I know what is expected from me at work: anything and everything. This is especially true shortly after our seemingly annual round of layoffs (right before the holiday season!). This increase in responsibilities has not come along with an increase pay, but our CEO got to double his total compensation package compared last year.
I'd look for something else, but seeing this report, talking to friends and reading some comments in various threads on HN, it's clear the grass isn't greener anywhere else.
As a staff engineer at my company, my stupid manager expects me to do his work all the time. I'm hardly building things but just managing jira, talking to other teams, managing shit, writing docs, dealing with politics etc. I never signed up for this crap. But sadly this is where many companies are going
“Staff engineer” varies by employer but this is generally exactly what I expect it to be.
There are times I do technical work and times my entire job is putting out fires and making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.
Any developer can write code. This stuff requires a different set of executive functions, and engineers that can do both are generally promoted.
> making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations
What you're describing is a manager, not an engineer. Do you have any managers in your company? What is their job?
No, what he is describing is a well-rounded staff level engineer. As you get more senior and take on more responsibilities, you start having to think about everyone's work and how it all fits together, you think about how the project fits into a product that meets the customer's need (unless you have a dedicated PM, which is becoming rare), you have to think about deadlines and how the project is tracking towards it, you have to think about other teams and how their work intersects and how their dependencies are timed to ship in time for yours, you need to communicate up the totem pole to actual managers. And, yes, you have to hold your nose and open up Jira.
I don't know where these "pure" perfectly spherical software engineers work who are super-senior staff level, but still do nothing but type in code. I've never seen them. As soon as you advance beyond the entry-level, you need to broaden your scope and be more of an actual engineer rather than just someone who writes code.
The manager's job is (among others) to make sure the team is working well together, solve any inter-personnel issues, work with each of their directs on career development, sometimes provide direction of what to work on, sometimes actually assign individual tasks, pass down announcements and direction from the higher-ups, help to manage the team members' performance, and work with HR when needed. They're not there to do all the stinky non-code-typing things in your project.
No, Staffs are suppose to be focused on the technical implementation of the product, not on the minute of everyone’s work. Most of what you describe are EMs. Staff/Sr Staff/Principals should be steering the high level architecture, tech debt refactoring, migration strategy, etc and still get in the weeds to implement said architectures. They have the technical experience to do it, trying to extinguish that experience by pushing them into administrative roles is a complete waste of their talent and experience.
They’re being pushed until these administrative roles because Directors have no idea how to leverage their talent and default to putting them into EM-like roles because that’s what they do but again, it’s a waste of talent and experience.
I've been working in the industry for huge, medium and small companies for 25+ years and have never seen a purely technical role above "Senior" level. Open to the idea that they may exist, but I think you're describing some kind of theoretical ideal that is rare in reality.
I’ve worked at multiple orgs where this is actually the case. Not sure what to say other than they exist and I hope you can work at a place like that one day, it’s awesome.
I used to work at a place where I could do things of value, but my role has changed to putting out fires that are (to my eye) manufactured by our acquiring company and silly admin things that I have now responsibility of, but no agency in. Ex: they need me to do a performance review of my reports, but don’t let me give them the rating or raise I think they deserve despite the decision makers never having a single conversation with my reports.
Nobody knows our codebase as well as me because I built it. My output of customer value has dropped to 10% of what it used to be and I don’t think it would be possible today to build the things we built pre-acquisition that made us valuable in the first place.
Thankfully we were able to hire another engineer who is very good and has been able to keep up with internal and external requests. I am thankful he’s been able to get up to speed so I don’t leave my coworkers high and dry.
At 35 years old, I’m cooked, Chat. Thriving at a megacorp with these management styles is orthogonal to delivering value to customers.
It seems managers are simultaneously worthless pointy-haired bosses and yet needed to keep self-described elite devs from doing work that's beneath them.
> Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.
What is the team's manager doing if not coordination, allocation, and tracking?
Have yet to be convinced that staff eng is worth it. Seems like it is [project] management by another name and placed at the top of the IC ladder so as to suggest that maybe, just maybe, you'll get time to actually write code.
IMO Staff Eng and line managers are both jobs where you may not write a lot of code, but the ability to write code is nevertheless a critical skill for the job.
I’m not sure the C Suite realizes that their efficiency drives — getting rid of managers — often means their engineers now aren’t as free to focus on engineering things.
The reality is (and not in defence id managers) managers are getting just as effed by "leadership" (ever notice how managers are framed as scumbags but leaders are saviors?) and sadly managers cannot tell employees - "hey mate we are all in the same boat getting effed so let us game it/survive it together" for fear of being outed as non company players. You are always supposed to sell the company as your own line! So they are squeezed from the top and the bottom. I keep switching between management and IC so I have a bit of empathy here.
Oh I totally see through that, true. It's obviously from the very top. I'm looking to switch to management for the first time for the empathy bit, myself.
I've been having to do stuff "as soon as possible" for over a year now. I'm at a mid sized company and in many ways the nagging to deliver ASAP is beyond even when I founded my own company.
And if something is gonna take a few days or a week, all the managers do is ask me five times if I can instead divide the work and farm it out to other engineers. If it isn't taking on the order of hours, they want to throw people at it to go faster. Parallelism is clearly a manager KPI.
The thing is: you've already got the means of production. You have a computer, your brain (the real core of software production), and the whole universe of open source / Free software out there.
What people actually want is VC money salaries without having to pay the VC piper's price, which is more of a problem.
(AI has changed this somewhat, because it's so energy-intensive that it's become a capital asset. And of course we have to consider the monopolistic nature of software markets.)
Most people don’t have this, but engineers do and we should be the last people complaining. We get paid well enough to save up and start a small company and take on the risk.
The Borg can buy you out, but don’t give them your soul. The world is a better place with more entrepreneurs and new businesses. That part is on us.
A refrain I’ve heard from real life friends and people on the internet alike is that employees are being asked to come back to the office where they wind up just sitting on video calls much of the day. This seems like an absolute worst case for job satisfaction to me.
I’m lucky enough to work wherever I want and accept Zoom meetings as a prerequisite to that, but find them tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation. If I were asked to come to an office every day and deal with the commute and the stupidity of most modern office designs and still had the majority of meetings happen over video, I’d be pretty dissatisfied with my job.
> but find them [zoom] tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation
After working remotely for 8 years, I find video conferencing to be preferable.
* I am more physically comfortable. I can control the thermostat, the humidity, the lighting level. My preference on these three things are very different than standard office. In addition I have better control over items such as the food I am digesting, the office chair I am sitting in, the smells in the room, etc. One concrete example, I am often cold in offices. If I am cold my muscles tend to be tense, and my mind reads that signal and makes me more anxious/alert. I can concentrate better and think more clearly if my body/mind is relaxed.
* Reduction of information to only the most relevant. Do you know how much data you receive when sitting next to another human. Significantly more than the 1000mb/s my home internet connection provides. During a critical negotiation or an intimate moment you might want that extra volume. During engineering it's a distraction. I don't want to smell my co-workers lunch while paired programming. All of the conversations are more focused.
* Consent. I choose to connect. I can choose to disconnect at anytime. I'm never stuck in a conversation while waiting in line for coffee, and if someone virtually decides to drop by my desk, I have more flexibility in dealing with the urgent need.
I think those are all fair and reasonable—ultimately I've chosen not to work in an office since late 2019, so I'm not exactly an in-person absolutist.
Personally, though, I do think that the higher-bandwidth effect is valuable to me. I think part of what makes me feel like video calls are tiring is that my brain is working overtime trying to extract some of that extra signal from the participants, while in-person I'm able to better gauge others' reactions intuitively and adjust my tone or approach without much conscious effort. People have told me for years that I have a "calming presence" in the workplace/meetings, which is not a way I'd describe myself unprompted, so I think I've silently benefited from nonverbal cues in that way.
Being in a comfortable environment is a huge one though for sure. So many modern offices are comically badly arranged, with people trying to do thinking work space shared with people having meetings who are overflowing from the insufficient number of conference rooms. It's kind of a joke.
In the last few decades workers got the impression that there is some sort of a utilitarian reason or rationale behind the workplace practices or management approaches. After all there is research! Business schools!
This facade has started to crack in many places, and RTO is just a very obvious example, it's almost absurd how the companies prizing themselves for being "data-driven" descended into "we're doing this because bossman says so". But it follows the spirit of times anyway, people will quickly adjust.
We're learning that our companies are not data-driven, they're data-chauffeured: Bossman decides what he wants to do, and then (maybe) they cherry-pick data that support that pre-determined decision and ignore any data that contradict it.
On the other hand, some people are stuck at home all day, no in-person interaction, management is possibly out of touch and ignoring remote people, less tasks, less achievements, less recognition...
Honestly, in-person communication is vastly overrated. If a decision is made in a meeting, you better hope someone thought to document it. If we are planning something that requires engineer feedback, hopefully you’re quick enough (and confident enough) to come up with your questions in realtime.
