The main thing I don’t get is that the top talent at your company are the ones that can easily find another job instead of putting up with your BS. The people that aren’t competent enough to leave on a whim are the ones you’re going to be keeping.
I don’t think being fickle and being competent are necessarily linked.
Some of the best workers i’ve met over the years are making way less than some of the worst workers i’ve met, just because the ones who could talk the talk and play the bullshit made way more money and swap jobs way more often.
The highest paid company hoppers are undoubtably the first ones to go, that doesn’t mean they are the most important, talented people though.
Yeah, but you’re thinking about when the company picks people to fire. Forcing people back to the office decreases worker satisfaction across the board, and workers will respond individually. I’d argue that those highest paid will be most willing to suffer the inconvenience of commuting, regardless of their talent, so the “make working here annoying” plan will tend to retain higher paid employees while losing lower paid people through attrition. Likewise, workers are more likely to tolerate the annoyances if they don’t have any other options. Good people can more easily job-hop, so this strategy is also likely to retain the lower-performing employees while the top performers go elsewhere, not considering pay rate. Total labor costs will decline, because there’s fewer people working, but it’s not an efficient selection process.
Long story short: pissing on your employees results in a smaller, lower quality workforce.
I’d argue that those highest paid will be most willing to suffer the inconvenience of commuting, regardless of their talent
I’m not sure this is accurate. Most of the highly paid people I know (myself included), feel quite empowered by the current job market and can basically pick jobs at their leisure.
Yeah, I think I phrased that badly. I just meant that people can be paid to tolerate annoyances. More likely to happen in reverse, like if I’m going to have to do this unpleasant thing, then you’re going to have to pay me extra, but the principle’s the same.
I agree on performance, but I’m well paid and would tolerate almost zero unjustified inconvenience. I can afford to take a cut, but in reality would probably earn even more elsewhere.
More experienced folk are also more likely to go freelance, since they have the skills, experience and contacts. Perm roles only make sense when they bring stability and benefits. I expect to see this a lot more, if RTO continues.
If bad people are aware that they’re bad, they’re strongly incentivized to not risk their livelihoods by voluntarily ending their employment.
If people are clinging to a job tightly even as working condition deteriorates, it’s an indicator that they don’t think they’ll fare well on the job market.
The disconnect has more to do with perception of their own value. Good people who underestimate themselves awill be inclined to stay. Bad people who know they’re bad will be more inclined to stay.
Bad people who think they’re good, and good people who know they’re good will be the most likely to leave.
So, the strategy of intentionally tanking your conditions to prune bad people actually only successfully prunes bad people who think they’re good.
On the other hand, you loose good people who know they’re good, entrenches the bad people who know they’re bad, and demoralized the shit out of good people who don’t realize they’re good.
How are “bad people who think they are good” likely to leave, wouldn’t they find it hard to switch jobs because they are bad? that is, they thought they could easily switch jobs, but find out in interviews that it’s not easy, thus they are forced to stay?
Even better, the competent ones ask for more money
Seriously the actions of all these big companies shows they don’t really give a shit about retaining top talent. Unfortunately, for big name companies, they’ll always have an inflow of talented new grads who are willing to give up their dignity to get their name on their resumes, and it’s cheaper (in the short term, which is all shareholders care about) to churn and burn them then to invest in long term talent
We are all freely interchangeable widgets in their calculations. They don’t have time to consider that some people might be better than the job than others.
They’re betting that some will leave, most will stay, and even if the some that leave are the best, most of their money is made by the vast majority of people behind them.
They’re looking at trends, not individuals. Individuals don’t matter to them.
They’re looking at trends, not individuals. Individuals don’t matter to them.
Exactly.
They’re going to learn better, but it’s going to be an expensive process.
The irony is that the average worker already knows better.
“Name two people at your workplace who, if they quit, everything will go to shit.”
We can all do it. Only the CEO can’t. And many of us would name differet people at the same workplace, and still be correct. But the CEO rarely knows that, or more likely can only name two, themselves, when their real risk is closer to 200.
I put up with hellish demands and a nightmare commute because I thought working at Important Company was a privilege. And to so degree it was. But I don’t put up with bullshit anymore and that was a lesson I had to learn on my own, the hard way.
yup - early on in my career, working at a specific FAANG company was my life’s greatest ambition, now I don’t think there’s any amount of money they might feasibly offer me that would make me work there lol - Once you have enough income to be comfortable, work life balance is worth more than anything
Had a convo with my mum last month, where she was concerned that I wasn’t looking to supercharge my career as I enter my 40s. She couldn’t understand why I’d declined an interview with Meta.
I had to spell it out… I won’t miss that extra money. I don’t have an expensive lifestyle, and I don’t want one. I’d miss the time lost with my kids, and I’d sure as shit regret the stress and anxiety of additional work pressure.
