The company I work for recently got acquired and the entire culture changed to one of "fuck the engineers, only contracts matter, engineers are just butts in seats, the more the better (quality not required)".
My boss is constantly turned down when he tries to advocate for me, or say that I deserve a slight bonus.
At this point, I have had all productivity beaten out of me. I really don't understand the mindset.
It's been a crash course on how to take a wonderful company and burn it to the ground in a matter of less than 2 years. Most of my coworkers have moved on at this point, and each contract they got out of it has now failed. So what the fuck was even the point?
How do you have 40% turnover and not think "Am I the problem?"?
I left one place where there was literally a line of 6 of us who all resigned one after the other the afternoon when our annual vesting hit our accounts in the morning. I can't imagine the day that Director had hearing the same story from all 6 of us back-to-back.
While I fully expect them to sell, I expect them to stab me in the back so hard that the shares are effectively worthless.
I've been learning ruby in my spare time, so hoping to transition to a job that uses that in their stack eventually. I think I'm going to take a long break though, I'm very burnt out from the entire experience.
They were talking about how they were surprised we were able to charge so much for our engineers on our contracts, when all of theirs had much tighter margins.
I told them it was probably because they optimized for winning contracts at any cost vs winning contracts that were worth it.
There is only one thing to do after your company is acquired: get out of the company that got acquired. Full stop: get out. You can do this one of two ways: via the org chart, taking a lateral promotion into the acquiring company, into a part/division/product team/group that existed before your company was in the mix. The second is to leave and get another job elsewhere. Everything else will eventually be discarded.
Acquisitions are always bad for the acquired company. If you aren't laid off in the first year, you'll be pushed to attrition yourself, but make no mistake: the old company is dead and its people and their brains are the least valuable asset to the parent company, so get out of the small company.
>My boss is constantly turned down when he tries to advocate for me, or say that I deserve a slight bonus
Just so it's said plainly: this feeling always means to get another job. Listen to it: you want more money, you deserve more money, and that's a perfectly good reason to leave.
You can come back to this company after you bounce your salary up, or not, it happens both ways, but they aren't going to give you nearly as much as you get by changing jobs. Ever.
>At this point, I have had all productivity beaten out of me. I really don't understand the mindset.
You are in an abusive relationship with the company you work for, this is natural.
I was there 9 months and at the end I ranked 5th in the company for seniority.
Sure, it's emotional stuff, and the purely rational actor would dip without question. But having emotions is healthy and normal, even if it means they sometimes lead you to somewhat suboptimal situations. Of course, it can reach a point where people get locked in out of fear of the unknown, just like bad relationships. But it's rarely as easy as just saying "Okay, time to leave."
"When is the time to let go?"
This goes for all areas of life: intimate relationships / marriages, employment, being part of a hobby club that's not the same anymore, local community help (donations, voluntary labor etc.).
We the people are extremely bad judges of when is the right time to leave -- and 99% of the time we leave way too late. Usually after getting some deep emotional scars as a bonus.
In hindsight (which as they say is 20/20) every time in my life after I left any kind of interaction between me and other people / companies, it was well after I should have. But only in retrospect.
I gradually learned to recognize the signs and started to escalate problems early. And if they aren't addressed, leave early.
Life is too short to keep a death grip on things that are poisoning you. It seems every one of us learns this lesson very late in life.
But don't get me wrong: I am doing my very best not to live with regret and make myself better utilizing those past lessons -- as you said. But analyzing it back in time, I know that I actually had the right mindset but was too weak to utilize it.
Prioritize your health. Go your pace and accept the consequences. Always feel satisfied with your choice.
Prioritizing your health is an absolutely sound advice every time. I started doing that and even if the improvements are small and hard to feel just yet, it still feels great to feel better than two weeks ago.
If you respect me as an engineer, you do what needs to be done to address my genuine and valid concerns. If you can't, I can still like you as person, but you've ceased to be an effective leader. (I hold myself to that same standard with the teams I lead as well. I'm only as good as 9 parts what I deliver and 1 part what I wish I could deliver.)
