In contrast, working hard in a place that doesn't reward you is sad. Slacking in a place where you can succeed more if you try harder is also sad.

I find that some people will perceive themselves to be exploited and orient their life around avoiding it, regardless of the situation (vs, reserving that feeling for avoiding actually exploitive situations.) For example, it's common to see HN posts describing someone as "subjecting themselves to unpaid overtime" when they work hard - meanwhile the person saying it is making $60K while the person being talked about is making $600K. There are some cases where working hard/loyalty/etc can lead to outsized rewards - but you need to be smart and keep your eyes open for that kind of space.

And then, assuming you are in the right kind of environment - allowing yourself to care and be engaged makes your work days much more fun. I think commonly in the example I described, the person that's proud of inoculating themselves from exploitation not only make 10% of what they can, but the exactly 8 hours of work they put in is a miserable drag for them. The guy working harder for 10X the comp might also be having more fun.

Then there was the mandatory unpaid overtime, the 12 hour days running the entire store solo. It nearly put me in the hospital, and I'm not exaggerating.

Then I got an unbelievable offer for a tech job ten minutes from my house. It was "only" twice my corporate salary, and I'm definitely being way underpaid for essentially being the senior R&D engineer. But it pays enough that my husband doesn't have to work and we don't want for anything. My job is so much fun, and my dedication is definitely noticed and appreciated. They've already given me a raise unprompted, and once we have enough revenue, I expect I'll get a much bigger one. Not that I really care about the money, I feel respected here, and I get to use all of my talents instead of cold-calling people to sell more crap.

I'll never go back to that corporate life. It was absolutely soul crushing for someone who has a lot of initiative and a lot of skills. This is where I was meant to be.

I've done electronics as a hobby for most of my life, and I just have a natural talent for engineering and problem solving. R&D is something I've wanted to do since I first heard of it at 10 years old. The stars just never aligned until now.

Maybe there is some untapped potential in all the store managers of the world?

McDonalds is a great leadership pipeline because there's no reason for a competent assistant manager to stick around.

In each case (various academic labs and the two startups), my loyalty was to the biological problem we were trying to solve rather than to the institution. I selected advisors and startup based on the problem that we were trying to solve (e.g. improving drug development and human health). As long as I thought the institution was making progress, I was willing to overlook a lot. I suspect that the video game industry and a few others might (space!) have a lot of people with a similar view of loyalty (and levels of tolerated exploitation).

I lasted six months. The only reason I stayed that long was because we were promised some huge bonuses for meeting our sales targets, which never happened. I got like $50.

My manager gave her two weeks notice a week before I did and our region manager didn't find anyone to cover. He expected me to run the entire store by myself for a week. I said no and walked out. They had to leave the store closed for several days because absolutely nobody worked there. It was extremely cathartic.

Those who make capital gains do not.

Of course, those who make capital gains don't need a social safety net, but discussions about taxes need to include both tax tracks because they behave so very differently.

But yea it's probably top 10%.

If you include medical costs outside of FICA, which many other Western countries get for near free after taxes, then it looks... quite different.

Edit: I am barely getting 30% in NYC, even including FICA (zip code 10118)

https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes

$90k as single is $27,171, or 30.19%.

$90k as married filer shows $20,758, which is 23.06% (incl FICA).

But, again, I would not include all of the social security portion of FICA (6.2%), since presumably you will be getting some of that back.

The state took it from me, either directly before I saw it, at a point of sale, as some convenience fee (restaurants, bars, etc), liquor fees to punish my drinking, or countless other state-sanctioned money transfer.

I like a return on my investment, and the same goes for the government I live in. And although this sounds like some libertarian style drivel, I'm not complaining about the taxes themselves, but what I get in return for what I pay for. And in this country (USA), it aint much. The most I've seen the govt do, after kilodollars paid in, was a whole $1200 singular check during covid. Everything else I "get", is fee'd, fine'd, and taxed to death.

I would prefer a strong safety net for everyone. Universal healthcare. Free K-12 school lunches. Free university classes/degrees.

Yeah, I look at the WHOLE package of taxes, what I pay in, and what I get. Well, there's a reason why I'm talking with my partner about leaving the country, and even possibly renouncing. But hell, even US citizenship is a -$3500 hole in my pocket.

Sure, there's edge cases where founders and early startup workers get paid income and capital (stocks, etc) both, but that's not the scope of the article.

I've worked in all permutations of your descriptions. If I believe in a project and can get good results on it, and much moreso if I'm having fun, I will work very hard. If I don't believe in it or have trouble getting good results or no one cares, then it's very hard for me to motivate myself.

Obviously, I prefer the situations where I'm highly motivated, and in fact I've worked very hard on some projects. Too hard, in fact.

The fact that a project is something you believe in, that you're highly motivated, that you can make a difference with it, or that you're having a lot of fun, doesn't make overwork healthy.

I've overworked myself a couple of times in my life. I hesitate to describe the worst case; I don't think readers will believe my description of what I did. Suffice to say that I worked on a new system project at Apple and was highly motivated to make it succeed (it didn't). I owned a small non-tech business at the same time.

I worked way too hard for a while. I didn't mind it. On the contrary, I was deliriously happy to do it. Nobody had to ask me to work hard. But it still did me harm.

