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from the beatings-shall-continue-until-morale-improves dept.
American workers who have more flexibility and security in their jobs also have better mental health, according to a study of 2021 survey data from over 18,000 nationally representative working Americans.
The study, published Monday in JAMA Network Open, may not be surprising to those who have faced return-to-office mandates and rounds of layoffs amid the pandemic. But, it offers clear data on just how important job flexibility and security are to the health and well-being of workers.
[...] Overall, the study's findings indicate "the substantive impact that flexible and secure jobs can have on mental health in the short-term and long-term," the researchers conclude.
They do note limitations of the study, the main one being that the study identifies associations and can't determine that job flexibility and security directly caused mental health outcomes and the work absence findings. Still, they suggest that workplace policies could improve the mental health of employees.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday March 27 2024, @11:15PM (5 children)
Not necessarily.
I'm very lucky: I have a dream job. I'm basically set for life because the company I work for has been growing consistently for 40 years, and the skills I need to do my job are hard to come by and long to acquire. So I'm extremely unlikely to ever be fired.
On top of that, I get to do pretty much anything I want with any budget I want, no questions asked. I mean I have tasks to complete like anyone else of course. But if I decide to go on a tangent and research something or other related to our products, I'm free to do so and I don't have to justify why or the money I spend on what I do, because my employer is confident that whatever activity I engage in will result in something of value for the company.
And if that wasn't enough, the entire company is friendly without exception: there's no toxic culture or toxic workers where I work. We respect each other, and we're encouraged to help one another or not, depending on how extraverted or introverted you are.
I am genuinely happy to go to work every morning because I know I'll be doing something interesting with people I enjoy being around of. I've been on the job market long enough to know the position I'm in is ultra-rare.
THAT to me is the ultimate luxury.
And so, while I'm paid well, I'm probably not making as much as I could be making at my age and skill level. But I'm not asking for a raise or extra vacation, because I'm so satisfied with all the other aspects of my working life that I'm happy to take the pay cut.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday March 27 2024, @11:36PM (2 children)
Uh huh [youtu.be] -- sounds, er, fantastic.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday March 28 2024, @12:06AM (1 child)
See? It's so rare in the workplace you can't even imagine that it's actually a desirable thing.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday March 28 2024, @11:33AM
I understand, Roscoe. I have had two of those. A real pleasure to work there. Actually, I never got off work - what I did was so challenging it literally consumed me.
In both cases, I was working for the guy who either owned the company or was the top guy in the division. No office politics. No middlemen. I understood what I needed to build, and it was a no-hold-barred effort to make it so. And I was pretty good at it.
In one case, I got kicked out of paradise as a result of a buyout, and middlemen with all their egos didn't set well with me and my own ego. Well, gotta admit I am terribly set in my ways, and mostly not complicit with short term goals. I have my own way of doing things, often with my own tools. Kinda like a pro golfer who plays best with his own private set of clubs. Don't issue me a company computer and think I am going to be proficient with it. I have spent decades with my own machines.
The other one was the owner died and I had a strong idea the other owner didn't like the relationship I had and wanted to rein me in to a corporate structure.
I have no intention of becoming someone else's boss. I work with team mates. Not subordinates. Only difference, I have a engineering degree. The guy I was to supervise has 20 years experience building the company's products. I was a consultant. Not an employee. In my mind, he outrankes me. He has been with that company for 20 years. Me: 4. It was challenging work. A lot of control system design for stepper motors driving loads with multiple mechanical resonance phenomena. I cherished working with him, not competing, but working together to make our machine the finest in existence. There were several avenues of exploration to follow...I wanted to use the DSP techniques I worked with in aerospace to track out the resonances ( I had multiple resonances - some magnetic ones in the motors, and some resonances in the positioners ). I was going to implement a transversal filter much like the ones we used to characterize multipath RF commlinks. But that takes time and I need to communicate with other engineering types, not a schedule and charge number accountant guy.
I have had some really unnecessary stressors due to other people trying to force me to do things I don't agree with, yet they want me to assume responsibility for it. This is my equivalent of capping a container of liquid and bringing it to a boil. Something is going to go. And it's not pretty.
For me, it's piles of twisted scrap metal where a useful machine once stood. For the office executive, it's a report with some bullet points .
I saw what those micromanagers did to other companies; I want no part of doing that to anyone else.
Kinda a moot point now. I am now mostly into building solar panel power combiners and 304AH LiFePO4 cell balancers for retirement fun. Hopefully, I will end up with a nice set of 48VDC batteries, and matched sets of 48VDC refrigeration / HVAC compressors which I will use for food, comfort, and thermal energy storage by phase-change of water, as it's far cheaper to bank thermal energy via ice than it is to store it as electrical energy in lithium cells.
