How committed to be to one's job is a dynamic topic. To me, the ideal dynamic is finding a place that will recognize and reward you for working hard and "owning it" - and to work hard and "own it" in that environment.<p>In contrast, working hard in a place that doesn't reward you is sad. Slacking in a place where you can succeed more if you try harder is also sad.<p>I find that some people will perceive themselves to be exploited and orient their life around avoiding it, regardless of the situation (vs, reserving that feeling for avoiding actually exploitive situations.) For example, it's common to see HN posts describing someone as "subjecting themselves to unpaid overtime" when they work hard - meanwhile the person saying it is making $60K while the person being talked about is making $600K. There are some cases where working hard/loyalty/etc can lead to outsized rewards - but you need to be smart and keep your eyes open for that kind of space.<p>And then, assuming you are in the right kind of environment - allowing yourself to care and be engaged makes your work days much more <i>fun.</i> I think commonly in the example I described, the person that's proud of inoculating themselves from exploitation not only make 10% of what they can, but the exactly 8 hours of work they put in is a miserable drag for them. The guy working harder for 10X the comp might also be having more fun.
One of the most depressing, nihilistic realizations I have had in my 30s is:<p>* People don't care about the work you do, they care about how you make them <i>feel</i>.<p>* People <i>will</i> steal the work that you do, or imply that they were a part of it, when they weren't.<p>* Those people <i>will</i> employ what I had though were high school tier manipulative tactics by sidechanneling communications, or in the way they talk in meetings to imply that they are more useful they than actually or, or to imply they had a involvement in things they didn't.<p>* "Middle managers" <i>love</i> this stuff, and will promote and hire people who also play this stupid game.<p>I have seen people share into our slack channels, or start meetings out by playing the most absolutely useless, tik-tok-level, linkedn-level garbage fake bizbro videos as if they are important useful business information that we need to incorporate into our philosophy.<p>I've seen companies then go to <i>hire</i> these absolutely useless borderline pyramid-scheme bizbros, incorporate their useless vocabulary cancer, and bring them into our meetings and make us defer to them on things.<p>This stuff is incredibly demoralizing.<p>Loyal, good workers get exploited by these parasitic people because they care about the company, they care about their good coworkers, and they take pride in making good products. Obviously this stuff is all easily exploitable by the people I'm describing.
I worked many different blue collar jobs in New Jersey as a teenager¹ in the early 2000s and I learned that every blue collar workplace has one or more of these "go-to" persons.<p>They're always there early AND late. They never, ever turn down requests for MORE X even if they're salaried and even if it makes their lives unnecessarily difficult.<p>They're often the ones most visibly damaged by the job, but they also irrationally defend their abusers. Perhaps they think that they'll be promoted one day, but why would a manager promote their best underling, especially if they've shown that they'll never be a flight risk?<p>[1] <i>Seriously, I started at fourteen and job-hopped ~2x/year: a "schoolyear job" and a "summer job".</i>
People in power who are aware of this and still make these decisions are the worst. I’ve seen abject examples in my career.<p>And what happens when you complain about burnout, repeatedly?<p>- “Yeah it happens. Why not take a vacation?”, but dropping last minute work on you or calling you when traveling<p>- “Yeah but we’re all under so much pressure. It’s a team effort and we need to all pull through”, and again dropping more work on you when teammates who don’t care don’t have to work half as hard<p>- “Oh yeah? Maybe you should focus more on your work life balance” and then calling you in the weekend for that “super important customer call on Monday we need to prepare for”<p>I came to realize 1-1 meetings with management are designed to manipulate and keep you under control, just how HR’s real objective is to protect the company. This and other instances left a lot of scars and tainted my perspective about salaried work.<p>I can’t drink the Kool-Aid anymore and even as a founder this is among my top priorities in how I treat people working with me.
Seems similar to what Venkatesh Rao has written about "The Clueless" in his "The Gervais Principle" article.<p>It is a really great read:
<a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...</a>
The de-facto inability to draw boundaries, especially towards people that one perceives to be dependent on, is one of the common symptoms of the large majority of mental health disorders. People have massive difficulties to defend themselves against this kind of workplace abuse, their ability to say “No” is impeded to a point where any reasonable person with understanding of the situation would deem it deeply unjust.<p>Meanwhile, it is known that people with dark triad personality traits - so people which fall more into the direction of very severe personality disorders such as ASPD or NPD, which have huge internalizing and externalizing costs and damage to society - are due to perverse incentives more often promoted into leading positions, from where they can further cause harm to the sick people below them. But they also get themselves further damaged as their promotions and monetary rewards don’t incentivize them to seek treatment, aggravating their pathology for decades, robbing them of meaningful and healthy lives. Any person with understanding of pathologies of mental health knows that their ability to simply stop abusing others is massively impeded to a point where objectively it appears like a perverse and cruel game to everybody involved.<p>Both sick-abuser and the sick-abused are the victims in these dynamics and suffer massively.<p>I hope that we as society will eventually reach a point, where the exploitation of sick people is not normalized anymore. There can be alternatives once we collectively incentivize compassion and empathy, but I dream - even Jesus tried to tell people this and look where we are today.