I don't know for sure that working like that caused or contributed to the chronic illnesses I now have, but I do know that the literature on one of them says that it's correlated with excessive hours worked and excessive exercise. I did both. (My side business involved a lot of intense exercise.)

Oh, and if the overwork did cause or contribute to my chronic illness, then it may also have cost me a fortune. I went bankrupt in the process of getting one of those illnesses properly diagnosed and treated. So even if hard work does happen to pay really well, that doesn't necessarily make it worthwhile--not even necessarily financially worthwhile.

Again, nobody made me work like that. I did it because I was motivated and having fun. It was nevertheless very bad for me. That became clear over the months after I did it, and I may still be paying for it.

You might think that I would have learned my lesson from that episode, and that's true to some extent. I've never worked that hard again. I have worked too hard since then, though. It's a consequence of personality traits, I think. It's a trap I can too easily fall into, even though I know better. So I have to keep watch and listen to my loved ones and my doctors when they warn me that I'm trending that way.

In short: don't think that fun and motivation make you immune to the ill effects of overwork. They don't.

I'm the opposite, I have the chops to get mid-grade developer jobs (the leetcode stuff kept me from the "big leagues" of FAANG which I'm fine abstaining from, they would sniff me out very quickly) and live comfortably, but I have next to no motivation to get anything beyond the minimum done. I think ADHD is part of it (but its on me for never getting it diagnosed or treated), and sometimes I feel guilty for "stealing time" from my employer (yet I've never been fired for bad performance, somehow my JIRA tickets always get done-enough to stay afloat). I am passionate about personal projects though, and I love coding. I still get satisfaction from solving bugs, but realistically I'll never be more than a mid-level maintenance coder.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple number or rule or formula? We're not that lucky. You have to pay attention, preferably with the help of sensible people who know you and have an interest in your continued well being. And yeah, that can be the luck of the draw, too.

source: directly worked at Apple in Santa Clara and Cupertino

People are so disillusioned to "hard work == comfortable life" that they might not even recognize it when it's real, or be incredibly suspicious.

There is also a separate, much bigger lesson in that if you make friends and/or play politics, you also don't have to work as hard and still get rewarded (sometimes massively).

When you layer all of these facts, it's really hard to sign up to be a hard worker. It feels more like punishment once you learn how easy the rich people have it.

For sure. A lot of HN went straight into STEM programs and then into STEM roles, and never had a chance to really do crappy jobs. I think of my brother's friend, who went straight to top tier tech school, then FAANG, than another FAANG. Nice guy, but he lives in a different universe and is painfully out of touch for anythign that doesn't involve hyperscalable infrastructure.

I worked wayyyyyy harder in bartending, or retail, or the military than I ever did in any IT/DevOps gig. And in most cases in IT I get paid 4-5x more.

Working retail was boring but it was a joke in terms of stress or care. Working doing help desk IT work was similar. Same for other odd jobs I picked up.

Then I joined startups, big tech, etc. all in SV and the stress is insanely high compared to anything else. The hours suck even when you’re an aggressive guy like I am about WLB - because I still have to spend hundreds of hours preparing for interviews every year. It’s mandatory to keep your compensation high and to avoid the new toxic boss you just got.

I left a $1m+/yr job because the stress was too much. Experiences with tech is a wide gamut but my experience is one of it being a shit show. I have friends who get paid well and have good hours and a great work environment but I’ve never been in that side of being happy at my jobs. I keep joining shitty employers/teams - somewhat out of bad luck tbh.

They all want the $3m house, private school, and the full-time nanny. If you get lucky - maybe you find one who will compromise for a $2m house but she'll give up her job.

I hate this dating market tbh.

Genuinely, I am rather unlucky. I've talked to many peers and even for people who have interviewed for the same job as I had - I constantly go through a much more rigorous process than others. I had to interview with directors, principle engineers, follow up interviews, etc. in order to get my last job when all my peers just did a typical onsite (2 coding, 1 behavior, 1 system design) for the same role whereas I did that in addition to all this other stuff. Same job and role - no downleveling or anything.

It is very easy to become extremely bitter when you're being lectured by someone who makes more in a month than you do in a year about "hard work"

Especially when you know their job is basically answering emails, giving a presentation once in a while, and golf trips with customers.

-manages multiple, large, multi-year projects across multiple time zones -is a filter for the shit that rains down from upper-management (the most important role of a manager) -if any of these projects fail, he gets blamed (and most likely fired)

- Is responsible for managing large multi-year projects across multiple timezones and basically offloads all of his responsibilities to his direct reports and just asks for status reports now and then

- Is not just not filtering the shit from above but is also a source of shit from above

- diffuses blame downwards instead of taking any for himself, cuts people under him and is never disciplined when projects fail.

He makes as much or more than the guy you report to.

Who holds him accountable? His other buddies in upper management? Maybe eventually, but let's be real here. If he ever does get fired he gets a golden parachute and worms his way in at another company in no time.

Maybe this isn't true at the middle manager-y layer, but it's definitely a pattern we've seen plenty of examples of with executives and other upper management types.

If it works well enough though, he’s fine.

A lot of folks don’t realize their value when they’re burning themselves out making your case look good, which enables it, and not even getting paid for the effort.

