plus senior management not being willing or able to make the distinction between important and interesting-to-know, i.e. the inability to separate organizational priorities from personal priorities.
It’s funny, you make some good points here, but I can at best think of maybe one or two senior executives I know who were “desperate to be successful“, and none who would happily take a promotion with no additional money ( I can think of a few who got screwed into taking more responsibility for little or no additional money, but they weren’t happy about it).
The biggest driver I see by far of the urge to move ahead is praise and recognition. People thrive on praise, they work hard because of praise, and when they get that promotion because they’ve worked hard, that’s even more recognition, and the cycle starts over again because now they’re now in eyeshot of even more senior people, and they’ll work even harder. And the harder you work, the more frequent that praise and recognition occurs. It’s insidious. And to be honest, I was one of those people who responded to it…add on top that I actually like the work I was doing, and I became one of those people working absurd hours.
As for prestige and power, definitely people liked it when they had it, but the few people I can think of that moved ahead because that’s what they wanted ended up falling out of favor and/or just plain failing. Those particular motivations often lead to stupid behavior of one kind or another, and at least if you work at a good company, it gets noticed.
It is insidious, and it’s largely BS. We’ve all had the experience with the person who lollygags around and doesn’t do anything until a few weeks prior to a deadline, and then suddenly springs into late hours action and is constantly busy, etc… Mostly because they didn’t manage and budget their time wisely, not because they’re committed to making the project/task be on time despite obstacles. But a lot of the time management doesn’t realize this, and as a result will reward that clown instead of the guy who steadily and without fuss budgeted his time well, and brings in his tasks on time and well without any fanfare or crunch time. To make it worse, this incentivizes the working late and people being demonstrative in doing so, rather than being competent and “all business”.
I’m fairly convinced that this kind of thing comes into play a whole lot on people who habitually work late- because that’s something that can be seen and indicates a level of commitment of some kind, while the guy who just gets the job done competently and well and goes home at 5 isn’t nearly so visible. I imagine it takes a particularly insightful manager to actually realize that, especially if the place is dominated by the culture of the late-workers.
Having been the guy who gets his shit done well and leaves at 5 for most of my career, I’m a little bit bitter about it; I don’t feel like I was judged on the quality or timeliness of my work, but rather on my willingness to make a show of working late, putting my job ahead of my family, and/or essentially work without pay.
Speaking as a sometimes-manager, this is why it is important to praise employees for the quality of their work, not for their hours.
When I review work, I always try to look for what’s good about it, and praise that, even if there are issues that need to be addressed. People really are motivated by praise, and you get what you encourage.
Article in the Times today on this very issue
A review of more than 200 studies over two decades on the relationship between long work hours and health found a correlation between extended workweeks and a higher incidence of heart problems and high blood pressure. People who worked longer hours (which in most studies meant 50 to 60 hours a week — practically part-time by some industry standards) were more likely to suffer injuries on the job and poor sleep at home. There was also a strong link between long work hours and behaviors that end up affecting workers’ health, like smoking, alcohol and substance use.
The claim is that people can handle this for four years, and then burn out, but since the top companies get a steady stream of new employees from college, the companies don’t really care. It also says that one reason for the overwork is the competition for bonuses. Don’t work as long as the person next to you, get ranked below them and lose out on the big bucks.
I don’t understand. You aren’t interested in getting promoted, but are bemoaning that promotions are going to people putting in extra time rather than putting in their nine to five?
The article Voyager links to describes it pretty well (even if it focuses on investment banking and specifically Goldman Sachs):
The people in the best and the brightest group, they have opportunities, they earn a lot, they work with other interesting people, they work on global deals. The rest push paper with uninteresting colleagues and over time, you’ll become like them. That’s what people sincerely believe. They believe that if you don’t work for an elite organization, you fall into an abyss of personal social status descent.
In the end, if you ask me, what is the one true fear? That’s it. It’s the loss of social status. It’s not the money. It is that people who formerly looked at you with respect and esteem will all of a sudden ignore you.
