“If you’re committed to your career and feel an emotional bond with the organisation or the career, then if an event happens that violates the psychological contract, the unwritten expectations, that abuses our sense of whether we can trust the organisation,” said Dr Ashley Weinberg, an occupational psychologist at the University of Salford.
It's fascinating to me how people can do something for 30% of adult life(probably biggest uniform chunk along with sleeping) and claim, that "living" happens outside of that time.
I would agree if we were on McDonald's employee forum, but on HN, where everyone lives under endless baragge of linkedin offers? That indicates questionable life choices then.
No one is going to pay me to slow sail around the world on a modest blue water sailboat. Unfortunately, we’re stuck with an economic system where people who did not consent to exist are mandated to take part in an activity to acquire income for survival (or be homeless, starve, and not have access to medical care).
Sitting at a desk for decades, regardless of what you’re sticking into the digital box, sounds like hell.
> "The NHS staff survey, conducted in the autumn of 2021, showed that morale had fallen from 6.1 out of 10 to 5.8, and staff engagement had dropped from 7.0 to 6.8 ... people’s way of relating to their work has changed"
If people's views have changed, they are not reflective in the ever so slight drop in these values.
That's like 5% or so, for the first one. Could easily be significant.
It's also probably worth mentioning that the range of those values is likely less than 10, in that the answer is never going to be greater than 9 or less than 2. That should make any movement have more significance.
Yeah, wait a second. I work so I have money to live and eat and do the things I love and spend time with my family and friends. Those are what I live for. Why would I spend more time than I have to on anything else?
Just a continuation of the same lazy, bullshit articles saying, “Nobody wants to work” now that unemployment is so low that the old headline won’t fly.
The nerds writing these articles are doing far less than “the bare minimum at work!”
I see your sentiment at r/antiwork but allow me to challenge that: Bare minimum to not get fired and doing what is expected of you are different things. There is work you accepted when you get hired and then if you fail to live up to that and all you do is just enough that the cost of replacing you isn't worth it, I think that is what the article is about.
If you are doing hourly type low paid work I get it. You get what you pay for and all. But salaried workers get paid whatever they are able to negotiate. Still labor in exchange for money but only if you show results.
Another way I will put it is, business is a competition right? Each employee is a competitive advantage to their employer, any business needs a certain portion of workers to do more than bare minimum to not get fired or else it would end up providing service equivalent to that.
I am all for workers rights but this shitty attitude sucks. Just about any place I try to do business at I practically have to beg them to take my money and then smile as retail workers, customer support,etc... shit on me. Because they don't give a shit how their laziness affects others other than their employer. No pride in their work.
This is the difference between the US these days and countries where it is offensive to tip people because they take pride in their work and paying them extra to do their job is saying they are lazy and lack self-respect as a default.
Work set/scheduled hours. Don't overwork yourself but come on! Give a shit and do more than what it takes to not get fired because you take pride in what you do? Because you do it day in and out and that is what you leave behind, your story!? Because someone raised you to respect yourself and act honorably?
sigh what is the point. Might as well talk gibberish in this "us vs them" society.
Employers give below-inflation "merit increases" (a paycut basically) and employees do the same in return. Why would a retail worker bother if his pay now buys half as much?
Again, for low pay and hourly work I get it. But still, pay or not treat customers right or go work in a warehouse or something. Treat others the way you want to be treated, if I am in a retail store or a restaurant I don't give a shit how much they get paid they don't have to work if they don't want to. They can form unions, have strikes etc... but taking it out on me their customer is called being an asshole.
If anything, I am growing less and less sympathetic to pro-labor movements because of this. The scale at which this is happening means it has no effect other than to be mean out of spite and empower laziness. I can't go to another business to encourage better pay at this one and tbh, if you mistreat me because you don't get paid enough I only want permanent unemployment for you and nothing more.
If you work for amazon and meet your minimim metrics though, power to you. I have no problem with packages being delivered late lol.
As someone who has an extensive background in costumer service (I worked in and managed restaurants before grad school), I think customer-facing jobs often get the worst of things like this. Yes, I believe there is a baseline of professionalism for those positions, but the public is frankly abusive to service workers and I will never blame them for acting indifferent or less than enthusiastic.
To your point of "go work in a warehouse" I mean fair, and that's why restaurants are hemorrhaging staff to the cannabis industry. But it's the customers who need the attitude adjustment. In what world do these people live where it's ok to berate, insult, sometimes assault, and otherwise demean workers? The public are pigs, and by the time you personally receive bad service from a worker they've probably been taking abuse from entitled jerks for the bulk of their shift.
I am not talking about rude customers, those get what is coming to them. I worked in a customer service position many moons ago myself, I literally quit right after a guy verbally abuser me for hours, I am no stranger to this.
But, if you take one customer's mistreatment of you on another customer that is doing their best to do right by you or you have a shitty jaded attitude work elsewhere or fix your attitude. Fake smiles and politeness if you must, that should be your default.
And they stereotype people and presume shit all the time which is very unfair. And I am supposed to feel sorry for them because other customers mistreat them? I think not, they treat others in a mean way without cause and they got what was coming to them as well.
You know in essence, this is the core principle of justice that even if a million people that fit a pattern are guilty, for the sake of the one innocent you treat them all with fairness and without prejudice.
So long as retail/service workers and peope like you continue to justify mistreating people as a default, while in principle I am very much for more pay for them (glad to pay proprtionally more as well as less profits for their employer), unions, better hours and treatment, because of the default hostility against the few that are polite and tip well I will only advocate for worse conditions. Perhaps we could shop more online and ghost kitchens delivering home can adequately replace restaurants.
