Companies have no morals. They only respond to profit.
Abolish the overtime exemption for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers. Make it unprofitable to extract labor until someone dies. All other actions are impotent.
majormajor · 10h ago
Removing overtime exemptions (across the board, not just for software) seems like a clear winner on many axes.
* Folks working more can have direct immediate compensation for it, vs handwavy promises of maybe future promotions or stock option rewards
* Creates jobs by lowering incentives to just over-work the people you already have
* Spreads out the income tax load by creating more paid labor out of thin air to get the same amount of total work done - better to have that marginal change in the average person's pocketbooks and income tax than tax-sheltered locations for corporations or the highly-wealthy
theamk · 9h ago
How is this going to be enforced? Does that mean everyone has to fill timesheets all the time? I've worked in placed with timesheets and without them, and I liked latter ones much better.
Not to mention that even if timesheets were used, they provide no guarantees. We always had to get management permission to put overtime in, but no one really knew how much time we worked - especially with a possibility of remote work.
This can only be fixed by pervasive monitoring, and IMHO this leads to a very unpleasant workspace.
const_cast · 6h ago
I work a salary job as a software engineer, I fill timesheets.
Companies love timesheets because, even though you're salary, they want to know what you're doing at all times.
They want all the control of an hourly paid employee, with all the money stealing of a salary position.
Also you're already being tracked, they already know exactly how long you're online. I don't know what to tell you.
kelseyfrog · 6h ago
I get it. Time sheets are tedious and frankly, they suck.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not advocating for time sheets. I'm advocating against overtime exemption.
Even so, all other things being equal, if the tedium of timesheets is on one side of the equation and all of the exploitation of unpaid labor is on the other, I'd still rather not be exploited. Working for free, which is what unpaid overtime is, is unsupportable.
There are many examples of non-exempt professionals who deal with this without resorting to spyware or coercion. IT support specialists, paralegals, and lab technicians all have systems that work: simple start/stop time logs or weekly attestations, plus manager pre-approval for overtime. No one is tracking keystrokes and no one is forced into surveillance. It's about accountability. You attest to your hours, managers approve exceptions, and overtime gets paid. That's the balance.
theamk · 4h ago
you are making it sound there is an upside in timesheets, but there really is not.
In a current world, manager says: "We have great work-life balance, feel free to work as much or as little as you want! Also, here is an assignment, if this is not done by Friday I'll PIP you, then fire you and you'll get deported. Wink wink, you might want to work more."
In a timesheet world, a manager tells the employee: "Sorry, I cannot approve overtime for you, because I care about you! Also, here is an assignment, if this is not done by Friday I'll PIP you, then fire you and you'll get deported. So make sure you don't record more than 40 hours, but remember we don't really know how much you spend working (wink wink)"
This law might eliminate those insane AI startups which openly advertise 996 schedules, but most requirements of overtime are not that overt.
kelseyfrog · 3h ago
Look, we can spin out any nightmare scenario, but the reality today is worse: unpaid overtime is the norm, and people in tech are burning out and even dying from overwork. That's not a hypothetical. It's our current world.
Timesheets arent fun, but they're not the end of the world either. Other skilled professions (IT support, paralegals, lab techs) use simple weekly logs or start/stop tracking without surveillance. They get paid for their overtime. We don't.
If the choice is between tedious record keeping or doing more work for the same pay, the latter is far more exploitative and soul crushing. We can fix the mechanics without ignoring the principle: work more, get paid more.
Honest question: is filling out a timesheet really worse, to you, than working extra hours for free?
theamk · 1m ago
[delayed]
ItsHarper · 7h ago
I think it can be solved with timesheets and trusting that your employees are filing them out reasonably accurately.
theamk · 4h ago
You are an employee and you are overloaded (like the OP). You are worried about getting fired if you don't do enough. Your manager had talked to you about not overworking and said you should not work more than 40 hours. At the same time, the manager said that the company needs only high performers, so you should be working faster. You can't do this, you are already working as fast as you can.
Option 1: you do as told and leave home at 5pm. You spend 40 hours per week exactly, but work is not getting done, so people are complaining about your performance. Your manager is putting more pressure on you, you are worried about getting fired.
Option 2: you record 40 hours per week, but actually work for 80. Sure your home life suffers but at least the manager is off your back. You are getting compliments about performance and vague promises about raise sometimes in the future maybe.
Which option do you think people will choose?
martin-t · 10h ago
How about instead abolishing privately owned companies?
Most western countries are democracies because people got fed up of being exploited by dictators (sometimes called "kings"), removed them and setup a system in which they elect who makes the decisions. This system has issues but is less bad than dictatorship.
