Small aside, reading all these conversations: I just think a lot of static gets injected into these discussions about wage/employers/comp on HN because a large majority of the commenters here are either currently business owners, or founders, or trying to be either of those. But there is also a huge contingent of people who do regular waged labor here, whether FAANG or freelance. Beyond any political differences, I think this is the main operating tension here, when there is one.
The very essence of this website is not amenable to workers coming together to discuss things like the propriety of employment-tied healthcare, or what we should expect from our managers, but mostly for aspiring and current startup leaders to, probably, discuss everything but that stuff. It is a forum attached to a startup incubator after all, and I can't imagine much VC money goes to those companies that are worried about their own labor related issues/externalities, at least those that they don't need to legally be worried about.
I don't think anything is lost here, there is no problem per se, discussions are of course not being diminished by this ultimately demographic point; but just... if you come to these threads and feel a little disappointed that there is not a more universal solidarity towards the basic decency of the worker, just remember it is because not everyone here is a worker!
> I just think a lot of static gets injected into these discussions about wage/employers/comp on HN because a large majority of the commenters here are either currently business owners, or founders, or trying to be either of those
I've been reading HN for years and I would assume 90% of the comment section or more is people who only want to be employees.
I hate to say it, but HN isn't a great place for genuine startup, management, or operation advice. At all. Even product discussions are very customer-centric rather than company-centric, and companies will get roasted here for making good business decisions that don't directly benefit the users.
For example, years ago the common refrain on HN was "charge more" and encouraged businesses to raise prices, fire problematic customers that weren't contributing value, and otherwise focus on the company's bottom line. Now whenever a company pulls a "charge more" and raises prices, reduces the free plan, or discontinues services for non-paying customers it's nothing but rage and pitchforks in the comment section.
HN comments can still be useful, but it's definitely not a friendly place for actual founders and business owners making tough decisions.
The pivot toward salary negotiation stuff came later, presumably because there's a much bigger audience for employee-directed writing on Hacker News than there is for startup founder advice.
Yes but not in the way I think you're implying. Labor makes a rational decision to make as much money as they can, and as highly paid software jobs have become more common, more labor has entered software. Rather than the past when most people were in software to try something new or start something, most software labor these days is in it just for a living. The distinction between labor and capital itself in software was a bit arbitrary as many engineers would go off and become founding or otherwise early engineers in other firms.
Thus it makes rational sense for capital-disinterested labor to maximize what they get out of a job, much as corporations are criticized/observed to try and extract as much labor as possible out of employees. Hence it's become en vogue for labor in software to loudly criticize companies for any small slight to extract as much value as possible much just as corporations make decisions to maximize shareholder value. Just as companies can treat their workers badly, labor can malign capital unfairly.
It's the end result of corporations with disinterested labor. The two sides try to fight a war while extracting as much value as possible. Labor isn't interested in joining capital the way it once did when software was newer and sees them as permanent adversaries. It's also probably why we're seeing increased attempts at software unionization despite software being so well compensated; labor doesn't see itself as being similar to capital.
1. By broader macroeconomic trends, I was suggesting that HN commenters might be criticizing "charge more" simply because consumers in general, who may not be able to afford as much as they used to, would be adversely affected. Of course, tech companies who monetize by pursuing any number of alternate policies (adding ads, selling data, F2P loot boxes) would be just as roundly criticized. Lose-lose.
2. I'm not sure how feasible it is to expect the amount of labor crossing into capital to be on par with how it was in the dot-com bubble, or even just a decade before. Sure, a large amount of dumb money continues to slosh around in tech so long as interest rates and other economic conditions remain favorable for investing, but that doesn't mean the number of entrepreneurs will increase proportionally
3. Tech industry trends have shifted over time, and corporations don't simply make decisions at the expense of labor only for the sake of shareholders, but also for the founders themselves (who are also technically shareholders, sure). Witness this rather curious pre-pandemic thread from December 2019 where the HN commentariat almost overwhelmingly denounces joining startups, in favor of joining FAANG or starting one's own startup instead. (Though the latter would seem to contradict the 'less of software labor wants to join capital' idea.) As the second comment puts it pithily, "the math changed."
I think we essentially agree. #2 is an interesting point to think about. Especially as the FAANGs continue to consolidate, while there will be a greatly increased appetite for software engineers as labor, thanks to network effects (and a bit of #3) you end up with fewer opportunities for labor to become capital and vice-versa.
> a large majority of the commenters here are either currently business owners, or founders, or trying to be either of those.
I wonder to what extent this is true. I've been on HN several years without even knowing that it has anything to do with start up. A lot of contributors don't even work in tech.
> a large majority of the commenters here are either currently business owners, or founders, or trying to be either of those
A good point. And I think the reason this article is so fraught is that the writer is basically arguing even that if you met all of their demands and tried to make the world a better place, they will fundamentally remain hostile to you.
I've been aware of that while reading this site for years as "waged regular labor." I don't think the perspective is the same at all. The audience isn't the startup focused audience it once was in 2011, but has broadened quite a bit.
I’m not inclined to do an exit interview because I’ve likely already expressed my opinions.
I do think the “the company doesn’t care about you” type advice does require some nuance.
Different companies make different choices and just because someone moves from mega corporation to mega corp doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust anyone…
There’s space in between giving your entire self to a company and imagining everyone is out to get you.
I’ve worked with folks who are absolutely obsessed with protecting themselves from being stomped on by a company, and nobody wanted to work with people who ooze cynicism like that / talk about taking a better job all the time . They of course interpret the results (not being put on some team or another) that as being punished because they “know” / are willing to express what they thin the truth is…
> I do think the “the company doesn’t care about you” type advice does require some nuance.
Probably something like: The company doesn't care about you regardless of the individuals at the company who might care about you. (Unless one of those individuals is the CEO, I guess. More nuance!)
My experiences while at Cisco about 4-5 years ago:
1st experience: Told my boss I am leaving. My boss’s boss calls me in a room , tells me he has some great projects for me and that we will work together on them. I agree. Turns out it was his last day!
2nd experience: Similar situation, told my boss I am going to a startup. Boss’s boss calls me and gives me a lecture about how it is a bad idea to go to a startup. I leave. A few weeks later I find out he also left for a startup.
Some time later I met the boss from the 1st experience and he told me “sorry, but it was not personal. I was just doing my job”
If you are in a megacorp your job should be to extract as much money as possible while doing as little work as possible. Because your boss's job is exactly the opposite.
Your coworkers are not out to get you but your managers are. Don’t fucking ever trust them.
It's wild to me that those managers would have been loyal enough to the company to behave that way toward you when not only were they themselves on the way out the door, but the hypocrisy of it would have been instantly obvious, on a timespan of days, not even months or years.
My impression is that in the modern world, most workers consider their personal network to be of much greater value than any ways that their current employer could reward them for "loyalty". Having been a manager and had people quit on me, my response has always been pretty candid and along the lines of, "yeah, obviously this is tough for me as I've really valued your contributions over the time we've worked together. However, you've been clear about your expectations as far as comp/projects/tech/mentorship/career/whatever, and although we've tried to do what we can, I can understand that the role is no longer a great fit for you, so the decision to move on makes perfect sense. Best wishes with your next gig."
Was talking to my manager about how there were opportunities for more money at other companies (like, 20% more, not huge amounts). She said she would work on getting comp adjusted for me, then 3 months later said she couldn't. I asked if my company would counter-offer if I got a better offer, she said no.
I got an offer for a lot more (+60%). My company immediately matched. Don't trust management.
My advice is never negotiate salary like this with a current employer. Always just leave, always on good terms. Let's say you leave for 15% raise and the new company sucks? Give it a year or two. Your previous employer will probably hire you back for a 10%+ premium above your new job that you hate.
Yeah I am manager. I am pretty honest with my employees. One of my normal sayings is "you have to look out for #1 " (#1 = yourself its not a Star Trek reference)
That said i never say things like that on comms. And usually preclude them with things like "this conversation never happened" etc.
But i feel like part of my job is to give them career and life advancement advice and if that means leaving my team...so be it. That said ive made it pretty clear my style (on a few fronts, this being one of them) may not be all that common. Things like encouraging people to use their PTO, even for mental health days to prevent burnout etc. I do find that style engenders more trust and generally a less combative interaction. I have even had some tell me when they are looking for jobs. I usually tell them not to make a habit of telling someone at work that type of thing.
I have worked with maybe a couple of managers like you in my career, and I have to say I was truly heartbroken when they moved one. It was the most enjoyable and productive years in my career.
It's sad that a manager saying to the employee "you have to look out for #1" has to be off the record.
Hopefully there aren't too many orgs left out there where a manager would be having to do this off-the-record; certainly it feels like the orthodoxy for some time has been that workers do their best work when they're well-rested and have had breaks, and at a systems level, people being away is important for identifying bus number issues.
All that aside, my company's accountants get antsy about what overhanging PTO does to the balance sheet, so there's a very explicit top-down mandate around fiscal year end time to get people using up their vacations.
Someone who sees a fundamental divide between Workers and Managers, and sees the job of the latter as being extracting the maximum possible work from the former. (And, based on my experience, sees the former as universally trying to do the least work possible for the most money, up to and including trying to defraud the company.)
As an ex-manager recently returned to IC work... This is awful, I'd never treat someone this way. I tried to always be respectful of my employees, to the point of recommending to leaving employees that they not take our counter, that they are leaving for a reason and now that they've made the choice I recommend they explore it, and they can always come by if it was a mistake. With the knowledge and backing of my CIO.
Point being not all management is like this and I hope you've found somewhere that respects you.
I think collectively too many of us are too willing to ignore red flags and it let's people/companies like this succeed.
Oh man, I worked with a bunch of ex Cisco folks years ago. Capable but there were a lot of folks just looking to hit metrics in the most cynical way and miss the point of the job. That and some surprising other issues.
My partner and I have found ourselves in similar situations 4-5 times already within a combined ~12 years of professional experience. I don’t have the capacity to trust management anymore.
Some people need to quit and run their own business and go through the pain of learning the skills to do so. If they don’t quit, they become impacted with resentment. People who are very creative and have the experience of having their innovations stolen / reassigned to others over and over again get extremely resentful.
I know because I am one of them. In my experience, the people who don’t understand are the ones who don’t create anything and are generally mediocre. Most employees do not design new ideas, programs or strategies. They act bewildered when their colleagues do create novel innovations and then seem to want to “own / run them.” Your reaction signals you are probably not in the creative sector, which is typical.
The people in the very upper 1% of the talent pool are most disadvantaged by corporate systems. If you create some new program that gets a lot of attention, management often can’t wait to divide the credit between you and others who didn’t do anything and then say it was “team work.” The one who produces all the inventions and ideas knows otherwise.
I have been burned so many times I am now deeply cynical and refuse to create anything new for anyone other than myself.
Example: I designed a program which got $20 million in funding (this is not a made up number). The project was then given to a lifelong veteran of the company. He got to “do the strategy.” That meant he took my exact slides and reformatted them. Then he was put to “manage” me because I was only allowed to be “an execution person” due to my seniority.
He got all the credit, I got all the work. That is one example of the benefits of being creative in these environments. Learned my lesson several times: Don’t create IP for corporations. Ever.
Best case scenario is they take it away from you Later rather than Sooner.
One of the reasons I left a BigCo is the pervasive cynicism. I really had trouble finding it satisfying to work in an environment where cynicism was so deep and widespread but nobody wanted to leave because of the advantages (like good pay and good tooling). It just felt stifling after awhile.
It truly is shocking that health insurance is tied to employment status.
I really think this is a large part of the trend towards overt ruthlessness in the USA, no one has their back so they have no ones back, as people age and experience medical bankruptcy (or narrowly avoid it at great cost) they are realizing this ruthlessness in our system.
Health insurance is not tied to employment status. Anyone can go to healthcare.gov and buy an equivalent BCBS or Kaiser or whatever gold/silver/bronze insurance. Unless you are in a particularly shitty state.
What employers do have is the ability to sell you health insurance with pre tax dollars, which is also available to self employed individuals. But the people who are screwed are those who are employed by employers that do not offer health insurance. They have to buy insurance with post tax dollars.
There is similar bullshit with retirement funding, where employer sponsored retirement account limits are drastically more than individual ones (401k vs IRA), and especially if you are a married couple with 1 spouse with 401k access and one spouse without.
>Health insurance is not tied to employment status. Anyone can go to healthcare.gov and buy an equivalent BCBS or Kaiser or whatever gold/silver/bronze insurance. Unless you are in a particularly shitty state.
Out of curiosity, I went and looked up the plans in NJ for a 32 year old person(56k salary). This is someone in a lower risk pool. The bronze plans are in the upper ~280$/month and include a $6000 deductible. There are three plans out of 36 that are ~380 a month that have a $2500 deductible. Everything else is more. This is NJ, one of the better states and definitely not a shitty state. These plans are garbage. Every time someone on HN extols the virtues of Healthcare.gov, I recheck my options and they always come back much worse than what I get working for a private employer (typical S&P 500 corp). I wish people would look up their possible plans on Healthcare.gov before tossing it out as something other than a scam.
ACA compliant health insurance pricing is pretty commodified since all the rating factors are codified in law (age, location, smoking status, and that is it I think).
Edit:
>These plans are garbage
The plans simply reflect the cost of healthcare. The companies that sell the healthcare have profit margins in the sub 5% range. Mechanisms to bring the cost down would be to have taxpayer funded medicine in the public domain so the medicine is sold without patent, increasing number of doctors by greatly expanding residency positions and reducing training requirements so that you can start practicing before age 28, reducing the need for "certificates of need" so more hospitals can open and compete, etc.
> The plans simply reflect the cost of healthcare.
Anyone who works in healthcare and looks at billing can tell you this is not actually the case, prices are not based on any reasonable metric and are rarely actually paid by insurers anyway.
>The companies that sell the healthcare have profit margins in the sub 5% range.
Point of contention here, these companies aren't selling healthcare, they're reselling it. Which is a service which should ideally not have any profit margins, and would be best suited for a large, collective entity that everyone paid into according to their financial ability, as opposed to smaller social-class exclusive pools.
What you are talking about is taxpayer funded healthcare, with the large collective entity being the government.
Seeing as how that is not politically possibly, middlemen with sub 5% profit margins was the compromise. Obviously not the best situation, but still better than before.
5% profit isn't the whole story here - If you can't increase profit, increase revenue. These middlemen have a lot of power and an incentive to use it in making the system less efficient.
All businesses would like to increase profit and revenue, but they cannot just will it. There are at least 7 major publicly traded competing managed care organizations (MCOs, aka health insurance comapanies) plus Kaiser Permanente among many others.
Is there any evidence that these companies are concluding to increase revenue by making the system less efficient?
Low profit margins plus multitude of competitors generally means there is not much juice left to squeeze.
Correct, that was what I was alluding to. There's lots of good reasons to move to such a system, and no good reasons to keep our current system.
