[HN Gopher] Managers exploit loyal workers over less committed c... ___________________________________________________________________ Managers exploit loyal workers over less committed colleagues Author : geox Score : 89 points Date : 2023-03-25 20:46 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (today.duke.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (today.duke.edu) | quantified wrote: | > Company loyalty is a double-edged sword, according to a new | study. | | I'm not sure what the second edge is? When is loyalty | meaningfully rewarded? | suoduandao2 wrote: | when it's layoff season. | Waterluvian wrote: | Layoff season is not about keeping the loyal employees, it's | about keeping the necessary ones. | | Loyalty isn't really valuable to the company when retention | isn't a concern. | jiriknesl wrote: | As a CEO who had to do some lay-offs, I would terminate | loyal workers who care about the company the last, even if | I had to change their focus. | | At a certain size when you know all people in the company, | a CEO always know which 15 % of people will be let go first | and which 15 % will the company keep even if the business | is losing money every month. | willcipriano wrote: | So you get to stay at a failing company as a reward? | toomuchtodo wrote: | How'd that work at Google? Loyalty is zero guarantee of | safety during any sort of reduction in force. You're just a | line in a spreadsheet. Also, you can have the best working | relationship with your manager and if they don't have enough | juice, you're still out. | | Tips: Robust emergency fund, keep your network warm, work | enough to keep your employer reasonably happy, show up every | day like it might be your last. | | (technologist for 22 years) | s1artibartfast wrote: | Do you realize you shifted the gold post from having | benefit to providing a bulletproof guarantee? | | Nothing in life is guaranteed. | gruez wrote: | Loyalty isn't rewarded per se, but someone who is committed | to their work/team/company is going to be lower on the | layoffs list than someone who's doing rest and vest while | doing the bare minimum. | vkou wrote: | Layoffs in large firms are typically handled in complete | secrecy by third-party consultants, and 'loyalty' isn't | an input they plug into their formulas. | | The decisionmakers that, at the end of the day, approve | the recommendations of the consultants are usually | incredibly removed from any actual work that gets done. | I'm talking about people with 300+ reports. They have no | fucking idea whether or not you are 'loyal'. | | The people who have an idea of that find out that you got | laid off at the same time that you do. | | Likewise, when an entire department gets gutted (with no | internal transfers available), nobody with any influence | over that decision is going to care that you were busting | your ass for the firm's bottom line every Saturday. | gruez wrote: | > and 'loyalty' isn't an input they plug into their | formulas. | | >They have no fucking idea whether or not you are | 'loyal'. | | My comment literally says | | >Loyalty isn't rewarded per se | | What metrics do you think the "third-party consultants" | are using? | vkou wrote: | > What metrics do you think the "third-party consultants" | are using? | | Closing their eyes, and throwing darts at the historical | record of your three-point "NI/Meets/Exceeds" score, | where you are on the org chart, and whether you're being | paid more than your peers. | | If there was any method to their madness, you wouldn't be | seeing people with strong performance histories getting | canned (In divisions that haven't been shut down). | toomuchtodo wrote: | Prove your assertion. You are attributing logical, | rational behavior to orgs and their participants that | rarely are those traits. I have personally attempted to | defend directs from layoffs, and that quickly turned into | me making calls to other orgs so they could land safely | elsewhere, facts and value be damned. | | I support rational decisioning ("here is the evidence | this person delivers value, is committed to the org's | success, and should be factored into retention"), it's | just rare imho. YMMV. Perhaps I've just been unlucky in | my journey. If that is the case, n=1, build your | assumptions off of competing data. | gruez wrote: | > Prove your assertion. You are attributing logical, | rational behavior to orgs and their participants that | rarely are those traits. I have personally attempted to | defend directs from layoffs, and that quickly turned into | me making calls to other orgs so they could land safely | elsewhere, facts and value be damned. | | And what am I supposed to do if my experience was the | exact opposite to yours? Do you want me to dig up emails | and/or other company documents that show there was | "logical, rational behavior" in my organization? | toomuchtodo wrote: | Nah, I'm just saying that our experiences are going to | wildly differ and my recommendation is to plan for the | worst. Please don't take my comments as anything other | than that, and I absolutely did not intend it as a | personal attack. | | If you've worked at amazing (logical, rational) orgs that | value commitment and will take care of folks in return, I | am genuinely happy for you. Envious even. It is more rare | than you would think. Regardless, workers must protect | themselves. If you'd like to discuss further, contact | info in my profile. | not_the_fda wrote: | I have never seen that