> I don't give a shit how much they get paid they don't have to work if they don't want to
The counterpoint to this is that you do not have to patronize businesses where you get bad service. You are free to patronize businesses that offer better service, or hire assistants to provide you the service. But just like you cannot afford better service, the employees you are dealing with cannot afford a better job. Maybe you and they deserve it, maybe you and they don’t.
For a long, long time, American voters have prioritized lower prices and lower taxes and an eat what you kill ethos above all else. It is no surprise that the country now reaps what it sows, and that is unless you are in the very wealthiest cohorts, you should expect decreasing quality of goods and services.
That's my point, all the businesses have bad service now because of this "movement" that penalizes innocent customers instead of pushing for proper unionization and labor laws. I am willing to pay more for better sevice and I can afford it, the employees don't give a shit because it isn't their business.
I would have to be repulsively wealthy and show it off to get good service basically.
Treat others like you want to be treated. Money is not an excuse to be lazy or mistreat others. I don't expect anyone to put up fake smiles and toletate me when I am being rude but I do expect to be treated with best effort service, respect, dignity and politeness. It shouldn't matter if I a hobo or a millionaire either.
> all the businesses have bad service now because of this "movement" that penalizes innocent customers instead of pushing for proper unionization and labor laws.
The movement does not penalize customers in a vacuum. The “movement”, and I do not really know if it is one, is just a size-able portion of the population waking up to the fact that they should not expect to own land, find a life partner, healthcare, have children, grandchildren, etc.
In my opinion, it does not entirely justify one to half ass work, but I can see being demotivate by the odds facing them.
How much do you make per year? I wonder how good of a mood you would be in if you were working 2+ fast food jobs to support your kids in a tiny apartment.
I don't know about mba programs but that is categorically untrue. People in well paying jobs (like tech for example) that love what they do, typically do more than minimum. Managers also make a difference, some of them are so good theit works want to put in their best work. Also, vitality curve is a thing (20/80 principle).
>sigh what is the point. Might as well talk gibberish in this "us vs them" society
Yeah it’s too bad. The quality of service has totally gone to shit in this country. But God forbid you complain, then you’re a Karen. People are “nice” these days, but they forgot how to be good. A nice person is trying to avoid conflict all the time. A good person is willing to enforce society’s standards in their interactions with other people.
For decades, employers have been intentionally scheduling employees erratically so that they have less opportunity to find better options and running bare bones staff with no redundancy while forcing employees to be on call.
Employers were able to do this due to the vast amounts of supply of labor relative to demand in conjunction with lack of taxpayer funded safety net and lack of minimum quality of life at work labor laws.
It is reasonable to expect society, after decades, to learn from this and begin playing by the rules that society has been propagating, which is that you look out for yourself first, and if you can climb to the top while stepping on others, it will have no negative effect on you.
> This is the difference between the US these days and countries where it is offensive to tip people because they take pride in their work and paying them extra to do their job is saying they are lazy and lack self-respect as a default.
I agree, but it is an unfortunate consequence of the breakdown of trust between one another. However, I find it hard to blame workers, when it is at the end of the day, voters and the people influencing voters to vote against things like sick/vacation leave, parental leave, minimum salaries that pay more than minimum wage, removing tipped minimum wages, daily overtime laws, etc.
The 'bare minimum to not get fired' is the expectation of any job.
If the employer wants to increase the expectations levelled on employees, then they should write it into their contracts. No contract? No expectations.
You can't hold people to some abstract set of expectations that are never written down anywhere; and if you try - well that's why they have to invent a stupid term like 'quiet quitting'.
True believers (or, at least, people who have figured out that their odds of survival are improved on playing the fool and seeming to be one) are way more than 20 percent of corporate workers. They're probably 70-80 percent (with an unknown contingent of that set being smart people who are simply good at pretending to buy in). This is counterbalanced by the fact that true believers tend to be not very smart and, therefore, incompetent. So it feels like only 20% of the company buys into the false consciousness, just because the people who really do tend to be the inherently ineffective ones: if someone who is not pulling 7 figures per year genuinely loves his corporate job--i.e., his position of having to sacrifice more than half his life to do paperwork for rich people--he is probably not very bright and it is borderline miraculous that he functions at all.
I think more people are wising up and doing the ROI on unpaid overtime.
Thankfully I did it within my first few years in the workforce, I worked my butt off for a project, got a lot of praise but a disappointing bonus, calculated my overall rate per hour and realized I was being stooged.
In the following year my first performance review was bad, I just presented the numbers and my manager was pretty much unable to counter my argument other than risking my scope for promotions.
I just flat out stated I've proven I can work hard, promote me first, then I go back to that output.
TLDR; people now see through corporate bullshit, fuck you pay me.
So curious to read these comments of yours. There is some truth in them, cloaked in all sorts of wild talk… “semidemonic parasites” !!! Is this serious?
Anyways, how desired is it really to weaponize the jealousy of the masses against those who have been given wealth? Any successful movement needs the buy in of some people in power. The strong rule the weak.
And after all, slavery was and is a human institution; it is debt-servitude that maintains our social relationships. Don’t think it’s so simple as ousting the master.
Words are most useful imho if they mean something.
I read "demonic" as "evil spirit" and "spirit" as "the prevailing or typical quality, mood, or attitude of a person, group, or period of time."
Fascinating perspectives are to be had if you picture the demon as its own thing with people providing the vessel. It takes quite a bit of ritual [proverbial] chanting and dancing around the camp fire for a person to swap his natural spirit for the new one.
the -ic in demon-ic only describes the thing as demon-like. Irish, greenish. I would argue they are actual demons. I see no value in using word to describe something that doesn't exist.
> Anyways, how desired is it really to weaponize the jealousy of the masses against those who have been given wealth? Any successful movement needs the buy in of some people in power. The strong rule the weak.