Those people often rant the exact same way you are, while not changing their behavior.

They also tend to be the most angry when their part is make clear though. So I guess it’s a good thing it’s at least semi anonymous here?

If they leave and things blow up, then that impacts things no? Accountability is about ensuring someone gets held to account for the results of their actions.

Accountability doesn’t mean ‘they pay because I’m unhappy’. It means ‘if they break the law, they get punished’. Or ‘if they break the org or don’t deliver results their bosses want they get fired.’.

Being a dick of a boss isn’t illegal. Burning people out (when they do it voluntarily) isn’t illegal. Things they may be doing that cause that tend to be purely subjective and individual, and many people will disagree it’s even happening!

Punishing them for those may be vengeance, or revenge, lashing out, or whatever.

And since no one can make someone happy (or unhappy), and there isn’t even an objective measure of it, society generally doesn’t care about that legally. What would accountability mean in those cases then?

Going to jail because people don’t like you as a boss?

Making a hostile work environment is already against the law and actionable, if it can be proven. It’s a reasonably high bar though, and most environments people are pissed about around here likely don’t meet it.

It’s up to everyone individually to make those decisions and tradeoffs. They’re accountable for the results of continuing to work somewhere, or not, for instance.

It’s a two way street. In the sense of;

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France

It may not be great, but other alternatives are so prone to abuse and shittiness that I personally haven’t seen many better alternatives.

This sounds like /antiwork fan fiction.

Some bosses encourage it, some bosses try to discourage it (and fail), some bosses don’t even notice.

Been on both sides. In the end, the ‘hero’ is usually the one that is the actual problem, unfortunately, and can’t stop.

Someone with experience in a higher level role can make it look easy, and it is objectively 'easier' than a lot of jobs. 'Easy' discounts the work someone has often had to do to get into those roles, but it also highlights how privileged some of these people are.

Having a family that prioritizes education, the education actually being good, having the ability to focus on studies instead of needing money or to take care of family, the ability to go to college without worrying about finances... All these are huge levers that get people into these director+ roles, and those are things that aren't available to the wide swath of humanity. People do amazing things despite these challenges, but it's clearly harder to do.

There are definitely crappy managers who don't bring much to the table, but a good manager does those same things but is a lever for their teams (and are invaluable as a result).

Too many people forget about the second part of the equation which is optimizing for long term success. You optimize long term success by constantly learning, creating and using that to leverage into positions with more responsibility / higher impact.

Maybe this isn't true in companies you've worked for, but it's still pretty common for "engineering manager" to be a title held by an MBA with no engineering knowledge.

I plainly said "I will do my best to do the deployments, but if deployment scripts fail, I will NOT risk customer data to complete this task".

The CTO overheard this dictate by our manager. The CTO backed me 100%. And, she was the previous syseng for our dept, and worked up the ranks from helpdesk->syseng->cto. Fucking sharp lady.

Play the game, get rewarded. I've been a hard worker my whole life, but I now limit my total output, so my employers don't expect me to over-work myself 100% of the time. Life becomes much easier after this.

It also helps that I'm an hourly consultant. When the shit hits the fan and a company tries to force me to work nights and weekends to make a deadline that was a result of their incompetence/mis-management, they now have to think twice about it because it directly affect the budget.

Because there is more to success and life than "hard work". Who can blame people (with money) who are willing to pay extra to be around people they want to spend time with ("make friends")?

There's a trope in the tech work that people should tolerate "angry nerds" because they are 10xers or whatever. Most of the real world doesn't operate that way.

I do agree one must stay on the lookout for opportunities where working harder is rewarded, and also that one should try finding some joy in work. But also that one must stay realistic in their expectations, and that much joy is to be found outside of work (relationships, hobbies, discovery, leisure, etc).

I worked my tail off. Worked late. Never missed deadlines. Signed on after hours. Learned a lot. Followed process. Took lots of pride in my work.

And I got a lot better at what I do.

When 2 members of my 3 person team departed and all of the work fell to me, I asked for a raise to $90k. Seemed reasonable to me taking on the work of 3 people given my track record.

I was told that wasn’t possible. So I interviewed elsewhere with my updated resume and turned in my notice. Within a day of turning in my notice I got a counter offer.

Apparently, one of the corporate policies at this telco was to only offer significant raises for retention purposes if the employee had another offer. Which was nuts but apparently the only way to find out if you were valued was to interview elsewhere.

At that point, I was so annoyed that I decided to leave anyway…to another job where I worked long hours and was on call. But I learned a lot.

The hard work paid off and I haven’t actually had to interview for a job in about 15 years.

This is what I think about when I hear people talk about not putting in the extra time. If I’d done that, done only the job exactly according to minimum expectations I would have collected a paycheck…and probably been stuck in the same place.

If they didn't recognize your value before and they only recognize it when you threaten to depart, they aren't respecting you any more w/the counter; they're just using that to stave off the impending issues that arise and will likely take any future opportunity to recoup that 'loss'.

I actively advocate, in advance, for my team. They have clear expectations on what the next step in their career w/us is and have a general idea of what to expect salary wise when they reach it. If they're looking, it means that I have failed them in my #1 core competency and priority as a leader to ensure they are getting what they need out of their day to day and I would prefer they openly communicate with me in advance of their feeling a need to look.

