There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

> The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

I started browsing spaces like /r/cscareerquestions and joined a few Discords to get a sense for what young devs are being exposed to these days. It's all very toxic and cynical.

I've noticed an inverse correlation between how much someone is immersed in Reddit, Twitter, and Discords and how well they function in a business environment. The Reddit toxicity seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle with evil managers. I've had some success getting people to chill out and drop the Reddit vibes, but some young people are so hopelessly immersed in the alternate reality that they see in social media that it's hard to shake them free.

10 years ago I'd pretty consistently run into 4chan-types as well (I was browsing 4chan as well, so I'm not immune to this).

There's definitely an aversion to treating real life and "the internet" separately in a certain cohort of people. But the kinda edge-y meanness gets really weird when it's applied to coworkers and the like.

> I've had some success getting people to chill out and drop the Reddit vibes

How did these issues manifest? And what approach worked for tackling them?

> The Reddit toxicity seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle with evil managers

What you’re saying is very true unfortunately and is going to be a real problem. It not only affects how you view your employers and companies but also your peers. If you’re exposed to extreme views even before you start your first job, what happens when you eventually start your first job?

>seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy

Is this not true to a first approximation though? I mean you do have to "hide your power level" in some way, but the fact that the employer isn't your friend or family is a good working model to keep in the back of your mind. It's a prisoner's dilemma type situation, and defect/defect seems to be the equilibrium we've converged at.

It’s not that simple. Even if you take the cynical view that the company is your adversary, the other people who work at the company (including founders, investors and execs) are actually playing a career-long collaborative game rather than a one-off prisoners dilemma.

Outrage yields clicks/revenue. So there is a financial incentive for media and influencers to fuel extreme narratives.

With that said, there are truths and lessons to be learned on the internet. I think it's possible to take that benefit without developing an overly negative outlook on everything.

There’s a big difference between somebody not being your friend and somebody being your enemy. I’ve had a similar experience with a sub par employee, who at some point admitted that he wasn’t doing his best at work because he was "only there to exchange his time for money, not make any meaningful contributions".

That guy was absolutely immersed in internet culture, making him less self-aware and very unpleasant to work with.

This mindset existed well before reddit; hell, it existed well before the Internet.

Some people simply show up at work solely to put food on the table, doing the minimum amount of work so as not to get fired.

It's true for many companies, but to be successful it helps to act as though it isn't.

Senior leadership sincerely believes that they are a force for good even when they are doing things to harm their workers, their customers, or society at large. It's human nature to feel that way, and to contradict that is to offend them and risk getting labeled as "hopelessly immersed in Reddit toxicity".

And the easiest way to keep up the act is to fool yourself, because most of us aren't good at faking it. Find the best in senior leadership and emphasize it to yourself; find win-win opportunities (or make them!). Maybe it's even true that the company is a force for good! (I genuinely believe this about all my past employers in varying amounts, but I've been choosy and have made sacrifices.)

But be stern about never putting yourself in a position where you can be taken advantage of, because senior leadership, being weak humans like all of us, will succumb to temptation.

The employer might not be the enemy but the employer certainly is not a friend either. Also its expected of young people to spend their time off with these things as well. All this plus the constant fear of being laid off results in people simply not caring too much. Which is reasonable. Maybe the bar is simply too high for what you get?

This mindset is completely sane. Sorry but if you work 40+ hours a week and barely can afford a vacation there is no reason for me to work hard. Especially not if I see managers with new cars every year.

The mindset exists because historically commercial entities have often been horrendously abusive to their workers. Dickens, anyone?

The flip side is the terror of an entrepreneur seeing their enterprise struggle.

In some sense this is the standard gambit of wage labor. If you want people to act like they have skin in the game, then they must have that. Tech is notable as a field for incentivizing overperformance and mission-driven-ness.

Companies are amoral profit-seeking automata. Individuals, even those in senior leadership, have only limited capacity to act in opposition to the company's nature.

Workers can definitely forge mutually beneficial relationships with such entities but anthropomorphizing them leads to sorrow.

Corporations are the reason for lobbyism and wealth accumulation which actively damage my personal quality of life. Its only fair for me to not view them in a positive manner. They view me as an asset, I view them as necessary evil to afford housing and food. I should not anthropomorphize them, yes, but I can anthropomorphize the management and stakeholders. And if they are greedy and behave as such, its my good right to be repulsed by them.

> >seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy

> Is this not true to a first approximation though?

