Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the pay is not enough to really get them invested in the work.
The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight.
I personally have done a few projects that turned out to be purely compliance based, and had no merit whatsoever. I remember the feeling of wasting my life to be absolutely soul crushing and I have been avoiding that kind of project as if my life depended on it.
Your mileage may vary.
I do this as a way to get back at corporate America. Too many companies get away with sucking out their employees dry and firing them once they can’t meet the unreasonable expectations that are set for them. You could be dying of cancer or have lost a child, and they will get rid of you the moment they can do so without breaking the law, and in some cases even break the law in the hopes that you’d not pursue any legal action. Nah don’t work hard, work smart, for yourself.
Amen, once upon a time I worked for a company and I didn't miss a single day for almost 3 years. Then at the moment I needed to work remote due to a family member's terminal cancer, I got oh so sorry to hear that, but by the way you f*** something up last week.
You sure you really need to work remote, can you work remote like one day a week. Are you sure, it's like terminal terminal.
Eventually they agreed to let me work remote but then they hired a replacement behind my back .
Luckily my childhood taught me not to trust people. When someone shows you who they really are, believe them. So I already had a better paying job lined up.
Hell, I nearly doubled my pay too!
Yep, I lived this and it really woke me up. The day my dad died my boss called to ask "your going to be in tomorrow right, since you don't have to take care of him anymore"
Not to mention things like "are you sure its terminal" "Do you know what terminal means? just checking maybe you didn't understand the doctor"
To a company you are a number and nothing more,treat them the same. The people in charge got there by ruthlessly focusing on that fact. Trying to get sympathy from work is like trying to explain to a debt collector why you can't pay. They don't care at all and never will, everything you say will be used against you and they are hoping you will slip up.
Its as pointless as a mouse trying to debate a hungry cat as to why he should not eat him.
I get back by having a life after 5 pm, Never going in to work on a weekend, taking time off to spend it with family and never letting stress and bs from corporate world affect my private life.
You haven't been wronged by “corporate America”. That's not even a thing that could have wronged you.
You've worked for or with people behaving badly. Did you call them out on it? If nobody calls them out on bad behaviour how will things get better?
Some people are being so bad that you just have to leave to avoid harm. Fair enough.
It's hard to imagine that this silent retribution does anything but make the problem worse.
Working your ass off continuously in pursuit of that ambition is pointless. If that’s the only thing in your life, then maybe it’s not, but ambition can be found outside of corporate America.
The companies, much less corporate America in aggregate, will have assuredly not noticed your protest. But will you notice your lack of professional accomplishment?
Being wronged extracts a price, through vengeance you can pay it twice.
Could it be something like diabetes, where it won't kill you today but it will kill you tomorrow? Maybe. Only you can figure out the answer for that for yourself. I know the answer for myself by now, which is yes. I'd much rather work for a company that gives me the opportunities to stretch myself, do work in a space I actually find interesting, and mostly get rewarded and advance even if they extract an absolute larger percentage of my surplus labor than other companies, than vice versa. And that is because I am getting a worse deal in today terms, and a better deal in tomorrow terms. I've been burned by this attitude before, but I've also had exceptional outcomes I'd never take back or redo any other way. YMMV.
agree with this. have been trying to get to this point for a few months. I usually am a friendly person but I’ve learned to limit to personal relations and not let it flow into my work ethic. I have some other issues to be ironed out though like overzealous colleagues, and some flexibility needs
That's the literal definition of dead weight.
They ask the manager, "If you want twenty tickets, just ask me for twenty tickets. Why do you set fifteen as the standard, and then try to use cheap psychological tricks to get me to do twenty tickets?"
I have managed teams going back to the nineties. If I want fifteen tickets, I ask for fifteen tickets. If someone just does the minimum, they just get paid the minimum, but I have set my expectations such that their work is a net benefit to the company, so they keep their job.
If things change and I need twenty tickets, I will ask for twenty tickets. It's not complicated. The "bare minimum" is still enough to keep a job. If it isn't, it's on me to establish a different minimum such that the "minimum" is exactly that: The minimum needed to remain employed.
"Dead weight" is someone whose work is not a net benefit to the company. If I as a manager set a minimum, and someone does the minimum, and they are not a net benefit, WTF am I doing as a a manager setting fifteen tickets as the minimum?
Employees meeting expectations but not being a net benefit? That's a management problem. And if it's across the org, that's a SYSTEMIC management problem.
So if this person is meeting the minimum, either they are NOT dead weight, or there is a management problem. Either way, they are not the problem.
Someone who does the bare minimum in order to buy get fired is just a... satisfactory employee. Never gonna get big raises, never gonna get promoted, but gets their work done and doesn't go above or beyond.
Every place I have ever worked has taken advantage of anyone who does more than they are asked. None of those individuals were ever rewarded for going above or beyond. Not a single time.
Doing the bare minimum is what employers do. Why should employees do any more?
I believe it is our moral duty to improve ourselves. I do not believe it is our moral duty to donate effort to an unthankful entity.
