I've personally seen other 'tactics' used, most notably a former company's CFO told my Manager that I was being paid 20k more in Salary than I actually was.
This 20k was then subtracted from the IT Budget presumably on a yearly basis. Any other stories from readers?
My new manager just admitted to me a couple weeks back that my old manager (who is his manager now) straight up lied to me to get me in the door. He lied about how quickly my salary would increase. They told me that every six months salary is generally increased. Now that six months has come, he tells me that it is very rare for an increase mid-year.
Most contracts (at least in the US) can be terminated by the employer at will with no further obligation to the employee. The only terms that are meaningful are those that obligate the employer to payment unconditionally, or upon termination.
That's what my friend told me too when I was considering the original offer. I actually flat out rejected it because it was far too low. They went up a little bit when I did that and then the promises came too. I figured 6 months wasn't so long and I could always look for something else if they don't keep their end.
I got the same bait & switch; hired as a contractor "consultant" for 60/hr and then got a job offer for 70k but the manager said it's possible to go up to 90k. I assumed I'd be starting at 80k because I don't see any opportunity for advancement here. How do you get to 90k if there's no chance of moving up?
Worse still is the fact that the salary/performance review comes up in a few weeks and I started in January. Getting the job offer at all apparently counts as the performance review so to get a salary increase or title upgrade I effectively have to wait 1.5 years.
This is just another instance of western societies devolving from a high-trust environment into a low-trust environment. In the short term, cheating in the prisoners dilemma of social trust is beneficial for the cheater, but in the long run it ends up resulting in lower economic growth, making everyone poorer.
Social trust is the key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.
OP will correct me if I am mistaken but I read it that way:
The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past.
I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.
Media plays a part as well. It's hard to trust your neighbors when you're constantly seeing and hearing about people doing horrific things to each other on the nightly news.
I agree regarding China, and I think it will end up limiting economic growth there once they get past the industrialization bump. (I believe they are past it.)
I contrast the west with, for example, Russia, which has a very intelligent work-force and extensive natural resources, but has been unable to break out of the corruption and lack of trust endemic to their culture. India is another example: there is no reason they shouldn't be a first world country looking only at their human and natural capital. The middle east is lousy with countries with incredibly intelligent peoples stuck in second-world (at best) conditions. And so on.
No, it's poor to non-existent property rights and corruption. Look at Venezuela vs Chile for an example of two very similar countries with wildly differing property rights.
A country with rather rigid castes and 40,000 endogamous groups is likely never going to be high trust. "Colonialism" if anything cut against these two facts.
Don't know about China, but they do have an issue with colonialism going back centuries and centuries, even if the Han culture eventually "conquered" the invaders.
All the Americas were colonized, and most (but not all) are doing better than India. Indonesia is roughly twice as rich per capita. South Africa is even richer. And Malaysia even richer than it. Algeria, Libya. Korea and Taiwan were both colonized and much more exposed to WW2, and they're very well off.
The poorest countries in the world were mostly colonized, but that's because most of the world has been victims of colonialism. And the effects of colonialism reverberate to the present day. But it's not really powerful IMO as an explanatory variable for differences in human development in the non-European world.
Out of curiosity, do you see any specific countries as having a generally non-intelligent workforce? If not, why mention it specifically for Russia and India?
Add Japan to the list of "the west" about this; obviously not all that western, but famously a high trust society, which also obviously had made a fantastic difference in their economic growth.
I think your read the parent comment wrong. OP is specifically talking about devolving from a high-trust environment to a lower (or low) one.
China (afaik) is just an environment with low social trust.
That's an interesting counter-argument to OP's last assertion (with whom I agree) since China has +10% economic /year while having really poor social trust standards.
Cultural diversity and high-trust are somewhat at odds with one another, because one of the very ways that cultures are diverse is the parameters of the trust they expect. Even two high-trust cultures can interact poorly with each other when the contract is too different.
Take the innocuous example of tipping. In one culture, waiters are tipped X%, in another, it's just in the food prices. Clearly, neither is absolutely right or wrong, yet in both directions, awkwardness ensures when the signals are crossed.
Signals can cross in much less innocuous ways.
It's one of the things I think the "melting pot" idea got right, and I tend to agree a lot of people who didn't really understand it did indeed jettison it too quickly and with too much excitement... layering on a minimal, high-level culture that defines things like the trust parameters, which are often not absolutely right or wrong like the tipping example above, while leaving religion, dress style, foods, cultural celebrations, all the really important elements of a culture vary beneath that umbrella was actually a really cool idea. (In practice, perhaps it was not quite minimal enough, but I think we'd have been better off addressing that directly rather than throwing out the whole idea.)
In the melting pot metaphor each new wave joins the homogenized culture -- adding something to it, but also losing what made them distinctive. In the salad bowl metaphor, each wave keeps what makes them distinctive while physically mixing with all the other groups.
To give you a concrete example of how this has changed, my mother was born in the mid-30s to a Cajun (French in Louisiana, by way of "Arcadia" in Canada) family, and prior to attending the public school system spoke no English. And English was all that was spoken at school, and not learning it was not an option.
Oh, yes. The current culturally-dominant thinking in the US is that we should let cultures fully manifest without judgment however they like, forming a beautiful tapestry of diversity, and that the "melting pot" is culturally imperialistic because it erases that tapestry.
