Work and work culture around the world

[msmith537]

@Cervaise

As a European resident and worker, I can confirm that I am free to give my resignation at any time and for any reason but my notice period is prescribed by law and varies according to my tenure. Based on how long I’ve been at my current job, my notice period will be 60 days. My employer is free to decline some or all of my work during this period and put me on “garden leave,” where I get paid to sit at home and be on call until the notice deadline (this is common for sensitive-IP jobs where you’re going to a competitor).

How does all that work as a practical matter? Slavery is outlawed in most modern countries so you can’t make someone work for you if they want to quit. So what if I give 60 days notice and just sit there not doing any work or I don’t show up at all?

@enipla

Interesting. Anybody can just quit in the US. My wife and I had a combined total of 67 years with county government. I let them know that I was retireing about a year in advance. Not required, but I like these people. Then I just worked on training the folks at what I do/did.

Well that is a very different work culture than the sort of companies I tend to work with and would explain why your coffee situation is so terrible. I’ve also worked with a few public sector clients over the years.

@bump

I think it’s less that whether the work is necessary or not, it’s more that there’s a sense that the axe could fall at any moment, for any reason.

I mean I’ve seen layoffs that are basically throwing heavy stuff out of the flaming airplane to keep it in the air, but I’ve also seen layoffs that are “We can make more money by letting several hundred people go and consolidating this division” type bullshit. I’ve also seen people let go (typically their position gets ‘reorganized’ out of existence) for stuff like personality conflicts or worse, just not having the “right” attitude toward working nights, weekends, vacations, being crammed into a conference room with 10 other people on a ‘tiger team’ to solve some problem for several months, etc. Or they bitched too much about that sort of thing. And some were just laid off because they got a mandate to reduce head count by X amount, and they were the least likeable people on the team. And the same is true about stuff like your benefits- corporate management can and does change that stuff without warning. I went through about a five or six year stretch where we changed health care insurance carriers every year, and the coverage changed every year as well. Exhausting.

So working in that environment feels very vulnerable and insecure. You may trust and love your immediate boss, but he’s got little ability to defend you from corporate bullshit and shenanigans, and you feel like if you don’t work like a cracked-out hummingbird and sing all the proper corporate paeans at the right times, you may be next. It’s a huge recipe for burnout, and it’s also not great for people’s mental health either.

It was a huge adjustment moving to the public sector and realizing that I wasn’t going to get laid off or fired unless some pretty damned dire stuff happened. As in the only people I’ve heard of being fired were the ones who did egregiously bad stuff, and merely not being good at your job wasn’t a reason, much less having a bad attitude.

This

You want to talk about exhausting, try having 30 year stretch of having to change jobs every 1-5 years. Because AFAICT, there’s nothing specifically or obviously “wrong” with me that I can pinpoint.

I think a big part of the anxiety people feel is because the actual work is so decoupled from leadership it’s impossible to figure out what to do to get ahead or even keep your job. Take Elon Musk for example coming into Twitter or his DOGE bullshit and just basically smashing everything with no regard for how stuff actually works. Or @Johnny_L.A in this thread getting laid off after 20 years from his job of (if I understand it correctly) fixing incoming client data feeds. Like is that no longer an important function?

As a “management consultant” I am part of the MBA-o-sphere of professions that IMHO has shitified Corporate America. We don’t really mean to be. But the career path and culture is such that we take lots of young, eager, fresh-faced undergrads and steer them towards these jobs in consulting firms, investment banks, private equity firms and whatnot where they don’t really learn any practical skills besides making Powerpoints, working 12 hour days, and sucking some partner or managing director’s balls.

So no wonder people are constantly anxious for their jobs. If you’re actually doing real work, at any moment, some manager might eliminate your position because some Mckinsey consultants showed them a slide deck where your job was no longer necessary because they don’t understand it. And if you are in one of those MBA-o-sphere middle management jobs, on some level you probably realize, even if subconsciously, that your job really only exists at the whim of some more senior middle managers all of whom may have only a vague understanding of the work.