It’s about who you know. Don’t socially isolate your self even when you are great at your job. Being invisible is a sure fire way to be overlooked when it comes to promotions or a raise. Also being likable means your colleagues will more likely have your back and root for you.
A couple of months ago there was a post on Reddit of a Gen Z person who hated when people would say a simple good morning to them. They rather walk into work, sit down, do their work and go home without talking to anyone. And a lot of other Gen Z people agreed with them. Crazy that they don’t understand how the “game” works, nobody is going to root for you when you act like that. Also no wonder Gen Z is struggling with loneliness.
Let’s not start shitting on the next generation, please. We promised to be better, so let’s make an attempt at empathy yeah? IDK how old you are but keep in mind they’re inheriting a dying planet, late stage capitalism, and in general, hopelessness. I’m very securely in the millennial range and we were also shit on heavily when entering the workforce. Be better.
We also need them very immediately to vote. We can’t count on other millennials, gen x has given up trying and boomers are still voting like it’s their job. We need to make sure they vote, IDC who they pick, they just need to be active.
playing the game is a necessary function of corporate work, otherwise it will chew you up and spit you out. you can have autonomy if you've made the right people happy, the rest can get fucked.
You are more important than the company, put you and your family first.
If your company doesn’t provide a pension plan you have no reason to be loyal and stay.
Telework is an excuse for minimal working. Most remote workers schedule emails, get their work done quickly than spend the work day doing personal work on the clock.
Charisma is more important than performance for career progression.
Favorite employees are typically the easiest to be manipulated and taken advantage of.
From an employer’s perspective, they are wasting their money if you work less than the work day. Most employees waste their workdays in the office, stretching out work. One of the reasons why telework is failing is because, after three years, employers finally figured out that their employees are not working the whole day. From their point of view, that means you are unproductive because you could be doing even more and can handle a much larger workload. Employees obviously don’t want them to know that.
So the solution is to get them back to the office so they are forced to spend more time either being slowed down by their environment or pretending to work like before? I don’t understand the point. Employees are not going to magically transpose 2h of efficient remote work into 8h of efficient office work. The point of view is irational.
Fuck the company, don’t get lured into a feeling of “fAmiLy” or even loyality towards them. Do as little work as possible, get as much money out of them as possible, then switch companies and get a significant pay rise. Rinse and repeat.
The way we’ve structured work in the U.S. is a capitalist farce. We’ve been duped into working our asses off to make someone else who doesn’t care about your well-being a large pile of money. So, I get my work done, I don’t slack, but, I’m not going to go out of my way to do things for a company that would replace me tomorrow if I got bit by a bus.
I love the image of a bus zooming towards you, the fear of being hit, the bus stops at the last second, you’re so relieved ‘whew’, and then it opens it’s giant bus mouth like jaws and CHOMP!
That’s never been my experience, I work in retail so it can be tricky when you’re going up against thousands of other applicants and they usually don’t require experience.
Interesting, I’ve definitely gone months applying for jobs and not hearing back for interviews or anything. I suppose location and sheer luck has a bit to do with it as well.
It depends on the job type really. If it’s something in the food business, you are in a literal death trap every day in the name of some random person’s sense of taste, but if you’re in a humanity job for example, they can’t afford the mentality that would cause the work scene to not accommodate to you.
I work in agricultural robotics… Our client develops a new harvesting machine, but is unaware of the real danger of it. My boss just want the things done as fast as possible. This expose us to danger. Not really a robotic cell, not really an agricultural machine, something in between, without any direct regulation to cover it because it is new.
Sorry about that. Hopefully they fix that and you live somewhere where they’ll be able to. In most relatively well-off countries, usually filing a complaint in court does the job.
Deducing whether a coworker is liked by all the other coworkers is unfortunately a very overlooked stepped of the hiring process that I wish would be there.
I’m halfway through scrolling this long thread, and this is the first comment I’ve seen that isn’t overly cynical. It’s also correct.