Which sounds really nice if you don't think about the details, but gets problematic when you start considering them. Again, even leaving aside the reality of widely differing moral/value judgments and sticking to things we can all be more-or-less be rational about like tipping parameters, some culture is going to have to "win" for this to work smoothly. So, you know, once you start thinking about it this way and start thinking about the concrete details of how people interact within cultures, it completely ceases to be surprising that cultures still physically/geographically self-segregate even within the beautiful tapestry of diversity... how could it be otherwise? It's very challenging to try to go out into the world and interact with the intersection of all possible cultural rules (that is, the things agreed upon by all cultures universally), because the intersection is really quite small when it comes to cultural protocols for trade and such. You could spend hours putting together lists of things that are mandatory in one culture, and verboten in another. For instance, this recently went by on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684152 Even if both you and the other person know all the possible protocols, how do you negotiate which you're going to use, when for most people these are really ingrained assumptions below the conscious perception? (And would not this metaprotocol have to come from somewhere and be some form of imposition?)
And to be clear, I mostly mean this post as food for thought, rather than a clear and confident claim of a specific opinion. (Yes, I did express a preference in my previous message, but I'm trying to go more food-for-thought here.) I've also carefully phrased this in terms of "cultures" and not "ethnicities", as in the context I'm discussing, there's only a correlation between the two, not direct causation, and adding in "ethnicities" can just end up clouding our thinking. You get these issues when interacting between countries and stuff too, which is why it's food for thought in general and not a specific attack. It's one of those things where even a smart person can initially think it's a set of very easy problems to solve if you think about it only at a high level, but when you start getting into the details quickly explodes in complexity. Humans are irreducibly interesting!
High-trust and low-trust understate the severity of the phase change, which is more accurately described as a shift from trust-density to trust-sparsity. You go from a state where people spawn with the "bozo bit" off to one where they spawn with it on. You get a completely different political dynamic when that happens.
Obviously, trust has varying degrees and context. In Japan, you can leave your laptop at a cafe; in the U.S., you probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that we're "low trust" or trust-sparse. We might generally trust most people to be decent while aware of the ~0.05% (?) chance per person (that someone steals the computer.
What is changing is trust with regard to competence. People were never so foolish as to trust all others without limits, but there used to be an assumption of competence in the professional world. Institutions like universities are less trusted, and so are people in general when it comes to basic competence and readiness for autonomy. It would be unthinkable, 20 years ago, that CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.
Right now we are in an era of organizational decline. It's not necessarily catastrophic; it might not even be bad. What it does mean is that institutions (universities, professional organizations, corporations, and even unions) have lost their role as central brokers of trust. It raises interesting questions. Thus far, most of the successful startups have been beneficiaries of institutional decline (and, again, some of those institutions deserved to break down, so I'm not moralizing) and there doesn't seem to be any economic reward to build institutions (as opposed to mere corporations, smaller in scope) up... so it doesn't happen.
> CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.
If that's been your experience with Agile, you've have the misfortune of seeing Agile done horribly wrong in a patholgically unhealthy workplace. You may also be romanticizing a bit about old school way of doing things (I have a co-worker who used to work at a major jet engine manufacturer. They were expected to be sitting at their desks when the bell (literally!) rang at 8:30 am. They were expected to wait for the bell to ring break time in before they went to the washroom. As a programmer! Scrum ceremonies aren't sounding so bad).
Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time, and it isn't supposed to be a vehicle for top-down micro-management. If it's either of these things for you, the problem is your organization, not your specific process.
In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team. It's a well defined point for people to raise general questions if they've run into ambiguity, or cast a wide net if they've run into impediment. To-do lists are de-emphasized; it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing.
> "In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team."
> And how could this not be more easily done with bug trackers and status emails?
As far as I'm concerned, bug trackers and status emails are functionally equivalent to stand ups at a scrum board. I find email to be a terrible form of communication for open-ended discussion and would much rather do so face to face, but it's self-evidently a matter a personal preference.
> "Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time"
> And yet, in most places, it devolves into just that.
The fact that some people do it wrong is a straw man.
> "it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing."
> Most people don't pay attention to other's updates; especially updates that they know aren't relevant to what they're working on.
I've always found people are pretty good at picking up on the verbal cues when somebody's asking a question and answering it, even if they weren't paying particularly close attention.
I'm dubious of DSM's merits. I've asked people (in small team nonetheless) less than one hour after a DSM what others have done / were doing and usually they couldn't remember.
I personally think a good team leader / project manager and an issue tracker + git annotations is better.
I'm not surprised that people quickly forget irrelevant information. The value is in the times somebody says "hey, it sounds like you're touching code I'm working in, lets co-ordinate" or "it sounds like you're doing task A the hard way, lets talk about it".
On my team, the throw-away todo listing usually goes very quickly. The value is in the discussion it frequently spawns. In my environment, stand-up spawns such discussion sooner and more reliably than CR/commits/etc.
First of all, some kind of periodic status meeting is a necessary evil. Everyone hates giving status reports and justifying time. It's humiliating and time-consuming. It probably has to happen. If you don't have a scheduled, formal status reporting, you end up with impromptu status pings that are astronomically more annoying and lead people to give up on getting anything done (because there's nothing more anxiety-inducing and flow-breaking than an unreliable environment in which you can be expected to give status at any time).
The upper limit for senior people before they start to get pissed off is probably: the lowest of 10 minutes per week person, or 60 minutes for a weekly meeting, or 20 minutes for a daily meeting. So with a team of 8, you can either have a 60-minute meeting or daily 16-minute meetings. With a team of 4, you're limited to 40 minutes for a weekly meeting or 8 minutes of status reporting for a daily meeting.
Standups are good insofar as they allay toxic suspicion that <Person X> isn't contributing. They're like prisons: not innately good, but the aspect of human nature that they exist to control or mitigate is worse.