>Seeing as how that is not politically possibly
Basically every other liberal democracy has taxpayer funded healthcare, and even many US states have successful programs. It's extraordinarily silly to call that impossible, or to call what we have now a "compromise" rather than a clear case of corporate welfare being put before the welfare of the citizens.
There literally was a compromise in 2009 during the passage of ACA that nixed the “public option” (taxpayer funded) healthcare in order to win the votes of necessary Senators to pass the bill.
Seeing as how Republicans have zero interest in taxpayer funded healthcare, and they have held enough Senate seats to stymie any Democrat led effort for the past 20 years and probably next 20, I do not see why it is “silly” to call it politically impossible.
Seems like Texas will go blue as the population changes. They almost elected one in 2018. They may also flip North Carolina and Pennsylvania to permanent blue as well.
> Your employer is probably just paying a lot for your coverage.
Yes but they get to deduct this, unlike an individual for whom no such deduction exists. Repeat after me: "a tax deduction is a subsidy." That is, welfare. An extremely biased, discriminatory welfare at that.
This just feels like a ‘well ackshually’ retort to health insurance being tied to employment. This is an extra added expense and often times the barebones insurance is garbage with high deductibles and out of pocket maximums.
How is it an “extra added expense”? Just because you do not pay for 50% of the premium out of your own pocket directly does not mean you are not paying implicitly. Your employer is obviously counting it in the total cost of employing you, and the figure is given to you in box 12 code DD on your W-2.
You can also buy a platinum level BCBS health plan yourself, without an employer, and get the same low deductible and low oop max.
It is still a headache to have to register for a plan after losing your job and possibly transfer/link your information to a new account. COBRA is better than nothing, but it is often more expensive than makes sense.
Furthermore you cannot use the exchanges if your employer offers plans IIRC. So your employer can control which plans you have access to.
The subsidies should just be given directly to the person who needs healthcare. There is no need to involve a third party. It just complicates the situation for no gain.
> Furthermore you cannot use the exchanges if your employer offers plans IIRC. So your employer can control which plans you have access to.
I do not think this is true. Everyone can sign up on healthcare.gov. Employers will want you to opt into the subsidized plans they offer, especially if you are a lower compensated employee, in order to pass their non discrimination testing requirements, but they have to make the portion they are paying for high enough to make it enticing enough, they cannot force you.
> The subsidies should just be given directly to the person who needs healthcare. There is no need to involve a third party. It just complicates the situation for no gain.
Absolutely. The whole employer tax benefit situation should be abolished, and all individuals dumped on healthcare.gov. Same with retirement benefits. Employers should not receive any beneficial tax treatment for providing benefits, and it would make compensation much more transparent and easier for employees to compare from one employer to another.
Hmm you're right on that first part. I don't know where I got that from. I seemed to remember playing around on CoveredCA and it said I couldn't get a plan because my employer offered plans, but I can't reproduce that now.
I'm assuming this is by design to keep the US population "on their toes" and at work doing productive things. Otherwise why would it be tied to employment?
Health insurance is "tied to employment" because of wage controls that were implemented in WWII. Employers still had trouble hiring people, and because they were prohibited from raising wages, they had to find other ways to attract people: benefits. Health insurance then became a popular benefit.
Also, note that you can buy your own health insurance in the US. You are not required to use health insurance provided by an employer.
> Health insurance is "tied to employment" because of wage controls that were implemented in WWII.
If that was the only or even dominant reason, then the removal of those controls in 1945 would have seen that tie rapidly unravel, instead, health care has become more, not less, tied to employment since the end of that policy, reinforced by deliberate policy choices like tax policy and explicit mandates.
The historical reason a thing first became common and the reason the thing is still common are often not all the same.
Having had both, this is not my experience. My experience is that employer plans have fewer choices and similar or higher rates. They're cheap because my employer is paying most of the bill.
Just a note for those who may not know, either because they've grown up under a different regulatory regime or they never shopped for private insurance before the ACA:
Pre-ACA, I was once a much healthier early-twenty something applying for private coverage. I have a genetic condition that has never manifested in a health consequence that has required treatment, and technically it was illegal even at the time to reject someone based on their genetic information. Despite that, I was denied coverage by every private insurer in the market because I had a preexisting condition. The only reason the private market functions at all for anyone with so much as a history of a sprained ankle is because of the ACA.
Insurance companies would routinely (and retroactively!) deny coverage and payment based on preexisting conditions. They would accept premium payments for years, then when you came down with breast cancer would dig up an old photo of you with a cigarette in your mouth and refuse to pay for your treatment because you claimed to be a non-smoker when you applied for coverage. This was considered normal.
Varies a lot state-by-state. Ours has no individual plans offered outside the "marketplace", which most years only has a couple companies offering plans on it, all with bad networks, bad coverage, and terrible rates. A fairly bad employer plan is a much better value than the marketplace plans while a middling employer-provided group plan will be way better than the best plans on the marketplace, and there are, I repeat, no other providers that will sell you an individual plan in this state (I've checked, both with brokers and with major providers around, all said the same thing: "no-one sells individual plans in this state anymore, your only options are whatever's on the marketplace")
Is it available off-market? That's how I bought my insurance (in another state). My state has a marketplace too, but I found better plans directly through the insurer's website.
>I haven't had insurance for five years because the (major, national) providers who cover what I need aren't available on my state's marketplace (NY).
As someone who purchases insurance from the NY marketplace, that hasn't been my experience.
Initially, I had a plan from one of those (Anthem/BCBS), which provided pretty good coverage because they increased my premiums by more than 50%.
Now I have a local (New York State) provider (Fidelis Care) which costs less and has a (fairly) low deductible through the state's marketplace.
That said, many providers are actively hostile to marketplace plans. Back when I still had an employer-based plan, my company changed insurance providers. I called up my GP to make sure they accepted insurance from the new company, but before I could even describe the scenario, the office person at my doctor's office raised her voice and said, "We don't take any Obamacare plans!"
Which was quite interesting, since back then many of the major national insurance companies were offering such plans, including the companies (both old and new) my employer was contracting with.
All in all, I've been fairly satisfied with Fidelis Care, although I wish I could do database queries of their "Explanation of Benefits" records rather than having to wade through PDFs for each visit to a provider.
All that said, I don't know your circumstance (none of my business) so you may have needs that I don't. I wonder what those might be that a "national" insurer might offer than an in-state provider doesn't, especially since the ACA specified requirements for all health insurance plans, not just those on marketplaces.
Although I'm not sure how no insurance could be better than some, unless you're against medical care in general. But my use case isn't yours and I'm sure you make decisions that are best for you.
Edit: Added a few thoughts to address parent's issues, clarified my point about coverage to be more clear that I'm emphatically not calling anyone a liar.
> As someone who purchases insurance from the NY marketplace, that just isn't true.
So have I, and I stopped purchasing insurance because I cannot find the coverage I want. I need a specific variant of a certain operation which is only performed by a few surgeons in the country, and the one surgeon in New York who offers it only takes Aetna for that operation. Aetna reentered marketplaces starting 2022, but I'm moving and the operation has a year-plus waitlist, so I'm SOL. It has made a ton of sense for me to have no insurance because I'm fairly young and in fantastic health, making it cheaper to just pay out-of-pocket for primary care once or twice a year. Please don't call people liars.
>So have I, and I stopped purchasing insurance because I cannot find the coverage I want. I need a specific variant of a certain operation which is only performed by a few surgeons in the country, and the one surgeon in New York who offers it only takes Aetna for that operation. Aetna reentered marketplaces starting 2022, but I'm moving and the operation has a year-plus waitlist, so I'm SOL. It has made a ton of sense for me to have no insurance because I'm fairly young and in fantastic health, making it cheaper to just pay out-of-pocket for primary care once or twice a year.
That seems reasonable. As I said, "my use case isn't yours and I'm sure you make decisions that are best for you."
>Please don't call people liars.
My intent wasn't to call you (or anyone else) a liar. My apologies if you felt I was attacking you. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've edited my comment to explicitly reflect that.
I'd also add that I had a similar experience with physical therapy (PT) after surgery. When I changed insurers from BCBS to Fidelis (just a month or so after surgery), I found that the PT group I was using didn't accept my new insurance.
It's sad that we have to jump through all sorts of hoops just to get the medical care we need. Which is often the case even when it isn't an edge case like yours (or mine with my PT -- my situation was, of course, much less consequential since there are many PT providers out there).
Because previously all social services, including police and fire safety, were privatized, and were only taken over by the state when it became clear there wasn't enough economic incentive to keep such services running without the operators doing stuff like roughing people up, burning down buildings, etc. But everyone decomposes as they age, and people fear illness and death enough that you can charge them however much you like, so it stays private and eventually employers start pitching in to attract talent without having to offer better wages, more holiday leave, or a shorter work week.
Now, there's a whole administrative system that drives up prices and puts a ceiling on availability and quality of care; with most Americans being (relatively) ill-traveled, ill-read, and fed a news product that beneath the packaging is some combination of entertainment and fear-mongering, it's easy for one to believe there's just something in the air that makes an NHS-style or even a German-style system impossible here.
Then, if you were around for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections, you'd have seen presidential candidates arguing about whether someone should have to pay for someone else's well-being. And it's not a debate along the lines of class—it's tied up with identity politics and a broader debate around the welfare state. Advantaged and disadvantaged communities alike are full of people who see how things are, and, knowing that it takes a lottery win to move up the economic ladder and a bad week to fall down, are skeptical that next time it'll be different.
Doesn't help that most Americans will never have the opportunity to get even an hour of education in macroeconomics, unless it's buried in disconnected lessons about individual economic downturns, nor that education on probability doesn't happen until second-year calculus (which is similarly rare in high schools), nor that most Americans don't learn about the mechanics of Medicare until their fifties or sixties
> all social services, including police and fire safety, were privatized
I think enforcing the law has been a government function from the times the first laws were laid down. Fire services were a private function, and this actually works fine in sparsely populated areas where fires are not likely to spread in temperate climates. The only reason fire services are public is because of the inherent risk to everyone that a fire poses in a dense, substantially flammable, city.
If a fire affects you and only you, then why not cover it under normal, optional, property insurance like every other disaster?
This is generally the model of government intervention I support - intervene when the actions of one group of people directly affect others. This covers regulation around rights of way, fire services, environmental protection, waste management, water supply, pandemic/disease control, police, and the military. It however does not cover supplying the personal necessities of life like food, shelter, clothing, medical care, entertainment, companionship, sex, fulfillment, etc.
These are fundamentally individual needs, and I therefore hold that meeting them should be an individual responsibility. Any cooperation to meet these needs should be strictly voluntary and consensual, not compulsory. I think this is where, to greatly simplify, "the left" and "the right" fundamentally disagree. For instance, in spite of the now well-studied and crushing effects of loneliness, it would be absolutely tyrannical for the government to mandate friendship. Similarly it is tyrannical for the government to mandate participation in public health care/insurance. Let people figure out how to meet their needs for themselves, and let them figure out how to cooperate voluntarily. Charity is exactly the virtue of helping those in need, but mandatory charity is indistinguishable from slavery.
I'm not sure what you mean "private police" - the Boston night watch, which predated the 1838 professional police force, were given powers by the town government[1]. I can't find any references to how the night watch was funded, but surely the town government was involved.
Edit:
> The duties of the Watch, as appears by the order, were to be performed in turn by the inhabitants; they were not "citizen soldiers," but citizen Watchmen, and having an interest in their work, no doubt did it well.
- A chronological history of the Boston watch and police
by Savage, Edward H.[2]
Savage seems to indicate that the night watch was performed in turn by the inhabitants of the community, by order of the government, and there is no mention they were paid. This doesn't seem like a private service to me.
sure, just pointing out that the _funding and availability_ of a social service wasn't a point of contention there. unintuitive as it is, the discourse around public health and health care aren't really related. anyway i was just giving people some background, not opining. if i was feeling saucy i might say something incoherent about people feeling entitled to a service they previously resented as soon as it's useful to them
Well, you made the case that police were previously privatized. I'm not sure that's true exactly. You also compare healthcare to police and fire services. I was just elaborating as to why that comparison may not be apt. Public health, insofar as controlling the spread of communicable disease, has always been a function requiring government authority.
The idea that people who set bones and cure cancer should be included in this category is a more modern take, one that requires much more careful discussion of what should and should not be a "public service".
> people feeling entitled to a service they previously resented as soon as it's useful to them
I think we should expect people to prefer suffering and death with dignity, rather than greedily and desperately peering into the pockets of strangers, but that's just my take.
uh i cant edit this anymore but i wanted to clarify to all the ppl spazzing out over the police thing that i was speaking in a broader historical sense and only got specific to america in the transition to the second paragraph
The origin of the tie between US employment and healthcare was during the Second World War when wage controls were put into place. Employers competed for workers by adding benefits packages, which later became ossified and further entrenched with exemptions in the tax code.
I knew an individual named Ron Hillhouse, he sold life insurance and built a large insurance company in Texas twice.
He sold it each time to a group in NY (MetLife each time if memory serves). He told me that his insight was that construction companies would have variable revenue and compensation requirements across TX building contracts (private vs government mostly) and to avoid discontent they would dump the difference into life insurance and other alternative compensation because as long as the take home paycheck was the same no one really complained about being put on lower compensation jobs.
Not sure if that was a similar origin for health insurance but I've always assumed it was.
I think you are framing it as a top down objective, but I think it's the opposite. Employers themselves offer healthcare because it's a way to attract employees. You can get other health plans (e.g. Obamacare) but they are not as competitive as employer-sponsored plans. To not have employer-sponsored plans, you would have to either 1) ban employer-sponsored plans 2) offer other plans that are competitive. #1 seems unrealistic, #2 is possible but would have to probably be done by the state, which the US doesn't really love.
I want to point out that the above analysis is completely ahistorical and does not track the path dependence and latent contexts of the development of the modern US healthcare system. The above is not an explanation, it is a post-hoc rationalization.
Any argument that claims anything is "the way it is" because of the ways people act today is only talking about current incentive structures and has nothing whatsoever to do with the systems and tendencies that have created what we see today. Current incentive structures are a product of the system they are expressed from, not the other way around.
There are competitive plans on the individual market. (Your local insurance market may vary.)
I could get approximately equivalent insurance for about 40% cheaper if I went on the individual market. But, my employer pays 75% of my employer sponsored plan.
The real problem is how expensive healthcare is in the US.
Compare Cignas global plan with and without US coverage. Somehow they can easily cover essentially all of the rest of the world for far less than the US.
Last I checked, pretty much the entire rest of the OECD was between 40% and 70% of US per-capita spending on healthcare. Some spend less total, per capita, than we do just from public spending that we already do (medicare, medicaid, CHIP, public employee healthcare plans, military care like VA and Tricare, et c.) without even having universal care like ~everyone else does
> Last I checked, pretty much the entire rest of the OECD was between 40% and 70% of US per-capita spending on healthcare.