I’ve been working for 38 years, and I’ve been someone who makes promotion decisions for 15 of them. The third one is helpful, not essential, but the others are super important. The people who rise to leadership positions aren’t necessarily the top technical people, they’re the ones who do those things with a good attitude.
The other thing I’d add is that they’re people who are able to see the big picture and how the details relate to it, which is part of strategic thinking.
I’m not sure if the competence is really in the last place. I’d say it’s on the equal level. Great communication and ownership of the problems means little if you can’t really solve the problems.
People have those things in spectrums, not all or nothing. You have to have at least some of all of them, but I’d argue that mediocre competency with really good communication and accountability is a better combination that really good competency with one of the others being mediocre.
I still kinda disagree. We’re talking here about engineering role after all. I have a colleague who is a code wizard, but has kinda problem with (under)communicating. He’s still widely respected as a very good engineer, people know his communication style and adapt to it.
But if you’re a mediocre problem solver, you can’t really make up for it with communication skills. That kinda moves you into non-engineering role like PO, SM or perhaps support engineer.
But I would say this - once you reach a certain high level of competence, then the communication skills, leadership, ownership can become the real differentiating factors. But you can’t really get there without the high level of competence first.
I think we might be agreeing, it’s just that “mediocre” means different things to each of us. My team supports human spaceflight, and no one we have is crummy. The “mediocre” people have pretty decent technical skills if you’re looking across all software development domains.
Personally, I’ve found the decent technical skills to be easier to come by than the other ones, and having all of them in one package is a real discriminator.
We’re talking here about engineering role after all.
where? seemed like general advice.
Even then, thee aren't mutually exclusive. your competence will affect how people see you on a personal level, at least at work. And your competence affects your ability to be given problems to own. You're not gonna give the nice but still inexperienced employee to own an important problem domain. they might be able to work under the owner and gain experience, though.
Documentation and presentation are highly undervalued, and your ability to understand and spread that knowledge can overcome that lack of experience to actually handle the task yourself.
I was taught that my job is “to make sure all my bosses surprises are pleasant ones”. 15 years of working as an engineer and that never changed. Now I have my own business and that’s the thing I look for employees… someone I can leave on their own to do a job. It they have problems they can always ask me. If they screw up I expect them to tell me immediately and to have a plan of action to fix it and to prevent it happening again. And I never ever get cross if someone does come to me and say they screwed up. Far better that we tell the client about a problem than wait until the client finds the problem themselves.
Reading all these comments makes me realize how lucky I’ve been in my career. I’ve always had great bosses who defended me and backed me up.
That with the limited number of jobs to accommodate for, changing monetary values and demand for goods and services, natural disasters and game changers, and fluctuating, unpredictable circumstances that change how something plays out, there is nothing about the job force that isn’t fluid and prone to putting you in some kind of shifting interdependent situation, enough that making the job scene a bureaucratic construct was a big mistake and that having career dreams is too oversimplified an expectation. I knew this to an extent but now I know the full scope.
Thank you everyone for all your suggestions! I’ll quickly try to summarize them for myself. So what you suggest is:
Operating Systems:
NixOs
Debian 12
ElementaryOS
mint
PopOs
EndevourOS
Fedora
arch
Opensuse
Novara
Tiling Window Manager:
Recomended to use something based on wayland.
hyprland (can be configured from file, good compatibility with nix)
sway (proposed with Debian, multiple suggestions, config via file as well, good for custom keybindings, already options for sway in nixos)
i3
bspwm
KDE Plasma
dwm / dwl
Status Bar:
swaybar (in case of using sway)
waybar (when using wayland)
eww
ags
KDE neon
Package Managers:
flatpack
brew (is this already stable enough?)