I’d rather move most of this stuff into slack or confluence. It’s more egalitarian, and it has the added benefit that I can search and find the past conversations to reference them later.
I think for discussion/negotiation with decisions being made, my hierarchy of preference would be (from most preferred to least):
- Message board style like Github issues
- Slack thread
- Email thread
- Video call
- In person meeting
I do really like in-person meetings for brainstorming or collaborative design type stuff. Having a real whiteboard is hard to beat, and I think the discussion can flow a little more naturally without any latency.
I have found that AI notetakers can bridge this gap fairly well—whether in a virtual meeting or in person. If the calendar event has a virtual meeting with a notetaker that joins by default, someone can join the meeting and throw a phone down on the conference table and everyone gets a full transcript, summary, and list of next steps afterwards. One of my favorite real world applications of LLMs so far.
My buddy works at Salesforce and they are started to enforce RTO for a few days a week in Seattle.
There are two kickers to this. First the employees have to hot-desk, which means they do not have an assigned desk and have to find a spot each day. Funnily enough, they all had desks before the pandemic...
Secondly, there is a second office essentially just for executives that is elsewhere and not connected to the main one. If Salesforce wants to complain about the cost of owning buildings and getting people to RTO maybe close the superfluous executive office first...
Hot-desking would drive me nuts. When I worked in an office I found it disruptive having to move or rearrange desks even once a year or less. One would think we would have learned from TBWA trying it 30 years ago https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/
It must be so that you’ll pass by other people and might have serendipitous conversations that lead to increased knowledge and synergy. /s Also among the claimed benefits of working in office.
I think you're romanticising in person meetings, so much wasted time, you don't have other information on hand. These days you have videocalls you didn't have that back then (less ubiquitous).
Yikes. I am very, very lucky to do fulfilling and meaningful work at a place that values me, with people who are a pleasure to work with. But from what I hear this is the exception and not the rule. Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.
For me the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition and the endless feature churn, corporate ladder climbing, disruptive managerial edicts to change horses midstream, ridiculous metrics to meet, and the inevitable burnout that environment seems to create. Has anyone else had similar (or contradictory) experiences?
I spent a decade in FAANG, then burned out and left. I’m at an early-stage startup now and couldn’t be happier.
The pressures are very different. My most stressful episodes at this startup have been related to technical problems, where I ultimately feel that I’m in control. My most stressful episodes in FAANG were ones in which I fundamentally had little to no control, but had “accountability” (i.e. blame) for the outcome.
For example, I vividly remember being on a flight to visit my ailing grandmother, and having chest pains from stress due to a parallel team throwing up a red flag weeks before the launch of a years-long project. They were a team of specialists whose work I could not personally do, and I had gotten their sign off on the project months prior. Team members changed, and a new person took issue with a fundamental aspect of the project.
I still believe there was nothing I could have reasonably done differently, as I didn’t have the domain knowledge to get sign-off in this area, and had done my due diligence of engaging the team and getting their sign off. Both my manager and their manager agreed, saying that there was nothing more I could have done, and even going so far as to say that I had been set up to fail.
However, this was of course treated as a significant failure on my part, and was held against me as the reason for lack of promotion. Way up my management chain, people were congratulated for the eventual launch of this project which was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
> Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.
Knowing what qualities to look for, them still existing, and being able to find them... are 3 different things. :)
I also consider myself extremely lucky in that regard.
> the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition
In my experience there are still healthy corporations out there. The signals I now look for are: profitable, privately held, not pursuing IPOs or buyers, grow headcount slowly (if at all), have never needed layoffs, promote engineers into positions of authority, and have high average employee tenure.
It's refreshing to work in an organization where people feel secure enough to make long-term investments in infrastructure, people, and projects that may not pay dividends for many years. (And to be the beneficiary of decades of prior long-term investments.)
Where do you find these places though? That's tricky. They're the real 'unicorns' from my point of view as an employee. I don't care if I earn quite as much if I enjoy my job.
Idk if it’s better. I’ve been trying to get into the university.
I taught a class recently. It’s pretty much yours to reign over. It made me never want to go back to corporate drudgery. It’s definitely not for everyone. Even into high schools teachers talk about being bullied by students. I don’t know what it’s like there, but some of it’s probably the schools not supporting the teachers with managing a classroom. Classroom management is really hard ime.
University IT, here. It doesn't pay anything close to what the private sector pays, but I've seen firsthand the good in the community and to society that my university does, and I feel like I'm actually making a difference and an impact. Feels so much less soulless than working enriching a faceless corporation.
I have the same experience working in the public sector. Doesn't mean I never get burnout, but I honestly can't imagine working in most of the IT industry these days.
The best place I ever worked was a small company, but not so tiny that there was no specialization of roles. We were making a complex hardware/software product that was selling pretty well. There were investors, but it was a long-term kind of thing and there wasn't pressure to double in size every few weeks or whatever Silicon Valley nonsense. I moved away from where the company was, unfortunately or I think I might still be there. They're still there doing what they do and building on it with a lot of the same people as when I worked there, rather than the turmoil du jour in "faster paced" environments.
Data science, specifically contextual data enhancement, small language model evaluation, and helping companies evaluate their use of LLMs. Nearly all unspecialized companies are flying blind with LLMs.
I was in ad tech, specifically media analysis and pipeline evals.
Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc.
Edit: This appears to be covered thoroughly in the thread ChrisArchitect links to.
>Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc.
Quits rate (ie. the opposite of "trapped and has nowhere to go") saw a spike in 2022-2023, but that associated with lower job satisfaction rating compared to 2020. There was also a huge dip in the quits rate after 2008, but engagement barely moved.
My mental model around these indicators: High quits rate + low engagement = workers leaving for greener pastures. Low quits rate + low engagement = no greener pastures to go to. Low quit rates + high engagement = "professional/career/work potential" sentiment high, happy workers staying put and grinding because they choose to.
(imho, n=1, scholar of the macro and the human, I am an internet rando trying to read the room and could be wrong)
It certainly doesn't help that we're being told every day that AI is coming for our jobs and, by-and-large, it appears that is true. Even if AI isn't technically capable of completely replacing us, CEOs are making it true by refusing to hire[^1] and reducing workforces as much as possible. Despite that the companies we are working for are recording record profits.
UBI is a nonstarter and the entire country is unprepared for this new future we're creating. What exactly is there to be excited about?
You don't have to look far. I am NOT saying that AI is actually 100% capable of replacing us, but I am saying that many CEOs are already treating it that way.
The companies that take such a zero-sum outlook will be devoured in the long run.
I think that companies that view AI as empowering workers to produce more, will blow past the ones dominated by bean counters and MBAs looking to optimize their quarterly earnings reports.
If you're saying that a bunch of CEOs are jumping on the newest bandwagon in an attempt to get a free lunch (revenue coming in without all those bothersome paychecks going out), then yes, I would agree. Check this space in two years though.
Is it the actual task they dislike or the fact there is no care or consideration for workers as human beings? I imagine many would enjoy their jobs a lot more if you had less focus on what is seemingly productive behaviour, aka coming into an office for no reason, working more hours than paid for, doing exactly what your boss says, not taking holiday and so on, and actually started being allowed to take care of themselves to allow themselves the opportunity to be more fulfilled across their whole life. Get rid of those staff who believe doing everything you can for the company is all that matters, and you will see more enthusiastic workers with better output.
If they're too far up to fire, maybe round up everybody who matters and explain to the shareholders that you're all going to quit and form a competing company unless they choose new leadership.
Of course, high enough up that is true, however there are always those middle management evangelists who have believed the word from the CEO and chosen that their workers should follow their lead.
Someone who won't say no and follows orders blindly is harder to work with than someone with unrealistic expectations and ideas. The latter is easier to deal with than the former in my view.
The return to office mandate at my company has definitely made most people at my company unhappy. Especially because it's obviously being done as a way to encourage people to quit. As a senior developer I've stopped caring about the company plan. If upper management doesn't care about employees, I don't care about deliverables. As the person that does most the technical interviewing anyways I know they won't be able to find any replacements in a reasonable time.
My buddy senior engineer left recently. And you know what happened? Nothing! His salary was a nice saving for a company. And his work was divided on the shoulders of those who didn’t quit. Management showed the priorities.
> Emily's thought bubble: It seems more than coincidental that workplaces became more focused on good management and culture when interest rates were very low and they could afford such luxuries as making sure employees feel valued.
Maybe it’s me who is out of touch, but how is that the author’s honest take away? That low interest rates make people better managers?
I’m not buying it. It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers. At which point, you’re probably not concerned about employee satisfaction to begin with.
With low rates, there was a lot of hiring, and the supply demand curve for SWE jobs was in favor of employees. So companies had to compete more for employees, leading to perks like remote work. In an era of hiring freezes and layoffs (including stealth layoffs via RTO), not so much.