I think they didn't realize that they had actually found a truly awesome company by chance and were witnessing its conversion to 'normal company'. Nothing more, nothing less. But if you ask me it was still totally bearable. The devil you know type of situation and hey, I'll let them pay me f they keep wanting to. I can still jump ship if they turn from normal company to actual evil (like introducing the kinds of perks that try and bait you into working 80 hour weeks and thinking it's fun and worth it and normal) company. I can still jump ship then.
I have been in that position before - that’s why I’m asking
I stayed 11 years at my previous job because it was fun and we were shielded us from a lot BS.
So while I'll never see another raise again, I have very decent overall total compensation, especially for the cost of living where I'm at.
The other side of it, is that I have about 3 months of vacation built up. The TLDR on that though is they tried to take it from me about a month ago (carry over policy that I was told I would be exempt from). I told them straight up I would leave that day, so they reneged in the end. But I have no clue how they wouldn't assume I'm going to just take it this year and look for another job.
So my play now is to enjoy the compensation while looking for another job.
I'm also pulling back heavily in my support to the organization, which is tough because I'm not used to putting in less than 110%.
I'm trying to look on the bright side though. I think this experience may have cured me of my tendency to be a workaholic.
So my advice: put in your 110% for 90% of the time (or something like that :)) I do this periodically. When required I'm there 110%. Done with something at 2pm Friday? Yeah well today I'll just call it a day instead of fixing yet another bug from the backlog that wasn't even in the sprint.
HTTPS://Levels.FYI/2020
I've experienced similar situations professionally. My previous employer was happy to hear and implement ideas from anyone on the team, it lead to a really productive and tight knit group, things got done well and at a good pace. My current one is the opposite. Very prescriptive, ideas coming from the top down. As a result everythimg moves like molasses and it's killed all the motivation I have for the work I do there.
I'd urge you not to give up. I still believe things can change for the better, it feels like we're at a tipping point where society will either improve massively or fall into stagnation. Gen Z gives me hope that the former will win out. They seem much more active and interested in tackling these issues than older generations.
This might be the biggest problem human race has to solve. How to encourage and reward good behavior for the greater good. Economists would say it's a problem on how to price in externalities. It doesn't matter.
I see it everywhere. In academia, most big PIs I've met don't care about pushing knowledge frontiers. It's about their own careers, putting their names on as many manuscripts as possible and securing funding to hire more and more people.
In my neighbourhood teens are systematically breaching COVID restrictions with huge illegal parties, spreading disease and therefore causing fatalities. Since the odds of having severe COVID are low for them, they don't care.
The local power plant was scamming with their emissions in a VW-like way, by tampering CO2 meters in their chimneys.
I could go on and on.
How can we address these behaviors? Pg has said somewhere I can't find now that scaling big companies is still an unsolved problem, and that solutions are welcome. I think it's the same class of issue. Once you are big enough to require a layer of middle management, you won't be able to filter out the selfish ones.
And a pure focus on “us” can lead to poorer outcomes as there is no immediate reward for the person doing the work.
I'm not claiming capitalism doesn't work (at least for many definitions of capitalism, and work), but we should acknowledge its drawbacks, acknowledge strengths of other systems that otherwise failed, and hope to find a better model that has similar advantages with fewer of the drawbacks.
..except when we're not. You often see in-group worker game the system by taking ever increasing cash comp ("i win either way") or special incentive bonuses for managers who ensure delivery. Meanwhile, VCs are on first-out preference shares. Worse, you often dont know this is happening so you continue to think the real game is cashing out your equity.
This is poor governance IMHO. And many workers end up sniffing it out. The ultimate capitalist system would have absolutely guaranteed comp by equity w/o special side incentives.
But I think it’s disingenuous to say that a system focused on “we” suddenly solves all the issues with capitalism (which is what the grandparent was trying to infer).
Alternatives to capitalism have been tried and it always fails.
Venezuela is the most recent example.
I just looked up Venezuela's situation. Well, food prices are going up because diesel sanctions prevent farmers from running their tractors. That's definitively not a currency problem.
Focusing on freedom ends up in anarchy and chaos everywhere.
Freench revolution is the most recent exanple - just look at the amount of people beheaded!
It's individualism for me now. Me, my friends, the neighbours.
Everyone else, figure it out, I'm not your pawn.
