38
votes
Older folks: Do you feel like work ethic has changed? Better or worse? Do you notice any generalizations? Have the times changed that much?
Just wondering what the sense is from others. Is it even a thing that you notice if you are in a more detached, work from home setting? Were “things different in my day, harumph!”
This isn’t intended to be a ranting thread on millennials or such. But I’m rather genuinely curious what is considered “normal” in terms of work ethic and work attitudes.
Older folks? Am I older? How many decades of work experience is older? 😂
I started on technology in the 90s out of interest and often worked long hours because I enjoyed the problem solving, or because my mind couldn't put the problem down until I figured it out. I changed roles about every 3-5 years and usually ended up lead or senior before moving on to the next problem domain. I've gone through phases in my career, typically 1-3 years of more intense work with longer hours, followed by a change in roles, a settling or figuring out phase of more normal 40 hour weeks, and then a gradual ramp up.
I've seen and managed lots of people at different phases of their career, from young engineers consumed with interest and drive to build cool things, to dedicated professionals with more reasonable work life balance, to people I've had to unfortunately let go because they couldn't meet minimum expectations of effort.
I still see all of those same people today just like I did 25 years ago. I think it's normal for people to go through phases as their life goals and priorities shift. It's also a lot different for an engineer to put in long hours to make journeyman or senior, than it is a paralegal or clerk to put in extra hours for... more work?
It just depends on people's goals. I've rarely seen people or teams that I thought were truly lazy, but more often poorly motivated, aligned, or managed.
Have you seen the proportion of these people change over time?
Not really, no. I've relocated and changed roles and teams over the years, but I've always seen a similar mix of people.
I've had about 20% of folks who exceed expectations in quality and quantity of work and that I had to watch for burnout and shoo them out of the office early on Friday to make up for long hours early in the week.
About 60% or so who do a good job of managing work life balance and do satisfactory to slightly above average quality or quantity of work, and about 20% who needed help with motivation, skill development, etc. Maybe 1-2% in that last 20% don't respond to efforts to improve performance and are ultimately let go or leave on their own when advancements aren't forthcoming.
I've thought through the specific team compositions I've worked with over the last 25 years and those ratios seem fairly consistent.
"Nobody Wants to Work Any More!": A brief history of capitalists complaining that nobody wants to work for starvation wages
So many businesses have been ruined by terrible management. There was this absolutely incredible sandwich shop named Fink’s in downtown Philly - an almost literally hole-in-the-wall place hidden down the hall from a Jewelry store with no street signs or front door of their own.
They had a ton of foot traffic and word-of-mouth free marketing because their location was convenient and their products were excellent. One day I saw in the Inquirer they closed down. The owner was trashing their employees, complaining it wasn’t possible to get good workers. My only thought was they could have kept their business if they’d just paid people more, maybe raised their low prices a bit.
The free market is holy, divine, and infallible until it requires you to raise your wages to attract labor. Then it’s a tool of lazy entitled millennials.
There's been a huge shift in the software developer sphere. I don't know if much can be inferred about the general population, as it's a result of selection pressures but back in my day developers were pretty darn keen nerds whose jobs were a result of their hobbies. Nowadays the rise of the professional class of developers, who are there because the jobs are there and school counsellors and parents pushed them there, has led to a totally different mindset. Any time you see a thread about software development work/life balance, you'll see the commenters split between your job being owed 8 hours a day, or your job being owed as little time as you can trick your employer into accepting while working a second overemployment job on the side. Absolutely nobody would suggest working unpaid overtime, which was basically the standard in the 90s.