Does that make line managers better or worse at being line managers? Probably not. But it may affect the experience of being managed if your manager is more or less stressed about fighting for headcount, figuring out who to lay off, fitting performance review ratings to a curve, etc.
Making sure employees feel valued does have a cost though. Managers spend a lot of time on this, and they have a high salary. Career growth, 1:1's, conflict resolution, comp adjustments, etc.
When managers' own heads are also on the chopping block in a tough job market, they're going to prioritize looking out for their own ass. If "leadership" is saying "boil the frogs or you're gone", they're probably going to do it. Even if they don't want to.
> It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers
But it does. Even something as simple as writing a thank you email has an opportunity cost. In that time a sales person could initiate a new call, or an engineer could write another paragraph on a design doc.
It's why engineers having free coffee, or even BYO coffee, is such a bellweather. When the free coffee goes, the good times go with it. It costs the company nothing to let engineers BYO coffee, yet my friends and I have been with many a company that eventually set up a small coffee shop or a pay-per-cup coffee machine and go around confiscating employee-brought coffee machines. Historically they cite a "fire hazard" or some similar safety issue.
> That low interest rates make people better managers?
It's not entirely wrong. Higher interest rates reduce investment frequency and amount because it increases the risk and opportunity cost. When interest rates are low it's easier to justify to investors/board members that diverting some capital to employee value and satisfaction. When interest rates are high, things like the aforementioned thank you email becomes an inefficiency, reducing your attractiveness to investors. An extra 2% on a 10MM loan is 200k, and someone's gotta provide that additional revenue. Suddenly free coffee, unsupervised/unmonitored work (like remote), and thank you letters don't provide direct increased revenue while a sales call or design doc could.
Forcing me to come into the office spending more of my energy, time, and money, not to mention socializing with people I don't want to socialize with, is miserable and unnnecessary. Not to mention I'm far less productive in such a distracting environment. So it just makes no sense why this is even happening in the first place. Most of my team is in a different city!
Meanwhile—I can't even expect regular keeping-up-with-inflation raises, let alone a reasonable promotion schedule. Fuck the current job market I'm moving to china.
Looks like the "10-year low" is vaguely in line with long term trends. The more interesting observation is that engagement spiked between 2012-2020, for seemingly no reason. What gives?
The chart in the article is essentially the inverse of the US unemployment rate chart. What gives, no doubt, is that workers are more enthused about their job when they have more leverage. Chances are you will find that people are more enthusiastic about all aspects of life when they have more leverage.
This seems to be fueling everyone's confirmation bias. The Gallup poll[1] shows a four year decline since 2020. I mean, I don't know what would have happened in 2020 to precipitate this /s. Preceding that was a decade of improvement in employee engagement.
What's a little more interesting (and not at all mentioned in the Axios article) is there is a parallel increase in /active disengagement/. There's clearly a significant minority who consistently feels disconnected from work, but this is back on the rise.
We're also reading a summary of a summary of a Gallup poll by Jim Harter, Ph.D. who posted 5 months ago [2] that "U.S. Employee Engagement Inches Up Slightly After 11-Year Low" [3], so I'm not sure what conclusions to draw.
Unrelated to the links, DOE immediately stop as soon as they realize they're reading derivative commentary and immediately search for whatever source material is being referenced? Unless you have access to the survey information[4] everyone in this thread is already at least two degrees removed from the data (Jim Harter -> Emily Peck -> HN).
It seems like covid let corporations do in 4 years what would normally take 20+. They usually have to slowly boil the frog, but with Covid they had a great excuse to take large actions without consequence. Layoffs, inflating prices, cutting perks are normally things that need to be eased into, but they all jumped on the covid/covid economy excuse to do these things overnight.
I'm extremely skeptical of surveys like this, and more skeptical about how they're reported. A person's answer can vary from one hour to the next, and an entire cohort's answer can vary based on what's in the news today.
Then, when it gets reported, the article focuses on what gets the most attention. It reports on America, even though if you look at the survey's own data you find that American workers' engagement is higher than most of the world. It reports on a 10-year low, even though the overall trend is that engagement has gotten higher over time, and the current dip isn't very pronounced.
Because if they didn't do that, there wouldn't be much to report on. The truth is that there isn't. But, Gallup is selling this survey methodology, so.
Data is all wrong. As a Millennial I've been told my entire life that my generation lazy and we don't care about our jobs. Yet somehow this article would have me believe that work enthusiasm has only gone up since we've entered the job market, or at least it did up until the pandemic exposed just how much contempt the ruling class holds for the working class.
The natural conclusion is that Boomer job enthusiasm rose during the period when the lazy millennials offered additional job entertainment, and once the pandemic came around we understand that they started retiring.
Those of us with our net worth in index funds are, on average, +50% in 2 years. That security can make the pull of early retirement or career change stronger.
Aside from AI zirp and pandemic I think gen z has also made a big difference.
Even though everyone is rolling their eyes at what they’re saying / doing it does seem to have shifted the equivalent of the Overton window. It’s made it more socially acceptable to speak up about the pointlessness of corporate life
It comes to no surprise to me when just today i had to deal with developers on reddit being surgically implanted that unions are bad, when they have an effect on wealth inequality. this was just a rant only partially related to the post
The issue should be less focused on why aren't the workers doing more, but more on who has let the few have so much power over others without being challenged. Society as a concept fails without workers.
Capital claims the rewards. Company gets twice as productive, there's no reason to pay workers more unless they organize to demand it. So the bosses keep more and more of the surplus.
It's more about unemployment & wages, but these things are connected in many ways. With more unemployment, employers have more power (since the supply of labor is higher) so employees have to grin and bear more abuse, including lower wages.
Back in March '23, Powell talked about enacting monetary policy specifically to raise unemployment. Labor was too strong, wages were too high. He felt that this was contributing to inflation. A lot of economists, like Jeremy Siegel, said there was too much low hanging fruit for the fed to be so focused on increasing unemployment, which would cause a lot of disruption to the working class for minimal gain. The fed will generally side with capital though.
More and more of the labor value is captured by fewer and fewer people. People are starting to ask why we are working so hard if all it does is enrich a handful of people. The fact that one person is worth 1% of the entire US GDP is a sign of an unhealthy society.
On HN's comment section, the sentiment seems to be "Unions benefit common workers, but I am the one uniquely well-paid hard worker that is skilled at negotiaton who would not be advantaged by a union." Everyone seems to think that they are the captain of their industry and couldn't possibly benefit from coordinating with everyone else.
Low trust society. Amazon recognized this and it’s why they push for diversity (https://www.vox.com/recode/23282640/leaked-internal-memo-rev...). Anyone telling you to hate your history or your people is grooming you and trying to take advantage of you.
Things like illegal immigration, offshoring and H1B take this a step further. With the incoming admin pushing for more H1Bs, how could we hope to organize when they’ll just import replacements?
We need to stop measuring GDP and start measuring things like the Gini coefficient as an indicator of how healthy our economy is.
This type of finger wagging is the exact type of thing that keeps workers in the US from being able to come together and unionize. Bezos however absolutely loves it.
We, here meaning the American worker, are already organized in the union known as government. But:
1. Not all workers are of the same mind. And minds haven't changed much. The decline in engagement is only few percentage points, and appears to be a return to the norm. If there was a catastrophic decline, things might be different.
2. Making waves requires work. You have to do things like talk to your representative, while most people would rather use that time to talk to their friends/family/random internet strangers instead.
When I worked in the grocery industry, it was interesting to see the difference between a non-union company and a unionized one. Part of orientation for the non-union company included a video explaining the dangers of unionizing. For the workers, the unionized company was far better but I'm not entirely sure it wasn't also better for the company. I worked in multiple stores for the non-unionized chain and employee theft was extensive, even with the managers. I never saw that at the union store. Same for caring about their work. One employee screw up can cause tens of thousands in merchandise losses. It's worth noting that the non-unionized chain grew to be one of the largest in the country but now is on the verge of being erased from existence. The unionized chain lives on as part of the Albertsons conglomerate. Also worth noting that the unionized employees generally had negative feelings about the union but most had never worked for a non-unionized grocery.
Because for most individuals, when somebody uses the word "we", they are only included in the effort and sacrifices and never included in the benefits.
Unions make sense as a response from workers who feel exploited, but it's hard to see how they'd help with the kind of vague ennui the source article is describing. Unions can sometimes clarify job expectations, I suppose, but they can't force a company to develop a sense of purpose or make your manager care about you as a person.
It is an interesting question. In many situations, the majority organising would produce significant change, however as a society we very rarely do it. Why not?
I think it's a combination of things not being bad enough to actually motivate change, and the anti-union propoganda/union-busting from the entities in power.
It is hard and time consuming work so until things become intolerably bad people would rather do something else that they find more enjoyable, like complain on the internet.