Per capita numbers can be misleading on healthcare as health is labor intensive, so countries with higher wages will have higher per capita costs with otherwise similar systems.
OTOH, the US spends the second highest share of GDP on healthcare, globally, behind Tuvalu, and about a time and half the GDP share of the second highest large, developed state (Germany). [0]
Yeah, like part of the reason Taiwan, say, is so much cheaper, is that wages are lower across the board.
Canada? Switzerland? Germany? Yes they pay a lot worse for some jobs (software developer, and, more relevantly, doctor) but ordinary fully-loaded employee costs aren't that different from the US. Admittedly, the countries more comparable to the US tend to be more in the 60-70%-of-US-spending range, than on the lower end.
That does mean that even allowing a generous premium over the most-comparable peers, we should be able to cut total healthcare spending 20% while covering everyone and removing a major drag from our economy, and a major factor reducing overall US QoL. As it is, we're struggling (and largely failing) to even keep cost increases to merely the inflation rate.
I was recognizing the potential problem with per capita numbers only for the purpose of specifically pointing out that they aren't misleading in this case because the same thing is there in the per-GDP numbers.
IMO, the population covered by employer-sponsored group policies is significantly healthier than the population shopping on the exchanges. The biggest weakness of the ACA was that it didn’t ban employer-sponsored coverage as a means to force everyone into the same free market.
Such mechanism give corporations the power to decide who gets terminated and loses health insurance. It's very effective at discouraging people from doing anything that goes again the grain, like getting into an union.
Bosses absolutely do not love healthcare costs if that's what you're suggesting. But even legal mandates for larger firms aside, if you're trying to hire white collar workers while not having a decent healthcare plan, you're going to find it's a challenge.
Give me a break. Bosses can add and subtract, and so can employees. They both know healthcare is getting paid for from the paycheck regardless. And with company plans, bosses may pay less or may pay more. Probably less. Either way, bosses love that employees know quitting their job is going to require switching health insurance plans, which is a dicey process. Bosses like holding that power in the same way they like holding visas over H1B visa holders heads.
And the most obnoxious part of it all is that you knew this.
>Bosses can add and subtract, and so can employees. They both know healthcare is getting paid for from the paycheck regardless.
It's not clear to me that most employees do know that, actually. I see a ridiculous number of people that oppose nationalized healthcare "because they'd have to pay taxes", not realizing that there is already a deduction from their total compensation to pay for their healthcare (i.e. a tax).
THIS is for real. If I don’t have a job with good benefits, I can’t pay our medical bills anymore, and we could lose everything. So even though I’ve had the “team player” personality from birth, I cannot allow myself to put my faith in any employer. The moment they start turning the screw on benefits, I’m out.
As an American who has worked closely with the Federal government, I'm significantly more afraid of the idea that the government would be responsible for my medical care.
Medicare (single payer healthcare in the US for everyone over age 65) has a lower fraud rate than private insurance, serves millions of seniors and has for decades, and as an American there is a big discontinuity in actuarial data where your life expectancy literally goes up at 65 because you get access to it.
Maybe don't generalize from a few personal anecdotes to the functioning of the entire 4 million employee federal government?
A common right-wing criticism of Medicare that I was trying to pre-empt is that it is rife with waste, fraud, and abuse.
But to directly answer your question: if you want your dollars spent effectively, you should care about fraud rates in services you pay for (public or private).
Alright, well I guess I'll take your comment as an attempt at a real conversation. But fraud in the medical industry isn't really something that crosses my mind, nor is it part of my concern about the government dictating my healthcare.
Medicare not only covers the most at risk of our population, but is also by far the cheapest per capita beside medicaid. Yes, American health care is expensive, but medicare is the cheapest way to deliver it.
Most of the world does not have government run health care, what they have is government run health insurance. Hospitals, doctors, health care providers in general are privately operated and anyone with the right credentials can go ahead and start their own practice/clinic, but the government provides single payer and universal health insurance.
That's not what anyone in the US is proposing though. Even medicare for all would still have the same private companies responsible for your care, they would just be paid by the federal government.
It would transition away from employer-provided health insurance, to employer-subsidized insurance, having instead individuals choose their health care plan from state-approved private insurers. It sought to make the cost of health insurance more transparent to consumers, with the expectation being that this would increase market pressures to drive health insurance costs down.
Health insurance is one of the least concerning things for the government to get involved in with healthcare, really. Worst thing that happens is they don't insure you or the procedure, and you have to pay for it yourself somehow.
I would question the viability of government for handling many things, but collecting taxes and distributing funds is one of the things they usually are pretty good at. Some of the leanest health insurers in the US in terms of overhead are public enterprises, e.g. the VA and various state assistance programs.
In Germany, health insurance is also tied to your employer. If you're a freelancer in Germany you pay out of your own pocket every month (around 500 bucks).
It's a very similar system, the real difference is that it's illegal to not have insurance, so you are "forced" to always be insured, and unemployment support is more generous.
They are either included in your insurance (if you are employed and have public health insurance), or you'd have to add them to the insurance at extra cost, if you have private health insurance (for example freelancer).
I have no problem believing that other nations governments do a great job. I also do not live there nor am I a citizen of those countries.
American government is a uniquely incompetent form of government. Despite being one of the largest & most expensive governments it gets little to nothing done. Anything that is 'done' is often done far over the original projected budget.
> American government is a uniquely incompetent form of government.
Objectively untrue by any serious metric you'd like to go for, and in particular government-run health insurance programs (Medicare chief among them, but also the VA) are notably well-run and have low incidence of fraud while maintaining remarkably low overhead.
It's interesting to me that you're lumping together Medicare and the VA. Because while I here almost nothing but positive things about Medicare, I hear lots of stories of people not getting the care they need from the VA (and "slipping through the cracks"). Granted, those seem to be mostly older anecdotes, have things changed in the past decade or so?
You're conflating things like physical infrastructure and defense contracts with welfare. The welfare that we do give, for the most part, is exceptionally well run and effective.
Because giving individuals money, targeted or otherwise, is given/spent to enhance an individual or families life in some way. It is a direct benefit to them.
And yes, SS is absolutely welfare and it is extremely effective. It reduces the poverty rate of the elderly by nearly 30%. It also reduces, directly and indirectly, child and young adult poverty by meaningful amounts as well, 1.5% and 3% respectively.
Regarding your first point, I disagree. I think the intention is clearly to provide a direct benefit, but that isn’t always the effect. One example which seems to be entering the zeitgeist now is student aid. The presence of additional student aid has a high correlation with the rise in tuition over time, but I think we’d all struggle to say it was commensurate with to the cost.
Addressing your second point re: social security and perhaps generalizing my first point slightly, I think the statistics you cite are reductions in poverty vs simply abolishing the benefit. I don’t think they measure the counterfactual scenario of there never having been social security to begin with, and those current seniors having had their take home pay increase by some portion of the 15% of their gross pay which otherwise went to SS. Additionally, it doesn’t take into account the future debt servicing cost of current SS recipients on future generations.
As to your point about SS, you are right, but the counterfactuals have been measured. We didn't have SS in this country for the majority of its history and elder poverty was terrible prior to its existence, reaching well over 40% in the 1920's.
SS also has always been a Pay Go system and doesn't have any debt servicing, actually the reverse is true, SS is owed money from the US government. That is, SS lent the US government money. That government debt would exist with or without SS as federal government spending is not constrained in any way by tax receipts, so SS's impact here is moot.
To your point about student aid, that is far more complicated. While it is likely true that the existence of the aid has resulted in some upward pressure on tuition, it is not the only factor. Increased demand both in quantity and quality of services, reduction in direct public aid to institutions, and increasing administrative costs among other things all play a part. Without student aid, it is likely true that prices would be lower, but probably not nearly as much as one would assume, and we would have a far less educated populace. The latter being a substantial negative in a world where the best paying work is and continues to be more knowledge based.
doctors would be responsible for your medical care; taxes would foot the bill. The primary involvement of the government is the logistics involved in getting from A to B.
As people age they do get “free” insurance from Medicare. And if a white collar worker experiences downward mobility they can qualify for free or cheap insurance through the Medicaid and Affordable Care Act provisions.
Every single one of those programs comes with a laundry list of asterisks that make them far worse than any employer provided insurance I have ever had.
Also, medicare doesn't kick in until 65, which pretty much guarantees that most workers won't be able to retire until then; even if they're otherwise eligible / able.
To offer a contrasting anecdote, my government health insurance (MediCal) was the best I ever had, including my current 6-figure job. It can be done well.
it shouldn't be! From an ethical standpoint, housing should be guaranteed as a human right. Obviously if you're living in a mansion paid by an executive job and you get laid off you might have to downsize, but nobody should have to fear homelessness in the wealthiest countries on earth.
> It truly is shocking that health insurance is tied to employment status.
I think "annoying" is a better description. It's not shocking at all, it was a fairly predictable outcome given the situation. It is really annoying that we haven't managed to walk it back to something more reasonable since then.
“Annoying” for me would be stepping on a small LEGO. As a Canadian, I think that the US healthcare system exists in a first world country is absolutely “shocking”.
As someone who has experienced both systems, the fact Canada covers all is great but there are big issues with wait times and coverage gaps (in some provinces).
Oh absolutely. If you don't have an emergency you will have to wait.
But man, when you do have a medical emergency, it's great not having to think about whether you're going to have to remortgage your house, sell your kidneys, put your kids up for adoption or reconsider all of your life plans.
Personally I think Canada is a little bit over-dogmatic about rejecting a parallel private system entirely: I know there are problems with running two systems (mainly around inequity and brain-drain incentives for healthcare workers to move out of the public system), but IMO, nothing that can't be fixed by sufficiently high prices/taxes.
The US system is a huge mess, but but the reason why it hasn't changed is because it works "barely" for most people.
Keep in mind that medical bankruptcy isn't unknown in Canada either - not being able to work is a bigger cause of medical bankruptcy than medical bills themselves.
Tying your personal health and that of your loved ones to your employer gives your boss unduly leverage over yourself, particularly when there are life and death decisions to be made.
Wages were frozen during WWII (Stabilization Act of 1942), and insurance was exempt from this freeze. At the time, it was a way to compete for employees. Eventually, you just weren't in the running if you weren't providing insurance.
historically Protestant work ethic
+ unrestrained pursuit of profit
+ weak labor protections and domination of corporate interests in the halls of legislation
= predictable outcome.
This is not historically accurate. Insurance through employers came out of the federally mandated price controls during WW2, and was later solidified by massive tax breaks for corporations for providing said insurance (under the eager endorsement by unions among others). Changing the system would require changing the tax incentive. Changing the deduction to apply to individuals could be a path forward.
Federal mandates and tax incentives are created in the halls of legislation. This was mentioned above, albeit concisely. You even mention "massive tax breaks for corporations" which really only happens with intense pressure (backchannel or otherwise) on Congress. We call that "corporate lobbying" today, just as we called it back then.
Recall the intense pressures on FDR from both sides. Eventually the unions won some important concessions, but the corporations still had sufficient representation to ensure the system calcified into one that continues to funnel capital upward.
I am old enough to remember families (my own included) being destroyed by this same reality pre-ACA. Insurance being tied to your job was a pre-aca reality.
I was born with heart defects, pre-aca it was literally impossible for me to get private, non-corporate coverage, I tried for years.
At least denying coverage for pre-existing conditions means that getting diagnosed between jobs isn't a complete family destroying death sentence like it was for mine.
The ACA ossified the existing system a bit, but employer-provided care was the norm before the ACA. That or just not having any insurance, especially for young people working for small companies.
ACA did not ossify it. If anything, ACA allowed non employers to purchase insurance. Previously, the options were to work for a deep pocketed employer or just not have insurance.
Plans that would cover pre-existing conditions was one very important change for a lot of people. What ACA didn't really solve was the "affordable" part for people who aren't fairly high income. Between the marketplaces in most states and COBRA for those in between jobs or near 65, insurance is available but it's expensive with no one else chipping in a big chunk of the premium.
Nothing will solve the affordable part other than massive wealth transfers (which ACA did, but obviously not massive enough), and increased supply of healthcare (more docs, hospitals, medication manufacturers - or medicines in public domain), and tort reform.
But ACA did what it could with the political compromises that had to be made at the time. It provided out of pocket maximums, maximum age rating factor (age 64 only pays 3x age 21), and required coverage for all applicants (removing risk of disqualification from pre existing condition).
It is unfortunate the mandate was repealed and state level participation in functioning marketplaces was politically hampered.
Yeah, even if you just arbitrarily chop 20-30% off of US healthcare costs--which aren't just from the pockets of fairly low margin insurance companies, the money still needs to come from somewhere. So maybe a random individual can get a decent insurance plan for $5K/year with a family plan something north of $10K without a company paying. I expect a lot of people would still not find that reasonable and would want someone else to pay for it.
There was a time in America a generation or two ago when you could give your all to a company. Here in Michigan there were a number of small towns where a single employer would dominate. If the town needed something, like a baseball park the owner would simply write a check. If a loyal employee had a health crisis that insurance didn't cover the company owner would write a check. When there were tough economic times the employees would rally to help the company knowing in better times it would have their back.
Then one of two things happened, the owner died with no capable heirs and the company was sold. Or after NAFTA the company wasn't competitive with low priced foreign labor and folded. If the company was sold a couple of MBA's came in to run the store and ruthlessly ran it exporting all the profits. Eventually the jobs would go overseas or to another part of America with lower wages like the South.
Either way the people eventually lost their jobs and entire towns would collapse. I have seen it here in Michigan happen over the past forty years again and again.
How is that any different than some fiefdom ruled over by some noble? The whole point of democracy and elective government is that you can't rely on a system like that to be consistently good, whether it's the Duke's son squandering all the wealth and not listening to the people or a shift in management at the company. Just because sometimes there were benevolent companies that decided to contribute to their communities doesn't mean relying on that is a stable or desired outcome.
Require employees be paid and treated fairly. Require companies pay their taxes. Tax employees on those fair wages. Use those taxes to pay for community needs. That's the goal. That's our responsibility as citizens of a democracy. Relinquishing these responsibilities to others because it seems easier is how we got where we are. Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones, so take away their ability to be abusive.
If you relinquish your power to another, you should expect to be unhappy when their goals conflict with your own. Don't relinquish your power.
1) Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary. It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner.
2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule.
That is a pretty solid contender for why people are less generous. I too would be investing more money in my community if I had more control of it. There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.
It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. People took control away from businesses and the businesses stopped being in control.
> It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy.
Do you actually believe that? That all these business owners were running their factories out of the goodness of their hearts and that they only stopped because the government took all the money they had to give out as charity?
If that is the case why do we see ultra profitable businesses returning to this form instead of trying to carve out any section of their work base that they can, ex. The FAANGs turning most job positions into contractor filled roles like the janitorial staff?