I think the driving factor behind this is general discontent with capitalism and the working class as a whole becoming wiser to being manipulated. There was a day and age (namely the 50s 60s and arguably the 70s) when taxes were high and in the US many companies were designed around employee development and the goal of training people up and keeping them within the company for life. There are a lot of benefits to doing this, but the entire corporate structure and social norms has to support it. I think one of the major driving factors to this was pensions, in which both the employer and the employee reap benefits for people sticking around for a long time. Nowadays with a global highly competitive market and pressure on short term capital gains instead of long term investment (dividend stocks are more akin to bonds nowadays rather than a core part of any portfolio) short term costly but long term return programs are discouraged and the benefit of employee retention drops off sharply after a few years and the balance of long term vs. short term employment contracts skews on the short end side. This means that companies do not have an incentive to train or retain most employees and thus loyalty to a company is not rewarded. Generationally it takes time for these ideas to flow down to new workers and change the work ethos, but it's a much more widespread belief than just in the software developer sphere and the speed at which people have learned to be more guarded of their work/life balance and less loyal to companies depends on the sector and how it's evolved in response to this shift in publicly traded companies. The more blue collar you get, such as with line worker style jobs, the earlier this shift happened and the more white collar you get, such as with lawyers and doctors, the slower this shift has been happening.
I have noticed in the last few (maybe 10?) years a lot of attempts to prove productivity in the software development industry. I think the people in charge really like watching factory floor metrics and seeing graphs that show how productive everyone is.
There are attempts to track story points, or lines of code, or number of defects found, or whatever other quantifiable metric that you want to try to use. This inevitably ends up with two results. The people attempting to just do a good job get shafted, and the people gaming the metric end up making the metric useless anyway.
We had a director at one company refuse to accept that more lines of code was not better. As such, while my team was there, we did exactly as we were asked and incentivized to do. Verbose code, duplicated code, excessive comment blocks, and boilerplate were everywhere. This is not a fun way to develop software. This is not productive. This is frustrating. This causes bugs. But, hey, that's what the director wanted. When it came time to cut some jobs, the people that chose not to play that game were let go because, in part, their metrics were worse. I played the game as long as I had to because I need health insurance.
The same applies to story points (inflation over time), defects found (no that isn't a defect, it's a new behavior request), commit rate, whatever. The industry has changed to be gamified rather than results-driven. Not every company does this, of course, but there is a particular flavor of burnout that happens in these environments that changes a passion into nothing more than a checklist to get through the next quarter. When people with this kind of burnout leave companies, it doesn't reverse. They keep the burnout when they go to the next company, at least for a while. The result is an employee that does the absolute bare minimum that is required.
In the end, I think it is just lazy or incompetent management. I see people doing scrum because Its What We Do, which to me just means they lack the experience or imagination to do something less when less is required, or they don't want to take responsibility for the risk of trying something different.
To be clear, there is a ton of value in good software process. Writing requirements, doing design work, planning and developing thorough tests. But scrum doesn't do any of those things. It just gets you a day's worth of meetings every two weeks when everyone already knows what they are going to do next anyway.
I think good management skills are the most underrated and scarce commodity in the tech world. I honestly have not known that many people I would consider good managers, and I have found few goods resources for building those skills.
Not that I want to become a good manager. The first rule of introverts club is there is no introverts club. I just want to find a good manager or get the bad ones to let me work without hinderance.
This is a hard truth, and part of the problem is the many different ideas of good. My current manager has not talked to me in any real amount in two months. This would, for most people, be considered a bad thing. I consider it absolutely fantastic.
He does not question what I am working on. He trusts me to work on the things I am meant to be working on, and he trusts me to do it well. In return, I don't waste his time on silly things. In the event that I hit a roadblock caused by a person in the business, he drops everything to get rid of it for me.
I have some ream members that hate his style of management. They need confirmation regularly that they are on track, and he struggles with the minutiae.
Ever since college I’ve noticed I’m one of the very few people around me purely doing software engineering for me. I need to get paid, and of course more money is more better, but I don’t give a damn about pleasing those measuring my performance. Grades didn’t matter to me, meeting my employer’s goals don’t matter to me. We are either aligned in our goals or I’m leaving. This has actually worked really well. I prioritize my own skill set and keeping myself happy and intrinsically motivated.
