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posted by Snow on Tuesday December 13 2016, @10:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-just-what-our-corporate-overlords-want-us-to-think dept.

You’d think striking it suddenly rich would be the ultimate ticket to freedom. Without money worries, the world would be your oyster. Perhaps you’d champion a worthy cause, or indulge a sporting passion, but work? Surely not. However, remaining gainfully employed after sudden wealth is more common than you’d think. After all, there are numerous high-profile billionaires who haven’t called it quits despite possessing the luxury to retire, including some of the world’s top chief executives, such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

But it turns out, the suddenly rich who aren’t running companies are also loathe to quit, even though they have plenty of money. That could be, in part, because the link between salary and job satisfaction is very weak.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 13 2016, @03:23PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday December 13 2016, @03:23PM (#440812) Journal

    When the shit really started hitting the fan and you needed everyone producing 200%, they could just go "Yah, well i'm the fuck outta here, i don't need this shit... i'm freakin' rich" and have them walk on you.

    I'm really trying to make sense of a case where this 200% thing seems like reasonable rhetoric at all. If an employer talks in those sorts of numbers, I'm probably out the door on day one anyway.

    On the one hand, there's the rational perspective where 100% is actually maximum effort or whatever, and all this BS about "giving 110%" all the time is just nonsense. In that case, even expecting 100% for extended periods will lead to rapid burnout and actually decrease productivity due to burnout effects. It's more reasonable maybe to expect 60-70% on a normal basis, pump it up to 80-90% for brief periods of crisis.

    But for you, if 200% is something like "maximum," and you're normally expecting only 110%, then you're actually expecting everyone to generally operate at 55% of capacity but acting like it's some great effort. The cognitive dissonance involved in such nonsense is enough to make me want to walk out the door on day one. And it's also just teaching everyone to act badly, "Yeah -- I know I could be doing better, but he only expects X, and I'm already giving a little more than that, so I'm good. Let's not show him what we're anywhere near capable of..."

    Now, on the other hand, if 200% is relating to something more quantifiable, like say number of working hours, or actual output of some widget or something, then what you're saying is also unreasonable. Maybe, in a severe crisis, you might expect people to do that for a day or two... ONCE in their career at your company. But if you're having an extended crisis that requires people to work twice as many hours as normal or produce twice as much stuff as baseline productivity for more than that, or if those "crises" occur on a regular basis, then the problem isn't "disloyal" workers who might walk -- the problem clearly is with the management who are creating these crises by refusing to staff properly. Either that, or if extra staff isn't affordable, the business is in danger of going under anyway, so I don't blame someone who wants to walk.

    If even a rich person has any pride in their work, they're going to stick around for a short crisis. But my experience is that people who use rhetoric like "giving 110% all the time" and then expect you to "give 200%" are frequently the kind of folks with irrational demands for workers, and that irrationality grows even stronger in moments of crisis. Thankfully I've never worked for such a company, but I have a couple close friends who have. I don't at all blame people who wouldn't want to continue working under such conditions.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:55PM

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:55PM (#440844) Journal

    Amen brother. Not even machines can operate at 100% duty all the time, why should we think people can? Where does people like this learn basic math? 100% is ALL there is.

    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday December 13 2016, @05:52PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Tuesday December 13 2016, @05:52PM (#440881)

      In engineering, you de-rate things as much as 50% so that they will work reliably for a long time.

      In that case, maybe 200% is the real maximum. However, at that power lever, you will get premature wear and possible failure.

      In the case of expecting workers to give 200%, maybe they are expected to exceed safe working loads, or sprint from station to stain fast enough that they risk injury.

      As you said, worker are not robots.