This made me far more angry than your frying pan, just gotta say.
Aww I’m glad I stir your emotions sweet friend.
So you turn on the lights, get your coffee and read your newspaper/browse your phone until someone else is actually there.
Then you do the same thing once you are the only person left.
Congratulations. Flipping on and off lightswitches is the shittiest metric a company can seek and is evidence of bad management.
It’s stock-in-trade Boomerism. As though the social contract hadn’t already been obliterated by parasitical corporations and rampant nepotism and Peter-Principled middle management.
To say nothing of the capability trap that most large corps are in, after a decade plus of finance junkying themselves into a hole, because free debt was more profitable than their actual business ventures.
Fuck these zombies. Let them implode- the way an actual free market demands.
Congratulations. Flipping on and off lightswitches is the shittiest metric a company can seek and is evidence of bad management.
There’s an economic i enjoy reading names Richard Wolfe who bemoans the capitalist mentality of counting towards on productivity.
You clock in and you count up the hours. You get on the factory floor and you count up the widgets you’ve made that day. You check your portfolio and count up all the money you’ve made.
There’s no concept of an upper bound. No idea how much you actually need or benefit from. One more is always desirable.
But what if, instead of counting up, we counted down? Know we need 10 widgets every day, so we count down until they’re finished. Know we need 10 tasks done so we count down until they’re completed. Know we need $100 to pay our bills, so we count down until we’ve earned it. Then we go home and enjoy our lives, rather than grinding endlessly at the millstone to build a surplus nobody asked for.
Even if you are productive from the minute you walk in to the minute you leave… who does that even benefit? Are you doing anything genuinely useful or just doing bullshit jobs to look busy? Are you reducing the workload of your peers or creating extra work for other people?
Because in the latter case, you’re not a hard worker. You’re a ballooning expense. Everyone behaving like you would be a disaster for your employer and your community at large.
Look, a company makes money by not giving you, the worker, the surplus the company made.
hope you choke on that nugget
This article was published more than six months ago. Some information may no longer be accurate
Hehe.
So, become the office janitor?
So if the same person is opening and closing, what is everyone else doing? If you’re going to saddle one employee with an important duty, you better have adequate compensation and opportunities.
There should be one person doing those tasks for most companies - the owner- who retains a lion’s share of the surplus value created by their workers.
Employees don’t owe the business anything other than their contracted labor. We are just still suffering the inertia of class traitors in the enormous Baby Boomer cohort, who made the work their entire identity, and who frankly love the taste of boot.
Not just on the Americas side of the pond, apparently.
I’m applying for dozens and dozens of jobs right now in the UK, so I expect to get plenty of rejection emails, but today, Monday, two days before Christmas, 11 rejection emails so far, which is a record (I’m not upset, I am aware I will get far more rejections than interviews). Obviously people are working like crazy to get everything done right before Christmas, but I thought at least the UK was more relaxed on this stuff. You really couldn’t wait until January to send out rejection emails? Gotta grind right up to Christmas?
“Should we promote Bob?”
“Hell no, he’s the only one here who does any work! We need him right where he is!”
Cries in Bob.
That said I’m a Bob who loves what I do and gets paid handsomely for it so que sera sera.
Experienced employees often make bad managers because they want to step in and do the work for other people, rather than handling all the status updated and workload balancing and reporting and new hiring that supervisors deal with.
If you’re a skilled specialist and you’re doing a challenging task there’s little reason to believe you shouldn’t be paid more than your direct reports.
This is not satire.
It’s called being pigeon holed and that shit is real depending on your company. Some hard workers get promoted some just get more work.
making yourself irreplaceable cuts both ways, sadly enough.
Indeed it is not.
I once worked at the new office of a company that just opened in the state, one of the first who was doing the job while the construction workers were still terminating wires and tacking up drywall. When a new supervisory position was created, all of my coworkers assumed I’d be the first one picked but I was told my experience and wisdom would be better served on the job and teaching new hires the ropes.
Didn’t take long before I stopped giving a shit about promotions and left for a different company soon after. Telling someone their hard work has been rewarded with more work and not more money for rent is a good way to drain the motivation right out of people you manage.
Before I go on, your comment is valid and I fully agree with you. I am not saying this is the case with you, but presenting the other side of the coin. Just because you’re the highest performer at a position does not mean you’re necessarily the best fit for a promotion. I work with plenty of people who were promoted for being the hardest workers. They are now managers who flounder because they cannot work hard to impress. They need to lead a team of hard workers, which requires a different set of traits than being a hard worker yourself. My manager when I started was promoted for being the hardest worker. That was all she knew how to do. She could not lead people. Couldn’t give constructive criticism, could not take constructive criticism. Any idea that was not her idea was not a good idea. Wanted to rule with an iron fist and feel important, but could not do anything that would actually get her there. Extremely hard worker though, and the work she did do was on point. Just could not lead a team. It’s shitty, but it’s the truth.
It may also be that someone does not WANT to be promoted. I get high praise from higher ups, everyone iny group comes to me for suggestions and advice.
I am, pretty low on the totem pole. I have no desire to move up to a position where Inspend more time making spreadsheets into lies tomplease upper management than doing actual tangible work. Plus the company seems like its always fucking over managers randomly the higher you go. Feels more secure down here.
Fuck you. Pay me.
Hahahaha talk about corporate propaganda. I feel sorry for the poor schlub that reads this and is like “yeah, I’m gonna do that”.
It is, unironically, good advice for new hires because it signals enthusiasm and work ethic. Getting in early let’s you talk to people before they’re swamped. Coffee room chatter is a good way to meet people and build relationships. Beating the traffic means less stress through your day.
