Young people 'feel they have nothing to live for'

[LaCroix]

I think one long-term effect on this generation is that they're going to be more loyal to themselves instead of employers.

They've got to watch as their parents gave years of their lives to a company -- only to be laid off or discarded without a second though.

And if they've been exploited or taken advantage of during by employers during their own struggles, it's only going to reinforce a distrust of their future employers.

You can already see that trend towards no job loyality in IT. People start in our company, and half a year later, they are looking for another job in their spare time, hoping they'll land a better gig. And head hunters are actually calling IT departments on their own trying to find people willing to change jobs for a good offer - I had such calls, and I certainly did not advertise anywhere, especially not under my office number...

[Mr Bean]

You can already see that trend towards no job loyality in IT. People start in our company, and half a year later, they are looking for another job in their spare time, hoping they'll land a better gig. And head hunters are actually calling IT departments on their own trying to find people willing to change jobs for a good offer - I had such calls, and I certainly did not advertise anywhere, especially not under my office number...

I have as well, since I've been at this job I've had about twenty offers for other jobs from headhunters.

[JME2]

You can already see that trend towards no job loyality in IT. People start in our company, and half a year later, they are looking for another job in their spare time, hoping they'll land a better gig. And head hunters are actually calling IT departments on their own trying to find people willing to change jobs for a good offer - I had such calls, and I certainly did not advertise anywhere, especially not under my office number...

It's the same with my situation and the jackass I've done contractor work for since late 2009.

It's kept a space on my resume filled and my skills current for that at least, I'm grateful.

But beyond that...I have no loyalty to the fucker.

[Simon_Jester]

I think one long-term effect on this generation is that they're going to be more loyal to themselves instead of employers.

They've got to watch as their parents gave years of their lives to a company -- only to be laid off or discarded without a second though.

Oh, that's pretty much already happened. Even for people in their 30s and 40s it's the norm, as far as I can tell. The only people who feel loyalty to their employer are the ones who have a good, longstanding relationship with that employer- who have been employed for years and treated well and logically should feel loyalty.

[Broomstick]

I think one long-term effect on this generation is that they're going to be more loyal to themselves instead of employers.

They've got to watch as their parents gave years of their lives to a company -- only to be laid off or discarded without a second though.

Oh, that's pretty much already happened. Even for people in their 30s and 40s it's the norm, as far as I can tell.

Yes, and even into the folks who are 50's.

For about 20 years employers have been demanding loyalty and giving not a whisper of it in return, preaching about how employees should "sell yourself" and operate in a business like manner then being all shocked when they actually do that.

[energiewende]

I think one long-term effect on this generation is that they're going to be more loyal to themselves instead of employers.

They've got to watch as their parents gave years of their lives to a company -- only to be laid off or discarded without a second though.

And if they've been exploited or taken advantage of during by employers during their own struggles, it's only going to reinforce a distrust of their future employers.

Why on earth would one be "loyal" to an employer? I gave years of my life to some employer in exchange for money, much of which I still possess. Not for any other reason.

[Zaune]

Why on earth would one be "loyal" to an employer? I gave years of my life to some employer in exchange for money, much of which I still possess. Not for any other reason.

Supposedly there was once a time when they'd take you on just after highschool and train you for the job at their expense whilst paying you a reasonable wage, and if you stuck around and were a good worker you'd have a chance of being promoted, and when you couldn't carry on anymore there was a contribution-based pension plan that was funded by the company so you couldn't find yourself destitute if the economy tanked.

[energiewende]

Ah, they joined the army.

[Zaune]

Not necessarily. My maternal grandfather started out as a clerk at an oil company soon after leaving his National Service, having been a foster-kid. When he retired he was in senior management. My paternal grandfather started out as an apprentice in a shipyard, ended up quite senior in the engineering team.

[Simon_Jester]

For about 20 years employers have been demanding loyalty and giving not a whisper of it in return, preaching about how employees should "sell yourself" and operate in a business like manner then being all shocked when they actually do that.

Does anyone have experience of the same employer simultaneously thinking employees should operate like a business AND being surprised when they show no loyalty?

I mean, if I were an employer, I would be pretty loyal to any worker except those who obviously don't belong at my business. Or so I would think. And I would in turn be surprised to see them show zero loyalty.

On the other hand, I like to think that if I was the sort of soulless bastard who shows zero loyalty to others, I would not be surprised to see it right back at me.

Then again, real psychopath/sociopath cases probably feel nothing like loyalty to others... but are accustomed to the loyalty and trust extended by others, and can still feel disappointed and betrayed when the person they've trashed stops giving them what they want.