If you are not getting this out of your current leadership, find a new job where your leader will be someone will be that advocate for you. Very often, people are a company's most valuable asset and they should work hard to retain that asset without rigamarole.

Without a competing offer, how can they be sure that you'll actually leave? Showing them that you can forces their hand. But you're still extremely unlikely to be receiving anywhere close to your supposed "value" to the business, and unfortunately mere managers can't really change such a fundamental misalignment.

sighs deeply

Keep up the good fight. I hope your people appreciate you.

That said, to respond to another commenter, policy can certainly cause friction with this sort of methodology and I have definitely run into it in the past. But, leaders exist to navigate company politics so their direct reports have more time to deal with the work they do; any friction encountered that is insurmountable points to deeper organizational issues and can (and in my case does) necessitate my moving somewhere that allows me the autonomy to build strong teams and develop high performing teams.

Yes, and I'm not sure if I feel completely negative about it. On the one hand, just pay up if the value is there, don't play games, right? On the other, the employer is "calling your bluff" about it being, more or less, about money alone. In the end, the policy works, I think.

That shows a clear level of disrespect and willingness to play games with my life — and is the sort of outcome one should expect if you allow departments like HR to engage in dark triad behaviors inside the company.

HR treating employees like cattle to exploit is a Day 2 failure mode.

I think the employer-employee relationship, especially when it comes to salary, is inherently antagonistic because our interests are basically 100% oppositely aligned. An employee always wants to be paid more; an employer always wants to pay less.

Your dark triad mentality is showing through:

An employer doesn’t have an inherent reason to pay less — they have an inherent reason to increase value of the company.

That people conflate the two goals of the company is purely a result of unchecked dark triad thinking in HR — and the preference of exploitation over growth.

This is a Day 2 failure mode because the substitution of your real goal (“make more money”) for a dark triad goal (“maximally exploit my workers”) leads to self-defeating behavior on the primary goal: you make less money by exploiting your workers.

However, as it satisfies the desire to abuse from unhealthy people, we tend towards that defective behavior when dark triad behavior isn’t regulated appropriately.

These "dark triad" corporate failure modes you describe I've always suspected are a distinctly US-American phenomenon and I have always avoided companies headquartered in the US because of this. We do have exploitative companies founded here as well of course but their practices pale in comparison to what I've seen people go through at the American counterparts.

Not sure I really understand how this position relates to the Dark Triad concept. I thought that these days DT was really only bandied about by people in the pick-up community with something to sell to frustrated men.

You can interact in modalities besides trying to maximally exploit your partner — and game theoretically, those cooperative modalities are dominant.

The mistake you’re making, due to viewing the world through a Machiavellian lens, is supposing that’s the only or even optimal strategy — when empirically and theoretically it’s not.

That you closed out with a lame insult (“muh incels!”) shows perhaps my comment struck closer to home than you’re comfortable with.

Ask Boeing.

This creates a constant flux of new companies engaging in healthy partnership with their employees and old companies cycling back to rekindle growth — and which removes the ones who engage in that problematic behavior, persistently.

So that behavior always brings about its own cessation.

See my point about “Day 2”.

Engaging in Day 2 policy is a choice; working with Day 2 companies is a choice.

There’s nothing at all which requires this phenomenon, other than people make lame excuses as if dark triad behavior is some unavoidable law of physics.

Then again, I think the next step to move towards is to recognize that we techies are going towards "factory code-work", and to respond with unionization appropriately. And unions arent just for getting more money, but also demand for payment of overtime, sane vacation policies, remote work, and more.

And yes, I'm an 8-n-skate. Want me longer? Fuckyoupayme. I dont work for free.

If a company respects this and cooperates this way, I'm perfectly fine pulling long hours if necessary, or weekend work if the criticality explains it.

But at the same time, if you start micro-managing my hours and start being picky if I organize my hours on a day around some long-running tasks I just need to wait for... I mean be happy I'm doing laundry off the clock or counting reduced time while the archive system is shoveling data towards servers, which requires minimal monitoring. And I have a phone notification setup if it does something weird.

If you call me at 10pm I'll pick up the phone, if I roll in late or sneak out early or take a long lunch, I don't want to hear anything about it. quid pro quo.

I understand the place where this comes from, but I don't agree. I think this is a very personal thing and there cannot be a single approach that works for everyone.

But for me, if I'm not trying my very best I can't continue doing the job. I'm internally motivated, I know that I'm doing a great job and can be proud of the work, I don't need others to tell me.

I can think of two jobs I left over these sorts of issues.

One was abusive -- VP told my manager to write me up over an email I sent out asking a question about software they were using. That was on a Thursday, I was gone the following Monday. I was later told that VP was removed because she regularly made people cry (she was just mean).

One because I realized the politics meant I couldn't do a good job. I had stepped into a fight between a manager and a CISO and the CISO made sure we were setup for failure. 2-3 months after I left they moved the manager directly under the CISO and he quit.

but in general I've not found myself getting exploited. That doesn't mean I always agree with what management is doing but it's generally been well-meaning by earnest people and I sometimes think if people feel they're constantly running into management like this they might be mis-interpreting. Oddly enough, I've found the larger companies (multi-billion dollar companies) to be more pleasant than smaller companies where it seems tribalism is much more rampant.