No, not at all. The company wants the employee to do well so that the team does well and the company overall does well. If the company was "the enemy", they company would be wishing for the employee to fail, which is not why they spent a lot of time and money to hire you in the first place.

Now, of course the company isn't your friend (or family) either. The employer doesn't exist in the friend-enemy axis, they're just an employer which is a different type of relationship.

Also, who is "the company"? People in upper management and HR, i.e. those who see you as a number on a spreadsheet but don't ever interact with you personally.

But most of your interaction is with your first and second level managers who are specific people. One would certainly be well advised to cultivate a professional friendship with them. Not only will you do better, but work will be a lot more pleasant.

> "only there to exchange his time for money, not make any meaningful contributions"

I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting these roles, instead of the up or out model.

There is in many teams a lot of busywork that for various reasons can't be automated (or new incoming busywork that takes over when the older one gets automated).

If an employee is content with just handling this kind of lower level busywork and go home at 4:30pm in exchange of not pursuing raises and promotions, there's nothing wrong with that. That work still needs to get done, so rather than getting a never ending stream of junior new hires constantly having to get trained, I'd be fine with having someone who is happy to stay at that level and take it easy.

As someone approaching 50 years old, "workplace like they're going into battle with evil managers", not sure where you are located, but in southern europe countries it has always been like this, regardless of the job.

That is why many countries still have a strong union culture, everyone gets exploited to the bones and they should be happy to have a job if at all.

It is quite depressing sadly, but that is what happens when many managers lack business education and see employees as replacable cogs without rights.

Only in places with SV like culture.

In many countries being a developer is a plain office job just like everything else, and everyone that doesn't want to move into management after reaching seniority is seen as a failure.

> The company wants the employee to do well

> Also, who is "the company"?

The company doesn't "want" anything other than to become a bigger pile of money — it's an amoral abstract construction, lacking human wetware and all its messy idiosyncrasies. I think I'd express similar sentiments in a slightly different way: the company benefits when it gets maximum value for minimum outlay over the lifetime of the employment relationship.

That model allows for companies which act in ways wildly counter to the interests of their workers. For example, the private equity firms asset-stripping Toys 'r' Us and KMart mostly "cared" that the workers at a given retail facility not quit before they could be let go.

Up or out generally stops once someone reaches engineer or sr engineer. Most of the time a jr engineer is going to need substantial mentoring and support. Them never moving beyond that point likely results in a net negative gain if you need another person always available to provide that for their entire time there if it goes beyond 1-2 years.

How do candidates express that in interviews?

> I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting these roles, instead of the up or out model.

But companies live or die by talent / passion density. If you try to only hire talented / passionate people, then many of them will still just be fit for grunt work so grunt work still gets done. If you on the other hand hire for grunt work you wont find much talent at all so company fails after a while.

Thanks for fighting the good fight. I know I left Reddit for Digg (btw Digg's back) because of all that negativity.

Sometimes it is, sometimes not.

In 2009 I worked for a really chill company with small but nice management. The owner/CEO wanted to turn it into a worker-owned co-op.

But one of my coworkers was so stuck in the "management is evil" mindset that he became hard to work with. (Although he also radicalized politically; I think he went from SNP to UKIP.)

> thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle with evil managers.

Given how many managers are strongly steeped in the mindset that every IC is an innately lazy bastard out to scam the company out of as much money as possible for doing as little work as possible, and explicitly design their policies that way (not to mention structuring their personal conduct that way), this is probably wise.

Hopefully it can galvanize more of them to form or join unions! Labor power is a vital tool in the current age to take back some of what we have lost over the past few decades to burgeoning corporate power.

The way I explain it is that your company is not your friend, but that doesn’t make them your enemy.

The trap is when they see everything as a false dichotomy between friend and enemy. Enemies are something you avoid or even work against. When someone starts seeing their employer as the enemy and they don’t want to do things that help out their enemy, they trick themselves into poor performance out of spite.

Which leads to performance management and eventually firing if they don’t get a handle on it. This makes them even angrier, confirming their belief that their company is out to get them, leading to deeper spiraling into spite and poor performance.

Breaking someone out of that mentality is hard but everyone is so much happier once you’ve cracked them out of the “friend or enemy” dichotomous thinking.

It’s not media and influencers doing this, though. It’s Reddit comments and chronically online peers in their Discords.

Weirdly enough, streamers like Primeagen are actually disabusing juniors of some of these notions.

It’s the grassroots commentary sowing the seeds of discontent.