There is this contemporary absurd narrative that businesses, business owners, and/or corporations only recently became greedy, and that this development (of greed), not the system itself, is the root of essentially all the problems with the modern economic system.
I think it is quite possible that you were more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord (partially because incentives were more directly, and forcibly, aligned) than find a corporation willing to put profits as anything other than first.
I’m frankly boggled that this thought is even entertained. We have literal centuries of evidence of corporations oppressing their workers and other peoples in the pursuit of profits, down to actual armies killing striking workers. I agree with you that you’d be more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord as they at least viewed their serfs as theirs and not some sort of cogs to be thrown away once they were worn out.
I'm not sure you are being clear in your argument. If we have literal centuries of evidence of corporations oppressing their workers [up to and including] actual armies killing striking workers ... how do you think it is possible that they've become more greedy recently?
Business greed has capped out since approximately the first 48 hours after the establishment of the first business back in Mesopotamia or wherever.
Possibly you haven't taken a literal enough read of what is being said here, but businesses don't ever get "more greedy". The greed capped out centuries ago. It cannot increase. It is impossible for it to get worse. It is at the human limit, and has been basically forever.
It is like the madness of people who think inflation is because businessesmen suddenly got extra greedy. If they could raise prices to that level they'd have done it in 22AD, not 2022AD. Prices are always as high as businesses can charge, if they go up something that isn't greed has to have changed. We can argue about what.
> Possibly you haven't taken a literal enough read of what is being said here, but businesses don't ever get "more greedy". The greed capped out centuries ago. It cannot increase. It is impossible for it to get worse. It is at the human limit, and has been basically forever.
I don’t agree with this premise, at least not in the context of the United States. You can even see in recent history where the greed amplified in the 80’s with the phrase “greed is good” becoming popular or that myth about how businesses have a legal requirement to pursue profit over everything got into the American psyche after that case against Henry Ford.
Fuck, charging interest on loans used to be considered a sin in western culture. We explicitly have seen greed change in magnitude.
You're right it's not greed itself, but the scale of its target that has grown. One person losing their job to corporate greed is a tragedy, and 10000 people losing their jobs is a statistic.
I think both lines of thought are correct and aren't mutually exclusive. Systemically, we have a fundamental underlying issue where profit motive isn't always aligned with the rest of society and there in lies what we see now.
I also think greed, or perhaps better described as flaunted greedy behavior, has increased over the past several decades. While capitalism has of course always been greed driven, different periods of time and different cultures have set guardrails up as to what level of greedy behavior is and isn't acceptable.
In the US the culture during the prime time of the industrial revolution, capitalism had technology progress propping its greedy appetite up. Those gains have been largely consumed and greed shifted over more and more towards optimizing on labor. We live in an environment now where we no longer assume your employer has your interests at heart and everyone listens to HR and leadership propoganda selling pictures of families and care for their employees while everyone rolls their eyes. We assume our employer will try the pay the least for us and get us to do the most for the least. We assume that they'll replace us the second they have a quantifiable cheaper alternative. Many decades ago these practices weren't as accepted, they certainly occurred, but they came with bad image and cultural rejection that harmed businesses. That isn't the case anymore. Businesses can basically do whatever isn't explicitly restricted by law or more profitable than penalties law sets and its just the accepted state of affairs. After all, it's legal, what are you going to do? Meanwhile through aggressive lobbying businesses are basically writing the law as they see fit.
Being charitable / good to employees is good for business and for retaining workforce in a world where employees don't have anyone else to care for them.
If I need to give 40% of my profits (and your salary) to the government and there is an avenue for getting some of that money back when you're in trouble, then go and ask for the government for help.
The mistake is in allowing the government to gather more resources and in turn making people dependant on them.
Welfare also destroyed the family unit (especially in the black community).
Indirect democracy is a fancy name for "electing" with your 1/100M vote an elite which gets to decide how to spend half of your salary.
If it is pretty clear that it did then you’ll have no problem finding sources that can prove that it occurred, that also take into account the targeted imprisonment that the black community has/had faced since emancipation. Anyone who looks at the black community in the US being destabilized and blames _welfare_ as the cause while ignoring that the legal system imprisons black men at a higher rate than white men regardless of the incident rate of crime is ignorant at best
I read the comment you're replying to as saying it didn't actually destroy anything, it's just easy to infer that from what's visible in records (e.g. statistics). "Didn't actually destroy anything in practice" pretty clearly puts it as against the idea that it destroyed anything though, to my eyes.
That may be what they meant, but my interpretation of their full statement(including the part about the formalization of that unit) was that they didn’t have any family structure to begin with. The poster may have had a nuanced reason for saying that, but given the dog whistle and lack of any nuance actually stated by them, I don’t see a reason to assume as such
Not quite sure what the "dog whistle" was that you're referring to...please explain that!
The statistics show significantly lower marriage rates among black families (moreso correlated to poor families, in which black folks over-represent). The thing not shown in the statistics is the number of families where parents are together, but unmarried (and oftentimes reporting different addresses) because they get SIGNIFICANTLY more benefits that way. So...the family unit is there, but just not formalized. And people are just responding to the incentives in front of them.
That explanation doesn’t have a dog whistle, but implying that a family structure doesn’t exist in any manner in the black community is the dog whistle that it seems you inadvertently triggered
You aren't "investing" in employees by paying them a salary. Employees will get a 10-15% payrise by switching after 2 years. Give them that payrise and communicate why. Even if they leave anyway, you only pay them while they stay so you don't lose much.
At least in tech, companies have already decided to make employees pay for training. You don’t see people doing leetcode training or side projects to pad their resume because their employers invested in increasing their skill set.
Given that this has already occurred, why would any employee agree to a system where now they have a financial obligation to their employer if they leave?
I get your sentiment but the employers already cut all the benefits out of the system when it comes to skill development. They’ll need to start adding back in investments to employee’s skills without any sort of guaranteed payback for a while before the average employee would extend them any trust
Can't even take seriously a comment which refers to elected leaders as "elites" and that's against my very harsh criticism of the voting restrictions and average voter apathy here.
If I overlay that spending graph with quality of life during the same timespan, I might conclude government spending is a miracle. A greater success within 200 years can hardly be imagined.
Correlation doesn't imply causation and the pirates disappearing didn't cause global warming.
I'm grateful to entrepreneurs and companies for innovating so much, while the USA is turning into the largest employer in the world (bigger than China).
From gp:
> There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.
Oh really? I'm somewhat familiar with German companies and the extreme regulation and worker-focused rules they endure as a good comparison to American businesses which I am intimately familiar with. My takeaway is that while it's much much harder to operate and innovate in Germany, the citizens are better off in immeasurable ways. Spectra, pendula, all that...
> 2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule.
> Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary
Is this a joke? Nepotism is a huge problem in every step of the executive pipeline. The children of executives are often groomed to become executives themselves from basically the time they can talk.
The problem is this isn't well defined. Somewhere maybe in the 1980s greed became good and the responsibilities of corporations shifted from being a fictional person that could benefit society to a thing that was in it for shareholders only. This is a cultural shift borne by MBAs and thinktanks, not something that can be pinned down to a specific incident.
As usual sunlight is the best disinfectant. It needs to be clear who owns what and who did what, and journalists need to go and look at cases where things are not in the interest of the community. There need to be records of whose interests are represented, who owns what, and who knows who.
This is not entirely untrue, but it's not particularly supported by the rest of your post.
Even if it's hard to completely define what "paid and treated fairly" mean, it's crystal clear that a very large percentage of employers today don't meet even the lowest possible bar—that being a living wage and not actively abusing the employees.
Yep, and it's not even hard to find examples of businesses that are not paying a living wage and/or are actively abusing people. Just walk into almost any restaurant or retail location. Pretty much anywhere below the highest end establishments of either kind will have both things going on.
Others have done a good job answering you, but I just want to add that there's a whole body of theory and scholarship that calls your mental model of this into serious doubt. It's called public choice theory and it essentially concludes that politicians, bureaucrats, and other officials are just as driven by selfish interests as anyone else, and that democratic systems typically do a very bad job at channeling that selfish energy toward the public good.
Forgive me for being sentimentalist a bit, but I think that nowadays we underestimate the weight that feelings of duty, loyalty, and trust had on rulers of times past. They were raised from the day they were born to be leaders, to care deeply about their family honor, to feel obliged to their subjects. Certainly, they were ultimately fallen men like the rest of us, and hereditary succession is not great at picking the best of each generation.
My point isn't that politicians are inherently better or more trustworthy than companies, but that you have more control over them. The amount of control as a community you can exert on a company beg enough to have a large influence in a community is minimal. The amount of control a community has over an elected official that oversees that community should be large.
There will be good companies and bad companies. There will be good politicians and bad politicians. One is easier to steer than the other.
Duty, loyalty and trust are good to have. What do you do if the large local company that has outsized influence on the community is lacking those? What do you do if the local elected officials are lacking those? Neither is easy to deal with, but I think one is a far more manageable problem.
The counter argument, is that relying on benevolent government to ensure a desired outcome is just as naive. In both cases, the holders of power are people. You're just trading one person for another.
You're trading one person who has no accountability to you in particular or the populace in general with a group of people who have at least some meaningful accountability.
Or, looking at it another way, you're trading a person who has the ability to go against group consensus for the betterment of the community to a person who is highly incentivized to follow group consensus to maintain their power (in the ideal circumstances, of course; I'm ignoring the obvious failure case of corruption or other manipulations). When that group consensus aligns with your values, that could be good. When it does not - such as living as a political minority, or when the group consensus is harmful to you (take, for example, NIMBYism), that can be very bad. In both cases you will have no meaningful political representation. A Democrat voter in a very Republican county has no real voice in government affairs unless they expend an inordinate and frankly unreasonable amount of effort campaigning - and will likely suffer some social repercussions for doing so. The reason people keep coming back to the idea of autocracy - why companies are often so much more efficient than governments - is that a central decision-maker can (not always will!) more effectively direct group efforts and establish priorities.
Democracy, as has been said, is the worst political system, except for all the others, but let's not lie to ourselves and ignore that in some contexts it is, in fact, strictly worse. The classic example, of course, is an army led by direct democracy. When a thing must get done, and damn the consequences, then there really is no substitute for autocracy. It's just unfortunate that the people who eventually end up as autocrats are rarely there to benefit the community. Building systems of accountability and responsibility through culture and non-systemic factors may better this (see, for example, the 85 terms of Roman dictators who did not try to seize any more power than they had been given by the Senate and in fact often returned their powers before their term was over), but culture-crafting to accomplish that is unfortunately beyond us at the moment.
if it is a local government you directly vote for, that supports your argument.
Often, it is layers of government, way over you, who have no clue of the local needs, and it gets much worse.
Not only does it not know the local needs, it has no expertise in the subject area itself, and so an unelected unnamed bureaucracy rules the roost, and over time, gathers so much power, that regardless of which government comes to power, the true power rests with these bureacrats.
Who the hell wanted either trump or biden in the last election?
There is simply no choice because the political elites offered us this and we need to vote our guy not to let the other guy win.
The game is rigged and your vote is not worth much.
When you're buying a product instead you're effecting real change and telling society you want more of that.
If only we could control law making in the same way we would have a decentralised society which better approximates what people want.
I think the point is that many had other preferences, but our two party (and FPTP voting) system doesn't address them. Who I voted for in 2016 and 2020 weren't nearly my first choices, and I think that's a fairly common experience.
Ranked choice would show a lot more nuance in people's beliefs that US politics would have to address. I haven't looked into it in some time, though. It seemed to work where implemented in Europe.
> Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones
Which is exactly what happened in their situation! They "hoped" that the company would just remain nice out of the goodness of their hearts, and did not make sure that those benefits were built into the system. Surprise: when ownership changed hands, the gravy train was over and the people had no actual infrastructure to sustain themselves.
The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. A time where societies had much higher levels of trust.
OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.
My opinion (having worked for one those companies the OP talks about) is it’s easy to be benevolent and generous when you face no real competition, profits grow year over year and everyone is fat and happy.
You never have to lay anyone off, pay raises come regularly, no huge pressure to perform, management gets big bonuses and shareholders watch the stock rise.
See the big US automakers in their hay day.
But when competition heats up, other companies take you business and profit growth has to be fought for, anything and everything is on the table.
The companies back then were never really loyal, they just never had the need to be ruthless, but they certainly would have been.
> The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output.
Correction, a time when companies didn't have an easy and clear path to global output.
> When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse.
I'm not sure that's ever been the norm anywhere in the world throughout history. I definitely don't think it was the reality in the Norman Rockwell like idea of what you think it was like.
We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses. Things were always bad, just in different ways. Those same companies that gave to the community and were the main employers in an area also set the working wage in the area with little market competition, and faced less scrutiny from the local law enforcement (who wants to be the prosecutor or police officer responsible for hurting everyone employed there in the community).
If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.[1]
> OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.
I wasn't really making a countering the OP, as much as expanding on a point they noted. Those situations that were good or appeared so are unstable and there's little the local community can do to change it. But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going.
> Correction, a time when companies didn't have an easy and clear path to global output.
No, you don't get to change what I said to fit your worldview. The 70's and the 80's had tons of multinational companies that didn't treat their employees like cattle, and that treated each of their branches as its community.
> We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses (...) If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.
It's curious why your cynicism doesn't cut both ways...
Just as it is easy to find evidence of corruption at all levels of government.
> But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going.
There are a lot more "ifs" here:
- If the local representatives are not in the pocket of the corporations.
- If the local representatives are not part of the elite with different interests from the common folk.
- If the local representatives are not just using their current term as a launching pad for a bigger point.
- If the community is cohesive enough to not have individuals just thinking for themselves, or (worse) divided into polarized feuds and make them waste all their political energy into hurting each other.
> No, you don't get to change what I said to fit your worldview. The 70's and the 80's had tons of multinational companies that didn't treat their employees like cattle, and that treated each of their branches as its community.
And were those companies acting as stewards of small communities, taking some of the role of local governments? If not I'm not sure how it applies.
> It's curious why your cynicism doesn't cut both ways...
> Just as it is easy to find evidence of corruption at all levels of government.
It does, and I agree. The difference is that with elected officials you have a mechanism to do something about it. How do you change the agenda of a company that controls the economy of the town you live in? You're not on the board, you can't feasibly get enough of the stock (if it's even public) to sway their strategy.
I will lay out my argument very clearly, again, so there's no confusion, and I will make some parts explicit that I left out that people seem to be making assumptions on.
- For any group in power, you cannot control their future actions. Any person that acts in a way you agree with today, may not act that way tomorrow. That extends to all politicians and all management of companies.
- Because of this neither a company, or interest group, or individual, whether elected or not, can be relied on to work in your interest in perpetuity. I do not view a governing body or a company in any way as superior or inferior to each other because both can go bad.
