alt Hacker NewsI’ve been baffled by how common these illusions about the labor market can be among people who have been isolated from the realities of the world in their career. I most commonly see it in juniors who never had jobs before graduating college, but I’ve heard it from adults who didn’t realize how much of their career fell into a very lucky, cushy track.
One of my strangest memories was a junior hire who decided after a few months that they didn’t like the work they were hired to do (which was exactly the job description, no surprises).
They informed their boss that the job wasn’t working out for them so the company would have to find some different work for them to do. There were a lot of difficult conversations trying to explain that they were hired to do a specific job that was needed, not to become part of a family where everyone belongs no matter what. This was a small company that didn’t have other open roles and wouldn’t have the budget to backfill even if they could move the person.
Yet it didn’t register. The person viewed their job as a jobs program, where they were chosen to join the company like a family and then it was the company’s job to find enjoyable work for them to do. They saw the paycheck as owed for their presence, and work produced for the company to be a nice bonus when it worked out.
It was a difficult situation until the person was finally let go because they could not accept the idea that their job was to do work in exchange for pay, and that the company wasn’t going to pay them if their work was not producing the necessary.
That’s the most extreme example but I’ve run into this a lot more in recent years. It got really bad again for the cohort of graduates who entered the job market post-COVID and thought getting jobs was always going to be this easy. I’ve been helping with resume review on and off and it’s stunning to see so many people who worked for 2-3 years post-COVID and can’t really tell you what work they did, but are so angry and shocked that their employers let them go.
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I'm personally more concerned by the entitled goobers who think it's perfectly reasonable to feed the hardworking majority into a woodchipper if it multiplies the money in their brokerage account. Those are a structural problem, unlike kids who need to learn and will be taught.
Yeah, the kids are too naive about the job market.
On the other hand, it's not in anyone's interest to tell them the accurate version, right?
If the same kid instead spent their evenings working unpaid overtime for the company, because they would see it analogically to helping a family in need... the boss probably wouldn't tell them that they are making a mistake.
Heck, if someone just started telling those kids "the company owes you nothing, and you owe nothing to the company, the relationship is purely transactional, either side will be replaced when convenient", probably many people would object.
So yeah, the kids are sometimes confused by the confusing messages they get.
Other countries have been far less capitalism pilled than the US by virtue of having universal health insurance.
So basically the kid bought into exactly the corporate propaganda which has littered almost every workplace for the past two decades. I am not gonna blame the kid here but rather a culture of hyper-capitalism which is creating this illusion seemingly on purpose in order to get workers who are more loyal to their exploiter over their own material conditions as workers.
> not to become part of a family where everyone belongs no matter what
I think this isn't helped by the fact that HR in alot of companies in the past decade or so has been going with this narrative. We are all a family together in this, stay late when needed, work extra/after-hours, etc.. Lots of places even have the expectation in this regard.
Of course this all goes away instantly when you get cold-emailed a layoff for example. I think its a systemic problem that originated some decade ago in an attempt to exploit people's judgment by creating self-doubt (ie: work more/harder under the premise that if you dont you are letting your "family" down), got perpetuated around alot, all job postings are worded like that nowadays too ("join our family") and it gives the newcomers to the job market the wrong expectation.
The worst offenders are all under IT companies as far as I can see, but because it's been going for so long it wouldn't surprise me if this is industry wide at this point for non-manual-labor job offers.