Agree, and the biggest chunk of this is housing and healthcare. Can you imagine a world where there is guaranteed basic housing and healthcare. Yet, all governments will do everything and anything but not ensure these two things. No matter how much money or taxes they are sitting on.
There are countries which can still offer this, but Americans recoil in horror when they convert the salaries back into USD. Even if they would technically be better off.
This is a shrill take in the same platitudinal vein as saying there should be world peace by now. You're regurgitating techno-optimist fantasies you've read from someone else and have come to mistake them for reality or desirability.
The median individual is not going to be working less than 40 hours a week. The system has found a balancing point and people will compete with each other for the money, resources and status as much as their sanity can endure it. There is nothing anachronistic about it, because it has been the case long before 19th century and will remain the case long after 19th century.
In a world of structural demographic compression and labor shortages popping up, I'm unsure if this assertion is accurate. As labor supply contracts while demand remains constant (or increases, due to aging non prime workers who consume without producing), labor leverage to move to a 4 day week increases.
Today, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers, for example.
You can but even today you are scarcely going to find people in the West working less than 40 hours. The competition drives people to work way more than 40 hours. Again, it all comes down to finance, status, and priorities. This mentality is also infecting the rest of the planet in an effort to just keep up.
40 hour (minimum) is currently enforced by what are otherwise busybodies who care more about looking good for their boss than they do for the benefit of the enterprise. However, they themselves work more than that and their efforts are promoted, so it's a positive feedback loop.
I personally don't know anyone who is employed full time in a "career growth" or "company growth" mode that only works 40 hours. Exec level is working around the clock. Is it sustainable? No I don't think so. But if you don't do it then your competition has an edge, and that's the root issue. You cannot enforce this restriction and remain competitive.
So again, it's not anachronistic. It's survival of the fittest. And the system balances itself accordingly.
Zirp... Never heard that before, but I can see the relation.
If you combine regulator/access control with central bank zero rate, it is a guaranteed giveaway for the rich. By definition you are giving the powerful unlimited free money.
Because of course Joe blow on the street can't get a zero or negative loan. He has to get it from the bank who gets to pocket the free money.
And a free loan can be fractionally scaled by a bank I would imagine.
What does this have to do with job engagement? ZIRP was coming to an end in the years prior to 2020, and that was associated with rising job engagement, but there was a huge interest rate spike in 2022 but that was associated with falling job engagement.
American workers are starting to develop class consciousness and realize who is doing the work (the workers) and who is getting paid (the bosses).
As bosses continue to treat workers worse and worse, the more we're starting to go, "wait a second, all this culture war bullshit it's just a distraction meant to keep us from banding together."
Sometimes people say that the fix is unionizing workers -- which, yeah, probably, eventually -- but I suspect the first step is just organizing their thoughts, so that people can get collectively outraged. It's way too easy at the moment for everyone to go along with injustices (like the CEO getting a double bonus while laying a bunch of other people off, like one of the top comments atm describes) just because it's hard to coordinate frustrations around them.
Society needs new morals for this new age. Even though capitalistically this kind of behavior is incentivized / almost required, humanistically it is not. Giving one person money for fucking over a lot of other people is actually NOT okay. But if the only metric by which it is judged is economic, then it seems fine. Organizing to fix things like this requires, basically, a collective consciousness (something like the "class consciousness" of yore, but that feels like an antiquated phrase from an antique age).
It is the same role that "freedom of the press" is supposed to fill (in a world where press is less dominated by strategic PR campaigns/subliminal advertisements like it is today). If people can't align their thoughts together, they can't rebel, or revolt, and the way things are today definitely merits a revolution -- hence the entrenched powers are very interested in suppressing the alignment of thoughts. (Certainly China's censorship is the best example of this, but it happens on Western internet too, in a more subtle way. Keeping everyone outraged over the other villainous political party is a great way to keep them from realizing that the daily apparatus of their life is designed to loot them.)
The other way people align their thoughts is finding a leader willing to voice them. That is, basically, what Trump has been doing, for a class of folks who are pissed about some other stuff (some of it real, but much of it deeply contorted by tricks of propaganda). Well, there are a lot of other folks without those kinds of leaders right now. Most of the people on here for instance. If anyone reading is thinking about dropping the follow-the-rules mentality and becoming an outspoken revolutionary, please do, but be sure you're attacking the real problem, not just the least-likable people who it's easiest to bandwagon against.
This is really it. It gets so frustrating reading HN sometimes because such a huge swath of commenters just seem ok with this stuff. You have companies doing evil shit and the sentiment is basically if it's not illegal, then it's fine.
There seems to be a large subset of people in this world that are still on the Medieval moral framework of "Might makes Right." With the modern definition of "Might" being money. And unfortunately, those are the people that seem to make it into power.
> You have companies doing evil shit and the sentiment is basically if it's not illegal, then it's fine.
Stands to reason, assuming a democratic nation. The law is to the will of the people so when something is deemed not fine, they do make it illegal. There will always be outliers who hold different views, but when randomly meeting other people the chances are you will most likely meet those who fit within the majority.
There’s a plethora of temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who lack the imagination to see how to build real solutions to real problems without being slightly evil.
This is not surprising. We’ve devalued character development in the west for quite some time.
Not sure if serious or not but this impulse is very dangerous collectively. One person cannot get us out of this. Putting that on a hero absolves us from having to actually do the hard work of deciding what would be better and implementing it.
But that's not where stasis is. We're not even trying to get together and do the hard work because we're not convinced that we're a "we". The hero need not do anything besides be the referent of "I'm with that person," as uttered by many different kinds of people.
Hashing out the consequences of "so transitively, I suppose I'm aligned with you now"... that's where the hard work is (solidarity, etc) but most of us aren't even considering that stage yet. We're still a bunch of smaller us's squabbling amongst ourselves--just how the powerful like it.
I know what is expected from me at work: anything and everything. This is especially true shortly after our seemingly annual round of layoffs (right before the holiday season!). This increase in responsibilities has not come along with an increase pay, but our CEO got to double his total compensation package compared last year.
I'd look for something else, but seeing this report, talking to friends and reading some comments in various threads on HN, it's clear the grass isn't greener anywhere else.
As a staff engineer at my company, my stupid manager expects me to do his work all the time. I'm hardly building things but just managing jira, talking to other teams, managing shit, writing docs, dealing with politics etc. I never signed up for this crap. But sadly this is where many companies are going
“Staff engineer” varies by employer but this is generally exactly what I expect it to be.
There are times I do technical work and times my entire job is putting out fires and making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.
Any developer can write code. This stuff requires a different set of executive functions, and engineers that can do both are generally promoted.
> making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations
What you're describing is a manager, not an engineer. Do you have any managers in your company? What is their job?
No, what he is describing is a well-rounded staff level engineer. As you get more senior and take on more responsibilities, you start having to think about everyone's work and how it all fits together, you think about how the project fits into a product that meets the customer's need (unless you have a dedicated PM, which is becoming rare), you have to think about deadlines and how the project is tracking towards it, you have to think about other teams and how their work intersects and how their dependencies are timed to ship in time for yours, you need to communicate up the totem pole to actual managers. And, yes, you have to hold your nose and open up Jira.
I don't know where these "pure" perfectly spherical software engineers work who are super-senior staff level, but still do nothing but type in code. I've never seen them. As soon as you advance beyond the entry-level, you need to broaden your scope and be more of an actual engineer rather than just someone who writes code.
The manager's job is (among others) to make sure the team is working well together, solve any inter-personnel issues, work with each of their directs on career development, sometimes provide direction of what to work on, sometimes actually assign individual tasks, pass down announcements and direction from the higher-ups, help to manage the team members' performance, and work with HR when needed. They're not there to do all the stinky non-code-typing things in your project.
No, Staffs are suppose to be focused on the technical implementation of the product, not on the minute of everyone’s work. Most of what you describe are EMs. Staff/Sr Staff/Principals should be steering the high level architecture, tech debt refactoring, migration strategy, etc and still get in the weeds to implement said architectures. They have the technical experience to do it, trying to extinguish that experience by pushing them into administrative roles is a complete waste of their talent and experience.
They’re being pushed until these administrative roles because Directors have no idea how to leverage their talent and default to putting them into EM-like roles because that’s what they do but again, it’s a waste of talent and experience.
I've been working in the industry for huge, medium and small companies for 25+ years and have never seen a purely technical role above "Senior" level. Open to the idea that they may exist, but I think you're describing some kind of theoretical ideal that is rare in reality.
I’ve worked at multiple orgs where this is actually the case. Not sure what to say other than they exist and I hope you can work at a place like that one day, it’s awesome.
I used to work at a place where I could do things of value, but my role has changed to putting out fires that are (to my eye) manufactured by our acquiring company and silly admin things that I have now responsibility of, but no agency in. Ex: they need me to do a performance review of my reports, but don’t let me give them the rating or raise I think they deserve despite the decision makers never having a single conversation with my reports.