- Having some way to incentivize or change those in power is important because of the above.
- Citizens of a democracy have some power to do this. People that rely on a non-governmental body for this are thus relinquishing some of their control to affect whether those in power if they are working against their interest.
- Therefore in the absence of evidence that a specific governing body is better or worse than some company in meeting the needs of a community if given the resources of that community (e.g. lessened tax burden and favorable treatment by the community and local government), choosing the apparatus that you have more control over is the better choice.
I am not making any claim that an elected government at any specific instance of time is inherently more likely than a company to act beneficially for a community, but I wholeheartedly believe that since the community can change that local government, they are a better choice to have the power.
I think I got it, but it still seems that you were talking past the point from OP.
You are trying to make some statement about how individuals have more power with functional democratic institutions vs the despotic-like nature of the "town company".
What OP seems to be getting at is the point how communities before had higher levels of inner trust, and how this relates with TFA.
In a time where things were not globalized and people actually knew and interact with their neighbors (instead of getting stuck on Hacker News talking with people on the different side of the planet), the idea of the "town company" as the institution that coordinated the society vs "the government" didn't matter so much, as long as there was some sense of community and high-trust.
It was this local community with insular trust that we lost with globalization, and this why it makes no sense to talk about "company loyalty" anymore.
My whole point rests on the assertion that things are not static. Explicitly stated as companies changing from benevolent to less so, or politicians going from working for the people to against them. Implicitly, I expected this to be applied to other things as well, and I think it should be applied to things such as inner trust in communities.
You cannot expect the current conditions to persist indefinitely. Ceding what power you have to control parts of that, or even just to control tools which themselves affect that (such as politicians), just because right now things are good and you trust your community and the companies in it is a losing strategy.
Even back in the past when people had much more trust that a company would not treat them badly, any actions to make that the status quo (by weakening methods which those people had active input and ways to influence) was a bad choice, but possibly a less understood one.
Additionally, my response to rmason was meant less as a rebuttal, and more as an aside to do with the entire concept that relying on a company was ever a good idea, regardless of whether it often turned out okay for people during a certain time period. Not all replies are counters directly to what was stated, even if we are sometimes primed to view them that way. I didn't view myself as rebutting someone when I wrote that, but instead exploring the idea of why relying on a company was always a bad idea.
The obvious difference is that the employees are free to change jobs at any time. Yes, they may need to move if there are literally no other jobs in town, but that's not an option serfs had in a fiefdom.
I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. And it's hard to totally escape any form of hierarchy when you live in a society.
> The obvious difference is that the employees are free to change jobs at any time. Yes, they may need to move if there are literally no other jobs in town, but that's not an option serfs had in a fiefdom.
You misunderstand my point, and possibly the discussion. If the company is large enough to be a majority employer in the area and much of the social works of the area are provided by the company, then regardless of whether you work for them you are beholden to them in some way. The local government will not want to upset the local economy by be antagonistic with them, they'll set the local pay scale based on whatever they pay as everything will be in relation to it, and there will be immense social pressure to not cause problems that would be bad for the whole community.
Do the people involved have more options for getting out from under the control of a company like that in an area? Yes, but far less than I think your statement would lead people to believe. To actually get out of control you'd have to completely leave the area. That's far easier now than in the distant past, but it's not easy.
> I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners.
I'm not saying every one of these companies was horrible, nor that every ruler was horrible. I'm saying that ceding your power to control who governs you to them leaves you at a disadvantage when inevitably a worse ruler or bad management comes into place, because nobody lives forever, and nothing is static.
Put another way, what if you contracted with someone to provide all your meals and you paid them $1000/mo. Maybe you're extremely happy with the quantity and quality of the food provided initially, but eventually, years down the line, the quality has changed to sub-par and the quantity is lower than your got previously as well. You'd want to renegotiate that contract, right? Well what if it was a lifetime contract? That would be a problem, and you'd probably see that as a major red flag initially and be wary of entering a lifetime contract where the future was uncertain.
That's what allowing a company to control the local economy and be the provider of social works is like. By allowing the company to take over the job of the local government, the people have ceded their power to enact change through their elected representatives, and they are stuck with whatever they get down the line. Elected representatives aren't perfect, but at least there's the option to change them or pressure them to change based on the community needs. What pressure can the community honestly exert on the company when if decides that it's so much cheaper to move the factory two states over that they have to do so?
> You misunderstand my point, and possibly the discussion.
I'm not sure what that adds to your post besides to antagonize. I'd respectfully suggest rethinking that as an opener on future comments.
I don't disagree with most of your post, and I don't think you seem to disagree with mine, preface aside. Yes, it's still difficult, but I think there is a world of difference between being under physical duress versus being very inconvenienced. Keeping the analogy, it's very inconvenient to change even a normal job, and we are held hostage with things like healthcare. That's fief like too. Scale matters.
> I'm not sure what that adds to your post besides to antagonize. I'd respectfully suggest rethinking that as an opener on future comments.
Then you interpreted my statement as more harsh than I intended, and I'll own up to my side of that, so I apologize. I don't necessarily take it as an insult for someone to say I misunderstood their point (if my statement to them comes across as a non-sequitur, I expect something like that), not that I've misunderstood some of the conversation. Sometimes comments are building on the context of a few prior comments in the chain, and seeing just the last two or three gives a distorted view of the context in which the current argument is being made. I'm not saying that happened here, but it is a reason I generally don't consider that statement to be very aggressive, but honestly it depends on the state of mind of the person hearing it.
> I don't disagree with most of your post, and I don't think you seem to disagree with mine, preface aside. Yes, it's still difficult, but I think there is a world of difference between being under physical duress versus being very inconvenienced.
My point was about control. No simile is going to be perfect. There will obviously be differences to being a fief than being a citizen in a democracy where the local company controls a lot of the resources and services.
That said, perhaps fiefdom wasn't what I was going for. Perhaps a Duchy is more appropriate? I admit to not being confident enough in the structures to know whether colloquially one implies more specific behavior than the other which might confuse the point (whether or not that implication is accurate).
> Keeping the analogy, it's very inconvenient to change even a normal job, and we are held hostage with things like healthcare. That's fief like too. Scale matters.
Yes. And I think adding power to this structure to reinforce those problems rather than a structure you have more control over which might alleviate them is the rational choice. I'm honestly surprised and confused that so many people are against that in this discussion.
Any time you think somebody is misunderstanding the discussion, pause a moment and consider that perhaps they have understood it, just in a different way from you. There are always multiple interpretations possible. A statement like the one you made assumes yours is the only right one.
> Just because sometimes there were benevolent companies that decided to contribute to their communities doesn't mean relying on that is a stable or desired outcome.
You are always going to rely on a few people, to do the right thing, which will become the wrong thing as life goes on, which will require a few more people, to do the right thing again, ad infinitum.
That's just how this human thing works.
Sometimes it's laws, other times it's breaking laws. Other times something else. It varies, there is no right answer forevermore, sorry.
You can't solve hard problems of coordinating, pleasing and doing right by many people with conflicting interests by 'requiring' it.
Who said there's a right answer forever? The whole point of what I said is to make sure you use your own power as a citizen to pass laws and elect those people you think will serve your interests best at the current time, and as soon as that's not the case, try to get rid of them. That's the point of democracy and a representative democracy, the power to keep interests aligned with the people.
Often that means putting in some safe lower bounds. Laws, as you noted. You put safeguards at the bottom preventing the worst behavior. That's the whole reason there are laws preventing child labor, because people decided that some things should not be tolerated.
Nothing prevents a company from still being a good employer and helping where they can, but that should not be required for our society to function. The goals of a company diverge from what is best for the people (both short term and long term) too often for that to be a good idea.
Your axiom is democracy and what sounds like dozens of other conditions.
My axiom is highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power. That's it.
My position is trivially superior, for many reasons, if only because your exact position is just one of many possibilities that highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power can choose to implement.
Well, I'm for utopias, which is better, so does that mean my argument is superior? I'm also for letting people eat as much as they want and not exercise and be in perfect health.
Perhaps having a feasible path to the desired outcome actually matters, rather than just assuming those are unimportant details... otherwise we'd already have off-world colonies and faster than light travel.
The vast majority of what makes society work is variations on the honor system. You can like it or hate it but it's better for everyone when we all agree on that.
The honor system works when there are social checks and balances that can be applied to punish socially for going against what's acceptable.
The whole point is that larger entities are shielded from some of these repercussions because of their size and power, and in some cases are almost completely untouchable by this system.
The legal system is there to catch extreme cases the social system can't feasible handle well enough. We don't just let murderers go and ostracize them, we incarcerate them and forcibly remove their rights. Some things are too important to allow social norms to be the ultimate arbiter of.
It worked and was stable for decades because unions ensured a balance of power between capital and labor. NAFTA and other pro-capital regulation broke that balance and shifted the balance towards capital.
Is the implication that conservatives supported NAFTA because it would reduce poverty around the world?
It's probably better to assess peoples motivations as they were at the time, not by what happened. A liberal would say they were focusing on the needs of the citizens of their own country and the problem in front of them. In any case, making this a case of liberals vs conservatives is silly, and to my view reductive.
As a citizen of a democracy you have power. Don't abdicate your responsibility, and thus your power, because it's easier to trust someone else handle it.
There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens. They (at least used to) have considerable purchase among conservatives.
As a category I think it’s also generally correct to say they’d argue for not yielding such power to any sort of decision makers, corporate or government, at all. Instead attempting to coordinate empowered individuals through coercive but distinctly non human forces like markets.
Whether the libertarians are correct or not is one thing, but I don’t think they’ve been hypocritical or inconsistent in their motivations.
> There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens.
And there are liberal policy makers that look to increase protections for US citizens because they believe in negotiating from a position of moral authority, because without being able to practice what you preach you're easy to point out as hypocritical and ignore, or at a minimum it's easy to convince others to discount your position.
The important thing is that neither side, as a whole, is choosing a position with the intention of hurting local or remote peoples, and to various degrees both succeed and fail on various metrics. Neither side is inconsistent or hypocritical, they're entirely consistent within their own ideology for the most part, it's just that when not within that ideology, it's easy to point at specifics and explain them in terms of someone else's ideology in a way that makes them seem inconsistent.
The first thing I do when I see something lambasting a groups actions as hypocritical or stupid is to try to look into that group's own messaging on what they're doing and why. Sometimes I think their reasoning is flawed, but far more often than not there's a core of truth and consistency and truth to what they're attempting, even in those cases where I think they're working on flawed information.
Before I was willing to call a large group of people hypocritical or inconsistent, I would try very hard to understand their reasoning and how that action it is being presented/sold within that group. The risk of my own biases affecting my judgement is far too high otherwise.
Extremely true and it happened all over, my dad worked for a place for 40 years and the last 10 the MBAs moved in, they were profitable, had profit sharing, and a great company.
Today its a footnote in a merger, place is closing down.
NAFTA was a symptom of globalism more generally. What we ended up with is selective globalism.
Want to import cheaper drugs from Canada, that's illegal! Yeah sure they might have been produced in the US in the first place but it might be dangerous!
Want to get a degree in a country where the price of education is lower? We won't honor it.
Want to hire the services of a Kenyan clinic doctor who has experience in everything from treating runny noses to gunshot wounds? Illegal he's unqualified according the the national doctors union (AMA).
Yeah you can get cheap crap from places that hire children to work in their factories, but the stuff that is really expensive we are 1700's Japan all of the sudden.
I argue that there is a larger effect: Bill Clinton making the decision that the Democratic Party turn its back on blue collar workers and the middle of the country because just having Wall Street support would be sufficient to win elections. He was not wrong, but it has had a bad effect because the republicans also started to ignore the working class in favor of the financial class.
Nationalism, something to be avoided, occurs when the underclass is not represented in a political system.
If you're middle class, with stocks, a professional job, your own house, you probably have been doing absolutely fine over the last couple of years. It's everyone else who's in trouble.
It might be worth noting that in the US, "middle class" is used in the same way as "working class" is used in the UK i.e. blue collar, non-professionals.
Some companies did offer benefits to their town, for roughly the same reason the FAANGs offer free lunches and dinners. Kind of a double edge gift.
I have no idea where the "companies used to take care of their employees" commenters are coming from. There's plenty of counterexamples.
"The toxicity of concentrated TEL was recognized early on, as lead had been recognized since the 19th century as a dangerous substance that could cause lead poisoning. In 1924, a public controversy arose over the "loony gas", after five[94] workers died, and many others were severely injured, in Standard Oil refineries in New Jersey.[95] There had also been a private controversy for two years prior to this controversy; several public health experts, including Alice Hamilton and Yandell Henderson, engaged Midgley and Kettering with letters warning of the dangers to public health.[17] After the death of the workers, dozens of newspapers reported on the issue.[96] The New York Times editorialized in 1924 that the deaths should not interfere with the production of more powerful fuel.[17]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Initial_controv...)
See also radium, polyvinyl chloride, assorted mine disasters, etc.
> There was a time in America a generation or two ago when you could give your all to a company.
The problem with these advice columns is that they aren't saying "don't give your all to a company".
They end up saying "your company is the enemy". The original article that this blog refers to was titled "Exit interviews are a trap", which many pointed out was a gross exaggeration. It assumes that every company performing an exit interview is doing something malicious, which is a ridiculous claim.
Yes, it's possible that some companies somewhere are using exit interviews as some sort of trap to get dirt or leverage over employees, and it's also true that you shouldn't rush in and use it as an opportunity to complain about everyone you hated at the company. However, it's unreasonable to assume that it's a trap and that the company is interested in nothing more than revenge.
That's the problem with these advice blogs. They cater to an idea that managers and HR are "the other", and once someone crosses the line to management or HR, they become evil and incapable of doing anything other than abusing you for no good reason.
We should warn young people about abusive employers, but it's not helpful to teach them that employers are universally malicious.
I think the message is more "you shouldn't form loyalty ties with your company, because your company won't form them with you".
Loyalty ties are still important, but not something you will find in most employer-employee relationships. Better to have a more "extractive" vision of companies and build loyalty ties somewhere else.
> They cater to an idea that managers and HR are "the other", and once someone crosses the line to management or HR, they become evil and incapable of doing anything other than abusing you for no good reason.
No one says they're evil. Corporate leadership, like corporations themselves, are amoral, which means they have no compunctions to actions that to them, are without intention, but for translates to the recipient as maliciousness.
<< They end up saying "your company is the enemy".
I read the article and I disagree. It does not say it either explicitly or implicitly. The article only urges the reader to think of the benefits to themselves first.. like a company would.
> I read the article and I disagree. It does not say it either explicitly or implicitly. The article only urges the reader to think of the benefits to themselves first.. like a company would.
This article is a response to criticisms of a previous article where the author was definitely very mercenary and suggested the only purpose of the exit interview was to “trap” the employee into giving information that their managers could use against them later… somehow.