And yet, oddly enough, countries with regular civil unrest tend not to be bastions of civil liberty, but violent mafia-run hellholes.
Perhaps the capitalists should drop the talk about freedom and voluntary trade. Or we need a new word for "freedom" that doesn't classify structurally coerced choices as "free".
If government policies are set in a way that encourages this outcome then that's what you get. It doesn't have to be that way.
In nations where people don't believe such blatant lies money doesn't turn into power nearly as easily. And look, poor people in those countries are actually much better cared for and live better lives than in USA! The bottom 90% are 90% of voters and therefore have all the power to make whatever policies they want. And once the 90% makes a lot of policies it is really hard to stop them from continuing doing that, you have to work really really hard to keep them away from power and to continue keeping them away.
You responce sounds like you are trying to have it both ways
But it is interesting to wonder if decreased birth rates could be both a symptom and cause of decreasing collectivism.
Not a very glorious or elaborate response, granted, but Occam's Razor must never be ignored.
"Decreasing collectivism" is only stemming from "every man for himself" because the economy is objectively getting worse and worse for most folks out there. It's a very logical outcome.
It’s not egotistical it’s just a matter of perspective. Most people don’t get to decide or don’t have enough energy to decide to “get mine” even if they knew where to begin.
There was a time, when I was.
And I've been blindingly lucky to crawl, bit by bit, out of that.
But I still identify with that, because precisely the same societal decisions that fuck me, are the ones that fuck them too.
I owe them something. They're still struggling.
I don't owe the rest of society anything at all.
Of course companies who are doing well can also afford to pay more and give all sorts of perks to their employees.
I suspect often that is the actual causation, not vice versa. People like to point at successful companies and say "see, if you would treat your employees like that, you would be just as successful". That seems a bit silly.
But assuming the best intent is just plain ahistorical. We’re only a century out from when companies routinely hired armed security services to threaten and ultimately murder people organizing to get their share of what wealth they created. That’s widely understood to be excessive now and those of us in privileged career positions take that for granted, but I think it’s worth remembering that some people still have that to survive and most of the rest of us are navigating a kinder gentler version.
To be honest that sounds to me as if those people "organized" to take by force what they thought they deserved. In that case, hiring security for defense seems justified.
But you mention causation. You have to treat your employees well if you want to be successful. It is necessary, but not sufficient.
Taking an extreme example, soldiers at war. Are they generally being treated well? I'm not sure they are, and I don't necessarily mean deliberately. I don't think generals want their soldiers to be killed, in general. It just happens that situations arise where there is struggle and soldiers get killed.
I remember complaints about CD Projekt Red (makers of Cyberpunk 2077) who had to ask for death marches despite of initial promises to ever do so. I don't think they liked doing that, but presumably the business situation made it necessary.
So the pressure to deliver sooner rather than later also directly benefited the employees financially, even if it negatively affected their time and work/life balance.
So instead they decided to crunch and deliver a buggy game with the result that other people were so disappointed that they didn’t buy it.
I don’t know which is the bigger group, but I wish they would have delayed it.
I'm saying that this applies at every level of the scale, in work, love, friendship, society, everything.
We are wasting mind-bendingly tremendous amounts of talent in our world simply because of tunnel-vision mindsets.
And it saddens me that as hard as I try, I can't change this. I've spent my career trying. The well has run dry, and now I'm one of them. :/
The culture in which you and I and many others live is, in the current historical moment, a deeply deranged one - 'deranged' not in the colloquial sense, but as an engineer might use it: we live within a giant machine which for a long time now has been operating dangerously far outside its design parameters, with all the metaphorical noise and smoke and flying bits of molten steel that entails. We're all dodging its shrapnel all the time, to a greater or lesser degree. Or failing to dodge. I forget who said it, but I like the way it's put in this (paraphrased) quote: "Everyone is walking wounded. We have never seen a totally sane human being." - not even in the mirror.
Even in the best of times, such a machine needs a large team chosen from among the best of people to operate it effectively. These are not the best of times, and they are not the best of people. Whether there'll be any fixing it before the bearings seize and the spindles snap, I've no idea. But even if they run it to destruction, that won't be the end of the world, although from here it seems like it would be. And either way - in the meantime, we all still have to get through the day, you know?