I think it’s been a learning experience on sticking to my own path. Back when I was a student I’d occasionally talk with peers about my approach to school. These days I occasionally talk about my career philosophy with other yuppies. To most people, what I’m doing is completely alien. They presumably are in CS/SE/tech because it seemed like a safe bet and decent pay. If they actually tried to copy my strategies I assume it wouldn’t apply to them at all. I constantly remind myself of how lucky I am that my childhood hobby and long time passion of web development, which really could have been a niche skill with little economic relevance, ended up being one of the optimal careers in terms of pay and number of positions to choose from. Like if there were hundreds of thousands of professional football players all getting paid pretty comfortable salaries.
It’s a shame that most people skilled in hobbies don’t get to have that experience.
I'll also toss out there that giving your employer exactly what they pay for (40 hours) is exactly what the passionate nerds should be doing...and then have the spare brainpower to apply their passions outside their employer for their own fun or profit.
I think as others mentioned, there were also a lot more unsolved problems back then. These days half of a solution is just knowing which pre-existing parts to glue together.
This is increasingly what I’ve been doing.
For several years after getting my foot in the door, it was nose-to-the-grindstone career establishment mode, exhausting my mental energy on employment. Now that my resume has been built up I’ve shifted to reserving energy for myself, which gets split between software side projects and whatever else (e.g. taking online classes).
I suspect another reason is just that the work is less interesting.
Back in the 90s you could get rich making a generic "social media app" or "first-person shooter" because many of the big players haven't been developed yet, and those things weren't yet "generic". The tools were a lot worse, but the expected quality and size of software was a lot less, so while I don't really know, it seems like it was a lot easier to make something useful. Nowadays it seems like there's an app for everything and you can't expect people to use your app unless it's extremely approachable. It seems like there are a lot of "bullshit jobs", and even work on genuinely important software isn't very creative. Although a big part of this perception is just me growing up.
Also as someone mentioned, the uncertainty of raises/promotions is a big factor. People won't put in extra effort unless they get extra reward, if not intrinsic, extrinsic. Which leads to non-innovative software, and I suspect eventually bad software, mainly because nobody can effectively measure productivity or quality, so developers need some level of trust.
Anyways, not everything can be novel, but I think it would help for both companies and developers to focus on what part of their product is essential and what "improvements" make it more useful. That's what people did back then, when computers ran in megahertz and stoage was in megabytes, and despite today's computers being much more powerful and people expecting a lot more, I think it's still relevant.
I think this change is also reflective of the company's behavior as well. In the 90s, tech was new and attracting talent with interesting work, over the top perks, "alternative" company culture. Things that made people feel like they were working for a company that was working for them. Today most of these companies are more of a standard job where direction and culture are dictated by the "shareholder" and amenities/perks are cut. On top of that "productivity" now reigns supreme. I think the behavior of employees is directly related to the behavior of the employers - they are the ones that set company culture.
I was reflecting on this quote the other day because it is no longer true!
I really think that was the ethos in the 90s, but it definitely isn't now. I think a "normal" life is probably healthier in the long run, but being L33+ hax0rz was definitely more fun.
Their defense is that they are independent contractors, and that they work extremely hard for their own company
The weird "overemployment" crowd definitely don't exclusively work as independent contractors. It would be way less skeevy if they did.
The overemployment crowd are, IMO, the only honest free-marketeers. Supposedly, in the free market companies pay employees what they're worth - so if they deliver 3x the results then they're paid triple. In practice, this isn't really the case and most people get The Standard Wage.
They're skeevy, sure, but honestly they are delivering value to each company and they're no worse than the CEOs who are paid tens of millions for roughly the same hours. Or to put it another way: if a company can't tell the difference between a slacker and an overemployed-er, then when viewed through the lens of free-market ideology there is no difference; they're delivering what was promised.
I think they're skeevy but I think the whole system is skeevy, and turnabout is fair play. Criticizing only the overemployment crowd in a vacuum is unfair and unwarranted.
Oh yeah I think it's a symptom of other problems more than anything, but I think they're a particularly visable part of the whole skeevy system.