Of course, most seasoned people realize that the game of status reporting is like playing Scrabble. It's not about dropping the 100-point words. It's about not opening up the board (and getting nagged with follow-on questions).
Now, I believe you that most of these Agile methodologies were designed with better intentions. I absolutely agree. But they devolve. We've seen that, over and over and over. They don't fix things. They make tolerably broken things more intolerably broken. If you're in an environment where business runs the show and engineers just implement (i.e. business-driven engineering) then the right thing to do, often, is to become politically inert, silently learn new skills, and save your energy (slack) while opportunities are few so you can step up when the business-driven engineering regime goes away (or when you change companies). Scrotum gets in the way of that, and by putting such an emphasis on micro-estimates (numbers that will always turn into political tools) it generates politics.
Excellent point. Beyond the high- versus low-trust gradient you pointed out is the time element. Our ongoing degeneration into a low-trust state is highly corrosive and even regressive to develop complex, multifaceted economic structures, which differentiate themselves from simpler structures by their exhibited time preferences.
When you select for low-trust options in a previously high-trust environment, you also select for shorter timeframes of activity. Those shorter timeframes directly manifest as fewer options; there simply isn't enough time to let beneficial compounding effects ramp up and hence open up more options by supplying more per unit resources over time. The cognitive load to manage these shorter timeframe activities also goes up per unit returned equity/resources/margin versus a longer timeframe; I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up non-linearly in most cases. None of these effects are reported upon, tracked, or even detected in accounting systems today, except at terminal end stages. The current dominant business culture is yield chasing with this behavior, and that has historically ended poorly.
1, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are weasel words. What is "a lot"; what is "extensive"; how often is "on occasion"? They're not lies: they just mean nothing.
2 and 3 are firm statements: ask for them in writing. Even if they're not in an official employment contract, an email stating same might give you enough ammo for a Fraudulent Inducement Of Employment case (if push came to shove).
Ask follow-up questions to get a quantitative answer based on past performance. Promises of future raises (or other future actions) are complete BS and should be treated as such.
Everything in the article's list is a basically gratuitous promise. Things change -- the economy, the financial performance of the company, management, etc. Any change can be justification to nullify one or more of those promises.
The easy way to see if the hiring company is lying? Ask them to put everything in the contract, and put --numbers-- where applicable (30 days of training at the company's expense per year, ability to work at home 2 out of 5 business days, budget to hire help if workload exceeds 50h/week, etc.).
It'll be pretty clear whether they're lying or telling the truth if they start balking at specifics.
No one is going to put that stuff in a contract unless it's a senior management position. The company cares much less about hiring you, no matter who you are, than about capping its liability. If you do manage to get such terms written in, you can bet that the company will still have no obligation to you as it can simply terminate the contract at any time without compensation. Even in a strong market, there are plenty of other candidates out there who will either value the gratuitous promises or simply ignore them, so there's no need to risk any real contractual liability just to hire you.
> No one is going to put that stuff in a contract unless it's a senior management position.
Of course they won't.
In all fairness, I don't think anyone who has been around the block would be tricked by any of the items in the list, but I'm sure a lot of less experienced job hunters could be.
SO, if you are a person who weighs a decision on these gratuitous promises what is the best course of action to see if the prospective employer is lying?
Probably to ask for all that stuff spelled out in detail in the employment contract.
Sure, you may not get hired for the reasons you cited, but it'll become pretty clear that those promises were empty too, and you'll handle the next opportunity differently.
I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I start I find out I'm working with a bunch of duds. How can I get a big picture view of (almost) all of the people I will be working with along with their skill levels?
I don't expect everyone in the company to be all A team or B team tier, but I don't want to be a part of an organization where 80% of the people are barley qualified to do their job.
Start by asking, "who would my manager be?" or "who would my team be?"
If you're not being interviewed by anybody who will be on your prospective team, that's already a red flag. You should be talking to your future coworkers (and maybe others, sure) and you should know which ones they are.
To be more precise: Let's say I will be working on a team of 5 people. They send the manager and the smartest guy and things look great, but how do I gauge the skill level of the people who aren't there along with the skill level of other teams. For example, maybe my team is great, but I'll be working with other teams (infra guys, networking guys, legacy systems guys, whatever) who are obstructive and unskilled.
How do you get outside the "interview box" to see more of the company?
Judging the other teams is going to be more difficult, but for your boss and teammates, at some point in the process before you accept the job offer, say you want to spend a little time with them.
Some combination of luck and observation, and/or good social skills, might elucidate how the team's interactions go with other teams.
As mentioned above, a refusal to do this is a huge red flag. Even for a company like Google, which routinely does this. There are a zillion horror stories resulting from their closed allocation policy, like the hardware guy who was given a job doing vaguely hardware related Python programming. Without the option of moving to another team for 18 months per Google's policy (de facto if not de jure), he had no choice but to quickly resign to avoid ruining his career.
And I should mention what happened in my last job, where I wasn't able to do that, and the boss I was assigned to, who had absolutely no buy in, he wasn't given a choice about my working for him, took an instant dislike to me. That did not end well.
Echoing the theme of this subthread, for my last N jobs, in all but one recruitment I was substantially lied to. The one before that said I'd get enough time to review the org's long abandoned legacy software before a very firm (government contract) commitment to how long it would take to make it viable again.
Before that, the manager didn't reveal she'd taken an offer to move to a subsidiary that was splitting off. She guilelessly told me that the previous attempt to hire someone in my position failed because she'd mentioned that. That job ended when
The company before that had a pattern of hiring a "second" techie only after the current one had given notice, without telling prospects they'd soon be responsible for it all.
