I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company where most of the employees are on work visas, so losing their job can very rapidly escalate into having to leave the country in short order.
After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.
I know not every manager is like that. I'd like to think I wasn't. But there are enough of them that think that way that legal protections often need to be there.
Early on in my career when I was first put into the position of hiring both employees and contractors, a guy I was working with said "We can ask him for a better price and promise to give him a better deal on the next one", and I said "but we won't have any more work after this one" and he said "yeah I know but we can just tell him that to get a better price".
It was one of the first times I realised that people are actively being jerks in business negotiations.
Another time was when I put my prices up to $160/hour from $80/hour after I realised I wasn't making any money (in fact by my calculations I was losing $3/hour for every hour my staff worked).
I didn't lose a single customer. They all just said "oh, right, well, okay when will you have it done?".
The same guys who had been crying poor a couple of months prior about how they "just didn't have the budget" were now paying double the rate and they could totally afford it.
As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist.
Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.
It does indeed extend all around, and I'm sorry you had to go though that. But you have to keep in mind that there is an extreme power imbalance between an employee and a manager who can have them fired, which means the jerk-factor is very much slanted heavily in one direction. For regular employees having those above you abuse their power over you in various ways is often a daily occurrence.
No idea why you're being down voted. I've had the very same experience once. Employee just sucked, after some nudges that went either ignored or just unnoticed I gave a very clear speech on where they're standing. Three months later I got him fired. He went to HR and claimed I was racist, and threatened with a lawyer. This really stressed me out for a good while, this was dragging along for weeks, with ugly mails and calls.
I won’t assume you or GP were racially motivated but “just sucks” can easily be code for “wrong race/culture”.
“Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood. That’s your responsibility as the messenger, not theirs as the unknowing recipient.
> “Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood.
Hence the "gave a very clear speech" part. If you don't get it at that point then I don't care if you're just stupid or it's cultural differences, at some point you have to adapt to the environment you work in. And no, there were no language barriers involved.
Yeah but the “very clear speech” came later, after the decision was made. After redemption was possible. At that point you’re just reinforcing your perceptions. Your job as a manager is to manage that expectation. If you fire someone for it that’s your failure.
> Yeah but the “very clear speech” came later, after the decision was made.
Huh? I clearly stated they had another three months at that point. Nothing changed, so they got the boot three months later. What the heck do you expect? Another two years? At this point I have to assume malice from your side. I guess you're just one of these people yourself. Blame everyone and everything but yourself.
> I clearly stated they had another three months at that point. Nothing changed, so they got the boot three months later.
Yes, and I clearly stated your mind was already made up so that didn’t matter. It was impossible for them to change your mind.
> What the heck do you expect? Another two years?
Your job as a manager is to address these issues before they become fireable. You know, to manage.
> At this point I have to assume malice from your side.
This is an internet forum, relax. What does it even mean to be malicious in an internet comment? I’m not taking away your livelihood.
> I guess you're just one of these people yourself.
“These people”? Is this still a thread about you not being racist?
> Blame everyone and everything but yourself.
Go look in a mirror.
Much like a blameless root cause analysis I believe a firing is a failure of the organization. How did this person get hired in the first place? How did you fail to coach them? What did the organization learn to avoid a repeat?
In my experience “performance” is code for “I don’t like you”. I have never seen a performance metric that isn’t arbitrary and inconsistent. Not just between peers but day to day for an individual.
PIPs are just CYA for HR.
I can’t speak to these specific situations because I wasn’t there but when managers speak about “performance” they’re using a euphemism for their perception. This can easily feel like racism because it comes from a place of discrimination.
“I have friends who are x” is a common refrain of racists so isn’t a defense, especially in an asymmetric power structure. Maybe you aren’t, or maybe your employees feel you are but they tolerate it to keep their jobs.
> If you’re bad enough at your job to get fired you basically are a fraud.
Depends on who thinks you are bad enough and how they came to the conclusion.
If your boss thinks you are bad enough - the question is why do they think so? Is it laziness, incompetence, or merely small nonsense that the boss couldn't accept retroactively? Is this all via stack rank or fake BS quotas? What is it?
Even without stack ranking, if you lead a team large enough, you get people who are struggling more than others. Sometimes it’s clearly situational: they are more junior and are still learning the ropes, the project is going through a rough patch and it’s hard to deliver, they are going through a rough patch and it’s hard to deliver and sometimes it’s just that their skillset is mismatched with what they have to do. In this case, you have to decide if it’s a case where training will solve the issue or if having someone else there would be better for everyone. And yes, not constantly being in conflict with everyone is also a professional skill.