It's to your credit that you tried so hard. But there's no shame in losing to something that's this much too big for any of us. Try not to take on too much about it, and spend some time thinking about how it, and you, might be if the machine does stop in your lifetime.
Human to human, one at a time.
Skip the interactions that discount you.
https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/why-high-earners-work-long...
Companies that are better to work at have generally seen more growth in their stock price:
https://www.glassdoor.com/research/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/...
Doubt these findings will change corporate policies however.
Can you explain your change of heart? You mention it happened in the last year but I’m not sure why. If anything this last year has motivated me to do even more. And I believe we can and will, but I am in a good place professionally.
Are you speaking more personally than professionally?
It sounds like maybe you did achieve some of what you set out to do but maybe you don’t think it was enough?
It's not about my accomplishments, but whether I feel like I have a stake in this. I have no stake in it now. They want a future that I don't want.
No social ties, no bonds, no community. No counter-culture. No culture. No high street. No shopkeepers.
Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber, Facebook, Netflix.
Skyrocketing wealth inequality. Printing, printing, printing, QE, home prices ten times the median wage.
An elite, and an underclass.
A society that interacts, in a regulated manner, through a screen. By _force_.
Because it's "safer". De-risked. Comfortable.
And their answer for me? Therapy. Anti-depressants. Coping strategies. Learn to love the screen.
Embrace the new future.
Not me. Your insults, your attempts at control, they bounce off me now. "I'm alright, Jack", as they say.
It was supposed to be satire on consumer culture. Looking at it again, it's could be called forward time shifted documentary.
Now that you've become "Red Pilled" as wrong thinker, you'll search out for more truths.
Especially how the establishment elite class pushes propaganda and pits the lower classes against each other.
When lower classes are fighting each other about racism, etc. then they don't have time to fight against oligarchy. How the establishment elite keeps getting richer every second.
Those are the most minor, trivial aspects of what has happened over the last year in the UK, and what continues to happen as we speak.
How about we make a trade.
I'll wear a mask in situations where others are concerned, take my vaccine, and you may distance from me as much as you'd like. You know, like I am and have been doing for eleven months now.
In return - I want my life back. Let's reinstate the democratic process, let's make it legal for me to go for a walk without an excuse, run my own business without having goons lock the doors, you know, stuff like that.
You keep your end of the bargain, I keep mine.
Fair trade? Or is this the part whereby you call me names, shout at me, and expect me to respond in kind?
I am choosing to do this, for you. It does not benefit me. Take it for granted at your own peril.
IMO, the UK handled Covid exceptionally poorly by repeatedly being afraid to act until it was too late.
Here in Australia (Specifically the Northern Territory) we locked down hard early on while we had around 20 cases, I think it was for 2 months, after which no further lock downs have been required. Quarantine for travelers has prevented Covid getting in to the community. Basically due to how we have handled it life is pretty much the same as before Covid here, restaurants are open, the shopping mall is packed and the only thing we had to give up was 2 months and international holidays.
By locking down hard on age groups who aren't vulnerable to the virus you're enabling the clown world that OP is referring to.
Sure lock down the elderly that's fine but making national health policy based on one demographic is full on straight clown world stuff.
With an infectious disease like this, what you want is to curb its ability to spread. That means disrupting the entire social network, because while the virus is most dangerous to the elderly, it spreads best through the young. Also lung damage, the fact that small chance of disability or death multiplied by whole country getting infected equals to more harm than inconveniencing everyone a bit and nipping the problem in the bud, yadda yadda. These are all tired points.
The main way UK (and US, and a chunk of EU) response was a "clown world" was pretending there's no problem until it was too late, and then doing too little, and then doing stupid things that nullified the effect of previous interventions.
But right now, we're eleven months in and it's illegal for me to have a single friend over for a cup of tea.
Not advised against; not something we should limit; illegal, punishable by law.
I'm at the point at which I've been told by medical health practitioners to ignore this nonsense and see people for my own wellbeing.
We have a vaccination program running in the UK and it's going fairly well. The thing that is keeping me clinging to sanity is the fact that once the vulnerable groups have been vaccinated, I'm just getting on with life.