But then, I also had to explain why staying in an unhappy marriage “for the kids” is infinitely worse than peaceful and happy co-parenting.
Yep. One of my friends works in sales and has worked from home for 3 1/2 of her 4 years with her current company. She’s in the top 10 performers out of 250-ish people in her division and her company is going to lose her if they stick to the demand that people return to the office. She’s waiting to see what happens, but she’s already had recruiters put out feelers once the tentative plan got out, and there are other top performers ready to jump ship too.
I’ve seen a lot of people with that attitude still get let go. I’ve fired people with huge ego’s that were extremely valuable to operations that really thought they were untouchable. As good as you think you are, there’s someone else just as good or better that will take your place.
That being said, fuck working for someone that doesn’t respect you, or makes demands of you purely because they want to flex on you.
Overall, employers hold almost all the power in their relationships over employees.
Depending on individual and conditions, some may find themselves with the privilege of slightly improved bargaining power, but no assumption is stable or reliable, and ultimately employers have the final word. A company always may find other workers more easily than, in the greater balance, individuals may find other job positions.
Workers have no inherent or intrinsic value in the relationship. Companies value workers only for their labor, and do so under systems of labor commodification captured beneath the whims of the market.
A company always may find other workers more easily than, in the greater balance, individuals may find other job positions.
This (emphasis mine, for clarity) is not accurate. There are currently more jobs than people, and people of certain positions have enormous power in job negotiations.
Companies value workers only for their labor
And workers only value companies for the pay. This isn’t really an argument about anything
A job opening being posted offers no important information about the situation inside any company, nor about the count of applications that have been received, nor the count that has been ignored or rejected.
For most of us, not having a job represents having a much higher risk of death. The conditions of workers are essentially conditions of work or die.
If you think workers have as much bargaining power as companies, then you are, frankly, deluded. You may personally not notice the depth of the disparity, due to your having certain privileges, but you are still giving a distorted representation of your own conditions.
Workers literally have more bargaining power than employers at the moment, be I’m not deluded about that. I work in retention and partner with recruiting daily.
You have argued that because you have encountered an abundance of job listings, therefore, employers have less bargaining power than employees.
Job listings are not a scarce resource. Any employer may create any number for any reason merely by choosing.
Your argument is fatuous.
The entire structure of the relationship between worker and employer is based on inequitable balance of power. Workers must sell their labor to employers in order to earn the means of their survival, in order to avoid destitution, homelessness, and starvation. Employers, in turn, benefit from a disciplined and stratified working class, and from a reserve army of labor.
The prevailing principle for workers, under the employment system, is work or die.
I’m not talking about seeing lots of job listings. I’m talking about the realities of recruiting personnel and the demographic and structural changes that cause those realities
Sorry you’re having trouble, but your experience is not the broad reality. There are more jobs than people and workers haven’t been this empowered since post-WW2
The prevailing principle for workers, under the employment system, is work or die
There is no system in which this is not the case, and that has nothing to do with your bargaining power.
I’m talking about the realities of recruiting personnel and the demographic and structural changes that cause those realities
…your experience is not the broad reality.
You are now being dishonest, by insinuating that I have presented an argument from personal experience, and also that you have presented a structural argument.
Both suggestions are false.
You have given no structural argument. I have given one, and have not appealed to personal experience.
There are more jobs than people and workers
As I say, job openings is not relevant. A job opening is not a resource of limited supply.
Any employer may post any number of job openings at any time, and also may eliminate any of them, at any time, and also may eliminate any job, at any time, dismissing whoever is holding it.
Indeed, an employer may also post a job opening, and simply reject every applicant, or even ignore every one.
There is no system in which this is not the case,
Yes, there is, obviously. As long as distribution of basic needs is decoupled from the system of organizing labor, everyone may survive even if not providing labor.
and that has nothing to do with your bargaining power.
It does, completely, for reasons I already explained. Only one side of the bargaining relationship is being subjected to grave threat.
Any employer may post any number of job openings at any time, and also may eliminate any of them, at any time, and also may eliminate any job, at any time, dismissing whoever is holding it.
Serious question: are you currently working as an adult in the professional world?
A job is a social relationship between a worker and an employer.
A job opening is a declaration by an employer of being willing to receive applications. If any application is accepted, by a job being offered to an applicant, then the applicant may accept the job, and may hold it, as long as the employer remains willing to maintain the employment relationship.
A job opening is only a declaration.
Do you understanding the meaning of bargaining power?
Please think about the substantive meaning of the concept, and then provide a clear explanation, based on your understanding.
Now, do the same for a company declaring a job opening. Explain the meaning, clearly.
