I manage a whole team of engineers. Last month, some C-level asshole with an MBA told a bunch of developers, to our faces, that our volunteer-run hackathons that we operate for the general public should instead be the general public contributing code to us directly.
We run those programs to build good will and help train new developers into the field. And this suit wants to milk them for shitty code we can’t even use (legally). This is in an industry which continues to get massive layoffs.
This isn’t his first bad idea. The others include removing perks, changing our department name three times in a year, and general fuckery of priorities.
So yeah, as a boss, I’m absolutely checked out.
Removed by mod
I hope the crumbling job market for programmers will make those people look elsewhere.
I hope it convinces white-collar workers that unions are a good thing for everyone.
Nothing ol’ Papa John can’t fix!
I’m feeling this right now, since I got a new boss and he is very bad. Would be nice to quit but so many other jobs seem worse, and force the workers back into the office. So I have quiet quit and only do the bare minimum at this point. The upside is I can learn about all kinds of fun tech stuff I can use at my next job when I find it.
I guess my boss also doesn’t enjoy his role, and just took it for the money and status.
You aren’t quiet quitting… That’s a bullshit term the business consultants came up with to shift the blame back to the employees again. You’re doing the quality of work you’re paid for. The company doesn’t care about you, and they aren’t going to pay you more for more effort.
If they want better quality work, businesses need to pay for it.
Yea … this! It’s a general pattern to keep a look out for across the board. How many things are being “put onto the employee” through culture, language and established practices.
You may find a bunch of things both specifically in your workplace and your culture generally.
Things like performance reviews, how promotion cycles are managed, what kinds if incompetence are tolerated and what kinds aren’t, how consistently “accountability” is used, what feedback channels exist and don’t exist, what groups of people are enabled to form entities and which aren’t … etc etc. You’ll find it’s everywhere and many aren’t even capable of seeing it.
Don’t forget when someone is fired or quite and they spread their workload to the rest of the team, and never hire a replacement. That’s a classic as well.
We should write a bunch of articles about “quiet downsizing”
I don’t feel guilty at all so I guess shifting blame didn’t work on me. It’s all a big game to keep people busy doing pointless things as the people who own everything gets richer. So why feel guilty for seeing that and adapting to it. :)
Paying me more won’t make me work harder, because I just don’t care about the company and that won’t change. If it was my company I would care I guess.
I’m feeling the same right now. My bosses managed to raise a million bucks for spurious reasons during last year’s AI hype and they’re grossly unqualified to run a company. I’m pretty sure they regret putting themselves in that position.
As a result, the company sees attrition levels which are ridiculous for an early stage startup, especially considering that they pay pretty well. But I can’t afford any down time so I have to stay there until a better opportunity presents itself. It sucks but yeah the learning is incredible.
I’ve spent the better part of the last decade of my 16 years in technology either trying to shield my team from a constant river of bullshit or contributing to projects that are clearly DOA from day one.
Got laid off a month ago and to be completely honest, I’m pretty bummed about the idea of going back to another corporate job. I’m going to do what I’ve gotta do to take care of my family. But there’s an increasingly large part of me that isn’t sure I want to do this until I retire. Don’t get me wrong, I do my job for the money; not the enjoyment. Anymore, a “good” job is one that I don’t hate. But it would be nice to work at something that doesn’t feel like a total waste of my time and expertise.
I get surveys at work asking me how much I believe the workplace aligns with company value x, y, z etc. Every question I just respond : I don’t have an opinion. I literally have no clue and do not care, I’m here to get paid.
My manager was an engineer who got promoted… Now she is still responsible for some technical contributions but also has to manage a team
She is extremely checked out.
We could be coworkers, I’m in exactly the same position. My manager shouldn’t be a manager, yet here we are.
this is why I don’t like management roles. so many are just “opportunities” for more work with no greater pay.
Bosses checked out first.
Everyone is bagging on Boeing. The leadership packed up and went east years ago. Boeing leadership doesn’t care so much they moved.
And now everyone is forgetting that the elite bailed on the US long ago.
I’m kind of in this situation now. Workload is a bit light at the moment and I’m just really not excited by alot of stuff going on at work right now. I’m just mentally checked out and coasting most of the time. I’m not looking for another job, but it feels like I’m in a mental rut. My area doesn’t really have levels of promotion and the next “logical step” is management, which I have no interest in because of how far removed from my job skills (graphic design). There’s nowhere else in the company I’d care to go to, I’m fine with where I’m at, but at the same time bored to tears with it. I know “getting out of my comfort zone” could help, but having a mortgage and kids to care for means I don’t really have the luxury of just uprooting everything on a whim.
Freelancing is an option, but I usually dislike doing graphic design for other people (ironically enough). I love the feeling of being so passionate about a project that I get lost in it and obsess over it for weeks, but I just don’t have that spark right now, everything feels dull.
Maybe try a new non work hobby in this downtime. You don’t have to be a more productive or engaged employee to find joy and excitement in life! Why can’t work be that consistent but dull backdrop that empowers/enables your the rest of your time?
Maybe a mindset shift will help. You don’t have to keep climbing that corporate ladder. Stop and smell the roses! Idk about you, but most above me on that ladder at my company seem pretty overworked and tired
I love being on or near the bottom of the corporate ladder. I’m not interested in extra responsibility. I just want to clock in and clock out and not think about work when I’m not there. I have too many other things I want to do with my time.
In my last job, I spent about 5 consecutive years kicking nothing but ass, getting 4.0 or higher annual reviews, customers saying how good and quick I got shit done. My “reward” for all that hard work…blanket 2.5% raise, the same as the6 people who show up at 8:45 at the earliest, take long breaks, longer lunches, gone by 4:30 because [this week’s BS excuse], and are consistently behind on every project.