If we're being honest, one is employed by the company to make them money, so it will always more or less boil down to this. Would anyone be satisfied that they made their boss a million more, while getting a pat on the back and the same salary?

This might be different for people who are happy to work for small comp in a non-profit or a lean startup, but I struggle to relate to that personally (doesn't mean they are wrong but its not for me.)

"you don't appreciate me!"

"that's what the money is for!"

You can't use that often, but doing it at the right time, it works. Worked for me at least :)

Even better is to be in a place that's smart enough to pay people to begin with because it hires the "best" (ie people with options.)

The quiet person doing an absolutely amazing job is never seen as an urgent case. It is sad and I don't agree with this view at all, but my opinion is not enough to change the system, so I need to live with it.

Personally I think it is a negotiation and a financial transaction - I’m trading my time for my salary and I better make the most out of it.

At the same time - from a negotiation perspective I find unlikely showing your hand in the way you describe is going to work in your favour. In practice, it also has the potential to backfire and you being branded as “disengaged” and a “flight risk”.

PS: please note I’m saying this in good faith, don’t read my comment with a snarky/sarcastic conotation :)

I've done this, and company didn't take me seriously. So then I did get an offer and said I'm leaving - then they actually did something.

like "bro if you get hit by a car things are gonna get ugly -- so leverage that"

we'll see if he will

I don't think this is a real problem IMO. If you learned it in the first place, you can learn it again after slacking off for a bit. You might need a few months for the focused effort, which is honestly not a cost but probably what we in the industry call a sabbatical.

It may add some risk to getting a job if your life is suddenly turned upside down after slacking and you need a job right this instant. That slacking might fail you some interviews, but not all of them. Even in this situation, there are financial options and temp jobs to get by with.

I don't think anyone should ever be convinced that if you stop practicing something that your ability disappears completely. I'd put some faith into the idea that you can relearn it just as well or better when the need arises.

Employer is also bringing in the value to the relationship: most software projects, for example require more than one person. If you was just a freelancer you wouldn't even be considered by the client, when they choose the vendor. Your company also insulates you from legal and financial risks (such as contractual penalties for not delivering the project on time). That's why they take some part of the profit. Now, what the fair split is, that's an endless debate.

Right it works both ways; some people will be blind to being exploited. It really makes me doubt that I have anything even remotely close to an objective view of things that are close to me.

So first of all, that is the wisest perspective on life! Human perception is objectively limited and recognizing that we may not be seeing (or even capable of seeing) reality is empowering.

But on the topic of exploitation vs fair compensation, I don't think it's impossible to figure out where you stand if you can move your feelings out of the way. Say you're a developer making 600K in my previous example, where an average dev is making I dunno, 150K. Being at 4X the average is a pretty good sign that you have a pretty decent gig going. Can you and should you push it to 700k? Absolutely! But probably no room to feel victimized.

On the flip side, if you're making 60K and hear of someone making 600K - it's less obvious how much of that is you and how much of that is someone underpaying you because they are greedy or because they can't? To suss it out - question #1 is - can they even afford to pay more? Like if you work for a mom-and-pop whose whole profit might be 600K for the year, you're in a pretty capped situation no matter who you and and what you'd do, so in terms of pure comp you should find something else. And then - how do you know if you're "as good" as the guy making 600K? One thing to try would be to interview for those FAANG jobs and see how close or far you're to landing them. If you are capable and persistent, you find yourself there. Maybe not making 600 but not making 60 either. On the flip side, if you can't then maybe you can't and maybe 60 or something like that is fair.

Still no guarantee of objectivity but this is how one would gather the data.

See, I'd like to think that's something I could (and already) do, but from the outside watching other people try to do this and fail utterly -- anything from "If you have a boss, they are exploiting you period" to blind loyalty to a company that clearly is exploiting people -- I do have to spend some time second guessing myself.

People always compare themselves to their peers. If you are making 600k at FAANG then yes, you are better off than those making 150k working for a small software company in Pennsylvania, but that is completely irrelevant to you. What matters is that your FAANG colleague, two desks away, is making 700k - he's not better developer than you, is he?

But I do want to challenge the compensation argument:

> For example, it's common to see HN posts describing someone as "subjecting themselves to unpaid overtime" when they work hard - meanwhile the person saying it is making $60K while the person being talked about is making $600K.

Higher paying jobs naturally have higher expectations. OTOH, I've also had managers/ employers who used "we pay you well" an excuse for all kinds of garbage treatment, specifically _avoidable_ garbage treatment: short notice evenings, weekends, _holidays_; denying vacation to compensate for staffing; pressuring folks to return from (legally protected) medical or family leave; required to do work completely out of the job's scope; and so on.

Now, some jobs are inherently like that. If the expectations are set up front and adhered to, then it's a free choice on each side. IME, lots of jobs don't have to be that way, the expectations aren't set up front, and expectations change. It takes only one jerk with a title to ruin things.

* People don't care about the work you do, they care about how you make them feel.

* People will steal the work that you do, or imply that they were a part of it, when they weren't.

* Those people will employ what I had though were high school tier manipulative tactics by sidechanneling communications, or in the way they talk in meetings to imply that they are more useful they than actually or, or to imply they had a involvement in things they didn't.

