[ZunarJ5]

It would be nice if the employer also cared in return, however in my experience, this is exceptionally rare. I think more than a fair share of us here learned our lessons in investing ourselves rather sharply. It rarely, if ever, pays off for the worker.

[atoav]

This is my experience as well.

As a former freelancer the standards I hold myself to are exceptionally high. Then I got employed and carried that standard with me (still do). The problem is that this means work will be pushed my way, because I am sometimes literally the only person who can do it within a day instead making it a month long project.

This led then to such an amount of work that I could mo longer hold that quality level, which made me unhappy. Of course I complained all the way, with no real change.

The only thing that worked was a strategic leaking of the fact that I was looking for positions elsewhere, suddenly a whole lot of concessions were made, and since then it has gotten better and I got much better at rejecting work.

Care too much and you burn out and get replaced.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Care too much and you burn out and get replaced

... or you become a menace to your boss. :-)

[paulcole]

In practice what would an employer caring look like to you?

[ZunarJ5]

You know what caring looks like. You experience it in your personal relationships every day. The disconnect isn't knowledge, it's incentives. The practical answer is straightforward: predictable schedules that people can plan around, living wages that are indexed to the COL, transparent paths for advancement, respect for work-life boundaries, investment in employee development beyond immediate productivity needs (i.e. good healthcare for the worker and their dependents), genuine sick leave without retaliation, respect for physical and cognitive limitations, and protection from arbitrary termination.

But you're asking the wrong question. The real question is why, despite decades of evidence showing these practices improve retention and performance, they remain exceptional rather than standard. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed. It is optimized for wealth extraction, not value creation.

Public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. Every dollar spent on employee wellbeing that doesn't directly boost quarterly metrics is arguably a breach of fiduciary duty. Middle managers who genuinely care get promoted out or pushed out. The few companies that do care either have unusual ownership structures (co-ops, private ownership with values-driven founders) or are temporarily buying talent in hot markets. Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.

So yes, we all know what caring looks like. The question is why we keep pretending the current system has any mechanism to deliver it at scale.

[tome]

> The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed.

I don't follow this bit. It's worse for employees, it's worse for employers, and it's exactly as designed?

[awesome_dude]

One of the weirdest things I am seeing is the pushback from employers on "Remote"

We have actual studies showing that remote workers are more productive, have higher morale, and save themselves and their company money (no commute, no office rent)

And yet employers are still doggedly determined that employees sit in their toxic offices being miserable.

Employers are worse off (lower productivity), employees are worse off (lower morale).

[aaronbaugher]

I'd bet that when employers that want to bring employees back to the office commission studies of the pros and cons of remote work, those studies unsurprisingly determine that remote work is worse in most ways. Things like productivity and morale are hard to measure accurately anyway, so it would be easy to slant them to fit what people want to hear.

[awesome_dude]

There's that piece of news that comes up semi regularly that claims that some unnamed individual in some in unnamed country is holding three remote jobs down simultaneously.

[ZunarJ5]

I have expanded on this above.

[Paracompact]

> Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.

I work in a tech field, but not quite the "pamper you with massages and ice cream sundaes" part of it. I am profoundly uncomfortable with the cultural deception at those types of places.

[atoav]

When I was producing no-budget movies (people work for you without pay!) the secret trick was to keep a mental list of why people were here. Diana the camera assistant was here because she liked to learn, John the actor was here because he liked to try some things out, Linda was here to meet people, Joe was here because he is your friend.

Now you only need to make sure the basics (food, shelter, etc) is alright and that everybody gets what they came for each day.

So to answer your question: What it looks like for an employer to care depends on the specifc employee. Some may just look for financial benefits, others (like me) may just want to be given the time and means to do their job well, yet others value free rime more than money, or a better office, more autonomy within their domain or whatnot. The wishes are many.

But you need to first get the basics right, and many fail at that.

[awesome_dude]

There are employers that care - they genuinely try to keep their staff engaged, and happy. They also, when times are hard, are the ones least likely to make people redundant, they hold on as long as humanly possible.

Then there are the employers at the other end of the scale, those who couldn't care less about their staff, they think that they pay the staff and that's all that's required of them, and everything that goes wrong is the staff's fault.

So, in practice, the employers that see their staff as human beings rather than "resources" to be exploited is a bloody good start.

[BobbyJo]

What risk/return are they expecting employees to accept? What risk/return are they willing to accept? Any advantage they give themselves over the employee, to me, means they don't care.

[nickff]

I don’t understand what you’re talking about; could you please give some sort of example, or perhaps further elaborate?

[BobbyJo]

For larger companies, "You have to move to X place and work 1 day a week in-office, but also we just laid some people off and will give you no guarantee that you won't be laid off after moving" is a good example that's common right now. You know none of the leadership is getting that kind of deal, but they expect a % of their employees to deal with it.