happen. | | I have seen people who were loyal and worked for the same | company for 20 years be thrown to the curb like trash, | and they were not poor performers. | | You are just a number on a spreadsheet, and if you have | been there awhile its an expensive number, you are | probably older with a larger salary and higher healthcare | costs. | noncoml wrote: | > You're just a line in a spreadsheet. | | Spot on. IT workers need to realise this and start acting | accordingly. You are no more important to an exec of a tech | company than a barista is to Starbuck's exec. | | Unionise and stop being jerks during technical interviews. | prepend wrote: | Or even better, use your skills to start your own | company. | | I've never seen a unionized software company make good | software. And I've seen lots of different types of | software. | | I don't think programmers are interchangeable cogs and | there's so much variance and diversity across people, I | wouldn't want to work for a company that paid me the same | as everyone else and fired based on seniority. | dsfyu404ed wrote: | If your whole department or project is being let go loyalty | and personal relationships doesn't matter. If your | department or project is one of the ones told to manage out | poor performers more aggressively or to cut X% of headcount | being someone your manager can count on is going to make | you substantially less likely to be one of the people | managed out or cut. | | Sure, they might bring in consultants like it's Office | Space but those consultants ask everyone what they think of | their team members and keep score and in that scenario it's | still better to be the person everyone likes and/or | respects with more than the absolute bare minimum work | output. | watwut wrote: | The layoffs I have seen just were not that thought out. | First people to go were the most paid ones, regardless of | performance anyway. | [deleted] | treis wrote: | >how'd that work at Google | | How do you know it didn't? | crazygringo wrote: | In theory, with promotions. | | In practice, they've decided to bring in an external candidate | to fill the role at the higher level. But you're the best | person to bring them up to speed because you know so much with | all the extra projects you've taken on! | quantified wrote: | Yes, all the projects that you were hoping to be able to work | on as a reward are out of reach because you're too valuable | to the ones you're on. | roenxi wrote: | In theory maybe promotions and bonuses were being handed out | they should tend towards the more loyal workers. | | But I would advise against working overtime as a strategy to | get rewards, it usually doesn't work in my experience. | vlunkr wrote: | I work for a small company, and I do believe loyalty is | rewarded here. Raises, bonuses, freedom to move between | projects, etc. | | I'm sure it's a different story when you're working with an | army of devs. It's a numbers game, everyone is easier to | replace in that situation. | [deleted] | doctor_eval wrote: | So loyalty is treated as a weakness, rather than a strength. | | What a shitty world we've built for ourselves. | henry2023 wrote: | Be loyal to your wife. People organizations are higher order | entities who could not care less about you. Building a | relationship of loyalty with them is just not something you | should do. | Gigachad wrote: | There is a middle ground. On one side you have working massive | unpaid overtime and stressing out, and on the other side you | have WFH bludgers who spend 90% of their time on YouTube and | reddit knowing they will get away with it. | | Then there is actually doing the work you are paid for and | putting a good effort in but not letting it extend unreasonably | beyond hours and not letting it stress you out. It's actually | far more rewarding to do this where you actually care about the | work you do and feel some pride in it vs completely | disassociating. | pigsty wrote: | > on the other side you have WFH bludgers who spend 90% of | their time on YouTube and reddit knowing they will get away | with it. | | If they're getting away with it, that's a problem with the | company not distributing their workloads properly. 90% of | work hours wasted should be immediately obvious. | eecc wrote: | If I ever did that, it'd be J2 or some training. YouTube and | Reddit have vampired way to much time from my life already. | fwsgonzo wrote: | Indeed. It's crazy the amount of stories I've seen on Reddit | this past decade from people who are warning others about the | dangers of treating a company as family etc., after they | themselves were discarded at a whim. It's always the same | story, and they sometimes profess how unexpected it was, and | how important they were (or how many projects they lead) in the | company. | whack wrote: | > _We value people who are loyal. We think about them in positive | terms. They get awarded often. It 's not just the negative side_ | | If the managers also award loyal workers in various ways, it | would hardly be exploitative. As a manager, if something | absolutely needs to get done outside of normal work hours, of | course I would lean towards asking the person most likely to say | yes. And of course I would also give that person a larger end-of- | year salary increase, bonus, or fast-tracked promotion to | recognize their efforts and commitment. It seems odd for the | study to focus purely on the additional work the loyal workers | are doing, and ignore the various ways in