I envy you for finding such a thing and not have some outside things wipe it out.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 28 2024, @12:55AM (1 child)
>I'm very lucky: I have a dream job.
Me too. But I'm in my 50s. Over the past 10 years I have watched a lot of coworkers in their 20s leave this dream job for things they apparently want more.
One nice trend in our department is: people screw up one way or another, often rather significantly in ways that won't come out for several years. They know this, and bail for another company before it becomes clear how bad they screwed up. Yeah, we are stuck fixing their mess, but the company is still quite secure financially, and the screwups won't be repeating their mistakes in our department again. This outflow dramatically lowers our toxic contingent, which is already pretty low to start with.
>know the position I'm in is ultra-rare.
My position isn't ultra rare, but it's rare enough to warrant staying put. The majority of jobs out there aren't worth staying put in, but back to TFA: stressed out employees without financial security often don't have the time or energy to find better employment.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 29 2024, @04:44AM
From what I've heard, there are two kinds of careers: many years in the same job at a good company, or job hopping from one bad company to the next. The latter has been my experience. Can't help some of that job hopping. Startups often fail and not because of anything I did or didn't do, it's because the founders had expectations and plans that didn't work out. Should they have known better? For the most part, yes. And I could've been smarter too, with more street smarts and less technical chops.
For one of these startups, they hired me to be the chief programmer. Said they had a method of comparing images all worked out, but needed a crack programmer like me to optimize their terribly slow system for speed. I jumped on that far too quickly, without asking them nearly enough hard questions. Then, when I arrive, they tell me that actually, they hadn't tested on any images, only text, because their code couldn't handle the quantity of data needed to process an image. What?! They lied. But as long as the money was good, was that okay? I took the pay, and got to work, first increasing its capacity so it could handle images.
As expected it was terribly slow, needing 20 minutes to compare 2 images. Their idea to speed it up was to swap out C++ iostream for the old C stdio. That sped the code up, yes, to 12 minutes. Then I said to them, okay, let me show you why you made a good choice in hiring me. I figured out what their code was doing, realized I could use a transform that was way faster than their method, and implemented that from scratch. Took me the better part of a month to get it coded and running. My version, before I'd done any optimizing, took 2 seconds to compare 2 images. Also, with their code for comparison, I saw occasional different output. I checked by hand, and found that my code produced correct output, and theirs was wrong.
So there I am patting myself on the back for a speedup from 12 minutes to 2 seconds. We were now able to run thousand of comparisons in an hour, instead of needing a whole week to do just a handful. Another huge speed increase I did was show the college kids they'd hired how to do batch processing of images, instead of using Photoshop. But all this served to show was that their image comparison method did not work. The slower code had enabled them to cherry pick the data and kid themselves that they had a working method. Shortly after this discovery, the pay dried up. They begged me to stay on and keep working for them for free. And I said, sure, I'll work for free, if you can persuade the apartment owners I'm renting from to let me live there rent free, and the nearby grocery to give me free food. Oh, you can't do that? Then, bye bye!
The boss did try to make amends. Sort of. He proposed that I join his financial backers at their company on the other side of the continent. He didn't explicitly say so, but it became painfully clear that his attempt to make amends was actually a set up. He was trying to manipulate me into a do-or-die situation. Make their fantasy work, or your life blows up and you lose your home and your car. Lot of managers believe in that sort of thing. I refused to go along with that scheme. Then he proposed that I go to the other side of the ocean to work in a teaching position. Um, no. He'd shown a certain deviousness and I no longer trusted him at all. He was something of a fraud, too. A PhD and a professor, and he cherry picks data? WTF? No good scientist does that!
At a defense contracting gig, it was a similar story in the expectations, but wholly different in the environment. Much more hostility and suspicion. The military boys had unrealistic expectations, but it took a while for this to become clear. Meantime, they were trying to make it happen with their characteristic military style bullying. Throw in some sales pitches from rival defense contractors who were only too happy to tell those military idiots what they wanted to hear, that they could do the work wanted (they were lying, of course, but the military boys couldn't tell who to believe), and the constant reminders that failure could be construed as treason and us punished for that with prison time, and things were plenty stressful. Greatly magnifying the stress was our own management's incompetence and decision to feed them bull. The whole thing ended in a massive trainwreck. Management tried to pin the blame primarily on me, getting me escorted off the base, but it didn't work. The military cancelled my employer's contract anyway, and so everyone else lost their jobs too. I have never been so relieved to lose a job as that one.
And so, I decided that as soon as I had enough saved up, I would do early retirement.