Because of that I would spend weeks at a time at my desk just watching youtube, reading imdb or fandoms, playing games on my phone, shooting the breeze with toners or online shopping. I built a new AR pistol and a PC over the span of 3 months doing all my shopping and comparison from my work PC. Then, after some personal stuff went down, at my last review (4.5), I told my boss that there’s no reason I shouldn’t be a Sr Programmer at this point. His response was “Some people get promoted quicker than others, some get promoted too soon. You need to be patient”
I completely checked out at that point and started applying for new jobs. It took about 6 months but even when I went to turn in my resignation my old boss is so damn scattered & detached it took me 3 tries to slip it into conversation instead of just saying “fuck it i’m out”
My new job? Kinda the same. But I make over 10% more and am far ahead of the current peer that anything I do look like magic. I still don’t care.
Fucking fortune
I just learned about enshitefication, worsening of quality to maximize profits. That sounds like what the workplace has become. Capitalism is enshittefying work, or life in general.
I’m still burnt tf out and unemployed but I felt this big time when I was working in corporate at a large company.
I don’t have a degree, just was good enough in an environment where the average was pretty bad, and I got along with everyone so it wasn’t long before I had risen up a bit. The higher I got, the closer I got to business school types. My work became less structured, more stressful, more chaotic. It felt like there was a new disaster that I had to solve, every week, and every time it was totally avoidable and often was directly caused by these catty assholes starting shit on purpose.
I started to lose sight of what I was even doing. When I met someone and they asked me what my job was, I couldn’t give a straight answer because I was basically just doing whatever the fuck my superiors arbitrarily decided that week. They’d often assign me projects, then a couple days later pull me off the project and put me on something else that’s not even in my area of specialty, and then get mad that I wasn’t meeting the original project’s deadlines.
Our department had a lot of specific lingo that everyone knew and learned in training. On occasion they’d decide that a term wasn’t good enough, despite everyone knowing its meaning well, so they would arbitrarily change it. I was usually tasked with relaying these stupid fucking changes and trying to justify why everyone should follow suit. I would literally wring my hands cringing about how much of a fucking joker I looked when orating the senior management’s petty degree du jour.
I was a fairly fast, efficient worker, and my quality was consistent so I gained a reputation for being the go to guy for getting shit done quickly. That’s great, I’m respected by my peers, right? No because it just meant they would get more and more comfortable with shorter deadlines, faster project turnaround, quality expected to rise with each one.
They would constantly use that manipulative family rhetoric and to my utter shame I fell for it to a degree, and stayed there far longer than was healthy because I didn’t want to let the team and my mentor down. It was moot in the end. Eventually I hit a mental wall that I could not surpasse. It became physically impossible for me to do the work. I would try to type and my vision would blur. If I tried to work out a problem my head would start throbbing and I’d feel nauseous. I became unable to do anything. I’d often end up spending a lot of my work time anxiously pacing around my office trying to calm my mind rather than working. I started taking a lot of time off. I was closing myself off to the world, stopped hanging out with friends, stopped texting people, started to drink too much again.
One day there was a very stressful emergency in my family that I had to attend to and in a moment of overwhelming inability to deal with it, I found the clarity I had been lacking for a while. The next day I put in my two weeks. It hurt more than I expected. I really bought into that family shit, like a fool’s fool. I don’t know what the future holds for employment for me but I will never return to the corporate world. It’s like another plane of existence where everyone is aware of what a farce it all is, how performative and fake, how no one in charge knows or cares. But everyone pretends to care. And in a way, they do care because they’ll drive themselves mad for it.
The Great Delusion
Removed by mod
The economy is recovering according to common markers used to measure the trend of the economy. But that usually takes a few years before it is felt in working class homes. And yes this is a factor that serves to generate a vibe of disconnect between administations and the public.
But the disconnect is real and complicated according to HMW. Workers have gotten used to gig economics, expecting their current position will not lead to promotions or even adequate raises. Furthermore, everyone wants to hire trained, experienced workers, but no one wants to do the work in leveling them up. So workers now fluff their résumés and fake it till they make it, all the while looking for their next job.
When people switch jobs from current employment, their salary increase is three times as much on average as raises and promotions within.
Also, workers are slacking off at their current job and focusing effort on finding and selling themselves to a competing business.
Which is all to say, the companies fucked themselves over by not looking out for their own workers. No one expects to keep their current job anyway, so why not just look busy and do the bare minimum?
You want hard workers? Treat them like human beings who have families and health concerns. Otherwise watch them slip though your fingers like crude oil.
Removed by mod
Well it’s tech and you can use your free time for that.
Removed by mod
Actually getting training is also a joke. I have worked for a dozen companies at this point, everything from small contracting companies to Fortune 500.They all pay lip service to training but very few of them actually follow through and pay for (or even partially subsidize) your continued professional development.
I paid for 100% of a job-related Master degree while working, and the employer did not pay for any of it, nor provide any time off to work on it, etc. They also declined a pay raise of any kind once I finished and had the credential. Needless to say I peaced out and got a different job immediately.
I’ve always had to eat the full cost of my professional development and I only got “paid” for it by jumping ship to a new job for more money.
Personally to I take a job for a particular compensation and I put in a certain effort level. When its at the right level I put in about 50 hours a week. I know I should not but its expected and the pay is good. Since raises have not kept up with inflation I have been dropping what I put in (this is another reason I put in the extra so I have control of my hourly compensation more). Honestly though im down to 40 hours and make it a point of taking an hour lunch. I would like to slough off more but I just find that boring. I do put any work that I already know at the back though and prioritize things I have to learn and research.
deleted by creator
