Every moment I have one on one time with a junior coworker and we talk about workload, I remind them that it’s a multibillion dollar corporation and it is not your friend.
Some of them get it.
I have a junior that keeps mentioning burn out, and I largely tell them the same thing. Working hard a couple times a year to keep a project on time may be worth it to make a good impression on my boss and make it easier for me to promote you (2-3 things for me to mention is plenty), but you don't want anyone to expect you to continue this long term. Chill 90% of the time and push occasionally to make a good impression, anything more is wasted effort.
"""
A worker is getting out of his car at the company parking lot when the company owner pulls up in a new sports car.
"Wow," says the worker. "How did you afford that beauty?"
"I'll tell you what," says the owner. "If you work hard, put in some extra hours, hit all our numbers, I can buy another one this quarter."
"""
Wage theft is bigger than all other theft. Some people are happy to be a cog in the machine.
Disproportionate wages =/= wage theft. The fact that wage theft is bigger than other forms of theft DESPITE this needs to be remembered.
It could be thought of as a form of theft. You'll only ever get back a small fraction of the real value you produce while your owners get fat on the rest. Your only hope is to "climb the ladder" to increase the size of your share, while decreasing your workload, but that becomes less likely with each rung and each passing year. Or "be your own boss" and become one of the owners. But that's hard to do if you actually care about others, because it's zero-sum - someone, somewhere will lose in order for you to win. We're taught to only focus on the winning side of things. And if someone else loses, well that's their problem, they mustn't have tried hard enough.
That's one reason "be your own boss" and "side-hustles" are so popular among the incels and others who lack empathy, and make the majority of us cringe. And how gullible (but otherwise good) people are vulnerable to pyramid schemes, like MLMs. "Someday, you'll be rich" is the lie that's told to us. And a hopeful person is very very useful for their owners. That's someone who will show up to work and slobber all over their owners' knobs with enthusiasm each and every day.
There are "good" companies out there (maybe "less bad" is more accurate): co-ops, worker-owned businesses, public companies with generous stock options, public benefit corporations, b-corps and such, but all of those combined are still only a tiny fraction of businesses. There's a reason you see capitalism going after unions, ESG and such. Even the financially solid, profitable businesses are eventually at risk if they're seen as pro-worker.
All workers need to understand that they have inherent value just by being a human person. You are not your job, not your job title, not your salary or the amount of currency in your account. You are not your assets. You are definitely not your likes and replies. Those things should be nowhere near your core identity. The root of your identity should be your inherent value as a human being. If you are a human being reading this, you have infinite inherent value (yes, even if you're an owner). At least one person believes this, hopefully at least two, even for just a moment. This is what is meant by "raising class consciousness". Yeah, it can get annoying, but it requires constant reminders and vigilance. If it seems childish, of course it is, because even children understand this and they will operate from this understanding before they are programmed to become good little worker bees who like sucking the knobs of their exploiters.
So yeah, sorry for the rant, but it is theft from a worker's POV, even if it happens bit-by-bit, year-by-year as protections and benefits are slowly chipped away at to tilt things in favor of our owners -- even when it happens perfectly "legally" through the prescribed channels by the powers that be, because the owners love to change the laws, too, I would place it in the same category.
Even beyond the semantics, though, if someone is trying to tell you that working for them is what's missing in your life, that you're not good enough until you're working under an owner, that spending your life's energy providing labor in return for peanuts is the highest virtue achievable, that is actually one of the worst kinds of theft, IMHO. Being passed around the marketplace your entire life, bought and sold between owners like some commodity until you're no longer useful should not be seen as a decent, acceptable way to live. To me it is actually the highest form of theft, as it attempts to directly supplant our original identity as inherently valuable, infinitely precious beings, and replace that with a corrupted perversion of what it means to live as a human who brings value to society.
In 10 years, the only ones who will remember that you worked late and on weekends will be your family.
Your work won't remember and won't care.
Okay, but how am I supposed to afford the food for my kids without the overtime?
Well, that's your fault for being poor.
Start stealing from people below you and stop paying some percentage of your tax as close to 100% as is financially sustainable.
Meanwhile I'm here skipping lunch because I have no sense of time when I'm solving an interesting problem.
Sometimes I’ll do that until 4 in the morning. Then I have to sleep and miss morning meetings.
Are you me?
Same. I legitimately like my job and sometimes skip because I'm doing something interesting. In general, the harder the problem, the more fun I'm having.
That said, I'm a manager and I absolutely tell my people to take breaks.
I do something that probably appears this way, i spend the first few months working extra hard to find ways to be maximally lazy going forward. I highly recommend it.
I'm a software engineer and involved in hiring, and I love hiring lazy devs, they'll automate the boring parts away leaving just the interesting stuff.
