# Why Aren't People Working? (Personal anecdotes only) **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 5, 2024, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662 "2024-01-05T17:34:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 18
**Author:** ![Euphonious\_Polemic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/euphonious_polemic/32/3002_2.png) [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2024, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/341 "2024-01-14T02:54:54Z")
> [@Boudicca90](#): > > That isn’t to say I do nothing. Not working has given me a lot more time to dedicate to various local political and mutual aid organizations as well as volunteer opportunities in my community. Which are things I tend to care about a lot more than making some wealthy assholes at the top richer while I get the scraps, if any. You raise a really important point here. Many of the unemployed, and many of those collecting disability, and many retired folks, and many who are not looking for work are doing a lot of good for society in their volunteer / unpaid positions. It’s not all about getting a paycheque. It’s about how you are improving the life of your fellow travellers on this globe. This salient fact is often completely missed by those who think the only value one can assign to people is the figure on their pay-stub. ---
**Author:** ![Boudicca90](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boudicca90/32/16818_2.png) [@Boudicca90](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boudicca90)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2024, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/342 "2024-01-14T03:07:39Z")
> [@Euphonious\_Polemic](#): > > You raise a really important point here. Many of the unemployed, and many of those collecting disability, and many retired folks, and many who are not looking for work are doing a lot of good for society in their volunteer / unpaid positions. It’s not all about getting a paycheque. It’s about how you are improving the life of your fellow travellers on this globe. > > This salient fact is often completely missed by those who think the only value one can assign to people is the figure on their pay-stub. Exactly. I would rather work for free doing something I feel helps society as a whole than get paid to do something I don’t care about and that improves nothing but a company’s profit margin. I tend to agree with Jean-Luc Picard’s philosophy: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” ---
**Author:** ![Euphonious\_Polemic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/euphonious_polemic/32/3002_2.png) [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2024, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/343 "2024-01-14T03:17:42Z")
> [@Boudicca90](#): > > Exactly. I would rather work for free doing something I feel helps society as a whole than get paid to do something I don’t care about and that improves nothing but a company’s profit margin. Well, thank you for your service! ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2024, 7:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/344 "2024-01-14T07:13:41Z")
> [@epbrown](#): > > Second, the idea that if a UBI gave everyone a bare subsistence living, 99% of people would stop working completely I am semi-retired, but I do a lot of volunteer work. Have to keep working at _something._ Dont get me wrong, I am taking it pretty easy also, but I am not a couch potato. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2024, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/345 "2024-01-14T21:38:54Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > One of my friends at work was a rising star because he was an excellent coder, and loved it. His idea of a fun weekend at home was rewriting parts of his network stack to improve something or other. He was the guy everyone would go to if they had a problem they couldn’t figure out. > > Anyway, his manager announced to him that he was so awesome he was being promoted to management. My friend is a serious introvert. He told his boss he didn’t want it, he just wanted to code, please don’t promote him. The manager said he didn’t like his attitude, that he was expected to ‘step up’ when asked, and promoted him anyway. Most of the places I’ve worked had a dual latter, one for technical, one for management. Being high on the technical ladder paid well. I used to see the Bell Labs salary scatter plots. It is easier to get into a low level management position, and high level technical jobs expect you to lead projects, not just code, but it is still easier. I was a first level manager, which was still technical, and I was a temporary second level manager when my boss retired. I hated it - it was all budgets and meetings and basically dropped the ball enough so that i didn’t get chosen. Never regretted that. As an example, one person who was the best debugger in the company went from that job to executive VP of the semiconductor division. And was awful at it, but he did spend a long time doing purely tech things for a lot of money, if not a big office. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2024, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/346 "2024-01-14T22:15:26Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Most of the places I’ve worked had a dual latter, one for technical, one for management. Being high on the technical ladder paid well. We supposedly had a ‘technical track’. You could go from Jr. Developer to Software Engineer, then Sr. Engineer, then Staff engineer, then architect. There was a similar track for QA. For years our annual engineering meetings were filled with questions like, “When is the company going to create a technical track for non-managers, so we can retain talent?” Then for a couple of years the meetings were about the great new upcoming technical track. After that, the meetings were filled with questions about fixing the problems with new technical track, and eventually comments about what a joke our supposed ‘technical track’ was. I don’t think they were ever really serious about promoting the top technical talent to equivalent levels as the managerial talent. It was all just buzzwords and titles to placate the help. The thing is, to be an architect you had to work in the ‘center of excellence’ in another country. So the top performers in the remote office wound up moving up in title over the years, which meant nothing. My last team was full of staff engineers and senior engineers, taking