No wonder they aren't inspiring Gen Z. A Mercedes isn't a status symbol for Gen Z, and it barely is for Millennials.

I'm glad to see people recognizing the emperor has no clothes. Sacrificing yourself for a company you don't own--at all, never mind completely--won't make you wealthy. The company wouldn't employ you if you weren't providing them more than you cost them. It's never been easier to create enough value on your own terms to sustain yourself and not let someone else siphon out your value on their terms.

The COVID shutdowns exposed the lack of loyalty (possibly humanity too) on the side of employers. Additionally, most employees have internalized that it's sometimes better to be unemployed while up-skilling than to maximize raw employment time.

This is blowback for companies treating employees as disposable, but acting surprised when employees catch on and start to see such jobs as disposable too.

Either way I see no evidence that there are “a lot of companies that did everything they could to keep people employed” when it meant them losing money or not benefiting from corporate government welfare to keep people employed.

In my experience there are more employers like mine than yours in the world.

This is a stabilizing (therefore desirable) feature in the system, not a bug. I want that (and work hard to ensure that) my company receives more value from me than I cost them. That makes them want to retain me in a stable relationship that benefits both of us. I don't want their surplus to be too great, but I want there to be a definite, undeniable surplus on their end.

The alternative is far worse: if you are costing the company ore than the value you're providing, a rational company should fire you to improve their company. That they haven't means you're working for incompetent leaders in the best case (and leaders who are about to fire you in a worse case).

It’s totally different when you are making $18 / hour and the company calculates your value at $19. Screw up a little bit your done. Push you to work extra for free and they just doubled your net value!

> The alternative is far worse: if you are costing the company ore than the value you're providing, a rational company should fire you to improve their company. That they haven't means you're working for incompetent leaders in the best case (and leaders who are about to fire you in a worse case).

I think the big problem comes from this largely overlooked next part. Companies are rarely rational. Some leaders will keep people on staff just to show that they are a big team. Some leaders have cronies. Some are just super incompetent themselves; and seem to use the Dilbert Principle [1] as a guiding light by promoting their incompetent cronies or flatterers to high positions. Often, they will snare workers in a lot of make-work tasks while awarding huge bonuses to themselves. Anyone in management is rarely fired -- you will often see managers who have been at the same job for 20 years coasting by just as much as, if not more than their employees.

It seems to me that the overlooked part of "quiet quitting" is due to workers noticing this sort of problem in their management; and taking that into account while deciding how long they work.

And, oddly enough I don't think this is at odds with what you said -- basically, the more irrationally a company seems to behave, the more they will get people who want to coast since they realize the irrationality. I feel like a good way to right the ship is to promote a lot more rationality into management; and quickly get rid of managers who seem toxic, prone to cronyism, or having a lot of attitude about "these people work for me".

----------------------------------------

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle, says (semi-humorously) that the most incompetent people usually get promoted to management to prevent them from doing more damage in IC positions

If, as another commenter said, I'm generating $600k of value and only being paid $300k, it's easier now than it ever has been for me to reduce my effort and generate, say, $450k, and still get to keep $300k of it working for myself. I can reduce my output my 25% without reducing my income.

That's not to say it's easy, just easier than it ever has been, and people are figuring that out.

If you reduce that $600K to $450K of revenue, the CM becomes $270K while paying you $300K, meaning a rational employer should fire you.

Yes, a company should fire you of you reduce production by 25% and require the same payment. But the whole point is that all these people are figuring out they don't need the company for their income as much as the company needs them for the revenue they produce.

Invariably, company management viewed the above as an expense to incur only as long as infra was percieved as a problem. In my third year of experience I had a banger of a year at a startup and could rightfully claim 3 million per year in savings. In uncertain terms it was implied to me that I wasn’t expected to stick around for the second year but I was given a 2% raise out of kindness :shrug:

Management generally views themselves as valuable, and finds people like themselves as valuable. I got wise to this and transitioned fields.

The past was no picnic, but I know there was better respect towards the workers in decades gone by. I remember a “how to get rich” book from back then talking about not hiring or contracting the absolute cheapest bid, believe it or not. It preached making sure your side of the deal didn’t come at an unfair cost to another side. Believe it or not.

The long timers in LV who had worked in both the mob days and corporate america/modern had a strong preference for working for the mob. That should tell it all.

// I didn't say this was easy. I said it was how.