Two before that I learned later that my boss didn't want to hire me, but I was the only one who passed his whiteboard programming test (which for me was so easy I hardly remembered it by that time) and the company would have otherwise died, and I was fired as soon as they convinced the guy they really wanted to move from SV back to the D.C. area.
Before that, I joined a company just as a couple of devil investors took it over with what we soon enough learned was the express intent of owning all the company; they deliberately sabotaged the launch just to have 100% of nothing (granted, this was investor betrayal, in the denouncement 13 of us simultaneously resigned).
Before that, no bad faith can remember, at least starting out, and those jobs and organizations were substantially more successful. If this sort of thing has indeed become a pattern, we shouldn't be surprised by general economic stagnation, whatever the other secular causes there might be.
One good gauge of a question would be: "how long does it take to get a new VM?" "And how long before the team has software installed?"
This will hint at the bureaucracy behind the scenes if they answer honestly.
The only other way is to know people either on those teams or that have worked with those folks before and essentially do "reference checks" but in reverse on your prospective employer.
Internships actually do a better job here. Some BigCorps are treating summer college student jobs as a 90-day interview process. When done right, the student works with an actual team on an actual product. Everybody gets a good, long look at one another.
I worked at a company that took 90 interns per summer. All of them outside of our mobile team did nothing but fake intern projects. We made ours do actual product work that shipped; the rest of the interns were very jealous. We made offers to three and one accepted, the other two went on to graduate degrees.
How are those "fake projects" not a gigantic waste of everybody's time? We put our interns to work - either embedded on product teams, or working with our architecture/R&D teams on new technology. I think the interns generally enjoy the experience and we try to hire the best of them back after graduation.
They still allow you to judge the capability of those working on them. And in the US at least, you're not supposed to have interns working on something you'd otherwise have a regular, full time employee on. The whole keeping companies from replacing employees with cheap interns thing.
At a prior digital analytics company we ran a 3 month training academy where the candidates spent half their time learning our methodology/trade and the other half of the time working on client projects under close supervision. After several iterations of this process we were able to develop talent efficiently. We were able to have our pick of the talent pool to hire as well as source other top performing candidates to other companies in need of the skillset we taught them.
Typical 80/20 split exists at most companies. It's rare when you get a team of qualified motivated people together working towards a goal. But when you do, harness it, because it'll be gone before you know it.
If employers really want people to work with them, they will pay them more. Everything else is meaningless and unenforcable. Cash on the barrel is the only thing that counts.
For job seekers, it's fair and reasonable to assume that any employer who makes promises against the future is lying, so for every promise you are made ("You'll eventually get to work on cool technology X!") you should increase your starting salary expectations, because you need to get a fair wage for being lied to.
The best defense is a good offense. In other words, you should not be locked into your relationship with your employer, especially as a new hire.
It's always your option to quit if things aren't as advertised, and not worth salvaging. This means managing your finances and attitudes to be more mobile, and not basing your security and contentedness on the good will of your employer.
Bad employers act a lot like political candidates. The hiring process is the campaign, and once the votes are tallied and the position is locked in, the worker is subjected to things not quite as described. You never know what things are going to be like for your personal situation regardless of how much you read up on company experiences, so keep a fallback plan open, sacrifice to maintain a financial buffer, and don't get bogged down in your possessions and location.
This mindset is also useful even when your employer is great, in family emergencies and other life-upheaving events.
This strategy would only work if "bad employers" (in this context those who will lie during the hiring process) are in the minority. Even a lying employer can still end up being a comparatively good place to work - but nonetheless - your strategy will just repeat the situation and at some point you will have to explain why you are switching all the time.
I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me. Lying to someone about what their life would be like working at the company seems totally counterproductive to that goal.
I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
I'm lucky to be asked basic questions like what time people are expected into the office in the morning let alone someone asking for concrete examples of advancement.
Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult - just breaking down their defensive barriers so they'll relax and give me candid answers can take half my time. Still, there is only so much I can do in a limited amount of time, so at the end I just try to lay out what an average work day looks like and my philosophy as their manager and hope that they will be able to make an informed decision.
The essence of the modern employment contract is that we keep showing up and doing more or less what we're told, and you keep the paychecks coming until doing so would jeopardize senior management pay, at which point you kick us to the curb with nothing. Anyone on either side of the table expecting something else is delusional.
> I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me.
Then you're not going to hire anyone, your empire will stagnate or shrink, and you will not be promoted into senior management. At some point you will be kicked to the curb.
Lying enables you to hire people who might otherwise be unavailable or much more expensive. When the labor market is weak, this isn't very important, but in a strong labor market it can be the difference between growing your organization and losing it to attrition. Assuming you're not willing/able to pay more than your competition (no one is), lying to candidates is going to be among your top tactics. By the time they both know they've been lied to and are upset enough to want to do anything about it, they'll have kids and a mortgage, or there will be another recession, or some other circumstance will trap them. They're not happy, but you are: by growing your team, you've earned a promotion to director.
Sure, your hires are less productive than starry-eyed believers, but there aren't enough of the latter to staff a giant corporation (or even a medium-sized one), and senior management pay is based primarily on the size of one's empire. There's no point in a staffing policy that limits empire growth. A giant company, even a very inefficient one, pays senior managers far more in absolute terms than a smaller, more profitable one. Therefore it's in the interests of the senior managers to encourage hiring as many people as possible as long as they're cheap, regardless of whether they're happy or productive (and don't worry, if business is bad, they can be kicked to the curb). As a line manager, it's in your interest to go along with this no matter what it takes, because that's how you climb the ladder.