Yet, companies kept their hierarchical power structures.
Workers should decide who makes the decisions. If they don't wanna invest time into selling their product, they hire a salesman. If they want somebody to make long term projections, plan what gets worked on and communicates with other teams, they hire an assistant. And they decide how much he gets paid according to how much value he actually brings them.
Managers should be assistants.
zahlman · 9h ago
Hierarchy is not dictatorship, and most small groups of people doing productive (in the literal sense of creating a marketable product) work would never get off the ground like this for a wide variety of reasons.
martin-t · 8h ago
> Hierarchy is not dictatorship
Sure, the difference if whether the hierarchy is determined from the top or bottom. Top leads to unfair benefits for the top layer. This is called exploitation.
> wide variety of reasons
Can you give me examples?
majormajor · 9h ago
If you're a worker with a bad boss you need other options to leave for and go to.
Let's have MORE companies, not fewer.
Put in strong escalating taxes to incentivize cooperation between small companies instead of bowing to the math that encourages consolidation otherwise.
But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
martin-t · 8h ago
> bad boss
It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve.
> But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
I don't see the problem. Every company starts with just a few people, maybe some machines, maybe some real estate. The issue starts when these people call themselves "founders" and everybody else becomes an "employee"[0].
Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
And yes:
1) the founders took some risk in starting the business. They should get rewarded based on the amount of risk and their investment. Not in perpetuity.
2) some companies need a large up-front investment. Similarly, the investory should get rewarded based on invested amount and risk, not by owning a large chunk of the company in perpetuity.
Key point: as time goes on, the amount of work done by regular "working class" people completely outstrips the initial investment. The reward should go to people doing the actual work.
[0]: literally meaning "person being used"
ThrowawayR2 · 8h ago
Anyone is free to create a worker-controlled, worker-owned business anytime they want. There are plenty of examples anytime the question comes up. In light of this, where is the need to abolish privately owned companies?
martin-t · 7h ago
Same reason we have laws against slavery and indentured servitude.
sekai · 9h ago
> How about instead abolishing privately owned companies?
We tried that in my country for about 50 years, it didn’t work out.
martin-t · 9h ago
Are you referring to communism? Because that was all about central control - the exact opposite. It was about as cooperative as countries with "democratic" in name are actually democratic.
Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea. Instead, look at what specific ways the implementation fails to learn for next time.
whobre · 8h ago
> Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea.
It would certainly help to see at least one good implementation of the “good idea”
- Oxide computer company - idk how exactly the ownership works but AFAIK all workers except sales have the same salary.
- The early idSoftware AFAIK worked similarly with all 4 core gamedevs getting paid the same
Note that nothing says everyone has to get paid the same, it just ends up happening in some examples.
CactusBlue · 1h ago
I'd say Oxide is the exact opposite, in that they have the same base salary but they vary compensation by adjustment of equity
geor9e · 9h ago
There should be a name for this sort of communal economic system
sokoloff · 9h ago
I wonder if it’s ever been tried and, if so, how those economies and populations are doing as compared to the exploitive systems that Microsoft and FAANG workers are forced to endure.
9rx · 9h ago
Yes, communalism (that's the name, for those who were wondering) has been tried. In the USA, the Hutterites are one such example. They are generally regarded as doing very well economically.
The more interesting question is: Can communalism work without the community having a deep attachment to the idea? The Hutterites achieve that through religion, but if you threw a group of random people together into a similar economic situation without some kind of strong belief system would they endure or would it quickly devolve back to what we see in the broader economy?
martin-t · 8h ago
Did you notice how communism was always about central control with only superficial or absolutely no elections?
Did you notice I specifically said decisions should be made democratically?
Are those two not in direct conflict?
Please, stop pattern matching, and actually consider what I wrote.
9rx · 5h ago
The name you are looking for is communalism, not communism.
You can tell we're not talking about communism because the previous commenter said "economic system", whereas the whole concept of an economic system vanishes with communism. It does not imagine an economic system would serve a purpose when scarcity is no longer a constraint. Hence the whole no state, money, or class thing.
You, yourself, literally wrote the original description of what we are talking about. How did you manage to end up so confused?
> Did you notice how communism was always about central control with only superficial or absolutely no elections?