It seems this article was meant to walk back some of the aggressiveness.
I don't think that was the point of the exit interview article. My understanding is it was mostly that nothing you say will make any difference to the company, in all probability - so there is no need to go into the interview looking out for anyone but yourself.
And definately do not go in to air your grievances.
But I generally agree with the mercenary approach, my personal ethos when working for a company is - take as much money from them as possible and provide my best estimate of (money+some reasonable extra) back in value.
The reasonable extra is an investment of time and effort with the goal of paying out as more money later.
What is the difference, from an employee's perspective, between an abusive employer, and one that would not hesitate to steamroll them in the name of profit. Sure one is intentionally targetted and the other is collateral damage, but in the end the employee is in the same boat. All you've said so far is "..but not ALL employers!"
I believe the phrasing should be "had to give your all to a company." This is the time period when you would retire from the same company you started at, right? And if you had more than a few jobs on your resume (or the infamous missing time), you would have a hard time being hired because you were unreliable.
You have a very rose-tinted view of the historical business world.
> You have a very rose-tinted view of the historical business world.
Indeed. We're only a few generations removed from a time when we had companies enlisting private armed security forces and militias to violently break strikes.
There are a lot of responses here discussing corporations vs. the government vs. the workers when it comes to social responsibility, but ignoring the fact that _everyone_ has become less socially responsible over the last 40 years.
People in general just aren't community or socially minded in the way they used to be[1], and the bosses of companies or leaders of government are all people too.
[1] To be specific, people are still charitable, but we don't have the same culture/institutions where everyone gives and takes in the same way we used to.
Things like working bees, community sport, or even just general behaviours like helping out friends/family/neighbours are all getting rarer by the day.
Yep. I have no idea what it is, but it's clear there is a broader issue here than any reductive analysis will acknowledge. Same thing with NAFTA. It wasn't a single trade deal. The exact same changes happened with my dad's employer, but he was a plumber for Los Angeles County. They weren't and can't be offshored and they aren't owned by corporate raiders or soulless shareholders, yet exactly what happened to rust belt manufacturing companies happened to government-employed blue collar laborers in California.
I think it's more cultural than geographical. Just anecdata, but most of the positive, restore-your-faith, "community" experiences in my personal life have come from non-Anglo migrants, as well as people from rural areas and also certain states (QLD, and to a lesser extent SA).
Long story short, I think it's simply a cultural shift more than an adaptation to any lifestyle changes.
It's been happening for much longer than NAFTA has been around. My hometown was known for building tires earlier in the 20th century and all that left in the early 80s and it never recovered.
That said, before that happened the place was kind of a "company town" and the big manufacturers with all the money essentially ran the place. Only good news if you were in their favor. Lots of stories about being harassed by police if you were on their bad side. They were the kind of people that would have still been using child labor if it weren't outlawed.
>They were the kind of people that would have still been using child labor if it weren't outlawed.
Allow me to remind you the manner in which child labor was outlawed:
Industrialization progressed to a point where it was no longer economically viable except in a few tiny niches. It was then outlawed, to much back patting.
Sure, some people would probably use it if it was viable, but don't pretend like it was some great accomplishment to outlaw it. It was basically a case of writing law after the market had made a decision.
>It's been happening for much longer than NAFTA has been around. My hometown was known for building tires earlier in the 20th century and all that left in the early 80s and it never recovered.
Also, the products they made were kind of crappy and expensive. It's very easy for a company like the one the GP described to stagnate and rot. Especially when unions get thrown into the mix.
The neat thing about company towns was company stores, which were the only kind of stores in town. They were happy to sell you anything you wanted, on credit. The problem being that at the end of the month you owed more to the company store than what you got in your paycheck.
A couple generations ago wasn't too far past the gilded age, and on the tail end of the Standard Oil empire, the Pinkertons, etc. Before that slavery and serfdom.
The idea that power was only used exploitatively after financialization of industry seems incredibly naive to me, or just an extreme warping of history and reality to fit a rose-tinted, romantic worldview.
Letting that level of power and resources consolidate to a few people at the top and crossing your fingers that they'll be "benevolent" is foolish. Historically speaking the % of times these rulers would graciously cover a health crisis out of pocket, or meaningfully donate to democratically chosen local causes was slim to none. Better to distribute the fruits more equally in the first place, but I'm guessing these kind and benevolent leaders would not have happily allowed their workforces to unionize. That expectation of trust only seems to go one way.
If a loyal employee had a health crisis that insurance didn't cover the company owner would write a check.
Not that this didn't happen. But I should add that it wasn't any benevolent plan on the part of the owners that made things that way. It was a combination of the presence of New Deal, Unions, the threat of so-called-communism, etc and the lack of hyperdeveloped capital and commodity markets, that pushed things in that direction from the 1930s to the 1970s. And then what you describe pushed things the other way.
The point is that same owner probably supported all the innovations, because they were about the owner having more flexibility. And by the token, you can't get back to this point, probably not ever but certainly not without outside intervention.
These things still do happen - my SO was diagnosed with cancer in 2020. Her boss and the owner of the company arranged a $10k bonus, 6 additional weeks of PTO, and a 6 month paid leave of absence once she was done with treatment.
I do agree it isn't good to rely on the beneficence of overlords in general though, since they aren't obligated to continue to be beneficent.
One of the wisest pieces of career advice I ever heard was "you cannot change an organization by leaving it."
It works both ways: if you're leaving in hopes that it'll be a wake-up call to management that a valuable person left, then it probably won't be. And, if you leave your workplace to improve your own life, you've also necessarily chosen not to try and improve the workplace. Leaving means giving up on trying to improve them.
With that in mind, the exit interview isn't a trap so much as pointless: all you can do is hurt yourself here, you can have them remember you fondly or not, but you can't get them to change things in the exit interview.
If they didnt listen to you when you were there, why would they when you are leaving? That is what it all boils down to for me.
If I didnt make issues clear while I was at a company then it was a failing on my part. If they didnt care or make any change when I shared about issues than its their fault.
Then if you really want them to change, you should try to become one of those powerful people... Not leave, and give up all power you have over them, is my point.
Yes, but the chance of becoming one of the ~10 most powerful people at Apple or Goldman Sachs is extraordinarily small, and you pretty much know if you even have a shot at it after you've been working at the company for a year. If you've been there three years and haven't been promoted twice you have zero chance of ever being in the top 10.
Yeah. Things you say probably fall into a few categories.
-- "So and so is toxic." Maybe they are. But this is the last sort of thing I'm going to get into during an exit interview because this is the sort of thing that could actually come back to bite you.
-- "The company has gotten so big and bureaucratic/isn't doing well/etc." Don't you think they probably know?
-- "I don't agree with the strategy any longer." Well, this might be a data point for some higher up you know well over a beer or whatever but probably isn't going to help anything in an exit interview.
Just come up with a socially-acceptable, PR-reason for leaving. Probably whatever you told the new job in their interview: "I'm leaving because of the commute," or "not enough potential for advancement," or something. The goal should be for you to part on good terms, not to take a last shot at them, which will only make them hate you.
Take the salary you are getting at the new place and add 50k. "I'd love to stay but salary + raise for moving on + 50k is a life changing amount of money for me and my family." Worst case you get a counter offer and you can decline that with "Oh, sorry the new job just offered counter + 25k" again. Might give them pause to raise the wages of the people you are leaving behind.
Or just some variant of "time for a change and this opportunity came along." Which whether or not it's the case with you, holds true for a lot of people who have been at a place for a while.
>The goal should be for you to part on good terms, not to take a last shot at them, which will only make them hate you.
Absolutely. Any satisfaction from bomb tossing in an exit interview or twitter thread is short-lived and the consequences may not be.
While that's true on an individual basis, I recently left a large company to join a FAANG and, as it turns out, so did quite a few other top performers shortly before me. By the time I left, there were definitely very senior folks asking questions about how to retain talent. I didn't even dislike the job - but the offers from FAANG were a good bit higher and came with some nice perks, so I'd actually think of going back if the message gets through that good technologists are worth paying for.
I wonder about the "worth paying" thing. As an example, I worked at a FAANG company for about 10 years and every project I worked on flopped, was cancelled, or wound up being a net cost. In some sense, the real dollars and cents sense, I wasn't worth anything and yet was paid quite a lot.
My impression is that the FAANG companies have a relatively small part of the company that makes them insane amounts of money (e.g. search ads) and then the rest of the company is just soaking up a lot of that money. In this model of the universe FAANG companies are just over paying software developers and the other companies out there without their own infinite money machine shouldn't actually be learning the lesson that they need to pay their developers more because maybe, as a business priority, they shouldn't be.
I don't entirely disagree with the premise but, knowing that there are companies with money printing machines paying top dollar, rationale talented people will all leave those other industries that don't pay up for ones that do (regardless of whether it is deserved or not). In my experience in other industries, the 80/20 rule applies in that 20 percent of technology employees deliver 80% of the value, but the pay is not well differentiated. In my estimation, many companies could fire half their tech employees, give the rest a big raise and come out more productive.
I once left a company and half the staff followed, they closed their doors 2 months later.
Apparently all the staff that actually knew how to layout the magazine, run the online content, and print the publications were important. A sales staff with no ad-space to sell can't do much.
...Okay, yes, technically sometimes by leaving you can change an organization from "alive" to "dead." :) But that's probably not the change that would have kept you around, right?
Depends on the scenario. I know personally of several examples where key people who had little say in a company, but were key technical roles, simply resigned. Resigned publicly, and drained other talent with them. First it was the better talent who had the most options, and then it was everyone else, like rats off a sinking ship.
This reminds me of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirshchman [0].
The gist is that you have two options Voice or Exit.
Voice means staying and fighting for things to change. It having any effect is predicated on the ability to Exit, to opt out of the situation and leave.
Staying and fighting means you may push for change. But quitting and bringing others with you means that you may force change.
This seems common in takeovers. I've seen it twice. In both cases the new management came in and said how surprised they were at the quality of their staff. Within two months all the management had gone. They were quickly followed by the technical staff.
If you have a chance to make things better where you are, then it’s good for everybody who works there. Also, you might not even have the option of getting a job elsewhere depending on where you live and what qualifications you have.
I've changed the place I work immensely in my three years here, and I think for the better. But at no point did I (or would I) threaten to leave if they didn't change... It just wouldn't work.
I worked in academia for quite some time, and you would think, "Well, this ought to be less of the kind of horror you can get in the private sector," but no. It was everything you could expect from any other environment.
I didn't comment in the exit interview thread, but I absolutely chortled inside when my direct manager was present for my last exit interview -- kind of a big no-no -- but these folks just lack any kind of shame. You will hear the same "A five is given for outstanding performance ... WORDS ... but we will never give fives ... MORE WORDS ... it is expected that everyone try for outstanding performance" doublethink. Watching a sixty-three year old employee get shuffled off despite decades of loyal work, well ...
Working for family? Even worse.
Currently, I expect any employer to sell me to the knackers for a Jell-O cup later on and not feel the least bit bad about it. Assume that at least the first couple levels of management are dead-eyed lizard people wearing human costumes and you'll probably be safer.
Honestly, start gathering dirt on day number one. It goes bad after a while (but doesn't decay with the rapidity that gratitude does), so make sure to update your map of where the bodies are buried. Keep your resume fresh. Make sure you can put the hurt on someone if you suddenly get the boot, fairly or not. You don't have to use any of this, but it is nice to have on hand when you find a knife in your back.
At the end of his book AMP it up, Frank Slootman provides some career tips. The things he focuses on. 1. Join a company that's growing and moving up. He talks about getting in the elevator by joining the right company. And how everyone during certain years at Microsoft did well (just one example). 2. Next he recommends ignoring compensation in the early days of your career.
I see this at my company sometimes. Mid level engineer will switch from Stream to Google and be surprised that the comp is higher. Of course it's higher, what you're sacrificing is career growth. Early on in your career thats usually not the right move. (of course some people crush it at google. google is probably not the best example, while slower than a fast growing startup its still doing well. Someone else joined the FT or some public companies that literally don't grow.
If you care about total comp the best options are.A. Grow your expertise so that you can join a FAANG company at a director level. B. Join a series A/B company and hope you can impact it enough to reach a good outcome.
The other thing people dont get it is that you're not negotiating salary once. You have to continue to deliver that value to the company. So if you sell yourself really well, get a massive salary, at some point the company will notice that you're not driving that much value. As an example see the people who joined Fast. I'd look for companies that share their revenue numbers with their team and are transparent.
Sometimes companies that pay the best are also under water in their stock options since they raised at a 200x revenue valuation. It gives them a lot of resources to pay top dollar, but its also more similar to joining a company where you don't get upside.
Not to be misunderstood, in general it's good to take the higher salary. Some people just don't negotiate well and some companies take advantage of that. (Still many engineers in the EU at <40k). You just want to make sure you understand the full picture and not focus only on salary.
"Of course it's higher, what you're sacrificing is career growth. Early on in your career thats usually not the right move."
I heard that a lot early in my career, having started out in startups. To some extent it's true for the first ~4 years: you gain a lot more background knowledge, problem solving ability, and confidence by wearing lots of hats and owning lots of problems end-to-end.
But I think you have to be realistic about how experience transfers. FAANG-level companies typically discount basically all experience in startups and small businesses they haven't heard of. You might be a senior developer in a small startup, but you'll get downleveled to an L3 new grad level at a FAANG. And you'll make more money, so they figure you'll take it. Or you might be a C-suite founder and (assuming you still have your technical chops) end up as a L6 eng manager (again, probably with better comp, assuming your founder stock isn't going up).
I've never once seen a Director hired from the outside without a.) coming from a Director position at a peer company, eg. Facebook -> Google or b.) having enough money that they don't need to work ever again. By far most Directors at FAANGs are promoted from within after delivering a big win for the company; the next largest category is founders whose startup is acquired; following that are Directors jumping from a peer company; and finally there are former founders and executives that are retired or hanging out as an EIR at a VC firm waiting for their next gig.
If it's early in your career (<10 years) I think the best possible thing you could be doing for your career is SWE at a FAANG. You're too young to move into management (IMO) and nothing will give you that level of resume credential. The real life experience of working on big projects is important too.
After that I think you have a point. I work at a FAANG as a SWE (15 YOE) and want to move into management, but it requires a SWE promotion first to staff engineer I don't think I'm capable of getting at this company. (I've been a staff engineer at a previous firm though).
I could switch to a lower tier company and definitely find a way to move into management and develop my career on that ladder but I would likely have to take a big pay cut. I think the trouble is people with 10+ years of experience are like me and have families and a mortgage. It's just not an option to make less for me even if the future was bright.
EDIT: As someone pointed out, 10 years entirely in FAANG is probably not as good as a varied career that includes FAANG.
