Dear Employers
Dear Employers,
It’s time to embrace your position in the world. It’s 2008, not 1958. You’re no longer a cubbie hole for a select group who will stay until they retire. You’re a stepping stone. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it allows for a more fluid workforce where new ideas flow faster and reach new heights.
It’s not you. It’s us.
XOXO,
Terry
I think employers in the next decade will learn to embrace the concept of a career that spans multiple workplaces. The guys who say, “hey, you know what? after you work here for a while, your resume will be significantly improved,” will be the ones who you talk to during your job interview.
Money is one big reason workers don’t feel as obligated to their employers. People change jobs to get good raises (that’s how I started making enough so Sara could stay home).
I think one of the often overlooked impacts of this is how it affects culture. As employees feel less and less bound for life with their employers, it’s important for the employer to understand that a good work environment will keep people around longer.
If you’re requiring developers to wear slacks and button up shirts, show up promptly at 8AM, take a notepad to lunches because lunches are meetings, provide bad benefits, only offer a week of vacation a year, charge for sodas, or only hire boring & stupid people, your days are numbered. Smaller companies are able to do more with less because of new technologies and open source software.
Where do those smaller companies come from? Most people would say “someone has a good idea,” but I think it’s more that everybody has a good idea, and eventually someone gets so fed up with the corporate bullshit culture that’s overtaken the US and starts their own shop. See: 37Signals.
Work should be fun. It’s taken a long time to get around to that, at least in the US, but it’s coming. Thanks to our generation of lazy and selfish folk who use technology way better than the previous generation, the young folks right out of college are starting to call the shots.
Big companies have figured this out. At IBM, there’s no dress code for most departments. I saw a guy walking into one of the labs in sandals and a bathing suit. IBM doesn’t even have a vacation policy really any more; just clear things with your manager, and try to be available when you can.
Where I work now has the same vacation kind of policy. Get your work done, have fun away from work when you can, but don’t hate your job.
Nobody wins when employees hate their jobs. I’ve had 2 jobs that I’ve hated. It ruins everything. Your home life is worse because you’re dreading going back to work. Your work is worse because you hate your job. You hate your job because the work you’re doing is boring. It’s a crazy cycle that can spin until either someone gets fired, a company goes under, or someone quits. I’ve been smart enough in both occasions to quit.
The first place I quit, I really didn’t contribute much work. I doubt I was missed, it just looked bad for the boss because of the high amount of turnover. The second job that I hated I quit, I know I’m missed. When you hinge all of your work on one person you set yourself up to get pretty screwed. And I quit, so obviously they got somewhat screwed.
Another tenet of embracing the stepping stone mentality is that, unlike above, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket. You want to make sure that employees feel valued but don’t hold all the value. Knowledge transfer, documentation, redundancy and good relationships are all key to this. Ideally you have someone who writes down what he’s done, who’s willing (and is given explicit time by the employer) to share that knowledge, allowing for it to be kept in several heads. If that’s not possible during the employment, it’s important to maintain good relationships, because otherwise that knowledge is either lost or incredibly expensive to retrieve.
So, stop having 15-year reward plans, employers. Keep things immediate, and make them good. Give us vacation. Give us bonuses. Give us good benefits. Give us good work hours. And we’ll treat you great in turn, delivering significantly more productivity than our predecessors.
[In case anyone’s curious, I’m in no way bashing my current employer. They’re awesome. Any specific anecdotes that are negative are from previous employers. Yes, at ST I only had 1 week of vacation a year. And no sick days. I’m glad I left.]