Please offer an explanation of how you may arrive, in general, at a sound conclusion, about which side of a negotiation has more bargaining power.
Now, please provide a meaningful argument that job applicants have more bargaining power than employers.
You have so far attempted to poison the well, but have not provided any genuine argument for your stated conclusion.
Either you are trolling, or you are simply extremely thoughtless in forming your beliefs.
Clearly, you are entirely lacking any understanding of social structure.
You have rifled through a handful a variations of the same general theme, attempting to argue, or perhaps attempting to avoid arguing, that employers have less bargaining power than employees.
The employment relationship is not a relationship of mutuality or parity between the two participating parties, employer and employee.
A business is a social structure, which is completely different from an individual worker, and the billionaires who own businesses, and through them accumulate private wealth, have no shared interests with their workers.
Each business may expand to employ arbitrarily many workers, but workers have only limited time to sell.
Businesses completely control the resources in society that the population requires to survive. They profit from the labor of workers, who sell their labor to earn the right to live.
It cannot be overstated that your comparison to romantic partnership is so utterly absurd.
The number of job openings is not related to the bargaining power of employees.
Oh the invaluable people do get fired. The problem is that the company never replace them, because they can’t be replaced.
Their value is not in how smart or skilled they are but in how much they know of their work in the company. Most of this work is not documented and it can take a decade to build this knowledge.
These people are key elements of the functioning of the company. You lose months of productivity each year simply because they’re not there, and you might even lose years of work that’s now unmaintainable.
I don’t know, if companies are too arrogant to see that or if they’d rather have people who obey than a working company. I bet on the second though.
Better yet if the workers unionized they could end up with a strike or no workers at all. If these were the good ol days they may even wake up without their kneecaps.
It’s because the people making these decisions aren’t incrntivised to think about the long term effect for the company. All they need to worry about is if it makes line go up in the short-term so they can get a fat bonus then use how much line went up to get a job somewhere else before the shit hits the fan. Rinse and repeat.
Have you ever had a middle manager above you who constantly has to interfere as if to prove how necessary they are?
This is similar. It’s not always about the amount/quality of your work or even about the money; sometimes it’s just about control. Those who don’t actually do much (again, managers and CEOs, etc) want desperate people they can rule over.
That’s part of it. Another part is middle management can’t function without seeing you. Finally, it’s not worth it to a company to maintain a lease on a building if nobody works there and it’s not easy getting out of those leases.
What would you recommend to capitalists, for defending themselves from the broader population, that might be a superior alternative to using human shields?
I’m skeptical a company would take that. They want to be able to shut down contracts with employee on a whim but somehow they would engage for a 20 years in a building? If it’s not a big industry I severely doubt it, and those are rarely I city centers for obvious reasons.
I agree with most of this except the lease is a sunk cost, making people come in based on a variable that won’t change is bad decision making, the discussion should be made independently of lease. I agree some managers think this way, it’s usually the ones who could benefit from remedial business finance classes.
Yes and no. It’s more like a trap that the company is trapped in. It’s the corporate equivalent of having to keep renting an apartment you don’t live in anymore and can’t sub-let. The sunk cost fallacy applies, but also it’s a case of “we’re stuck with this and we’re going to USE it even if it kills our wage slaves.”
The larger issue may be that companies occupying the buildings supports interests of the owning class, and so its influence is being applied accordingly to shape the larger social forces.
Ever see how much real estate companies like Google has? If all those bay area companies said fuckit let’s be remote it would crash the market and rock the economy.
No one cares about retail office market. A market bubble crashing is merely an opportunity to earn money for the others. Capitalism doesn’t care about losers.
America only has capitalism for the poor. For the rich, it’s socialism. You better believe retail office owners stand to be losers, and they have power to fight.
There is no money to be earned though if nobody needs office space then all those offices will need to be converted to living space which will reduce the price of domestic homes too.
My town has been stuck fighting over rezoning for decades. The urban sprawling is fucked. So many empty lots and buildings while the suburbs fight to keep half acre lots as single family zoning. Add in poor mass transit and it is an ugly mess
Certainly, it is expected that politicians operate on the same side as developers and owners, and that all such parties insulate themselves from the population through NIMBY.
I’m told that office buildings are actually terrible from a housing standpoint. Like, it’s actually easier to just tear the whole thing down and build an entirely new complex than convert it into apartments.
Perhaps. There are other possible uses, though, such as commons spaces. Also, even housing that has a quirky design may carry value, within the context, in symbolizing transformation away from the old.
Few organizations own their own office space, most lease. So it’s not so much “they”, the CEOs that want you to return to work, but “they”, the venture capitalists (whom the CEOs answer to). These investors have a stake not only in the organization, but separately have investments in commercial office real estate that they stand to lose money on if those leases aren’t renewed.