Nobody knows our codebase as well as me because I built it. My output of customer value has dropped to 10% of what it used to be and I don’t think it would be possible today to build the things we built pre-acquisition that made us valuable in the first place.
Thankfully we were able to hire another engineer who is very good and has been able to keep up with internal and external requests. I am thankful he’s been able to get up to speed so I don’t leave my coworkers high and dry.
At 35 years old, I’m cooked, Chat. Thriving at a megacorp with these management styles is orthogonal to delivering value to customers.
It seems managers are simultaneously worthless pointy-haired bosses and yet needed to keep self-described elite devs from doing work that's beneath them.
Schroedinger's manager.
> Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.
What is the team's manager doing if not coordination, allocation, and tracking?
Have yet to be convinced that staff eng is worth it. Seems like it is [project] management by another name and placed at the top of the IC ladder so as to suggest that maybe, just maybe, you'll get time to actually write code.
IMO Staff Eng and line managers are both jobs where you may not write a lot of code, but the ability to write code is nevertheless a critical skill for the job.
I’m not sure the C Suite realizes that their efficiency drives — getting rid of managers — often means their engineers now aren’t as free to focus on engineering things.
They don't care, their goal is to hit the numbers for their bonuses. Once dev collapses, they've moved on to make another company "efficient."
My manager mostly just asks everyone if "it'll be done today" and tries to constantly subdivide tasks as infinitum (never read the mythical man month)
The reality is (and not in defence id managers) managers are getting just as effed by "leadership" (ever notice how managers are framed as scumbags but leaders are saviors?) and sadly managers cannot tell employees - "hey mate we are all in the same boat getting effed so let us game it/survive it together" for fear of being outed as non company players. You are always supposed to sell the company as your own line! So they are squeezed from the top and the bottom. I keep switching between management and IC so I have a bit of empathy here.
Oh I totally see through that, true. It's obviously from the very top. I'm looking to switch to management for the first time for the empathy bit, myself.
> the grass isn't greener anywhere else
That may be true, but even the act of looking can provide some measure of hope, which can make everything more bearable.
I've been having to do stuff "as soon as possible" for over a year now. I'm at a mid sized company and in many ways the nagging to deliver ASAP is beyond even when I founded my own company.
And if something is gonna take a few days or a week, all the managers do is ask me five times if I can instead divide the work and farm it out to other engineers. If it isn't taking on the order of hours, they want to throw people at it to go faster. Parallelism is clearly a manager KPI.
The added bonus of replacing laid off tech staff with overseas contractors is another morale booster.
The ball is squarely in the employer's court and they are maximizing their position accordingly.
> The added bonus of replacing laid off tech staff with overseas contractors is another morale booster.
Woah, woah, they're not overseas, they're "Virtual Employees" now. You're not supposed to look behind the curtain.
Grass! You have grass on your side?
Lucky you. :P
Damn that sucks. Wanna seize the means of production?
The thing is: you've already got the means of production. You have a computer, your brain (the real core of software production), and the whole universe of open source / Free software out there.
What people actually want is VC money salaries without having to pay the VC piper's price, which is more of a problem.
(AI has changed this somewhat, because it's so energy-intensive that it's become a capital asset. And of course we have to consider the monopolistic nature of software markets.)
Most people don’t have this, but engineers do and we should be the last people complaining. We get paid well enough to save up and start a small company and take on the risk.
The Borg can buy you out, but don’t give them your soul. The world is a better place with more entrepreneurs and new businesses. That part is on us.
I assume you're joking, but I do think wealth inequality is a major driver of this.
Reminds me of an oldie but a goodie- The Onion Weather Report - Revolt Forecasted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJwHZVl5Buk
I remember my sophomore year of college.
[dead]
A refrain I’ve heard from real life friends and people on the internet alike is that employees are being asked to come back to the office where they wind up just sitting on video calls much of the day. This seems like an absolute worst case for job satisfaction to me.
I’m lucky enough to work wherever I want and accept Zoom meetings as a prerequisite to that, but find them tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation. If I were asked to come to an office every day and deal with the commute and the stupidity of most modern office designs and still had the majority of meetings happen over video, I’d be pretty dissatisfied with my job.
> but find them [zoom] tiring and a poor simulacrum of real in-person conversation
After working remotely for 8 years, I find video conferencing to be preferable.
* I am more physically comfortable. I can control the thermostat, the humidity, the lighting level. My preference on these three things are very different than standard office. In addition I have better control over items such as the food I am digesting, the office chair I am sitting in, the smells in the room, etc. One concrete example, I am often cold in offices. If I am cold my muscles tend to be tense, and my mind reads that signal and makes me more anxious/alert. I can concentrate better and think more clearly if my body/mind is relaxed.
* Reduction of information to only the most relevant. Do you know how much data you receive when sitting next to another human. Significantly more than the 1000mb/s my home internet connection provides. During a critical negotiation or an intimate moment you might want that extra volume. During engineering it's a distraction. I don't want to smell my co-workers lunch while paired programming. All of the conversations are more focused.
* Consent. I choose to connect. I can choose to disconnect at anytime. I'm never stuck in a conversation while waiting in line for coffee, and if someone virtually decides to drop by my desk, I have more flexibility in dealing with the urgent need.
I think those are all fair and reasonable—ultimately I've chosen not to work in an office since late 2019, so I'm not exactly an in-person absolutist.
Personally, though, I do think that the higher-bandwidth effect is valuable to me. I think part of what makes me feel like video calls are tiring is that my brain is working overtime trying to extract some of that extra signal from the participants, while in-person I'm able to better gauge others' reactions intuitively and adjust my tone or approach without much conscious effort. People have told me for years that I have a "calming presence" in the workplace/meetings, which is not a way I'd describe myself unprompted, so I think I've silently benefited from nonverbal cues in that way.
Being in a comfortable environment is a huge one though for sure. So many modern offices are comically badly arranged, with people trying to do thinking work space shared with people having meetings who are overflowing from the insufficient number of conference rooms. It's kind of a joke.
My current coworker is a complete cunt through slack, but if I get my ass to their desk, all discussions last 5 minutes max and are very productive
In the last few decades workers got the impression that there is some sort of a utilitarian reason or rationale behind the workplace practices or management approaches. After all there is research! Business schools!
This facade has started to crack in many places, and RTO is just a very obvious example, it's almost absurd how the companies prizing themselves for being "data-driven" descended into "we're doing this because bossman says so". But it follows the spirit of times anyway, people will quickly adjust.
We're learning that our companies are not data-driven, they're data-chauffeured: Bossman decides what he wants to do, and then (maybe) they cherry-pick data that support that pre-determined decision and ignore any data that contradict it.
Plus there is often no good room to take Zoom meetings so people do so at their desks in an open office plan.
On the other hand, some people are stuck at home all day, no in-person interaction, management is possibly out of touch and ignoring remote people, less tasks, less achievements, less recognition...
I'm looking for a new job, and one of the pre-requisites is that it is fully remote.
When parts are remote (or if teams are split in 2 locations) you run the risk of excluding people who are remote.
In fully remote situations even water-cooler chats are deliberate.
Honestly, in-person communication is vastly overrated. If a decision is made in a meeting, you better hope someone thought to document it. If we are planning something that requires engineer feedback, hopefully you’re quick enough (and confident enough) to come up with your questions in realtime.
I’d rather move most of this stuff into slack or confluence. It’s more egalitarian, and it has the added benefit that I can search and find the past conversations to reference them later.
I think for discussion/negotiation with decisions being made, my hierarchy of preference would be (from most preferred to least):
- Message board style like Github issues - Slack thread - Email thread - Video call - In person meeting
I do really like in-person meetings for brainstorming or collaborative design type stuff. Having a real whiteboard is hard to beat, and I think the discussion can flow a little more naturally without any latency.
I have found that AI notetakers can bridge this gap fairly well—whether in a virtual meeting or in person. If the calendar event has a virtual meeting with a notetaker that joins by default, someone can join the meeting and throw a phone down on the conference table and everyone gets a full transcript, summary, and list of next steps afterwards. One of my favorite real world applications of LLMs so far.
My buddy works at Salesforce and they are started to enforce RTO for a few days a week in Seattle.
There are two kickers to this. First the employees have to hot-desk, which means they do not have an assigned desk and have to find a spot each day. Funnily enough, they all had desks before the pandemic...
Secondly, there is a second office essentially just for executives that is elsewhere and not connected to the main one. If Salesforce wants to complain about the cost of owning buildings and getting people to RTO maybe close the superfluous executive office first...
Hot-desking would drive me nuts. When I worked in an office I found it disruptive having to move or rearrange desks even once a year or less. One would think we would have learned from TBWA trying it 30 years ago https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/
Hot-desking also makes it hard to find someone in person, which is one of the claimed benefits of working in office.
