As an Employee, You Are Disposable (2023)

Hi, former employer here who valued employees over profitability.

It's true for all employers. Your job as a business owner is not to provide jobs to your employees, it's to keep the business afloat and maintain your income. There are limits to how much of a good person you can be, those limits are set by the economic system we exist in. Ignoring these limits will cause your business to fail.

It's a sad view and it's not entirely accurate but it has better predictive power than the rose-tinted glasses you and possibly your employer may be wearing. Profitability is the baseline requirement, all else comes after. That's how a market economy works. If you remain at a stable net-zero that's great as long as nothing ever changes but it means you're extremely vulnerable to any disruption.

To be clear: I'm not even talking about shareholders. This is true for private businesses too, maybe even more so. Profit means reserves, reserves mean being able to survive dips and downturns. But when the market changes you need to adjust and adjustment means the value of an employee can change drastically and it may be better to replace someone who was a great fit for the old market with someone who's a better fit for the new market. Sentimentality is a competitive disadvantage.

You can balk at the morality and decency of this and I'd agree with you but you shouldn't be upset about the persons, you should be upset about the system that is requiring those persons to act this way in order to stay afloat.

Certainly not true for the company where I work

In the 2 decades I have worked as a Software Engineer, I met numerous people, in numerous different companies, that said those words, exactly.

All of them were eventually proven wrong. No exceptions.

Also maybe it's true for OPs country, not in mine. It costs a lot of money to get rid of someone in my country. So that makes laying people off less profitable.

"it's profitable" hides a world of problem though. "it's profitable" over what timeline - just because an employee isn't doing something profitable this week, doesn't mean they won't be next week. It costs a lot to fire someone even in "at will" countries where you literally just tell them to F-Off

But it's bold to generalize. Certainly not true for the company where I work.

I'd say this is true for all for-profit companies, by definition.

Perhaps there is extra cost that makes it not worth it - laws, contract rules, etc. All the more reason to have that in place.

Certainly not true for the company where I work.

I'm old enough to have heard this about a very large number of companies and it's always wrong in the long term.

Realistic.

It's a job offer, not a marriage vow.

It's great if there can be rapport in a public company (as opposed to private) but that culture is a luxury trim at best.

Maybe that's true for your employer. But it's bold to generalize. Certainly not true for the company where I work. And a quite sad view.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a business person, so I have no idea what the correct fancy terms are for any of these things.)

If the company had to choose between survival thanks to firing someone ("recovery to positive" predicted after all legal unemployment stuff has been paid), vs loyalty keeping people on payroll risking bankruptcy[1] if the current trend continues, then I would expect them to choose fire-now-and-secure-survival, rather than don't-fire-because-i'm-sure-it-will-all-work-out-somehow-if-i-stay-loyal.

After all, as an employee, I would also choose assured survival (moving companies) over loyalty (staying in the same company) the second I realize staying at the current company isn't beneficial for me (i.e. what the company pays me vs cost of living, not enough for savings, too little time to spend with family, always way too tired, etc).

If your company would choose loyalty over being profitable, then that's interesting for sure. (EDIT: Though there's some companies that just run at a loss off the founder's savings, so it could be possible. I'm not denying your claims, just find them unusual.)

[1]: Either because company is already on negative profit ("debt"? no idea if that is the correct word), or because current profit isn't enough to please VC and risks losing their support which would then put them on a negative profit situation.

maybe true until MBAs take over the board. Then everyone becomes disposable.

Certainly not true for the company where I work.

How do you know that? Even if so, how do you know that it won't change in future?

It's heartwarming to believe in the "family" narrative some companies promote, but it's important to remain pragmatic. This narrative is just a motivational tool to encourage employees to go above and beyond their compensated duties. It's not a binding contract though.

In reality, the power dynamic inherently favors the employer. Once an employee has invested their time and energy, the company holds all the leverage. There's little incentive for the company to uphold their end of this unspoken "deal."

Leadership changes, company priorities shift, and the "family" narrative can quickly fade when faced with financial realities or strategic decisions.

It is a relatively safe generalisation from my experience, both direct and through family & friends, even though I don't think it is true for my current circumstances.