10 years is also (very roughly) the historical average doubling time for an investment in the s&p 500. one way to look at that is for every $1 you didn't save at age 25 while building experience at a "scrappy" startup, you need to save $2 at age 35 just to break even on retirement. that's probably not infeasible; you don't have to double your salary to double your savings. but it's a significant amount of drag you need to overcome for the "trade comp for career growth" advice to work out.
You are absolutely right in terms of resume credential, but in terms of engineering experience I don't think it's so cut and dried. The ability to work on large systems, and access to mentorship is unparalleled, but you also miss out on end-to-end perspective and how to focus on solving the most critical problem in the simplest way. FAANG has some of the best talent in the world (if you're lucky enough to be able to work with them), but it is also has many smart but unmotivated clock punchers who would struggle to execute without the world-class tooling and resources that they take for granted.
Working for a smaller, fast-growing company will give you faster feedback loops, and a closer connection to the business that will give you a broader perspective on what is truly necessary vs FAANG best practices for scale. Ironically this makes you more fit for leadership because you can then see patterns which repeat themselves in all companies, but are obfuscated by specialization and huge org sizes. By contrast, if you join a big company you'll get better at the corporate jargon and cultural games, but you won't have the same visceral understanding of what really matters and why.
For much of the past century, the best career advice in the world was: go to IBM, General Motors, General Electric. Climb the ladder for a few decades, get a pension, retire at the top 1% of the income pyramid. That worked great until it didn't, and millions of people got left with no savings or useful job skills.
Today's world offers so many more paths for talented builders, beyond joining the currently hot company as a cog in the giant ad-tech machine and hoping for the best. As a data point, go read last week's article on how Sidekiq has made $13 million for a solo developer.
I’ve published 2 books, created a significant open source project, and was staff engineer at a Fortune 50 company. Was reasonably well known as a blogger and speaker in the JS community too. (I’ve given up on OSS since FAANG)
But you know how I’ll be introduced? They’ll say I was “ex-FAANG”. None of that other stuff matters in comparison.
I’m not at all saying it’s the only path, I’m saying it’s the best and certainly most reliable one.
I’ve seen too many layoffs where critical people were fired, and experienced the resulting train wrecks first hand, to have any sympathy for companies or management in this regard. Team mates yes, psychotic dystopian organizations? Hell no!
For real, I've seen companies fire some of their best and brightest, I'm talking top-tier academic talent in some cases, because they didn't think they were committing code frequently enough, only to wonder why their shit is on fire 6 months later and why the systems those same engineers maintained aren't able to produce new features as fast as before, messing up their delivery timelines, etc...
Even funnier is when it's not a money issue, some middle manager just thought they could find better or wanted to make room for some of their own hires.
In all of these cases, the company held "exit interviews", in some of these cases myself being one of the few or many others, and I have to say, there's nothing you can tell them that will benefit anyone, even your old co-workers who you're not trying to actively harm.
Wow. It's incredibly degrading to ask an employee to do an exit interview immediately after they were laid off. A company which does that deserves naming and shaming.
Not telling the entire truth during the very last phase of employment, the exit interview, is but a drip in a bucket of lies that is called employment.
You lied to get in. By emphasizing your strengths and hiding your weaknesses. The employer did the same thing.
You lie constantly about the work or its conditions being fine, as complaining about it is kind of a taboo. You lie to your peers and superiors all the time when they do or say things you disagree with, especially when the cost of conflict is too high.
You lie about the company drink being so much fun, whilst you really don't want to go. You lie about how much effort that task really costs, as you want to build in some security. You lie about how much time you're not really working.
You lie about being a well behaved human being whilst the minute you arrive home, you burp, fart and swear all over the place.
...yet you won't at your mother-in-law.
Conclusion: any human relation that is involuntary (you do not directly pick your manager, colleagues or mother-in-law) is diplomatic, which is a fancy word for not genuine. You keep up appearances and tell people what they want to hear, because the downside of the truth is too large.
So silence or lying is fine. Unless some massive humanitarian thing is at stake based on your input, which I figure to be rare. Alternatively, one can learn how to criticize in a non-damaging way.
> You lied to get in. By emphasizing your strengths and hiding your weaknesses. The employer did the same thing.
One of the most powerful tools I use when interviewing senior candidates is being brutally honest about the company's weaknesses. Implicit in the act of hiring is the reality that you have a problem you need an employee to solve for you. Pretending those problems don't exist is bizarre.
That sounds wonderful, I'm sure in such an open and honest dialogue, a candidate would also be more comfortable to admit a weakness.
Other than anxiously hiding weaknesses, the other bizarre thing in business is the idea that any and all weaknesses must be addressed.
To use the sports analogy: one can conclude that the star attack player is terrible at defense, but it really makes zero sense to invest a lot in defensive skills.
I've had some interesting experiences with exit interviews but generally agree with the canned politically friendly response strategy, "I'm just moving on; need to make the best decision for me and my family" etc. If you have some angry criticism about why, personally I think it's one of those situations where you should write a letter expressing those feelings but not send it.
One I did with BigCo I was leaving was all just box checking yes/no questions like, Are you leaving because you felt discriminated against, are you leaving because you were harassed, etc.
During another one the HR person asks me, "At what point did you realize you had no future here?"
And at my most recent one I was asked if the client I was assigned to had anything to do with it, and I said yes. They were actually working on ending the relationship as far as I know.
I live and work in countries with good social security nets and less overtly dystopian work conditions (not perfect of course). I still agree with his advice. Work is a game we play for money. No more real than a choreographed dance. Companies do not really care for you, that should not need stating. Your coworkers might, and if the ones you're friendly with are high up or influential, things might seem like a family. It's actually an in-group.
Don't waste your time trying to be collectivist in an inherently individualistic system. You need to play the game by its rules if you want any results. And less stress.
My reaction reading "Exit Interviews Are a Trap" is that the danger was overstated a tad which left too little room for the value of potentially benefitting people that are not yourself. To me it wasn't so much as "thinking about yourself" as it was "overstating the risks to yourself".
But I think it's still the advice people need to hear despite that. I agree with your article that people have rose-colored glasses on when going into those meetings and speaking their mind.
On a personal note: Jacob and I worked at a company that to me fits the description of the one in the article. I'm very curious if it's the same one.
This piece is mostly a response to how people here thought the author was too paranoid about being honest in an exit interview. And the answer is unionization?
I 100% agree you should be a mercenary at work. Look out for number 1, HR isn't your friend, etc. But being so paranoid you can't even speak your mind in a nearly zero stakes situation of talking to your company before you leave speaks to a very negative outlook on work that seems honestly exhausting.
And more to point, if you are a good mercenary, unionization only harms you.
You might have misunderstood me. I really meant that my incentives (which are 98% monetary) are well aligned with helping my peers. If they do well, we all elevate each other (I'm monetarily motivated to elevate my peers, through aligned incentives at work through good management and tending to my network)
FWIW I'm intentional & clear to my peers about priorities.
The fact that there was an outcry big enough to merit this is sad. HN and sites like it are saturated with people trying to turn the tides of a world with better worker protections. Some of it is because people making startups genuinely think they will "do better than those guys" which is never true at scale.
The reason that the job market is such a mess in the US is that it is dehumanizing from beginning to end, from interview to exit and at both of those stages there isn't really any benefit to trying to speak your mind.
Companies will do whatever makes them profit. If a car kills X people it has to outweigh Y in legal costs before a Z amount will be spent on a recall. You can be friendly and enjoy the comrodery of your fellow employees but at the end of the day make no mistake they are not invested in you and will replace you the moment you are dead or inefficient to their KPIs. Take care of yourself, take care of your family and friends but do not make the mistake of confusing those with your bosses or managers because I promise they won't get those mixed up when it comes your well being.
Exit interviews are a trap...because everything you say and do at your company has little landmines built into it because they are constantly trying to use humans like cogs in a clock and when you wear out you are no longer helpful to the clock maker or the people who use the clock everyday...then you get removed from the clock and replaced quickly.
The problem may be that his advice is a defeatist "never do this". In the referenced article about exit interviews, the advice centers entirely around not providing feedback. Be as bland as possible. The workplace is presented in a combative manner where you cannot ever win.
While that article mentions game theory, and describes one situation where it seemed safe to provide feedback, it then focuses on that feedback being unproductive. The author could have offered advice on /how/ to provide feedback. If enough people leave for the same reasons it may start to turn the ship - so let's consider why the feedback was not well received.
Providing negative feedback to the company follows similar patterns to the company providing negative feedback to employees. We're still talking about humans communicating with each other - emotional, flawed, egotistical (aka fairly normal) humans. Decide which one or two points are most important to communicate. Offer genuine positive feedback to make it easier to accept the negative feedback, and try not to present other topics in a negative manner. Let the 1-2 negative points stand out among other positive language.
Some companies care. Some bosses care. Some don't. Some are combative, dysfunctional, or selfish. Some care but are misguided. Rather than blanket "never do this" advice, let's focus on learning when to offer vs withhold feedback, and how to offer negative feedback when it is warranted.
I gave some very honest feedback during my exit interview at Yahoo when I left, and I was blacklisted. So from then on I never ever gave exit interview feedback ever. It’s not worth it.
From an employee's standpoint it's simple: You should do every possible thing to put your interests and those of your family or dependents first and foremost above all else, especially your job. Once you've done this to the best of your abilities, you politely give the company or companies you work for what you can based on how reasonably they're compensating you, while never being ashamed of taking a mercenary option as soon as it seems necessary.
Taking all questions of labor law fairness aside (you won't solve them alone in a workplace anyway), reality is what it is and while it's still imperfect, hedge yourself against those imperfections to your own benefit as well as you can, legally.
Secondly, companies that vomit platitudes about "we're all a family here" and "we look out for each other" are by default spewing lying, superficial PR bullshit. They should never be trusted for a second on such nonsense unless you've secured a written contract of provisions for how you'll be treated, have your healthcare taken care of or be compensated if dismissed for any reason. If you can't secure those things, then tread carefully and keep hedging.
Any company that says "we are a family" or talk about loyalty is immediately not to be trusted. Was on linkedIn today and say some director stating that the one thing she looks for on a resume is loyalty, if someone has jumped ship every couple of years she is not interested. Looked at her CV and she had been with the current company 5 years. Prior to that, not a single job longer than 17 months. She essentially reached leadership and then decided that its insulting for the plebs to quit on her. She also made a statement along the lines of 'you spend 12 hours a day at work...'. Any leader that thinks you should be spending 12 hours a day at work is not a leader you want. It was the clearest red flag I have ever seen a people leader post.
I will work for a company and try my best as long as they provide me with good yearly raises and benefits and don't require insane hours. Fail on any of those points and I am gone. There are plenty of opportunities for a 20% raise somewhere else. I know that as soon as times get tough they will cut whatever heads are required while being sure to give the execs or in-crowd a golden parachute and the rest nothing.
I recently joined a big tech company. It was a long term project and something quite new to me as I switched career and was working in a different context. There are pros and cons, but it's a bit of a disappointment.
I've got the impression very quickly that absolutely nobody cares about me in this company and that employees mostly don't love what they do. Specifically
- There's a high turn-over
- Everybody is focused on their performance, compensation and on improving evaluation metrics
- Right after joining, I found the form explaining how to resign. Extremely easy.
- People do get fired: including a skilled, friendly, colleague of mine (didn't meet expectations for two semesters).
- Management knows how to keep the pressure high (in a friendly manner)
- I can't like my project: there are too many things to do and broken things to fix, also no feeling of ownership, no incentives to refactor or redesign.
>It seems to me the healthiest behavior falls somewhere in between. “Put your own mask on first, before helping others”: look to help others, but do it from a place of safety. That’s the general tone I aim for. You absolutely should try to look out for your colleagues – but not when it comes at great personal expense.
Excellent advice. I also read the linked article about exit interviews and I concur they're a trap. I've dealt with vindictive former employers like that. Frankly, the easiest way to get over it is to pretend you never worked there and forget the place exists. When asked to explain the gap in my employment I just partially lie and say it was health related. Because of HIPAA in the US they can't pry too much, and as long as I can prove I'm healthy now and otherwise qualified they legally aren't supposed to deny me the job because of it.
I read through the exit interviews are a trap blog post and now this latest one. If you're leaving a company because of one particular person (manager, co-worker), then I agree that there's not much to gain from divulging honest feedback. That's a clear case where things can get ugly and personal and you're better off just not being 100% honest. But very often, there are inefficient processes that can't be attributed to one individual. Even when I left my recent team of 5 years, I wanted my co-workers and manager to be able to get support from upper management. To me that's worth providing feedback in an exit interview even if it does nothing and the cost is pretty minimal.
Eh, as much as I would like to be able to say that the advice is too 'mercenary', it is not. It is by far the most rational piece I have read on the matter.
In my little corner of the world, a good chunk of the team quit over the past few weeks leaving a skeleton crew. I know for a fact that each and every one of those, who quit indicated very clearly why they quit ( money, benefits, limited chance of promotion ). To the best of my knowledge, nothing changed ( we didn't suddenly get a better working environment )..and, realistically, this is the best case scenario: nothing changes.
If anything,as employees we are not being mercenary enough. All the niceties employers enjoyed worked only one way..
I don't think so. IMO, things function fine when everyone simply admits the truth: all any of us care about is ourselves (well, and our own families).
Companies want us to make them money and we only care about the company's success when it benefits us. But in this 'arrangement' there's an alignment of values: an agreement that we both want the company to make money.
More problems arise when companies succeed but don't share the success or when employees demand high compensation but do nothing to earn it. As long as everyone's honest about their own greed it can work out.
If you don't like something about your job/org, speak up and let management know.
If nothing happens, try to spearhead some change. It's your job! Sometimes the lower levels can see value that upper levels can't.
If you can't change it, cope.
If you can't cope, then leave.
Anything you want to say in an exit interview, you should have spoken up about already in step 1.
If there's something you haven't spoken up about, then it's probably for a reason. Just leave it. No need to be a martyr for your ex-colleagues, as it's only perceived. You have no idea the complexities of running a multi billion dollar tech organization.
Depending on the organization and your position in it, it can take a tremendous amount of mental energy and effort to accomplish anything, having a negative effect on your mental and physical health. Is that cost worth fixing something that doesn't even belong to you?
I've learned this lesson the hard way, both successfully and unsuccessfully. Now I have a much lower threshold of what effort I am willing to exert to help a company change.
I can imagine a lot of new graduates having trouble with this:
> I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are [...] I’d love to live in a world where less mercenary advice wasn’t dangerous, but that’s not our world.
If you are lucky you will land in a place that has empathy and you will work with people whom you can trust, but those places are hard to find and even in the best places there will be ruthless actors.
If you are going to say something on exit it is best to say it to someone who has power who you trust. If you have access to a VP or CEO, for example. HR’s job is to quickly make problems go away and minimize risk to to the company. Them passing along helpful information to impact change is the opposite of making something go away, it creates a complication. No one hires HR people to create complications.
