When it comes to HR, everything you say can, and will, be used against you.
Too easy to extract physical profile from ray tracing shadows. You should have gone the Vice Informer route and worn a creepy bald Auton mask.
“Human Resources” is there to protect the company from liability.
Say it with me again: protect the company from liability.
I’m not saying that that they’ll necessarily lobotomize you to achieve that goal…but then again, I’m not saying they won’t, either:
Stranger
Shit. I totally have a creepy giant baby mask from Halloween I could have worn!
https://www.perisphere.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Brazil.png
There’s always next time.
Stranger
This sounds like really good advice to me. My work history (mostly outside the US) is too atypical to provide definitive data supporting it, but anecdotally, I concur completely.
I suppose it would depend on what exactly I would “do” at such an organization and what their culture is actually like.
I don’t want to be bored doing nothing all day, nor do I want to work with demanding a-holes or be overwhelmed with pointless crap. I sort of vacillate between that now in my current job. At least with my current client.
There is also a bit of cognitive dissonance between what we “do” and what we “sell”. Like I sat in on some training session about how our company is getting into “AI”.
We’re “AI experts” now? Because last time I checked my client is keeping track of a multi-billion dollar compliance program using Excel spreadsheets. And when I last worked with the partner who is “having conversations with our clients about AI” he was having conversation with our client about basic expenses tracking for some stupid system upgrade they botched.
Another thought that occurred to me is that maybe it has nothing to do with my company or our clients. That’s just how work is now. I really don’t do anything these days that I used to consider “fun” (or at the very least broke up the day to day monotony). I never travel anymore. I never go to conferences or meet clients for dinner or drinks. Training is always by Zoom, never in person. Even if I go to our office, it’s usually a bunch of strangers or people working on other shit. So it doesn’t matter if I’m having Zoom calls with people in different states from my home or from the office.
It’s convenient being able to work remotely, particularly with two small kids who need taking to and from school. But often it does feel like “barely working”.
What you don’t realize (because the “Artificial Intelligence” industry has spent billions on NDAs and intimidation) is that all of these LLMs and ‘generative AI’ tools are actually just interlinked ‘macro enabled’ Excel spreadsheets all the way down. This is why it is so computationally costly to basically do a bunch of linear algebra transformations and why they are so inconsistent in their reliability.
This may vary from industry to industry but it is definitely true from my perspective, and it goes back from well before the pandemic restrictions; twenty years ago we’d travel in groups to major reviews and if you had something worthy of a submittal to an AIAA or IEEE conference it was automatically approved. Today, we’re constantly being asked to justify sending any quantity of people to a review versus attending on Zoom or Teams (which means not participating in side discussions or splinter meetings) and you can forget about getting any funding for conferences or to produce a paper to submit for publication. It’s problematic not only from a ‘building a community’ or developing key relationships aspect but also because we miss important information or decisions that only get propagated after the fact, nobody is accountable to follow up on anything, and then we are questions as to why we didn’t weigh in at the time, and all for penny-pinching on travel budgets when it takes so much more time and effort (and endless series of meetings) to address the ramifications of bad decisions that could have been forestalled by in-person participation. It’s a kind of enshittification of the workspace where your qualities and what experience and knowledge you bring to the job don’t really matter, just that you’re consistently counted in the roll call for a weekly IPT and that you updated your charts this week.
Stranger
Well, can you do outside work, or even volunteer work or a hobby that’ll give you the fulfillment you’re missing at your job? I have a friend who spends just as much time as a freelance designer as he does at his “9 to 4” job. His friends think he’d be insane by now if he didn’t have that outlet…
I’m old enough to remember when people had their WORK, and then they had their LIFE, which happened after 5 and on weekends.
And then, according to an article I read, the Mary Tyler Moore Show came along, and suddenly people expected their JOB to be fulfilling. And they were expecting their co-workers to be their friends. Which put a lot of pressure on the workplace that wasn’t there in the previous generations.
My dad (WW2 vet) came home, changed clothes, and it really seemed like his day started then. The things he valued doing certainly did… and I’m humbled by his ability to just shake off whatever had happened at work and jump right into family/hobby/“meaningful” activities.
If you’re old enough to remember your dad coming home from WW2 then you’re probably close to my dad’s age and he’s been retired for 15 years.
I think there were people in every time period who had ambitions and pursued careers and there were people who were content to go to work-a-day jobs where they can just punch a clock and go home.