* "Middle managers" love this stuff, and will promote and hire people who also play this stupid game.

I have seen people share into our slack channels, or start meetings out by playing the most absolutely useless, tik-tok-level, linkedn-level garbage fake bizbro videos as if they are important useful business information that we need to incorporate into our philosophy.

I've seen companies then go to hire these absolutely useless borderline pyramid-scheme bizbros, incorporate their useless vocabulary cancer, and bring them into our meetings and make us defer to them on things.

This stuff is incredibly demoralizing.

Loyal, good workers get exploited by these parasitic people because they care about the company, they care about their good coworkers, and they take pride in making good products. Obviously this stuff is all easily exploitable by the people I'm describing.

I don't mean this directed at you specifically, but it's fairly common for people to take their bad experiences in a handful of places and extrapolate that to all places everywhere, and end up feeling depressed/nihilistic, as you mention. I find myself doing it too, from time to time.

So, maybe this is more directed at other readers who might see your comment and take it as validation of their "everyone sucks" suspicions — grain of salt, and all that.

But I agree that what you describe is genuinely demoralizing and a crap way to be treated (: I hope you get to experience a good work life, if you haven't already.

[1] There's a good amount of research on this topic (search for "depression, over-generalization"), in addition to my personal experiences.

This is the reason why I will never join a company that has more than 100 employees. Once they get big, they all turn into cancer.

lol I had to do this at my last job. My manager would say I need more visibility, share it with X team since it touches on their work.

Then I'd have to be like "Hey we just launched this project/feature, look at it!" And nobody in that team's channel would comment on it.

I felt the exact way you're describing - I'm sharing something into a channel just to seem important.

I'm not sure how to reconcile the need for visibility, there's probably more subtle ways. Or alternatively being in the channel for a while and being part of discussions there rather than popping in just to give myself visibility when there's something worth showing.

If you want engagement... Your manager got you to share it by directly asking you to. You will have better luck receiving feedback if you follow that lead. You asked them to look at it, and got discouraged by the lack of any reciprocity. Ask for engagement, if that's what you feel like you want. One effective way for me to do this is to share my assumptions. :)

If you don't want to feel like you are playing that "importance" game... Play it on behalf of your team, instead of you. Give kudos to everyone around you. And be genuine about it.

I once had such a manager, who managed our small dev team, but he was not a coder, he didn't have any IT background, he was a dude with business background... and the depth of which he was able to understand the business logic of our systems was on the "typical user" level (i.e. he used the systems, but had no idea what amount of work would additions and changes in these systems require). This person reported directly to our CEO. So of course we would spend obscene amounts of time on trash features which were complex to incorporate into the existing structures and most of which provided questionable business value in the end (i.e. a feature took 6 "man months" to develop and integrate, but its added monetary value to the business was probably similar or lower than that). Because of these bs jobs coming from the top, we were swamped with questionable work and our core systems and features stagnated. At the same time, hiring more people - adding to the IT team - was out of the question because we were already "so expensive". And so this person came up with a genius idea of offloading one of our core systems to an external entity (so we have more time to spend on his questionable tasks). I mean, fair enough if you do that while being well aware of all the business logic and make a calculated decision, but this person (and I don't want to be too specific here) basically went behind our backs, told the ceo something along the lines of "hey, we're gonna offload system X to entity Y for Z amount of money, so our IT has more time for other important stuff" and then, once everything was a done deal, came to us that we're going to integrate Y. Long story short, we spent about 2 years (on/off) on replacing our X to work with Y, tightly integrating it with Y's api (and that company in general), having around a dozen of 2-5 hour meetings, Y updating their system like 10 times so it even does what our system X did 5 years ago and spent a crap ton of money on all of this (easily more than new hires would cost). Why would it take two years, why wouldn't we cut our losses? Because sunk cost fallacy and because the manager couldn't admit fault to the ceo. We were going to do this because it was his idea.

upper management hire bull-shitters who tell them what they want to hear or who will execute the unpopular things they don't want to do....and so on down the chain.

They're always there early AND late. They never, ever turn down requests for MORE X even if they're salaried and even if it makes their lives unnecessarily difficult.

They're often the ones most visibly damaged by the job, but they also irrationally defend their abusers. Perhaps they think that they'll be promoted one day, but why would a manager promote their best underling, especially if they've shown that they'll never be a flight risk?

[1] Seriously, I started at fourteen and job-hopped ~2x/year: a "schoolyear job" and a "summer job".

This is of course a caricatured oversimplification, and I am in no way defending abusive arrangements, but I worry that the relative proportions of each type seem to be changing, and not in a promising direction. I also worry about the normalization of scorched earth, such that a young person might never learn, or learn only later, that the latter is not the only or the most rewarding approach to life. Finally I worry there is a similar lesson still to be learned at the species level: reciprocal partnerships with ecosystems and other living beings tend to produce better long term outcomes than opportunistic extraction

I think there's nuances here, I imagine we can all agree that the Victorian workhouse is not an institution anybody ought to revive for example while also appreciating that not all hard work has to be exploitative.

Often the toil is the point. I’m stuck in one of those jobs presently and am aggressively interviewing.