For smaller companies, bad equity splits, or a lack of transparency around equity or company performance is probably most common. It's pretty common for startups to avoid telling the whole story to the rank and file to keep them unaware of the actual risk/reward they are taking, which then allows founders/leadership to pad the risk/reward they themselves get.

[atoav]

Well a classic would be to insist the employee treats the company like "family" and comes in when someone misses their shift on their free day.

But when the employee is in need the employer discards them like an expendable resource, instead of making good on the "we are family"-tagline.

Work world is full of these one-sided "deals".

[koakuma-chan]

Employer who pays themselves less than they pay their employees.

[awesome_dude]

That's a foolish metric - the employer is usually making money through asset accumulation (the business that they own is worth more)

Cash compensation isn't very reliable.

[cyberax]

Stock options.

[hinkley]

Unless they're preferred stock options, that's not caring. It's misdirection.

[rjbwork]

Yup. If they won't show you a cap table or if you have different shares from the founders, you value it at zero until proven otherwise (liquidity event).

[cyberax]

Uhm... No? Founders typically also have common stock. Preferred stock is for investors.

[hinkley]

I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but I've never heard of a early or even founding engineers getting preferred stock.

Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually. You will become math to them at the point where they get rewarded and find out your reward is more work.

[FreakLegion]

It's the case. And the kicker is that if you understood the tax games we play with startup stock, you wouldn't want preferred shares.

Why? Because common shares have their price set by a 409A valuation, which through the first few rounds of funding especially will be a small fraction of the preferred share price, set by agreement between the company and its investors. Cheap common shares make early exercise practical, so you can file an 83(b), not worry about AMT, and benefit from the QSBS tax exclusion after five years. Cheap common shares also mean you capture most of the value of preferred shares as gains, rather than having it as basis, out of the gate, since in a successful exit preferred shares are simply converted to common.

What companies that care actually do is offer early exercise, so employees who want to can take advantage of the QSBS tax exclusion, and give 10-year exercise windows with ISO->NSO conversion, so employees who decide to leave aren't forced to exercise or forfeit their options within 30-90 days. There's a lot of uninformed talk about preferred shares on HN, and you really ought to ignore it.

[cyberax]

Sorry, but you're wrong.

"Preferred stock" is not really "preferred", it has a lot of limitations that common stock doesn't have. But it does have preference during liquidation and/or secondary market tender offers.

There are ways that founders or major stockholders can use to screw the minor stockholders, but preferred stock does not protect against them at all.

> Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually.

If people are giving non-trivial amounts of stock in a company where they work is "just math", then I don't know what else you want.

[MrDarcy]

To be fair, he says in TFA he wants to recruit like a cult. I don’t know many cult leaders who care about their followers, so at least he’s honest if not psychopathic in the way he says he’s going to abuse you before he does so.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I don’t know many cult leaders who care about their followers

My impression is that cult leaders often do care about their followers. The problems rather start when the cult member becomes disobedient - this is when matters become very dirty.

[aeve890]

>My impression is that cult leaders often do care about their followers.

Cult leaders care about their followers insofar as they stay submissive ass-kissing sycophants. It's not like they care about the follower's actual well-being.

[throwmeaway222]

Yeah they're literally paying you money so they don't have to.

[hexage1814]

It oftentimes feels like you are paid way less than you actually gave to the company – assuming you actually worked hard and cared.

In my country it's like "Well, the company broke all records of profit, we earned 500 million dollars more than last years. Here, have this box of chocolate as a gift. Keep the good work guys"

[saulpw]

This is why workers are "losers" according to the Gervais Principle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

[jodrellblank]

Maybe this opinion would have more weight if you respected that humans are not perfectly spherical massless money sinks.

[awesome_dude]

No. They are profiting from your labour, and returning a smaller portion of that profit to you.

Your work creates the profit that your salary comes from, the employer takes a cut of that and gives you what they deem they can get away with.

[mrbungie]

Not to invoke a true scotsman fallacy, but most knowledge/white-collar workers I know aspire to be more than just being a cog on a payroll.

[atoav]

No, they are giving you a tiny fraction of the cake you earn them. The fact is that you are there to make them money.

[throwmeaway222]

I guarantee you, if you were running the company you work at, there might be a few here and there that you truly care about, but the vast majority of your workers are workers.

[hinkley]

Maybe this opinion would have more weight if you didn't use a throwaway account to post it.

[NegativeK]

That, at best, is dehumanizing the employer. There is no corporate structure that exists without humans making the decisions at some point in the chain. The decisions might be abstracted or broken into small chunks, but it's still humans at the bottom.

And humans that replace caring with money are assholes.

[RobRivera]

I missed this clause in

checks notes

Literally my entire career.