> I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
It's more that there's little point in asking because the assumption is that you will lie. At best, even honest answers have a very short shelf life; the experienced candidate assumes that conditions will change quickly and for the worse. Most importantly of all, the candidate knows he or she will have no recourse if conditions are not as advertized, regardless of the reason. That makes the answers non-actionable, and thus the questions a waste of time.
> Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult
We don't tell you because we know you don't care. People have been getting a lot smarter about the employer-employee relationship over the past decade or two. A corporation exists primarily for the benefit of senior managers: it gives them a place to compete with one another, engage in cutthroat politics, try out pet theories about business and management, and gives them the lion's share of the business's profits for little or no work. It does not exist for the benefit of the rank and file, customers, or shareholders. Few people are so foolish as to expect anything but misery and insecurity as a member of the rank and file. Why give you information you can use against us later? Put another way, what's in it for us?
Hmmm; while I'm definitely old fashioned (entered the job market in 1980), part of my "employment contract" is lies made during the hiring process, or the akin later in the course of employment, provide me with the moral basis to quit the jobs at any time, and with 0 days notice if I so prefer. How I "kick companies to the curb" if needed (and more than a few have then died as a result).
I would think the possibility of not being miserable for a third of your life would be more than enough incentive.
I suppose though if you're worldview is that you're destined to be nothing but a cog in the meat grinder of humanity, then that must sound like a pipe dream. And frankly, it doesn't sound like it would be possible for one to ever be happy even in a good environment with that kind of deeply cynical worldview.
> I would think the possibility of not being miserable for a third of your life would be more than enough incentive.
So, your argument essentially boils down to "tell me what I want to know or I'll make your work life a living hell."
Please tell me the name of your employer. I don't ever want to work at the same company as you (or, at the very least, I don't want to be on the same org chart as you).
I'm saying that unless you're honest during the interview about what you need out of a job, you'll end up joining companies that will make you miserable because they are fundamentally a bad fit for you.
Ah yes, the old "bad fit" chestnut. What employers never mention, however, is that when candidates are foolish enough to open up about what they want, they're often pushed away as "not a good fit for the company/team".
There's nothing cynical about it. Experienced candidates know what corporations are and how they work, and they know that employment is a business relationship. Its purpose is not to make either side "happy" but to exchange value for value on agreed terms. It is not a family relationship, friendship, or psychologist-patient relationship. In that context, your question to candidates is out of line. Answering it nontrivially helps you but not them; it gives you more leverage, and more opportunities to make promises you cannot or will not keep. Your argument may be that you wouldn't do that, but how is the candidate to know? They don't know you; you just met. The sensible thing to do is to keep one's cards well hidden.
"I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers."
It's rare because in our experience, this does nothing to help your chances of getting the job, and can do a lot to hurt them. And while they can help you root out places you don't want to work, many places will simply lie.
The article is more reasonable than the headline for me.
I don't think most employers around me lie on purpose. It's really that kind of situation were you try hard to be good to the other person, but in the end real life hits you in the face and you don't come around to deliver as much as promised. I'd argue I fell in that trap a few times myself.
Flat hierarchy is a big one. Many startups use it to convince junior hires that they'll be two hops from the CEO when, in fact, that CTO has 75 reports and the junior engineer is actually two de facto levels below where he was told he'd be in the offer letter.
Investor contact is another, related, one. When engineers accept 0.05% equity slices at the expense of hedge-fund jobs, they're doing it because they've been told (and haven't had the life experience to have doubts) that they'll have investor contact within 6 months if they do a good job, and have the connections necessary to be founders inside of 18 months. It almost never happens that way.
Immediate requirement to fill a newly opened position. Must be able to assume a project which had abrupt departures of project members. Must be able to work in a fast-paced environment. Travel required.
Why don't you ensure that all the promises simply written down in the employment agreement, so that in case that you are betrayed you have a lever (on the other hand: If the employer are not willing to write it into the employment agreement, there is a chance that he will try to cheat you sooner or later).
What employment agreement? In the US most everyone is employed "at-will" which means you or your employer can terminate the employment relationship for any reason whatsoever. It's usually only C-level executives which have employment agreements in the US.
I knew that the US have no period of notice for employments (and thus the employment can be canceled at about anytime). But I wasn't aware that there are usually no employment agreements in the US.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadI've personally seen other 'tactics' used, most notably a former company's CFO told my Manager that I was being paid 20k more in Salary than I actually was.
This 20k was then subtracted from the IT Budget presumably on a yearly basis. Any other stories from readers?
Heck, in writing doesn't count for much if it isn't part of a contract.
Worse still is the fact that the salary/performance review comes up in a few weeks and I started in January. Getting the job offer at all apparently counts as the performance review so to get a salary increase or title upgrade I effectively have to wait 1.5 years.
Social trust is the key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.
I don't see China as being a tremendously high-trust social environment, for instance.
The West of a previous time, presumably.
The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past.
I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.
I contrast the west with, for example, Russia, which has a very intelligent work-force and extensive natural resources, but has been unable to break out of the corruption and lack of trust endemic to their culture. India is another example: there is no reason they shouldn't be a first world country looking only at their human and natural capital. The middle east is lousy with countries with incredibly intelligent peoples stuck in second-world (at best) conditions. And so on.
Don't know about China, but they do have an issue with colonialism going back centuries and centuries, even if the Han culture eventually "conquered" the invaders.
All the Americas were colonized, and most (but not all) are doing better than India. Indonesia is roughly twice as rich per capita. South Africa is even richer. And Malaysia even richer than it. Algeria, Libya. Korea and Taiwan were both colonized and much more exposed to WW2, and they're very well off.
