There has been an erosion and change in the nature of the employee-employer relationship.
Back in the day that the author initially started working, the nature of the relationship was probably much more balanced: the employee got a decent wage, was trusted to fulfil their duties with reasonable concessions and freedom (sometimes possibly doing overtime if necessary, but also being able to leave early on days when they had to take care of their kid), and they probably had much better implicit labor protections: in the event of economic downturns, the company was much more accommodating and tried its best to take care of the employee. In other words, the employer was trusted and the employee was trusted to "take care of each other". The job was "for life", after all.
Fast forward to these days: companies have stripped away a lot of the care they took for employees; in the event of economic issues, big corps will fire people basically at random. Most employees are monitored to the minute, and leeway from the employer is unheard of in most situations. All of this "taking care of your employees when things go awry" is expensive (like insurance) and employers have tightened their belts.
It's not surprising then that the employer also starts looking for ways of not doing more than they are contractually obliged to do.
It is mostly about the erosion of trust both ways.
In general, the relationship between employer and employee has never been balanced. One thing that induced balance in the middle of the 20th century was the power of unions in the middle of high-demand industries; after World War II, manufacturing and transportation were massively valuable to rebuild tracts of the world bombed to bedrock, and this put bargaining power in the hands of labor because labor in e.g. heavy manufacturing and rail had already organized; bosses were incentivized to work within those power structures because there was so much money to be made hitting quotas that it was in nobody's interest to slow process. Your company was your extended family because the union had made it so (it's not like bosses would be offering those pensions out of the goodness of their hearts).
That balance began to unravel as the world rebuilt, manufacturing moved out of its traditional bases, and labor shifted from industry to service without a corresponding shift of service to unionized workplaces.
The Boomers' attitude towards work is shaped by experiencing the benefits of the closest the US came to strong labor representation and national-level socialism, if not outright communism.
You have massively over estimated the power of Unions, and completely overlooked what I believe is the real reason for the shift. The institutional investor.
401K's, Pension funds, and other funds of funds that since WWII have pushed the business cycle from being a 5 year + picture to being a Quarterly Earnings report
That more than anything has had the biggest impact on what the parent comment is talking about
No, you only think that because you believe unions had any power to begin with. They could only ever move the needle by a few percentage points, never anything drastic
Taking care of employee requires the need to be able to look at the long term viability of the company, and understand that experienced work force is far more valuable than not.
However, when you are measuring your performance in 1 quarter goals no on give a shit about profitability in 5 years or how to service the customer in 5 years, that is the next CEO's problem
Agreed. You can still see the five year planning thing at GE. I thought it was cute. We couldn't predict our business environment next month let alone five years from now.
I think the basis of your comment is incorrect. Employees have never had more freedom. Work from home is now widespread. Working hours are more flexible than ever. Workplace benefits have improved drastically over the last 10 years. Percentage of workers with access to maternity/paternity leave is increasing year-over-year.
> There has been an erosion and change in the nature of an employee-employer relationship.
This however, is correct. I believe the cause is counterintuitive. Workers simply have more choice today.
For the last five years (excluding a brief hiccup during the worst of COVID lockdowns) demand for workers has outstripped supply. Low earners can choose between ultra-flexible gig work (Uber, etc) or endless less flexible options. Knowledge workers/tech have enjoyed a hot market where recruiters largely come to them once. The result of this? Average tenure at companies is decreasing. There is always a better opportunity around the corner. Why work hard at your current role for a 10% raise (at best) when you can focus on improving your interview skills and get a 30% raise at the next company?
Young people aren't "quiet quitting", they're just no longer subject to the Stockholm syndrome workers have exhibited over the last 20 years. They realize that maximizing their income means gaining 18 months of experience and moving on. If companies want to get 100% effort out of their employees, they should make sure that internal opportunities are as good as, if not better than, external opportunities.
It's not. Look beyond the HN bubble. Where applicable, hybrid is the status quo, and hybrid is still a far cry from complete WFH. Traffic jams certainly speak of the opposite.
As long as most individuals are limited by their location regardless of legal issues, WFH is not widespread.
>Working hours are more flexible than ever.
