Conversations in life at work.
You have a regular job making okay money and your work responsibilities are adequate for what you get paid.
How this conversation should work:
An authority person comes to speak with you and asks you to take on some extra tasks as you’re a hard worker and they recognize that you do a great job and can handle the responsibility.
In return you thank them for the complement and advise them that with the new responsibility you’d like a higher compensation for your time.
The discussion is had and you get a higher wage for the new responsibilities.
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I want to jump in here and talk about this because this is how thing should work and we know things rarely work this way. I think this is a great frustration with younger generations who do work hard and go the extra mile at work to get recognized and promoted only to see the lazy people making more money and getting promotions while taking credit for others work and etc.
This to make a second statement, cause fight for 15 is idiotic, most of the younger generation do not have a clue what hard work is or if they are even working as hard as their wage entails. Such as the ignorance behind fight for 15. You’re doing a 5 dollar an hour job for 10 dollars and hour and complaining you are not getting paid enough.
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How this conversation actually goes at work:
An authority person comes to speak with you and asks you to take on some extra tasks as you’re a hard worker and they recognize that you do a great job and can handle the responsibility.
In return you thank them for the complement and advise them that with the new responsibility you’d like a higher compensation for your time.
They then tell you that you can accept the new work or find another job and that there will be no discussion about it.
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This is what is wrong with the workplace and why I think so many are stressed over their jobs. They feel they are overworked and underpaid. I feel a lot of people are. I personally am not paid for my skill level or knowledge in my field. I’m compensated fairly well for the actual work that I do however and I recognize that. The issue becomes that employers don’t want to pony up the money in the work place because there are 50 people standing behind you that will take less pay for more work regardless of their actual skill level.
There is not much we can really do about this either and it is what makes the workforce depressed and feel uneasy. I wish I had a solution, but the only idea I have is to work to those positions where you can make the difference. Employers would rather pay a multiple sub par workers a sub par wage for sub par work than pay 1 person who can do it all a decent wage for the work they are doing. Which math wise is even more amusing when you think you’re paying 3 people 30k a year for 90,000 dollars instead of paying 1 guy 70-80k a year to do all the work the 3 guys are doing. However I feel the purpose behind things like this is so they have people who will take tasks they are thrown and wont complain for more money. They are happy to have a job and will gladly do excessive amounts of work for the same pay.
I’m all up for other solutions here, just a shower thought. Thats all. The best thinking happens in the shower.
10 replies on “Working Hard Work Conversations”
The interesting error of your discussion is that three people worth $30K a year cannot deliver the value produced by a person worth $90K a year.
First, they have to spend a lot of time int “meetings” to find out what to work on and how to do the work. Then another huge chunk of time in training to learn what they need to do to do the work. All with little time left over actually to do the work. So they just might get $30K value produced for their $90K.
On the other hand, the person who is worth $90K a year already has the knowledge and skill to do the work and only needs to be informed of the goal of his efforts. As a consequence, he will produce much more than his $90K a year. This is as it should be because for the business to continue, the business MUST make a profit and produce more value than it spends to create that value.
I suggest that managers who try to substitute the three people who can’t do the job for the one who can is to feel important by micromanaging failure. Ultimately causing the demise of the business.
There is NO substitute for competency and actual ability to deliver. It is NOT that if it takes one woman nine months to deliver one baby then nine women can deliver one baby in nine months. That is EXACTLY what you are saying.
Agree, except I think you meant one month at the end, there.
One problem with every company I’ve ever known is that the political pull of managers is set by how many people they manage, not the quality of the work their team does. In many if not most circumstances that managers don’t know how to judge the quality of the work. But they can count with integers.
And that problem goes all the way to the top, in almost everything. Example: government agencies are judged by how many dollars they have in their budget — not what they do with those dollars.
As in all things, you get more of what you reward. No, I don’t know how to break that cycle. At the moment, the only way seems to be to start over with a new company and send the moribund ones to the gallows (metaphorically-speaking).
Capitalism rewards those who do the right things well for the long run. Those who don’t, will fail sooner than later. The problem fixes itself.