The regime I'm currently under genuinely seems to value me and the others around. I've been afforded quite a lot of understanding with regard to unplanned time off (and sometimes missed deadlines) due to dealing with some personal issues and looking after ill family (damn near lost the old man a couple of weeks ago, scariest day of my existence thus far). Admittedly there are some things that I have a very low bus count on, so they can't just easily kick me out or risk irritating me to the point where I chose to go, but it is more than just that.

Of course if it came down to me or the whole company I'd be dropped quickly as is only sensible, so there is a limit to how much I can count on such loyalty (or if it _isn't_ loyalty, their feeling that they need to keep me around).

Previous regime¹ was quite different. I wouldn't have trusted some of them enough to lend them a fiver³, and when I got news of the current lot coming in I was very close to telling them to fuck off⁴ in most unprofessional terms even though I didn't have anywhere lined up to jump directly to.

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[1] I've effectively worked for that same entity for many years², though there have been a couple of complete changes of ownership & company name, the usual staff turnover overall, and changes to the product line-up.

[2] due in part to a shocking lack of ambition :)

[3] At one point I found out my line manager was leaving the day he did, via an email to the whole company about leaving drinks, management had known for at least weeks. Also working piles of unpaid overtime on a project then being bitched about by the CEO for not being present at 0900 on the dot one morning, was a good indication of how much my efforts were respected (I started working to rule at that point, in at 0859, out at 1731, no overtime without agreement up-front it would be paid for).

[4] What had stopped me some days earlier was the brexit vote: that implied potential economic uncertainty which, to my many risk-averse personality segments, demanded I be a little more cautious for a time.

Companies aren't people. Even if your current direct boss wouldn't do this, they won't be your boss forever, and there's always somebody further up the chain who can overrule them (or fire them too).

If you write something at work does anything realistically stop you retaining enough person documentation / snippets to fully or partially recreate it?

My buddy Slim seems capable of it and has built up quite a portfolio of "ready to go" solutions for common problems over the years.

No, you're not in an unusual situation and there are very few companies doing anything interesting that would agree to this.

The fact that the parent comment is so upvoted is a reflection of what people dream of, not reality.

It's not even necessarily about employers. I was pushing to open source an internal project I worked on. Turns out other coauthors are not interested in spending any time on it (reviewing code, make adjustments, go through approval etc). What can I do.

I asked this once, and I was told “It is fine to work on/contribute to open-source as long as you don’t connect yourself with the company.”

I thought that was a pretty cool thing. My job is essentially subsidizing some open source projects without ever getting the credit for it (or the potentially negative publicity, from their perspective, I guess)

Am I unusual in working at places that take an extremely restrictive attitude to their IP?

No.

How many people have had this work?

Statistically, almost nobody.

I would argue that it happens more than you may think. You depend on an LGPL library? Tell your manager that either you can make the module that links to it LGPL as well, or that you can keep it proprietary but it will take "a lot of work". Often the manager will not value that piece of code so much and will allow you to open source it.

Your employer allows you to open source something? Push for a copyleft license and no CLA.

Your manager says that "we could consider open sourcing it"? Take this as a yes.

Learn about licenses, what they mean, and think about IP at work. Many times the employer does not get anything from not open sourcing the code. It's just that they don't care. If you do, you can push them towards doing it.

I am not saying that it will be bad for the employer! It may actually be good. I am just saying that it is better for you as a developer, so you should push for it.

I've done it pretty successfully ( https://artsy.github.io/blog/2019/04/29/how-did-artsy-become... ) and now regularly look back at prior source code and blogs as I work on something else but with similar patterns

I would say that getting to a point where this sort of thing is possible requires a huge amount of out-of-bounds culture and technical work though. Probably outside of the commitment range of folks who just want to work as an employee and not think about work outside of your paid hours

At my previous job I extracted and open sourced quite a few libraries and such, although never the entire application itself.

And I don't think anyone really would have benefited from open sourcing the application either. The code wasn't all that brilliant, it was hard to run, had a lot of assumptions that would only ever be true for us, and we didn't really want to spend the time fixing/optimising that. Tons of other things to do. Practically we would also have to scrub the commit history, do an audit to make sure we really don't have anything sensitive in there, and stuff like that.