> Sorry but if you work 40+ hours a week and barely can afford a vacation

Software developers are relatively highly paid. When they start acting like they’re minimum wage workers flipping burgers at a dead-end job, they’re missing the big picture. That’s the problem I’m trying to communicate.

Yeah, a lot of Reddit seems to be people wallowing in their own unhappiness.

As far as the attitude toward employers, I kinda get it. A lot of these kids were sold the idea that college will mean a solid, lasting career and, pre-pandemic, a lot of companies were trying to sell themselves as a “family” and throwing cheap benefits around (ie. free food, beer, etc) only to yank most of that back during/after the pandemic.

It also doesn’t help that, inside US, it sometimes just feels like we’re trying to scam each other constantly. All of this is breeding a ton of cynicism.

Showing up to work and actually doing their job, even if it’s the minimum, would be an upgrade over the Reddit toxic mindset I was describing about.

The problematic juniors show up to their jobs determined to be uncooperative, sow discontent among coworkers, stonewall progress in meetings, and think they’re just going to job-hop to the next company before the performance management catches up to them. They see the jobs or even the concept of working to live in general as a scam and feel like they’re winning some deep cultural war if they collect paychecks while making life difficult for their manager.

This is a generalization. Salary in Europe is different to salary in the USA for example. I earn median wage currently. Also lots of non degree having devs out there that aren't 6 figure earners.

In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Something like the analogue to the “Reddit-infused worker” archetype, where leadership is inappropriately cynical about their workers and see them as “the enemy”?

> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Of course. If you don’t see that, you’re missing the point.

In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employee? Or do you assume all employees are inherently good and do appropriate work for their pay and don’t need constant performance management to simply do their job?

In my posts I’m not talking about all juniors. I’m talking about a problematic subset. You seem to be assuming I’m generalizing to all of them. I am not. This is a phenomenon specific to a subset of juniors that is unfortunately a repeated pattern where they all share some very common and obvious characteristics. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to break them out of that mindset and have them join their much happier peers, but to be honest once someone is that deep into the cynical mindset it’s hard to wake them out of it.

> lot of companies were trying to sell themselves as a “family”

Has your company actually done this?

When I was doing mentoring I heard this complaint all the time, but literally no one (juniors on first jobs in this case) could point to an instance of their employer saying it. They had all picked it up from Reddit as something the archetypical company did, and they felt obligated to punish their company for it.

Similar problem happens with take-homes: About 90% of the take-home interview problems people shared in the #interviewing channel were entirely reasonable, short, and clearly not real work. Yet many had picked up this idea that take-home problems were unfair because they were “a week of unpaid labor” or that companies were using them as a tool to extract free work from candidates. So they tried protest the concept of take-homes and stated they would refuse to do them in protest. Of course, when they actually received one for a job they wanted they would abandon that mentality and do the problem, and in many cases they preferred that to doing in-person interviews. Yet the mentality remained that take-homes were evil exploitation and they must rally against it because they read so many Reddit comments about it being “unpaid labor”.

> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employee?

Of course — I implied as much via the “inappropriately cynical“ characterization.

The tension between capital and labor is inescapable and ancient.

I didn’t think you were generalizing to all juniors. Rather, what caught my interest was that before this last message I perceived the perspective of capital in your words.

Companies require different attributes in various roles. Those attributes extend far beyond passion and talent. The trouble with hiring based on those two attributes alone is that you're setting up a culture where the people who do the necessary grunt work are failed hires and where the employee themself feels held back. In otherwords, you are setting up a toxic workplace.

> the fact that the employer isn't your friend or family is a good working model to keep in the back of your mind.

That's completely different than being your enemy.

What you want to avoid are work environments where most workers are focused on gaming internal politics to get ahead. Those environments are soul destroying.

But that's not all work environments. And most work environments are some mix of internal politics and wanting to actually create good and useful products.

Then find a different job with better compensation.

That's the tradeoff you're making for universal health care and generous public benefits.

I never saw a company hire grunt programmers separately though, and when you suggest that they should people also get angry at you here. So what do you want really? Do you want to have to pass the same tests as these roles, or do you want to pass grunt tests and have a different role? You can only have one of those.

Who would've thought that decades of wage repression that fell especially badly on the young would lead to a surly and uncooperative workforce.

Yes. if the work is installing software and being on pager duty then we can really stop pretending that identifying O(nlog(n))is relevant. And if the job is to write a compiler optimizer, it's pretty important you know the basics of CS (like decidability).

smashing these two together and pretending they are the same has been a huge source of cognitive dissonance in the industry and serves no one.