Yes that's true of course.

>It's never been easier to create enough value on your own terms to sustain yourself and not let someone else siphon out your value on their terms

Not so sure about that part. Maybe it's easier today but if you mean things like freelancing the problem is that you then have to do lots of stuff that isn't interesting to a lot of technical oriented people (like finding clients, negotiating contracts etc). The advantage of working for a company is that you can concentrate on the things that interest you and leave the rest to others.

Sure you'll end up earning less but, in my book at least, its worth it. But nothing says you have to "sarifice yourself" you can work for a company but still have a decent balance to have time for other things.

For most, it's way more work handling all those tasks you mentioned, in addition to the work you 'are getting paid for'. The stress alone is killer.

In our industry, it's hardly serfdom: I have reasonable autonomy, get paid vacation time, and can largely code (my preference) the bulk of the day.

Will you? I thought going independent had a higher variance but similar or slightly lower median than working for an employer.

Rather than having a company with gazillions of layers of management tell me what my options are for everything outside of the work that is my direct responsibility, I can choose which things I care about and how much and pull those levers myself, either doing them or hiring them done.

Ah sweet summer child. Even if your 1st lvl logic would hold they would ditch you if your replacement + replacement cost was less than yours. But never mind. Companies have limited and wildly inaccurate information regarding your value and contributions. But even worse, "companies" do not make hiring/firing decisions, people do. And people have not only extreme irrational behaviors, but even when they act rational they act in their own interest, not "the company's", and the larger the company, the less causally aligned these interests are.

Obviously the entire thing has a big "in their assessment" caveat around it too. This is also* part of the problem, not anything that negates what I already said.

It's interesting to me that it's defined by owning things in other generations.

I don't think there was ever a time you could take for granted being treated decently. So it does really seem like different priorities.

It was a status symbol to own a Mercedes, now I can easily rent the newest nicest of any car for a few Instagram shots a year.

So this is what many millennials did/do. Chose their status symbol for the current occasion then use something practical the rest of the time.

GenZ was brought up with this mental model and didn’t see any of these rentables as real status symbols.

That's not really true - figuring out contribution value is really hard in a lot of cases, they could be overstaffing for expected growth, keeping you off the market for competitors, could be for political reasons etc.

Millions of reasons why you could be on the payroll but not pulling your own weight.

Well yes, but actually no. "The company" has no idea how much value you provide, and even if it did, the value you provide to "the company" and the value you provide to your immediate management chain (who is likely to make hiring/firing decisions almost autonomously at the IC level) are entirely different. Empire building is the first thing that springs to mind.

This is basic micro economics: both parties are better off after the exchange. It’s not zero sum. Or at least doesn’t have to be.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-microeconomics/chapter/...

IF both parties were actually better off, people wouldn't leave and stay gone. They might strike out, thinking the grass was greener, but they'd be back in short order.

That they're leaving and staying gone shows that the reality wasn't living up to the theory.

Employees are exhausted and their employers were only one part of the equation.

COVID and other personal issues are the others.

Thanks to healthy savings accounts, many people could afford to quit their jobs. Quitting wasn't 100% the employer's fault.

They've clearly concluded they're better off now than before, across whatever factors matter to them, so again, the reality wasn't living up to the theory.

It's currently cobfirming that the pre-covid reality of work wasn't living up to the balance in the theory where everybody ends up better off.

That changes nothing about my point though--if your employer was getting exactly the value they were paying you, they would be indifferent to keeping you employed. And vice-versa.

I want maximum money for myself not making less money so I can make some philosophical point about other people not siphoning value from me. If a company pays me that money then I don't really care how much money they make (aside from when I'm negotiating for more money from them). If something else pays better, without additional cost such as shitty healthcare or a lot of tasks I hate doing, then that's the way to go but not due to caring if someone else also makes money or not.

Many people factor other values into their consideration than raw dollars, but since value is subjective, it's their prerogative to do so and yours to value only money if you wish.

It's not about some self-righteous desire not to produce value for anybody else. It's about a realization that you can derive maximum value without the corporate employer.

Are they? According to the BLS the percentage of people who are self-employed is lower than it was 2004-2006. It increased during the start of covid but hasn't gone up since then.

Going from "we don't want to put as much effort into corporate jobs that won't reward us for it" to "we want to be self-employed" is a big stretch that numbers don't justify.