One reason I open sourced this stuff was just enlightened self-interest by the way: it enforces "clean" library-oriented programming with clean separations. When I joined there was stuff like "email parser module" which in principle would parse RFC2822 messages, but then would also call models to do a few database things, and nonsense like that. It was all pretty messy, and this hugely improved things.

When I was young, my father worked for a place where asking for a raise was a fireable offence. The founder had been a pioneer in the modern cattle-not-pets attitude toward servers, except he applied it to developers. When an employee asked for a raise, it meant on of two things:

1. The employee was a vain troublemaker who had over-value what they were worth in the market. Firing them would not only remove an inefficiency from the system (as they were likely not to work as hard if they believed that they were underpaid), but it would also helpfully remind the other developers that they were all expendable.

2. The employee was a 10x developer who was vital to the company processes and could command a much higher salary somewhere else. Even if you gave them a raise today, they could be hit by a bus tomorrow. The best course of action was to simply rip off the band aid. Fire the employee, have security immediately escort them from the building, and begin triage to ensure that the critical systems that they wrote/managed could be handled by the next resume in HR's pile.

The line I will always remember is: Developer are like eggs. They are heavily undervalued, but also will crack under too much pressure. Thankfully, like eggs, you can buy them for cheap in packs of twelve, so it doesn't matter if you break a few.

Ive been in SWE management for roughly 20 years now and if you get labeled as “the person who wants everything open source”

Not if you do it right. Don't be "the person who complains about stuff not being open source".

I believe I have been pretty successful at open sourcing a lot of my code. Sometimes by convincing my management that it was good for the company, sometimes by manipulating them (I guess it would mean I manipulated people in your position :-) ). Not in a way that hurt the company at all: I never open sourced anything where it actually mattered for the company.

I see it like this: when given the choice between not open sourcing (no work needed) and open sourcing (some work needed), every rational manager will go for the former ("I don't care about it, so don't wait my resources for it"). I just adapt my narrative to make it sound like it is cheaper to open source, and everybody is happy!

Yet all software companies and to a lesser extent the whole economy depend on open source software to function. In my opinion, the toxic attitude is marginalizing developers who see that.

I'll be honest, getting paid is good for my career. What code I specifically get paid to monkey over weighs on it far less.

Totally agree with avoiding labeling yourself more generically, but having spent enough time in the sun... I just want shade.

I work to get paid, not get acclaim or friends. At a certain point your professional development stops being at work. Being a mercenary is an interesting way to consider that, actually. For yourself, nobody else will.

I'm not even a developer. I do SRE which kind of requires I play one while not being on the friendliest terms with the real devs: "oh, that guy again"

I guess my point is this: don't subject yourself to whims... but do be amenable. Just not too much.

It's easy to become the sucker. Don't accept working on business critical code without business critical pay. It's just a weird way to look at things.

labeled as “the person who wants everything open source”

If you're always banging on about it, then yeah, that will happen. But that is of course a bad idea, because always banging on about any topic is almost always a bad idea in almost any context.

If you can convince your company to do that, you can probably convince them to use a copyleft license, I would think.

This was rather disappointing to me. I had really expected better because my colleagues in general were typically pro open source. I'm not using Django anymore, and I'm not inclined to put any personal time into it to keep the project alive.

Why would your colleagues want to maintain your pet project instead of making their own? Most open source projects live or die with their main contributors, if you expected the company to spend money maintaining your project then that’s the wrong expectation in my opinion.

At least it's part of your portfolio: you can show that code.

What's the worst case? The code just gets unmaintained and dies. That's not a problem at all.

You're paid to produce code, not to fight against open sourcing it.

Fair point. I just feel like it doesn't cost much to learn about open source licenses, and developers would benefit from it.

I managed to open source a lot of code just by convincing managers (sometimes in a manipulative way, but that's the game: they do that, too). It did not imply any bureaucracy.

With change in leadership to GenXers and millennials I don't think it's an expectation really.