Yes, but no. lol
The ones in power are not the strong ones. Increasingly less so! One has to desire ruling the weak and that requires it to present at least some challenge and/or requires at least some insecurity.
A chess player doesn't desire to defeat someone who learned the game 20 min ago. Beating up a 6 year old is only interesting if you are 6 years old.
> Don’t think it’s so simple as ousting the master.
If the masses have no desire to be released. What is the point? When they do all it takes is to show them their actions have effect. (just a bit of light so they can see) Then one can return to the cabin in the woods. Entirely without leaving the shadows.
Your comment cheers me up, but you are assigning to much blame to individuals.
Everybody notices that companies could function (even better actually) with something like 1/3 or less of their workforce. The other 2/3 are just doing BS work. Why? As with evolution there is really no objective, just some causes with an outcome. One of them is that companies don't know what to do with the money. They have all this people trying to figure out what to do next. Hence the hiring freezes in some companies right now with the economic downturn.
May be because flooding market with free money called quantitative easing isn’t anymore putting selective pressure on efficiency of company. Since 2008, thousand of billion of $ where distributed to market, reaching the point that there is too much money available inducing negative loan interest and. Even more surprising negative oil barrel price in 2019. Can you imagine negative interest is literally like getting paid to subscribe to a loan. You borrow 1 000 000 , you reimburse 900 000 and keep the difference.
So thousands and thousands of companies are keeping alive with zero or negative profit. Those company are totally inefficient or sustainable in a normal world where you have to fight to be profitable.
So the main responsible aren’t the worker, but all the top managers who instead going bankrupt and face realistically that their companies are totally inadaptés and inefficient to generate profit, they just eat the free cake of quantitative easing that central banks are cooking every day. In this scenario, the standard worker of those company is just an incounscious partner in this con scheme and nobody ask him to be in any way profitable or efficient.
I am always amused when I see people do not believe in competition in capitalistic markets.
>May be because flooding market with free money called quantitative easing isn’t anymore putting selective pressure on efficiency of company.
Quantitative easing does no such thing. Educate yourself about the banking sector. Private commercial banks create money. Quantitative easing is a bandaid to maintain liquidity between banks as depositors demand ever more liquidity.
I hope you are aware that when you have a mass of people being unemployed then hiring them by no means deprives another company of a potential employees because that other company can just hire another unemployed person. When there is unemployment there is no competition over employees. It is impossible for there to be competition amongst companies. The idea that somehow free money is ruining everything shows a complete lack of understanding of even the most basic concepts of a market economy.
>Can you imagine negative interest is literally like getting paid to subscribe to a loan
People pay money to store cash in safes it is only natural that people pay money to store risk free liquidity when the real economy consists of nothing but risk and illiquidity.
>So thousands and thousands of companies are keeping alive with zero or negative profit. Those company are totally inefficient or sustainable in a normal world where you have to fight to be profitable.
Fight to be profitable over what? What constraint exists that forces companies to win a competition? A lack of employees? No. A lack of physical capital? No. A lack of energy? Maybe but there are energy producing technologies that benefit from lower cost of capital.
Again, if you have a mass of unemployed and underpaid people it doesn't matter how efficiently you use them because you are competing with unemployment, a wholly unproductive activity or underemployment which is partially unproductive.
I find it amusing that your primary concern with the economy is that profit requirements have disappeared and hence we are able to create more wealth and employ more people, you deride those things as unproductive or inefficient, as if people have to operate at peak efficiency their entire life or get eaten by the commercial bank and investor sharks as threatening people with poverty and long term unemployment is the only way to beat the laziness out of people while blaming those people for the systemic unemployment you advocate for as that allows you to call people lazy and absolve you from any responsibility.
Anyone who understands the system knows that it is wrong and no, a lack of extortion through interest is not the part that is wrong.
Remove the need for people to work for their basic and advanced needs.
Guarantee everyone a medium standard of life, with or without a job, and suddenly talent becomes expensive and efficiency rises.
We do not need to all work. Mass unemployment with strong protections that the Industrial Revolution and computers promised us would actually be a good thing.
You can write whatever tartufferie you want to hide the fact.
You didn’t even understand the basic of negative interest. By inverting who pays who.
Surely you avoided that negative oil barrel price events showing how much those smart ads financial boys can be more stupid than common sense.
After that you talk about unemployment which was not the topic here and is irrelevant in this talk. When there is free money you don’t need to fight to get it. I hope this is something easy to understand.
Most of the time the free money is injected into market to buy back stock and keep value at top. In order to fake the reality that most company aren’t sustainable without this free money.
You should read about John Law and the conclusion of the first attempt of printing money for free…
But if not, then you are welcome to stay in your fantasy financial bubble and keep your sarcasm to your other brainwashed mates.
For information im an it guy working in financial institution for 20 years. So everyday I meet smart ass finance boy with high perception of their smartness while failing most of the time to beat the market.
I was in front line with my computers in a high frequency trading service, when all my traders bet on remain, and loosing millions of euros the day England choose to brexit.
You talk like an idiot, an ideological idiot. That’s all.
> flooding market with free money called quantitative easing isn’t anymore putting selective pressure on efficiency of company
On the contrary I think that selective pressure is brutal. That's why everyone is trying to predict the future, because everyone knows that whatever they are doing today it's not gonna be valid in 20 years. Companies are constantly reinventing themselves, changing the way they do business. Internet has swallowed whole sectors of the economy and changed even the most traditional ones in what, 20 years?. Nobody would call you crazy if you said that in another twenty years Apple or Google have disappeared or are irrelevant.