And no. That sounds like you are thinking of a dictatorship. Probably a dictatorship at the hands of a political party that includes "Communist" in the name, granted, but thinking of that as communism is like thinking the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
Communism is science fiction that is imagined on the same basic premise as Star Trek. It is not about central control. As before, it rejects the idea that a central control (the state) would even remain. Marx and Engels hypothesized that the proletariat would have to temporarily seize control from the capitalist elite in order to usher in communism, but even if you somehow managed to confuse communism with their work, that isn't really central control either. What they pictured is still closer to being a democracy, except one that that excludes the bourgeoisie, similar to how women were historically excluded from democracy.
nkrisc · 9h ago
I think there are worthwhile, incremental steps to take before it comes to that.
martin-t · 8h ago
Can you expand on that?
nicbou · 9h ago
This has been attempted multiple times and the results were disastrous.
martin-t · 8h ago
A dictator deciding that every village needs to produce X amount of steel instead of actually harvesting their crops and them millions of people dying is exactly the opposite of what I described.
RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem.
I meant cooperatives and other structures at a lower scale. Stalinism was not the only attempts at collectivisation.
OJFord · 9h ago
Companies didn't 'keep' hierarchical power structures, companies emerged exactly from that separation of industry and state.
martin-t · 8h ago
One theory I read is that historically states got bigger only up to the limit of their ability to manage the land and force people to pay taxes.
I don't know if it's right or wrong (and to what extent, most natural systems are complex with a multitude of factors influencing them) but I can easily imagine a similar principle applying to companies.
If you wanna expand by starting an office in the next town over, you need a way to communicate with it, otherwise it's just a separate business with a cash injection to start.
So you have a point.
But the core issue stands - the power hire/fire people, determine their salary and also capture their entire economic output leads to a power imbalance.
firesteelrain · 10h ago
The sad part in all of this is that Microsoft likely had no policy that required him to work this much and yet the Microsoft cultural pressure combined with H1B unknowns drove him to not take care of himself and apply immense amounts of undue pressure. Managers need to be aware of this and question why their employees feel the need to work this much. Either hire more or coach the employees not to burn out.
nikolayasdf123 · 10h ago
> H1B unknowns
this. most countries have similar policies. been there, seen so many others going through this in UK, USA, Japan, Korea, Singapore. it really damages your life.
to everyone, check other countries (Portugal, Thailand, Japan) that give you residency for years and allow to work remotely
don't let your employer hold you and your family a hostage with your legal status
javierluraschi · 9h ago
That would be nice, but if you want to immigrate, that’s the current deal.
robofanatic · 10h ago
It's most likely the immediate manager in this case, who probably knows the H1B and green card situation very well, especially for Indians. Unfortunately it's become very common to exploit them.
javierluraschi · 9h ago
I remember being so stressed on an immigration visa, if you don’t perform well and get fired, you also get deported.
paxys · 10h ago
> Microsoft likely had no policy that required him to work this much
They do have these policies written down: bi-annual performance reviews, stack ranking, PIPs.
PretzelPirate · 8h ago
You're implying that he was under performing, and therefore felt the pressure to avoid a bad review and the resulting PIP.
We don't have enough information to support that.
Bi-annual performance reviews themselves aren't a bad thing that force overwork.
If he had a history of good performance reviews (100% or higher on average), the risk of getting a PIP would be very low.
Microsoft stopped stack ranking years ago.
I don't think we should speculate on people's behavior or how they aligned with company policies, because we might accidentally be insulting this man.
11324msthrow · 6h ago
This comment is off-base enough that I've created a throwaway, as I post openly as a Microsoftie on my main, to prevent anyone else from getting the wrong idea.
Microsoft reintroduced stack ranking over the last year or so. It's widely documented.
The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well.
I don't think any of the things I said above (or were insinuated about Microsoft culture by other posters) are in any way insulting to Prateek, regardless of what his individual situation or performance is. If anything, calling attention to it and attempting to address it is a powerful way to show respect to my eyes. The incentive systems at play, the pressures and stressors, will result in these outcomes unless anyone forces a change. End of story.
PretzelPirate · 2h ago
> Microsoft reintroduced stack ranking over the last year or so
Microsoft has forced differentiation, not stack ranking. They aren't the same and differentiation is much better for employees.
> The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well
I'm sure you're feeling a lot of options due to your proximity, and I'm sorry for what you're going through.
The article says he was under pressure, but it didn't say the source of that pressure. Perhaps it was due to a series of "lower than expected" reviews, or the constant worry about losing their job and their visa. It didn't say that the pressure was caused by internal policies.
I've known many people who put pressure on themselves and burnt out because of it, despite no one expected them to do so. I suffered through that in my own career and nearly quit software engineering because of it.
If you have real details about the situation and that it was internal Microsoft policy or the pressure put in them by their manager which may not have aligned with Microsoft policy, that woukd be very useful information to share with the public.