Employment are an adversarial relationship of convenience

Given the chance, both parties would expect the other party be loyal while they optimize for something better than what they have.

What annoys me, is when companies expect _you_ to be loyal, when they would get rid of you in a heartbeat.

Reality is that neither has to be loyal. Employees leave all the time for better pay/perks etc. You are judging employers too harshly in this respect.

This reminds me of the argument GE made (from David Gelles book about Welch) that laying off staff is a kindness, as it lets them try and find a new job they’re “better suited for” sooner rather than later

That argument falls flat on its face as soon as you look at the balance sheet of these companies. They are exceeding expectations and still laying people off.

I thought it was a discussion about generic companies, but it seems to be a discussion about specific ones?

where employees are actually valued beyond mere numbers

Isn’t this the point of the article? That even when you feel this way that you are still disposable?

When I'm evaluating whether or not I want to take a position at a company, once of the things I look for is that company's history of layoffs. Some companies have a habit of engaging in them, and I prefer to avoid them. In part out of self-defense and in part because I think it's indicative of a general business mindset that I wouldn't get along with.

Is it because of something inherent to software development, or is it just that software development became a big job category in an environment that was skeptical of unions?

- A literal supermajority of software developers

_American_ software developers. Many in Europe don't fall for this way of thinking.

These comments miss so much nuance. This isn't black and white.

I don't want to work for a union not because I'm a rising star. It's because I know I'm on the right of a normal distribution. I don't want to revert to median pay. No thanks.

I make enough money, I’m happy in my position, I feel like my employer treats me fairly. Why should I want a union?

I also have nationally strong’ish labor laws.

You’re not wrong, but in Australia where I work only 12.5% of all workers are in unions. We have some moderately union-hostile legislation (strikes are hard to pull off lawfully) but nothing preventing union organisation in principle for most workers. So evidently it’s not only software developers who think this way.

If you work at a Union place, you know the complications are absurd.

I've worked at both, and the efficiency, friendliness, experience were all absurdly better without unions. With unions, everyone was trying to get each other written up, seniority mattered more than performance, politics were half the conversations at work.

Engineering would be miserable with a union, you'd be basically locked into an employer climbing the totem pole.

Over here (austria) the unions, which are pretty powerful, argue on behalf of ALL employees in that field. They basically set the minimum pay/benefits across the country for the kinds of jobs they represent by negotiating with the industrial association. By law, the result of those negotiations are the baseline for everyone. And everyone can still negotiate for better terms with their employer.

One benefit the union members have over the non-union ones, though, is that you get insurance for legal counsel, for example. Other than that, union members don't have that many benefits, tbh. I still chose to be a member, because IMO it's the right thing to do.

>If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.

True, but those "good salaries" are only but a fraction of the total salaries in the countries you mention. Methinks a country should prioritize the welfare and well being of the entire country's people and the average worker instead of focusing on the top 1% SW devs while letting everyone else sink.

Maybe keeping public services running for the bottom half of society is more important for society than creating the top SW companies in the world. After all you can't eat software, but we do need garbage men, doctors, pilots, sailors, nurses, handymen, architects, oil & gas and construction workers, farmers, car mechanics, barbers etc. a lot more to survive and run a modern society, than we need web devs to write yet another food delivery, ride sharing or crypto trading app designed just to skirt the laws and scam VCs and clueless investors while the interest rates are low.

If your toilets breaks, you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix it since he can't push an OTA fix remotely from home, otherwise you'll be rooting in your own shit no matter how advanced your knowledge of K8s and ML-Ops is. Who cares if you're a well paid SW dev in London, NYC or San Fran but you can't walk alone at night because you're surrounded by poor minimum wage struggling and homeless people on substances or mental illness from wealth inequality, lack of welfare/social care and societal collapse due to decades of poor political and financial policies designed only to favor the wealthy?

This is just my biased opinion, don't treat it as gospel ground truth.

> New York where unions are not really a thing.

I live in NY, and I can tell you that unions are very much a “thing,” hereabouts.

I don't want to be "equalized".

You already are - by your employer. Mostly equalized at the absolute bottom of every situation where you disagree with your superiors or need to rely on the company for something.

I'm happy to negotiate my own terms.

