Comment by photonthug
Comment by photonthug 4 days ago
I used to hate the over-employment thing, because I suspected it was making my own job harder while I do someone else’s job. But I get it now. Workers can only be punished so many times for being passionate, interested, and trustworthy before they say “ok, let’s do things your way” to management, and start to play the game that the system has pushed them into.
If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine, constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative, remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly and only what they are told rather than looking around for the best way to help. If you can’t keep them busy & don’t really understand what they do well enough to supervise or evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting another job and laughing if you’re upset about it.
Interestingly to me, there’s still many who believe tech is some sort of utopia of meritocracy where everything is logical and sound, because (relatively) high labor rates.
It’s always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate closer to business leadership than many industries so many get this idea of being modern clerics or something and being part of the nobility class in organizations when again, really we’re often some of the most despised in the labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization experiments are attempted at our expense.
Business leadership doesn’t like you, they like that the things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech scales. That’s about it, IMHO at least.