Further, try to abide by their requests. If they want the trash can by the door to your office or cubicle on Thursday evening, move the damn trashcan to the door. They have 100 to empty; it's a trivial task for you.
We can get wound up in ourselves and forget to hold a door, or avoid spilling crumbs on our carpet, or log out of our workstation, or use a different hallway when the floor is being waxed, or to move the trash can. It's not really a reflection on our self-importance. It's just a character flaw.
I never did any of this stuff but got along with them all. Theyplayed with my Oculus Quest, we'd shoot the shit sometimes, shared some of their bomb ass guacamole.
Everyone's got their mode of interacting with people. I'm really not into this shaming people for not matching your interaction mode thing.
This sanctimonious ostentatious virtuosity is really too much.
To make it worse this is truly junk content. God help me.
It's hard for me to imagine a place where a janitor would dare make such a request. Usually service star are dreadfully afraid of getting abused by the (relatively) powerful problem all around them who can easily ruin their jobs and therefore lives by spite or just accident .
I do get being nice to janitors--and I am happy to help them with something if asked, and I don't "ignore" them as noted in this article as I definitely agree that's rude to treat them as second-class humans unworthy of being regarded with eye contact or banter--but I am being paid to do my job and they are being paid to their job and if I am spending my time or mental energy doing part of their job then I feel like something in the division of labor has failed. No one wants me spending my time working on the website or managing the social media account, and while every department certainly has something I could add to my task list to make their job easier--such as going out of my way to maintain a high-level changelog of the product or maintain a list of new translation syringe--it is their job to let me do my job, and we hired the people to do the extra work of going back through the work I did and finding those things I didn't write down at the time so I could maximize the time I spend on new development or architecture or debugging or cutting server costs or whatever it is that I was hired to do. I also think there is something to the people who argue that if you go out of your way to put away carts or use self-checkout "to help the people who work there" without realizing that you are REPLACING the people who work there--as, due to your efforts, the company can hire fewer people to do whatever that job is--then you are not actually their friend. While I avoid getting crumbs on the carpet because it is likely to attract ants or cause other forms of permanent damage to the room in the form of ground-in debris or stains, it just isn't clear to me that the most "janitor friendly" action--in the long run--wouldn't be to actively create as large of a mess as I can without people deciding I am myself such a liability that I lose my own job (and one could imagine actually conspiring with the janitorial staff over creating such elaborate "but understandable" messes ;P). Certainly, if we merely move all the trash cans to where they are most quickly gathered, the company would be almost negligent to not assign the janitor some new task to fill the time that was saved (or reduce their hours, or scale down the department, etc.).
The point I was making is that someone else's job isn't being nice to them, because you aren't doing something nice FOR THEM you are instead doing something nice FOR THEIR EMPLOYER as the amount of money they are paid or the load of tasks they are being given will adjust behind the scenes. It isn't intuitive, but once pointed out I hope it becomes obvious? If you do enough of their job for them, they get fired :(. If you cause then enough work, maybe you can get them a raise. (And yes: capitalism sucks like this if this makes you feel bad somehow, but you are moving in the wrong direction if you are trying to work on it: you should strive to have solidarity with workers!)
>you should strive to have solidarity with workers
Kind of weird to make this point at the end, right after you apparently say you intentionally make the cleaning jobs harder. As a cleaner if people make more of a mess of things, you'll just get overwhelmed with too much work and then things will look messy and you'll get fired. Cleaners usually don't get raises, and especially not raises for doing more work. You maybe get token raises when you threaten to leave due to low pay and the managers can't find a replacement straight away.
Nobody ever saw a clean office and came to the conclusion, "Our cleaning staff must be lazing about because someone else is cleaning for them, we should fire them all!"
Again, where did this meme about 'doing someone elses job'? The point made was, be respectful of them when they're doing their job, by cooperating and not winging about it.
This has become a tortuous argument which on the surface seems to be for justifying being disrespectful or lazy.
I don't know about other people but I go through my life trying to make things easier for other people, or failing that at least not make things harder, in the hope that someone else will do the same for me.
The people at a company are all hired to fill specific positions and accomplish specific tasks. The entire goal of working for a living isn't kind to begin with. Here: let's say you literally donated your time every night to do the janitor's job entirely, so they didn't have to do anything, as you love cleaning anyway and it makes you feel really happy to see them not having to do all of this work... now the janitor is going to be fired, because the janitor isn't adding value to the company anymore. It is frustrating to be sure, but if you want to actually show solidarity with workers in a capitalist system it involves realizing that the incentives are already screwed up.