And your employer is even happier for you to believe you are actually negotiating your own terms.

In my experience the union leaders negotiate better terms for themselves than for the people they represent.

That is certainly a potential problem. But think about the distribution of status, benefits and compensation of owners, managers, and employees - that's even more extreme, and prevalent, than misdeeds by union leaders.

This sounds like a bit of a "democracy can have corruption so let's support the monarchy" kind of an argument.

The company prefers to have a good "shepherd" for the flock - the union leader.

What companies prefer is to shepherd the flock themselves. Failing that, getting a collaborative shepherd. The challenge in unionization is disrupting the shepherding and allowing for conscious collective reflection and action.

in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.

The US is the center of the major world empire right now, and is not really comparable with most other places. However, even if you took the US - it's pretty much a hellscape, socially. Large tech companies are swimming in their ill-gotten gains while a huge number of people are homeless, many can only access contaminated water, students are in massive debt, infrastructure is in poor repair, public facilities and systems are under-developed...

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Exactly this. Union members, to an fair extent, are leeching on the back of other, productive employees.

It was always employees being let go suddenly and on a whim.

I don’t have that experience. Nobody in my circle has ever been let go. Meanwhile many of them have gone through 4 or 5 employers in the past 15 years.

Yeah in my decades I've only once heard of an employer going the extra mile to keep a guy at a company.

Boss drove to his house in a Bentley and gave him the keys.

Of course the dude was making far more than a Bentley for the company, in a role where your value is pretty much visible on the screen at any time.

I have worked long. And I can think of many, many examples of people quitting suddenly and leaving everything hanging, in companies of various sizes.

These days I run a solo business. I do not want to have any employees. I've been burned too many times in the past — and my experience (generalizing horribly) is that most programmers think they are the cream of the crop, superstars that deserve salary, benefits, perks, bonuses, vacations, and fantastic treatment. But then it turns out that a) they don't perform as superstars, and b) the company deserves absolutely nothing in return, so people leave suddenly and without warning.

In the businesses I've seen, the relationship was very asymmetric, heavily biased towards the comfort of employees.

If you're a good employee then employers won't want to lose you.

That's very generously assuming somebody above you actually has a clue who's valuable and who is not, which I have to tell you that I have witnessed, yes, but rarely.

I feel like there's a general shift away from contractors happening though, which is weird because at least in tech, it's often a strictly better situation for both employees and employers.

Contractors get paid a lot more than FTEs in the same position, employers save on lots of overhead for healthcare and stuff. At least for younger people without chronic illness, this is often a way better deal. Employers can not only have the truly elastic work force that they seem want, but they can also actually remove staff where it's not working out without facing some kind of lawsuit. And without waiting for huge rounds of general layoffs while they keep useless/ignorant folks for years and task more productive people with trying to minimize the damage they cause. And yet.. if you want part-time or contract work, it's crickets when it comes to find/filter. The increasingly monolithic staffing empires at big websites like Indeed apparently have so few of these jobs listed that they just ignore the filter and show all the full-time positions anyway.

I don't have a great theory about why. Could be the economy in general, could be AI removing the 1% of actually thoughtful recruiters from the loop recently, or changing tax laws, or employers just enjoying leverage while they use the classic healthcare/employment situation in the US as a cudgel in negotiations, or it could be the perverse incentives to engage in arbitrary hiring/firing to manipulate hype and stock-prices. If anyone can speak to this from the perspective of an employer (or better yet an economist..) it's probably an interesting story.

Whatever the reason, this is all so stupid. Why vacuum up huge numbers of people who are actually looking for stability and disappoint them, and refuse to engage with people who are looking for more casual employment? I will probably live to regret this, but I have wished there was a actually functioning market for gig-work in tech. More and more small/boutique consultancies are shutting down, staffing agencies still barely understand the domain they try to serve, companies usually don't want to talk to people angling for contracts showing up to FTE positions, and the scammy little ecosystem for temp-work in tech is probably little better than hustling on craigslist in the early 2000's. What's up with that?