You should start a blog: this is the quantitavely different level of cynism. The image of "demonic parasites" needs some refiniment, though. Those rich parasites are the ten priests of the temple, if I may use an old allegory, the priests of power, lust, greed, hatred, envy and so on, and they derive their strength from the darkness of the inner shrine where the demon of ignorance dwells. The demon wants to rule directly, but the masses aren't ready to abandon the reason yet, hence the need for the ten priests.
Regardless of our views on capitalism, unjustness, or any of those related matters, I have to read this and feel sad for the lost talent, potential, and productivity especially now that we badly need every ounce of hard work we can get for some of the bigger problems we face, climate change, global uncertainty, and such things.
Now more than ever, we as humans need to find a way engage and unite. But instead we are seeing more apathy, what feels like more division, and less interest in tackling truly difficult problems. Again, not trying to pin it on why (unchecked capitalism, etc), just trying to say that the state of affairs does not seem encouraging.
"They we're technically taxed" is just pedantry. What is the effective tax rate compared to the 1950s-1970s when the economy actually worked for the middle class?
I disagree. From my experience our best minds tend to work on the most important problems. And in America most people living paycheck to paycheck are doing so by choice, so that’s really more of a cultural problem as opposed to economic.
That's borderline negative view. I never sold an ad in my life, yet I have pretty good life, very very far from the need for a second job. I assume most of people here are in similar spot.
What I see is tons of people living the same template: pick secure, well paid job, no matter how meaningless. Even when they take a risk to spin some startup, very often goal is to sell off and retire, with little interest in what they actually do.
Then these people get depressed and complain how life is bleak, capitalism cruel and everything should collapse.
I never said that, there aren't people with bigger issues than mine. Sure there are. I argue that you don't have to go to silicon Valley or wall street to have decent life, which was stated by OP.
Btw I'm not from USA and reading HN recently, I'm kinda happy about it, because it seems only options on your side are: starving, prisoner of job, sell-off with guilt trips/existential crisis, demoralized billionaire. Is there anyone left in the US, who simply enjoys life as it is?
I obviously dramatize here a bit, but literally a few comments earlier someone wrote to me, that, he/she didn't consent to be alive. Really dystopian thread.
The world is a borderline negative place. I just read an article about journalists being beheaded in some country.
I notice financially privileged people tend to advocate for a 'dont worry be happy' 'everythings going to be alright' mode of living life because theyre shielded from the brutality of the world by their money or their families money.
It's the same reason financially privileged people never admit that they had help from their family and always claim that they made their money themselves.
Because they're completely unaware of what it really takes to make it in life without any help from anyone and I suspect feel a little guilty how easy their life has been compared to others and want to connect with, and associate with people who actually made it on their own.
If you have ever been poor or financially struggling, you would realize 'don't worry be happy' is not a functional way of living life if you don't have family money....at least in America.
The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
My parents were factory workers in socialist eastern block. Recently my father recalled that Wrangler bag, he received when he finally had money to buy branded jeans was status symbol on par with the jeans itself. Currently I'm earning maybe a half of what's advertised as average dev salary in US (which admittedly takes me much further, where I live - maybe you guys should consider relocation?).
May I have my happiness-pass now please? :-)
> The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
It is. My parents surely did and I'm also going to (btw calling this privilege and guilt tripping over fact, that somebody's parents are decent human beings is kinda weird).
This is how life works. No reason to obsess over some places being shitty. There's less of them than a few generations ago (fun fact - my city still has its old beheading stone. Thankfully not used for couple hundreds of years).
They did, quite recently(with some twists in the meantime due to fall of socialism and later privatization). Currently they renovate what's left from grandparents house to settle in countryside - mostly by hand as they enjoy the process. Honestly pretty lovely & tranquil place.
What's funny, they will tell you, that factory wasn't bad compared to work in the field they did with their own parents. It also got them place in block of flats - objectively kinda crappy, but everything was crappy back then.
There's something really satisfying about working in the country and working with your hands to build your own house and grow your own food after working hard in the system your whole life.
What happened to them after the fall of socialism?
Not that much. Factory went private which was sometimes better (more reasonable investment, tech progress), sometimes worse (high unemployment levels meant people were treated shitty sometimes). It was closed maybe 15 years later. Dad's pretty good welder/mechanic (spends a lot of time on this even now), so was hired in company providing, let's say, maintenence outsourcing for various business.
Nothing exciting, but they always provided for the family and helped us to start adult life however they could.
This sort of dysfunction isn't new to history. China and Japan nearly industrialized several times in the second millennium, but such movements were quashed by the elites. Industrialization requires the ubiquity of fuels, machines, and at least low explosives; the last thing samurai who'd trained 20 years to be formidable with katanas wanted was to live in a world where a peasant with a hand cannon could be dangerous. The upper class knew it would better ensure its own survival by preventing progress, so they did.
Unfortunately, it seems to be an extreme historical anomaly for elites to put the welfare of their people over the zero-sum needs of their own class. One recent such anomaly was in the middle of the 20th century--The U.S. and USSR both invested heavily in building large middle classes (it being historically rare for such to exist at all) because they wanted research supremacy, which you can't get if you squander 95% of the natural intellectual talent, during the Cold War. Also, the existence of other systems put both sides on better behavior: capitalism couldn't be as scummy as it is today, and state-run socialism had to improve material circumstances and scale back the authoritarian tendencies it had developed during WW2... because, otherwise, neither system would have survived. But now that the Cold War is over, we're stuck in this global authoritarian capitalism that retains the worst aspects of both systems.
The division we're seeing is, of course, artificial. The elites deliberately pit people against each other (and trot out old divisive garbage: zero-sum nationalism, weird-ass conspiracy theories to distract from the more boring and often technically legal conspiracies occurring in plain sight, and of course antisemitism) because otherwise, the natural lay of the land would have 95+ percent of the people guillotining their dusty asses. That being said, I can't think of an easy way to end it. We do, as humans, need to (using your words) engage and unite; the problem is that what we need to unite to do--that is, overthrow the current global corporate elite using any means and mechanisms that shall work--is extremely socially unacceptable because those in charge have made it so. Thus, we're just expected to accept a declining standard of living and a nearly complete halt on technical progress at a time when we need it the most.
i've been a bit enamored with revolution since i was young.