To add clarity, that's caused by social programming not human nature.

>It's all very toxic and cynical

You're commenting on a blog post by a B2B SaaS company that sells AI engineer stack ranking with a cute ball of yarn mascot and you're wondering why they're cynical?

>Has your company actually done this?

Ive worked for plenty of companies that pretended that they cared about the human resources and not one that has ever been upfront about the fact that they will lay you off for a bump in the stock price without blinking.

>Similar problem happens with take-homes: About 90% of the take-home interview problems people shared in the #interviewing channel were entirely reasonable, short, and clearly not real work. Yet many had picked up this idea that take-home problems were unfair because they were “a week of unpaid labor”

It's largely been my experience that a lot of companies think an 8 hour take home is actually 2.

They tend to be badly constructed and full of ambiguities that require you to read the mind of the test setter.

Of course the people who set them dont know this and they never test their tests. My experience on the other side of the hiring desk is that rank amateur shit is the norm.

The "unpaid labor" thing happened to me once, I think. It was a company that wanted somebody to build an X. Take home was "build an X". Not common, doesnt happen to juniors, but it happens.

Corporate America could clean up its act or Gen Z could force itself to grin and bear it with a smile it like you seem to want. I wont hold my breath for either to happen.

> I've noticed an inverse correlation between how much someone is immersed in Reddit, Twitter, and Discords and how well they function in a business environment.

That's probably due to the sample bias.

Have companies given any of these young people a reason to think differently?

“I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it further” has been the majority of my career and my peers. Very few people(as a percentage of population) actually have had enough leverage at any point to not have to eat shit if their company says so.

There are also people marketing things on Reddit to young people: alt coins, option trading, sports gambling that have an incentive to say working is for suckers, your only hope is to get rich quick. I think most young people are smart enough (or cynical enough) to reject the get rich quick schemes. But the same cynicism allows them to accept the messages that tell them that things are hopeless for their generation, work is unrewarding and you are way behind.

The need to search for what they are being exposed to already outs them as being out of touch. Them coming to the wrong conclusion only cements their misunderstanding for both the industry's status-quo and the experiences lived by up-and-commers.

This is the type of toxic, cynical attitude GP is talking about. It doesn’t have to be this way, and you approaching it with this expectation is possibly creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Programmers are incredibly well paid.

> some young people are so hopelessly immersed in the alternate reality that they see in social media that it's hard to shake them free.

One of my favorite staff/principal engineers always begins Monday's by asking people what they did on the weekend. He always talks about the things he did - farmers market, local parade, etc.

It's shocking to many of the junior engineers. They generally do "nothing".

I disagree. The tendency towards self justification is a universal human trait. Even if some may overcome that tendency, it is still qualifies as “human nature”.

This is germane because while labor and capital may perceive each other as the “enemy” and may in fact act counter to each other’s interests, nearly everyone perceives their own actions as justified.

To the extent that there is “social programming” involved which could conceivably change (unlike “human nature”), it has to do with the acts themselves, not the strong impulse to believe that your own acts are justified.

I've had the same experience -- employees who do the minimum and then whine when (one case) asked for a raise or he'd quit and I said sgtm; and (a different person) I chose to mentor and promote other people on the team. Some people can't wrap their minds around the idea that our interests aren't always aligned, but sometimes they are and also why would I invest in someone who doesn't invest here. Mentoring and promoting people is one of the best pieces of my job, but my time is finite and I want to also spend it productively :shrug:

They just don't want to tell you because they don't think it's your business.

They had me sit down and pair program for a bit during my interview. On their real code.

> If you’re exposed to extreme views even before you start your first job, what happens when you eventually start your first job?

You are less likely to be taken advantage of?

I don't know why you come up with an ideological statement like that.

The management culture, anti software/nerd mindset among the population and eastern European competition in the offshoring market have a much bigger impact.

E.g. even though Germany is practicing mercantilist beggar thy neighbour export surplus policies, the country has failed to become an exporter of software or be known for quality software. Anyone who wants to work in the software industry is better off leaving the Eurozone and going to Switzerland where they get paid more in addition to the things you claim are the cause.

That's only true for the young. As they get older, or the exit grows large enough, some people smell that last iteration and defect hard.

Just the existence of the Bay Area tech antitrust suit and the pittance of a settlement should tell you otherwise. Who knows how sky high developer salaries would be if those companies hadn’t conspired to lower salaries during such a strong and low-interest-rate economy.

> The Reddit toxicity seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle with evil managers.

