> In a recent job listing for a property-and-casualty insurance agent, TGS laid out those expectations: “If you’re just OK with getting by, or are a ‘quiet quitter,’ this will be too fast paced for you. We’re looking for people that want a new Mercedes.”
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.
> I'm glad to see people recognizing the emperor has no clothes.
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.
Perhaps your employer received money from the pandemic “corporate giveaway” bills that were passed? Or perhaps they are a rare breed that choose to willingly lose money?
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.
Recruitment also costs a lot. There is the visible fee when you use headhunters or even ads. Bur there is the not visible cost of internal effort (that could be used elsehwere) and lower efficiency before everyone gets onboarded.
And mine (at the time) cut everyone's pay by nearly 30% with almost no notice, then acted like they were doing us all a solid by putting everyone back to where they were almost a year later without making us all do performance reviews first.
In my experience there are more employers like mine than yours in the world.
> The company wouldn't employ you if you weren't providing them more than you cost them.
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).
That’s easy to say when you take home 300k and the company generates 600k of revenue per employee.
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!
Some people look at this and think "yeah man the company is terrible!" and some people look at this and think "what do I have to do to make $300k/yr instead of $18/hr?"
You want the company to make more revenue from you than you're costing. I agree with this, and try to keep this balance myself in my job.
> 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".
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[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
But this assumes your only option is employment, which is exactly the opposite of my point.
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.
The other commenter posited $600K of revenue, which is not value. The absolute cap on direct value would be revenue times contribution margin percentage. If the CM% for your company is 60%, they're making a CM of $360K on the marginal $600K of revenue while paying you $300K.
If you reduce that $600K to $450K of revenue, the CM becomes $270K while paying you $300K, meaning a rational employer should fire you.
You're missing the whole point again, which is that by leaving the company, you don't have to produce as much revenue or value for you, yourself, to RETAIN the same amount of money as income.
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.
This assumes the company knows how to value your work. I started my career in operations working at companies that pioneered working in public clouds. What this meant was long weeks, missed sleep, and thankless work. I saved the companies millions per year through improved resource allocation, high uptime, and fast deployment cycles.
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.
Exactly my experience in ops as well across very different industries. Ops feels like a stain on my career at times, bizarrely.
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.
key word "evidently" ... you have to ensure it's evident to the evaluators, or find different evaluators .. maybe even make yourself the evaluator by starting your own thing
An adjacent field that was higher value. I’ve made a bit of a career transitioning fields and now work on a mix of ml and database internals at a large tech company.
>The company wouldn't employ you if you weren't providing them more than you cost them.
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.
I feel like the 'capture all the value you provide' type comments come from those who have never run a business or worked independently, or maybe they did and got extremely lucky.
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.
Speaking for myself, I disagree with OP. I have a price for nights, weekends, and overtime. That price, however, went up beyond the average salary. Second to that, even if they do want to pay that money it needs to be in writing. No amount of lip flapping will get that out of me. I have goals and those goals require money. They either pay, or I do what I'm paid to do. What I'm paid to do is still a good and needed job. From my perspective, workers learned their value.
There's a big difference still between "easy" and "easier than it ever has been."
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.
"The company wouldn't employ you if you weren't providing them more than you cost them."
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.
All you've said is the same thing I already said, but you spelled out the "opportunity cost" part of the equation separately, while I assumed everybody knew that was part of the consideration and didn't need to be spelled out.
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.
My perception (though I was not alive for this first part) is that there was a shift from giving a shit about your employees and wanting them to have good lives to not giving a fuck about employees if it meant saving a buck. And it took a long time for the culture to catch up.
> The company wouldn't employ you if you weren't providing them more than you cost them.
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.
> The company wouldn't employ you if you weren't providing them more than you cost them.
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.
I think the mass exodus of employees is proving that they were not ending up better off, or at least not nearly to the extent their employers were. That's precisely the point.
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.
Money isn't the only measure of value either, though. If they thought they were ending up better off on the whole, they would come back.
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.
Them staying home is showing that it is a reality. If they went to work even when it was a shit deal then that would show the theory didn't hold, but the fact that as the job gets worse fewer want to do it shows the theory works.
Yes of course: when the exchange doesn't make you better off, you don't make the trade. And the Great Resignation is a sign that plenty of workers are looking for better exchanges than they had been getting.
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.
Esp for a "property-and-casualty insurance agent" role, which presumably is high volume, high stress, and is about screwing people out of insurance payments.
>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.
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.
Sure. The whole point is that people are, en masse, concluding that they do not derive more value from being employed by a large corporation than they do working independently or on a smaller scale.
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.
>The whole point is that people are, en masse, concluding that they do not derive more value from being employed by a large corporation than they do working independently or on a smaller scale.
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.