Me and Dwight Schrute are on the same page:<p>"Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most."
Consider the large companies with hiring processes intended to try to acquire each employee at the minimum compensation each individual will accept.<p>I suppose it shouldn't be any surprise if the company (or a manager within the culture of that company) also tries to get the maximum value out of each employee according to what each individual will endure.<p>Now consider closer to home for HN. Typical pre-seed/seed startups, where the first couple engineering hires might be offered 0.5% to 2% in ISOs, although critical to getting to MVP. While the founders, who started months earlier, get an order of magnitude more equity, and under better terms. Not because that's fair or fosters an environment that deserves much loyalty, but because they're trying to get the employee at the minimum cost they'll accept, even to the employee's disadvantage.
I'd go further and say that emotional attachment in business is always a net negative that gets exploited.<p>As a consumer, you often see guilt or other attachment with car and home purchases. I'm definitely guilty at work. I really enjoyed the work at some jobs that were objectively awful. The customers, mission or colleagues were great in some way, but the company gleefully exploited that emotional attachment.<p>In my case, I attribute that inappropriate attachment to work to my own failure to deal with conflict or emotional issues in my personal life. It's really the only regret that I have in life, as it's a problem caused by my own stubbornness. Time is the enemy -- age, death and other events make it impossible to take back or fix. Whenever you find yourself thinking "we can do <X> next time, I have this <important project/task> to do", stop. The kids will grow up, your partner will get sick, your parents will die. Someday there won't be a future, and you'll find that you don't care about or remember the "important" things you did, but you will regret that things you didn't
In other news, water is wet.<p>I am an <i>exceptionally</i> loyal worker, but it's been very important to enforce my boundaries.<p>Part of being loyal, is finding a company worth being loyal to.<p>Not so simple.
Loyalty is a great characteristic to have in a dog. Humans should put a bit more thought and skepticism into their devotion to employer, country, party, religion, etc.
Based on the comments, there are obviously many people who have had bad experiences of this.<p>I agree with the general sentiment, I think this is a common behavior in many organisations.<p>But at least anecdotally, I'd just like to mention it's not always true.<p>For example, a friend who had loyally had worked at the same company for several years. He was going through some tough times personally (family) and was basically not doing anything useful for half a year or more.<p>Since he had been there for a while, they knew him well and didn't try to force him to get more things done, or anything else. They were basically fine with him doing nothing for many months. About half a year later, things were looking better for him on the personal front, and he would be back to speed (mostly).<p>If he hadn't worked there for several years [been loyal], I doubt they would have treated it the same.
Ya know, I guess someone has to say the obvious. Hopefully it reaches its target audience of "company men" who don't realize they're getting shafted in exchange for Bamboo kudos and Chipotle gift cards. If you want a depiction of this dynamic that's just uncanny enough that it might break the haze and is just those guys who are wasting their youth because "one day they'll make partner" watch What We Do in The Shadows.
This conclusion shouldn't be shocking to anyone. The entire foundation of the employer-employee relationship is <i>built upon</i> exploitation of labor value. So when an employee signals <i>loyalty</i> what he's truly signalling is that he's open to a higher level of exploitation.
It's an aspect of human nature. If you've been in at least a few relationships for example, you will have witnessed up close and personal how being taken for granted works. People tend to do that to those that are loyal to them, at some point or another, intentionally or not.<p>All workers being exploited in regards to loyalty are being specifically exploited by a person that is doing the exploiting. It's not a faceless corporation (a robotic entity in imagery) doing it, it's a specific person (or people) that is doing it to them. Why does that matter? Because you're dealing with a dark facet of human nature in action. If you understand what you're dealing with in actuality, you'll be better situated to deal with it, control how you react to it, pre-empt it, et al.
1 job where an unpaid job title change to something higher results in exploitation to prove its worth it<p>1 job where a 5% raise occurs results in exploitation to prove its worth it, after exploitation for the 5% raise<p>1 job where a counteroffer results in a 10-20% raise results in exploitation to prove its worth it<p>2 jobs with zero ambition results in 100% raise and no exploitation and a manageable workload<p>I think companies should just embrace this and attract talent specifically for this. YC could just spearhead this with their portfolio companies. “hey, our candidates are overemployed, its cool, everyone knows. They’ll join your standups on the east coast, and join their other companies standup on the west coast 2-3 hours later, let them allocate tasks and deliver them. if performance isn’t good enough then they’re let go, like any other employee”<p>employees get to vest in two options/equity based lotteries, instead of just one at a time for years of their life<p>employees make $300k-$500k/yr (2x $150k - 2x $250k base salaries) without worrying about what Big Tech is currently doing<p>win for everyone
There is some survivorship bias. Loyal workers get worked harder, but disloyal and lazy ones either leave or get fired, leaving the loyal ones to be selected more.