Nix (obvious choice if nix os chosen)
snap
(pacman if arch)
integrated one
Packages:
together with wayland alacritty or kitty
foot
Yakuake
suckless
At the moment I am trying to avoid anything where RedHat is involved. Not because of the recent controversy, but simply IBM is known to kill their software solutions on a whim. (although i still use ansible), so Fedora is unfortunately out (again, no judging on how great it is). I’ve been quite interested in EndevourOS, so that might be fun to try out. Debian for the desktop probably not right now. I’m running it on servers for stability, but for a desktop environment, i prefer having more recent packages (e.g. neovim). The “sales pitch” for Mint sounded pretty interesting as well. However i’ll give NixOs a try first, simply because it was mentioned very often, same with sway.
Based on this i’ll try out these combinations first:
NixOs with sway and eww
NixOs with hyprland and waybar
NixOs with dwl and ?
If this does not satisfy, i’ll look into endevourOS and mint, but that might require some Ansible I assume.
But I don’t see the unique selling point of it compared to alacritty and kitty, besides web-enabled. Is there anything that it does better than these 2?
There is no ideal place to work where they “do it right”, whatever kind of “right” you care about right now. When you change jobs, you merely exchange one set of problems for another.
Absolutely. There is no business yet in which you invent money from nothing. Everyone works for someone else. It might be a capitalist boss, it might be a client, it might even be constituents or donors, but no one truly works for themselves. The only winning move is to not play, and the ones fortunate enough to not have to play were born rich. Being self-employed and/or owning your own business is just trading one boss for another.
Source: Was in private practice for a decade; now I’m a corporate attorney, and it’s just a different set of people making my job hard.
I feel better about the things I do wrong, because at least I made the decisions and I can only blame myself. I can also choose which things I especially care about doing well instead of being subject to someone else’s preferences. It feels better, but still yes.
And, as CEO of a tiny company, I have to interact with bureaucracies more than I did as an employee, so becoming my own boss didn’t mean escaping that nonsense, anyway.
Having worked 7 different jobs that all were in the same field made me have some backbone of standards that nobody else could have built without going through that, though. It’s a blessing and a curse, so be warned. The things I picked up on that I never realized I would care so much about in the healthcare field is good office administration and Director of Care leadership. The morale is just as important as the pay rate.
As a consultant, I now feel grateful to the variety of dysfunctions that I experienced, because they provided me with some of the credibility that I use in advising others. That’s the blessing part.
i worked at all the pizza chains delivering ---- the absolute shittiest ones were a nightmare, for the same 3 reasons:
not letting employees make food themselves. it’s a restaurant, you have abundant food, it’s cheap, we all know it’s cheap, we work long shifts, come on. the cobbler’s son should have good shoes.
overemphasis on dress code – if you genuinely give a shit if the pizza guy has his hat backwards, you should literally be sent to the gulags.
being overworked for low pay, especially being made to drive when exhausted [literally dangerous and life threatening!!]
That said some companies do it more right than others. The problems at the current company are ones I can live with. Which is why I’m still there after way more years than expected.
Indeed, that’s what I mean: you’re always exchanging one set of problems for another, until you find the set of problems that you can accept (enough (for now)).
Reading about it, it seems they are in fact all the same. Even the white haribo mice. TIL.
Yeah, in a way. As in, I don’t feel like I have any responsibility in things in the company going to shits (which I would if it were, well, my company).
The book The Responsibility Virus helped me a lot with this. Most people are over-responsible for the choices of others, specifically ones they can’t reasonably influence, anyway.
Yes. This lies among the reasons I find it easier not to blame enterprises for their dysfunctions. The unsustained growth imperative of our economic systems makes the Gervais Principle behavior the path of least resistance. Indeed, the only way to stop it seems to come down to the heroism of one key influential person who chooses differently.
This also accounts for why I stopped trying to fix enterprises and instead focus on helping the well-meaning people who otherwise would need to fend for themselves.
I’m determined to ever only work in public, state-owned companies. I believe in a causal connection between being a private, profit-oriented business and the daily “wtf” moments, the only true measure of quality.
Efficient workers get more work if you’re in the office. I work from home, and that allows me to work efficiently until my work is done, set up scheduled emails to go out at the time I would’ve otherwise been done, then do what I want until then.