The poorest countries in the world were mostly colonized, but that's because most of the world has been victims of colonialism. And the effects of colonialism reverberate to the present day. But it's not really powerful IMO as an explanatory variable for differences in human development in the non-European world.
China (afaik) is just an environment with low social trust.
That's an interesting counter-argument to OP's last assertion (with whom I agree) since China has +10% economic /year while having really poor social trust standards.
Take the innocuous example of tipping. In one culture, waiters are tipped X%, in another, it's just in the food prices. Clearly, neither is absolutely right or wrong, yet in both directions, awkwardness ensures when the signals are crossed.
Signals can cross in much less innocuous ways.
It's one of the things I think the "melting pot" idea got right, and I tend to agree a lot of people who didn't really understand it did indeed jettison it too quickly and with too much excitement... layering on a minimal, high-level culture that defines things like the trust parameters, which are often not absolutely right or wrong like the tipping example above, while leaving religion, dress style, foods, cultural celebrations, all the really important elements of a culture vary beneath that umbrella was actually a really cool idea. (In practice, perhaps it was not quite minimal enough, but I think we'd have been better off addressing that directly rather than throwing out the whole idea.)
Compare to bilingual education.
Which sounds really nice if you don't think about the details, but gets problematic when you start considering them. Again, even leaving aside the reality of widely differing moral/value judgments and sticking to things we can all be more-or-less be rational about like tipping parameters, some culture is going to have to "win" for this to work smoothly. So, you know, once you start thinking about it this way and start thinking about the concrete details of how people interact within cultures, it completely ceases to be surprising that cultures still physically/geographically self-segregate even within the beautiful tapestry of diversity... how could it be otherwise? It's very challenging to try to go out into the world and interact with the intersection of all possible cultural rules (that is, the things agreed upon by all cultures universally), because the intersection is really quite small when it comes to cultural protocols for trade and such. You could spend hours putting together lists of things that are mandatory in one culture, and verboten in another. For instance, this recently went by on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684152 Even if both you and the other person know all the possible protocols, how do you negotiate which you're going to use, when for most people these are really ingrained assumptions below the conscious perception? (And would not this metaprotocol have to come from somewhere and be some form of imposition?)
And to be clear, I mostly mean this post as food for thought, rather than a clear and confident claim of a specific opinion. (Yes, I did express a preference in my previous message, but I'm trying to go more food-for-thought here.) I've also carefully phrased this in terms of "cultures" and not "ethnicities", as in the context I'm discussing, there's only a correlation between the two, not direct causation, and adding in "ethnicities" can just end up clouding our thinking. You get these issues when interacting between countries and stuff too, which is why it's food for thought in general and not a specific attack. It's one of those things where even a smart person can initially think it's a set of very easy problems to solve if you think about it only at a high level, but when you start getting into the details quickly explodes in complexity. Humans are irreducibly interesting!
Obviously, trust has varying degrees and context. In Japan, you can leave your laptop at a cafe; in the U.S., you probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that we're "low trust" or trust-sparse. We might generally trust most people to be decent while aware of the ~0.05% (?) chance per person (that someone steals the computer.
What is changing is trust with regard to competence. People were never so foolish as to trust all others without limits, but there used to be an assumption of competence in the professional world. Institutions like universities are less trusted, and so are people in general when it comes to basic competence and readiness for autonomy. It would be unthinkable, 20 years ago, that CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.
Right now we are in an era of organizational decline. It's not necessarily catastrophic; it might not even be bad. What it does mean is that institutions (universities, professional organizations, corporations, and even unions) have lost their role as central brokers of trust. It raises interesting questions. Thus far, most of the successful startups have been beneficiaries of institutional decline (and, again, some of those institutions deserved to break down, so I'm not moralizing) and there doesn't seem to be any economic reward to build institutions (as opposed to mere corporations, smaller in scope) up... so it doesn't happen.
If that's been your experience with Agile, you've have the misfortune of seeing Agile done horribly wrong in a patholgically unhealthy workplace. You may also be romanticizing a bit about old school way of doing things (I have a co-worker who used to work at a major jet engine manufacturer. They were expected to be sitting at their desks when the bell (literally!) rang at 8:30 am. They were expected to wait for the bell to ring break time in before they went to the washroom. As a programmer! Scrum ceremonies aren't sounding so bad).
Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time, and it isn't supposed to be a vehicle for top-down micro-management. If it's either of these things for you, the problem is your organization, not your specific process.
In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team. It's a well defined point for people to raise general questions if they've run into ambiguity, or cast a wide net if they've run into impediment. To-do lists are de-emphasized; it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing.
And yet, in most places, it devolves into just that.
"In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team."
And how could this not be more easily done with bug trackers and status emails?
"it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing."
Most people don't pay attention to other's updates; especially updates that they know aren't relevant to what they're working on.
As far as I'm concerned, bug trackers and status emails are functionally equivalent to stand ups at a scrum board. I find email to be a terrible form of communication for open-ended discussion and would much rather do so face to face, but it's self-evidently a matter a personal preference.
> "Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time" > And yet, in most places, it devolves into just that.
The fact that some people do it wrong is a straw man.
> "it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing." > Most people don't pay attention to other's updates; especially updates that they know aren't relevant to what they're working on.
I've always found people are pretty good at picking up on the verbal cues when somebody's asking a question and answering it, even if they weren't paying particularly close attention.
I personally think a good team leader / project manager and an issue tracker + git annotations is better.