Meanwhile, it's only the owners actually getting the Mercedes.

Do they truly want people that will happily just throw money down the drain for appearances’ sake?

I’m interested in many ridiculously expensive things. But a car sure ain’t one.

For most of us, it's just how we get places, and there's not a big enough difference between how comfortable I am with a carful of screaming kids in traffic in a Toyota vs. a carful of screaming kids in traffic in a Mercedes.

Driving isn't an "experience" for Gen Z. Being a passenger certainly isn't. They barely look up between getting in the car and back out. They're not even going to notice the features of a Mercedes.

Look at the features and interior of a modern Civic or Corolla. The software is as good as it gets, the quality of materials and fit an finish are as good as what a BMW or Mercedes was a decade ago. A GR Corolla has 300 HP and tons of torque.

Expensive cars just don't make as much of a difference as before.

But one doesn’t need to own or event rent a Mercedes for that.

While I can see how it could be reasonable for a professional driver to use such a car, I fail to see how it makes sense for most other (non-ultra-wealthy) people.

And making owning any specific thing, especially such a generic one, into some sort of personal life goal really is beyond me.

It just isn't the status symbol if was for previous generations.

The tech bro demo in SF loves high tech electrical stuff, and Lucid, Rivian, Taycan, etc. are, COOL and NEW and align to their political and social sensibilities, while also allowing them to flex the conspicuous consumption and signaling.

Mercedes is not new and does not align to obvious socio-political ideals outside of $$$$.

This is also mid-level bling in the grand scheme; the big money is still driving Lambos

Fixations about cars (literally, or as a proxy for income), or about "our people", or "good families", are largely disappearing in the cohort of people who are starting careers and families today.

This trend started 60 years ago in the US, and is finally fully mainstream today, even if some parents are still holding on to the past (and if some communities are slower than others). But thank goodness for the progress, at least!

...

But the super-out of touch part of "new Mercedes" is that, even among the status/materially-motivated members of younger generations, a new car, and certainly a new Mercedes, ain't it.

"We want people who want a new Chevy! .. I mean, a new Lincoln! Cadillac? Camaro? Lotus? Mercedes? BMW TT? Prius?! Tesla?? Rivian??? Oh Jeez stop making it so difficult for me to sign up you kids to make me richer already!"

I assure you it’s not unique to desis in the US.

> even if some parents are still holding on to the past (and if some communities are slower than others). But thank goodness for the progress, at least!

It’s sad how many desis confuse “being more like white people” with “progress.”

But I would suggest that children living their parents' lives, or for their parents' approval, is a recipe for deep dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and lost opportunities for many many people.

Some communities impose their "traditional" (usually hierarchical and patriarchal) expectations on the next generation more strongly than others.

And I would characterize moving away from those kinds of traditional expectations, as progress toward a more (difficult, but) chosen and intentional life. And I would call that a good thing.

But that’s your ultimate point.

> But I would suggest that children living their parents' lives, or for their parents' approval, is a recipe for deep dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and lost opportunities for many many people. Some communities impose their "traditional" (usually hierarchical and patriarchal) expectations on the next generation more strongly than others.

In desi culture, it’s very important that children follow the right track, which their parents understand, instead of their own impulses. This cultural disposition is conducive to success—desi children are far more successful in American society than American children from similar economic backgrounds.

It’s also a recipe for contentment. You assert that living for what parents wants makes kids unhappy, but it seems to me that it’s American kids, who grow up being told to “follow their bliss,” who end up unhappy when their silly and unrealistic dreams fail to materialize. If you look at the statistics, from suicides to drug overdoses to cratering family formation, the western approach isn’t going that well.

> And I would characterize moving away from those kinds of traditional expectations, as progress toward a more (difficult, but) chosen and intentional life.

Individual “choice” is a distinctly western fixation. Worshiping the impulsiveness of youth over the judgment and experience of elders is a western fixation. It’s sad that so many desis conflate “being more westernized” with “progress.”

Self-determination and the ultimate responsibility of children to outgrow the default acceptance of their parents' belief systems are the absolute rights of every generation. Some communities acknowledge that fact, some encourage it, and some hide from it. Hiding won't make it go away.

Anyone who holds them back is committing an injustice against future generations.

It's not measured in economic success. That's a plainly myopic point of view. Freedom of activity and of thought is very noisy stuff, and it necessarily includes some failures. There are parallels to other systems of control exerted upon others here too, i.e. governments, etc. The seeds of those failures live in every community, they just are not dealt with as honestly in some.