Again, much like some people in this thread, I feel like the author has a bit of a condescending “look at these idiots working their life away” vibe. But I think the statement above is applicable to a lot of industries besides investment banking - consulting, law, tech companies, creative industries (including writing for the NY Times). Goldman Sachs is just an extreme example. People work those sort of high pressure, demanding jobs because they spark some sort of interest in them.
I can tell you this, having just lost my job, not being “successful” at it sucks. Psychologically, you think “I’m going to the best schools I can get into, getting the best grades I can, I want to work for the best companies I can.” I guess the question are they the “best companies” because they are successful with great marketing and PR, but are insanely demanding? Or is it because they are legitimately good places to work at?
'Zactly.
Are they best at making happy fulfilled well-paid employees, or best at maximizing the partners’ income, or best at hiding their rampant evil behind a smokescreen of Capitalist Virtue signalling (and Virility signalling).
It’s true that working in a high position for a true powerhouse firm has amazing rewards. Being Tom Brady has amazing rewards too.
The error is when legions of people decide that all that separates them from becoming Tom Brady is a few more hours on the job. 'Taint so. Working insane hours may be a necessary condition, but it’s 0.01% of the sufficient conditions; without the other 99.9% in the bag, you’re simply spending your life unwisely.
Another take runs something like this. Consider professional musicians from the guys at your local beer hall to Bono. 99% of the money is made by 0.01% of the acts. If management can persuade you that the ratio is far less lopsided than it really is, it will make sense under those false beliefs, that you too have a real shot at the big stuff. When you don’t.
Any contest with really outsized rewards at the top encourages over-effort in that direction. You gotta work a lot harder to date the homecoming queen than the runner ups or the gals who didn’t quite make the cut to even be a runner up.
No… what I’m saying is that a lot of companies say one thing about things like work/life balance, putting family first, etc… and then don’t walk the talk by promoting the very people who do NOT do those things, and put the company ahead of everything else. It’s massively hypocritical- I’d much rather have them put it all on the table and be frank about it, rather than what so many do today.
And when I say “desperate to be successful”, it’s very much what Voyager linked to- the loss of social status and idea that if you’re not promoted, you’re a failure. I think I’m saying the same thing as that article here- just describing it differently.
Some of us don’t measure ourselves by our jobs; I mean I am successful, but in large part it’s in spite of myself sometimes. And if I lose my job, or have to go back a notch in job title, it really won’t matter- who I am and how I define my success isn’t dependent on my job title or paycheck. I learned long ago that’s a fool’s errand, and that you can’t control that sort of thing, no matter how much you may want to.
Depends on what you mean by “big stuff”.
I read somewhere that there is a misconception of investment bankers being “risk takers” and “gamblers”. It’s actually the exact opposite. It’s a lot less risky a path to obtain wealth than, say, starting a business or trying to become Bono.
I have a number of friends who have worked in investment banking for years. They do well, but not Wolf of Wall Street private yacht rich.
Basically if a company makes a point of telling you how much they consider “work / life balance” it probably means they don’t give a shit about it.
Yeah, I’m mostly just interested in not being miserable at work. My pre-covid job was like that. I had only been there not quite a year though before my whole group got laid off (me, my director, our regional VP, and the head of professional services quit to go be the assistant dean of a military academy). Sucks, because that was kind of an “ideal job” for me. A bit of a salary cut from my previous job, but made up in stock grants. But more importantly, it allowed me to do the sort of client consulting I like, but without the long hours or bs. I mostly worked from home except when I’d take a day to drive out to a client and just check on things.
My previous job working for a small management consulting firm was kind of the same. Sort of a laid back firm founded by a couple of ex-Accenture guys. Perhaps a bit too laid back, truth be told. Unless you were a principal, titles were largely meaningless. Being on the bench for months also seemed to not be a big deal (although it probably should have been).
Although, the main reason these more enjoyable jobs were available to me was probably because I spent ten years working the more demanding ones.
I don’t know. That’s great if you can completely detach yourself from your job. I try to be somewhat engaged in what I do. Doesn’t always happen though.