History shows revolution almost always ends in civil war and destroyed infrastructure. You can't just create a power vacuum with nothing to fill it.
Even if you do manage revolution on a unified front, it always seems to splinter within a generation unless something radically new from some outside source forces you to alter or die.
The best revolutions start with an abdication and reform, reform, reform.
The only way i see that happeniing in the US is if everyone started voting third party and stopped being a two party system. That would create some competiton among the ruling elite.
I'm with you. By far, the best outcome is to find a way for the global corporate elite to peacefully abdicate and allow a better world to emerge. However, there is unfortunately a nonzero chance of them defending what they have by harming human life, in which case they have surrendered theirs and one cannot be afraid to complete their decisions.
What many seem to fail to grasp is that the problems do not originate from anything that a violent revolution would resolve, the revolution would only shake things up for another human lifetime until old structures re-emerge.
The problems actually originate from the way we engage in peaceful transactions and activities among each other. It is pretty much universally agreed by economists that something akin to a land value tax is suitable for the efficient allocation of land. This should be used as an opportunity to give everyone an equal share of land on the planet. By that I mean parts of the revenue of a land value tax would be paid out as a citizen's dividend, it is almost as if you were receiving a land certificate but was automatically renting it out for money. You can then use that money to rent your own land.
This would fix the "rent is too damn high" problem. The money problem mostly fixed itself in its own but anyone who would advocate for e.g. a demurrage currency could introduce it as an equivalent to food stamps, not necessarily for the entire population.
> the natural lay of the land would have 95+ percent of the people guillotining their dusty asses
I like to think about how much time/effort/energy has been put into designing and indoctrinating people into systems so that that the 95% or so will actually do the work to defend its existence and the elite class can operate effectively as managers rather than ever get their hands dirty. How easy and self-reinforcing it is for people to operate against their own interests is the product of millenia of heavy research into information control, psychology, and power, not an emergent property of social people
We recently had a new young coworker who was extremely slow and would show up only when he felt like it. He was even honest about it. Sometimes late, sometimes not at all. Since they needed 20 people and cant find any they just put up with it for a few weeks.
People complaint but I argued he was the best employee we had thus far. "If we can find just a few of these guys I too can stay home whenever I feel like it! We just need 3 or 4 of these guys to do what use to be a one man job. Then it will actually get done in stead of you guys wasting precious time talking about how bad he is, wanting him gone. Gone where? To sit at home and live of our tax money? Well, I for one love paying for it. He should sit at home until you guys wake up to the new reality!
Those unmotivated milenimals apparently are the answer. Waving a moldy dried out carrot in front of their nose has no effect.
Its not a real solution of course... at least I think not? Not sure really. But things will change regardless. It might not be pretty, it will at least be interesting times.
I blame it on unchecked risk free liquidity which some people seem to confuse with "wealth".
Just look around you, the interests of the savers override those who are still working for their own wealth. Housing and money are supposed to be appreciating investments instead of shelter for people and a medium of exchange for workers.
As people get wealthier, they want their wealth to be in forms that are harmful to the rest of society that isn't as wealthy.
"...working late on a Friday evening, organising the annual team-building trip to Slough or volunteering to supervise the boss’s teenager on work experience..."
---
I could do that, or I could go home and work on writing a novel, or read, or go to the gym, or learn a musical instrument, or work on ground school for a pilots license, or learn a martial art, or, or, or, or, or ad infinitum. The idea that any of this warrants comment and analysis is deeply, profoundly, alien and grim to me.
"Quiet quitting" = doing what's expected and competently carrying out your job, but not going above-and-beyond for a company who is undoubtedly massively underpaying you. What a load of shit.
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Sitting at a desk for decades, regardless of what you’re sticking into the digital box, sounds like hell.
If people's views have changed, they are not reflective in the ever so slight drop in these values.
It's also probably worth mentioning that the range of those values is likely less than 10, in that the answer is never going to be greater than 9 or less than 2. That should make any movement have more significance.
Lol - the definition for "quiet quitting" is doing your job to expectations and leaving on time.
So not overdoing your job is basically quitting in their eyes. Ridiculous.
The nerds writing these articles are doing far less than “the bare minimum at work!”
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1549527752763588608.html
If you are doing hourly type low paid work I get it. You get what you pay for and all. But salaried workers get paid whatever they are able to negotiate. Still labor in exchange for money but only if you show results.
Another way I will put it is, business is a competition right? Each employee is a competitive advantage to their employer, any business needs a certain portion of workers to do more than bare minimum to not get fired or else it would end up providing service equivalent to that.
I am all for workers rights but this shitty attitude sucks. Just about any place I try to do business at I practically have to beg them to take my money and then smile as retail workers, customer support,etc... shit on me. Because they don't give a shit how their laziness affects others other than their employer. No pride in their work.
This is the difference between the US these days and countries where it is offensive to tip people because they take pride in their work and paying them extra to do their job is saying they are lazy and lack self-respect as a default.
Work set/scheduled hours. Don't overwork yourself but come on! Give a shit and do more than what it takes to not get fired because you take pride in what you do? Because you do it day in and out and that is what you leave behind, your story!? Because someone raised you to respect yourself and act honorably?
sigh what is the point. Might as well talk gibberish in this "us vs them" society.