On my team, the throw-away todo listing usually goes very quickly. The value is in the discussion it frequently spawns. In my environment, stand-up spawns such discussion sooner and more reliably than CR/commits/etc.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! No. Stand-up is all about accounting for time:
* What did you do yesterday? (That's accounting for time)
* What are you working on today? (That's also accounting for time)
* What roadblocks/hurdles are you encountering (That's accounting for things that take unexpected amounts of time...ie also accounting for time)
The upper limit for senior people before they start to get pissed off is probably: the lowest of 10 minutes per week person, or 60 minutes for a weekly meeting, or 20 minutes for a daily meeting. So with a team of 8, you can either have a 60-minute meeting or daily 16-minute meetings. With a team of 4, you're limited to 40 minutes for a weekly meeting or 8 minutes of status reporting for a daily meeting.
Standups are good insofar as they allay toxic suspicion that <Person X> isn't contributing. They're like prisons: not innately good, but the aspect of human nature that they exist to control or mitigate is worse.
Of course, most seasoned people realize that the game of status reporting is like playing Scrabble. It's not about dropping the 100-point words. It's about not opening up the board (and getting nagged with follow-on questions).
Now, I believe you that most of these Agile methodologies were designed with better intentions. I absolutely agree. But they devolve. We've seen that, over and over and over. They don't fix things. They make tolerably broken things more intolerably broken. If you're in an environment where business runs the show and engineers just implement (i.e. business-driven engineering) then the right thing to do, often, is to become politically inert, silently learn new skills, and save your energy (slack) while opportunities are few so you can step up when the business-driven engineering regime goes away (or when you change companies). Scrotum gets in the way of that, and by putting such an emphasis on micro-estimates (numbers that will always turn into political tools) it generates politics.
When you select for low-trust options in a previously high-trust environment, you also select for shorter timeframes of activity. Those shorter timeframes directly manifest as fewer options; there simply isn't enough time to let beneficial compounding effects ramp up and hence open up more options by supplying more per unit resources over time. The cognitive load to manage these shorter timeframe activities also goes up per unit returned equity/resources/margin versus a longer timeframe; I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up non-linearly in most cases. None of these effects are reported upon, tracked, or even detected in accounting systems today, except at terminal end stages. The current dominant business culture is yield chasing with this behavior, and that has historically ended poorly.
2 and 3 are firm statements: ask for them in writing. Even if they're not in an official employment contract, an email stating same might give you enough ammo for a Fraudulent Inducement Of Employment case (if push came to shove).
Ask follow-up questions to get a quantitative answer based on past performance. Promises of future raises (or other future actions) are complete BS and should be treated as such.
Everything in the article's list is a basically gratuitous promise. Things change -- the economy, the financial performance of the company, management, etc. Any change can be justification to nullify one or more of those promises.
The easy way to see if the hiring company is lying? Ask them to put everything in the contract, and put --numbers-- where applicable (30 days of training at the company's expense per year, ability to work at home 2 out of 5 business days, budget to hire help if workload exceeds 50h/week, etc.).
It'll be pretty clear whether they're lying or telling the truth if they start balking at specifics.
Of course they won't.
In all fairness, I don't think anyone who has been around the block would be tricked by any of the items in the list, but I'm sure a lot of less experienced job hunters could be.
SO, if you are a person who weighs a decision on these gratuitous promises what is the best course of action to see if the prospective employer is lying?
Probably to ask for all that stuff spelled out in detail in the employment contract.
Sure, you may not get hired for the reasons you cited, but it'll become pretty clear that those promises were empty too, and you'll handle the next opportunity differently.
I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I start I find out I'm working with a bunch of duds. How can I get a big picture view of (almost) all of the people I will be working with along with their skill levels?
I don't expect everyone in the company to be all A team or B team tier, but I don't want to be a part of an organization where 80% of the people are barley qualified to do their job.
If you're not being interviewed by anybody who will be on your prospective team, that's already a red flag. You should be talking to your future coworkers (and maybe others, sure) and you should know which ones they are.
To be more precise: Let's say I will be working on a team of 5 people. They send the manager and the smartest guy and things look great, but how do I gauge the skill level of the people who aren't there along with the skill level of other teams. For example, maybe my team is great, but I'll be working with other teams (infra guys, networking guys, legacy systems guys, whatever) who are obstructive and unskilled.
How do you get outside the "interview box" to see more of the company?
Haven't tried that, not sure how it would go over, but I feel pretty reluctant to go somewhere new without getting that chance.
Some combination of luck and observation, and/or good social skills, might elucidate how the team's interactions go with other teams.
As mentioned above, a refusal to do this is a huge red flag. Even for a company like Google, which routinely does this. There are a zillion horror stories resulting from their closed allocation policy, like the hardware guy who was given a job doing vaguely hardware related Python programming. Without the option of moving to another team for 18 months per Google's policy (de facto if not de jure), he had no choice but to quickly resign to avoid ruining his career.
And I should mention what happened in my last job, where I wasn't able to do that, and the boss I was assigned to, who had absolutely no buy in, he wasn't given a choice about my working for him, took an instant dislike to me. That did not end well.
Echoing the theme of this subthread, for my last N jobs, in all but one recruitment I was substantially lied to. The one before that said I'd get enough time to review the org's long abandoned legacy software before a very firm (government contract) commitment to how long it would take to make it viable again.
Before that, the manager didn't reveal she'd taken an offer to move to a subsidiary that was splitting off. She guilelessly told me that the previous attempt to hire someone in my position failed because she'd mentioned that. That job ended when
The company before that had a pattern of hiring a "second" techie only after the current one had given notice, without telling prospects they'd soon be responsible for it all.