The paternalist-authoritarian impulse to constrain the next generation's path is just old people not being able to admit that they don't know everything. This is like the landed gentry model of democracy. This way lies the death of the mind and the spirit.

Remember we're talking about overbearing parents having opinions about what brand of car their child's (inevitably, their daughter's) suitor drives. This is a trivial case of the parents' belief system failing the child. There are much more dramatic cases, of course, springing from the same self-serving impulses.

Spoken as someone who hates the necessity of owning a car. To me, it is a mode of transportation and that's it.

I think the reason cars might not be a reliable status symbol anymore is debt. If someons is in my socia-economic group but driving a very expensive car, it signals to me that they loaned the money so that they could have the status symbol.

I also agree on your last point. Most young people today are unable to afford a home, or even pay off college debt. Wealth distribution is increasingly fat-tailed.

This has been my experience, and my personal theory to explain this change in productivity is that it's taking younger people in the workforce less time to figure it out than it took people my age. There normally comes a time around middle-age, when you say "I've been working like a dog for 15 years now, and what has it gotten me, and what good has it done in the world, and how much worse would it be if I coasted from here on out?" Now that's happening a few years sooner. The pandemic probably accelerated this introspection.

> An ADP Research Institute survey conducted in November 2021 found that U.S. workers said they were doing 8.4 hours of unpaid overtime work each week, down from nine hours the prior year.

Lazy so-and-sos. Makes me sick to my stomach.

One of my friends busted his ass the first year he started working, got an average performance review. 2nd year he chilled out a lot and got a better performance review. Performance reviews at most companies are useless and it doesn't take long to figure it out.

Another friend told me that it's not possible to get the top performance rating in his company. They just don't give that rating out.

My take is that a lot of Gen Z are entering the workforce and thinking "you expect me to do all this work for an ok salary I will never be able to afford a house on? that's a bad deal".

Not just useless but political and down to interpersonal relations more than they are to actual work.

I used to work for a major tech company that would have their employees write a plan for each year. It would be agreed and signed off by your manager.

At the end of the year you were supposed to use this as a template to see if you had achieved your goals, and that would be part of some sort of grading which would affect any bonus, promotion chances and any pay rise you might have coming that year.

Only, in between the two the year would happen. Business realities and management direction would change, and what you did bore little relation to what you planned to do. So instead of you being graded on how much of your plan you had achieved, you were graded much more fuzzily, usually on how much the manager liked you or how much you made them look good to their superiors. I'm not saying this out of bitterness either, I was usually one of the more favoured ones.

When I had a few years under my belt I decided that it was much easier to be a contractor and opt out of all that sort of ****

Boss: You did a good job this year, really appreciate the effort.

Serf: Well, golly thank you boss! Have I noted how great your hair is? Or how well you crack the whip? I surely would not have been as productive had you not been overseeing me with such zest.

So I have to question the validity of your anecdote. And even if you HAVE completely avoided any going-through-the-motions performance reviews, because you're working only for SUPER-early-stage seed round startups, then well... there are plenty of disadvantages to that life too. Not the least of which is that rising interest rates will likely be choking off the 15-year private equity gravy train cycle this year.

A formal review process at least surfaces those thoughts. It’s better than the quiet process where managers form their own conclusions without communicating them.

Individual performance reviews reduce incentives to cooperate, because you only need to have a good review in comparison, not on some non-existent absolute metric.

Performance review systems will always have flaws, but it’s better (in nearly all workplaces) to have a formal and transparent process for them than to have none at all.

Working hard has basically made my career. I'm not substantially smarter than most of the people I've worked with, but I got rapid promotions basically exclusively from going above and beyond.

I respect not everyone wants to do that, but it's concerning that people increasingly don't even see the value in caring.

You're not going to get to $1M+ TC with job hopping alone.

you just exactly described me, exactly 15 years. a lot of sleepless nights dwelling on this.

why do this for another 15, will never afford a home, my savings will be worth -50% in 15 years of what they are now.

i feel like i have to do something different but stuck on that first step. if it was that easy and so on...

Maybe this is true in America, but many of us don't live there despite a desire to do so.

Specially with Air BnB and pensioned foreigns driving the prices sky high.