which they would be | rewarded for it. | jeffrallen wrote: | > Participants handing out the unpaid work in Stanley's study | were compensated $12 an hour. | | Isn't that a kick in the nuts for poor John? | yalogin wrote: | Loyalty also makes you earn less compared to their peers. I am | exhibit A for that:) | WesleyLivesay wrote: | Sucks being dependable. | osigurdson wrote: | It seems pretty obvious. The ones most willing to do the work end | up doing it. | Animats wrote: | A more effective cure: pay for overtime. | [deleted] | analog31 wrote: | My knee jerk impression is that the study could be explained by | _defining_ loyalty as willingness to accept unpaid work. | maxk42 wrote: | It's not "unpaid work" if you're classified as an exempt | employee, which is never explicitly addressed in the article. | That's why you get a certain salary regardless of sick leave, | holidays, etc - you are being paid to apply your professional | skill to a task, not conduct menial labor for a certain number | of hours. I would never work unpaid overtime when I was working | as a retail clerk. That's why they had a time card system which | I had to punch in and punch out of. If a customer kept me late | by even 15 minutes, I'd be compensated for all of that time. | Now later in my career I'm an exempt professional, and I don't | mind crunching when it's crunch time. That's part of why my | salary is so much higher now: I understand that I have a job to | execute at any cost. If a deadline is in danger of being missed | I will put in the extra hours necessary to achieve success | regardless of being asked to or not. That's why managers award | me crucial projects and that's the kind of employee I would | lean on when I have a crucial project of my own to manage. | That's also the first employee to be put up for promotion and | the last one to be expendable during hard times. This isn't the | least bit surprising. | ary wrote: | Did anyone think otherwise and need to have it explained? | | Having been on both sides of the employment equation a few times | now I can say confidently that people act on their values and | respond to incentives without regard to where they sit on an org | chart. This too doesn't require a study to confirm. Perhaps I'm | naive and the point of publishing this is to drum up engagement | from the aggrieved employed. | | Be you an employer or employee the hardest thing to be in | business is _ethical_. Convincing (or paying) people to care is | incredibly hard, as is convincing (or paying) people to learn. It | gets a lot easier when you find a way to tie either of those | things to their values, and honestly most people, rationally, | value themselves above all else. Is it any wonder people give up | and begin exploiting one another? | | This article reads like someone found the Gervais Principle [1] | and viewed it as full of low-hanging fruit for a study. | | [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais- | principle-... | zabzonk wrote: | > it doesn't mean we should just abandon work commitments or | dodge uncompensated overtime. | | it's not dodging! if you won't pay me for my work, i'm not going | to do the work! | happytoexplain wrote: | Indeed. That the author chose this wording is a signal of how | sick and biased the employee/employer relationship is. | zabzonk wrote: | but only in certain professions - you try getting a | builder/electrician/plumber to do unpaid overtime! why | programmers are suckers for this is a bit of a mystery. | sokoloff wrote: | I've done a fair bit of not-specifically-compensated | overtime over my career. | | In my 20s and early 30s, if I didn't have anything going on | socially or sports on a given evening, I was pretty likely | going to write code (for enjoyment). Sometimes that was for | me, but often it was for the company. | | Doing what I enjoy is why I was a sucker in your | estimation. | jakelazaroff wrote: | I mean, yes? You could have built side projects, | contributed to open source, freelanced, etc. There are a | ton of ways to do what you enjoy without allowing someone | to profit off your unpaid labor. | zabzonk wrote: | yes, i certainly used the university that i worked for | facilities when i was starting out, but only for my own | projects (arguably bad, i might admit) - i never did or | have done any work for my employers that i wasn't | compensated for, and i can't imagine why anyone would. | SteveGerencser wrote: | Because the barrier to entry in programming is zero. Or | near enough to it. Code on your free time, learn php on | your free time. Suddenly you are WordPress developer. | | Learning a trade can require very expensive tools, often | time as an apprentice or journeyman, and learning at the | very first stage of your career that your labor has value | and you need to charge for that. | | I can hire a programmer from anywhere in the world and | often incredibly cheaply. I can't do that with a tradesman, | they actually have to be local, often have more work than | they can ever get done, and know that I can't outsource the | construction project to someone 1,000 miles away. | dilyevsky wrote: | > I can hire a programmer from anywhere in the world and | often incredibly cheaply | | This has been tried many times with quite predictable | results and you're incorrect that you can't hire | tradesmen from far away - happens all the time. | sage76 wrote: | Where I live, programmers tend to be book smart and very | arrogant about it. | | Plenty of people from