They aren't that wrong however. Over the last two-three years alone we've seen waves of layoffs. Layoffs from FAANGs hit the headlines, but so many more happened without hitting the news.

And the thing is young people... They adapt.

They usually don't have the cultural baggage we older people have, so they often see things for what they truly are without any rose-tinted-glasses from past better times.

Their grandparents were able to get a fairly stable job at a company, stay there until retirement and grow a family. Their grandparents were able to switch jobs IF they wanted to. On the other hand, kids nowadays know they will likely be fired at some point, irrespective of their performance, and that they need to play the game for what it is.

Can you really blame them?

The more likely outcome is going to be that these people will be left behind. If you came in with extreme views like say for things like DEI, would you be able to work that well with a female manager or a black coworker? If you came in with extreme views about lofty wage expectations or not working extra as a salaried employee, how likely are you to be hired or be put up for promotion? Keep in mind, we are not talking about reasonable takes, we are talking about extreme views that are formed solely through online spaces and not personal experiences.

I didn’t really approach it that way. The companies did to me. My experience with companies has been entirely that unless the money is already in my pocket, I should expect them to renege on the deal.

At this point it’s in the corporations court. If you have managed to generate a relationship with your labor force where they are no longer lying flat, but actively trying to cause sabotage like you described then I think you(the companies in question, not you in particular) share some of the onus on how we got here

Edit: and to be clear I’ve been working in tech for over a decade, this is not a perspective from a new grad with only the internet as their source of information. The younger generation has seen their older siblings and cousins getting fucked over more and more each year and we’re reaching the point of societal unrest where a large group of people no longer think the “deal” society is offering them is worth it

A subset are paid incredibly well. For arbitrary lines im going to put that at 250k+/year in comp by year 2-3 of your career.

Another large cohort is paid pretty well with salaries from 110k-150k by that same point who have effectively no negotiation power and are given “take it or leave it” deals with the only leverage being to find another job

And even for the incredibly well paid ones, as the other commentator noted, there’s documented proof of organized wage suppression by the corporations

To be fair in most jobs that is the relationship approach you need to not get screwed a lot of the time. Cs work has been one of the few exceptions because it was flush with money and in need of workers for so long.

That is the antidote the toxic attitude.

Go into business yourself for a bit and see the world from an entirely different angle. If you don't make it and come back to employment (most likely) you will be a much humbled and more enlightened person.

It's a simple business arrangement. Corporations give you money, you provide work.

Yes it's possible and maybe even common to be taken advantage of in a business arrangement but that doesn't negate the concept of honer. You have agreed to provide work for a set amount of money. If the other party isn't acting honorably you can leave the arrangement but otherwise you should fulfill your part of the deal as best you can.

When most parties act honorably society does well. When the concept of honer breaks down into lying, cheating and scamming as a way of life, society will collectively not do well.

As far as I'm aware, nobody ever improved the situation of society by acting dishonorably. The Reddit complainers should try forming their own Reddit society and see how it works out.

>And the easiest way to keep up the act is to fool yourself, because most of us aren't good at faking it.

The better way is to work for a company that doesn't suck.

I mean with as many 'who do these simple Google bugs last for years' posts we see on HN, how much of the grind and grunt work is getting done? If everyone thinks they are a superstar then anything that's not an A+ project ends up on a 'killed by Google list'.

As bad as big non-tech companies are at things I quite often see they are better at providing fixes and updates for the little hidden pieces in the background because they have people that aren't fighting their way up the ladder.

When you look at the quality and the dog eat dog mentality of many CEOs out there do you expect any different? If you can look at modern capitalism without a cynical eye it's very likely you've lived a pretty privileged life.

I mean really no, and yes I've been on both sides. Owners have skin in the game. That's why when Musk says we should work 80+ hours a week he should be summarily ignored. He stands to gain billions while the rank and file stand to gain ulcers and an investor class that fights against them getting health insurance.

The number of absolutely toxic business owners is insane.

No offense, but in America, this is true, employer are an enemy.

Reddit is american and trusting businesses is how we continue to fail.

Like mike tysons iconicquote, everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. You may have good intentions as a managsr until theres a "market correction".

In america, this business toxicity is well deserved and will only get worse.

Sure some may take defensive employee relationships to far but acting like this posture is toxic to appropriate self care is gaslighting.

Thats not reality though.

I didn't get laid off 3 times because I have a bad attitude. I got laid off because:

1) it was cheaper for the company to move the software department over seas

2) The business got sold to Amazon and as part of that process they had to downsize

3) Company collapsed due to leadership failure

I had a good attitude until I saw how disposable I was to these companies. You're an asset until you aren't.