Microsoft operates like many big companies vs a single company, and some teams go beyond standard Microsoft policy and have unrealistic expectations of their employees. Those departments and managers should be called out and shamed.
firesteelrain · 8h ago
I didn’t take his comment that way of which GP replied to me. I took it as sarcasm. In that, GP was saying it like “Yea but they found time to make these policies…”
That’s how I read it
ronbenton · 10h ago
Microsoft’s continuous firings over the past few years has put a tremendous amount of pressure on employees to demonstrate value. I have observed H1B holders especially affected by this pressure as getting laid off in this economy may well result in getting kicked out of the country. Pretty shameful stuff.
i7l · 9h ago
Shameful yes, but entirely expected from corporations that only care about profits. Sorry, shareholder value.
ronbenton · 9h ago
No doubt. They’ll only care about an employee dropping dead from stress if it causes enough negative press to affect shareholder value.
Maksadbek · 10h ago
The sad part is that no one forces you to work that hard. You're free to say NO! and work less, even this will results being laid off. Only during 1:1s your manager may highlight that deadline is soon and would be great if the project would be delivered on time, and little hint about a promo. But you set goals and force yourself to do more, single night this less sleep doesn't hurt anyone. Then there are more such nights of coding and you feel barely alive. 90% work is done, only very little left to finish. And then bam!
Upd:
I didn’t mean that this is ok, I’m for workers rights.
blitzar · 10h ago
> The sad part is that no one forces you to work that hard.
You are free to be poor, broke and homeless.
We really need a management class that doesn't insist on continuing the cycle of abuse on their underlings.
stackskipton · 10h ago
>We really need a management class that doesn't insist on continuing the cycle of abuse on their underlings.
This won't happen. Your manager puts pressure on you, they get pressure from their manager and so on until it reaches the CEO who might be getting pressure from investors/board.
Only fix is regulations from the government which seems to be a curse word by many posters on this site.
haswell · 10h ago
History is filled with people saying “this won’t happen”, only for that thing to happen.
Culture evolves and changes. What is acceptable in a culture evolves and changes with it.
Be the change you want to see, apply steady pressure, speak up when the opportunity arises, debate people who see things differently, and with time, many things can happen.
Most progress is hard-won.
stackskipton · 9h ago
This is like saying I can fix global warming by recycling better and going vegan. You are not wrong but it's also like trying to stop a flood with few sandbags.
I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care. They were politely told they were not meeting expectations and since they had mortgages and other stuff, they took a hint and moved on.
Again, this fight is political and not corporate. Make tech workers hourly and this will stop. There will also be plenty of tech workers who will fight against this tooth and nail.
haswell · 8h ago
> This is like saying I can fix global warming by recycling better and going vegan.
I can't agree. I don't think anyone who is diligent about recycling or making environmentally conscious food choices believes it will fix global warming. But doing the things that we can is still important for changing culture over time.
If you're a young person growing up in a home that thinks about these things responsibly, the hope is that more people reaching adult-hood will think about the world through that lens. Is it enough? No. Is it still critical? I think so.
> I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care.
I've worked at places where management did not behave in the way you describe. The point being that such places exist, and such an outcome is not so impossible.
One way to guarantee things will not change is to do nothing.
9rx · 9h ago
> Only fix is regulations from the government
Problem is that government is the very same people you just spoke of. If they had the collective will to change things, they could just do it. But as they lack the collective will to see change, government can't change either. I believe they call this the stag hunt dilemma.
layer8 · 10h ago
The implication that the only choices are either working yourself to death or becoming broke and homeless, is ridiculous.
I’m all for workers’ rights, though.
toomuchtodo · 10h ago
Workers need organizing and unions. If the policy is voluntary and subject to change at someone’s whim, it doesn’t exist.
AstroBen · 9h ago
..save money..
Why are you putting yourself in a position where you're forced to find work as fast as possible or you'll be homeless?
For all but the people on the lowest incomes or those with terrible luck this is a solvable problem
martin-t · 10h ago
How about removing the hierarchical power structure entirely. The west claims people are all equal and then they happily slave for cents while their "bosses" make dollars.
Worker cooperatives are to corporations what democracies are to dictatorships.
9rx · 9h ago
> How about removing the hierarchical power structure entirely.
We, at least those of us in the software industry, tried that. If you look closely, that's what Agile was all about. The associated Twelve Principles of Agile Software outlines what needs to be considered by developers when there isn't a "boss" to oversee operations.
But I'm sure you know how that turned out in practice: The power structure quickly jumped on usurping the name and bastardized it into something that gave them even more power.
javierluraschi · 9h ago
No you can’t, the system is setup to make you work that hard. Their compensation policy is based on rewarding disproportionally the top performers…
So if you can work 10% more than your peers, you get not 10% bonus but rather 30%-100% more. So it makes business sense to put the extra 10%, until everyone is working at 110% and then again, adding an extra 10% pays off, rinse release, death spiral.
