The only mystery is why this guy acknowledged he could earn more money by switching jobs, yet chose to harm his body for his underpaying employer, which he himself acknowledged.
He feels “almost” betrayed after that. Wonder what it takes to convince him he is being betrayed.
If most people are making the obvious move to better compensated jobs with better working conditions, what’s driving some people to stay in the underpaid, overworked jobs? It’s not hard to switch jobs in 2021.
And cleaning 40 rooms in a day is disgusting, no way a hotel room gets properly cleaned in 15 min or less and laundry gets properly washed or protocols are followed.
Edit: nevermind, I read more of the article and Marcus is a $15 per hour employee, not a salaried “manager”.
> While Marcus used to complete “every single step” while cleaning rooms, they now sometimes skip dusting and mopping. But they worry that slacking off too much will only backfire on their colleagues, who would be the ones left to clean up the mess. “That’s the only thing that holds me back,” they say.
You get good at it.
Different people did different parts of the job, with only one in a room at a time. For example, one person removed all the bedsheets, cleaned surfaces, polished mirrors, replaced toilet rolls etc and tidied things that were out of place including the resident's items. Another brought in and fitted clean bedsheets and placed clean towels. Another went around with a vacuum cleaner after them.
The total time per room when you count each person probably exceeded 20 minutes.
When not cleaning rooms I worked in the kitchen.
I was 17 at the time, and this job helped pay my living expenses subsequently at university, because the government grant was sufficient for rent, but no food.
On the other hand, there are lots of motels and franchised hotel operators trying to squeeze 20min per room from housekeepers at low pay, and I would not believe they can keep that pace up and delivery a quality product for 13+ hours in a day.
I think there's a real perception of "better the devil you know" for some people that factors into it, even when there's evidence of friends and coworkers doing better. To some degree it's hard to tell if the market is just good or if you just have a sample size of people that got "lucky", and no matter what there's some risk and luck involved in switching jobs. It's even harder if you have little in the way of savings. Having a family relying on you and your income and living mostly month is not a situation amenable to trying to trying new jobs on the market. Stability is prioritized, and even if you secure a new job before quitting the old one, there's always the risk that they'll tell you it's not working our after a couple weeks and then you're in a bad spot.
I am in a state where I am encouraging someone else to move away from their toxic workplace and they still don't do it because they are too afraid and not very confident of their own capabilities (even though they are very talented and financially very secure). Imagine how difficult it would be if you have other barriers on top of the mental one.
I've never seen that happen. I find momentum almost always wins the day and few people really ever 'reverse course' at the same job. Just a human thing.
> These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies.
That's absolutely true and a good opportunity. I know some folks who did that and it worked out great. When you're Jr. you can take chances like that (and IMO should) and it can pay off. If it doesn't, move on... no harm no foul.
Heck when I got my first job in a new industry I joined a small company, wasn't paid a lot, they had old tech / tech debt. It wasn't one of the larger / well known companies in town.
But at that place I could make real changes / whole applications from top to bottom that went into production. Pay went up fast.
Other folks I know who went to the big company and are doing well, but are also kind of amazed "you get to do all that". It's not hard to do, but they don't get those opportunities to do it all themself at big company.
I see a lot of folks who want to land at 'best company' but sometimes I think a variety of companies or even 'not best company' teaches you important things / opportunity.
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity." - Sun-Tzu
That's a genius move. He can also use his new position at the company to pivot their tech stack to mimic the one used at the place he'll be applying soon.
Have you tried paying more?
Unfortunately some companies interpreted "equal pay for equal work" as "everyone makes the same". In effect, polyglot engineers that work on infrastructure-y applications make the same as someone who only works on a web app backend. Infrastructure teams have tried to fix this by promoting quickly or hiring ultra-senior only positions, but then that breaks the promotion model, which has some specific steps and outcomes to it.
It worked at NeXT. But unless you have a world class founder and are hiring in a top tier market, good luck.
The real question you need to ask yourself is: is it equal work and are you an HR company that happens to write software or a tech company?
In my software we deal with complexities in OSI layers 4-8, in multiple languages, with multiple protocols. As long as I've been working in core infrastructure software it's always been this way, and I think that's why I stay in the domain. The challenges are always new and this space sees a lot of constant iteration, but it's usually iteration down in the stack. We deal in systems technology all the way up to HTTP. There's a big variance to the nature of work you'll take on is my point. Additionally, this team seems to benefit from fundamental knowledge in math, systems, and software engineering.
When I worked strictly on web backends the most amount of Layer 4 I ever touched was a load balancer. I dealt in a few protocols but they were all fairly predictable. The system was not really something that we touched, improved, or even really relied on. It was more a consequence of development, so patch solutions were okay. I don't see the kind of fundamental knowledge on my team being required when I filled these kinds of positions, but maybe it could.
The thing I have trouble reconciling is whether I judge web backend development more harshly (and thus think, this is not the same work) purely because it wasn't interesting to me, or because my company doesn't mandate that kind of attention to detail (or tries to provide broad solutions and discourages individual problem solving), etc... It's hard for me to tell on an individual level.
> They weren’t surprised, since the starting pay can be as low as $11 an hour, while “you could go to any of the fast-food places and get at least $4 more,” Marcus says.
So… mystery solved. The company is forced to pay higher wages and the market corrects itself.
The more interesting discussion would be around what happens in these circumstances where low pay isn’t an obvious issue. A few jobs ago we had an employee exodus despite above-average compensation. Many people were leaving to jobs that paid less and they didn’t care. They just wanted out. I stuck around for a while under the foolish thought that maybe management would see the exodus as a wake-up call and reverse course on some obviously bad decisions, but instead they doubled down on the bad choices. Eventually they switched to laying off remaining employees and opening a new office somewhere else because the remaining staff was too demoralized to do much.
Strangely, there were a few die-hard employees who sided with management on every move, no matter how obviously bad the outcome. These were largely junior employees who saw the exodus of senior employees as an opportunity to move up fill in the new vacancies.
In some cases, they were right. One of the more combative but inexperienced coworkers I had is now running his own department. He capitalized on the turmoil to advance his own career. However, the department’s progress has ground to a halt and they haven’t had a good software release in years now. Doesn’t matter much for him, because he can now pivot to another company and show a track record of rapid advancement.