Our department scored really low on work-life balance a few years ago. A committee of peons was set up to recommend ways to address work-life balance.
Their top recommendation was to stop talking about work-life balance. The brass were not amused. At 4pm on a Friday the committee of peons was told by the leadership to bring forward a presentation to the board on Monday at 9am.
The irony of asking their underlings to work through the weekend on a presentation in work-life balance was lost on the “leaders”. It was just a “check the box” thing for them.
Eh, I don’t agree that’s true for every company. It turns out that if you put in consistent, regular measures of work/life balance, and you have a CEO willing to repeatedly call out the senior executives who have poor numbers, those people will either figure out how to make it better or they’ll leave. And by “make it better” I don’t mean cheat the system, because you also have to keep it transparent. Will it be universal? Not even close…some people will drag their feet, or cheat around the edges…but you can get to a strong majority saying they have good work-life balance, by creating incentives for the right behaviors.
Then of course, there are these kinds of managers. I cannot even begin to count the hours lost to committees formed in the expectation that they’d return some kind of anodyne response in service of showing something being done, hoping to keep HR happy and delay any actual progress…
That’s it exactly. It is all about culture, the real culture, not the culture in the memos. I worked in a place where they meant what they said about work-life balance. We had the time between Christmas and New Years off - paid. And you needed special permission to work then - it happened for emergencies, but it was not the usual thing. (Like how it seems the Goldman Saturdays off is a farce.) And the CEO used his online radio show to tell everyone to chill.
And we were a top tier Silicon Valley company
It’s kind of like companies which cut corners, ship crap, and when they are caught at it put out a statement saying that quality and their customers are the most important things. Yeah, right.
I wonder how much of the 2008 crisis came from exhausted bankers thinking that hiding crap mortgages in good tranches was a great idea.
I think this statement completely misses the point.
People work “100 hours a week” (or more generally long hours or constant travel) for their particular industry (whether that’s investment banking, consulting, law, whatever) just to keep playing for “The Patriots” or “The NFL”. Not necessarily because they want to be the next “Tom Brady”. They don’t consider it “spending their life unwisely”. Their career is how they chose to spend their lives.
I suppose there are two very different threads here deeply intertwined. Both “threads” in the SDMB / Discourse sense and in the lines of thinking sense.
One is, as you say, the folks where working serious hours and molding your life around the edges of your job is simply the price of admission to the game, a game they willing and happily play with full understanding of the costs and benefits. Both of which are considerable.
Another thread, the one I have experience with, is more like your most recent job than your much happier times a few years ago. Where the long hours are still the price of admission, but it’s to a f***ed up game where cynical management simply squeezes more hours and, ideally, more results out of unwilling people who’re locked in a zero-sum unpaid timeclock arms race with their cube-mates. Or who are locked in a brown-nosing face-time race for the limited promotion possibilities as they try to out-climb their peers up the greasy pole. Many of these jobs are in the low $1xxK range, but as demonstrated by several folks above these can range up to maybe the low $3xxK for a fortunate few.
I’m now in a completely different spot. I’m paid hourly at a real nice rate, but it’s effectively piecework. I can’t work more than my employer can feed me work. I have no ability to create more work for myself or to do it faster or slower than it happens.
There’s only so much work to go around amongst myself and my pool of identical co-workers. Some of us volunteer to work 10-20% less and earn correspondingly less; others go the other way. Management manages the headcount versus the workload so on average it works for them. Once in awhile when crunch time hits it’s all hands on deck and they’ll bump the average quota and / or incentivize extra participation with limited dollops of time-and-a-half rate. Best of all, who gets exactly what they want and who gets stuck with what they probably don’t prefer is not subject to managerial whim or favoritism.
It leads to a very different attitude to work. And the absence of office politicking and pressure for “face time” is especially soothing. I like to think that in a more performance-based system I’d be a star versus the reality I’ve had: stuck on the short end of the stick for far more than my “fair” share of years. OTOH, in a politics-based system I’d probably be getting an even shorter stick.
It’s interesting to consider what society and worklife / homelife balance would be like if a much larger percentage of US workers of all sorts, both grand and humble, had an arrangement closer to mine.