Context matters. When I walk into a high-end store and see a shirt on sale for $X, I assume that I need to pay $X to get the shirt. If I see a shirt at a flea-market priced at $Y, I assume I can get the shirt for some percentage off by just bargaining. The sellers are also aware of this context and, presumably, set their prices accordingly. The same thing regularly happens in business. For most services, people understand that pricing is not fixed and act accordingly. They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.
>They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.
That's a good point and honestly is often caused by the seller in the first place. A lot of tools used by businesses are intentionally not priced or priced on a floating scale so that the sales team has an opportunity to introduce fake discounts to make the sale, but ultimately this signals to the buyer that negotiation is part of the transaction. Almost all enterprise software and hardware sales work like that. Often the buyer would rather have a set price upfront than how to deal with the haggling process but it's the sellers that are creating this problem.
Doing business in the Middle East, we ran into the mistake of not intentionally pricing 20% higher than what we were actually aiming for. Even if you’re not actually looking to negotiate, you still need to keep a buffer for the negotiator to claim he’s done his job effectively — and some room for his boss too.
Doing contract work, I usually find that eventually extra work gets identified during the project; no one wants to do the paperwork around a change order (or more importantly, explain to their boss[es] why a change order is needed), so the easiest solution is to pad the initial pricing to account for it, and then when it comes up do it pro-bono. The larger the company, the more you buffer, as the paperwork gets worse and the misidentified scope becomes more likely.
And then of course a lot of companies end up with “yearly budgets”, and are price-insensitive as long as you stay in their remaining budget. Not pricing as much as the budget allows is just leaving money on the table.
That is, the floating price isn’t just some sales fuckery to trick buyers into bad deals (although it probably often does happen) — there’s some legitimacy to the madness. And buyers love haggling; IME it starts with haggling on direct price/effort, and then with haggling on scope. They want the project price to be fixed after haggling, not before.
you create such a great linkedin post on this story, you will get quite good traffic. But i think the guy who told you to lie is not wrong. hear me out.
He tried to save money. he didnt steal or do anything but. am not saying what he did was right, but it was not harmful or wrong. he should have framed the sentence better so it would make the contractor feel that he was not being promised anything.
he may have had his own reasons. its how life works.
I am from India and this is very common thing from Indian managers whether they are in India or working abroad (and I am sure this is not limited to India but since I am from there I am sharing this example). It's just a thing. I often am a pariah at workplace when it comes to views on work-life balance. So I have learnt to never get into discussions about it and just shut up and keep my head down while never giving in to any manager's pressure and still trying to maintain calm and composure avoiding direct conflict. It's like walking on egg shells.
Private equity is destroying US infrastructure to make a quick buck. It's happening in almost every sector of the economy you can imagine. I'm not exaggerating when I say that PE firms are buying up nursing homes, transfering ownership of the land and building off into a separate entity, and have that entity charge the nursing home rent which keeps going up and up. This forces management of the nursing home to find ways to cut expenses until there's nothing left to cut except stuff directly related to resident care, safety, etc. Families see the writing on the wall and move their relatives out which accelerates the demise of the nursing home and it has to shut down (or is shut down, by the county/state.) Then the PE firm bulldozes the building and sells the property (which is what they really wanted.)
The US suffered a massive toxic fire in Ohio that destroyed a big chunk of the town and left a huge area heavily poisoned because a private equity firm bought the railroad and was squeezing it for every penny, and despite plenty of warnings by union officials and experts, the FRA did nothing and then...boom. Wheel bearing seized, train derailed, town polluted by hundreds of thousands of pounds of incredibly toxic chemicals like vinyl chloride.
- insanely strict rules about when engineers can request time off even for family medical emergencies, and sick days (so you have train engineers and other staff working while sick as dogs. Totally safe! Really stressed out employees, too - and stress means mistakes.) RR unions tried to strike twice. First congress and then and Biden bitch-slapped them back to work with a "compromise" that was still oppressive as hell because the economic disruption from the trains not running was more important. All because the railroads want to cut the number of employees down as low as possible so there aren't available engineers to replace sick ones, and they don't want delays while replacement engineers head out to trains that had to be left somewhere because the engineer was sick.
- dramatically reducing the time rolling stock maintenance crews have to inspect a car for problems - from three minutes to a minute and a half. Not only does this save labor, it means those maintenance crews don't find as much stuff wrong which takes a car out of service and costs money for the repair...woo, saving more money!
- reducing the number of employees per train; I believe it's currently two, and they're trying to push the FRA into allowing them to run one employee per train.