Marginally. Most places still have core business hours and soft-enforce synchronicity. A lot of this also happens naturally thanks to pushing daily standups or whatever the equivalent is in another branch around the late morning, in a way that requires participants to look presentable.
>Workplace benefits have improved drastically over the last 10 years
Eeh.. questionable, really depends on the context. And that's without mentioning the obvious: benefits exempted from tax vs straight cash.
>Percentage of workers with access to maternity/paternity leave is increasing year-over-year.
True, with the obvious caveat that one-and-a-half income households are practically required to even start a family now. Those benefits are primarily a countermeasure to the issue of having any of the two parents spend time with kids, and paternity leave in particular tackles the "issue" of moms quitting work.
>Knowledge workers/tech have enjoyed a hot market where recruiters largely come to them once.
I fail to see how you make this conclusion. The service industry exploded and with them, recruiters. Recruiters got to eat too. It's nigh on zero effort to cold call or post something, either directed or undirected. Alternatives exist, but the culture of recruiters as middlemen has firmly taken root. Even managers tend to complain about their existence.
Meanwhile, job ads have noticeably blown up in demands over the past few decades. Every job went from requiring a bachelor if not a master, when most individuals could do with a few months and proper documentation. On top of that we have YoE for starters (wtf) and a giant wishlist of skills with no rhyme or reason. Despite your claim of demand and supply, competition is far more fierce than before, with popular companies getting their ridiculous wish list job ads blown up.
WFH is more widespread, but have you seen all those videos and memes of people attaching their mouse to a fan or whatever so their employer can't see that they're stepping away from their laptop? That would be unthinkable at my cushy tech job, but some employers are clearly using it as an opportunity for even more employee surveillance and asserting more control over their employees' time.
Yea I think us HN'ers are in a bit of a bubble here and many of us are unaware of the unprecedented amount of monitoring and measurement being done on employees in "normal" companies today, and not just office workers having their keystrokes counted. Service workers, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, everyone is now subject to monitoring and measurement of their behavior at a microscopic level! The last 20 or so years have been a real permanent sea change.
But for how long, I ask? There is now a pretty strong tendency to get people back to the office. It may seem like trying to turn back the clock, or put the genie back into the bottle, but in these times of economic downturn, I guess they figure they have a chance of succeeding...
I work not in dev but in the operations side of IT, and for system administration and help desk there has been a DRAMATIC shift away from WFH job offers, 8mos ago I would say 80% of the admin jobs I saw posted were remote... today that is less than 50%
I wonder if the housing market is also impacting this. It is a lot easier to pick up and move jobs when you don't own a house or have kids. It will be interesting to see how this changes in the future.
If I could have a job with a private office where I could close the door, have peace and quiet, and open the window as I wished, and I had a manager who simply gave me tasks to solve, like our parents had, I would also never quit and work there for 35 years. The working environment and conditions today are terrible in comparison, and people insisting to work from home is probably mostly a symptom of that.
I always liked going to the office to hang out (as a 35ish year old) but I would go home if I wanted to get something done. When afternoon hit the office was always too noisy. This was a typical cubicle office environment.
I got a pair of Sony WH-1000XM5's and they're like magic. Lightweight, incredibly comfortable, and the active noise canceling is like getting transported into another reality.
It's the first pair of headphones I've been able to wear for a full 10-hour flight and never feel uncomfortable.
The office is handy to confer with others when necessary, but you waste a lot of time just getting there and back. So much easier and less stressful to grab coffee in your boxers and just get on the computer at home. I realize some people need the brownian bounce of personalities, but a lot of people just don’t and managers and execs need to realize this, especially for work that is not people-facing.
At the time I cared about my career, so I couldn't hang out looking like a pod caster. And this doesn't solve the problem of people standing there waiting for me to take them off.
I would also argue that this correlates with the weakening of pro-labor political blocs. This includes but doesn't necessarily only include labor unions. I'm also talking news reporting (muck-raking) and labor watchdog orgs. Companies stopped feeling like they are obligated to society (including their workers) and are now mandated to operate only to make more money for the select few owner class.
Most of the anti-labor sentiment I’ve heard from non managers has been about systemic quiet quitting by union members. Some of those examples are 30 years old.