No.
literal definition
> the weight of an inert person or thing.
The metaphor refers to people that do nothing and are only a burden. Dead weight cannot positively contribute.
I think you missed the productivity porn thread posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32335165
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deadweight
Examples of literal in a Sentence:
" The literal meaning of “know your ropes” is “to know a lot about ropes,” while figuratively it means “to know a lot about how to do something.”
I was using the word in its literal sense.
The story he told was basically true, even if it wasn't the literal truth. "
Going above and beyond requirements is a personal decision.
But this isn't what a dead weight does.
You must not have worked in companies with actual dead weight.
Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead. For a lot of people, it takes only a few instances of this to switch to "I'll do the bare minimum not to get fired - why sacrifice much of my life and mental energy for this?"
I've been there a few times, and to speak to your point: I decided that instead of being a dead weight I should just look for another job where I don't feel this way. I can say that amongst my peers, that behavior is an exception. Most people who become deadweights will remain that way. It's work to find a new job, and you may have to move, etc. Amusingly enough, Leetcode style interviews are effective at ensuring deadweights remain so.
yep. They also ensure that anyone wanting to move on will probably be doing most of their day Leetcoding. Because you're going to stay at a tech job 1-2 years max and it takes most people probably 6+ months (kids, family, etc.) to ramp up from nothing. Once you have LC down and did the hard part, you need to retain it. Which means constantly doing problems.
Our industry is a burnout treadmill.
I did great work for a company and got fired... because I took a freelance w2 contract in my spare time. The company didn't even know that I'd taken on the role, and the role had actually finished, when they somehow did find out and I got my marching papers.
FUCK working hard and FUCK doing "good" work.
Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally checking my work laptop for emails, working on personal projects on my personal laptop and gardening or doing some DIY fixes on our old house.
Felt bad the entire time and finding a new job was a huge weight off my shoulders.
Bonuses eventually hit our account and we all resigned serially; literally a line outside the manager’s door waiting to resign.
It sucked; was so bad that one colleague didn’t want to Google something one evening “because he needed something to do tomorrow at work”.
> The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight.
My guess from your comment is that you judge them for being slackers, and the feel obligated to explain to YOU that its not morally correct. Personally, I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps while collecting a nice paycheck.
Dead weight? Sounds more like friendly antimatter
GP:
> > I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps
For me, that depends on what the company is doing. Let's say it's mobile games or quant trading -- then, slacking at work in a way just gives people more time away from the computer (fewer games to play?). And changes which ones of the rich people, get richer.
Then what does it matter.
Whilst if one is working for a hospital or a stopping-online-manipulation department, then, in such cases, slacking is sad, not good for society, right
Promotion or bigger bonus - it’s the same as playing stock options with your time, you are better off playing office politics for a much better RoI.
Self value? Senior engineer in FAANG is almost never going to have REAL impact, so I can only enjoy thinking that someone cares about that tiny piece of software that I work with. Again, getting drunk is a better RoI. Same with self improvement… where side project usually allows one to grow more
So, what is the benefit of working harder?
Note that I'm not claiming you to be a manager, however your viewpoint of these employees reflects some of the managers I've dealt with. I once worked at a company who provided zero training, zero documentation, very poor pay, and no possibility of anything despite offering the world when I joined. I was told by my manager that I was dead weight. I was fired by HR. The situation did not end well for them, legally, or in terms of coworkers leaving.
In my experience working in software development, I've encountered only one person who was dead weight, and he ended up leaving on his own. I've been doing this for close to 20 years mind you. I've seen many accused of being dead weight, and sure, some could have tried harder, but most simply struggled with the mess that was the code we were working on. The symptoms were common: no documentation, hostile management demanding tight deadlines, and poor communication.
When there's little correlation between amount of effort and advancement as is very often the case, it's justified to just cruise.
I don't see it as "morally wrong but they didn't really want to be dead weight" when it is a justified response.
For example, people who steal office supplies from work always have a good reason they tell themselves.
For another, all the people who post on Hackernews justifying cheating in college. My favorite bullshit excuse was cheating was justified because the professor didn't expend much effort with countermeasures.
But on reflection this happens frequently, not due to personal reasons, but due to corporate politics. Side A won the war, so side B just punches the clock until whenever they get around to layoffs. In any big company, there's going to be a bunh of teams where "they know, but we haven't told them yet".
This isn’t true at all in my experience. I’ve contracted at many places that simply had a culture of avoiding work. Where a majority of the permanent employees hardly do any work, their main focus is coming up with reasons why problems are somebody else’s problems to solve, and avoiding accountability for anything that goes wrong. The pandemic and WFH has made this a lot worse in many companies. Out of the dozens of large orgs I’ve contracted to, far more of them had these problems than didn’t.
Nah man. They just want to chillax. I know because i was one of them at some of my jobs. I don't get any satisfaction from crud/etl type jobs at all. I just want to a paycheck to fund my lifestyle and hobbies. I know tons of people like me , like 50% of my friend circle. Ppl just don't give a shit.
