I’m cursed to live at inbox zero with my paycheck extremely directly linked to how fast my response time can be.
I have a couple times in the past responded to something and then realized I should have caught up my inbox first because a later email changed the context. By now I’ve learned my lesson and don’t really respond to any until I’ve read them all.
Basically I work for a European company, so I usually start at 7 or 7:30 and have meetings until 11:30. Sometime after lunch I read through and pop out the threads that needs something from me and sort of triage what I am going to work on and then work on responding to them. It doesn’t drive me nuts at all. And people know if there is something that requires immediate attention from me they need to instant message me because I will usually answer those while I’m in meetings.
Skim my emails throughout the day. Quick responses get done instantly. Bigger things gets noted for later.
Everything else gets ignored and unread. If its important they will follow up.
Edit. I get 300 plus emails per day. Mostly not important.
I can’t remember the last time I got my inbox below 6000 unread. Edit: I’m on the same plan as Rugby.
Fairly certain responding to emails quickly has bumped by salary by at least 25% from what it was a few years ago. People appreciate a quick response. It shows you give a shit and know what you are talking about. I’m constantly at 0 unread.
What if I set an autoreply that says Go Fuck Yourself?
Some general musings here mostly inspired by my and close friends’ work situations, plus this Atlantic Interview about “Quiet Quitting” (dumb name, I agree)
I feel like what we’ve seen since Covid hit is the first part of a longer cycle of all the Boomers exiting the work force. Covid very clearly accelerated it with a massive amount of older workers opting to retire, but it’s still happening and has a ton of consequences for the labor force, mostly in the levels of management and higher.
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Boomers retire, emptying a ton of the leadership roles, leaving a hole of institutional knowledge in the company that can’t be immediately filled.
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Companies are cheap, refuse to raise salaries because why would they? They complain that there’s nobody good available to hire. This is mostly true because you have a mass exodus of high level older employees and not a 1:1 ratio of people qualified to fill them. It’s also true because, again, companies are cheap and refuse to pay more.
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Smart companies realize that good higher end labor is a scarce supply and in high demand. They begin to pay more for qualified employees, and the qualified employees out there start to jump ship.
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Companies insist they have to keep growing because it’s the #1 rule of capitalism.
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Despite taking a massive hit to their labor force and institutional knowledge base, they keep trying to force growth to happen. Employees who left their job earned a big raise, and so the company feels compelled to work them harder. Employees who stayed largely did not get the same big raise, but companies are still trying to do more with less and asking more of their same employees
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(Where we are now). Employees broadly across the spectrum are wondering why they’re putting up with all of this and whether or not the money is actually worth it. This will likely depress employee retention again due to burnout and companies will have even fewer human resources to attempt to do more with.
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Today I was on a call with big shot execs and a random lower level employee, in front of hundreds of people, was like “we are losing people because we are forcing everyone to come to the office then replacing them with fully remote hires, wtf?” Hilarious silence follows, career limiting behavior but tremendous entertainment!
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I agree with your overall observations, but maybe not this one. I think people that move get both more pay and less work. It’s the foolishly loyal workers who are getting fucked on both ends.
Oh I love corporate Emperor Has No Clothes moments.
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I agree with this. I see some people at my job who just don’t know their worth. They keep taking on more and more responsibility. Not only do they not get paid more its actually impeding their career trajectory because they’re too valuable in their role to promote.
I feel like maybe this is a self-inflicted wound? Isn’t the obvious response, “Yes, we’ve traditionally been willing to pay more for employees who show up in person because we believe they’re more productive. But now that everyone wants to be remote, we’re going to choose the remote employees with the lowest cost. So which is it going to be, return to office at current salary or take the pay cut?”
Or are they genuinely replacing with remote hires at full pay?
I’d be surprised if they’re not paying more for the new hires.
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I think for these kinds of roles there is a pretty tight band so everyone makes basically the same, remote or not. The middle manager types insist on people showing up, then after they quit HR just hires remote replacements because its the only way to fill the positions.
this is absolutely correct, you get what you negotiate and you never have more negotiation leverage than when you are interviewing
(that’s not entirely true, but it’s the easiest point for most people to who aren’t skilled/practiced at it to negotiate)
The other thing that sucks for the well intentioned loyal people is they tend to just take whatever is thrown at them until things get absolutely unbearable, then they snap. Which is then used to justify them continuing to be taken advantage of. “Man Karen your work product is good but we need to talk about your professionalism…”
I think I need to spend a year working a real job again. I think I’ve lost complete sight of how things work in a normal company nowadays.
This may be true in reality (don’t actually have any experience with it), but is super counterintuitive.
Feels like when you are interviewing, you should have the least leverage. (“Oh you’re asking for so much? We’ll just go with a different applicant.”)
Whereas if you’ve proven yourself valuable after being on the job awhile, the employer should be doing more to make you happy, since replacing people is a lot of time and effort.
This thread continuously makes me grateful I didn’t go the big corporate route. When I am 60% more productive I generally make >60% more money.
Our merger hasn’t officially happened yet but since it was announced 14 people have left or basically been told they should find other jobs. All of which are in the tax and HR department which makes sense to me.
I don’t feel particularly worried as it seems like the new overlords only purchased to gain market share in a sector they are not in.