Product finished? downsizing. Financial crisis that doesn't effect our industry? downsizing. Company about to IPO? downsizing.

Companies have no loyalty, you shouldn't either.

Not in comparison to the value they provide.

A grocery store I worked at tracked finances and they were available to all employees. The grocery store made $270 per worker per hour. New hires were paid less than 1/10 of the value they provided.

I can only imagine how much more exploitative tech is

You don't solve the problem by "humbling the workers".

The solution is rewarding people when a company is successful and more importantly not punishing hard workers. Right now people are under the impression that slacking and working hard will be equally rewarded, because that is the truth. Hard workers also get laid off so that CEOs can make a few extra bucks.

Send me a single job employment posting that is fair

No I should fulfill my part of the deal. In no way I am obliged to do it "as best as I can". If my employer isn't happy with my work, they can let me go. My employer is essentially exploiting my workforce for their gain and unfortunately this is not compensated fairly in most cases. I'll work hard if I actually believe in the cause and am treated fair. Otherwise its minimal effort that gets the work done.

Executives are almost solely focused on financial rewards.

Employees (middle management and down) are explicitly structured to use salaries (to reduce costs/earnings from going to them).

Salary is generally a flat monetary incentive, and bonuses aren't big enough typically. You make more money by promotion up a rigid hierarchy: so that is the true motivation.

And that is politics.

If you have salaries, you have politics, and a downward trend towards more of them.

Engineering workers are often idealistic, which is a different set of motivations to exploit by management for monetary advantage. But idealism/creation leads to turf wars and emotional investment in "your code", which is another entire axis of politics.

> not working extra as a salaried employee

This is not an extreme view :/

And? Part of the toxicity is coming from a misunderstanding that for some reason the company is morally obligated to keep offering you employment ad infinitum.

If the work runs out, find another job. Nothing wrong with that.

Agreed. I’m a senior dev. With rare exceptions I work 8:30 to 4:30.

My previous job gave us every other Friday off.

I get things done, do a good job and get nothing but positive feedback from my bosses.

Haha good catch. I wondered why the article leaned into AI so heavily in the second half

> or not working extra as a salaried employee

Getting paid to work is a normal expectation…

Cynicism usually doesn't help you, no matter how trendy it might be to be a cynic.

The more likely outcome is that you'll (intentionally or unconsciously) perform poorly, have a bad attitude, and always act like your employer is out to get you. Your managers will notice this and not like working with you. Eventually you'll get managed out or fired, and then your cynical opinion will be reinforced by this experience, even though it was avoidable.

I'm not saying you should think your company is your friend or your family (they're not!), and I'm not saying you should work uncompensated overtime, or buy into the whole company "mission" and "values" and stuff. But do go in with a healthy attitude, get your work done to the best of your ability, and act professionally and, sure, be friendly toward your coworkers, and develop relationships with them and your managers (professional ones, not personal ones, if that's not your thing). If your management still treats you poorly, then yes, absolutely, get out of there. But going in with a bad attitude isn't going to set anyone up for success.

It feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. If you go into a new job, full of cynicism, doing the bare minimum (or less), acting like everyone there is out to get you, then you shouldn't be surprised when you're the first to go when layoffs happen (or sooner, even).

Yes, the labor market has changed, and in many ways not for the better. But layoffs are not new. I remember my dad being afraid of them back when I was a teenager in the 90s. I remember him getting hit by one of them, even, and scrambling to figure out what to do (fortunately he was re-hired by the same company, in a different group). I survived layoffs in the three following decades; yes, the most recent waves were brutal, but I wouldn't say they were anything special compared to, say, ~20 years ago.

You can recognize a company for what it is (a capitalist organization that cares more about next quarter's numbers than whether or not you still have a job), but also be a positive, professional person, who goes in and does good work every day, gets along with coworkers and managers, and doesn't play games. You can be realistic without being a toxic cynic.

> And?

It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy like claimed above.

In fairness, many employers exploit their workers. Wages have been supressed for multiple decades. Rights stripped through arbitrary pay-for-play work agreements, etc.

Eventually you lose all goodwill and get a saturation of ill-will related to that exploitation, debt slavery through student loans or worse. Quite a lot of business people blind themselves to the reality.

Those that drink the kool-aid are always in the next round of layoffs, after they pulled 80 hour weeks to have a project come in on time. Its not reddit fueling this, its bad business behavior at scale unfortunately.