- increasing train lengths to reduce labor costs by moving more cars per people they have to pay. This increases the chances of derailments, and also causes other problems, like slower brake response time (the longer the train, the longer it takes for a pressure reduction in the brake line to make it to the end of the train, though I believe some end-of-train devices can be set up to remotely release brake pressure.)
- reducing track crews and time allocated to track maintenance so the tracks are more available and maintenance costs are lowered.
Keep in mind locomotive engineers are paid a median wage of $35/hour with a 10/90th percentile spread of $28/$44. These aren't enormous sums of money they're saving by going to one person on the train, particularly since it will be a lower-paid employee who is removed.
The crash was caused by overheating bearings which caused a wheelset to seize and derail the train.
Hilariously, the EPA, the railway, and "independent scientists" all declared the area safe but EPA employees visiting the sites became sick in ways similar to how residents were being affected.
The railroad companies responded to public and congressional furor by saying they'd self-regulate (!) better, and join a program similar to the FAA's close-call incident reporting system. Only one railroad has joined that system, and all but one raiload saw an increase in derailments in the following year.
The PE firms know their maintenance and staffing cuts are causing increasing problems and will destroy the railroad companies. They don't care. They're milking the railroad companies for every dime they can squeeze, leaving them in tatters from all the deferred maintenance and repairs. These companies are responsible for moving massive amounts of cargo around the country, and when they fall apart, it will be a national crisis, and the federal government will have to step in and bail the companies out because they're 'Too Big To Fail.' And the PE firms that own trucking companies will see record profits...
I couldn't breathe reading this. I had no idea it was THIS bad, these private equity firms need to be reined the hell in if not eliminated and legislated against. Make them do something useful to society or tell them to get bent
I am sure you heard of red lobster going bankrupt because of endless shrimp.
Well, that wasnt actually the case but once again private equity.
They forced red lobster to sell off their land/buildings to a PE controlled entity. Which rented it back to them. Also forced them to go to a specific, PE controlled, fish seller.
In fact, they got forced into starting the endless shrimp stuff because that seller had too much shrimp.
And for the privilege to be managed by them, the bought companies get forced to take on the debt that PE took on to buy them in the first place, along with paying an outrageous amount of money every month.
And lets not even get into what they do to elderly homes..
Darden group sold Red Lobster to GGC because it was massively underperforming in it's portfolio due to mismanagement through the 90s. GGC wasn't able to make much headway with it, and so it sold 25% to a vendor on the supply chain as part of debt restructuring and forgiveness, that allowed them to get some unit economics back into reality and the owner of the supply chain company took the rest of the position to continue the work of re-building the supply chain. Should the PE firm have involved the vendors in that way, maybe not, however it seems it was a decent enough strategy in terms of thoughtfulness.
Red Lobster had a death rattle long before PE got involved, PE is just a convenient story.
McDonald's, a non-failing firm, not owned by PE, was once described by a former CFO thusly: "We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business." They realised that owning the land upon which their restaurants, allowed them to succeed.
Red Lobster's PE firm, on the other hand, did the exact opposite: sold the most valuable asset out from under their restaraunts, to another PE firm, which then squeezed the restaraunts on rent and ruined their store economics (along with the aforementioned supplier further ruining their unit economics) until they went out of business.
They're in Chapter 11, they're not out of business yet.
Why do you think that is what happened? It doesn't seem to be in line with what GGC told their LPs, so I'm curious where you get your interpretation of the events from? Do you have any links or reading you could provide me with?
The reason I think that is what happened is because that is what happened. Here are some links, as requested:
How a bad real estate deal sunk Red Lobster [0]
When a private-equity firm bought the iconic seafood chain in 2014, it sold the real estate under the restaurants for $1.5 billion. Then the restaurants struggled to pay the rents [1]
It Was A Bad Real Estate Deal, Not A Bad Meal Deal That Killed Red Lobster [2]
Ultimate Endless Real Estate Costs at Red Lobster [3]
Golden Gate crippled Red Lobster by selling off one of its most valuable assets, the real estate it owned [4]
To help fund the deal, Red Lobster spun off its real estate assets in a transaction known as a sale leaseback agreement. Red Lobster had long owned its own real estate but would now be paying rent to lease its restaurants. Sale leasebacks are very common in the restaurant industry, but the arrangement wound up hurting Red Lobster because it became stuck with leases it no longer could afford to pay. [5]
But again, it wasn’t because of the shrimp. Following the sale of Red Lobster to Golden Gate, the chain’s real estate assets were also sold off, which meant that the restaurants now had to pay rent on these locations to their parent company. As such, the company was stuck in leases for underperforming restaurants that it couldn’t afford [6]
The vendor wouldn't have been able to afford the price of the business with the land in the deal, it would have massively complicated chapter 11 if they needed to enter it (they did), given were the company was, reducing tax burden was important (sale was done at near breakeven). Sale+Rent back is a very traditional move in clearing up a business that has very little value and is leaning heavily on a real estate portfolio (not it's core business). You can read all the court filings and disclosures over the years, it paints a different story.