I'm 46 and never in my whole career have working conditions been less ruthless nor less sociopathic than they are today. I'm constantly barraged with acceptance training, "human connection" training and calls where the expectation is to "share and connect" by telling the group something personal. I'm not with a bunch of kids either, these are all upper management very high 6 figure types.
I don't want to be one of those "back in my day" types but it use to be up-or-out. You came in at the bottom and either went up the corporate ladder at the proper rate or you were fired. That was sociopathic and bread ruthlessness in the workforce. Today it is touchy feely to the point of being confusing on what the actual expectations of the job are.
I'm constantly barraged with acceptance training, "human connection" training and calls where the expectation is to "share and connect" by telling the group something personal
We had a "leadership training" thing a few weeks back where one of the segments involved a breakout session with a random coworker who you may or may not already know, with the expectation that you share something deep and revealing you've never told anyone else.
The person I got paired up with and I were both incredulous about the exercise, specifically the "something you've never told anyone else" part, and shared a couple of surface level phobias "I'm afraid of spiders", I told him. He told me he was scared of sharks. We spent the remaining 5 minutes of our breakout talking about local sports.
Companies need to back the hell off with this stuff. I pay a therapist for those kinds of conversations.
I'm fine being friendly and even making friends with my coworkers over drinks for a little bit work before we all go home, if it happens organically and in a way where people get to choose their level of interaction and disclosure about their personal lives, but a lot of this "top down camaraderie/management facilitated team building" going around feels like a toddler smashing a Barbie and Ken doll together making smooching noises at best, at worst it feels like mommy and daddy making play dates.
I always dread the "two truths and a lie" game, usually performed in front of a large group of people you don't know. It's the ultimate trap. Either come up with two things that sound impressive to strangers, or risk being seen as a bore. Plus you'll never beat Todd who went before you and is literally the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World. Fuck you Todd.
I know someone who had a similar event happen in training, except the deep and dark secrets were meant to be shared among a group of six or seven. People shared actual deep and dark secrets; crying was involved. My friend who told me about this was deeply uncomfortable with the whole affair and found it bizarre and cultish, but of course, they went along with it and made up some semi-plausible thing to be a "team player." Amusingly enough, IIRC, it was also a phobia.
I wonder if phobias are just easier to share because some of the more common ones most of us share are ones we know are probably not very rational but still powerfully held.
Do you think this is real though? I always put this in the bucket of "HR is my friend" level of lying. When it comes down to brass tack, outside of a few virtue signalers, I think we'll be fed to the wolves the minute it is expedient to do so.
I'd like to agree with the latter part of this sentiment as a young person who didn't experience any other times of working to which you refer.
I got fed this narrative that the corporate environment was ruthless and cutthroat, but I found it highly resistant to even profitable, labor-saving new ideas or practices in favor of ego management, image management, and non disruption.
Maybe it's a false expectation on my part, but I would have at least expected ruthless people to be pragmatic and open minded toward things which may be of benefit. That's not to say they're without fault or downside, but that's certainly not generally characteristic of the corporate environment I've experienced.
OTOH, I've found smaller employers with a more direct connection to market forces much better in this regard. I don't think those two things are unrelated.
Less ruthless and less sociopathic, my ass. If that were true, Justine Sacco would not have lost her job for making a dumb joke on Twitter.
All this touchy feely bullshit matters right up until the point where the company is even in the slightest way negatively effective monetarily, then all your happy happy joy joy horseshit goes right out the window.
If anyone wants me to believe we live in a society that actually holds the values you claim are on display, then the next time someone makes a faux pas on Twitter or Facebook or in the office, the company stands strong against public sentiment and says, "So-and-So is one of our own, and we're not going to throw them to the wolves to appease a mob. Period." And then actually back it up.
Then I'll agree that things have actually changed. And if that ever does happen, then things will actually have changed.
That's OK, they'll refer back to posts like this if[1] they get burned once or twice. I think its the sort of thing most have to experience themselves before they believe it rather than accepting it's true up front.
[1] Who knows, maybe they'll be one of the lucky few who don't get burned.
The irony is that he's arguing more towards individualism, but then ends with the most collectivist urging that there is: "Don't like it - join a union".
I have no problem with mercenary advice, in fact I give it myself often: most relationships with a company are adversarial and it’s fine to operate on that basis… but I felt that the exit interview article was wrong: I’ve personally benefited from attending exit interviews and never incurred any costs because of one, and so from a purely selfish point of view, it makes complete sense to attend an exit interview. There’s a lot of value in relationships.
Zero-sum bridge burning makes sense sometimes. But a career is rarely fully zero-sum. You likely need a reference, may have stock options dependent upon improvement, want a job offer X years later from a colleague making the new hotness, etc. I've given references for mercenary folks, but always with that asterisk, which is a Career Limiting Move.
In my view, it's mercenary if you're exploiting a power or trust relationship. In the case of exit interviews, if businesses want to benefit from access to that kind of information, they can lobby for statutory protections for workers who disclose it. Or, they
Being a mercenary is great if what makes you happy is being a mercenary. The problem is that mercenaries excel at destroying things and getting paid for it, not at creating things.
This is going to depend on the health of the organization you're in. If you're in a healthy environment, giving mercenary advice is probably not the best move - literally, less likely to advance your career.
If you're in a hypercompetitive and/or toxic environment, you'd better be very careful about what advice you give (and everything else you say).
Semi-related, I hate the term "late-stage capitalism". It was invented by a Nazi over 120 years ago and in the meantime has constantly been applied to whatever the new thing is. And the implication is awful - "things suck and it's not my responsibility to make things better besides waiting for the revolution".
Please stop using this phrase unless you want to further alienate me from the position you are trying to make.
> That'd be a good trick, given that there were no Nazis until 1920.
It was in a work published starting in 1902 (though the part concerning late-stage capitalism was published in 1927) by a German Marxist [0] (at the time he wrote coined the term) who became a nationalist in the Weimar era to the point that some of his writings later in the early 1930s apparently aligned to a certain extent with Nazi ideology, but who was putting out anti-Nazi writings (actively suppressed by the Nazis) by the late 1930s.
So, while “by a Nazi over 120 years ago” is not really accurate at all, it has some recognizable connection to facts.
> I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are. (I’m speaking mostly about the US here; that’s what I know.) Most employees have essentially no workplace protections; in most states you can be fired for no reason and no notice.
Non-US-dweller here: isn't that system entrenched since always? - i.e. that way of treating workers has been present in the US ever since there's been an "US"? Somehow Europeans managed to make life easier on themselves like mandatory vacation, a lot of sick leave, etc., but the US just didn't sign up for that.
I think there is a lot of us vs them in the world. We seem to have forgotten how to collaborate and cooperate. Unless you are in our tribe and you can only join the tribe after a trial by hazing. Then if you leave the tribe you are back to you and them again. Maybe that's the spirited world of capitalist competition but the reason we have companies and endeavor to solve humanity's problems.
No, companies killed collectively beneficial motivations. You could even risk some sort of lawsuit from the company in the form of malicious underperforming by suggesting things at an exit interview.
This was all you needed to write:
>I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are.
> I think many people, especially those newer to the working world, underestimate just how ruthless and sociopathic our late-stage Capitalist working conditions really are.
Thank you for this! I have been raised in and appreciate a Machiavellian approach to society, especially upwards mobility.
I have no sympathy for workplace advice that attempts to coddle someone who cannot psychologically operate in a world told more truthfully. “Mercenary” advice works in this environment, being more like a mercenary, a “sell sword”, is a pragmatic approach than being gaslit by the company’s “were a team” chant. This is why Netflix’s older culture document resonated with so many people, its appealing! Intruiging! Truthful! Refreshing!
Many of us can psychologically operate in a world so unforgiving and its a more effective tool for improving financial and healthcare stability, whether that includes an employer or [eventually] doesnt.
There are selective pressures towards people that can perceive reality accurately and use it to their advantage. another population relies on not perceiving reality at all to maintain a view that makes them happy enough to tolerate the mundane, and another population perceives reality accurately and it exacerbates chemical imbalances in their mind such that their chronic depression keeps them useless to society, which by definition means selective pressures against those traits.
I see only a complete rejection of the collaborative organization that is society, which provided literally everything that gave you the opportunities and outcomes you now enjoy. And now you brag about enriching yourself beyond your share, occupying space where others could make use of those opportunities, reducing the opportunities for everyone in the future.
Society improves when more people have more chances to contribute positively. There is so much underutilized talent out there. To block off those opportunities hampers the development of society writ large.
Still have an obsessive attachment to acting purely selfishly? Then think of it like this: acting to close off others' opportunities prevents them from inventing and producing things that you could benefit from. Would you act differently knowing that giving someone else a chance may lead to the development of a medicine that will save your life a few years down the road?
Also, that last paragraph makes me think you don't really interact with real human beings that often.
Society is collaborative, the private sector of society is not. Its a flawed incentive model that most of society periodically navigates through. These are different things than society as a whole. It is aspirational to want something else and be in an environment to rely on different advice. You are either conflating society and the private sector or projecting something I have no idea about. (I dont really understand who the “you shutting off opportunities” is about. What specific thing am I doing exactly?)
Innovation rate in a society is roughly proportional to the branching factor of the possible futures that that society engenders. One way to reduce the branching factor is to consume (or store) resources that others may use to innovate.
"Taking up space" in society corresponds to collecting and storing resources beyond the share which makes you productive, such that an opportunity cost is incurred. Insofar as there is a teleology to capitalist economic organization, it does not include a distribution of resources which optimizes opportunities. The profit motive ensures this.
Delineating the private sector from society at large is an artificial distinction that does not reflect the material realities surrounding resource distribution and utilization. We are all part of one big network, and the boundaries described above are not obeyed by the chaos of self-emergent organization at these scales.
The for-profit corporation can survive with “mercenaries” coming and going, compared to the risk averse co-dependent people married to their fake corporation family, the largest and most profitable ones have very high actual and expected attrition, tech workers finally normalizing 1-2 year stints and being okay professionally for the next stint.
For the people who don't know they can operate this way, now they have advice on how to.
Society wont be worse off because more employees are looking out for themselves instead of falling for company rhetoric. Just as the article said, if you aspire for something else, support a unionization effort.
You seem to be implying that there is only one alternative to the current situation: that if you don't want to be a ruthless mercenary the only alternative is to become a sycophant, a simp for the corporation which pays your bills. How unimaginative.
Unions are necessary but insufficient. Why is there no discussion about further alternatives in your replies? Cooperative ownership structures are prevalent and successful by multiple metrics. Do you wish to limit the conversation to only those defensible by your preconceptions?
> Why is there no discussion about further alternatives in your replies? Cooperative ownership structures are prevalent and successful by multiple metrics. Do you wish to limit the conversation to only those defensible by your preconceptions?
Sure, no, I don't like false dilemmas and am only pointing out that everything you're talking about is aspirational. It means, it doesn't currently exist in the US in any reliable fashion so a current employee that isn't a labor rights activist cannot assume they'll encounter those environments.
I'm a fan of things I've seen in developed countries, such as the employee union having a board seat by law, which also relies on such union existing, this thread isn't about those structures.
In the present, in the US, the dichotomy you summarized is what I perceive.
> Would you act differently knowing that giving someone else a chance may lead to the development of a medicine that will save your life a few years down the road?
A counterargument to this is that I’d personally pick today over tomorrow almost every time. So yes, not gambling on the future, but doing what’s right for yourself today is +ev.
Society benefits when the mercenary and competitive urges of high achievers are channeled rather than opposed. That's the secret behind the success of modern market economies, and the alternatives are clearly worse for everyone in a society, including the poor.
Even the Nordic so-called "socialist" countries are actually market economies, with private ownership of the means of production, and they channel the results of capitalism rather than opposing it. They channel it into a somewhat larger safety net than the USA has, but fundamentally they are doing the same thing, because they know that's the only approach that really brings prosperity to a society.
This not a zero-sum game either. Underutilized talent now has more opportunities to be recognized and contribute than ever before. One person's success does not prevent another person's success. We are not just dividing up a pie -- we are growing the pie too. Who is closing off other's opportunities by pursuing their own success?
> Society benefits when the mercenary and competitive urges of high achievers are channeled rather than opposed. That's the secret behind the success of modern market economies...
Big statement, unsubstantiated.
> the alternatives are clearly worse for everyone in a society, including the poor.
Big statement, unsubstantiated.
> they channel the results of capitalism rather than opposing it
This perspective is conspicuously self-serving, but it doesn't seem to be a very clear or elucidating one. What parts of capitalism are being "channeled"? What outcomes are you referring to?
Certainly the poor don't see benefits except where the rich are forced to pay back into public funds for redistribution. It seems to me that the results of capitalism are tempered by more regulated economies, considering the natural end state of capitalist pursuit is feudalism if left unchecked. The profit motive guarantees this.
> that's the only approach that really brings prosperity to a society
This was the popular narrative for describing the failings of Soviet-style communism re: economy. But it stinks of essentialism. Actually, your whole argument does. The reason the CCCP crashed has been studied in more detail now that we have the benefit of hindsight. The rest of the global economy was capitalist, and furthermore, was shaped and organized by a select few power players to engineer the demise of CCCP by creating conditions of brittleness, so that relatively small disruptions (eg localized famines) would cause knock-on effects. There is a direct throughline to today: see all the talk of sanctions vs "the West's" enemies, which amounts to nothing more than exactly what is described above.
> One person's success does not prevent another person's success.
An unqualified notion of "success" seems to be used here. It is not clear even what you think is "success". Seems to be some abstract Enlightenment-style ideal that has a murky-at-best connection to material reality.
One person's consumption prevents another person's consumption because we are limited by the law of conservation of mass-energy. One must consume to innovate. Hoarding and asymmetric investment limit the distribution of these resources to those who may be able to utilize them more effectively, because they can contribute their own IP. This, in the language of basic economics, is called an opportunity cost, and the point of economies (insofar as there is a point) is to minimize that cost. Seems pretty obvious to me, interacting with people from varying levels of class and societal rank, that this cost is harming our progress.
To think we have reached any kind of pinnacle of societal organization demonstrates a depressing lack of imagination. Conservative philosophy has a long way to go to properly argue its side -- and unfortunately for conservatives the work done to advance systems science over the last couple decades has done a lot to tear down the fundamental tenets thereof.
The very essence of this website is not amenable to workers coming together to discuss things like the propriety of employment-tied healthcare, or what we should expect from our managers, but mostly for aspiring and current startup leaders to, probably, discuss everything but that stuff. It is a forum attached to a startup incubator after all, and I can't imagine much VC money goes to those companies that are worried about their own labor related issues/externalities, at least those that they don't need to legally be worried about.
I don't think anything is lost here, there is no problem per se, discussions are of course not being diminished by this ultimately demographic point; but just... if you come to these threads and feel a little disappointed that there is not a more universal solidarity towards the basic decency of the worker, just remember it is because not everyone here is a worker!