I think to still know enough about my home country.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIE

In order to have v 2.3 you basically need to have 0 for the next 4 years if you average the previous year in.

[0]: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg

Treating employees like humans; getting to know each one as an individual, and sincerely working to help each of them to achieve their personal goals. Treating their work with Respect is also really important.

I was a manager at a company that paid "competitive" (i.e. "low") salaries, and had to motivate with "softer" rewards.

I've always been a "carrot" person, as opposed to a "stick" person. I find that it's better (but not easier) to lead folks with rewards, than it is to drive them with threats. I also found that money is a fickle motivator. It works well, if you want transient, highly-capable people that will not stick around, and will not be there, when the fecal matter hits the air circulation device.

But I have also found that I'm an outlier, and that my style of management is not only ignored, but attacked and despised.

I'm pretty happy to be out of the Rotten Management Rat Race.

You say this, but money is also part of respect. Many employers do not index raises to inflation, so you're literally working for less each year you stay with that employer. Yes, you absolutely need to treat employees like humans and not numbers, but compensation is part of the respect you show employees. Ignore it at your peril.

> It works well, if you want transient, highly-capable people that will not stick around, and will not be there, when the fecal matter hits the air circulation device.

Anecdotally, the most capable people I have worked with are there to solve problems, and if they run into a problem that can't be solved (mostly because of organisation politics/culture) then they recognise the futility of trying and move on.

Not being there when the excrement hits the fan is just a byproduct of not sticking around in a dysfunctional environment.

Agreed. Many companies push non-monetary HR stuff, in an effort to keep salaries low. That's usually pretty transparent, though.

In the end, there's absolutely nothing that can fix broken management; especially the first- and second-line managers.

I found management to be a very difficult and humbling experience. The variable was usually me; not the employee. I had to be constantly reviewing my own motivations and whatnot.

> Anecdotally, the most capable people I have worked with are there to solve problems, and if they run into a problem that can't be solved (mostly because of organisation politics/culture) then they recognise the futility of trying and move on.

One of my jobs, as a first-line manager, was to shield my employees from the corporate culture. I managed highly experienced C++ engineers, working on pretty advanced image processing pipeline stuff. Not exactly your "bootcamp leetcode master" type. When they finally rolled up our department, the engineer with the least tenure, had ten years, and we were never really paid that well.

But I have had many folks, on this very forum, tell me what a terrible manager I must have been.

Hum... The GP is talking about your superiors. What you just confirmed when you said you had to shield your people from them.

That is, unless you were the one deciding to reduce people's salaries every year.

But I had to fight like crazy to get them raises and promotions. I have to admit that I sometimes did less than I would have liked.

I was often instructed to reduce the positive scores of my employees. It was infuriating. They did good, they deserved praise, even with the best score possible, their raise would not have been that great.

I almost never got a good score, myself, but they also kept me for almost 27 years.

Very few people would show up to work without the money. Let’s stop pretending they would.

You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with me then. No big deal. We find the environment that motivates us.

This is pointedly true for employees who hop between low-wage jobs.

One of the ways that I've learned to practice respect is actually not really getting to know people personally too much. I've been manipulated before by "leaders" who try to use personal information like family needs or other goals as a fake carrot that is not in their power to exchange. As a result I have a pretty "no questions asked" policy on the privacy rights of my direct reports when it comes to approving any time off or facilitating whatever it is they want to do with their careers, and it doesn't require "getting to know them" beyond their own voluntary sharing in private. Sometimes it will grow into a closer relationship but it totally doesn't have to.

Maybe it's an extreme reaction to the bad taste from interacting with folks who like to pretend that work is a family. I just don't trust workplaces enough to be fully vulnerable anymore, and by extension would never demand that another employee be unconditionally trusting with their full humanity, because it is never a two-way street. When the company wants to mess with livelihoods it does not need to seek permission, so it is unfair to ask for the disclosure of personal information beyond what is necessary to carry out the work.

For just one more recent example, I fell for the advertised inclusive corporate culture by putting my pronouns on my Slack profile (having never been publicly out as a queer person at work before), I experienced weird behaviours from people that made it harder to do my job normally. So I ended up going back into the workplace closet because it's just easier to project what "regular" folks want to see in order to solve problems efficiently.

I'd love to hear your take on healthy boundaries, because sometimes I wish there could be more connection with people in the workplace besides the naturally occurring camaraderie that arises through direct collaboration and the inevitable small handful of friends with similar values. Is it possible to have a deeper connection with everyone as a general approach?