Why shouldn't you? It's a comfortable car with lots of bells and whistles. From personal experience, it is much more pleasure to ride inside one, compared to cheaper cars. I think it is also much more pleasure to drive one (I don't drive, so I can't tell for sure)
I'm sure there are some people for whom driving is "an experience" and worth spending lots of money on.
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.
Well, one of the feature of the Mercedes is a very smooth suspension. It is much more convenient to type on the mobile keyboard while onboard of such a car. I think Gen X really should notice that.
A friend had a 20-yr-old Merc, it was about 1990 model so he had it in 2010. When he gave me a lift in it , it did indeed have a nice smooth ride. Being 20 yrs old, it had the added benefit of not costing a s** ton of money and therefore he didn't have to work for a soul-sucking sweatshop to afford it. ;) It was also still reliable, unlike modern Mercs (if anecdotes are to be believed)
The difference between a cheap car and an expensive car has gotten drastically smaller in the last 5 years.
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.
Oh, I certainly appreciate being in one. Much more quiet and less bumpy.
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.
If you use the car every day (as, I believe, most people in the US do) - there is a strong incentive to invest in the quality of that part of your life. Like, everybody understand why you need good bed frame, mattress, pillows and bedsheets. I mean, I can, of course, sleep on a fully synthetic bedsheet, which feels like part of some goods packaging, which I had to do recently. But my oh my, I won't do that again deliberately.
Mercedes is not a status symbol for Gen Z only because Gen Z generally just can't afford a Mercedes. Therefore for Gen Z a pair of sneakers is a status symbol.
Do you have any reference showing Gen Z wouldn’t think a Mercedes is a status symbol? The Zoomers I know are the most materialistic human birthed yet, they just don’t have a way to get a Mercedes. But if they did…fr fr bussin’ on their friends immediately with it.
One thing I love about their ad is it reminds me of this classic speech by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Same tactic, different decade.
> The bad news is - you've got, all of you got, just one week to regain your jobs, starting with tonight. Starting with tonight's sit. Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. You get the picture? You laughing now? You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money. Get their names to sell them! You can't close the leads you're given, you can't close shit, you are shit.
It’s difficult to articulate but something as pure symbol of status as Mercedes is actually low status. Tesla, which is also an environmentalist symbol, is high status. This is an example of a pattern.
I would argue that Tesla is losing ground as a high status symbol, at least in the Bay Area. They certainly don't turn heads anymore, it's now Rivian, Lucid, Taycan, Ioniq 5, etc that are the talking points in the fancy grocery store parking lots.
What matters isn't the specific brand or even what they're selling, it's that it's The Cool New Thing.
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
I think that view might be some of the same generational (and cultural) mindset misunderstanding.
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!"
> This trend started 60 years ago in the US, and is finally fully mainstream today,
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.”
Sure, I agree that it's not unique to the US. And I'm not trying to suggest that US/Anglo culture is superior in any way.
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.
> And I'm not trying to suggest that US/Anglo culture is superior in any way.
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.”
The "right track", you say. And parents know better. That's pretty self-serving, don't you think?
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.
Financing is so readily available, that so long as you have stable employment, I think it is possible to procure most "luxury" cars, regardless of income. Whatever status symbol it may have conveyed as to wealth has been greatly diminished without going for the extreme upper end.
Spoken as someone who hates the necessity of owning a car. To me, it is a mode of transportation and that's it.
This is a false assumption, because some people definitely are. What is the real point of your statement? That you are not interested in opinions of such people?
Sure. You shouldn't care about the opinion of anyone who cares what car you drive, because they are, as made clear by that opinion, entirely superficial thinkers.
There's a comment higher from here that expensive car is a good proxy signal of wealth. Preferring wealthy people may feel unjust and even obnoxious, but it is definitely not superficial thinking. I personally would too steer clear (pun intended) of people like that, but just discounting them looks like the same behavior, isn't it?
At least where I live, what car you drive has mostly come decorrelated with wealth. Obviously at the extremes there’s still a relation (the guy with the beat-up 1990 civic is probably not rich, the girl with the $120k AMG wagon is), but is a new Tesla 3 driver richer than the person with a 2005 Subaru Outback? Who knows!
You might be thinking of counter-signalling on one hand. On the other hand there are just different groups of social status as well. To one group, a mercedes might be very impressive, to another it might be your time spent overseas, even if you all make the same money.
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.
Counter-signalling partly explains why pure status symbols are not among Gen Z. Taste, or aesthetic sensibility, is also an explanation. An expensive watch, such as a Patek Philippe, is still status since it's durable – to be passed on. A Mercedes? Not so much.
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.
How is a Tesla an 'environmentalist symbol' when it has a 500kg battery with lithium mined from the global south and shipped around the world in the supply chain to add value?
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.