US Employers will too.... I've seen 6 months at the VP level, a year at the C-Suite level

That's due to tax laws that effectively make it cheaper to compensate healthcare than in cash. Since everyone needs healthcare it's a standard offering.

But you're free to purchase it privately. I've bought health insurance privately when unemployed easy peasy.

You can't change the reasons for which you need a new person, and you've materially benefited from the person working for low pay. But it's not guilt, it's your morality and ethics identifying a gain you made that you feel you shouldn't be comfortable with.

One suggestion, perhaps the most obvious: identify the likely pay/compensation of the person who will replace them, and then pay them the difference (or as much of it as you can) in severance over and above what you're required to offer.

Second suggestion: help find this person a new job at the kind of pay they should actually have been earning for the quality of work they were doing.

But don't feel guilt: it's more like a moral obligation. It's a good thing, not a negative emotion. It means you're thinking like a complete person in a world where it is common to pretend that isn't necessary.

I had a worker do some good work for low pay, because they believed in the idea.

Basically preying on someone's low self-esteem and impostor syndrome. It's a vile thing to do, but unfortunately businesses keep exploit workers this way.

Did they believe in the idea to make shareholders buy themselves another yacht?

The person you're responding to is not anthropomorphizing at all.

When it comes to employee disposability, companies are run by their ultimate decision makers, which is usually the board or direct owners. Even the C-suite is relatively powerless if given direct orders from the board/owners to trim head count.

some of yall really need to get your sarcasm meter tuned up

fruit basket.

This seems like a really good advice. Thanks.

Also the addition of "how hard it can be to even figure out what you want to do". This is imo a huge thing.

The decision paralysis and fear of doing and being what YOU authentically want - not somebody else, not some rules, not some abstract expectation what your future partner want you to be like, not what your mother/friends/teachers/mentors wants you to be like, not some "rational person" as described below, but you and you only - brings you pain and avoidant behaviors.

The avoidant behaviors come with a compounding cost on top and you can spend so much time not actually doing what you want.

Curious: what do you want to do in retirement and how does that differ from what you do day to day?

we shouldn’t define our work and identity by our employer or specific job role. > By building your identity as an expert in the field

I get your point that diversifying the points of external identity validation makes you less dependent and this is a better position.

My question is about another strategy, to stop identifying/attaching etc. at all with what you do. And that is not illuminated to me.

Their optimizing for stock price growth which go up when random layoffs happen.

The only metric they worry about each day, looking good for their C-suite bosses. Genuinely, they'll go and say they've reduced costs and their orgs headcount by whatever, and absolutely NOBODY will ever ask the follow-up about what functions those folks managed or what institutional knowledge has just walked out the door never to return.

I'd say the nature of a contractual relationship fundamentally differs from that of an employee-employer dynamic. As a contractor, you're not requesting a raise but rather renegotiating the terms of your engagement, which is a standard practice as contracts come up for renewal.

Working with a lawyer for your contract negotiations can ensure that your interests are well-protected. They can help include provisions such as inflation-adjusted rate increases and other legal protections to safeguard your position.

Ultimately, the outcome of such negotiations hinges on the power dynamics and mutual dependence between you and your client and your leverage is never higher than at the start of your employment/contract.

What? You want your salary to match inflation?

We dont have the money for that; we just hired a junior for your team that interned at a FAANG and had to pay them 2x your salary.

This is worse than the typical family speal. I hope you realize it's just another tactic of the same manipulation. Trying to provide a sense of superiority to it's employees to justify working conditions. If you can't handle it, "go work at USPS" is especially telling.

Over a long enough time period: France became a well functioning democracy with a strong social safety net, worker protections, and work life balance.

The royals and the feudal system crumbled?

More such types met their death in the guillotine, including some revolution leaders?

Count me in!

(Sorry, I'm European, we know the whole history in my parts, from Charlomagne to Robespierre, Saint-Just, all the way to De Gaulle and Macron)

100% this. Even when executives aren't the owners, they still have a very different position of power than even upper management. The industrial era black-and-white model of worker vs capitalist may not be a good fit for the way large companies are structured but executives are very much the true labor aristocracy, acting more like the royal guard to keep the rabble in check than like a fellow worker who shares your fears and needs.