I saw my employees through a lot of life's challenges, like cancer, marriage, divorce, child issues, elder issues, whatever. I made sure that we could keep working as a team, even if it meant that one of the members may have had to opt out for a while.

I also withheld information from HR, that they would have liked to have had, because, quite frankly, it was none of their damn business. It did not always endear me to them. I kept secrets, and never used anything I learned to manipulate, but I did use it to optimize.

For example, I had one engineer that is "on the spectrum." He Just. Could. Not. Come. In. Before. Noon. to save his life, but often worked until 2AM.

Also, the code he wrote was nothing short of miraculous. He's possibly the best coder I've ever worked with.

HR wanted me to bully him into submission. I did not, and they were un-thrilled with me. But Japan loved him, and they held the upper hand.

It wasn't for everyone, but we made it work.

I feel that "one size fits all" solutions may be necessary for large organizations, but I had the luxury of managing a small team (never more than 10 people). Everyone involved was serious about the work, had pride in the company, and appreciated the leeway I gave them. My LI profile has a number of testimonials, and some are from former employees. To this day, we still keep in touch.

Because of the nature of the work we did, there was no way for "slackers" to hide. Everyone's work was just too visible.

As a manager, my #1 priority was always to represent what was best for the corporation. In some cases, that meant preventing the corporation from engaging in self-destructive behavior. Now, that is a classic "slippery slope," and it could have easily turned into self-will run riot, but it didn't; because I'm who I am.

Managers aren't cookies, and they can't be formed from cookie-cutters, no matter what the "HR Consultants" say.

I did my best. I do tend to expect top-shelf results (as opposed to "effort"), though, which does not always win me fans (but the company I worked for, expected nothing less).

It’s easier to manage when all you do is assign work, reward with money and blame silent quiting, millennials, or whatever the latest cause of people “just not working enough”.

As opposed to actually caring about your staff, making sure the work is fulfilling and that the team are bought into what they are doing at an individual level.

Leading shouldn’t be about what makes it easier for the manager.

However, it is clear that the cat is out of the bag now - and people look at those working their asses off like they're suckers, not like they're role models.

I wonder if compensation & promotion is going to change, or if the future is just going to be a race to the bottom for worker productivity.

A family friend of mine operates a couple small businesses in a rural community. They’ve tried to bootstrap or acquire a couple companies over time, operating them at a loss for a while as they try to make them efficient enough to work.

It’s surprisingly hard to make a break-even business. There’s a common misconception that business owners are all raking in cash at the expensive of their employees, but that’s not easy or common. A lot of small businesses close because it costs more to pay employees than the business can actually bring in (minus operating expenses).

Even many big companies like Uber are operating at a loss, contrary to the public perception that these companies are a rip-off that exploit everyone to the max.

Ironically, in software I’ve seen a lot of people getting compensated far above their output for many years before the company finally catches on. This is one field where people who interview well can get a foot in the door and then coast on organizational inefficiencies at a lot of places while doing very little work. Obviously this doesn’t apply at all companies, but it’s weirdly common to hear engineers bragging here on HN about how few hours they work each week, or even people expressing disbelief that anyone can do more than an hour or two of work each day.

And I waste a lot of time here and did not seen much bragging about working too little.

To state the obvious, operating at a loss is not contrary to exploiting your workers.

Because workers aren't productive, because you get paid by the lowest common denominator, because that's all businesses expect - and anyone doing more - unless to gain skills for the benefit of themselves - is a fool.

Many small businesses are completely family owned and operated and only employ 1 or 2 people (the family).

So this statistic that everyone spouts out that most people "work for" small businesses - I'm curious how accurate that statement actually is to what people think it means.

Most of their workers had their own LLCs that only employed themselves. A lot of companies force people to subcontract to get out of paying benefits. The statistic is a shameful one because it is not an indicator of a society that values gumption, tenacity, and entrepreneurship - it’s an indicator of the exploration of labour and crushing one’s fellow man underfoot in the eternal march for lower margins and higher profits.

But saying that they "work for a small business" seems strange.

This seems true for most contractors, tbh.

It's not a new problem. 150y ago Marx called this exploitation of laborers the extraction of surplus value. Slavery is of course a very ancient evil.

There is notably one group who are at minimum compensated for the work they do: billionaires, some of whom "earn" a million dollars per hour.