I understand the media told a story, but the story isn't the whole story, in fact it's just that: a story.
The 6 reliable sources provided, which I trust you read in the 30 minutes between their posting and your reply, speak for themselves.
If you can convince all 6 reliable sources I linked, to correct their story, such that it reflects your own personal narrative of what happened, I will believe you.
Alternatively, you could provide 6+ equally-reliable sources which explicitly point out that the 6 reliable sources I cited are wrong (rather than just reframing the issue, or attempting to predict what would have happened had reality been different than what it was).
While I respect you as a person, and as a valuable contributor to this forum, your personal narrative simply isn't as reliable as the 6 reliable sources I provided.
Darden had a very interesting pitch to GGC, going so far as to secure covenants from franchisees holders in advance to sale+leaseback - GGC in spite of S+LB, obligations, the in fact bought millions more in real estate to try and shore up the stability in locations.
It seems we're in violent agreement: The sources you provided don't actually dispute the ones I did: indeed, they confirm that the real estate was sold out from under the restaurants. To further cement this point, your last link flat out says what we're all already saying: Private Equity can't/didn't save Red Lobster.
This action further distressed individual restaurants, rather than helping them out.
Instead, the sources you provided instead simply say that it was advantageous for Private Equity and the Private Equity deal, which is the point here: it was good for PE, bad for the individual restaurants.
Which makes sense, it's not a complicated concept: how does jacking up rent on an individual restaurants help it? It doesn't, as the sources I provided pointed out. If you were paying X today, and now you have to pay >X, that doesn't help you.
Why was it worse for the restaurants than the alternative?
Why was the rent increased, by how much, and by who?? What was the difference between the payments and how much did it diff from market over time or at whatever time you're talking about.
I'm an LP in GGC so I have lots of thoughts, happy to hear yours in detail!
By how much? By enough to hurt the restaraunts. I'd be happy to hear from you the specifics of how much it was increased, per-restaurant, if that's what you're referring to.
Was it worse for the individual restaraunts than not jacking up the rent? Yes, paying more is worse than paying less.
Was it worse than not being bought out by PE? Probably, but that's the sort of prophesizing about what would have happened had reality been different, in which I'm not interested in participating. What we do know is that a lot of value was extracted from Red Lobster into the pockets of PE, leaving the company a withered husk of its former self, a common PE playbook.
It's not prophesying given we have additional facts we could include to play out the alternative (socioeconomics)- if you wanted to engage from a place of intellectual honesty, that is.
"Playing out an alternative future" is "prophesizing" with more words, and prophets always claim to have some basis to predict the future, but nobody can. That's why I'm not interested in prophesizing about what might have happened had reality been different.
You mentioned rent costs, though: I'm happy to hear the rent costs before vs. after private equity sold the land out from under the restaraunts – it sounded like you were saying you're in a position to access those numbers? Given your excellent posting history, I trust that you want to engage from a place of intellectual honesty in that regard.
As it stands now, all we know is that, post private equity, they were jacked up so much that the stores struggled to pay. So how much was it exactly?
That's a fair bit of revisionist history trying to make PE look like it's not the bad guy.
Red Lobster was flourishing in the 1990s; it was one of the most popular sit-down chains back then. There were lines around the block at most locations.
In 2013, Darden Restaurants decided to spin-off Red Lobster and Olive Garden by selling them to a PE firm which coveted the ability to exploit these profitable chains. (Average EPS was approximately $0.77/share, and Red Lobster remained the countries' most popular seafood chain until COVID.)
The sale to the PE firm GGC included a sale-leaseback of all of Red Lobster's real estate. The purpose of this was to fund the acquisition, since PE never puts its own money down; it funds acquisitions with the assets of the acquired company. Red Lobster's operating expenses jumped more than 50% overnight, as it now had to pay rent on locations it used to own.
Within 2 years, this PE-driven cash grab had Red Lobster on the verge of bankruptcy. Selling Red Lobster to its biggest supplier didn't fix things because the problem was that PE had the bright idea to ruin the company through the sale-leaseback arrangement.
PE was not just a convenient story, they are the cause for Red Lobster's demise.