I actually do, but the reasoning isn't because I am deluding myself into thinking I am being kind to the employees (it is because I am trying to be kind to the customers, by making the food cheaper). I realize you want to be nice to other people, but you should realize you are doing it wrong (or at least doing it to a different set of people than you intended)... as noted, I treat the janitors with respect and don't ignore them and even do things they ask me to do as I tend to know who they are in a way most people don't (partly as I tend to be the only person still hanging around in the middle of the night, but also because I don't have any issue talking to them as I don't do the bad thing the article is complaining about). I have even hired janitors for my spaces and I make sure to pay them well and treat them with respect. You aren't being kind to people when you pick up their job function... you just aren't.
Following the logic here and above, do you make sure to create very large and annoying to clean messes in office spaces / spaces were janitors will clean so that, by the nature of the work, pushes their employer to increase the pay for the job?
No, because 1) in cases where it is a building I am working in/for such a thing is likely to have direct and potentially significant negative blowback on me for increasing the company's costs; 2) in other places many people (I am guessing including yourself) are sufficiently privileged to not see the "us vs. the overlords" dynamic and so look at people who increase these sorts of costs with contempt; and 3) as noted elsewhere in this thread, helping the janitors isn't the only goal: keeping costs low for society IS valuable and so it can be perfectly rational to avoid creating messes you know someone else will have to clean in order to lower the costs on society to clean them... but only if you realize you are not doing this to be nice to the janitors.
Like, the issue I am having with this thread is that a ton of people who seem to have some concept of what the ethical thing to do here is--and I don't even necessarily disagree with the concluding actions!--but I don't think they actually have the perspective to realize that the reasons why those actions might or might not be ethical are completely different from what one might intuitively expect due to the incentive structure of working for a company under capitalism. And so then you are all taking this idea of that ethical conclusion and trying to make me feel shitty for how I treat the janitors somehow when the janitors are categorically not the people you are helping with your ethical outcomes :/. Yes: the result of this thought process applied en masse would be horribly inefficient and seemingly costly for a ton of people, but the janitors would call you a hero as they are paid by the hour.
My context: while I myself am yet another privileged software developer, I am also a strongly-left-leaning elected government official who often has deep heart to hearts with friends who are union organizers... people who fight daily on behalf of people in these situations, and it is when I channel them--not some heartless asshole who refuses to even look at janitors--that I feel most strongly about these issues. The idea that you are doing someone a favor by going out of your way to not help them in their personal life but to do part of their job is just such a strange thought process to me... I have houseless people in the area CONSTANTLY asking for work, and if there were tasks that needed to get done maybe we could hire them to the beautification program we're in charge of (which explicitly works with houseless employees); so sure: if you care about them, you might literally litter our streets with trash ;P.
The reason to maybe not cause messes (and I don't, because while I am not an asshole to the janitors I am not optimizing for them over everyone else) is not to be kind to these people in the way the person I replied to seems to think: it is because it is an inefficiency--a cost to the system as a whole--and that cost to the system will be born by someone else, whether it be tracked directly back to you or indirectly cause increased costs for food or other staples. The fewer people who work at supermarkets or restaurants, the cheaper food will be--your taxes are paying for our beautification program, so your taxes might be lower if there is less work to be done--but this comes at a disproportionate cost to the people who relied on those jobs, so don't think you are doing them the favor... if you were truly wanting to do them a favor, you would, in fact, do this awkward thing of trying to cause messes.
What I don't do, though: go out of my way to clean up messes caused by other people when I know someone else has a job to clean them. Example: I now no longer clean streets myself if I walk past a pile of trash... I pull out an app on my phone and take a photo of the trash so the aforementioned local beautification program sends a person out who is excited to be paid money and the program can show that it is being successful to the community and thereby people will be OK with the taxes being paid for it. The person who was sent out to pick up the trash gets to have the dignity of a job instead of me handing them money (which I also do!!! but they really hate taking the money from me like that, and it frankly isn't scalable or fairly allocated anyway). Meanwhile, I spend my time working on software or whatever I do which earns more money than this person was paid to pick up the trash in the same amount of time, which helps bring money into the area to pay for the local taxes. This is almost entirely a win/win/win.
Or you could actually try to help the janitor by NOT doing that so they still can get paid to do it. These are people who are often looking for hours and picking up multiple jobs and you seriously think you are helping them by doing literally any of their job for them? (FWIW, I also haven't ever experienced a janitor asking me to do this kind of stuff for them and I am actually the only person at the various buildings I work at who has bothered to talk to the janitors, because I actually try to treat them like humans who have needs.)
> Or you could actually try to help the janitor by NOT doing that so they still can get paid to do it.
Sounds to me like a very inefficient way of accomplishing tasks. Marginal cost of everyone doing their own simple task is less than the cost of employing a janitor. Furthering the logic, we should litter the place for more janitors to get employed.