That’s just an implementation of the Pareto principle. But GE didn’t just get rid of the 'C’s - if you got rated a C they put you on a performance improvement program. If you were still a C the year after your PIP, that’s when they eased you out the door. You got a chance to do better, and they really tried to get you up to speed.
I’m not even sure they were wrong to do it. If you are at the bottom of the work force, you aren’t doing yourself or the company any favors by sticking around in a dead-end job. Better for everyone if you find something that suits you better.
The truth is, the Pareto principle is bang on in engineering as it is in many areas. 20% of engineers are responsible for 80% of productivity, and the bottom 20% create 80% of the problems. In programming it’s even worse - the level of productivity between the best and worst employees could be as high as 100:1.
This is surprisingly true across many different jobs. Sales, service… There are the ‘vital few’ that actually move things forward, a large competent middle that get the job done but no more, and then a bottom few percent that are responsible for most of the bugs, or schedule slippage, or lost sales, or legal trouble, or whatever.
It used to be the primary job of HR departments to recruit the top 20%, train and nourish the middle 70% to improve them, and ease out or retrain the people at the bottom who shouldn’t be there or don’t have the right skills to do the job. Welch made it a formal process, but something like it happens in most companies.
A lot of people work long hours paradoxically because they lack work ethic. They don’t get their work done on time, and are forced to stay late to finish. For some people it’s positively chronic.
But the high performers who work like dogs often do it simply because they love the work and it’s what they want to do. This goes double for entrepreneurs. When I started my business I pretty much slept, worked, slept, worked… And I had a ball doing it.
In programming there are lots of peole who just do nothing but program. It’s all they want to do. I had guys on my team who would stay and work until 7 or 8, then go home and do more programming for fun. They constantly entered coding competitions, contributed to open spurce projects on their own time, etc. For them, actually getting paid to do what they loved was a huge bonus, and they’d be dojng it anyway if no one paid them.
Of course, companies take advantage of this. It’s one of the reasons age discrimination is so bad in software development. The fresh young coders have no problem working around the clock - give them a cot and free Cokes, and they’ll never leave the place. But once you’ve been doing that for 20 years and have life responsibilities and a wife and kids, the boss can’t get you to do those endless death marches. That’s why by the time you get to age 50, the vast majority of programmers have either moved up into management or are no longer working in the field.
I read once that of all the fresh working programmers, half leave the field by age 30, and of those left half leave by age 40, etc. By age 50, maybe 10% of the people who started as programmers are still doing it.
Unwillingness to work the killer hours management demands is a part of that.
Still seems pretty dumb to me. Suppose your selection process is effective. Then, you’ll quickly get rid of the anti-productive types and any further attempts to remove the bottom 20% will result in removing the productive ones.
On the other hand, suppose your selection process isn’t effective. In that case, why do it at all? You’ll always be getting rid of some slackers, but you’ll also be getting rid of the productive ones.
It’s even stupider when this kind of selection is applied to individual teams. Any given team might be filled with either superstars or idiots. Arbitrarily declaring that the bottom 5-10% should be fired is silly. Productivity should be judged on an absolute basis, not a relative one. And done in a way that’s difficult to game (i.e., avoid nonsense metrics like lines of code written or bugs fixed).
100:1 is a bit of an exaggeration unless you are comparing your top developer to Phil from Marketing. But I agree in principle. There can be a huge difference in productivity, depending on who is writing the code.
A lot of engineers THINK they are 100x as productive as they are.
And I think that mentality filters its way through the entire project lifecycle from inception, sales, development, QA and production release. At least on many of the projects I’ve managed (particularly at my last company). They are sold and scoped as if they will be built by the 100x developer, but then they put 10x developers (or whoever they can get) on them.
Another major reason there is such ageism in tech is that no one needs a developer with 20 years of experience. Maybe there’s some legacy stuff that needs to be fixed. But for most applications, there is diminishing returns after a few years of experience. At least compared to more traditional forms of engineering or accounting or law where that knowledge and relationships tend to accumulate over time and add value.