Without that; well the news is saying 'social distancing until 2022' and the Government are telling us that maybe in a month it'll be legal to sit on a park bench with a coffee.
This is not me being hyperbolic. It is currently illegal for me to leave my house and sit on a park bench.
If I followed that stuff to the letter, I'd have already gone postal or just thrown myself in front of a train.
This is a policy that, if it works at all, works for specific types of people; nuclear families, introverts, etc.
Those might even be a majority.
But it's not viable at a population level because a significant percentage of people are either in situations whereby they need to mix households in order to function, or have brain chemistry which means that avoiding social mixing for prolonged periods (months or more) causes them to become depressed, anxious, or in extreme cases psychotic.
We're doing all of this stuff in an attempt to reduce coronavirus cases prior to vaccination, because we care about public health, not purely for the sake of it. That would be "clown world".
> But it's not viable at a population level because a significant percentage of people are either in situations whereby they need to mix households in order to function, or have brain chemistry which means that avoiding social mixing for prolonged periods (months or more) causes them to become depressed, anxious, or in extreme cases psychotic.
That's absolutely true. The long-term effects of social restrictions on public health and general morale was something somewhat unexpected, or at least not thought much about early in 2020 (and, hindsight being 20/20, only confirms that the big mistake was not doing hard but short lockdowns early on). I'm just hoping we can vaccinate our way out of this in the coming months, because even introverts are having troubles taking this much longer. Myself, I started this pandemic in a state of being burned out by interacting with other people - a year later, I now desperately crave some socialization, but I'm not sure if I'm even capable of it anymore.
I actually had to look this up in order to make sure I had the dates right, but it's absolutely correct.
It is also illegal to meet a single person in your garden or outside unless you're exercising. I don't have exact timings on that, because in order to protect my mental health I've stopped following the news.
"A tad excessive" is understating it a bit. It's inhuman. Writing it down makes me feel ill. When people talk about it as if it's normal and okay, I get an intense feeling of anger and a desire to cause them pain.
So if you want your perspective on why people are acting like "covidiots" or whatever offensive name we're applying to our brothers now - this is why.
I am done with bureaucratic despots telling me what to do, I am not a guinea pig to be experimented on.
I've felt like you for a long time, after monitoring the actual statistics instead of the news.
Do you think Covid is following an exponential growth model in the under 55 age group if in a YEAR there's still less deaths than car accidents?
Covid is way more complex than "SHUT IT ALL DOWN, EXPOENTIAL GROWTH, FLATTEN THE CURVE".
These have just become buzzwords for simple minds to cling to a simple narrative and don't model the world accurately at all.
Honk honk! Welcome to Clown world!
Anyway, my point is that the UK choose their current situation by being afraid to act back when small steps could have made a huge difference.
No no it doesn't.
What is the percentage of people who have that type of reaction? Have you even looked at that? It's miniscule.
It's argued not to be from Covid directly but by comorbidities and would happen with any illness.
The news media blew it up out of proportion to scare you and millions of other people like you who have a poor grasp ofstatistics and risk... for money and it worked!
Welcome to clown world. Honk honk!
Your leaders not taking it seriously to begin with is the reason you are in this situation now.
Where I am we took this seriously early last year, and as a result have been able to live life mostly like normal since.
Anyway, you live in a democracy, so maybe convince as many people as possible to vote someone else in at the next opportunity. And if you think they are all stupid then run yourself.
Honk honk!
I'm tired of it as well, but rather I feel the length of the lockdown is a result of the prevarication that took place in the beginning and a continuing series of poor choices intended to save political face afterwards.
My opinion is that had we locked down hard and early, banning foreign arrivals until the pandemic passed globally, we'd have quickly been able to meet without putting anyone's health at risk and at a lower economic cost.
Initially, at the start of the lockdown in March 2020, people voluntarily acted far in excess of legal requirements, or even guidelines.
I think that this made sense, and I'm proud of our behaviour on that front. I remember walking out of the house, once a week, in my homemade mask, to do the weekly shop.
Beyond that, as we learned more about the virus, but bizarrely went the other way and started to make everyday activities unlawful in an attempt to control the population, well, I've been increasingly choosing not to comply for the sake of retaining my sanity.
