[dougmwne]

Absolutely. Nearly everyone I know left college doe-eyed and ready to dedicate a piece of their soul to their shiny new job. Everyone learned otherwise one person at a time. Some worked for “we’re all a family” companies and were able to remain innocent ignorants till the day the axe fell.

[jrochkind1]

It's almost like... people really want to find meaning and purpose in an occupation, community in the place they spend at least half of their waking hours, and work they can be proud of. How... immature?

I agree that the present society cannot generally fulfill these wants/needs.

[PragmaticPulp]

> Absolutely. Nearly everyone I know left college doe-eyed and ready to dedicate a piece of their soul to their shiny new job

When did you graduate college? In the social media era, the sentiment has been more about "fuck you, pay me" and "H.R. is not your friend" type ideology. This is especially true in recent years, where a lot of college graduates have been exposed to years of /r/antiwork in their daily Reddit browsing before they even get their first jobs.

A lot of juniors want to do good work and produce good results, but it's common for them to believe that corporations are evil, capitalism is a failed ideology, and that it's virtuous to minimize their labor input while maximizing their compensation. It can take a while to convince some of these new hires that as their manager, I'm a person too.

[DoughnutHole]

People can hold a lot of cognitively dissonant but valid viewpoints at the same time.

I put effort into my work because taking pride in one’s work nourishes the soul.

I try to meet my manager’s expectations because I know him, he’s a good guy, and I know he’s got my back to the extent he is able to.

I also know that my employer as an entity abstracted through a dozen tiers of hierarchy would feed me and my manager both into a woodchipper if it would increase quarterly gains more than the alternative would.

I work to minimise how much of myself I give to my employer, and maximise how much I give to myself and to the relationships I value (which still includes workplace relationships!).

[dougmwne]

Yes, I am older than that. I truly feel for a lot of the younger people who came of age during pandemic isolation and raised by YouTubers. I work with some of them and they are not having an easy adjustment into adulthood.

Good on you for putting in the effort. The corporation cannot be your friend, but a good manager can be.

[Apocryphon]

You being a person is not mutually exclusive with any of those other sentiments. They are able to coexist.

[WeylandYutani]

After WW2 they found out that a lot of the Germans who commited war crimes were completely normal and decent people just following orders. Managers aren't bad guys but they WILL follow orders.

[uxcolumbo]

Yes, be a good German, right?

You can say no… I did when my then boss asked me to fire people because he personally didn’t like them.

[sangnoir]

> It can take a while to convince some of these new hires that as their manager, I'm a person too.

However the company is not a person - RMoney be damned

[triceratops]

> it's virtuous to minimize their labor input while maximizing their compensation

It's not? That's what capitalism is. More productivity with fewer inputs.

[bradleyjg]

This business about “fuck capitalism” and so on is also infantile, just in the opposite direction.

[HarryHirsch]

That's an assertion of belief, not a statement of fact. You'd have to bring arguments why the interests of workers and owners are congruent (which they are not).

[bradleyjg]

I don’t need to do any such thing. Just point out that no reasonable alternative has been proposed by anyone and conclude that it’s therefore infantile whining.

[Apocryphon]

German-style Rhine capitalism with co-determination for labor unions and a robust social safety net that isn’t even as leftist as the Scandinavian countries.

[bradleyjg]

It’s still capitalism, so if you want that why are you going around saying “fuck capitalism”?

Scandinavia has capitalism too, welfare capitalism, sure, but still capitalism.

[musicale]

> "we’re all a family"

... that's why our valued Craptech employees should not be surprised if they are subject to abuse, estrangement, abandonment, financial hardship, mistreatment in care homes, abortion or termination of life support, etc., concurrent with our expectation of absolute loyalty at the expense of happiness, health, and sanity. And of course our gender pay policies are modeled on domestic work.

[ThrowawayR2]

The Dilbert comic strip has been running since 1989 and was about the life of engineers at something that nominally looked like a tech company and, even then, people were remarking that a lot of its humor worked because it was true. If anyone graduated without the awareness that the working world wasn't going to necessarily be all rainbows and unicorns, they weren't paying attention.

[Apocryphon]

And yet people are willing to give a lot of credence to pointy headed bosses, as many discussions on HN will attest to.