I see your work doesn’t have invasive programs that check idle mouse and idle keyboard behaviors.
this is an old one but i can’t help thinking, what if they installed it without my knowledge, after all, my work laptop was given to me already pre prepared by our IT department.
Yeah, they’re pretty behind the times, and I’m happy for that. They gave me a work laptop, but since they didn’t block me from just using my home computer instead, I just do that so that I’ve got an excuse if they ever bring up any strange data they might be skimming from the laptop. It’s been a couple years now without any word from them about it, though, so I think I’m in the clear.
Yeah, I figured they’re aware I’m not using the laptop - I’m not on the VPN most of the time as a result. I’m still able to do all my work in my own copy of excel, though, so I’m hoping I can continue pretending I’m unaware that I’m not following the correct avenues to get my work done, at least until they force me to use the laptop.
There is an entire department at my work that employs thousands of moderators to review desktop screenshots of all employees every 5 minutes to make sure no one is “idle”.
I’m not writing up anything. I clock in when my shift starts, I complete the work designated for me for that shift, send it out by the time it needs to be sent out, and clock out at the end of my shift.
Obviously not if it’s a flat rate. But empoyment rarely is flat rate based. The contract are usually require you to work a certain amount of time per week/month.
It does not, or at least should not work like this. If you can do same work, with same quality in less time than average, then pay rate is higher than average.
Most shops I know of these days assign a labor time to any given job. You get charged that amount whether the mechanic does it in half the time or takes five times as long.
Anymore, it’s an internal benchmark for mechanics to build on the efficiency of their own work.
In my line of work, it may take me three hours to solve a client tax issue. I will bill for that accordingly.
If another client comes along the next day with the exact same issue, but this time I know the answer because I researched it yesterday, so I can solve it instantly, should the second client get charged nothing?
If you’re in tech, it can be absolute hell. I worked at an agency that required 7 hours clocked to projects every day. Doesn’t sound so bad until you realize you still need to eat lunch and deal with random non-billable things that arise. Now you’re working a 10-hour day to appease the numbers, while furiously clocking every minute to every job. If you estimate 6 hours for a task and find an efficient way to do it in 2, that’s the expectation going forward—even for the devs that haven’t done it before.
It doesn’t sound terrible until you do it for a while and realize that it’s a fucking meat grinder. Instead of being gauged by your abilities and skills as a programmer, you’re quietly evaluated by how many tickets you can get out the door.
I have tasks where I might spend 6 hours to make the task take a half hour going forward. That’s value-added work and I shouldn’t be rewarded with an onslaught of new tasks because of that simply to fill a void.
I deserve to find some ways to keep my sanity intact until I’m mentally incapable of continuing to write code anymore in the older years before ageism starts shoving me out the door.
I mean, sorry. That sounds quite horrid. But that just sounds like a really shit agency.
I do work in tech and I also have to write up all billable hours minutely. But most of the work I do is on internal projects anyway, so I have to write up the time, but it’s not billable. Paid work usually takes priority though.
But when it comes to it, I’m required to work 8h a day. Doesn’t matter what as long as it is what matters the most right now. And I could easily just keep it there and work my 8 to 5 if I wanted, not giving a shit.
But I actually like my work, most of the time. So I do. So when you have to solve a lot immediate problems, the internal projects often get delayed and you risk overshooting the deadline. That’s bad for the company in general, so best to avoid it. That gives incentives to solve everything asap and still get the internal stuff done on time.
And if we risk falling behind the deadline, that means overtime (voluntarily of course), but all of our devs know that missing a deadline could set us back quite far, so everyone shows up. Of course all overtime is paid and at better rates. Hell, I’ll sometimes do overtime just to get the better rate and get ahead of things I’d have to fix eventually anyway.
And the boss very much appriciated the effort we put in. In fact, he makes less money then me. I know that because I’m a shareholder and can read the yearly financial report, they gave all the senior devs a share when the company went public.
