It's easy: You're pre-selected. You've been trained for decades in one way or another to unquestioningly chase the mission. You went through five interviews and putting mission-over-self was the #1 selection criterion in each.

You call it imposter syndrome or cPTSD or ADHD but the truth is you've just had people screaming expectations in your ear your whole life. It's not a question of you vs. your employer but of you vs. not-you. And you always pick not-you because that's all you know how to do.

I always enjoyed this song along these lines

https://genius.com/Lcd-soundsystem-other-voices-lyrics

Much love to you for bringing up lcd soundsystem.

So what does it mean to pick you in this situation?

Unemployed

In the short term, you get a pretty-much-objectively-better employee. In the long term, hiring too many of this type of employee hurts the company culture in a way similar to the CEO being surrounded by "Yes" men. It creates a paralyzed indecision culture of over-engineering. The binge-and-purge nature of tech is to reach this state and then do massive layoffs to address it.

Before globalization, you company's funds would stay in your local community. Success of the company would mean more funds in your community, which would mean a safer or better living environment for you.

Nowadays, of course, most of that money disappears overseas so you're right.

Plus that company would look after you if you committed to them and they might employ your kids and grandkids too if you could help keep them around.

Now... Doesn't matter if your employer succeeds or fails. You just go somewhere else and do the same thing for a similar salary, and some numbers go up or down in wealthy people's portfolios. Not sure if that's freeing or depressing.

You mean the capitalists ensured that they exploited you enough so that they also had your offspring on the hook for further exploitation? You almost made that sound like a good thing.

That's a pretty cynical take but there are some truly old businesses in the world where generations of families have worked and enjoyed a good life. Work can uplift people and be a centre of the community. Or it can be like most are today where you work away for some faceless shareholders who fire you when they need a stock price boost.

> enjoyed a good life

Did they? As good as the capitalists company owners life?

Or have they just been told that „this is the good life“?

I think the problem today is that a lot of work is actually not needed anymore. It’s just there to make a small elite richer and keep people under control.

Sometimes being able to buy a house and raise a family is a good enough life.

The question is, what would they have been able to buy without the exploitation?

No system can fix a corrupt elite. Even Adam Smith acknowledged that capitalism is an abusive system when you have elites that do not have their people’s best interest in mind.

A high trust, cohesive populace is the minimum for any societal progress. And that starts with rulers who work to ensure they’re doing right by their people. America, instead, has rulers on both sides working to ensure the populace hates one another.

I'm on the camp that it's depressing, devoid of meaning, I'm human, I want to care. It's definitely not freeing to me to feel this jaded, this "whatever" feeling... I'd love to actually care more deeply about my employer if I knew there was a counterpart to it, the feeling of being a cog is life-sucking, why does it matter I work except for the money I'm paid for it?

Typing this out made me realise that it's exactly the kind of metric that is hidden, all the bean-counting and MBAs cannot put a value into the engagement of an individual towards their employer when they feel safe and cared for. It does not have value on the next quarter or next year, it has value over 10-20 years, and given climate change and other issues that devolve over a long term it seems that late-stage capitalism simply does not care about 10-20 years spans, at all. There's no incentive and no punishment for caring or not caring, it's all in the now.

This immeadiatism will be the bane of the whole system, it's not sustainable.

At least where I‘m living (Switzerland), the company‘s funds would stay with the very rich local company owners and make them even richer. Technically the funds stayed in the local community of course, but without benefit for the commoners.

I don‘t see a fundamental difference here.

I don't like being an employee as I like to do my own thing. I'd appreciate your thoughts on https://www.adama-platform.com/2023/04/15/going-hard.html

Maybe if you have shares of your company stock there’s some motivation?