It must be so that you’ll pass by other people and might have serendipitous conversations that lead to increased knowledge and synergy. /s Also among the claimed benefits of working in office.
I think you're romanticising in person meetings, so much wasted time, you don't have other information on hand. These days you have videocalls you didn't have that back then (less ubiquitous).
Yikes. I am very, very lucky to do fulfilling and meaningful work at a place that values me, with people who are a pleasure to work with. But from what I hear this is the exception and not the rule. Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.
For me the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition and the endless feature churn, corporate ladder climbing, disruptive managerial edicts to change horses midstream, ridiculous metrics to meet, and the inevitable burnout that environment seems to create. Has anyone else had similar (or contradictory) experiences?
Very much agreed.
I spent a decade in FAANG, then burned out and left. I’m at an early-stage startup now and couldn’t be happier.
The pressures are very different. My most stressful episodes at this startup have been related to technical problems, where I ultimately feel that I’m in control. My most stressful episodes in FAANG were ones in which I fundamentally had little to no control, but had “accountability” (i.e. blame) for the outcome.
For example, I vividly remember being on a flight to visit my ailing grandmother, and having chest pains from stress due to a parallel team throwing up a red flag weeks before the launch of a years-long project. They were a team of specialists whose work I could not personally do, and I had gotten their sign off on the project months prior. Team members changed, and a new person took issue with a fundamental aspect of the project.
I still believe there was nothing I could have reasonably done differently, as I didn’t have the domain knowledge to get sign-off in this area, and had done my due diligence of engaging the team and getting their sign off. Both my manager and their manager agreed, saying that there was nothing more I could have done, and even going so far as to say that I had been set up to fail.
However, this was of course treated as a significant failure on my part, and was held against me as the reason for lack of promotion. Way up my management chain, people were congratulated for the eventual launch of this project which was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
That’s about the time I left.
> Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.
Knowing what qualities to look for, them still existing, and being able to find them... are 3 different things. :)
I also consider myself extremely lucky in that regard.
> the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition
In my experience there are still healthy corporations out there. The signals I now look for are: profitable, privately held, not pursuing IPOs or buyers, grow headcount slowly (if at all), have never needed layoffs, promote engineers into positions of authority, and have high average employee tenure.
It's refreshing to work in an organization where people feel secure enough to make long-term investments in infrastructure, people, and projects that may not pay dividends for many years. (And to be the beneficiary of decades of prior long-term investments.)
Where do you find these places though? That's tricky. They're the real 'unicorns' from my point of view as an employee. I don't care if I earn quite as much if I enjoy my job.
well established companies in an industry where there is not much competition or incentives to make drastic changes fit the bill
Idk if it’s better. I’ve been trying to get into the university.
I taught a class recently. It’s pretty much yours to reign over. It made me never want to go back to corporate drudgery. It’s definitely not for everyone. Even into high schools teachers talk about being bullied by students. I don’t know what it’s like there, but some of it’s probably the schools not supporting the teachers with managing a classroom. Classroom management is really hard ime.
University IT, here. It doesn't pay anything close to what the private sector pays, but I've seen firsthand the good in the community and to society that my university does, and I feel like I'm actually making a difference and an impact. Feels so much less soulless than working enriching a faceless corporation.
Benefits are nice too.
I have the same experience working in the public sector. Doesn't mean I never get burnout, but I honestly can't imagine working in most of the IT industry these days.
The best place I ever worked was a small company, but not so tiny that there was no specialization of roles. We were making a complex hardware/software product that was selling pretty well. There were investors, but it was a long-term kind of thing and there wasn't pressure to double in size every few weeks or whatever Silicon Valley nonsense. I moved away from where the company was, unfortunately or I think I might still be there. They're still there doing what they do and building on it with a lot of the same people as when I worked there, rather than the turmoil du jour in "faster paced" environments.
Yep, after layoffs, took a severance break and started a small company with friends. TC is less of course, but your sanity is part of your TC :D.
Checking back in with my friends who I left behind I made the right decision.
That's pretty cool - what do you do, if I may ask?
Data science, specifically contextual data enhancement, small language model evaluation, and helping companies evaluate their use of LLMs. Nearly all unspecialized companies are flying blind with LLMs.
I was in ad tech, specifically media analysis and pipeline evals.
Out of curiosity: what do you do?
Yeah, thats the dream hut hard to find it seems like.
Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc.
Edit: This appears to be covered thoroughly in the thread ChrisArchitect links to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697779
>Everyone is trapped and has nowhere to go. Without hope, this is what you would expect. Engagement is sentiment of hope of future development, comp, responsibility, etc.
Quits rate (ie. the opposite of "trapped and has nowhere to go") saw a spike in 2022-2023, but that associated with lower job satisfaction rating compared to 2020. There was also a huge dip in the quits rate after 2008, but engagement barely moved.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR
My mental model around these indicators: High quits rate + low engagement = workers leaving for greener pastures. Low quits rate + low engagement = no greener pastures to go to. Low quit rates + high engagement = "professional/career/work potential" sentiment high, happy workers staying put and grinding because they choose to.
(imho, n=1, scholar of the macro and the human, I am an internet rando trying to read the room and could be wrong)
It certainly doesn't help that we're being told every day that AI is coming for our jobs and, by-and-large, it appears that is true. Even if AI isn't technically capable of completely replacing us, CEOs are making it true by refusing to hire[^1] and reducing workforces as much as possible. Despite that the companies we are working for are recording record profits.
UBI is a nonstarter and the entire country is unprepared for this new future we're creating. What exactly is there to be excited about?
[^1]: https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
> by-and-large, it appears that is true
[citation needed] and not from an AI company's marketing materials.
You don't have to look far. I am NOT saying that AI is actually 100% capable of replacing us, but I am saying that many CEOs are already treating it that way.
- https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/ai-job-losses-by-203...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/klarna-st...
- https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-...
In the age of AI, no human job is a profit center any more. EVERY job is a cost center and it's the duty of CEOs to reduce those expenses.
That is more of a confirmation of what everyone knows, many CEOs have no clue what SWE is.
It will take some time but it will die, just as visual programming, total quality management etc...
Anyone who thinks that code generation is the primary issue has no real understanding of the core problems.
The companies that take such a zero-sum outlook will be devoured in the long run.
I think that companies that view AI as empowering workers to produce more, will blow past the ones dominated by bean counters and MBAs looking to optimize their quarterly earnings reports.
If you're saying that a bunch of CEOs are jumping on the newest bandwagon in an attempt to get a free lunch (revenue coming in without all those bothersome paychecks going out), then yes, I would agree. Check this space in two years though.
Is it the actual task they dislike or the fact there is no care or consideration for workers as human beings? I imagine many would enjoy their jobs a lot more if you had less focus on what is seemingly productive behaviour, aka coming into an office for no reason, working more hours than paid for, doing exactly what your boss says, not taking holiday and so on, and actually started being allowed to take care of themselves to allow themselves the opportunity to be more fulfilled across their whole life. Get rid of those staff who believe doing everything you can for the company is all that matters, and you will see more enthusiastic workers with better output.
> Get rid of those staff who believe doing everything you can for the company is all that matters
Typically this is impossible, because those staff are the top management. (I'd say "leadership" if they were actually that.)
If they're too far up to fire, maybe round up everybody who matters and explain to the shareholders that you're all going to quit and form a competing company unless they choose new leadership.
If they don't comply, make good on your threat.
Of course, high enough up that is true, however there are always those middle management evangelists who have believed the word from the CEO and chosen that their workers should follow their lead.
Sure, and if the top management changed their approach, so would this middle layer. A fish rots from the head down.
Someone who won't say no and follows orders blindly is harder to work with than someone with unrealistic expectations and ideas. The latter is easier to deal with than the former in my view.
The return to office mandate at my company has definitely made most people at my company unhappy. Especially because it's obviously being done as a way to encourage people to quit. As a senior developer I've stopped caring about the company plan. If upper management doesn't care about employees, I don't care about deliverables. As the person that does most the technical interviewing anyways I know they won't be able to find any replacements in a reasonable time.
My buddy senior engineer left recently. And you know what happened? Nothing! His salary was a nice saving for a company. And his work was divided on the shoulders of those who didn’t quit. Management showed the priorities.
> Emily's thought bubble: It seems more than coincidental that workplaces became more focused on good management and culture when interest rates were very low and they could afford such luxuries as making sure employees feel valued.
Maybe it’s me who is out of touch, but how is that the author’s honest take away? That low interest rates make people better managers?
I’m not buying it. It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers. At which point, you’re probably not concerned about employee satisfaction to begin with.
With low rates, there was a lot of hiring, and the supply demand curve for SWE jobs was in favor of employees. So companies had to compete more for employees, leading to perks like remote work. In an era of hiring freezes and layoffs (including stealth layoffs via RTO), not so much.