And the work ethic is rarely Protestant, but really a stress reaction for a certain percentage of the population. One that is very hard to get out of once it starts.

Sure, the value is just distributed the opposite of the way most people would like it to be. The vast majority of the benefits accrue to a practically random individual, some goes to the worker, and a tiny bit trickles to the community.

I would wager most people are far more interested in situations where the worker and community benefit greatly, and a tiny bit trickles to whoever owns the business.

Besides that, if you wanted to benefit your community there are much better and easier than ways than grinding away at work and being proud of the income tax you pay, I guess?

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

----------

The vast majority are not doctors, nurses or public defenders. The vast majority work for private companies whose direct value to the local community is much less obvious, with the exception of paying people who (might?) live close by to the business.

Shitty companies exist and you must always be prepared to protect yourself against abuse, but it's ridiculous to look down on those who want what they do 8+ hours a day to have value.

These places thrive on people forgoing any personal life in order to line someone else's pockets.

Be careful what you wish for.

You could make the argument that working hard at your job is setting an example for your family (kids) and community (through leadership/running a successful business/employing people of the community/etc).

For the second thing, you could make that argument. Are you? Because I'm old, and our fathers mostly considered "good parenting" to be work as hard as possible outside the home to aspire to wealth and model hard work. And I don't know any of my generational peers that aim to emulate them in this, because it makes you a distant and uninvolved member of your family.

So if you're going to make this argument for yourself you certainly can. I've experienced first hand what "setting a good example" through labor does for your children.

It's also made me realize that yes, I want to be there for my kids more than my dad did, but I also have personal goals related to work that I want to accomplish in my life, more macro-level goals. It's also made me more involved in my community because I want more ownership in what's going on around me. It's definitely a balance and you need the self-awareness and time management to finese it.

The fact that your tiny view of humanity doesn’t include those people doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

if someone is taking your passion and making money so that they can be a useless lump - that's really fine. its sad if they ruin your work because they don't care or know better. and of course its ultimately critical to cultivate relationship and build families - so its not _everything_.

life without work is pretty empty

There are monks living in mountain monasteries who spend their whole lives in quiet reflection, doing basic chores and making basic meals, and they believe they live the richest lives possible.

I'm not saying we should all be monks, but this idea that work is the only way to live a fulfilling life is very narrow, and very much cultural.

That's all work is. A state of: I can do something for you, and you can do something for me, and we see ourselves as both being better off for it. Sometimes practical constraints means something cannot be delivered immediately, so a party may promise to deliver it later. That is all money and accounting is – a record of the promises made.

We're social creatures. I expect most do truly do see life as being empty if they cannot grow with other people. Protestantism may have taken notice of that, but it didn't invent it.

Again, the monks believe they live rich lives without being "useful" by North American standards, that's certainly a cultural thing.

In North America our culture strongly believes a person's value is linked to their usefulness.

That's not up for debate really. I mean you can try to argue it's not, but honestly look around. Look at what value we place on people who are homeless, addicts, crippled, blind, deaf, or hell, even someone who is just unemployed.

We look down on them heavily. We judge them as having lower value because they are less useful.

Even look at the original comment and the disdain for "useless lumps"

This attitude doesn't exist everywhere. Don't try and say it's not cultural.

You seem to have only one counterexample: monks. Why would you assume that their highly unusual replacement of this by devotion to God is the less cultural option?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27734627

Do you need me to go and list all of the ways every culture on the planet has different views on the value of an individual?

I don't have that kind of time.

It's interesting to look at the social and political divisions that have been growing in Israel over the role of the Haredi (ultra-orthodox). The men are exempt from conscription and mostly don't work for wages. Instead they focus on religious study and survive on welfare and donations. More secular Israelis tend to resent the Haredi as useless lumps who don't do their fair share of work.

That's begging the question.

Historically, nearly all societies valued work because work was necessary; they valued being "useful".

Historically, nearly all societies also specialized, moving some folks away from directly producing/ harvesting food and to other jobs like building tools; they also produced art, philosophy, religion, and other things which don't appear to be "useful" but _empirically are_.

> Look at what value we place on people who are homeless, addicts, crippled, blind, deaf, or hell, even someone who is just unemployed.

> We look down on them heavily. We judge them as having lower value because they are less useful.

No. WTF, no.

Most people who are "unemployed" _were_ employed and _will soon be_ employed. Most people who are homeless had a home and will soon have a home. These are usually short term circumstances.

The folks who are long-term unemployed or long-term homeless are a completely different category: lots of substance abuse, mental issues they refuse to treat, refusal to adhere to basic societal norms, etc.

But if someone improves themselves, wow, do folks love a comeback story. I think that's almost universal across societies, but I'm happy to see evidence otherwise.

As for physically handicapped folks, plenty of them work for money. Some of them can't _but they want to_. And they find other ways to be useful to their families, their community, their society. I don't see disdain for that.

But that one is definitely cultural. Historically, most societies would "put them out of their misery". Still true in Canada.

> Even look at the original comment and the disdain for "useless lumps"

> This attitude doesn't exist everywhere.

Generally, yes, it does. See everything above.

Very different from modern corporate work culture, where you must appear to be working all the time, even if there's no work of value to do at a given time, and even if you worked day and night last month on a crunch project.