If anything, I am growing less and less sympathetic to pro-labor movements because of this. The scale at which this is happening means it has no effect other than to be mean out of spite and empower laziness. I can't go to another business to encourage better pay at this one and tbh, if you mistreat me because you don't get paid enough I only want permanent unemployment for you and nothing more.
If you work for amazon and meet your minimim metrics though, power to you. I have no problem with packages being delivered late lol.
To your point of "go work in a warehouse" I mean fair, and that's why restaurants are hemorrhaging staff to the cannabis industry. But it's the customers who need the attitude adjustment. In what world do these people live where it's ok to berate, insult, sometimes assault, and otherwise demean workers? The public are pigs, and by the time you personally receive bad service from a worker they've probably been taking abuse from entitled jerks for the bulk of their shift.
But, if you take one customer's mistreatment of you on another customer that is doing their best to do right by you or you have a shitty jaded attitude work elsewhere or fix your attitude. Fake smiles and politeness if you must, that should be your default.
And they stereotype people and presume shit all the time which is very unfair. And I am supposed to feel sorry for them because other customers mistreat them? I think not, they treat others in a mean way without cause and they got what was coming to them as well.
You know in essence, this is the core principle of justice that even if a million people that fit a pattern are guilty, for the sake of the one innocent you treat them all with fairness and without prejudice.
So long as retail/service workers and peope like you continue to justify mistreating people as a default, while in principle I am very much for more pay for them (glad to pay proprtionally more as well as less profits for their employer), unions, better hours and treatment, because of the default hostility against the few that are polite and tip well I will only advocate for worse conditions. Perhaps we could shop more online and ghost kitchens delivering home can adequately replace restaurants.
The counterpoint to this is that you do not have to patronize businesses where you get bad service. You are free to patronize businesses that offer better service, or hire assistants to provide you the service. But just like you cannot afford better service, the employees you are dealing with cannot afford a better job. Maybe you and they deserve it, maybe you and they don’t.
For a long, long time, American voters have prioritized lower prices and lower taxes and an eat what you kill ethos above all else. It is no surprise that the country now reaps what it sows, and that is unless you are in the very wealthiest cohorts, you should expect decreasing quality of goods and services.
I would have to be repulsively wealthy and show it off to get good service basically.
Treat others like you want to be treated. Money is not an excuse to be lazy or mistreat others. I don't expect anyone to put up fake smiles and toletate me when I am being rude but I do expect to be treated with best effort service, respect, dignity and politeness. It shouldn't matter if I a hobo or a millionaire either.
The movement does not penalize customers in a vacuum. The “movement”, and I do not really know if it is one, is just a size-able portion of the population waking up to the fact that they should not expect to own land, find a life partner, healthcare, have children, grandchildren, etc.
In my opinion, it does not entirely justify one to half ass work, but I can see being demotivate by the odds facing them.
You completed 10% more story points than expected this sprint? Nice, here's a 10% raise, but you can only keep it if you stay at this level of output.
They literally hammer into your head for months on end that employees will do the absolute bare minimum not to get fired in every MBA program.
Ordinary pay gets ordinary effort. And businesses always want the cheapest supplier.
Yeah it’s too bad. The quality of service has totally gone to shit in this country. But God forbid you complain, then you’re a Karen. People are “nice” these days, but they forgot how to be good. A nice person is trying to avoid conflict all the time. A good person is willing to enforce society’s standards in their interactions with other people.
For decades, employers have been intentionally scheduling employees erratically so that they have less opportunity to find better options and running bare bones staff with no redundancy while forcing employees to be on call.
Employers were able to do this due to the vast amounts of supply of labor relative to demand in conjunction with lack of taxpayer funded safety net and lack of minimum quality of life at work labor laws.
It is reasonable to expect society, after decades, to learn from this and begin playing by the rules that society has been propagating, which is that you look out for yourself first, and if you can climb to the top while stepping on others, it will have no negative effect on you.
> This is the difference between the US these days and countries where it is offensive to tip people because they take pride in their work and paying them extra to do their job is saying they are lazy and lack self-respect as a default.
I agree, but it is an unfortunate consequence of the breakdown of trust between one another. However, I find it hard to blame workers, when it is at the end of the day, voters and the people influencing voters to vote against things like sick/vacation leave, parental leave, minimum salaries that pay more than minimum wage, removing tipped minimum wages, daily overtime laws, etc.
If the employer wants to increase the expectations levelled on employees, then they should write it into their contracts. No contract? No expectations.
You can't hold people to some abstract set of expectations that are never written down anywhere; and if you try - well that's why they have to invent a stupid term like 'quiet quitting'.
Thankfully I did it within my first few years in the workforce, I worked my butt off for a project, got a lot of praise but a disappointing bonus, calculated my overall rate per hour and realized I was being stooged.
In the following year my first performance review was bad, I just presented the numbers and my manager was pretty much unable to counter my argument other than risking my scope for promotions.
I just flat out stated I've proven I can work hard, promote me first, then I go back to that output.
TLDR; people now see through corporate bullshit, fuck you pay me.
IME, they generally stick to the original plan of not promoting people.
The comp was ok and I had good work life balance so I stuck around.
Anyways, how desired is it really to weaponize the jealousy of the masses against those who have been given wealth? Any successful movement needs the buy in of some people in power. The strong rule the weak.
And after all, slavery was and is a human institution; it is debt-servitude that maintains our social relationships. Don’t think it’s so simple as ousting the master.
Words are most useful imho if they mean something.
I read "demonic" as "evil spirit" and "spirit" as "the prevailing or typical quality, mood, or attitude of a person, group, or period of time."
Fascinating perspectives are to be had if you picture the demon as its own thing with people providing the vessel. It takes quite a bit of ritual [proverbial] chanting and dancing around the camp fire for a person to swap his natural spirit for the new one.
the -ic in demon-ic only describes the thing as demon-like. Irish, greenish. I would argue they are actual demons. I see no value in using word to describe something that doesn't exist.