In principle, municipalities could gain control of the assets.
Little doubt, if a course were followed, the previous owners would be compensated at outrageously inflated prices, defended as rescuing the investors, but nevertheless, control by the public, in the sense of genuine control by the public rather than control by corporations pretending to be concerned for the public, could open pathways for many opportunities toward social interests.
A coprophagous organism is one that eats the faeces/excrement of another animal. Many insect species are coprophagous and often specialise in the consumption of faeces from large herbivores.
That’s what I was thinking, it essentially makes bosses obsolete and they don’t want the system to be deconstructed from the top down, ever. That’s toppling capitalism, kinda talk.
Nice, in theory, proving it is the real problem. Meanwhile you're not getting paid and they have an entire fund just for lawyering you into submission.
Yeah, that’s why unions are so important… Without one in that situation you’re fucked.
Kinda baffling to me most tech-companies don’t have one. I get they’re attempting to stop unionising but they can’t easily be replace their whole workforce at once. They’d loose all their know how…
How soon do you think we'll start seeing articles about indentured servitude being great for you and the next hot thing in work trends? Some Linkedin lunatics are probably praising it already...
Next big work "trend." A fucking trend. Give me a goddamned break...
What is the point of LinkedIn anyways, can anyone actually describe it to me? All these years later and I'm still confused. The only thing I've found it useful for, is basically a digital rolodex for when I want to get ahold of someone. I can't read the news feed or whatever it's called, it's insufferable.
I’m a middle manager. I run reports to make sure my team is doing what they’re supposed to do and identify things they need to be coached on if they’re falling short. I also attend meetings with other teams to figure out solutions to things my team collaborates with them on.
Still seems to me the idea of “if people don’t come back into work the real estate market implodes” is the most convincing.
Commuters vaporizing and countless city blocks losing their purpose will cause huge upheaval in the real estate market.
And turns out a /lot/ of CEOs have a vested interest in keeping the real estate market artificially propped up.
Thus, they try and force people back to work as hard as they can.
It won’t last, the big companies that don’t give a shit about real estate due to being even bigger in scale will out compete and the international market will absorb most of the workforce.
If you shackle your success to real estate, then you can’t compete with international megacorps that saw this coming awhile ago. Prepare to be acquired.
Not talking about the housing market here, talking about the Real Estate market, which the housing market is certainly a subset of, but not what is going to be as big of a player in this issue.
The issue at hand in this case are massive, but vacant, skyrise business focused buildings. And of course the countless giant concrete cubes all over the place in every major city that used to house hundreds of employees and now largely… dont need to. At least not as many, and now 1 of those cubes could be plenty to house several entire businesses, instead of 1.
Hell a company I used to work at was in a giant building and even though it was growing, it was only using maybe 1/5th of its total rooms. Half the hallways were completely vacant and you could walk down rows and rows and rows of dark closed off rooms with just a table and chair in them, lights out.
And that was before the pandemic, post pandemic the entire building had like 3 people in it for a long while, and even when some people filtered back it largely stayed a ghost town. I dunno if they cut their losses and moved to a much much cheaper option to save tonnes of money (I hope they did, it would be a smart choice), but last I saw the place was super empty.
And when this happens, suddenly the property values of an uncountable amount of real estate will plummet. And a LOT of people have a LOT of money banked on that not happening.
Synthic CDOs were just one example of the problem we didn’t learn. There’s a whole logic, risk and visibility problem around derivatives of derivatives. The fact that the CFTC has suspended swap reporting, and that we have a derivatives markets that is so massive and then we have derivatives (like swaps) based on those derivatives is a system designed to fail.
The derivatives market is over $1 quadrillion dollars large.
That’s a conspiracy theory. Most companies have no interest in keeping high housing market prices, because it increases the wages they pay to their workers and it increases the lease for their offices.
I have not seen any evidence of a ceo needing the office market to stay high. Some companies renting those building? Sure! But most ceo don’t care about those.
Managers though can’t adapt to remote working teams, and they must justify their use to the company. A ceo will also be very easy to convince that people won’t work if they’re left alone at home, eventhough all studies prove the opposite. There is a toxic culture within the management and directors that workers won’t work if they aren’t under a leash.
Among poly-workers identified by Deputy, the vast majority (78%) work in the hospitality sector, 12% work in healthcare, 6% work in retail, and 5% work in the service industry.
So the jobs that historically pay as little as legally possible are the ones where people are working multiple jobs? Shocker.
Hey who knew that the best way to make money as a company is have very few workers and be an amazing talker that can dupe others into investing into your pile of shit. Oh wait, Holmes, Neuman and Bankman-fried already came up with that business model. The innovation on that model is just don’t get caught.
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