I know people that try to extract the maximum amount of value from their job with the least amount of effort. This typically entails taking extended mental health leave. They get 6-24 months of 0-100% base pay, healthcare, pto, and rsu vests while providing negative value to the organization.
I feel like these "take advantage of the system people" are partially the cause of stricter monitoring and leeway.
> I feel like these "take advantage of the system people" are partially the cause of stricter monitoring and leeway.
But these people are so obviously detected it makes no sense. They are not even trying to hide. They could be the cause of stricter legislation, not monitoring.
I think everyone has a good measure about the value of the people they are directly in contact: direct coworkers, bosses and subordinates. You can ask other people when in doubt. I'm not claiming this solves every problem, my point is that monitoring is usually completely unnecessary and creates an oppressive atmosphere.
> But these people are so obviously detected it makes no sense. They are not even trying to hide.
Why would they try to hide? If their employment agreement or their company's benefits clearly spell out a way to get 6-24 months of leave, how is it wrong to simply choose to do what's spelled out? How did "making use of benefits that are clearly written out and allowed" turn into "taking advantage of the system"?
I take advantage of 100% my company's 401(k) match. Am I taking advantage of the system? How about someone who takes their full maternity leave? Should too many people who do so be a cause of stricter legislation?
If the entire company fully utilizes their unlimited PTO, then open ended policies will become less open ended... Unlimited PTO and sick days become tracked PTO and sick days. Which brings us to the original point of employers tracking their employees more.
They're only partly responsible. Management has a tendency to optimize everything and big structures/corps are rarely fine grained, they like synthetic and uniform rules that are easy to monitor. It's a subtle cultural shift.
> What if they're experiencing mental health issues?
The people I know that do this use the time and money for a full time vacation as they travel the world. I am not sure public or private healthcare should fund people's (mental health) vacations.
Well, a vacation probably isn't hurting their mental health. I assume it's short term disability insurance that's picking up that bill. I wonder who actually ends up working more days - a French worker who gets all kinds of leave by law, or an American who maxes out their private insurance benefits? I really couldn't say, but I just can't get all that angry at a worker getting the benefit here.
I just had a thought that there's a turning point in parts of the economy, whereas before the group/company was always attractive, usually they were people smarter and better organized, you'd want to join in because the benefits were obvious. Nowadays network/software is flipping that relationship around. Many many people are only perceiving negative aspects of workgroups (management, politics, commute, salary games) because being on your own is possible now.
I think the problem is when you start trying to get away with doing less than what you're paid for. For example, taking short cuts, hiding issues, or neglecting other responsibilities. In many roles, this would probably work for quite a long time but create massive long-term issues for the company.
Does that matter if the company allows the culture of 18 months then new job?
It's the company's job to create a long term culture. If anything people who can hide bad stuff for 18 months then get a 30% pay raise are simply optimizing for the reward mechanisms in front of them.
From post-WWII and into the 70’s, American[1] workers had it good. Not because employers were nice but because the work of socialists had eventually payed off in the form of social democratic concessions. Enter the Baby Boomer who entered the workforce in the 60’s: employers were probably “nice” and “fair”.
Now the “Mills” and “Zs” get to enter the workforce after decades of neoliberalism. Employers are no longer “nice” and “fair”. Not because they are worse people but because they don’t have to be.
[1] This Swiss website uses American pop-sociological concepts for some reason.
Back in the day that the author initially started working, the nature of the relationship was probably much more balanced: the employee got a decent wage, was trusted to fulfil their duties with reasonable concessions and freedom (sometimes possibly doing overtime if necessary, but also being able to leave early on days when they had to take care of their kid), and they probably had much better implicit labor protections: in the event of economic downturns, the company was much more accommodating and tried its best to take care of the employee. In other words, the employer was trusted and the employee was trusted to "take care of each other". The job was "for life", after all.
Fast forward to these days: companies have stripped away a lot of the care they took for employees; in the event of economic issues, big corps will fire people basically at random. Most employees are monitored to the minute, and leeway from the employer is unheard of in most situations. All of this "taking care of your employees when things go awry" is expensive (like insurance) and employers have tightened their belts.
It's not surprising then that the employer also starts looking for ways of not doing more than they are contractually obliged to do.
It is mostly about the erosion of trust both ways.