> Anyways, how desired is it really to weaponize the jealousy of the masses against those who have been given wealth? Any successful movement needs the buy in of some people in power. The strong rule the weak.
Yes, but no. lol
The ones in power are not the strong ones. Increasingly less so! One has to desire ruling the weak and that requires it to present at least some challenge and/or requires at least some insecurity.
A chess player doesn't desire to defeat someone who learned the game 20 min ago. Beating up a 6 year old is only interesting if you are 6 years old.
> Don’t think it’s so simple as ousting the master.
If the masses have no desire to be released. What is the point? When they do all it takes is to show them their actions have effect. (just a bit of light so they can see) Then one can return to the cabin in the woods. Entirely without leaving the shadows.
Everybody notices that companies could function (even better actually) with something like 1/3 or less of their workforce. The other 2/3 are just doing BS work. Why? As with evolution there is really no objective, just some causes with an outcome. One of them is that companies don't know what to do with the money. They have all this people trying to figure out what to do next. Hence the hiring freezes in some companies right now with the economic downturn.
So thousands and thousands of companies are keeping alive with zero or negative profit. Those company are totally inefficient or sustainable in a normal world where you have to fight to be profitable.
So the main responsible aren’t the worker, but all the top managers who instead going bankrupt and face realistically that their companies are totally inadaptés and inefficient to generate profit, they just eat the free cake of quantitative easing that central banks are cooking every day. In this scenario, the standard worker of those company is just an incounscious partner in this con scheme and nobody ask him to be in any way profitable or efficient.
>May be because flooding market with free money called quantitative easing isn’t anymore putting selective pressure on efficiency of company.
Quantitative easing does no such thing. Educate yourself about the banking sector. Private commercial banks create money. Quantitative easing is a bandaid to maintain liquidity between banks as depositors demand ever more liquidity.
I hope you are aware that when you have a mass of people being unemployed then hiring them by no means deprives another company of a potential employees because that other company can just hire another unemployed person. When there is unemployment there is no competition over employees. It is impossible for there to be competition amongst companies. The idea that somehow free money is ruining everything shows a complete lack of understanding of even the most basic concepts of a market economy.
>Can you imagine negative interest is literally like getting paid to subscribe to a loan
People pay money to store cash in safes it is only natural that people pay money to store risk free liquidity when the real economy consists of nothing but risk and illiquidity.
>So thousands and thousands of companies are keeping alive with zero or negative profit. Those company are totally inefficient or sustainable in a normal world where you have to fight to be profitable.
Fight to be profitable over what? What constraint exists that forces companies to win a competition? A lack of employees? No. A lack of physical capital? No. A lack of energy? Maybe but there are energy producing technologies that benefit from lower cost of capital.
Again, if you have a mass of unemployed and underpaid people it doesn't matter how efficiently you use them because you are competing with unemployment, a wholly unproductive activity or underemployment which is partially unproductive.
I find it amusing that your primary concern with the economy is that profit requirements have disappeared and hence we are able to create more wealth and employ more people, you deride those things as unproductive or inefficient, as if people have to operate at peak efficiency their entire life or get eaten by the commercial bank and investor sharks as threatening people with poverty and long term unemployment is the only way to beat the laziness out of people while blaming those people for the systemic unemployment you advocate for as that allows you to call people lazy and absolve you from any responsibility.
Anyone who understands the system knows that it is wrong and no, a lack of extortion through interest is not the part that is wrong.
Remove the need for people to work for their basic and advanced needs.
Guarantee everyone a medium standard of life, with or without a job, and suddenly talent becomes expensive and efficiency rises.
We do not need to all work. Mass unemployment with strong protections that the Industrial Revolution and computers promised us would actually be a good thing.
You didn’t even understand the basic of negative interest. By inverting who pays who.
Surely you avoided that negative oil barrel price events showing how much those smart ads financial boys can be more stupid than common sense.
After that you talk about unemployment which was not the topic here and is irrelevant in this talk. When there is free money you don’t need to fight to get it. I hope this is something easy to understand. Most of the time the free money is injected into market to buy back stock and keep value at top. In order to fake the reality that most company aren’t sustainable without this free money.
You should read about John Law and the conclusion of the first attempt of printing money for free…
But if not, then you are welcome to stay in your fantasy financial bubble and keep your sarcasm to your other brainwashed mates.
For information im an it guy working in financial institution for 20 years. So everyday I meet smart ass finance boy with high perception of their smartness while failing most of the time to beat the market.
I was in front line with my computers in a high frequency trading service, when all my traders bet on remain, and loosing millions of euros the day England choose to brexit.
You talk like an idiot, an ideological idiot. That’s all.
On the contrary I think that selective pressure is brutal. That's why everyone is trying to predict the future, because everyone knows that whatever they are doing today it's not gonna be valid in 20 years. Companies are constantly reinventing themselves, changing the way they do business. Internet has swallowed whole sectors of the economy and changed even the most traditional ones in what, 20 years?. Nobody would call you crazy if you said that in another twenty years Apple or Google have disappeared or are irrelevant.
Now more than ever, we as humans need to find a way engage and unite. But instead we are seeing more apathy, what feels like more division, and less interest in tackling truly difficult problems. Again, not trying to pin it on why (unchecked capitalism, etc), just trying to say that the state of affairs does not seem encouraging.
And those are the lucky ones.
The rest get paid meagerly while inflation and rent gobbles up any earnings they have so they work numerous jobs to scrape by.
Most of the country lives paycheck to paycheck.
I love your idealism but I think most people would be happy to see everything collapse at this point.
Hmmmmmmm
> From my experience the best minds tend to work on important problems
My experience is that you're incorrect.