A lot of the time, private equity (like MBAs etc.) is a convenient bogeyman for why crappy underperforming companies are crappy and underperforming. But private equity often gets involved because they are crappy and underperforming (or are just in a line of business that doesn't have good prospects any longer).
A small fraction of the time, private equity is brought in to make an ailing, breakeven business profitable.
Much more often, it's to bite off limbs until it dies, feasting on cashflow and assets.
And then the third portion of the time, the business is generating reliable, modest long-term returns, a "blue-chip" company. Private equity doubles down on future growth that is not projected, gets the company into debt to the owners, makes it worthless, compensate themselves in stock with bank leverage, issues themselves further priority stock, files bankruptcy to get rid of the pensions, and on, and on, and on with various tricks to sack whatever assets the have on their books and whatever cashflow was generating a reliable 5% return before private equity got involved.
Eastman Kodak is a good example. Fujifilm arguably sort of came out the other side but much smaller company in much different country.
B&M retail, especially in the traditional department store sense, is much reduced. Could Sears have become Amazon (presumably including AWS)? I guess. Would anyone to a first approximation who was employed at Sears still be there? Probably not. Would Sears as it existed have brought any particular assets or expertise to the table? Probably not.
At some point, reinvention is sort of pointless because it means bringing along a lot of baggage that has net negative value.
It's all bullshit. Buffet bought BNSF but the rest of the major railroads are publicly traded companies. And Berkshire Hathaway isn't private equity either.
I know a number of nursing homes had >50% mortality from COVID, as there was not even a real attempt at isolation.
While visiting hours may have been restricted, we pretended that nurses and staff (already scarce) were simply unable to transmit COVID, taking them on and off premises on regular shifts, and the result is hundreds of thousands of people killed.
Don't worry, this happens everywhere that caves to free market ideologies. In the UK local government (tax payers) get ripped off exactly the same for social care. Private equity firms know the local government has a legal duty to provide care for the elderly and those with chronic conditions. So they can charge whatever they want.
Obviously the global investors have no problem morally with this, they are more than arms reach away. It's an executive in one of the companies they own that takes the heat for a couple of weeks, and then it goes away (and the executive gets their bonus for being the face of immorality).
If anyone wonders why public services are crippled, this is the main reason.
No, this is just what happens when capitalism is treated like a religion and thus never questioned nor given safeguards against abuse.
This is also why Europe leans a lot more towards legislative oversight rather than the libertarian attitude that the market will somehow magically correct itself.
Even if in a lot of cases the market would correct, it often takes a lot of time, and with a lot of negative externalities. Society bears the cost of that.
One might accept this crap as inevitable if we were talking about a consumer market, like for barbeque grills or dog food or some such. But railroads? We're talking key infra.
So, which totalitarian dictatorships are behind this wrecking of America's railroads ? Russia? China? Norfolk Southern (et al.) ?
Why do you find it so hard to believe that this isn’t just a result of greed?
It’s not like those who are bleeding that infra dry are consumers of the service itself. And couple that with a complete lack of regulation, it means they can continue to bleed the service with literally no consequences for their actions.
…but I think it’s fair to say the rot introduced by profit at all costs goes waaaay beyond this specific infra. You could apply similar complaints for plenty of other industries too, such as Boeing.
Not in the US. I mean, not culturally. Trains here are viewed as a plague, as stupid, as a waste of time. Of course they're really important and move around a lot of shit.
I would not be surprised that the train company doesn't give 2 fucks about trains. Nobody cares about trains. If you asked the average American if shutting down the railroads would be a good thing, they'd probably say yes. They're old, nasty, derail, loud...
Freight rail is absolutely key infrastructure even if the average American doesn't think about it day to day. No, except for a few places (including commuter rail in some cities), Americans don't care about and aren't willing to pay for passenger rail given that they can drive or take a plane.
Americans do not care about freight rail and they do absolutely despise it. You can go ask Americans (hint: I live here).
There are cultural issues here as well as economic ones. You're not viewed as doing something important or something innovative, and I'm sure that can discourage you from doing it right. And if you do it right - who cares? The expectation is to do it wrong.
> Americans do not care about freight rail and they do absolutely despise it.
Yeah, but those Americans are idiots (as so many of them seem to be). Idiots not caring about or despising it doesn't change the factual matter of whether it is infrastructure vital to their lives or not.
This is way off base in my experience. I live near several freight lines and cross the tracks often. The only negative is having to wait at a crossing every once in a while, but that's a very minor problem. I've literally never heard anyone bash trains in general and want them removed. In fact, it's more the opposite. There is a niche of serious train enthusiasts that get really excited about trains of various types.