Very much cultural.

They also just did more. They didn't work to earn money to employ someone to work on their house; they went home and worked on their house. That might look to a simple observer as them working less, but I doubt the serf would see it that way.

The existence of something bad happening doesn't refute the point being made.

Life prior to the industrial revolution sucked. It took a lot of backbreaking labour to produce basic necessities of life.

But grinding away for a manager ain't it either.

Unfortunately, the generation of politicians after Lincoln allowed the capitalists who took advantage of Lincoln's "free labor" system to pull the ladder up behind them then the next generation (the "Progressives") decided big business was "inevitable" and just needed to be regulated so it didn't become a monopoly that cheated consumers. The generation after that allowed the workers to form unions which could bargain for something resembling what they were worth which worked fairly well for a generation until it was dismantled as the "solution" to an inflation crisis caused by US foreign policy and US environmental policy (I'm referring to the 1970s inflation crisis, not the current one that has the same causes).

Tech is one of the few places in the American economy where the true American Dream of financial independence and self employment is still accessible even if you weren't born a millionaire and you don't win a Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot. But there is a fair question of how much longer it will be until FAANG and/or government regulation to "rein in Big Tech" pulls that ladder up like all of the previous ladders have been pulled up by big business and/or its allies in big government who pretend to be its enemies.

That is a very interesting way of describing that process. Lives were lost in that battle.

Trade happens because it's mutually beneficial.

People from lower soc-ec backgrounds tend to focus on technical excellence, and wait to be noticed and promoted, rather than engaging in more overt self promotion. There is a great video on the topic by a guy called Luke Hart here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwKcjg5lPk8

I’ve been there personally.

Setting good boundaries and living a balanced life, whatever that means to you, is virtuous.

Loyalty is for henchmen playing at zero-sum games. The idea that it is a virtue is a psyop by the people out there who would have us as their henchmen.

If your work is solving a problem that needs to be solved, you don't need loyalty, you can be on the team you're on because it's the best way to attack that problem. And when the power goes to your leader's head and they try to make you into a henchman, you can go find a different team with which to attack the same problem.

Otherwise the problems don't get solved and we all end up working for marketing in some way or another.

And what happens when you complain about burnout, repeatedly?

- “Yeah it happens. Why not take a vacation?”, but dropping last minute work on you or calling you when traveling

- “Yeah but we’re all under so much pressure. It’s a team effort and we need to all pull through”, and again dropping more work on you when teammates who don’t care don’t have to work half as hard

- “Oh yeah? Maybe you should focus more on your work life balance” and then calling you in the weekend for that “super important customer call on Monday we need to prepare for”

I came to realize 1-1 meetings with management are designed to manipulate and keep you under control, just how HR’s real objective is to protect the company. This and other instances left a lot of scars and tainted my perspective about salaried work.

I can’t drink the Kool-Aid anymore and even as a founder this is among my top priorities in how I treat people working with me.

I've never seen a business that would actually fire you for this. And if they do, good riddance.

So which is it?

Somebody who makes trouble and gets noticed for it.

> gets the oil

Is subjected to 'corrective measures.'

It's another way of saying the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

It is a really great read: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Meanwhile, it is known that people with dark triad personality traits - so people which fall more into the direction of very severe personality disorders such as ASPD or NPD, which have huge internalizing and externalizing costs and damage to society - are due to perverse incentives more often promoted into leading positions, from where they can further cause harm to the sick people below them. But they also get themselves further damaged as their promotions and monetary rewards don’t incentivize them to seek treatment, aggravating their pathology for decades, robbing them of meaningful and healthy lives. Any person with understanding of pathologies of mental health knows that their ability to simply stop abusing others is massively impeded to a point where objectively it appears like a perverse and cruel game to everybody involved.

Both sick-abuser and the sick-abused are the victims in these dynamics and suffer massively.

I hope that we as society will eventually reach a point, where the exploitation of sick people is not normalized anymore. There can be alternatives once we collectively incentivize compassion and empathy, but I dream - even Jesus tried to tell people this and look where we are today.

It sucks, but realistically we don’t even really understand what causes NPD for instance (or BPD), and since one of the core things with NPD is they will never admit they have a real problem, and are really good at manipulating people and hiding their problems….

"Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most."

I suppose it shouldn't be any surprise if the company (or a manager within the culture of that company) also tries to get the maximum value out of each employee according to what each individual will endure.

Now consider closer to home for HN. Typical pre-seed/seed startups, where the first couple engineering hires might be offered 0.5% to 2% in ISOs, although critical to getting to MVP. While the founders, who started months earlier, get an order of magnitude more equity, and under better terms. Not because that's fair or fosters an environment that deserves much loyalty, but because they're trying to get the employee at the minimum cost they'll accept, even to the employee's disadvantage.

I think with BigCo managers they are more focused on getting performance — they have somewhat limited control over budget.

But founders tend to give the energy that they want to make sure they don’t give away too much. They act much more like it’s theirs personally to lose.

Not always the case. When interviewing for my first FAANG job (coming from defense) I requested what I thought was a reasonable salary, but turned out to be a low-ball offer. The recruiter came back and told me that I wasn't asking for enough and that they wouldn't pay someone so below the average for their level.