Does that make line managers better or worse at being line managers? Probably not. But it may affect the experience of being managed if your manager is more or less stressed about fighting for headcount, figuring out who to lay off, fitting performance review ratings to a curve, etc.
Making sure employees feel valued does have a cost though. Managers spend a lot of time on this, and they have a high salary. Career growth, 1:1's, conflict resolution, comp adjustments, etc.
When managers' own heads are also on the chopping block in a tough job market, they're going to prioritize looking out for their own ass. If "leadership" is saying "boil the frogs or you're gone", they're probably going to do it. Even if they don't want to.
> It doesn’t cost anything to make sure employees feel valued, unless you’re doing things to hold back their careers
But it does. Even something as simple as writing a thank you email has an opportunity cost. In that time a sales person could initiate a new call, or an engineer could write another paragraph on a design doc.
It's why engineers having free coffee, or even BYO coffee, is such a bellweather. When the free coffee goes, the good times go with it. It costs the company nothing to let engineers BYO coffee, yet my friends and I have been with many a company that eventually set up a small coffee shop or a pay-per-cup coffee machine and go around confiscating employee-brought coffee machines. Historically they cite a "fire hazard" or some similar safety issue.
> That low interest rates make people better managers?
It's not entirely wrong. Higher interest rates reduce investment frequency and amount because it increases the risk and opportunity cost. When interest rates are low it's easier to justify to investors/board members that diverting some capital to employee value and satisfaction. When interest rates are high, things like the aforementioned thank you email becomes an inefficiency, reducing your attractiveness to investors. An extra 2% on a 10MM loan is 200k, and someone's gotta provide that additional revenue. Suddenly free coffee, unsupervised/unmonitored work (like remote), and thank you letters don't provide direct increased revenue while a sales call or design doc could.
Forcing me to come into the office spending more of my energy, time, and money, not to mention socializing with people I don't want to socialize with, is miserable and unnnecessary. Not to mention I'm far less productive in such a distracting environment. So it just makes no sense why this is even happening in the first place. Most of my team is in a different city!
Meanwhile—I can't even expect regular keeping-up-with-inflation raises, let alone a reasonable promotion schedule. Fuck the current job market I'm moving to china.
>Fuck the current job market I'm moving to china.
I hope you enjoy a 6 day work week.
It would not be my first time! Worst three months of my life.
Regardless, my friends in china seem to work hours that roughly align with 40-50 hours a week, similar to you'd see here.
When you look for work for months and have no choice but to accept the first offer you get, it tends not to be your dream job.
Looks like the "10-year low" is vaguely in line with long term trends. The more interesting observation is that engagement spiked between 2012-2020, for seemingly no reason. What gives?
The chart in the article is essentially the inverse of the US unemployment rate chart. What gives, no doubt, is that workers are more enthused about their job when they have more leverage. Chances are you will find that people are more enthusiastic about all aspects of life when they have more leverage.
According to TFA: corporate management improved and leaders realized the importance of culture
Based on their actions since, this does not seem to be true.
This seems to be fueling everyone's confirmation bias. The Gallup poll[1] shows a four year decline since 2020. I mean, I don't know what would have happened in 2020 to precipitate this /s. Preceding that was a decade of improvement in employee engagement.
What's a little more interesting (and not at all mentioned in the Axios article) is there is a parallel increase in /active disengagement/. There's clearly a significant minority who consistently feels disconnected from work, but this is back on the rise.
We're also reading a summary of a summary of a Gallup poll by Jim Harter, Ph.D. who posted 5 months ago [2] that "U.S. Employee Engagement Inches Up Slightly After 11-Year Low" [3], so I'm not sure what conclusions to draw.
Unrelated to the links, DOE immediately stop as soon as they realize they're reading derivative commentary and immediately search for whatever source material is being referenced? Unless you have access to the survey information[4] everyone in this thread is already at least two degrees removed from the data (Jim Harter -> Emily Peck -> HN).
[1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jkharter_after-us-employee-en...
[3] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/647564/employee-engagement-...
[4] https://www.gallup.com/q12/
It seems like covid let corporations do in 4 years what would normally take 20+. They usually have to slowly boil the frog, but with Covid they had a great excuse to take large actions without consequence. Layoffs, inflating prices, cutting perks are normally things that need to be eased into, but they all jumped on the covid/covid economy excuse to do these things overnight.
Plot twist: The real 'Great Resignation' was top managers resigning from their responsibility to build good workplace culture.
I'm extremely skeptical of surveys like this, and more skeptical about how they're reported. A person's answer can vary from one hour to the next, and an entire cohort's answer can vary based on what's in the news today.
Then, when it gets reported, the article focuses on what gets the most attention. It reports on America, even though if you look at the survey's own data you find that American workers' engagement is higher than most of the world. It reports on a 10-year low, even though the overall trend is that engagement has gotten higher over time, and the current dip isn't very pronounced.
Because if they didn't do that, there wouldn't be much to report on. The truth is that there isn't. But, Gallup is selling this survey methodology, so.
Data is all wrong. As a Millennial I've been told my entire life that my generation lazy and we don't care about our jobs. Yet somehow this article would have me believe that work enthusiasm has only gone up since we've entered the job market, or at least it did up until the pandemic exposed just how much contempt the ruling class holds for the working class.
The natural conclusion is that Boomer job enthusiasm rose during the period when the lazy millennials offered additional job entertainment, and once the pandemic came around we understand that they started retiring.
Those of us with our net worth in index funds are, on average, +50% in 2 years. That security can make the pull of early retirement or career change stronger.
> Only 39% of workers feel strongly that someone cares about them as a person at work,
That's not as bad a self-reported perception as I would've guessed.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42694932
Aside from AI zirp and pandemic I think gen z has also made a big difference.
Even though everyone is rolling their eyes at what they’re saying / doing it does seem to have shifted the equivalent of the Overton window. It’s made it more socially acceptable to speak up about the pointlessness of corporate life
It comes to no surprise to me when just today i had to deal with developers on reddit being surgically implanted that unions are bad, when they have an effect on wealth inequality. this was just a rant only partially related to the post
I got sent back to the office where I work in an open floor plan cramped next to people and were all on our own video meetings. Its awful.
A saying explains this as it's because the market keeps surging, is it true?
More money being made but the workers not seeing the benefits of that is of course going to lead to low morale.
What's keeping the workers out of the market?
The issue should be less focused on why aren't the workers doing more, but more on who has let the few have so much power over others without being challenged. Society as a concept fails without workers.
The products generating revenue just don’t need many workers to keep going.
Capital claims the rewards. Company gets twice as productive, there's no reason to pay workers more unless they organize to demand it. So the bosses keep more and more of the surplus.
It's more about unemployment & wages, but these things are connected in many ways. With more unemployment, employers have more power (since the supply of labor is higher) so employees have to grin and bear more abuse, including lower wages.
Back in March '23, Powell talked about enacting monetary policy specifically to raise unemployment. Labor was too strong, wages were too high. He felt that this was contributing to inflation. A lot of economists, like Jeremy Siegel, said there was too much low hanging fruit for the fed to be so focused on increasing unemployment, which would cause a lot of disruption to the working class for minimal gain. The fed will generally side with capital though.
More and more of the labor value is captured by fewer and fewer people. People are starting to ask why we are working so hard if all it does is enrich a handful of people. The fact that one person is worth 1% of the entire US GDP is a sign of an unhealthy society.
Why don't we all organize then?
On HN's comment section, the sentiment seems to be "Unions benefit common workers, but I am the one uniquely well-paid hard worker that is skilled at negotiaton who would not be advantaged by a union." Everyone seems to think that they are the captain of their industry and couldn't possibly benefit from coordinating with everyone else.
Someone posted a great answer to this on Reddit today: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1i10xjh/...
(summary: "we" don't tend to think like a "we")
https://web.archive.org/web/20250114151644/https://old.reddi...
Low trust society. Amazon recognized this and it’s why they push for diversity (https://www.vox.com/recode/23282640/leaked-internal-memo-rev...). Anyone telling you to hate your history or your people is grooming you and trying to take advantage of you.
Things like illegal immigration, offshoring and H1B take this a step further. With the incoming admin pushing for more H1Bs, how could we hope to organize when they’ll just import replacements?
We need to stop measuring GDP and start measuring things like the Gini coefficient as an indicator of how healthy our economy is.
> Anyone telling you to hate your history or your people is grooming you and trying to take advantage of you.
I'm with the rest of your points here but this point seems like an irrelevant, unsubstantiated musing to push an agenda.
Nobody is thinking "wow, a sociologist's opinion about labor in the 1700s makes me hate the thought of unionizing in God's-given-year-of 2025"
This type of finger wagging is the exact type of thing that keeps workers in the US from being able to come together and unionize. Bezos however absolutely loves it.
Bringing up unrelated grievances is a great way to divide a group.
