From their point of view, that means you are unproductive because you could be doing even more and can handle a much larger workload. Employees obviously don’t want them to know that.
So the solution is to get them back to the office so they are forced to spend more time either being slowed down by their environment or pretending to work like before? I don’t understand the point. Employees are not going to magically transpose 2h of efficient remote work into 8h of efficient office work. The point of view is irational.
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You’re not interviewing for a job, they’re interviewing to be your employer.
Lots of meta-level comments here so I’ll add one that’s more in the weeds:
In an office job, it’s always good to be friendly with IT and the office manager/administrative assistant.
The more someone is paid, the less actual vital work they tend to do.
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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 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.
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.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
The “family” talk is only just talk. If an employer says “we’re family here” or some similar nonsense, it’s not family as in “we stick together through everything” - what a family actually is or should be… It’s more of a farengi perspective…
Rule of acquisition 111: “Treat people in your debt like family… exploit them.”
And rule 6: “Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.” (Which is also cited as “Never allow family to stand in the way of profit”)
Fact is, they want you to be family in the way that you’ll do anything for them, like you would for your own family. But when it comes time that you need them to help you out like a family would, they’ll show you the door very quickly.
Related: if you’re hit by a bus tomorrow, your job will be posted before your obituary. You’re just a cog in their money printing machine. As soon as you lose your value in that regard, you’re gone. If you slow down the machine too much, they’ll find a cog that is more easily lubricated (to push the analogy). If you’re broken and can’t work, they’ll replace you without a thought. Management is there to put a nice face on the company (for your benefit) and make it seem less like you’re a number; but that’s all you are.
Knowing enough of the process makes it incredibly easy to slack off, and that should always be the goal.
Being emotionally detached from really stupid leadership decisions is harder than it seems
That hit hard 😶
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.
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).
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.
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.
Success 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…
It’s suffocating to be in a middle management position because you get squeezed by the higher-ups and your own team. If the higher-ups make a decision that your team dislikes or vice versa, you’re going to be in the shitter with whichever party suffered every time even if you had the best intentions.
Yup. At my last job, I did my best to produce quality work, I got an award for making zero errors in a year, and I was one of the go-to people for new employees to ask for advice. I trained new team members, even while I was still a temp myself. Eventually got told that I was joining the team that dealt with all the escalation emails. I only knew how to work on 2 of the many types of products that went into that folder, but it was mandatory to work every single email that went into that box, 2 hour shift, every email had to be answered by the end of the 2hrs. I also only had a single 30min super quick “training” on how to even answer the emails (really complicated template system, which I still did not understand by the end of it)
I told my manager I wasn’t comfortable working in that box, considering they never trained me to work on most of the other products, but she ignored me and said I’d figure it out. Luckily, I only had to do it once, then they delayed my actual start date for that task, until I got laid off (along with most of the rest of my team) 3 months later. YAAAAAAY. :|
Sounds like they needed an excuse to get rid of you easily.
They got rid of my whole team to get rid of me? Lol, I don’t think so. The job was mortgage related, and the work volume tanked in 2022, after blowing up in 2020. I was just a barely above minimum wage minion, with no team members under me. I honestly think that along with there not being enough work for all of us, they wanted to eliminate WFH teams.
It is “just a job” - just roll with it and pretend and you’re fine.
Company time should be used to shit, piss, walk around mindlessly, and search for a better job.