The compensation model is pure evil.
9rx · 9h ago
> So it makes business sense to put the extra 10%
Does it actually? I'd buy that it makes silly arbitrary emotion sense to bask in the nonsensical feelings about an even bigger number. The actual business case is much less clear. There is obviously an opportunity cost associated with that extra 10% and 30-100% is not necessarily the best opportunity. I suspect it is often not.
11324msthrow · 6h ago
Microsoft engineer throwaway chiming in.
I think the parent emphasizes the wrong side of it, although I agree with them strongly that it is a damaging way to do things. Yes, you get slightly more upside on the top end, but it's more like 30% vs. 10% for an average performer, there's no 100% bonuses here unless you're in the "ruling class" (roughly VP and above).
The actual risk is that if you're on the downside of what they call "differentiation", if you're not the one who pushed above your peers, what used to be called meets expectation is now considered below expectations, and is a path towards pip and layoff. Lack of growth for non-terminal roles is also now identified as a path towards pip and layoff.
Microsoft is intentionally turning up the heat to thin the herd.
pixelatedindex · 9h ago
Or, you can just be happy getting the lower end of the bonus. It’s not like the pay and RSU is peanuts. Or work just enough to be in the middle of the bell curve. I put in the work to be in the top part earlier but it is absolutely not worth it, they will lay you off anyway.
9rx · 10h ago
> The sad part is that no one forces you to work that hard.
Maybe I've been farming for too long, but my brain, at least, is wired to push until completion and until things are done it will consume me. If you're going to be up all night ruminating about it, you may as well actually work on it.
Of course, in farming you get a nice long break after you've pushed yourself hard. I've never worked at Microsoft, but I suspect, given what I've seen elsewhere, that as soon as it is done it's already on to the next thing, never giving workers a chance to stop for a while.
robofanatic · 10h ago
> You're free to say NO!
It gets complicated really fast if you add decades of temporary visa status to it.
JCM9 · 10h ago
Big tech companies will take every once of energy and time you give them. With H1Bs it can be horrible as they threaten firing folks that will often have to upend and leave the country if they stop working there. By most standards it’s almost indentured servitude.
As much as they say they care about employees, honestly they don’t. It’s important to draw a line and say no. These companies would dump you tomorrow and not think twice about it. Work hard and have fun, but remember they call it “compensation” for a reason. Don’t let a company you don’t own be your life… that never works out well in the long run.
cmkcyanmag · 10h ago
This is horrible.
Nearly as horrifying are all of the people that bust their asses because they care and don’t want to lose their jobs, then the managers and/or companies who’ve come to expect that fire them when they burn out, after they’ve amassed health problems, and they haven’t spent any time in career-related training nor networked with others to find something else.
javcasas · 10h ago
There was this meme I read somewhere:
"Here is a button. If you press it, you get $50.000, but someone you don't know dies. Will you press it?
Some people never press it. Some people press it once, maybe twice. The billionaires press it as fast as they can."
This time we got to know one of the victims, but definitely all those projects he was working on generated so much value for the shareholders.
LaserDiscMan · 10h ago
That meme is likely a reference to “Button, Button” a short story by Richard Matheson that was later adapted into a Twilight Zone episode and the 2009 movie “The Box”
djmips · 10h ago
Temporarily embarrassed billionaires downvoting right now.
djmips · 10h ago
For anyone out there who's in the same situation, please don't work when you're sick - that's when you're the most vulnerable. Over my career, I've known two otherwise healthy individuals who continued to press despite having the flu and both lost their lives.
kyleee · 8h ago
They literally died while working with the flu?
horns4lyfe · 10h ago
The issues around H1B visas are ruining American work culture and have been for some time. TBH, it’s already captured and I think it’s too late to fix it
jimbohn · 10h ago
But that's exactly the point of those visas! It's all about leverage. I truly hope that one day, centuries from now, we will look at the fact that people working for the richest man in the world had to poo in bags to work harder and faster with disgust
nikolayasdf123 · 10h ago
get visa in countries that allow remote work. Portugal, Thailand, China now issue good vias that let you work for a company anywhere in the world and stay many years in the country, or start your own business.
don't let your employer keep you and your family hostage with your legal status
twilo · 10h ago
I dunno I’ve been seeing more of these stories ever since sars2 started circulating but it’s probably “just stress”
andai · 9h ago
Hush now. I come here to numb my emotions, not contemplate death.
OutOfHere · 10h ago
The more you work, the more you will have to work. They will exploit you that much more.
Insufficient sleep is very bad for the heart. It is critically important for long-term health to to leave work on the dot at 5 pm, then get some exercise done in the evening if not in the very early morning. Also, stop relying on fast food for meals.