orders from 20-somethings with no experience from the ‘center of excellence’ and pretty much doing the same thing they did as plain old software engineers. A little more money, but not much. And that’s where your career capped out. They ‘solved’ that problem by shutting down our office and laying off the engineers. Eventually they shut down the entire division, because it turns out that ignoring the engineers who brought you to the party because ‘everyone knows’ tech firms need to be in Silicon Valley, and replacing them with H1bs and rejects from Google and Meta doesn’t work so well. But it did solve the technical track problem for experienced non-managers… ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2024, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/347 "2024-01-14T22:37:40Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Most of the places I’ve worked had a dual latter, one for technical, one for management. Being high on the technical ladder paid well. The company I retired from started doing this in the early 80s. It was originally only the “Harvey” track, because Harvey was the one guy they really didn’t want to lose. It evolved pretty quickly, though, and being a non-managerial _very_ high earner became institutionalized decades ago. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2024, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/348 "2024-01-15T02:39:36Z")
The company I spent the longest definitely had a technical track, but it was fundamentally a firm of engineers and the managers all knew who did the work. You didn’t want to promote a good engineer into management unless that was how you kept him - because then the engineering didn’t get done. (Chemical engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and software engineers) However, engineering teams were led by former engineers who wanted to move into management, not by random MBAs. There was also no penalty for moving into management for a few years and then moving back to a technical role - either because it turned out you weren’t a great manager, or because you just decided you preferred not managing. During my time there, one guy moved back and forth three times - he was a pretty good manager, and a good engineer - when they needed him to manage, he’d step up, until they found someone else to care about someone else’s work. ---
**Author:** ![CaveMike](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cavemike/32/16379_2.png) [@CaveMike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaveMike)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2024, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/349 "2024-01-15T04:38:26Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I don’t think they were ever really serious about promoting the top technical talent to equivalent levels as the managerial talent. It can be difficult to find equivalent roles for a technical ladder and even harder to find senior engineers to fill those roles. Sometimes I hear the technical ladder described as something like “If you don’t want to manage, you can go on the technical ladder, still get promotions, and not be penalized for not managing.” But what is often overlooked is that to climb the technical ladder your work has to have an impact on a larger and larger set of team members just like it would on the management track. And this involves tasks that a lot of engineers that don’t want to be managers also don’t want to do: write documentation, give presentations, mentor junior engineers, create schedules, coordinate with other teams and orgs, evangelize, speak at conferences, etc. Companies with strong engineering principles like where @Voyager has worked or @Dangerosa’s old job (which sounds awesome BTW) might have room for engineers to advance on the technical ladder doing research and creating IP, but I think those are the exceptions not the norms. We have a technical ladder where I’m at and the requirements to join are pretty tough. If I hadn’t been grandfathered in, I don’t think I could qualify due to my aversion to SW IP. ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2024, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/350 "2024-01-15T06:46:08Z")
> [@Euphonious\_Polemic](#): > > The engineer’s dilemma. > > “Bob is the best in the department at writing code. Let’s promote him to manager so he can deal with human resources issues, petty squabbles between co-workers, and attending meetings with upper management”! > > Thing that are not in Bob’s skillset, nor thing that Bob enjoys. > > Bob goes on from being a happy, excellent coder to being a miserable shitty manager. It happens with physicians as well. I have a colleague who retired early due to this. The analogy I like to use is that of a car dealership. If the owner of the dealership takes a well trained mechanic and sends them up front to the showroom to sell cars, they’re just wasting the mechanic’s training. The same goes with turning a doctor into a glorified manager. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2024, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/351 "2024-01-15T19:17:09Z")
> [@CaveMike](#): > > But what is often overlooked is that to climb the technical ladder your work has to have an impact on a larger and larger set of team members just like it would on the management track. > > And this involves tasks that a lot of engineers that don’t want to be managers also don’t want to do: write documentation, give presentations, mentor junior engineers, create schedules, coordinate with other teams and orgs, evangelize, speak at conferences, etc. > > Companies with strong engineering principles like where @Voyager has worked or @Dangerosa’s old job (which sounds awesome BTW) might have room for engineers to advance on the technical ladder doing research and creating IP, but I think those are the exceptions not the norms. That’s kind of the point. In any technical meeting there are participants whose views are respected, and those who get ignored. Sometimes this even happens for good technical reasons. Yeah, the top people wind up on committees, but do you really want your project represented by clueless managers or incompetent tech people? Ditto for creating schedules. I’ve never seen top people stuck doing documentation, unless they want to. And if you want to look good at conferences, you definitely send your best people - both in technical and presentation skills. These days a lot of companies strongly discourage presentations at conferences. Apple employees are