When I was in my mid 20ties I was writing code in C almost non-stop, they replaced me with 7 people and a scrum master. Apparently, cheaper than giving me 12% raise I demanded (around 2015).

Look at it from business point of view, they are the only ones who see the money and if they don't feed you requirements you are blind. If they give you a 12% raise today then who's to say you won't just come back tomorrow and request another and another and another, there's really no end. Newsflash, asking for a raise everyday is an exponential growth (did you even know that your incessant raises would lead to your cost ballooning 30x within a month?), while 7-8 highly skilled consultants is a one time 7-8x bargain relative to your exponential growth demands wherein you will consume all the earths resources within the year. How selfish can one person be? MY GOD!

Twentyties?

Serious comment: some managers are addicted to empire-building and their status derives from the number of people they manage. Not how productive they actually are...

That's really approaching "effectively zero time to do things that are important to me". You only have one life to live and while money enables some things, free time is much more precious. It's really hard to see a justification for giving up that much capacity for self determination.

some IT companies I worked for in a past life paid for overtime. it was a lot more than what you would get regularly and lots of coworkers did it. is this not a general experience? are companies not paying for overtime?

Additionally those sacrifices won't count anything when it comes to select who's going away in the next layoffs round.

The guy doing 40h is getting the same as the overworked ones doing 60h plus. Plus in Germany it is illegal to do more than 10h per day anyway.

Always remember that the Mortgage Bankers Association defaulted on their mortgage.

Only buy what one can afford, subscriptions only for infrastructure, credits only those that one can afford to pay from saving and no longer than 3 years.

I have been doing this for quite a while, no need to get rich, not even money can cure everything, only make it less painful.

The important part is that the mortgage was backed by an asset - I could have decided to sell the flat and pay back the debt at any time.

Not everyone needs or wants to live on the west coast.

Debt, as long as it’s backed by a sufficiently good asset can be a good option.

Right now you need a pretty good rate of return just to keep pace with inflation if you're saving.

Meanwhile that same inflation is reducing the value you the debt you've taken on to buy a house and you get to live in the house as it pays off.

That’s just not worth it for many people. I too wouldn’t give away a weekend for that money, considering I’ll be in a zombie state for the next two weeks and would probably straight get sick and waste many more days in paid leave depending on the timing. Even the money I’d spend to compensate for the stress could burn through the surplus.

It would of course be a different proposition if I was someone who could work for weeks without any impact, I know some people fit the bill, just not me.

PS: Forgot one of the most important aspect when you have family: is your overtime pay worth the time you’re not spending with them, especially on weekends ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-and-a-half

Cashiers where I live have those terms. And young people without children benefit alot from the deal.

ime for most white collar contracts: no

maybe because time tracking (esp. with remote work) is trust based and hence essentially just a formality where noone expects the employee to report under-time.

But there seems to be a lot of “time in lieu”, work extra take the time off.

But that’s only a 1 to 1 ratio, not 1.5 or 2.0, and.

> I get paid because of my expertise.

Agree.

> You cant’s compensate me enough to put in more than 40-45 hours a week

Disagree. (There’s probably a speed to results + pay that has value here) The assumption is that there’s way more work to do than possible to finish.

There is a limit to how long you can focus on a single task for longer periods of time before you need to rest up properly to recharge your batteries. Everything beyond that will lower your productivity, up to a point where you will end up negative due to the mistakes being made. If you are lightweight on useless processes and stuff, a 30 hour week would be way more optimal for a lot of people. Crunch time should be very short and if stuff cannot be "crunched" in a single week it is useless to continue on like that, because everyone involved will be like 50% as effective as someone just working 30h per week (who can focus on the actual work).

However, the data is never available until mid-day the day before (it’s all news based). The deadline is next trading day. You have 16hrs to make the new model and data work.

The upside is that you’d be compensated a percentage of the trades. Positive is good(if you’re good, make millions), negative you get nothing.

Is 40hr a hard limit to work now?

My point is if someone was paid high enough, they’d bust that 40hr limit easy. It’s not really a hard limit of any sort. There’s a price for it, that’s for sure.

Thing is, it will damage you, and no amount of money can save your rear end from an early exit out of this world through the accumulated damages.

I asked in another reply would someone work for Twitter at twice their current compensation. Both of the replies were that wouldn’t.