Abolish the overtime exemption for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers. Make it unprofitable to extract labor until someone dies. All other actions are impotent.
* Folks working more can have direct immediate compensation for it, vs handwavy promises of maybe future promotions or stock option rewards
* Creates jobs by lowering incentives to just over-work the people you already have
* Spreads out the income tax load by creating more paid labor out of thin air to get the same amount of total work done - better to have that marginal change in the average person's pocketbooks and income tax than tax-sheltered locations for corporations or the highly-wealthy
Not to mention that even if timesheets were used, they provide no guarantees. We always had to get management permission to put overtime in, but no one really knew how much time we worked - especially with a possibility of remote work.
This can only be fixed by pervasive monitoring, and IMHO this leads to a very unpleasant workspace.
Companies love timesheets because, even though you're salary, they want to know what you're doing at all times.
They want all the control of an hourly paid employee, with all the money stealing of a salary position.
Also you're already being tracked, they already know exactly how long you're online. I don't know what to tell you.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not advocating for time sheets. I'm advocating against overtime exemption.
Even so, all other things being equal, if the tedium of timesheets is on one side of the equation and all of the exploitation of unpaid labor is on the other, I'd still rather not be exploited. Working for free, which is what unpaid overtime is, is unsupportable.
There are many examples of non-exempt professionals who deal with this without resorting to spyware or coercion. IT support specialists, paralegals, and lab technicians all have systems that work: simple start/stop time logs or weekly attestations, plus manager pre-approval for overtime. No one is tracking keystrokes and no one is forced into surveillance. It's about accountability. You attest to your hours, managers approve exceptions, and overtime gets paid. That's the balance.
In a current world, manager says: "We have great work-life balance, feel free to work as much or as little as you want! Also, here is an assignment, if this is not done by Friday I'll PIP you, then fire you and you'll get deported. Wink wink, you might want to work more."
In a timesheet world, a manager tells the employee: "Sorry, I cannot approve overtime for you, because I care about you! Also, here is an assignment, if this is not done by Friday I'll PIP you, then fire you and you'll get deported. So make sure you don't record more than 40 hours, but remember we don't really know how much you spend working (wink wink)"
This law might eliminate those insane AI startups which openly advertise 996 schedules, but most requirements of overtime are not that overt.
Timesheets arent fun, but they're not the end of the world either. Other skilled professions (IT support, paralegals, lab techs) use simple weekly logs or start/stop tracking without surveillance. They get paid for their overtime. We don't.
If the choice is between tedious record keeping or doing more work for the same pay, the latter is far more exploitative and soul crushing. We can fix the mechanics without ignoring the principle: work more, get paid more.
Honest question: is filling out a timesheet really worse, to you, than working extra hours for free?
Option 1: you do as told and leave home at 5pm. You spend 40 hours per week exactly, but work is not getting done, so people are complaining about your performance. Your manager is putting more pressure on you, you are worried about getting fired.
Option 2: you record 40 hours per week, but actually work for 80. Sure your home life suffers but at least the manager is off your back. You are getting compliments about performance and vague promises about raise sometimes in the future maybe.
Which option do you think people will choose?
Most western countries are democracies because people got fed up of being exploited by dictators (sometimes called "kings"), removed them and setup a system in which they elect who makes the decisions. This system has issues but is less bad than dictatorship.
Yet, companies kept their hierarchical power structures.
Workers should decide who makes the decisions. If they don't wanna invest time into selling their product, they hire a salesman. If they want somebody to make long term projections, plan what gets worked on and communicates with other teams, they hire an assistant. And they decide how much he gets paid according to how much value he actually brings them.
Managers should be assistants.
Sure, the difference if whether the hierarchy is determined from the top or bottom. Top leads to unfair benefits for the top layer. This is called exploitation.
> wide variety of reasons
Can you give me examples?
Let's have MORE companies, not fewer.
Put in strong escalating taxes to incentivize cooperation between small companies instead of bowing to the math that encourages consolidation otherwise.
But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve.
> But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
I don't see the problem. Every company starts with just a few people, maybe some machines, maybe some real estate. The issue starts when these people call themselves "founders" and everybody else becomes an "employee"[0].
Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
And yes:
1) the founders took some risk in starting the business. They should get rewarded based on the amount of risk and their investment. Not in perpetuity.
2) some companies need a large up-front investment. Similarly, the investory should get rewarded based on invested amount and risk, not by owning a large chunk of the company in perpetuity.
Key point: as time goes on, the amount of work done by regular "working class" people completely outstrips the initial investment. The reward should go to people doing the actual work.