No one can fool everyone all the time. The deceivers are always eventually found out, and then its "we can't find anyone"...

The young listen to the stories of people who have accrued a certain amount of experience who are in their 40s now, and quite a lot of those stories are not success but rather exploitation, use and abuse, oh and now all the jobs went to AI... its a trend, and its going to get real bad because the old needed the young to take over those jobs to fuel their money-printing debt spree over the past 30 years. Demographics are destiny, and you either get slave labor, or you get movements towards letting things rot when the environment reaches a certain threshold, and is disadvantaged in the fullest sense of the term.

The number of absolutely toxic employees is also insane. Are businesses justified to treat employees as if all of them were that toxic? Should not employees then not treat their employers as if all of them are toxic?

That is true, but the problem is that nearly everyone believes it. Every dictator and revolutionary thinks they are doing good.

I can understand what you are suggesting, but the balancing act of assuming they are acting for the best and also ensuring you do not let yourself get taken advantage of is very difficult.

Try measuring how much house a median junior programmer salary will buy and compare it to how much house a median wage of the 1950s would buy.

The results will surprise you.

> their employer is their enemy

Without significant safeguards and in the average case, the employer seeks to extract more from you than it gives back. You on the other hand, must work or you will die. This is a power dynamic that positively stimulates the growth of bad behaviour. Knowing that has nothing to do with Reddit, it is an inherent fact of this system.

> The way I explain it is that your company is not your friend, but that doesn’t make them your enemy.

Or to hijack Bryan Cantrill, do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing your employer.

They are not your enemy, you are far too small for them to care.

I think it’s important to distinguish between human leadership and the capitalist entities they work within.

I’ve worked for multiple small businesses, led by wonderful humans, which ran out of money. When those businesses went under, it tore their leaders apart to let workers go — but those leaders were still constrained in how the could act by economic realities.

There are both leaders and workers who are too cynical about each other. But it makes sense to be guarded with every company, even if I think it’s debatable how best to act — and how we might dream of improving matters at the macroeconomic level.

I don't disagree about the number of absolutely toxic business owners and I've worked for a few of them.

But there are some real bad employees too that don't understand how the world works.

Maybe the toxic business owners should work in the coal mines for a bit?

No. opposition is not the right model

It’s just business. You have something they want, they have something you want. Try to take advantage of places where your incentives aligned and watch out when they are not.

CEOs are also employees. This is a weird thing where you have invented enemies in your head you’ve never talked to.

Yeah capitalism is sad in a lot of ways - particular the modes of possible value. But we are actually talking about working in hierarchical management organizations which have existed forever and have nothing to do exclusively with capitalism.

> Executives are almost solely focused on financial rewards.

This is not true at all. Far more important in upper management is ego - they will lose money to improve their legacy or beat a competitor.

> If you have salaries, you have politics, and a downward trend towards more of them

Nobody said politics do not exist.

So let’s take what you said at face value - management is paying for jobs but they are looking to cut costs, etc.

Is that arrangement something you can use to benefit your life for a season? Or an inherent war zone?

Framing DEI skepticism as an inability to work with minority or protected groups makes me think you don’t understand the position well.

I mean ... if a junior can stonewall a progress on a meeting then seniors there somehow horribly failed the meeting moderation. I have literally never seen that, because you can just make meeting without them the next time

Second, I seriously doubt juniors ability to "sow discontent" among more experienced seniors. They can latch on existing discontent, but juniors are too low on hierarchy and seniors have too much of opinions for juniors to have much power there.

It is not toxicity if they are expressing pragmatic reality of how employment works. It is just being respectful and direct.

Framing some of the extreme views of DEI as DEI skepticism makes me think you don’t understand the extent of radicalization that young unemployed people are going through.

> Keep in mind, we are not talking about reasonable takes, we are talking about extreme views that are formed solely through online spaces

You’re taking it out of context. I’m not talking about a 996 culture or regular overtime, I’m talking about ocasional extra push to make things work. Any full time salaried employee will tell you that it is completely acceptable to work extra here and there, when you are allowed to take it slow at times.

I think you may be imagining a disruptive person who can’t work with others, and then associating it with a political position.

This only applies to large monopolistic companies in an unregulated, thus nonfree market. The most companies, which actually perform the work in the country are small people, who have huge risk and not much money and generally have the company, because they like the work and want to create things. Most people are moral, otherwise we had far more crimes.