not allowed to even ask questions without permission. Forget about panels. It is pretty much the norm in Silicon Valley that even real managers have good technical chops - or they don’t go on further. It’s not surprising - you can’t make decisions about what route to pursue for a project, let alone see if schedule and cost estimates are reasonable, if you don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe companies that churn out more or less the same product in different iterations are different. > [@Dangerosa](#): > > However, engineering teams were led by former engineers who wanted to move into management, not by random MBAs. There was also no penalty for moving into management for a few years and then moving back to a technical role - either because it turned out you weren’t a great manager, or because you just decided you preferred not managing. The great advantage of tech is that the MBAs are petrified of us, since they don’t understand any of the work. It extends further. I’ve read many horror stories about HR people ruining recruiting by stupid rules and stupider requirements. I never had that problem, since the HR people didn’t understand half the words on our job reqs. No reason they should, and they universally didn’t pretend to, so they were always helpful when I was recruiting, sometimes very helpful. When companies eliminated levels of management, you’d go from managing five or six people to managing 16 or more, which is too many to get anything technical done. In my last job though I wasn’t technically a manager I did all the recruiting (but not the paperwork!) defined projects, set schedules, and led a small team. It was great - except for the commute. ---
**Author:** ![Euphonious\_Polemic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/euphonious_polemic/32/3002_2.png) [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2024, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/352 "2024-01-15T19:24:43Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I’ve read many horror stories about HR people ruining recruiting by stupid rules and stupider requirements. Oh yes. Here’s another one for you: I had a student screened out of a database job by an HR consultant because they didn’t have "Squills’ Turns out their resume had “Strong knowledge of Structured Query Language” and the HR person was looking for “SQL” which they were calling “Squills” ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2024, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/353 "2024-01-15T19:49:06Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > A lot of immigrants did have a safety net - relatives or people from their town in the old country who could help when they moved to the new country. And this is also why “chain immigration” is a thing. You send over the young single guys first, with the expectation that they’ll just suck it up the first few years when they’re living in a flophouse, trying to find a career that will let them move up in the world. Once they get on that ladder, they start sponsoring other family members, who now at least have a roof over their head when they arrive. Wash, rinse repeat for a decade or two, and eventually the whole family is now established in the new place. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/354 "2024-01-16T05:43:55Z")
How did they get away with not sending her to school, or was this in the days before mandatory school attendance? Anyway, at least where I live, full-body tattoos seem to be a requirement for adulthood, period. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/355 "2024-01-16T06:14:02Z")
I played bass for the Squills in college. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 9:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/356 "2024-01-16T09:32:24Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > How did they get away with not sending her to school, or was this in the days before mandatory school attendance? Lived in the mountains of West Virginia in a very remote area that, shall we say, has no fondness for “government interference” or any form of outsider. They did manage to find a birth certificate for her but other than that she had never had any form of ID, basically just never entered into the system and thus was never missed. ---
**Author:** ![EddyTeddyFreddy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eddyteddyfreddy/32/18796_2.png) [@EddyTeddyFreddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EddyTeddyFreddy)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/357 "2024-01-16T16:46:52Z")
That poor woman. What became of her? ---
**Author:** ![Briny\_Deep](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/briny_deep/32/17188_2.png) [@Briny\_Deep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Briny_Deep)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/358 "2024-01-16T18:33:33Z")
> [@Euphonious\_Polemic](#): > > Turns out their resume had “Strong knowledge of Structured Query Language” and the HR person was looking for “SQL” The Squills part is horrifying (and probably very common with some of these HR nitwits) but the applicant should have known to use the acronym SQL. Resume keyword scanning has been a thing for a very long time. ---
**Author:** ![Chingon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chingon/32/17645_2.png) [@Chingon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chingon)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/359 "2024-01-16T18:51:26Z")
Maybe they dodged a bullet? Who knows if the candidate likes to hike on the weekends or something equally horrifying. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2024, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662/360 "2024-01-16T18:52:21Z")
> [@Briny\_Deep](#): > > The Squills part is horrifying (and probably very common with some of these HR nitwits) but the applicant should have known to use the acronym SQL. Resume keyword scanning has been a thing for a very long time. The poor student probably didn’t know better, but I don’t think I ever heard “structured query language” used in the five years I worked for Oracle. I got to define the search terms, by the way, and if I had wanted someone with an SQL background I doubt I would have put “structured query language” in them. I mostly put in the acronyms current for the specialty I was in. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662.md?page=17) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-arent-people-working-personal-anecdotes-only/995662.md?page=19)