[0]: literally meaning "person being used"
We tried that in my country for about 50 years, it didn’t work out.
Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea. Instead, look at what specific ways the implementation fails to learn for next time.
It would certainly help to see at least one good implementation of the “good idea”
- A bunch of examples here: https://old.reddit.com/r/cooperatives/comments/p23rxr/what_a...
- Some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ownership
- Oxide computer company - idk how exactly the ownership works but AFAIK all workers except sales have the same salary.
- The early idSoftware AFAIK worked similarly with all 4 core gamedevs getting paid the same
Note that nothing says everyone has to get paid the same, it just ends up happening in some examples.
The more interesting question is: Can communalism work without the community having a deep attachment to the idea? The Hutterites achieve that through religion, but if you threw a group of random people together into a similar economic situation without some kind of strong belief system would they endure or would it quickly devolve back to what we see in the broader economy?
Did you notice I specifically said decisions should be made democratically?
Are those two not in direct conflict?
Please, stop pattern matching, and actually consider what I wrote.
You can tell we're not talking about communism because the previous commenter said "economic system", whereas the whole concept of an economic system vanishes with communism. It does not imagine an economic system would serve a purpose when scarcity is no longer a constraint. Hence the whole no state, money, or class thing.
You, yourself, literally wrote the original description of what we are talking about. How did you manage to end up so confused?
> Did you notice how communism was always about central control with only superficial or absolutely no elections?
And no. That sounds like you are thinking of a dictatorship. Probably a dictatorship at the hands of a political party that includes "Communist" in the name, granted, but thinking of that as communism is like thinking the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
Communism is science fiction that is imagined on the same basic premise as Star Trek. It is not about central control. As before, it rejects the idea that a central control (the state) would even remain. Marx and Engels hypothesized that the proletariat would have to temporarily seize control from the capitalist elite in order to usher in communism, but even if you somehow managed to confuse communism with their work, that isn't really central control either. What they pictured is still closer to being a democracy, except one that that excludes the bourgeoisie, similar to how women were historically excluded from democracy.
RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem.
This is related: https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a...
I don't know if it's right or wrong (and to what extent, most natural systems are complex with a multitude of factors influencing them) but I can easily imagine a similar principle applying to companies.
If you wanna expand by starting an office in the next town over, you need a way to communicate with it, otherwise it's just a separate business with a cash injection to start.
So you have a point.
But the core issue stands - the power hire/fire people, determine their salary and also capture their entire economic output leads to a power imbalance.
this. most countries have similar policies. been there, seen so many others going through this in UK, USA, Japan, Korea, Singapore. it really damages your life.
to everyone, check other countries (Portugal, Thailand, Japan) that give you residency for years and allow to work remotely
don't let your employer hold you and your family a hostage with your legal status
They do have these policies written down: bi-annual performance reviews, stack ranking, PIPs.
We don't have enough information to support that.
Bi-annual performance reviews themselves aren't a bad thing that force overwork.
If he had a history of good performance reviews (100% or higher on average), the risk of getting a PIP would be very low.
Microsoft stopped stack ranking years ago.
I don't think we should speculate on people's behavior or how they aligned with company policies, because we might accidentally be insulting this man.
Microsoft reintroduced stack ranking over the last year or so. It's widely documented.
The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well.
I don't think any of the things I said above (or were insinuated about Microsoft culture by other posters) are in any way insulting to Prateek, regardless of what his individual situation or performance is. If anything, calling attention to it and attempting to address it is a powerful way to show respect to my eyes. The incentive systems at play, the pressures and stressors, will result in these outcomes unless anyone forces a change. End of story.
Microsoft has forced differentiation, not stack ranking. They aren't the same and differentiation is much better for employees.
> The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well
I'm sure you're feeling a lot of options due to your proximity, and I'm sorry for what you're going through.
The article says he was under pressure, but it didn't say the source of that pressure. Perhaps it was due to a series of "lower than expected" reviews, or the constant worry about losing their job and their visa. It didn't say that the pressure was caused by internal policies.
I've known many people who put pressure on themselves and burnt out because of it, despite no one expected them to do so. I suffered through that in my own career and nearly quit software engineering because of it.
If you have real details about the situation and that it was internal Microsoft policy or the pressure put in them by their manager which may not have aligned with Microsoft policy, that woukd be very useful information to share with the public.
Microsoft operates like many big companies vs a single company, and some teams go beyond standard Microsoft policy and have unrealistic expectations of their employees. Those departments and managers should be called out and shamed.
That’s how I read it
Upd:
I didn’t mean that this is ok, I’m for workers rights.
You are free to be poor, broke and homeless.
We really need a management class that doesn't insist on continuing the cycle of abuse on their underlings.