I agree! But the person at the top of this thread wanted to help the janitor, and that's not what they are doing: they are, at best, helping the people who pay for the janitor, whether you want to model that as the company or the customers of the company. And that's a reasonable (or even "noble") thing to optimize for (though if you work at the company and are being paid to do something else with your time or mental effort you aren't helping the company either as you are just reassigning peoples' roles that were carefully chosen), but it simply isn't the same thing as helping the janitor, which is what everyone seems to think they are doing. You 100% shouldn't be an asshole to the janitor: they are people like you and you shouldn't avert your eyes or ignore their presence as if they are a pariah... but I think if you talk to them for a while you will realize more of them than you seem to think understand how this works as they are often a unionized position and their organizers are making sure everyone knows to keep work up and not tolerate their job being redistributed to others.
> Further, try to abide by their requests. If they want the trash can by the door to your office or cubicle on Thursday evening, move the damn trashcan to the door.
Better yet, take your damn trashcan out to the damn dumpster your own damn self.
Then we can save some damn money and fire the damn janitor.
> They have 100 to empty; it's a trivial task for you.
It's a trivial part of their job. They're getting paid for it.
In Japanese schools, the kids are the ones doing the cleaning. Not just taking out the trash, but cleaning the blackboards, mopping the floor, tidying up the desks, cleaning the bathrooms, etc.
The reasoning isn't to save money, however. It is precisely to teach them there's no such thing as work that is beneath them.
my granddad who was educated by Japanese says the crappiest stuff that made you clean like you meant it; don't read on if you don't want to be obsessed with cleaning stuff.
on how to leaving any space...
Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.
on how to clean...
treat the object you want to clean like it's your soul
> Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.
I love the Japanese ethos of Community (but don't always find myself in agreement with some of the other aphorisms, like "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.").
However, the person responsible for that gem has obviously never looked into a hawk's nest.
It's not all that different than going home and doing the cooking or the laundry. Surely you don't leave housework to your partner "because your time would be better spent elsewhere", right?
We don't think of brushing our teeth as "wading into the weeds", it's just an integral part of life for us. Cooking and laundry is (hopefully) just as much an integral part of life. Similarly, the Japanese famously don't have public trash bins everywhere and yet their streets are spotless because they consider public space cleanliness an integral part of life.
And one would hope that saying hi to people is an integral part of life too.
If I had the money I would pay for a cleaner in my house, for sure. I value cleanliness and relationships enough that of course I will do chores myself absent a cleaner, but I have no illusion that I am not trading my time and that my time would not be better spent doing other things.
> I have no illusion that I am not trading my time
I think that's kinda the point of the article. The people that ignore janitors surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent elsewhere than talking to cleaning staff. Rich parents in Dubai surely are under no illusion that it is better to hire full time nannies than to waste their time raising their own kids. The people in Wall-E surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent entertaining themselves than, well, anything.
But as the increasingly absurd examples hopefully illustrate, not everyone thinks the same way. For example, my wife firmly believes that food that is paid for is intrinsically inferior, because, all else being equal, it's not made with the same level of care as if it was made by family (and this in fact can be a particularly noticeable observation if you come from a culture that takes pride in elaborate cuisine)
We all have things that we believe implicitly are a waste of our time, perhaps because of our upbringing or some other reason, but I think the overarching message of the article is that there are some things in life that we should not be compromising on, even if we did have all the money in the world.
I went to an American private high school that also did this, although not everyone was thorough, so they had custodians clean every so often. In retrospect, it was kind of cool.
Trivialities in logistics and their impact on you as a person are two different things. If I added 500ms of latency to a keyboard (ssh, a bunch of VPNs, etc) I imagine a janitor would say ‘it’s a trivial part of your job, you’re getting paid for it.’ Yet that would cause many developers to pull their hair out.
It’s trivial to correct code formatting. You’re getting paid to code, presumably. What’s the better world: one in which your colleagues make a trivial effort to install a linter and make their code nicely formatted before handing it off, or one in which they don’t bother, say it’s trivial and part of your job for you to correct it, and then threaten to fire you?
I don't mind taking out the trash but I think we'll need to have a janitor on staff because at least a few (figurative) bad apples will neglect to take theirs out, and they'll throw away (literal) apples, which will go bad, and then we'll get flies.
Straw man? The example was moving the can near the door so the janitor could efficiently collect them, without for instance entering your office and perhaps upsetting cables, equipment etc.
Let's quit jumping to strawmen about doing the janitors job, shall we? It's just about being respectful of the guy in the job next to you.
The comment I was responding to suggested that people take out their own garbage and fire the janitor, that was the thought I was responding to. Perhaps that is the comment you meant to respond to?
I'm not sure if it is a strawman. They seem to be suggesting that going too farther in the direction of helping the janitor would remove the need for the janitor. To the extent that it is a strawman, I think they've even failed to beat up on their strawman, for the reason that I point out -- the janitor would still be necessary.
We can get wound up in ourselves and forget to hold a door, or avoid spilling crumbs on our carpet, or log out of our workstation, or use a different hallway when the floor is being waxed, or to move the trash can. It's not really a reflection on our self-importance. It's just a character flaw.