If I had an opportunity to make twice my current compensation but I had to give up my current lifestyle - working remotely, traveling six months a year, never being on call, doing the work I enjoy, I would say no without thinking twice.

In exceptional circumstances this would be true, but I seriously doubt many company's actually have those (as opposed to managers pushing the panic button at the last second after ignoring issues for months).

At my first tech lead job working for a company that sent home health care workers to take care of special needs kids. The field workers were making around $12-$17 hour (government reimbursement rates suck).

I was leading an integration effort based on my own designs and we were migrating off of their current payment platform. If the integration efforts didn’t get done by a cut off date around Christmas, they would have received paper checks late. The office salaried workers wouldn’t have been affected.

My management said that was an ok alternative - I vehemently disagreed. I fought for my team to get comp time and bonuses for working over time to meet the deadline.

I could also see mandated overtime at TurboTax. You have hard deadlines to meet and often the “requirements” aren’t set by the government until late.

Yes, in any given year, the specific nature and timing of the requirements may be out of their hands, but in aggregate, they absolutely bear some responsibility for that.

Furthermore, it should also be their responsibility to ensure they have enough trained staff on hand to handle the tax season rush without harming their employees.

I wish everyone had the ability to not be afraid of their employer, it's liberating.

I declined each time. Anything we couldn’t afford from my working 40 hours a week we didn’t need.

We are settling into a grove of traveling six months, flying across the US with a couple of stays in Canada and Mexico, staying in hotels and the other six months living in what would usually be considered a second home/investment property.

There is no amount of money that would make me give up my dream.

My dad is a retired factory worker and he turned down overtime opportunities a lot during the latter part of his career. My mom (teacher) and my dad retired in their mid 50s and are still going strong at 77 and 80.

They had ordinary middle class jobs and never got involved in the rat race.

Her retirement is a combination of a government pension and social security.

My dad as a factory worker just got shares of middling performing consumer goods company (Proctor and Gamble) for his retirement.

They bought a house in 1978 in southern Georgia where they still live. It only increased in value along with inflation.

And reconcile this with some companies requiring 80+ hours a week. I guess you think they are ignorantly damaging themselves.

I find very unlikely the idea that we have found the sweet spot of hours worked per week at 40. How do you know it's not 50 hours per week which maximizes production?

Pencavel, "The Productivity of Working Hours", 2014

> The conclusion from the work presented in this section is that the output-hours relation is decidedly non-linear: below 49 weekly hours, variations in output are proportional to variations in hours; for those observations corresponding to 49 or more hours, output rises with hours at a decreasing rate and a maximum of output occurs at about 63 hours. Output at 70 hours differs little from output at 56 hours and, therefore, the HMWC’s recommendations about the innocuous effects for output of hours reductions are consistent with these estimates.

Note that this is about manual labour, not knowledge work.

I guess you think they are ignorantly damaging themselves.

Not the OP, but I would think they are deliberately damaging their workers. The effect on the company itself is of no concern relative to that.

80+ week schedule is not because of output effectively. One reason for it is mismanagement - a lot of wasted time and general chaos. People posturing how much they work, but not actually being productive. And second reason is creating social buble - a group of people effectively isolated from outside relationship. That allows for generaly more abusive/controlling style of management, it allows you to shape employees opinions more. That is necessary condition for companies like Enron used to be to operate.

> I won’t work overtime

Is personal preference.

> You *can’t* pay me enough to work overtime

Is being diva, implying that there is imaginable number of money that can convince them to do so.

So not a diva. Just honest.

I made “enough” when I was making in the $150s in 2020 that we didn’t even notice the difference when I fell into my current BigTech job where the intern I mentored got a return offer that was that much.

We already had the big house in the burbs, retirement savings, etc.

We are spending less per month now than we were when we already had “enough”.

See the story of the Mexican fisherman.

https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...

It's also generally accepted as a primary mechanism for determining how a company values your work, unless you hit one of those "career levels." If you're a junior person stuck at a low level for a few years, something is probably askew.

It'd be fantastic if positions had a wider salary band and you could earn raises for productivity without having to constantly climb the corporate ladder. I've not really seen that outside of union jobs and even then, you don't have a band so much as a guaranteed raise every few years. This is all based on US companies I've seen in the tech (salaried) and construction (union, hourly) sectors.

That is why promotion must be a goal for everyone, so that people who actually have a clue get to make the decisions.