No they don't -- they intentionally blur the freedoms of contractors with the (relative) safety of employment. Their argument is that their true company is themselves.
I am a salaried employee, officially. I do all the work I am assigned and then a little to keep up appearances. If you won't adjust my wage to cost of living, I'll adjust my effort to match my diminished wage.
It matters not that I am not "officially" a contractor. It matters that I only work the time needed to get the job done. I would consider the contracting life officially if it didn't also do away with the substantial protections and benefits that are afforded to 'proper' employees.
Much the same way I am an anarchist, but must weigh the rules around me and judge whether my benefit of breaking them outweighs the risk.
I won't attack someone for littering. But I'll chuck a rock at a car that almost runs me over in a crosswalk. I might get in trouble, but maybe that shit will think twice before trying to zoom past a line of cars waiting at a crosswalk.
I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Act your wage, man.
My parents were of the generational mindset that you slave away for your employer no matter how terrible they are.
My first job out of school, the month after my wedding, I was working till 8 or 9pm every night, unpaid over time. A coworker leaving the job was shocked when I said I only made pennies on his dollar.
Second job, "we're family". Laid off over the phone when US construction took a tumble, after months of reassuring everyone we're family and we hang tight and put in 120%.
I do the work and I'm proud of it. But I don't do free work anymore.
I see a lot of new staff much more willing to push back about long work days, how much "after hours" being salaried gets you, and other similar workplace issues. But not being unwilling to work. I think one 'bad apple' ruins leadership's perspective on work ethic. Reasonable concerns and requests for balance are met with assumptions that someone doesn't want to work because Joe Employee was fired for not doing anything at work at all.
However I work in higher ed and I've watched my area make strides to improve QoL for our staff and make efforts to retain them in the face of the Great Resignation. Mostly effectively IMO.
Also I'm taking "old" at 40 when my new colleagues are 24.
To be honest, I always think of this as being asked at a car dealer, "how much can you afford monthly". If employers offer you $100k a year (for maths sake), but if you're working 80 hour weeks then in reality you aren't making $50 dollars an hour, you're making $25. And that's only $5 off of the new proposed minimum wage in California. Now factor in that a normal exempt employee also gets time and a half for overtime, that lands those additional hours at a worth of $75 an hour, but you're completely uncompensated for them.
Our issues are more of an on-call coverage for emergencies so completely unpredictable in how many hours you'll end up working, and events like move in and move out where you know weekends are going to be involved and hours will be longer.
We are also in higher ed so we're already not getting compensated even half of your proposed salary. But we are getting free housing and all of the assorted utilities that go along with.
I support my colleagues push for more change, I also don't expect WFH to ever be a thing in my dept for our live in staff. And that's fine honestly. It'd be weird almost to have it now when we didn't during COVID.
I do agree generally that you have to figure out what your time and work is worth. But, practically, I will not make more money elsewhere without either working for a corporation whose values I hate (and even then I got paid less) or switching career fields. World needs more than programmers after all 😉
I have not noticed any changes or demographic differences in work ethic, with one huge exception: When I moved from the US to Australia in 2012, I noticed a huge jump in work ethic amongst my coworkers. They worked harder, they were self-motivated and did tasks beyond what they were asked, etc. Likewise, I found that bosses trusted employees more and micromanaged them less. I am sure this is related, but raises and promotions were much more readily forthcoming, and employee turnover was also noticeably lower (indeed, I've hardly ever seen any coworkers fired, whereas that happened all the time when I lived in the US — note, I lived in a right-to-work state, so my coworkers would get fired for things like getting an injury or having to take time off work to deal with family emergencies).
I have worked several jobs in both countries, in a few different industries, and this pattern generally holds (though there are individual exceptions, of course) — whether the employees are younger or older, more educated or less educated, in a high-level position or a low-level position, born inside the country or born outside the country, etc.
This entirely depends on your field.
By and large, I have plenty of people my age and older who have worse work ethic than my juniors, who are often hungry to prove themselves. That is not to say that they're are no lazy young people but I think you get that already.