So what? Whether railroads are critical infrastructure is a totally different question from whether the average American cares about railroads.
Most of us (myself included!) didn't think of grocery store workers as critical, either. We learned that they are during Covid.
(New on my list: The person who refills the toilet paper in the restrooms at work. I saw this guy doing it one day, and it struck me how critical he was - what an absolute catastrophe would happen if nobody did that job. But if you ask the average person, that is a totally unimportant job.)
The key is realizing that the system itself creates the result - no conspiracy needed. Everything naturally results as a consequence of the way the entire system is built, as sure as water will run downhill.
That everything isn’t already like this everywhere is because of active work by individuals, companies, and governments to stop and dam the natural flow.
It is entirely frightening once you realize that total enshittification of various industries is being held back by one company or even one CEO/owner. And those times will pass.
Imagine a world without Apple, for example - how would the phone market look if it was only Google
(advertising company) and Facebook (advertising company) making phones?
Holy shit not everything is Russia, this is literally mostly americans (and other westerners) doing it to the US. This is a result of capitalism, not everything bad happening in the world is russias fault jesus
I've had Indian managers and never experienced this. You're probably extrapolating from a small sample size which may all be from same company / industry.
I have had 7 managers from India at big US companies over a 30 year span and 6 of them where like this. It is an interesting phenomenon, in another timeline I'd like to be a tech ethnographer.
Most people who have worked both in the west as well as in the country will say there is a stark difference in the superior-subordinate dynamic between these two places. Concepts of professional respect, upward feedback and personal boundaries are less evolved here. It's a byproduct of the region's culture which is inherently hierarchical. While there are places which actively eschew traditional ways, especially those that are part of global orgranizations, given the size of the industry there are many more where a strong hierarchy and subordination is unfortunately the norm.
I had a similar experience with an HR manager in Australia, boasting about how they'd used a recent downturn to cut individuals' hourly rates by 10% (including many of my friends), while not reducing the charge-out rate to the client. Corporate management (as distinct from small business) selects for people like this.
He's right, and I think we're seeing this done across the industry (especially FAANG).
However, just because employees "have to take it" doesn't mean that it's better for the company to have employees that actively hate it and are just staying because of a lack of alternatives. Especially in a field where work output and especially quality is hard to measure, and the success of many companies hinged on motivated employees...
The thing is that it’s not that important if it hurts the company long term. If the company is big enough, any of those "managers" have plenty of time to make a great career there for several years if not more.
imo, that’s the issue when company’s ownership gets so diluted that nobody have personal interest anymore in the company’s long term viability.
Heck when your company is owned by private equity, even the company itself becomes a line in some excel spreadsheet. And you’d better not get that conditional formatting turn to red.
Skimping on feed because the penned milk cattle have to take it.
I would actually appreciate if our systems were coherently sociopathic rather than chaotic due to individual personality faults. At least then, conditions “on the farm” might make sense rather than look like an expression of mental illness and unchecked antipathy.
Not annoying at all. I'm more annoyed by people just letting me keep making the same mistake without saying anything. In fact when I first wrote that something in my brain said maybe it wasn't right, so I looked up the word "scruples" and saw the definition "motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions." I thought maybe that it might be a valid interpretation for the ethical or moral principles to be flawed in that context. What I should have done was look up examples of "lack of scruples" being used in sentences; that would have made it clear that I wasn't using it right.
Ex-manager here as well. I have always been surprised at how many managers will jump at the opportunity to put pressure on employees, even when there is no real benefit to the manager themselves or the organisation.
You pretty much summed up managers that have most of their employees on H1-B in the US. I know multiple managers that offload most of the work to the Asian immigrants on the H1-B visa, have them work 10+ hours a day and know that they can get them to do anything they want, because if they don't, they are scared that they can get fired and have to leave the country. I know multiple friends who silently work on weekends to potentially avoid being fired and leave the country!
Unfortunately the word "company" encompasses hundreds of millions of entities, of enormously different cultures, attitudes, ethics and so on.
Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse.
Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on.
Of course there are companies, too many of them, that behave badly. There are too many people who treat other people as nameless, expendable and exploitable. There are also many others, the ones that don't make the juicy comments on reddit, which behave well, treat people as people, and so on.
Treating your work-place as a hostile environment can be emotionally and mentally draining. It can be counter-productive if the environment desires to support you.
Equally, if your environment is hostile then at least be looking elsewhere. Not all companies are created the same so there are likely better options elsewhere (although getting those posts is harder because people tend not to leave.)