I believe that only works if you believe you'll benefit from moving the stock up and are in a position in which you actually can. Both seem doubtful to me for many workers. This is also why commission is a great motivator for sales people; they directly benefit from putting in the extra mile, so of course they want to work hard. Meanwhile a tech worker centering a div has no way of connecting their work with the company's bottom line unless they work in ads or similar. Even then they're more likely to be tangibly rewarded with a bonus or promotion.

Edit: Here's a simple math calculation that illustrates my point. Let's say you increase your company's stock price by 10% which is enormous for an established company, and 60% of your TC is stock. Congratulations, you got yourself a 6% pay raise, which is checks notes an inflation adjusted raise.

The example is a bad one because if one person does something attributable to just them that causes an established company’s market cap to rise by 10%, you will have earned quite a bit of recognition which should translate to future income security and additional income.

Hence bonuses and promotions...

bonuses have become almost algorithmic

at least where I work in BigTech, your bonuses are more or less pre-baked based on:

- company prospects (they do well, you do well)

- seniority (your "level")

- tenure

I've not seen anyone get outsized bonuses based on individual merit

I have asked people to try and convince me of this on several occasions, and the best argument so far has been about climate change and how preventing that is in my interest.

That's pretty good for the specific case, but fails in the general case. You could maybe generalize it out to altruism, if you believe your company being more efficient will be net good for other people, but that's not a given.

Part of it probably comes down to company culture. Working at a place full of people that are engaged and fixing/reporting/debating things is healthy. It's a good environment for people to learn and grow so you can move ahead in your career long-term. Being stuck somewhere where everyone is coasting is demoralizing. You'll most likely plateau in skill since you won't take on hard problems and need to constantly learn new things. You can learn stuff outside of work but it's also nice to have a life and not feel like you're working the mines.

Work is supposed to be fun too. Some people get a rush from working on hard problems. There's at least some joy when you debug a heisenbug for a day or two and finally solve it or take on an impossible project and succeed. Having a team that you gel with where everyone is high flow state makes you look forward to doing work things too.

When you look at it economically as a 8 hours in $$$ out, you're looking at the short-term and discounting your long-term personal growth. If you aren't growing in your job, leave and find a place where you can build your skills and work on things that you find enjoyable.

There are probably some software jobs that would be fun to do. Why not go for a fun job doing something you love if you're currently stuck?

Not disagreeing with your perspective but as an exec here is my perspective

A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan).

B) People that show up and dependably are very important until someone cheaper makes more sense.

The rat race at any job you have is evaluating where between A and B you want to achieve your career goals.

You're missing any mention of alignment and as a result I think you're leaving out a very key situation where someone can be in your group (A) but actually working against the overall company goals.

If you hire someone to solve problem X but they get sidetracked and spend all their time on problem Z instead... they can be excelling at driving solutions and still be doing the wrong thing in the eyes of the company.

Caring about completely different things than your boss can get you in trouble even if you excel at everything you do.

That’s just bad management. High quality work that doesn’t actually move the business needle is almost the same as if people didn’t even come in at all.

That said managing a large organization is extremely hard. I don’t think most companies have the overall business dynamics to sustain a large company where teams can do things that don’t matter. Usually those companies, which there are a lot in the tech world, have something else going on (no product market fit and too much cash) that leads to those symptoms

> That’s just bad management. High quality work that doesn’t actually move the business needle is almost the same as if people didn’t even come in at all.

I mean, it's worse, IME, it usually slows down the rest of the org.

But it is worth mentioning in the discussion of "why should I care if my employer does great or not when there's no direct reward in it for me" - otherwise you could just wave that whole question away with "that's just bad management" more generally. Yet it's mathematically implausible to suggest that everyone can escape bad management; some number of managers are going to be subpar, so the situation remains relevant to people.

I agree that it’s worse in like 99% of cases that 1% though overly influenced my word choice :)

To your other point, I wasn’t trying to be as hand wavy as that came across.

There will always be people who make mistakes or are not good fits for their job (engineers, management, execs, investors, etc).