Two before that I learned later that my boss didn't want to hire me, but I was the only one who passed his whiteboard programming test (which for me was so easy I hardly remembered it by that time) and the company would have otherwise died, and I was fired as soon as they convinced the guy they really wanted to move from SV back to the D.C. area.
Before that, I joined a company just as a couple of devil investors took it over with what we soon enough learned was the express intent of owning all the company; they deliberately sabotaged the launch just to have 100% of nothing (granted, this was investor betrayal, in the denouncement 13 of us simultaneously resigned).
Before that, no bad faith can remember, at least starting out, and those jobs and organizations were substantially more successful. If this sort of thing has indeed become a pattern, we shouldn't be surprised by general economic stagnation, whatever the other secular causes there might be.
This will hint at the bureaucracy behind the scenes if they answer honestly.
The only other way is to know people either on those teams or that have worked with those folks before and essentially do "reference checks" but in reverse on your prospective employer.
For job seekers, it's fair and reasonable to assume that any employer who makes promises against the future is lying, so for every promise you are made ("You'll eventually get to work on cool technology X!") you should increase your starting salary expectations, because you need to get a fair wage for being lied to.
It's always your option to quit if things aren't as advertised, and not worth salvaging. This means managing your finances and attitudes to be more mobile, and not basing your security and contentedness on the good will of your employer.
Bad employers act a lot like political candidates. The hiring process is the campaign, and once the votes are tallied and the position is locked in, the worker is subjected to things not quite as described. You never know what things are going to be like for your personal situation regardless of how much you read up on company experiences, so keep a fallback plan open, sacrifice to maintain a financial buffer, and don't get bogged down in your possessions and location.
This mindset is also useful even when your employer is great, in family emergencies and other life-upheaving events.
I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
I'm lucky to be asked basic questions like what time people are expected into the office in the morning let alone someone asking for concrete examples of advancement.
Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult - just breaking down their defensive barriers so they'll relax and give me candid answers can take half my time. Still, there is only so much I can do in a limited amount of time, so at the end I just try to lay out what an average work day looks like and my philosophy as their manager and hope that they will be able to make an informed decision.
> I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me.
Then you're not going to hire anyone, your empire will stagnate or shrink, and you will not be promoted into senior management. At some point you will be kicked to the curb.
Lying enables you to hire people who might otherwise be unavailable or much more expensive. When the labor market is weak, this isn't very important, but in a strong labor market it can be the difference between growing your organization and losing it to attrition. Assuming you're not willing/able to pay more than your competition (no one is), lying to candidates is going to be among your top tactics. By the time they both know they've been lied to and are upset enough to want to do anything about it, they'll have kids and a mortgage, or there will be another recession, or some other circumstance will trap them. They're not happy, but you are: by growing your team, you've earned a promotion to director.
Sure, your hires are less productive than starry-eyed believers, but there aren't enough of the latter to staff a giant corporation (or even a medium-sized one), and senior management pay is based primarily on the size of one's empire. There's no point in a staffing policy that limits empire growth. A giant company, even a very inefficient one, pays senior managers far more in absolute terms than a smaller, more profitable one. Therefore it's in the interests of the senior managers to encourage hiring as many people as possible as long as they're cheap, regardless of whether they're happy or productive (and don't worry, if business is bad, they can be kicked to the curb). As a line manager, it's in your interest to go along with this no matter what it takes, because that's how you climb the ladder.
> I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
It's more that there's little point in asking because the assumption is that you will lie. At best, even honest answers have a very short shelf life; the experienced candidate assumes that conditions will change quickly and for the worse. Most importantly of all, the candidate knows he or she will have no recourse if conditions are not as advertized, regardless of the reason. That makes the answers non-actionable, and thus the questions a waste of time.
> Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult
We don't tell you because we know you don't care. People have been getting a lot smarter about the employer-employee relationship over the past decade or two. A corporation exists primarily for the benefit of senior managers: it gives them a place to compete with one another, engage in cutthroat politics, try out pet theories about business and management, and gives them the lion's share of the business's profits for little or no work. It does not exist for the benefit of the rank and file, customers, or shareholders. Few people are so foolish as to expect anything but misery and insecurity as a member of the rank and file. Why give you information you can use against us later? Put another way, what's in it for us?
And your question to Aloisius is excellent: what's in it for us?
I suppose though if you're worldview is that you're destined to be nothing but a cog in the meat grinder of humanity, then that must sound like a pipe dream. And frankly, it doesn't sound like it would be possible for one to ever be happy even in a good environment with that kind of deeply cynical worldview.
So, your argument essentially boils down to "tell me what I want to know or I'll make your work life a living hell."
Please tell me the name of your employer. I don't ever want to work at the same company as you (or, at the very least, I don't want to be on the same org chart as you).
I'm saying that unless you're honest during the interview about what you need out of a job, you'll end up joining companies that will make you miserable because they are fundamentally a bad fit for you.
It's rare because in our experience, this does nothing to help your chances of getting the job, and can do a lot to hurt them. And while they can help you root out places you don't want to work, many places will simply lie.
I don't think most employers around me lie on purpose. It's really that kind of situation were you try hard to be good to the other person, but in the end real life hits you in the face and you don't come around to deliver as much as promised. I'd argue I fell in that trap a few times myself.
Investor contact is another, related, one. When engineers accept 0.05% equity slices at the expense of hedge-fund jobs, they're doing it because they've been told (and haven't had the life experience to have doubts) that they'll have investor contact within 6 months if they do a good job, and have the connections necessary to be founders inside of 18 months. It almost never happens that way.
Immediate requirement to fill a newly opened position. Must be able to assume a project which had abrupt departures of project members. Must be able to work in a fast-paced environment. Travel required.