Maybe the big shift since WWII is there are a lot more professional jobs and often those jobs are a lot more abstract and have higher demands in terms of emotional and intellectual investment. That is to say, they don’t want people just looking to “punch a clock”.
But by the same token that expectation to show how “fulfilled” you are by your job comes from the company themselves.
But really for me it’s a more basic question of whether the company is going to be financially stable for the foreseeable future. Also weighing the risks and benefits of taking a new job vs staying put.
Plus companies ignoring the 13th Amendment and presuming you are available 24/7 often unpaid. My daughter-in-law was a victim of this due to the duress her company used (which many do) playing on loyalty to the company, unwritten promises of promotion or a raise in the end, having to be a team player, etc.
When I started work in 1980, that was how it was. My job was great, but at 6 pm or so I walked into my house and had no cell phone, no computer, no email to draw me away from my wife and later kids.
Work from home is great, but there is work from home instead of working in the office, and work from home and work in the office.
QFT. I am moving away from being on the steering committee on what used to be a big IEEE Computer Society conference, and I’m sure seeing this. Not only in paper submission but in getting people able to volunteers. 40 years ago Bell Labs and IBM encouraged people to both submit papers and get involved. I never had any push back or had problems getting funding to go to meetings. Today you get almost all older senior people with enough clout to do it. I got told by my VP to reduce my involvement (this was pre-Covid) but I was close enough to retirement to ignore him.
As for the detrimental effects of siloing oneself, we had a product delayed at least three months due to a problem which was known in the industry - but none of the engineers responsible for this thing ever went to conferences or ever read the literature. Don’t blame them, they were too busy. Paying for IEEE memberships and journal subscriptions could have saved millions of bucks.
There is a lot of that on TV but I’ve always assumed that part of the reason was the convenience of showing characters’ backstories/lives outside of work without having to have a gazillion more characters. Usually dramas limit important relationships outside the workplace to the occasional spouse/parent/child. I don’t think real life is like that very often.
He didn’t say he remembered his dad coming home from WWII, he said his dad was a WWII vet, and when his dad came home from work, he turned off the job.
Personally I’d rather be a bit too busy than too idle. Not unsustainably crazy busy. But I don’t want to be sitting around with nothing to do either. I kind of feel like Corporate America doesn’t have enough actual work for people to do. Which seems worse somehow.
I’ve worked in all manner of companies. I don’t mind putting in extra hours if it means not working at one of these jobs where I just clock in 9 to 5 with little to do working with a bunch of people who are completely indifferent about the work or each other. Because I’ve had those jobs and they suck.
But that is my time, not theirs.
The jobs I’m talking about are 9 to 5 (or at least hourly) but ask you to work a few extra hours unpaid. Or we just fired Shirley (without notice BUT if you don’t give us 2 weeks notice you’re worse than Hitler) so you need to absorb he work with no extra pay. Or we need you to run that report this weekend so I have it Monday morning. OR we really need you to download the email app onto your personal phone so we can reach you 24/7.
Perhaps they are “only” working 9 to 5 because when they worked longer the company didn’t reward them in any way. In my last company a lot of people came early and/or stayed late - but even though we were doing well, they used the Jack Welch 20% get money, 70% get nothing and 10% get fired rewards strategy. All of a sudden the 70% stopped coming in early and left early.
HR sent a memo to managers bemoaning this. My boss, to his credit, could hardly keep a straight face while reading it.
If companies don’t reward extra effort/results by the masses, they get people pretending to work.
Is the issue that people were not working 40+ hours or that work wasn’t getting done? Becomes it seems to me that if the company was still functioning with people showing up late and leaving early, a lot of it was “pretend work” in the first place.
Which in and of itself is pretty demotivating IMHO. Irrespective of compensation, I think most people want to feel like their work provides value. Even if their employer doesn’t value the work, presumably some other employer in the marketplace might. IME, doing bullshit busywork no one cares about is not only demotivating for working at my current job, it gives me anxiety about my employability elsewhere,
Another factor is you aren’t getting 10% raises if the company is only growing by 2% or 0% or less. If sucks if you don’t get raises when the company is growing because that means the company is selfish and doesn’t give a crap about you. But if the company isn’t growing, it’s worse because it means the company sucks as a business.
So for me the questions becomes “how long do I sit here and see if this sucky company stops sucking?”