Maybe a better way to say it is that low impact work happens at the tail end of bad management. It’s usually a luxury problem (pet projects from a company that makes too much money but has too little maturity) or a symptom of terrible management (no clue what is valuable or worse unable to actually get team to work on what is valuable)

> A) The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan).

And what is the company doing in exchange for these people? Extra Compensation? Extra promos? Extra Vacation time?

Or is the company just subjugating people with bullshit performance reviews, PIPs, canceled bonuses, dangling promos?

Companies only want people that are in he A bucket. That’s what market rate is.

If you aren’t actually and truly in the A group then your company is thinking about how to pay you less, replace you eventually, or invest in other people who likely will become part of the A group.

Right. I'm still not hearing what the company will do for A workers.

How can management guarantee that an A player is evaluated and rewarded correctly? What controls does the company have to prevent B-level management from hurting A-level workers?

I think he's saying that you will continue to get paid and be part of the team. That's the trade. The others are on their way out, slowly or quickly. Not that there's some extra benefit by being on the A side.

> I think he's saying that you will continue to get paid and be part of the team. That's the trade. The others are on their way out, slowly or quickly. Not that there's some extra benefit by being on the A side.

And why does he think that A employees will continue to be around if this is the game?

I assume the quiet part is "they won't have a choice not to because everybody is playing the same game"

That still doesn't answer the question of what value the company is bringing to the employees.

>The most valuable people can notice problems, find solutions and get it done (either themselves or by articulating a pragmatic plan).

Do you compensate these people? Why should I be this person if you don't pay me for it?

As an SVP of Eng: Market dynamics and pay equity mostly force me to pay everyone the same. Not everyone gets paid the same but little disparity between people of high impact and low. Ie most companies total annual comp between people is a lot smaller than you’d think.

So the job of management is to weed out people who aren’t having as high as possible impact when convenient.

I don’t like it, but it’s often what’s going on

This strikes me as nonsense corp-speak.

"Market dynamics" force you to pay your highest performers barely more than your lowest performers?

How exactly does that work?

Disparity between executive salaries and worker salaries are astronomical, but when it comes time to reward your highest performing workers you can't find any possible way to increase their take home? Between salary, bonuses, stock grants, retirement plan matching or any other possible methods of compensation, your hands are absolutely tied? Because of "Market Dynamics and Pay Equity"?

Come on.

yeah, its sort of the unintended down side of pay equity / transparency movements. Very little room for discretion anymore, gotta be "in band". For better or for worse. I think its mostly for the better, but yeah thats the way it is.

I've found nothing more frustrating in jobs than when I can't help but care about things the company doesn't care about.

If your company doesn't care about 50K I don't think there's a need for me to convince you to care about it. If they have no mechanism for either raising those savings opportunities to leadership and prioritizing fixes, or rewarding someone for saving them 50k on their own, they pretty clearly don't care.

So if you're in a company where nothing that you could do from your own initiative would matter to the company (maybe you can save them 50k but they are spending 400 million a year so it's a drop in the bucket), you can still care about success for job security, any sort of bonus or stock compensation, etc. But how much you should care maybe should be proportional to how much you can influence.

Maybe the company is being irrational to not care, maybe they aren't, but you also choosing not to care about the things they don't care about seems healthy to me.

(It's good to remember that while "Quiet Quitting" is the buzzword of the day, this is also literally the premise of a 25 year old movie, Office Space. Literally down to the level of "it's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I don't care" and "Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ")

> "I've found nothing more frustrating in jobs than when I can't help but care about things the company doesn't care about."

Gotta put it in my fortune file.

Fortune has so many hilarious lines in it. I feel like it makes me a little smarter.

replace "saving 50k" with "eliminating tech debt" for many

we all know we could rebuild or refactor systems to improve them, but all we would be doing is spending time and money to earn no more money, because the "improved" product/service wouldn't appear different to the outside world

my new attitude is to not even both with tech debt unless the product will be enhanced or improved in some user-obvious way

Your point about this reminds me of this scene in Office Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_1lIFRdnhA

This movie really spoke to me during the pandemic and I'm guessing it has for many others as well.