I am a lazy DevOps developer, I spend half my time developing software with another team because I got everything to run so smoothly, I only had a small amount of maintenance tasks left to do. I am going for three 9's for the one pipeline this year. It could have been that or better already but nobody works on weekends, so if it goes down nobody will take care of it until Monday morning.
Nice! Lazy devops are best devops.
Seem very competent, work hard, understand all the processes and help review or improve products...
That way no one comes back to my office to check on me and notice I'm playing BG3 at the desk instead of working.
This isn't funny; it's depressing.
Skipping those things is illegal. The company could get fined. Maybe if they knew that, they wouldn't skip them.
Might be different in other countries but I think at least in the EU and likely the UK you are correct so long as it isn't freelance work.
It's VERY true here in the USA iv had to sue every employer iv had since iv started working over this sort of shit.
It's so unbelievably common for employers here to try to scam you out of break or lunch.
Hell my current job is currently fucking not giving me a lunch and having to pay me a penalty for it daily.
At least in my area, it's illegal for companies to not accommodate breaks, but if someone wants to work on their break, that's on them. Some of the more dangerous jobs have more strict rules, but your typical office job certainly doesn't.
“Your hard work will be rewarded with more hard work.”
Don't work hard, your employer would only waste it on something stupid like a new yacht.
Tell them immediately. Speak about wages. Talk about work life balance.
I skip lunch to leave earlier
Everything I want to spend my time doing is at home. If I'm not at home, I'm getting paid
How do you not feel so hungry in the afternoon that you're unable to work effectively?
Most places I've worked at have allowed a 10-minute paid break, so I just pack something that I can eat quickly
I'm also fine with just not eating for 8 hours. Even on non-work days I tend to have a pretty light lunch
I'm the same way. Sometimes I'll even skip breakfast and lunch and I'll only have problems if I go more than 12 hours or so.
That said, I'm paid salary and we don't track hours, so I only work through lunch if I'm behind on something. I can usually get my work done in 30-35 hours/week, so most days are pretty chill and I'll take breaks with my coworkers.
In that position, I'd definitely take lunch
Unfortunately where I am employers usually only make people salaried if they're planning on requiring more than 40 hours a week from them
That's often true in my area, and there are weeks when I put in >40 hours. But since we're able to provide our own estimates and upper management is generally happy with our delivery (our dept tends to over-deliver on our yearly goals), we can generally keep things manageable.
But yeah, I do take lunch 99% of the time when I'm in the office, but more like 40% of the time when I WFH. Nobody seems to care when people leave early as long as the work gets done.
I think my company is a bit unique here, and it's why I stay. I could probably get a bit better pay elsewhere, but the work life balance makes up for it.
Holy throwback profile pic.
You just unlocked a part of my brain I forgot was there.
lo bob
After they don't get a raise a few times, they usually figure it out by themselves.
The trick is not rewarding people.
Not that, but I just feel weird to do anything but non-stop work during work time, so I'll drink less water to not have to use a toilet during the 6 hours till break/end (just a part-time job).
Once I was told to wait for something without being officially put on waiting time, and I just felt weird standing there doing nothing, because officially I was supposed to be working.
When I was told that I am too slow (based on statistics for the day) and once that I did something wrong I took that quite personally. And fearing a negative point basically flooded my mind, meaning I couldn't quite concentrate, meaning I was more prone to further mistakes, which just made me fear more... positive feedback loop of fear.
I don't know, I've been there for over a year. I just kind of have a dog-like "pleasing the owner" mentality. As such, getting an email saying I got a positive point feels pretty good.
Your a golden retriever in human form
You can fool us.
This is also the look supervisor gives me for spending 30 minutes on lunch while an employee skips it to work.
Where I work they'd fuss at you for skipping lunch
Same but sometimes I really don’t want to interact with coworkers.
I say hey to mine, but that's about it.
Man I am pretty chill (nowadays in my old age), but if I saw my team skipping lunch I'd tell them to stop working and start eating.
There are parts of our jobs that are unavoidable on a few nights or weekends, but I make sure we spread that around fairly, and I take more of them than my team.
Not surprisingly, my team is consistently the happiest so of course other managers complain to me that I'm making them look bad. When our CEO says every manger can set their own work polices. Just change yours!
Don't worry. I'm not skipping breaks for work, I'm skipping breaks because I'm literally too busy chatting.
What are these corporate drones doing in my swamp!
I make sure my henches eat their lunch. Me on the other hand, fuck it I'll eat later.
Not because I skip lunch for work but because I just don't eat during the day.
I take double the break I'm supposed to. It's not exactly the optimal fuck you, but it's something.
I only do that so I'll have less shit to deal with later on.
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