Given government intervention into the economy, failure is rewarded and success is punished. That way, when something fails, the government can do more of the same only more so. Which, in turn leads to failure. Rinse, repeat, until it runs out of other people’s money.
The cure is trim government by 90% so that it can do only that which it can or should do: cause crime and initiation of force to fail.
And how do we convince 90% of the government to go home and not come back?
The only true way to convince the government to go home is to take away the money they wastefully spend.
Just think of how rich our economy and country would be if we didn’t throw money away on countless government jobs where people sit and collect a paycheck. Or all the other places that the government sends money daily to subsidize everything in all aspects of life that should be left to die if they fail, or succeed on their own merit.
Our taxes would be lower, our economy would be stronger and I would venture to guess we’d have less of a homeless problem. As well with all the money flying around, the actual programs which help people would be far more successful as you’d be able to donate and help locally to people in need.
I’ll just reference the Penn Jillette argument about how you don’t build a library with a gun. So why if you don’t pay the government, does somebody show up with a gun to take the money from you?
I don’t recall suggesting or not suggesting that the 3 people can or cannot produce that same product. But this is a situation I’ve ran into many times in the work place where they will throw bodies at a job instead of skill. It’s easier to power over top of people with no skill and little training than to contend with an educated individual who can do the job without training and possibly better than you. So they do this in the fear of somebody being hired who will take their position.
As well, it was more or less for example overall. Hence any sort of things like Training and such left out.
In the IT industry we hit a big boom of specialization which kicked guys like me to the curb. They would rather 5 guys with all specific jobs vs 1 or 2 guys who can do it all. Fortunately for me, the job market in the IT industry is turning back to jack of all trades guys as lots of services are now self managing themselves and they want to have 1 maybe 2 people on staff for IT vs 5, 10 or 15.
But it still comes back to why hire 3 unskilled or partially skilled workers when you can hire 1 skilled worker for the same cost or slightly less than the 3 other workers total pay. It’s still done constantly. Most likely for the reasons I mentioned above.
In interviewing for IT jobs, I’ve met more insecure managers than in any other industry. They are faking their jobs so hard that they are in constant fear of any competition in the work place. This I’ve also dealt with. You should see the reasons they fired me. It was like a 3rd grader tattling on a fellow student.
The IT industry has another giant list of problems. You are correct about the fear of competition.
It’s an issue as old as shamans. The head wizards killed anybody who they thought might replace them.
Were worried about racism, which is forced into public view, trans bathrooms and all this other stuff.
Just think of the strides we could make in tech and business if people were less focused on somebody taking their job and more focused on just crushing everything and doing a good job.
Instead we got guys looking to take credit for peoples work, we got unions keeping shitty employee’s from being let go, we got people who are brilliant who cannot find jobs or are underpaid and never allowed to move up because somebody above them has their boot on their neck.
I’m guessing a bit of an issue of the human condition. And I think a lot of our society is supportive of this bad behavior because nobody up the line ever checks and talks to the people at the bottom of the list.
Just imagine if your bosses boss came to you and asked you about your job as he was doing a review of your boss. And you were actually able to tell them about the problems that exist with the work flow, or other issues in your department caused by your boss? Yeah. To bad that never happens.
We got all these fools who instead of talking to employee’s just measure everything like bean counters with charts, graphs and lies.
Like my job, they are more concerned about metrics in the system, when I ship things, if I update this file (yes, they are measuring if I update certain files. It’s really archaic.) They have no clue what I actually go through to please the customer and what BS I have to deal with from coworkers being douches to the customers. Thankfully the customers want me there and not them, but I cannot always be there. But nobody above me knows this. Not even my boss, I’ve never met him and he really has no clue what we do as he came from a whole different department. He’s a decent boss, but he doesnt’ ever take care of serious issues with any sort of grit.
I have had managers who asked me to use my magic to give them the contradiction they want. If I refused, I was called “Not a good team player.” It was irrelevant to them that a contradiction cannot be delivered. I moved on to the next job.
That is why I became a lone wolf consultant taking jobs only when the managers were lined up against the wall and nails were being pounded in the hands. I could then work the problem, solve it, deliver the solution in record time, and then move on to the next panic.