Your advice rings true for many companies. But people stay in those places because they believe everywhere is the same. So a more nuanced advice might be to understand the culture and behavior where you work and decide if that's a culture you want to assimilate, and support, long term or not.
For the record, the place where I work has never expected anyone to do emails etc out-of-hours and you'd be laughed at if you suggested people should behave otherwise.
I wonder how much of a thing "long-term culture" really is in the tech industry. The culture at Google in the year 2024 looks very different from the culture at Google in 2010. In many ways the culture at Microsoft in 2024 is radically different from the culture at Microsoft in 2001.
I do agree with the notion that company culture trickles down from the CEO over time. So that suggests that company culture can shift as CEOs come and go. Another factor that can impact culture include market pressure. I can say with some confidence that the relentless squeeze that shareholders put on operating costs undeniably has a direct impact on practices and policies that govern the quality of the average employee's experience at work.
I disagree. The fundamental idea of a company causes this behavior. They, the company, actually doesn't have a choice.
You have to turn a profit and the only way to achieve that is exploitation. You have to take labor and pay less than it's worth and pocket the difference. There's no way around it.
You might say "well you can be less exploitative" - but not really. Because you ALSO have to thrive in your market. Even if you are an angel sent from God to save corporate America, your competition isn't. They lie, they cheat, they steal. If you don't you're a sucker, and it's only a matter of time until your company goes under.
Because consumers will choose the cheaper option almost every time. And they don't actually know much about the company, they only know advertising. And they don't know much about the product either, because products are complex. Even domain-specific products, like, say, medical equipment - the buyers don't know shit. They know what the product should do, but do they know the materials are reliable? Do they know the power system is reliable? Do they know the software is written in a memory-safe manor? No, they don't.
So you lie (advertise). And you steal (pay your employees a low wage). And you cheat (use capital to undercut competitors, sometimes selling at a loss in new markets). And if you say no, then you will be replaced by someone who does. Nobody has any choice in this system.
> Because consumers will choose the cheaper option almost every time.
Largely true - but the key word is "almost".
> You have to turn a profit and the only way to achieve that is exploitation. You have to take labor and pay less than it's worth and pocket the difference. There's no way around it.
But this is NOT the only way to achieve lower prices. Lower prices can be achieved by simple things like keeping your employee turnover at a minimum, not going through rounds and rounds of layoff+hiring cycles, not wasting time on "performance reviews" and other BS management activities - and generally treating employees and customers as an asset. This is automatic cost savings that can be passed down to the customers.
Do you know why customers are willing to pay higher prices at Trader Joes? It is because the store is always staffed, clean, and full of inventory with happy employees.
There is clearly a higher quality way of winning. The factory-style squeeze and replace seems rather naive and stupid from a branding and long term return perspective.
As I've said, you can be less exploitative. You can't be not exploitative.
> happy employees
Trader joes employees are not actually paid very well. They're paid okay. Also trader joes is not very successful. They're a small niche, only profitable in the whitest and richest parts of the country.
> seems rather naive and stupid from a branding and long term return perspective
Yes, to an extent. But branding, as I've alluded to, is mostly advertising. The reality of your product is a tiny tiny part of your brand. How your brand is advertised is a much bigger part.
Luxury goods are often not actually higher quality. They just advertise to rich people and have big "no poors allowed" signs on the front door. They create an artificial scarcity in people's minds, and monkey brain says "ooo ooo rare = valuable!!"
Trader joes is cleaner, sure, and the experience is nicer. But from a food quality perspective, how much better is it than Walmart or Target? ... not much. I can find produce and whole-foods at both locations and I can live an equally healthy life with a diet consisting of only foods from Walmart.
But Walmart doesn't have the prices written on cute little chalk boards, so...
This is not true. Specifically because you are pointing out that exploitative companies will retain more money than non-exploitative ones and thus not be beaten in competition.
However, it is paradoxically also true that the same competition is beaten merely by high quality - leading to higher margins. Cost cutting is not the only way to squeeze margins.
> Trader joes employees are not actually paid very well. They're paid okay. Also trader joes is not very successful. They're a small niche, only profitable in the whitest and richest parts of the country.
And yet, they are nowhere close to running out of money and have a firm loyalty against cheaper competition. Exploitative cheap is not the only way and you are proving that same point.
> Yes, to an extent. But branding, as I've alluded to, is mostly advertising. The reality of your product is a tiny tiny part of your brand. How your brand is advertised is a much bigger part.
> Trader joes is cleaner, sure, and the experience is nicer. But from a food quality perspective, how much better is it than Walmart or Target? ... not much. I can find produce and whole-foods at both locations and I can live an equally healthy life with a diet consisting of only foods from Walmart.