The Government simply does not get to decide on my behalf whether I have my friends and family over for dinner. I don't give them that power; if they wish to send men with guns like an authoritarian despot, that's their choice.
I think that if we'd enacted sane policies it wouldn't bother me as much.
Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber etc should have had an 80-90% windfall tax for the duration given that their competition is essentially illegal.
Tenants with no income should have had their rent cancelled. Not delayed - cancelled.
Working from home policies should have been optional for employees. Students should not have been required to pay full rent and full fees for Zoom calls.
But we haven't done any of that. We've taken a public health crisis and used it to absolutely destroy the country.
It's a leadership problem, and hard to fix for regular Joe.
It leads me to my original post:
> They will throw you under the bus immediately and comprehensively as soon as there's even the slightest microscopic threat to their wellbeing.
> And they'll cast the blame on you. They'll say it's your failing. They'll say - never mind our responsibilities to you - you need to do your bit regardless.
I'm just repeating myself now though.
I voluntarily restricted myself for a long while. Far, far longer than I should have, to the point that I may have given myself brain damage.
Now I am visiting my family because I'm not willing to do it indefinitely. The UK government is waffling on about restrictions until 2022 despite the fact we'll have vaccinated most of the vulnerable in a month or two.
Everyone has their breaking point, and I've reached mine.
Two weeks to flatten the curve, yo.
I'm opening up from March 23, they can do whatever they want.
But I can't help but wonder if there wasn't another way, like making only that most vulnerable part of society go in lock-down -- and nobody else. Most of the elder people aren't exactly spending hours outside every day anyway (by my observations at least which can of course be wrong). And many of them don't have the physical energy to be active outside, so maybe making only them go in lock-down would have been the best outcome for everyone?
Who knows. But in general the COVID pandemic has been handled extremely poorly almost everywhere. And businesses are closing down forever.
Thankfully it appears the vaccines will be effective if enough people get them for life to return to normal soon.
"Just a few weeks to flatten the curve" was a once in a generational play. I did my bit, and so far I've been punished for it.
I really hope for our sake it doesn't come down to this again, because this time it really will be a bloodbath, rather than a particularly bad year or two.
You are absolutely correct that there might not be "next time" even if that means humanity's doom.
Careless reasoning risks under reacting just as much as over reacting.
I've read a study in my home country about children suffering from bronchopneumonia (I was one of them) at early age and how does that affect their adult life -- and how much does it reduce their life expectancy (especially in terms of increasing the chance of pulmonary diseases in elder years).
I mean, all diseases are awful -- especially those that leave lasting negative effects.
The whole thing seemed to turn into a campaign to gain political capital at one point. Enforcement was loose, rules changed many times (the WHO organization didn't help matters there), and data gathering was unreliable for months.
What are we to do? Just bow our heads and pretend that the people in power are oracles? I am willing to obey well-informed decisions but at least where I live clear facts were extremely hard to get throughout at least half the 2020.
I don't necessarily disagree with you -- making this clear here. It's just that the pandemic was handled in a rather totalitarian manner and results have been... questionable.
:(
There's an old movie called They Live, starring wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper.
It's supposed to be satire on consumer culture, but looking at it now can be thought as time shifted documentary.
Are you sure you're not the one that's spying on the wrongthinkers? ;) Just kidding.
Why is it not getting better?
Who keeps getting richer every second, while everyone else stagnates?
The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in.
When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely killed it, I was paid well for the time, everyone was happy.
When I moved on and was given the respect and decision making ability that I wanted - same thing. Absolutely smashed it out of the park, money flowing from every plug socket.
Whenever I've been in a working environment that has cost cutting, or bureaucratic bollocks, or management that decide what's best for the employees rather than asking them - my productivity has been horrendous, the company has lost money.
Every single time I've worked without return - burnout. Every time, without fail.
This extends outside of work. The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money, to just thinking - you know what?
No-one outside of your immediate circle cares. They never did, and never will. They will throw you under the bus immediately and comprehensively as soon as there's even the slightest microscopic threat to their wellbeing.
And they'll cast the blame on you. They'll say it's your failing. They'll say - never mind our responsibilities to you - you need to do your bit regardless.
Well, you know what? Fuck you guys, I'm getting mine now.