My Employer: Should I be worried?

[Voyager]

@Doggo

Agreed. In all my years of work, mainly for taxpayer funded jobs, it was my experience that managers really don’t care about employees, beyond lip service. Seems to be human nature to grind down the little people to either make themselves seem more important, or to divert more money to themselves.

That’s unfortunate. I’ve had very few managers who acted like this (actually just 1, and he was a psycho), and when I was a manager I heard the uncensored comments of others (especially during performance reviews) and never got this. Some were just plain clueless, but not hateful. Just lucky I guess.

[Count_Blucher]

Be VERY sure any new job you accept offers you Permanent work or a guarantee of the minimum number of weeks of work required in order to be able to file for Unemployment Insurance.

Don’t get burned by an unethical recruiter throwing you knowingly into Temp work that leaves you with Zero income coming in, because That’s the new norm. :mad:

[Kent_Clark]

@nion

Someone asked if the company is public or private. It’s private, funded by investors, which reminded me of something. Our last big meeting, it was emphasized that we need to be profitable enough to keep our investors happy. This has never been stressed before. Perhaps these investors tasted blood on these big numbers and are becoming increasingly greedy? Kind of makes me wish we were publicly traded.

Here’s my guess. The investors were lured in on something like a five-year plan, with the plan being that the company would churn through cash for the first couple of years while building, then start to make money, then be in the position where the original investors could sell (profit!) either to other investors or through an IPO.

Your company has passed from step 1 to step 2, or step 2 to 3. Sales is no longer enough. Gross profit is no longer enough. Now the company has a whole bunch of different metrics: sales:employee ratio, cost of benefits, cost to get new business, account retention and other stuff I can’t even imagine.

I worked at one place where the new owners set a goal of 20% profit. Not a dollar goal, but a percentage. The managers all had to shift to an efficiency mode, even to the point of dropping accounts that needed a lot of attention, because they couldn’t get a high enough return.

So the answer is yes, things are going to get worse, and I’d start looking. But here’s the problem. EVERY business is squeezing so you may end up at another company that’s no better.

[Doggo]

@Voyager

That’s unfortunate. I’ve had very few managers who acted like this (actually just 1, and he was a psycho), and when I was a manager I heard the uncensored comments of others (especially during performance reviews) and never got this. Some were just plain clueless, but not hateful. Just lucky I guess.

You don’t mention if you were in public service or private.
In my experience, because it’s not about profit, public service managers are often bum lickers that know how to work the system to get promotion beyond their capabilities. I did have some excellent managers, but they were the minority.
A few were just plain nasty, but most were mediocre or just plain incompetent.

[Voyager]

@Doggo

You don’t mention if you were in public service or private.
In my experience, because it’s not about profit, public service managers are often bum lickers that know how to work the system to get promotion beyond their capabilities. I did have some excellent managers, but they were the minority.
A few were just plain nasty, but most were mediocre or just plain incompetent.

AT&T, so halfway between public and private back then. My mother worked for the city of New York with no problems. My father worked for the UN - if you think US federal, state, and local governments are bad, you should see the UN. Your normal government office doesn’t have to deal with Russian spies.
I assure you, however, that going after profit just makes things worse.

[RTFirefly]

@nion

Our last big meeting, it was emphasized that we need to be profitable enough to keep our investors happy.

This is the part I don’t get. If the company’s doing well, it doesn’t need additional infusions of cash from the investors. But there’s really no other reason they’d need to keep the investors happy. What harm can they do to the company that’s in their interests? They can sell their ownership shares to other investors, but that doesn’t affect company operations.

Now the CEO might want to keep the investors happy in order to keep being CEO since they could replace him if they feel the company could do better with someone else, but that’s his problem, not the problem of the employees in general.

Am I missing something here?