my college and department genuinely | think they are smarter than everyone else. | | This blinds them to the kind of street smarts required to | understand even basic ideas of how to not get exploited, | the utility of unions, power dynamics between employers and | employees. | astrange wrote: | Programmers are salaried/equity holding exempt employees so | it's not unpaid. | zabzonk wrote: | on the contrary, most programmers i've worked with have | been contractors/consultants, paid by the hour. | eggsmediumrare wrote: | It's crazy how many people don't understand this | xyzelement wrote: | It depends on the job and company. I've worked with folks w | your mindset who'd bail at 5 when their team stayed till 7. | | Then 5 years out, their team mates were making an extra 200k | a year because they got bonuses and raises in return. | | So in their case it was short term uncompensated overtime , | long term well compensated. | zabzonk wrote: | 5 years is short term? do the maths. anyway, few people | stay with a company that exploits them for 5 years. | xyzelement wrote: | I feel like you mentally inverted every thing in my post | and then replied to that. | zabzonk wrote: | I feel otherwise, but please expand a bit. | xyzelement wrote: | Alright. Two guys working in a great company. One had the | attitude of "no uncomped OT" and leaves at 5. The other | guy works till 7. | | At the end of the year guy 2 gets an extra 40k comp raise | vs guy 1. In 5 years that's a 200k difference. | | So by avoiding "uncomped OT" guy 1 fucked himself out of | a ton of comp. | | OBVIOUSLY this depends on the company and there's no | guarantees. I've been lucky enough to work on companies | that were like this and this every man for himself short | term thinking was poison. | | YMMV. | bigbillheck wrote: | You went from '200k a year' to '200k over five years'. | zabzonk wrote: | > YMMV | | it certainly does. i have worked for several investment | banks as a contractor, and i can assure you they do not | much care how many hours you put in. if you wanted a big | bonus (as a contractor, i obviously didn't get one) you | had to produce value to the bank. and sitting at your | desk until 7pm simply does not do that. | | also, how much does that 2 hours per day, per year, over | 5 years add up to? | bleep_bloop wrote: | The few companies I've worked at, by 5 years the company | either has sold up and everyone was replaced / let go, | maybe a select few get to stay out of dozens - the vast | majority lose out and were exploited or the company goes on | a hiring spree and there aren't pay raises or bonuses | because company growth is valued over employee | satisfaction. Feels like you're talking about the exception | rather than the rule or perhaps the tech industry 10+ years | ago but certainly not today. | AlexandrB wrote: | > So in their case it was short term uncompensated overtime | , long term well compensated. | | How does one identify whether one will be long term | compensated or not? Would an employer agree to committing | to something like this via a contract? | | In my experience, switching jobs gets you there faster and | without the unpaid overtime. | sage76 wrote: | I have seen loyal people get exploited, frustrated and | leave more often. | yedava wrote: | The way I see it, companies know that there will always be | people who would sacrifice quality of life for money, and | adjust compensation for that. This wouldn't be a problem if | only a few companies do this. But when every company does | this, it results in forcing everyone to just keep working | long hours in order to stay afloat. | happytoexplain wrote: | Yes, but this form of gambling is a terrible thing to | encourage implicitly. It's awful for society to ask people | who have worked to attain a "normal" education, trying to | apply to "normal" companies, to choose between life-harm | and _potential future compensation_. For specialized cases | like a silicon valley moonshot startup or whatever, fine. | But this scenario, allowed to progress naturally, will work | itself into more and more "normal" cases. | | This is especially compounded by the fact that software | developers have a higher tendency to fall outside some of | the social norms that normally serve as natural controls on | this kind of scenario. I.e. if you can do your job for | unusually long (because it's not physical labor, and/or you | enjoy doing it both as a job and a hobby), and you don't | have many other obligations (you don't have kids, or you | can afford childcare; or you don't have a wife, or you have | a wife who doesn't mind you spending little time together; | or you can afford to order prepared food often or don't | have a cultural/personal bias against it), what happens is | the people with these properties work more hours, causing | the market to adapt and pressure the other people in the | same field. In other fields, this doesn't happen in enough | numbers to cause this problem. | m348e912 wrote: | Former manager here, I definitely leaned on the guys/ladies on | the team I could count on over "less committed team members". The | ones I could count on were eager and willing to step up when | needed and I very much appreciated it. In this case, they were | salary and worked more hours than some of their counter parts. | | I did my best to reward them with promotion opportunities and | supporting them as much as I could in their career. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-03-25 23:00 UTC)