If you’re annoyed with “woke”, form a group to protest that.
We, here meaning the American worker, are already organized in the union known as government. But:
1. Not all workers are of the same mind. And minds haven't changed much. The decline in engagement is only few percentage points, and appears to be a return to the norm. If there was a catastrophic decline, things might be different.
2. Making waves requires work. You have to do things like talk to your representative, while most people would rather use that time to talk to their friends/family/random internet strangers instead.
Decades of anti-union propaganda, combined with the fecklessness and corruption of existing large labor unions.
When I worked in the grocery industry, it was interesting to see the difference between a non-union company and a unionized one. Part of orientation for the non-union company included a video explaining the dangers of unionizing. For the workers, the unionized company was far better but I'm not entirely sure it wasn't also better for the company. I worked in multiple stores for the non-unionized chain and employee theft was extensive, even with the managers. I never saw that at the union store. Same for caring about their work. One employee screw up can cause tens of thousands in merchandise losses. It's worth noting that the non-unionized chain grew to be one of the largest in the country but now is on the verge of being erased from existence. The unionized chain lives on as part of the Albertsons conglomerate. Also worth noting that the unionized employees generally had negative feelings about the union but most had never worked for a non-unionized grocery.
We do in Europe, for example in Germany, https://www.igmetall.de
Because for most individuals, when somebody uses the word "we", they are only included in the effort and sacrifices and never included in the benefits.
Nobody falls for the "we" scam anymore.
Unions make sense as a response from workers who feel exploited, but it's hard to see how they'd help with the kind of vague ennui the source article is describing. Unions can sometimes clarify job expectations, I suppose, but they can't force a company to develop a sense of purpose or make your manager care about you as a person.
It is an interesting question. In many situations, the majority organising would produce significant change, however as a society we very rarely do it. Why not?
I think it's a combination of things not being bad enough to actually motivate change, and the anti-union propoganda/union-busting from the entities in power.
It is hard and time consuming work so until things become intolerably bad people would rather do something else that they find more enjoyable, like complain on the internet.
The answer is cost of living, make it cheaper to live and you solve almost everything.
Agree, and the biggest chunk of this is housing and healthcare. Can you imagine a world where there is guaranteed basic housing and healthcare. Yet, all governments will do everything and anything but not ensure these two things. No matter how much money or taxes they are sitting on.
Housing is something you can do something about at a local level: https://yimbyaction.org/ or https://welcomingneighbors.us/
It's fulfilling to see stuff built that you advocated for! Or policies enacted that get more housing built.
There are countries which can still offer this, but Americans recoil in horror when they convert the salaries back into USD. Even if they would technically be better off.
40 working hours per week it's an anachronism. We should have been doing far less hours.
We are in the computing era (plus robotics), not in the 19th century.
This is a shrill take in the same platitudinal vein as saying there should be world peace by now. You're regurgitating techno-optimist fantasies you've read from someone else and have come to mistake them for reality or desirability.
The median individual is not going to be working less than 40 hours a week. The system has found a balancing point and people will compete with each other for the money, resources and status as much as their sanity can endure it. There is nothing anachronistic about it, because it has been the case long before 19th century and will remain the case long after 19th century.
In a world of structural demographic compression and labor shortages popping up, I'm unsure if this assertion is accurate. As labor supply contracts while demand remains constant (or increases, due to aging non prime workers who consume without producing), labor leverage to move to a 4 day week increases.
Today, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers, for example.
https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/world-de...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/us-faces-... | https://archive.today/Lyr5t
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/08/us-labor-shortage-older-wor...
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26633/w266...
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/01/rise-of-4-day-workweek
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> This is a shrill take in the same platitudinal vein as saying there should be world peace by now.
But there is. We literally live in the most era time in the entirety of human history.
Solid moniker.
40 hour working week was something that organised labor fought for and won during the latter of the 19th and first half of the 20th century.
We can do the same for 30 hour working weeks in this century.
You can but even today you are scarcely going to find people in the West working less than 40 hours. The competition drives people to work way more than 40 hours. Again, it all comes down to finance, status, and priorities. This mentality is also infecting the rest of the planet in an effort to just keep up.
40 hour (minimum) is currently enforced by what are otherwise busybodies who care more about looking good for their boss than they do for the benefit of the enterprise. However, they themselves work more than that and their efforts are promoted, so it's a positive feedback loop.
I personally don't know anyone who is employed full time in a "career growth" or "company growth" mode that only works 40 hours. Exec level is working around the clock. Is it sustainable? No I don't think so. But if you don't do it then your competition has an edge, and that's the root issue. You cannot enforce this restriction and remain competitive.
So again, it's not anachronistic. It's survival of the fittest. And the system balances itself accordingly.
Zirp... Never heard that before, but I can see the relation.
If you combine regulator/access control with central bank zero rate, it is a guaranteed giveaway for the rich. By definition you are giving the powerful unlimited free money.
Because of course Joe blow on the street can't get a zero or negative loan. He has to get it from the bank who gets to pocket the free money.
And a free loan can be fractionally scaled by a bank I would imagine.
What does this have to do with job engagement? ZIRP was coming to an end in the years prior to 2020, and that was associated with rising job engagement, but there was a huge interest rate spike in 2022 but that was associated with falling job engagement.
American workers are starting to develop class consciousness and realize who is doing the work (the workers) and who is getting paid (the bosses).
As bosses continue to treat workers worse and worse, the more we're starting to go, "wait a second, all this culture war bullshit it's just a distraction meant to keep us from banding together."
I suspect things are going to get worse before they get better as the oligarchs really start to ramp up their policies.
Sometimes people say that the fix is unionizing workers -- which, yeah, probably, eventually -- but I suspect the first step is just organizing their thoughts, so that people can get collectively outraged. It's way too easy at the moment for everyone to go along with injustices (like the CEO getting a double bonus while laying a bunch of other people off, like one of the top comments atm describes) just because it's hard to coordinate frustrations around them.
Society needs new morals for this new age. Even though capitalistically this kind of behavior is incentivized / almost required, humanistically it is not. Giving one person money for fucking over a lot of other people is actually NOT okay. But if the only metric by which it is judged is economic, then it seems fine. Organizing to fix things like this requires, basically, a collective consciousness (something like the "class consciousness" of yore, but that feels like an antiquated phrase from an antique age).
It is the same role that "freedom of the press" is supposed to fill (in a world where press is less dominated by strategic PR campaigns/subliminal advertisements like it is today). If people can't align their thoughts together, they can't rebel, or revolt, and the way things are today definitely merits a revolution -- hence the entrenched powers are very interested in suppressing the alignment of thoughts. (Certainly China's censorship is the best example of this, but it happens on Western internet too, in a more subtle way. Keeping everyone outraged over the other villainous political party is a great way to keep them from realizing that the daily apparatus of their life is designed to loot them.)
The other way people align their thoughts is finding a leader willing to voice them. That is, basically, what Trump has been doing, for a class of folks who are pissed about some other stuff (some of it real, but much of it deeply contorted by tricks of propaganda). Well, there are a lot of other folks without those kinds of leaders right now. Most of the people on here for instance. If anyone reading is thinking about dropping the follow-the-rules mentality and becoming an outspoken revolutionary, please do, but be sure you're attacking the real problem, not just the least-likable people who it's easiest to bandwagon against.
This is really it. It gets so frustrating reading HN sometimes because such a huge swath of commenters just seem ok with this stuff. You have companies doing evil shit and the sentiment is basically if it's not illegal, then it's fine.
There seems to be a large subset of people in this world that are still on the Medieval moral framework of "Might makes Right." With the modern definition of "Might" being money. And unfortunately, those are the people that seem to make it into power.
> You have companies doing evil shit and the sentiment is basically if it's not illegal, then it's fine.
Stands to reason, assuming a democratic nation. The law is to the will of the people so when something is deemed not fine, they do make it illegal. There will always be outliers who hold different views, but when randomly meeting other people the chances are you will most likely meet those who fit within the majority.
There’s a plethora of temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who lack the imagination to see how to build real solutions to real problems without being slightly evil.
This is not surprising. We’ve devalued character development in the west for quite some time.
It's like we need a hero to rally around or something.
Not sure if serious or not but this impulse is very dangerous collectively. One person cannot get us out of this. Putting that on a hero absolves us from having to actually do the hard work of deciding what would be better and implementing it.
But that's not where stasis is. We're not even trying to get together and do the hard work because we're not convinced that we're a "we". The hero need not do anything besides be the referent of "I'm with that person," as uttered by many different kinds of people.
Hashing out the consequences of "so transitively, I suppose I'm aligned with you now"... that's where the hard work is (solidarity, etc) but most of us aren't even considering that stage yet. We're still a bunch of smaller us's squabbling amongst ourselves--just how the powerful like it.
Lots of heroes, maybe, doing pieces of the work.