But once you start having a real life, this doesn’t work. Dogs need walks. Kids come first. You’re not a 20 year old with lots of free time anymore, so you can’t indulge your boss with the fantasy that you exist exclusively for the benefit of the firm.
Capitalism promises everybody can be above average. In reality, a big majority of people is putting in an above average effort, but earning and owning way below it. Because some slobs in top positions vacuum up the doe while mostly stalling.
I’ve learned to be the one to turn the lights off. It pisses the boss off but ensures everyone knows the shift is over
I turn the lights on in the morning and make coffee. Because I’m the only one that knows how to make coffee that doesn’t taste like dirty water. Has nothing to do with work ethic and everything to do with coffee.
Fresh filter, water, and more than 3 kernels of coffee grounds?
I turn the lights on in the morning because “lmao I’m off at 3 to beat the traffic, suckers”.
Thank thee for thy works, thou serv’st our Dark Lord well.
Shit when im the first one in, i leave the lights off. Then i get mad at the person who eventually turns them on. If i have to be in that early, i dont also want to be miserable from the bright lights
“Why are you sitting here in the dark?”
Uhh, my computer is lit up and I can hear the damn fluorescent lights when I’m sitting there alone, piss off and let me drink my coffee in peace.
I knew a guy who kept his office dark except for a little desk lamp. He said he preferred cold and darkness. One time when we all walked to a group lunch in below freezing weather, I was shivering in my down jacket and he had shorts and an aloha shirt. Freaking reptile!
was it a UV desk light?
His chair is just a boulder.
Work ethic never went out of fashion. Many, many people work very hard everyday. Always have. Work is a part of life, always has been, always will be. It’s the incentives that are the problem. Paying people just enough (or not enough, in many cases) to just keep their heads above water, for taking on more and more work, so that owners, investors, and executives can make ever increasing profits, just doesn’t motivate people to work very hard. Much of the hard work in the current system is motivated by fear. That is not positive or sustainable.
Hard work feels great when it benefits you, your community, folks you care about, or even just real people.
It feels fucking awful to work hard when the only people who will benefit are some rich assholes who exploit you.
a great round up of the difference between work versus toil.
Nice and succinct and 💯
Super well said!
First, don’t get stuck in the mindset that hard work is only worthwhile when making money. You can work on things that directly enhance your life and those of the people around you and skip the medium of exchange entirely.
Then, upgrade to the understanding that hard work to only benefit others can be the most rewarding yet.
It probably won’t make you feel any better, but if you work for a corporation the profits don’t just go to rich assholes. People’s pension plans and retirement funds buy and sell stocks, and so do mutual funds anybody with money can buy. You don’t have to be rich to own stock, just not poor.
I agree with you, but this is an “anti work” community, and there’s a substantial part of the movement that is techno-utopian and is actively arguing for the dissolution of work in general.
There is a real chance that a great change is coming. If most of the problems with AI can be overcome (though that’s far from certain) there will be a change in the job market of dimensions never seen before. A gigantic loss of jobs and a booming market at the same time.
If that happens and the politicians drop the ball this can be a time of great human suffering and a divide between the rich and the poor worse than ever before.
On the other hand an implementation of general basic income and social redistribution of wealth could lead to a golden age where working is a choice not a necessity.
I know which one I would be betting on. I’m not sure if changes to the current system will be even possible without a violent revolution.
I understand, but until the technology necessary for a transcendentalist, post-scarcity, post-work society is developed (assuming said technology is even possible), work will remain absolutely necessary.
Gosh, I hate to disagree with you, but it seems like multi-generation inheritance might affect the necessity of work for some. Currently.
I’m fairly tech-utopian myself, but it’s is more of an aspirational goal that won’t help anybody for the foreseeable future. Automation will become capable of performing all human labor, but having it actually do that will take a lot longer because it will require reshaping our whole society. It will essentially mean the end of money, and therefore the end of some people being hugely wealthy compared to everybody else, which those people won’t want to let go of.
I managed an auto parts warehouse with a small fleet of delivery drivers, I was the one with the code to the alarm and they keys to everything. Sometimes if I had trouble sleeping or was a bit hungover from imbibing too much I’d sleep in and roll up to the shop around 9-10 instead of 7. Not a single one of my employees ever had an issue with starting the day later and I didn’t care about them leaving early to pick up kids or whatever. Long as you show up and shit gets done I’m putting the same hours on all your paychecks anyways
We work a lot of hard, long hours in my field. Occasionally I get a fuck off easy job but that’s only when business is slow. I’m the lead tech on every job. I also have a bad problem waking up in the morning. Despite being fully sober and getting at least 7 hours of sleep, I sleep through my alarms which are incredibly loud and annoying, and they’re set 5 minutes apart for two hours. Guys who know me know that they can go in, do their work, and if I’m late I let them go early by the amount of time I am late. I’m often finishing the job by myself at night.
That’s ok though. That’s the way the world should work. I’m not a morning person. Waking up is literally the worst thing that happens to me every day barring tragedies or serious injuries. It’s so much worse in the winter too.
I once took a programming / analyst job specifically because it was at least partially a night shift. I had to be free to work alongside a team on the other side of the planet for a few hours a day. Best job I ever had, I’d still be doing it if they hadn’t run out of projects for us to do.
I can stay up all night if you need me to, but fuck waking up early.
I would rather sustain the injuries than to wake up half the time, regardless of how much or little sleep I’ve gotten. I feel your pain. Genetic night watchmen unite! Whichever morning person decided the world should exist 9-5 should be dragged into the street and shot.