This won't happen. Your manager puts pressure on you, they get pressure from their manager and so on until it reaches the CEO who might be getting pressure from investors/board.
Only fix is regulations from the government which seems to be a curse word by many posters on this site.
Culture evolves and changes. What is acceptable in a culture evolves and changes with it.
Be the change you want to see, apply steady pressure, speak up when the opportunity arises, debate people who see things differently, and with time, many things can happen.
Most progress is hard-won.
I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care. They were politely told they were not meeting expectations and since they had mortgages and other stuff, they took a hint and moved on.
Again, this fight is political and not corporate. Make tech workers hourly and this will stop. There will also be plenty of tech workers who will fight against this tooth and nail.
I can't agree. I don't think anyone who is diligent about recycling or making environmentally conscious food choices believes it will fix global warming. But doing the things that we can is still important for changing culture over time.
If you're a young person growing up in a home that thinks about these things responsibly, the hope is that more people reaching adult-hood will think about the world through that lens. Is it enough? No. Is it still critical? I think so.
> I've had managers who tried. None of them lasted at these companies that did not care.
I've worked at places where management did not behave in the way you describe. The point being that such places exist, and such an outcome is not so impossible.
One way to guarantee things will not change is to do nothing.
Problem is that government is the very same people you just spoke of. If they had the collective will to change things, they could just do it. But as they lack the collective will to see change, government can't change either. I believe they call this the stag hunt dilemma.
I’m all for workers’ rights, though.
Why are you putting yourself in a position where you're forced to find work as fast as possible or you'll be homeless?
For all but the people on the lowest incomes or those with terrible luck this is a solvable problem
Worker cooperatives are to corporations what democracies are to dictatorships.
We, at least those of us in the software industry, tried that. If you look closely, that's what Agile was all about. The associated Twelve Principles of Agile Software outlines what needs to be considered by developers when there isn't a "boss" to oversee operations.
But I'm sure you know how that turned out in practice: The power structure quickly jumped on usurping the name and bastardized it into something that gave them even more power.
So if you can work 10% more than your peers, you get not 10% bonus but rather 30%-100% more. So it makes business sense to put the extra 10%, until everyone is working at 110% and then again, adding an extra 10% pays off, rinse release, death spiral.
The compensation model is pure evil.
Does it actually? I'd buy that it makes silly arbitrary emotion sense to bask in the nonsensical feelings about an even bigger number. The actual business case is much less clear. There is obviously an opportunity cost associated with that extra 10% and 30-100% is not necessarily the best opportunity. I suspect it is often not.
I think the parent emphasizes the wrong side of it, although I agree with them strongly that it is a damaging way to do things. Yes, you get slightly more upside on the top end, but it's more like 30% vs. 10% for an average performer, there's no 100% bonuses here unless you're in the "ruling class" (roughly VP and above).
The actual risk is that if you're on the downside of what they call "differentiation", if you're not the one who pushed above your peers, what used to be called meets expectation is now considered below expectations, and is a path towards pip and layoff. Lack of growth for non-terminal roles is also now identified as a path towards pip and layoff.
Microsoft is intentionally turning up the heat to thin the herd.
Maybe I've been farming for too long, but my brain, at least, is wired to push until completion and until things are done it will consume me. If you're going to be up all night ruminating about it, you may as well actually work on it.
Of course, in farming you get a nice long break after you've pushed yourself hard. I've never worked at Microsoft, but I suspect, given what I've seen elsewhere, that as soon as it is done it's already on to the next thing, never giving workers a chance to stop for a while.
It gets complicated really fast if you add decades of temporary visa status to it.
As much as they say they care about employees, honestly they don’t. It’s important to draw a line and say no. These companies would dump you tomorrow and not think twice about it. Work hard and have fun, but remember they call it “compensation” for a reason. Don’t let a company you don’t own be your life… that never works out well in the long run.
Nearly as horrifying are all of the people that bust their asses because they care and don’t want to lose their jobs, then the managers and/or companies who’ve come to expect that fire them when they burn out, after they’ve amassed health problems, and they haven’t spent any time in career-related training nor networked with others to find something else.
"Here is a button. If you press it, you get $50.000, but someone you don't know dies. Will you press it?
Some people never press it. Some people press it once, maybe twice. The billionaires press it as fast as they can."
This time we got to know one of the victims, but definitely all those projects he was working on generated so much value for the shareholders.
don't let your employer keep you and your family hostage with your legal status
Insufficient sleep is very bad for the heart. It is critically important for long-term health to to leave work on the dot at 5 pm, then get some exercise done in the evening if not in the very early morning. Also, stop relying on fast food for meals.
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