I think we need to separate the general economic trends from @bump simply not being suited to working at a consulting firm or whether that firm had good business practices.
Americans have had a love/hate relationship with corporations and CEOs probably since forever. On one hand we celebrate corporations like US Steel, JP Morgan, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla as engines of progress and prosperity and their CEOs as great leaders and innovators.
But we’ve also always recognized they they can also wield too much power and act against the greater interests of society.
The corporate workplace has alternately been portrayed as centers of innovation and as dull, institutional centers of corruption and bureaucratic stagnation.
Until relatively recently that relationship and duality had been perceived as mutually beneficial to society. Corporations produced jobs and wealth and products we all use and even provided opportunities to rise above one’s station through promotion and advancement.
But I think we are at a point now that people are feeling that mutual relationship no longer exists. They can’t afford to buy products. They can’t find jobs. The jobs they have are under constant threat of layoff, automation, outsourcing, or replacement by AI. There is often no path for advancement unless you come in through very specific channels.
More and more it seems like this corporate structure solely exists as some sort of virtual feudal society for “elites” to assign wealth and position to each other. And those people are often only “elite” because they came from means enough to send them through an education system with financial, academic, and extracurricular barriers that are beyond most normal families who have to work normal jobs for a living.
To an outside, the system seems insane and it doesn’t work. Like why is Tesla a trillion dollar company worth 20x General Motors when GM sells 4x as many cars globally?
That’s the big one I’ve seen personally. The corporate mindset seems to lean toward people being interchangeable parts, which lends itself to companies putting great emphasis on finding people with the ‘right’ skills and experience to slot right in, and almost no emphasis on identifying and growing internal talent for promotions. A symptom of this IMO, is the recent corporate jargon adoption of the term “resources” when speaking of people, as if they’re just as fungible as a box of pens or a copier. So you end up with people who can’t get promoted because the mindset is that they’re looking for someone who can just plug and play.
Combine this with like you say, a nearly feudal system where companies will hire an upper manager/executive who will invariably turn around and staff important positions with his followers, almost like a medieval noble and his retinue. And when that guy leaves for greener pastures, so will his buddies.
How do you get to each tier in the system? Either connections, meaning you went to college with the right people, grew up with the right people and they/their family hires/promotes you, or sheer luck that you got promoted somehow because the planets align. Hell, having the right connections opens doors to high paying and what seems like lower skill jobs than most of us have. I know a guy who went to SMU from a wealthy family, and he makes crazy money doing some sort of real-estate grunt work. He’s at least ten years younger than me, and while he’s a nice guy, he doesn’t give off the super-competent vibe. But I’d guarantee he makes as much or more than I do, because he had the right connections out of college. And he’ll likely end up with an ownership stake in his firm at some point, while I’ll just retire with a public sector pension if I’m lucky.
Yet another relatively minor, but still significant and symbolic, casualty of the billionaires’ and corporations’ war on independent media (aside from their war on the environment, war on the working class, war on regulations, war on taxes, etc.):
Any billionaire could keep Salon running for relative peanuts. It wouldn’t impact their bottom line one iota. But what do billionaires do when they acquire media they actually want to keep running? See Bezos and the Washington Post – they turn them into propaganda outlets.
I’m sure there’s been some version of this complaint since the invention of “work”.
Sure there’s luck involved. But if your the guy who only wants to work 40 hour weeks minimal travel at a consulting firm when there are 50 other consultants willing to work as hard as it takes to get promoted, why should they promote you? And a lot of people want raises and promotions but don’t really want the extra (or at least different) work and responsibility that comes with it.
Of course that begs the question as to whether the system is set up such that “work” is actually useful and valuable in creating goods and services for society. Or is just some useless social construct?
Take Japan for example. Japanese corporate “salarymen” employees are known for working insane hours. Japan is the least productive nation in the G7.
When did personnel become known as human resources at most companies? It’s been human resources for about as long as I can remember in my 30+ years of working. One of the reasons for the change from personnel to HR was a shift to viewing employees as a stragetic asset. i.e. They’re not fungible like a box of pens or a copier.
The term was coined in 1893. It replaced “personnel administration” as the popular term somewhat gradually and in different contexts at different times but it was the dominant term by the late 50s.
No… I mean in the context of project managers and execs talking about “resources” specifically when they’re talking about people. Like “We’ve got 15 resources already on this project, why do we need more?”.
It’s one of those situations where I feel like the words actually matter. It’s the exact opposite of looking at the team members as assets who each bring a unique set of skills and experience. It’s easier to talk about reducing ‘resource footprint’ than it is laying people off, for example. It’s a stupid euphemism, but it’s a damaging one IMO.
Is it? I think there’s a pretty big difference. Being fired, at least as I understand it, implies that job loss is due to poor performance of some sort on the part of the employee. Being laid off, again as I understand, has more to do with the employer’s finances, the job itself being eliminated, boss can’t afford to pay the employee, etc.
That’s interesting , because every company I worked at had the Personnel Department, not HR, until probably the 80s. And this was in supposedly in progressive California.
I wonder where HR first became predominant as the moniker.
Ah, okay. Referring to employees as resources in this context hasn’t hit my company yet. Management still refers to them as people, personnel, or workers when talking about how many are on a project.
I’ve never been laid off from a job but I’ve been in the position of laying others off. I don’t think calling it something different makes it any easier. We’ve taken to calling it a reduction in force rather than laying people off.
Firing people does have a different connotation. You generally fire someone for cause whether it’s gross misconduct, sub-standard work, tardiness, etc., etc. whereas someone who is laid off loses their job for no fault of their own. Small comfort for those who suddenly find themselves out of work though.
I definitely disagree with this definition of fired. In modern usage, fired means fired for cause. Laid off means your position was eliminated and you were let go. In the UK, I think they use “made redundant” for laid off, still with a different connotation than “fired”.
I’d rather be laid off than fired – it may come with a severance package, and it’s easier to get the next job if you were let go through no fault of your own rather than fired.
And of course in the USA unemployment benefits depend on your having been either laid off or otherwise dismissed, rather than having voluntarily quit. Whereas for professionals the offer to “resign” is a courtesy to spare having been fired on their resumés,
Have you ever managed teams of people or had to staff up a project of any size? I assure you, even thought we collectively refer to the people as “resources”, most of the time we actually do need a unique set of skills and experience.
That’s my point; why euphemize? Anything other than people is describing them as something else. Dehumanizing is a bit of a stretch, but I feel like using other terms lets managerial types gloss over the fact that their “resources” aren’t fungible or something other than someone who’s got a family, wants of their own outside of work, etc…
When you need a plumber, or a house cleaner, or a dentist, you are thinking in terms of a human resource that can do a task for you. You don’t care who Roto-Rooter sends out, if Joe Plumber was scheduled to do the job but he gets shit canned the day before, you expect them to send an equivalent cog to do your plumbing. They’re a tool.
I get that we want companies not to be so cold but at the end of the day they’re trying to staff projects with skill sets, and those skills are often fungible.
No, I think in terms of a guy who comes over and does the job. If the regular guy can’t do it, I’ll have to find some other guy to do it instead, but it’s still a guy, not a “resource”. Also, once I find a good plumber, or house cleaner, or dentist, I’ll try to work with them again in the future because I know they’ll do a good job.
But then, I don’t have an MBA, so I still think of people as people.