I moved from the Bay Area to SoCal because of family. Did programming here in my own company for a while. Made money, but not enough. Did some work in housing (industry I was in before programming (I’m old)). Hated that. Played poker for a while. Looked for something new and like construction stuff and saving the world from global warming.
Solar being more lucrative than programming is not a reason I would have expected, especially since I’m sure you weren’t bad at it.
It wasn’t the programming that was the problem. That was my own business. It was the sales that was the problem. (I barely did any and would just add features because that’s more fun than sales).
Anyway, I went into housing (finance for low income and senior housing) after leaving that programming gig and the money there was good, but I hated it.
Couldn’t you have gotten a programming gig with someone else, though? I mean if money was the only issue.
Probably. At this point my dad was sick, my kids were little, there weren’t the wfh possibilities there are now, the software scene in SoCal wasn’t like it is now and software jerbs were pretty much all a decent commute.
You don’t want a paper trail in the government.
(Is my guess 
)
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Most people do absolutely nothing at work. Like less than 30 minutes of actual work during the day. Their job is to do one thing that almost always doesn’t need doing.
It’s exactly what riverman said. Most people are incredibly unproductive at work, it’s a very low bar to clear.
The place where this generally isn’t true is minimum wage type jobs. “If you can lean, you can clean.”
Yeah, but those aren’t the ones that are transitioning to WFH
I’ve had white collar jobs where I could easily do the work of 4 other full time employees with my same job title.
In almost all cases, if you tell your manager this, they will a) assign you more work with no additional pay, resulting in b) a situation where you never get promoted because you’re too valuable in your current role. And if you ask for a pay raise you are inevitably “already at the top of the band.” Corporate America is so stupid.
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+1
Only thing I’d add is that you don’t even have to tell your manager this. If they sense you can and will do it, then the same course of events will take place.
Another support for this is thesis that most companies moderately hit by COVID quickly fired 15- 20 percent of their workforce with most of the remainder working remotely with basically no impact on performance in average
It’s not the CEO’s job to do that, it’s the managers job. And the manager gets kudos (and compensation) directly in proportion to how many people they manage. Whether those people perform or not (because there really isn’t that good of a way to accurately measure performance in these settings).
Well they don’t do “nothing”, they outsource jobs to India and stuff all the time. Particularly for rote tasks where grinding for X hours a day is exactly twice as valuable as working for X/2 hours per day.
I think for many jobs it’s actually perfectly sensible to compensate someone for the things that they achieve rather than the time they spend doing it. If the most important task for the day is to, say, generate an analysis of Q2 sales and present the relevant facts to the team, if someone can finish that in an hour and someone else takes all day why should person A get paid less? And as @Riverman points out, why would person A decide to work super hard for the rest of the day if they’re outperforming their peers? And if you are the manager, why would you risk making person A disgruntled? It’s actually a pretty natural outcome of the implicit incentives that a lot of the best people, people you can count on to do something well and do it efficiently, don’t work really long hours unless you give them some very explicit reward to do so. When I worked as a consultant with billable hours I worked way longer because someone was counting up the hours, and I got paid more for racking up big billable hours. In my current job, I work plenty but I can dial it down when I feel like it and there’s no immediate punishment and more importantly there’s no explicit lost bonus or promotion.
I mean they have a major round of layoffs every 3-5 years…
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One thing I’ve truly never understood is why big companies don’t raid retail/fast food/restaurants. Those jobs SUCK, and anyone willing to do them is a prime candidate to transition to a white collar job and be successful. $50k, health care and a predictable schedule would be life changing for these people. It’s probably as simple as firms hiring for “experience” while not wanting to spend money on training.
Which touches on a core point here: most people simply will not work hard, so you can’t just fire people and replace them with better, you’re almost always replacing them with a similarly useless person who will screw stuff up for a while before they learn the organization. If everyone was smart and motivated it would be a lot harder to succeed!
Let’s face it, a lot of decision makers at big companies think (consciously or unconsciously) that retail workers are inherently inferior and could never succeed in a white collar job.
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Yeah, that’s it. Also, a lot of people can immediately name who is productive and who isn’t in their teams but they are also often wrong because of the subjectivity.
Depends on what for. We have an informal policy not to put stuff in writing that we wouldn’t want to see on the front page of a major newspaper, or that we wouldn’t want to show up in an access to information request. But there’s other times we purposely get people we’re working with on files to on the record if we think it’ll be necessary to show someone later on.