I wouldn't call the categories calcified in a conflict-oriented prescriptive ideology dating to the 19th century to be "ancient", but I suppose YMMV.

> It's true for many companies, but to be successful it helps to act as though it isn't.

"lie through your teeth 8 hours a day to people you see at least 5 days a week"

depends entirely on the size of the company, or size of the team.

Anyone who thinks their boss/coworkers are their friend is surely deluded. There is no loyalty in this day and age-- both from the employer and employee side.

Even asking "how was your weekend?" -- its implied that you just say good rather than sharing details of what you actually did -- they don't really care.

I’ve seen it. In my organization, open discussion and creating space for disagreement and alternate perspectives are the norm. A couple of junior programmers were upset about a process change, and weaponized the process to sow discontent at every retrospective, usually through vague “a lot of people have told me they’re unhappy about X” comments. A huge amount of energy was spent trying to take their concerns seriously and address them.

Eventually they were removed from the team. It should have been sooner, but the manager is very empathetic and supportive of his team. Morale immediately shot up and things are much better now, as well as more productive.

Not every workplace is a dog-eat-dog hellscape. In fact, I’d say they’re the minority. But you do reap what you sow: if you’re determined to see it as a zero-sum game and go looking for conflict, you’ll find it.

Even if you want the most cynical approach - networking is an essential aspect of career development. If you stick to just "job description during work hours" you won't get far.

Building a cohesive team involves sharing interactions like this. If you truly value your privacy, I suggest you come up with an alternative thing to discuss: sports, weather, funny stories, etc.

I've certainly had weekends where I very much did not want to share what i did, so I deflected in a way that kept the conversation going.

If HR is asking about where you were at 3:15pm on Saturday, and who you were with, and whether you were using work resources at that time, I would start to worry. But a very large and generic, "so what did you do this weekend" - where you are in the driver's seat, that's not the same thing.

When I look back at previous jobs, my strongest regrets are not building stronger interpersonal relationships with my coworkers. I've since rectified that.

Think of it this way, if you must: coworker relationships are owned by the company - personal relationships are owned by the employees. When you become friends with a coworker, you acquire an asset that will go with you when you leave the company. Much like a new skill, this asset will allow you to get higher pay somewhere else.

Any company has bigger ambitions than just you.

No it's not acceptable. At the very least they must let you take that extra time off at a moment of your choosing.

This applies to any CEO no matter the business size. Otherwise most people could afford life.

Small companies don't even have a CEO. Most people can afford to life or they would be dead now. :-)

The company boss won't afford treating his costumers like assets, because then he won't have costumers and bringing his children to the kindergarden will become the gauntlet.

> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Yes. My employer has gone all in on the AI bandwagon. To achieve this, they lay off around 10% of the workforce every February to free up capital for whichever AI fad they wish to pursue that FY, all the while spouting the usual bullshit about being a "family".

I could make a lot more money elsewhere working 12 month fixed term contracts, with possible extensions, than I do as a "permanent" employee doing effectively the same thing.

It would greatly surprise me to see one company owner paying themselves out equally to their employees. While that's not the case that person is exploiting their employees labor for their personal gain. And no, people cant afford life. They do so many things to meet months end, which cant go on forever.

qu'ils mangent de la brioche?

and yet their wages are still supressed

it sounds like you had a bad experience with two coworkers and are using them to generalize an entire generation.

I’m not sure how you’re getting that at all. GGP said they didn’t see how junior developers could “sow dissent” and I shared an example of where it happened. I wasn’t making any generalizations. (I also wasn’t on that team.)

> You can recognize a company for what it is [...] but also be a positive, professional person, who goes in and does good work every day, gets along with coworkers and managers, and doesn't play games.

One one hand I agree, but on the other hand I say: it's something that comes with time and experience.

Your examples by the way all come from of way better economic times, and more abundance of jobs.

It's easy to be optimistic (naive?) when times are good. But it's not what the current kids are experiencing, far from it.

> to see one company owner paying themselves out equally to their employees.

Depends on what you mean. Getting the same pay, the same pay per hour or the same pay per hour averaged over a long time? Bosses often have a higher pay, but they are also more likely to "work" at home during the family meeting or at night, without it being clocked in anywhere. That's kind of the deal with being the company. They also don't see any money in when the company is in a rougth situation. Often they also don't have a salary at all.

Companies brought this on themselves, they treated their employees as disposable cogs and then started complaining when employees returned the favour.

You can't complain about people becoming cynical when right now you can see all the tech giants investing ridiculous sums in order to eliminate staff from their payroll.