It was indeed a shit agency, but I’ve found almost identical practices in other agencies. It’s the nature of the work and it sucks, which is part of why I won’t work at another agency ever again. Another issue I’ve run into are colleagues that don’t clock all of their time for a task, which makes management say things like “well X did this in 2 hours; why is it going to take you 6?” It took me a long time in my career to arrive at a place where I feel like I have actual control, so I can empathize with younger devs that are feeling crushed under the weight of work.
My role now is all internal product work and I always clock my time spent, but it’s not crucial. I do it mostly to gauge how long things I build take (a lot of which are greenfield projects) and keep the data on hand as a point of reference for myself.
I like what I do but don’t really like that it’s become a big part of what defines me as a person. That’s really besides the point though. I think white collar employees like us have it easier than others in the workforce elsewhere, and that’s somehow with the absolute onslaught of tech layoffs I keep seeing. I have a friend that has been laid off 5 times in the span of 3 years, and I was laid off myself for 3 months before finding a new role. I’m actually shocked at how many times previous employers have tried to take advantage of myself or others. Those things are the reason wage theft in the US is a 50b dollar industry and it’s just going to get worse as capitalists try to squeeze as much value out of things as they can.
It really is a problem that is unique to the US. So if you encounter a lot of us US folk that are angry and jaded due to work, that’s why lmao. The protections and time off that Europeans receive is leagues better than anything here. Europe is definitely something we’ve personally considered for the future.
So if you encounter a lot of us US folk that are angry and jaded due to work, that’s why lmao
That might have been an issue. I actually know a lot of people from the US, but because I lived near military bases or international schools. But those are probably not people stuggeling. I don’t have actual insight into the mood of the country or any personal expirence.
But going by this thread and comment chain, working conditions, even in sought of sectors like IT, are apperently exploited quite badly in the US. More than I could have imagined. I was not trying to mock people that just want to get by.
Still, it seems very sad that this is apperently a reality so many Americans have to deal with, even in IT. You desperately need better labour protection laws in generals. And unions.
It’s honestly like a pressure cooker sometimes. That’s why strikes are happening so much more often in the US. The attitude towards corporations here is rightfully really pessimistic because of the mass layoffs, the rising prices of rent and everything else, poor employment environments, etc. We’re facing the brunt of late capitalism.
Amazon is still very much fueled by human labor. “Warehouse Associate” would be the job title. It is definitely a “real job,” and the people grinding their joints into dust deserve so much more dignity (and compensation) than Amazon, and society as a whole, really, deigns to give them.
Yeah, that’s exactly what they said… can you refute that surplus value is extracted through exploitation of labour forces? No? Didn’t think so. Much easier to insult and deride, and pretend that was a meaningful or valuable argument, than to actually make one.
Wage theft is one of the least acted upon crimes. This system is immoral, and the people who run it are immoral. Thinking you will get any justice except for what you take for yourself is naive and wrong.
This system isn’t designed for us, its literally designed for the people its named after… Capitalists. Taking anything you can back from them is perfectly fine.
I grew up in a communist country, and we had a saying “if you don’t steal from your employer, you’re stealing from your family”. And people acted accordingly.
You would love that! Or perhaps not, it actually sucked for everybody.
Wage theft (when employers don’t pay their employees what they’re owed) in the US accounts for more stolen value every year than grand theft auto, larceny, petty theft, and breaking and entering combined. Yet wage theft is not considered a crime.
It’s the same story all over the world. The real issue isn’t the economic system but rather greedy people in positions of power with no accountability.
Most employers pay you to be on standby for last minute tasks. That’s what you are doing for the rest of the time. You are also planing on how to do these tasks more efficiently. That is all billable in my opinion.
It’s a double edged sword. I was very efficient, and did get more work, which got me noticed and eventually promoted out of a doing position into a leading position
It’s a nice change, the work is light, the people side of the work is easy. I have higher pay and much more free time
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