What I see is tons of people living the same template: pick secure, well paid job, no matter how meaningless. Even when they take a risk to spin some startup, very often goal is to sell off and retire, with little interest in what they actually do.
Then these people get depressed and complain how life is bleak, capitalism cruel and everything should collapse.
Personal experiences is anecdotal. There's hard stat's that say that a majority of this country does not live like you do.
Btw I'm not from USA and reading HN recently, I'm kinda happy about it, because it seems only options on your side are: starving, prisoner of job, sell-off with guilt trips/existential crisis, demoralized billionaire. Is there anyone left in the US, who simply enjoys life as it is?
I obviously dramatize here a bit, but literally a few comments earlier someone wrote to me, that, he/she didn't consent to be alive. Really dystopian thread.
I notice financially privileged people tend to advocate for a 'dont worry be happy' 'everythings going to be alright' mode of living life because theyre shielded from the brutality of the world by their money or their families money.
It's the same reason financially privileged people never admit that they had help from their family and always claim that they made their money themselves.
Because they're completely unaware of what it really takes to make it in life without any help from anyone and I suspect feel a little guilty how easy their life has been compared to others and want to connect with, and associate with people who actually made it on their own.
If you have ever been poor or financially struggling, you would realize 'don't worry be happy' is not a functional way of living life if you don't have family money....at least in America.
The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
May I have my happiness-pass now please? :-)
> The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
It is. My parents surely did and I'm also going to (btw calling this privilege and guilt tripping over fact, that somebody's parents are decent human beings is kinda weird).
This is how life works. No reason to obsess over some places being shitty. There's less of them than a few generations ago (fun fact - my city still has its old beheading stone. Thankfully not used for couple hundreds of years).
That's a rough start. Did they retire? What do they do now?
What's funny, they will tell you, that factory wasn't bad compared to work in the field they did with their own parents. It also got them place in block of flats - objectively kinda crappy, but everything was crappy back then.
What happened to them after the fall of socialism?
Nothing exciting, but they always provided for the family and helped us to start adult life however they could.
Unfortunately, it seems to be an extreme historical anomaly for elites to put the welfare of their people over the zero-sum needs of their own class. One recent such anomaly was in the middle of the 20th century--The U.S. and USSR both invested heavily in building large middle classes (it being historically rare for such to exist at all) because they wanted research supremacy, which you can't get if you squander 95% of the natural intellectual talent, during the Cold War. Also, the existence of other systems put both sides on better behavior: capitalism couldn't be as scummy as it is today, and state-run socialism had to improve material circumstances and scale back the authoritarian tendencies it had developed during WW2... because, otherwise, neither system would have survived. But now that the Cold War is over, we're stuck in this global authoritarian capitalism that retains the worst aspects of both systems.
The division we're seeing is, of course, artificial. The elites deliberately pit people against each other (and trot out old divisive garbage: zero-sum nationalism, weird-ass conspiracy theories to distract from the more boring and often technically legal conspiracies occurring in plain sight, and of course antisemitism) because otherwise, the natural lay of the land would have 95+ percent of the people guillotining their dusty asses. That being said, I can't think of an easy way to end it. We do, as humans, need to (using your words) engage and unite; the problem is that what we need to unite to do--that is, overthrow the current global corporate elite using any means and mechanisms that shall work--is extremely socially unacceptable because those in charge have made it so. Thus, we're just expected to accept a declining standard of living and a nearly complete halt on technical progress at a time when we need it the most.
History shows revolution almost always ends in civil war and destroyed infrastructure. You can't just create a power vacuum with nothing to fill it.
Even if you do manage revolution on a unified front, it always seems to splinter within a generation unless something radically new from some outside source forces you to alter or die.
The best revolutions start with an abdication and reform, reform, reform.
The only way i see that happeniing in the US is if everyone started voting third party and stopped being a two party system. That would create some competiton among the ruling elite.
The problems actually originate from the way we engage in peaceful transactions and activities among each other. It is pretty much universally agreed by economists that something akin to a land value tax is suitable for the efficient allocation of land. This should be used as an opportunity to give everyone an equal share of land on the planet. By that I mean parts of the revenue of a land value tax would be paid out as a citizen's dividend, it is almost as if you were receiving a land certificate but was automatically renting it out for money. You can then use that money to rent your own land.
This would fix the "rent is too damn high" problem. The money problem mostly fixed itself in its own but anyone who would advocate for e.g. a demurrage currency could introduce it as an equivalent to food stamps, not necessarily for the entire population.
I like to think about how much time/effort/energy has been put into designing and indoctrinating people into systems so that that the 95% or so will actually do the work to defend its existence and the elite class can operate effectively as managers rather than ever get their hands dirty. How easy and self-reinforcing it is for people to operate against their own interests is the product of millenia of heavy research into information control, psychology, and power, not an emergent property of social people
People complaint but I argued he was the best employee we had thus far. "If we can find just a few of these guys I too can stay home whenever I feel like it! We just need 3 or 4 of these guys to do what use to be a one man job. Then it will actually get done in stead of you guys wasting precious time talking about how bad he is, wanting him gone. Gone where? To sit at home and live of our tax money? Well, I for one love paying for it. He should sit at home until you guys wake up to the new reality!
Those unmotivated milenimals apparently are the answer. Waving a moldy dried out carrot in front of their nose has no effect.
Its not a real solution of course... at least I think not? Not sure really. But things will change regardless. It might not be pretty, it will at least be interesting times.
Just look around you, the interests of the savers override those who are still working for their own wealth. Housing and money are supposed to be appreciating investments instead of shelter for people and a medium of exchange for workers.
As people get wealthier, they want their wealth to be in forms that are harmful to the rest of society that isn't as wealthy.