Yes you can find the same produce at whole-foods or walmart or target. And yet, trader joes survives and is expanding. Once again, you are proving the same point - cheap exploitation is NOT the only way to win.
No, because if you're not exploitative that would mean you're producing exactly as much money as you're paying out to your labor, or less. This is impossible in a capitalist system, because you go under.
It can be done and sometimes is, but we call that charity. I've seen some businesses that take 100% of their profit and just redistribute it to their employees. But they can never expand, only float, and the company exists on borrowed time.
The difference here is made up with capital - as in, we're told the myth that capital is the reason why businesses pay less for labor than it produces. Because they provide the capital.
In reality, capital can be democratically owned and capital is also not the cornerstone of our economy. People, labor, is.
> No, because if you're not exploitative that would mean you're producing exactly as much money as you're paying out to your labor, or less.
This is an incorrect understanding of exploitation. Even in the most ethical corporation to have ever lived, 100% of the money earned will not go to labor. The money earned by a corporation is always paid out to
1. Employees/suppliers
2. Government
3. Shareholders
4. Company's own balance sheet
The exploitation part happens when companies cut on 1 to boost 2, 3, and 4. They do so to boost margins.
But strictly speaking, they could cut 2 via tax deduction maneuvers, cut 3 via shareholder return cuts, and cut 4 via plain old not saving more.
Cutting 1 is the most visible cut there is. Within 1, they could cut labor, quality, suppliers, advertising, what have you. Everything is shortchanging the company.
There are so many levers at play here. Exploitation only starts at stripping your company's assets (labor, loyalty, real estate, supplies, customer goodwill) in order to boost other aspects - usually 3 and 4.
There are economic systems in which 100% of the value produced is paid out to laborers. We're just not in one.
> Exploitation only starts at stripping your company's assets (labor, loyalty, real estate, supplies, customer goodwill) in order to boost other aspects - usually 3 and 4.
First, this is merely an opinion. It's not a matter of me "misunderstanding" exploitation. It's an opinion that this is when exploitation starts.
Also, this is UNAVOIDABLE. You MUST, necessarily, take some money away from labor to give it to 3 and 4.
Your entire thought process rests on this word here - "stripping". What is that? When does that begin?
Is one dollar stripping? To me, yes, to you, no. What is that magic number? And, if you can find that magic number, why is it correct? And who decides?
> There are economic systems in which 100% of the value produced is paid out to laborers. We're just not in one.
You will need to give examples.
> Also, this is UNAVOIDABLE. You MUST, necessarily, take some money away from labor to give it to 3 and 4.
Absolutely. Can you point at where this was not implied?
> Your entire thought process rests on this word here - "stripping". What is that? When does that begin?
This where your understanding is completely off. It seems that you are missing the forest for the trees. Instead of focusing on "stripping", try to ask the question, "What steps can the company take when they are stagnating in revenue or margins?"
The problem is you're not able to quantify where the problem begins. I am, the problem starts at 0.
Apparently there's a point where siphoning money from labor becomes bad. When is that point, according to you? You have no idea. What's that number? I dunno. Apparently nobody on Earth knows.
But you're telling me you understand exploitation? Yeah, fat chance. It's obvious you've gave a very minimal amount of mental effort into your views and outlook on economy and just ran with it. If you're not actually able to quantify what the problems are, reliably, you don't have an opinion. You have a delusion that makes you feel good. Which, granted, is easier and simpler to sell to voters. But it's also nothing - it's fluff.
I had a manager relate to me overhearing almost that exact comment made in a manager meeting at a mid-size corp I worked for in 2008. He left in part because of that attitude, and I ultimately did too. It’s egregiously abusive.
Yeah i got a peek at how the sausage gets made at the higher levels and I decided I needed to keep my HH costs down and reach FI(maybe)RE asap. Until that happened I was ultimately a wage slave, and that's how they wanted it, with a gun to my head in the form of rent/mortgage/kids's schooling whatever keeping me desperate to perform for them.
This has nothing to do with being a manager or not, it's just that many people are jerks. I've seen non-managers do something similar when they consider themselves hard to replace. It's unfortunate this is where we have ended up as a society.
In a strong market the management and owners will have to pay more and improve conditions.
Maybe some managers will be faster to exploit things when supply/demand turns in their favour, but pretty quickly the invisible hand of the market would have readjusted anyway.
After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction.
I know not every manager is like that. I'd like to think I wasn't. But there are enough of them that think that way that legal protections often need to be there.