That being said... I do think it's more about who you work with that makes work more enjoyable. I find extra motivation at work for mundane things like working on tech debt if it means making my colleague's job easier and such.

Yeah I rewatched it a couple times after getting laid off. It’s always uncanny how “real” many of Mike Judge’s characters are.

Because for the next job hop you can put on the resume "saved 50k a month in cloud waste" and it'll make for an interesting discussion.

You can put it on the resume anyways and as long as you are able to describe how you would do it and field questions about the idea, no one really will fact check too hard.

I honestly do that. If I have an idea that I know will be near-impossible to get through the internal politics and that likely nobody will really care about (like the saving 50k example), I put the idea on my CV as if I actually implemented it. I get asked about it at interviews and just fantasize about what would have happened had I done it. People tend to be mighty impressed. I tend to choose under-the-radar things that my boss wouldn't necessarily know about.

From a pure selfish point of view (not judging), by reporting it, you'll be able to add a bullet to your resume/LinkedIn saying you helped the company save $50 thousand dollars a year, which in turn increases your odds of landing a better-paying job in the future.

Accepted.

You are an employee, but if you would like to explore consultancy and possibly earn 2X or more, then fix this, document it, and start a side hustle doing ONLY this. I suspect if you can do it for one, you can do it for hundreds. If you do not fix it, it will be harder to sell. If you do, you have proof.

Why aren't your job hopping then and getting more money?

Doing your job properly can lead to unexpected rewards. I found great contacts that helped me job hop after I performed some tasks with excellence. Mediocrity or active sabotage as you suggest also do not motivate me at all.

Ultimately society is the result of our collective effort. If I'm employed and assigned to a task, I do my best to finish it well, within reason - no overtime, not working on weekends, etc. I think this attitude leads to much better outcomes personally and socially than the one you describe.

This is understated a lot. Sometimes you work hard, not for the company, not for your boss, but for your coworkers sitting in the trenches with you. It pays off in terms of the relationships built. I would not recommend/refer mediocre devs to new companies. I'm sure lots of other people feel the same way to. Don't be a lazy dev. Work hard at the current job and find another one.

> But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it

Are you empowered to fix it instead of just reporting it? How much effort to fix it? Sometimes the effort to do the fix is smaller than the work of selling the problem and jockeying for priority in the issue reporting process. Especially if going through those processes won't lead to anything meaningful getting done besides extra bureaucratic work.

Or if you have skip-level meetings with your manager's manager, get their opinion. Or even finance's opinion. It may be unclear how to reallocate that savings to other projects or budgets. Or if people are penalized for unplanned savings by having to over-explain it, there may be misaligned incentives that someone higher up might want to improve. For example if 10, 100, or however many other employees each find 50k savings that turns into real money quickly.

> Are you empowered to fix it instead of just reporting it? How much effort to fix it? Sometimes the effort to do the fix is smaller than the work of selling the problem and jockeying for priority in the issue reporting process. Especially if going through those processes won't lead to anything meaningful getting done besides extra bureaucratic work.

This has always been a warning sign for me; I've had cases where I was admonished for spotting a 1-line, very obvious bug (that either -would- happen, or was an as-yet-unfiled/unprioritized support request/ticket.) Never mind I'm already in that part of the code base and fixing/testing it would be trivial; The bug -must- be tracked separately, which means it must be prioritized and wait for proper resources to again be allocated before work can be done. These work places tend to be pretty toxic in other ways FWIW.

Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need -- this is [hu]man.

this type of malaise will be fixed as 80% of the people and companies in tech disappear over the next ten years

the remaining 20% will replace all of their workers with fresh blood from college and for a time, everyone will feel vital