Someone inside Amazon created a slack channel for employees to publish their compensation. The results are consistent: the longer a person stays with Amazon, the lower their compensation is compared to their peers, so much so that a L6 could earn 50% less than a fresh L5. Of course, there was not enough data points for L7 and above and people who got promoted fast wouldn't suffer the slow growth of their compensation.
You should never be loyal to a company more than you need to perform your job well. Similarly you should never be loyal to a company as a customer. What makes people not understand these two principles? The need to belong? I just don't get it. It's like those people that demand to work in offices, at the cost of personal and family lives, mental health, and great financial cost, simply to please a boss.
In any tech work environment, per my observation, you have mainly two teams:<p>- The technical folks: those are usually the engineers but not necessarily, those dedicate their time (heck, their lives) in mastering the skills they do, as a result, they lack the political skills to engage and avoid other work politics.<p>- The non-technical folks: Usually of biz backgrounds and usually mid-managers, they severely lack the technical side, and as a result, they often use work politics to make that up by manipulation, credit taking, etc.<p>The first team, once they realize what the other team is doing, they either fight back by escalating (this is rare since it will add up to their stress of what they are already dealing with by building stuff), or switch jobs, which is the common one. The second team will keep doing it until they find the perfect candidate, the ones who do most of the job while being underpaid and “sharing” all credits. Which is why a lot of companies they barely produce anything productive and the real work usually get outsourced to contractors. I personally the first question I ask in any interview is how flat the management style.
There is an importance of knowing your worth and weight if you are loyal and subject to exploitation.<p>Just because you can get shit done does not mean it is okay for managers to dump work on you where others are failing to pull their weight. You will burn out and you will be resentful of those exploiting you.<p>Also with regards to monetary value, ask for the raises regularly and prove that your work leads to said results. You should be getting the maximum rewards and having your salary adjusted based on the competitive market rate. Apply regularly to remind your employer who you want to remain "loyal" to that they can lose you if they aren't keeping up monetarily.<p>There are very few people in the world who look out for your wellbeing if you are "loyal". They will not help make space for when you need to take time off, they will not advocate for your promotions/career growth if you're in a crucial role, they will not see the disparity of how much value you bring versus how much you're rewarded.<p>You have to advocate for all this yourself. Be loyal to yourself first.
Being a worker is being underpaid, to varying degrees. Another way to put it is "the most valuable employee makes the most impact for their salary", so the tendency is to maximize the former and minimize the latter.<p>"Loyalty" is a manipulation game. The only true loyalty is to #1, but most honest people don't even do that.<p>One primary way to get ahead is be in-demand, court many offers, and play offers off each other in an ego-respecting manner within whatever the market will bear.
Raises rarely happen, so it's usually better to switch jobs every 1.5-3 years.<p>At some point in a high-income career path, switching jobs doesn't have to be as necessary or desirable, and a lawyer and a TC negotiator can help them get more $$$.<p>Furthermore, anyone good will have lots of options and should always be open to other homes if only to window shop. (Never be stuck somewhere miserable or without options.)
I was fiercly loyal to a manager I had in the past - I now view him as a viscous (EDIT: viscious!!) psychopath. The upside is that the enormous pressure I was under was character building for me, and has helped me further my career once I was away from that situation.<p>Now my loyalty is hard won and entirely transactional, and I'm much happier for it.
In my experience, company loyalty was useless but personal loyalty was valuable.<p>In tech, in good companies, most managers are helpful and thoughtful and ambitious themselves and my career was greatly accelerated by developing those personal relationships and playing the long game.
Could they have studied a more obvious thing? Doesn’t this result completely fit intuition?<p>When I think about loyalty I immediately think about people who would do things for me that are uncomfortable.<p>Haven’t they seen the documentary “Pulp Fiction?”
“ironically”? Loyalty is an obviously exploitable trait, so if you assume capitalist firms <i>want</i> to exploit labor as much as efficient, and there is a subset of labor more exploitable (better payoff for same effort at exploitation), its not ironic that they are particularly targeted for exploitation, it is expected.
It's the prisoner's dilemma.<p>If both employers and employees are loyal, everyone wins.<p>If both are disloyal, everyone looses.<p>If one is loyal, the disloyal one screws them badly.<p>If I were to be able to time travel, I might write a commandment to burn anyone at the stake who tried to work in HR.
It's amazing to me how much can be written (and published, and rewarded) about something so obvious. Parents, this is why your kids' tuition is so high.