I said I respect them as human beings. I didn’t say they were my friends.
But if I were a manager of some sort, damn right I’d know where my subordinates’ kids go to school. I’m responsible for these people, so I have to make an effort to know them.
I don’t give two shits whether my manager knows how many kids I have or where they go to school. What’s actually important to me is that she actually moved a standing call because it falls during the time in the afternoon when I have to pop out and pick up my daughter from school.
I presume you aren’t planning work for thousands of plumbers, house cleaners or doctors?
What I was trying to get at is that when you think of people as “human resources”, you’re fixated on the job at hand. In your case, getting your plumbing work done. So if one “resource” can’t come, you expect another.
When you think of them as people, it starts to change the thinking- things start creeping in like “Well, can this wait until tomorrow? Some person is going to have to stay late to do this.” Or a myriad of other considerations about the human side of things that get intentionally glossed over by referring to living, breathing people with the same language that you’d use for a ton of sand or a 55 gallon drum of lubricant.
It has always felt to me like an intentional phrasing intended to put people on the same level as the other resources involved in a project or effort of some sort, and to not actually consider them as a separate and special piece of the puzzle.
The conspiratorial part of me wants to think it’s so that execs and management types can make decisions without the emotion and compassion that thinking of them as “people” would entail.
How would a prospective employer know if you were laid off, resigned, or fired? I’ve never put why I left a previous company on my resume, nor would I have ever thought to. Nowadays when someone calls your previous employer they will usually only confirm that yes you were an employee from date x to date y and nothing more for fear of a defamation lawsuit.
I always understood that they’d confirm your employment and say whether or not you were eligible to be rehired or not.
Which is a legal fig leaf for them saying whether you left on good terms or not (i.e. were you enough of a shit to get fired outright or not)
There are companies that by policy won’t rehire anyone for X years in order to discourage people hopping back and forth between positions at different companies to increase pay.
Sure, but that’s different from whether you are eligible for ever being rehired.
I don’t know that these guys know anything about what they are talking about. For all their disparaging talk of “MBA types” and “consulting and manager and executive types”, I’m curious what decisions they would make if they managed people or had to run P&L for part of a large organization.
Because in my experience, most managers aren’t complete assholes or psychopaths. But time is money and resources (both human and otherwise) are not infinite and there is a lot of pressure to get more done with less.
Are there aspects of the system that seem callous and unfair. Certainly. But honestly a lot of the complaints sound like “it’s so unfair that the guy who went to the good school and actually studied business and worked more than 40 standard hours a week got promoted to management”.
I actually have an MBA, and am aware of how it works.
But from where I sit, the problem seems to be that executives are incentivized to choose the company over people. Many will choose laying off 1000 people just to make 5% more profit. Which to me, is reprehensible. You’ve fucked up 1000 people’s lives and livelihoods, as well as that of their families, just to make money for either yourself (depends on your compensation structure) or on behalf of others (shareholders).
I’m not against the idea of layoffs or RIFs if it’s along the lines of “cut off the gangrenous leg so the person can live” type thinking. But I’m wholly against it if it’s just a question of more profit.
And honestly, I’ve seen more dumb-ass decision making, nepotism, favoritism, bandwagon thinking, and change/pissing all over the status quo for the sake of showing who’s boss now, than I’ve seen rational, considered, intelligent, and compassionate thinking out of the c-suites in companies I’ve worked for. Strangely, and in contradiction to most propaganda to the contrary, the public sector where I work has a LOT more of that than the private sector ever did.
There’s some research that shows CEOs with MBAs don’t really do anything to improve the business they’re leading. i.e. They don’t increase sales, productivity, or any other innovation that improves the business itself. They tend to increase the value for shareholders, but this corresponds with declining wages for workers.
You’re right that most managers aren’t complete assholes or psychopaths. And the truth is you sometimes have to make decisions that hurt people when you’re running a company. You might very well have to close a line of business that is unprofitable and reduce your workforce, premiums for insurance might go up as healthcare expenses increase, or workers might be forced to adapt to new policies, procedures, and learning new systems to continue doing their job.
I think some of that comes from feeling as though they’re treating like a cog instead of a human being. Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world and his employees have to pee in bottles because they don’t have time to take breaks. There’s seriously something wrong with that.
By the Pareto Principle or what have you, the majority of executives are going to be useless like this. Up to the board to find and hire a brilliant one.
To me it sounds like that is exactly as intended, on the corporate side.
Which is kind of the problem leading to the OP asking about the complaints they’ve been hearing. I’m not a big fan of universal basic income or younger people complaining about having to work for a living, but a lot of them have legitimate complaints about what they see as a bleak economic future, so I can hardly blame them for being hostile to capitalism, corporations, billionaires, and CEOs.