I think one long-term effect on this generation is that they're going to be more loyal to themselves instead of employers.

They've got to watch as their parents gave years of their lives to a company -- only to be laid off or discarded without a second though.

And if they've been exploited or taken advantage of during by employers during their own struggles, it's only going to reinforce a distrust of their future employers.

Why on earth would one be "loyal" to an employer? I gave years of my life to some employer in exchange for money, much of which I still possess. Not for any other reason.

Yes, but you are the very model of a homo economicus- an ideal, frictionless, spherical person operating in a vacuum, who does not perceive the web of social interactions, trust, and so forth that make money matters so darn complicated for homo sapiens sapiens. Which makes me sad for you, because that web is what motivates the average member of the human race to get out of bed in the morning.

Anyway, since I know you're about as close to a real homo economicus as I've ever met, let me try to explain.

Once upon a time, the idea of working for hire was actually rather rare, and calling someone a "hired man" was actually a description that gave you unusual information about their status. Nowadays it'd be about as informative as calling him a "biped." The norm was that the people working to make a business operate either owned a share of it, or had some defined social relationship with the owners. For example, a farmer might rely on the labor of their children to help make the farm a functioning proposition. A master craftsman would rely on the labor of apprentices, but the apprentice-master relationship was enshrined in the culture- it wasn't just job training, it was almost a kind of surrogate parenthood- and the apprentice had a good chance of inheriting or at least becoming a 'partner' in the master's business.

As the industrial revolution occurred, this model of labor relations changed in factories- but not so much in offices, not at first. Even as white collar workers became more numerous, the social environment of white collar labor continued to favor long-term employment, strong social bonds among the employees, and at least some degree of two-way loyalty and support between management and employees.

All these things create the idea of being 'loyal to the firm.' Of the entity one works for as being more than just a temporary buyer of your labor, but as a cooperative endeavour, one you have an interest in seeing successful.

I know you don't get how that can exist when money changes hands, because you are homo economicus, and I feel sorry for you.


But yes, this did once exist. Still does in some companies- the idea that the business is a living community, not just a producing-consuming economic animal. The concept, and I think you should be made to learn it, is part of what this Harvard Business Review article calls the living company. More of the text can be found here:

http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/degeus.htm

[energiewende]

"Living community" and so forth are appealing to employers because they are 'free' benefits that can be used to substitute pay. And sure, sometimes it's worth it; everyone likes to go to work with friendly people and do something worthwhile. I do too. But don't kid yourself; your relationship with your manager and the guy in the next office is not your relationship with "the company." Your relationship with the abstracted legal entity that pays your wages is purely professional. If you ever treated your employer like a friend or a relative then you have made a mistake. A vague and unenforceable promise to employ me forever and then pay me money in the distant future (a company-administered pension plan) will be discounted to near-zero. You don't like that I don't trust you? Tough. If you view your employer as a "surrogate parent" then I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Grow a spine and you might not get so effortlessly abused in future.

My blue collar grandparents thought much the same way and never had a 'job for life'.

[JME2]

Does anyone have experience of the same employer simultaneously thinking employees should operate like a business AND being surprised when they show no loyalty?

The asshole I was alluding to earlier, while not quite a textbook example, has shades of this.

He likes to go on and on about his company is a family, tightly knit, and loyal to each other.

But the truth is that he cares about his workers as long as they're useful to him.

He expects absolute loyalty and takes it as a personal betrayal if someone leaves.

[Simon_Jester]

Does anyone have experience of the same employer simultaneously thinking employees should operate like a business AND being surprised when they show no loyalty?

The asshole I was alluding to earlier, while not quite a textbook example, has shades of this.

He likes to go on and on about his company is a family, tightly knit, and loyal to each other.

But the truth is that he cares about his workers as long as they're useful to him.

He expects absolute loyalty and takes it as a personal betrayal if someone leaves.

Sounds like that bit I rambled about psychopaths (or sociopaths, or whatever, they're both informal terms and sometimes I have trouble remembering which is which). People who don't understand why they shouldn't screw over others, but who are accustomed to not being screwed in return, and who start whining when someone makes them bleed their own blood.

---

"Living community" and so forth are appealing to employers because they are 'free' benefits that can be used to substitute pay.

Companies seek to become 'living' to ensure their longevity as organizations (if you read the damn link you would see this).

Companies in the past were (sometimes) living because people had different ideas about the relationship between wages, careers, training, hiring, firing, employee retention, and the minimal needs the employer had to provide the worker to keep the worker from quitting in disgust no matter how good the pay was.

Your relationship with the abstracted legal entity that pays your wages is purely professional. If you ever treated your employer like a friend or a relative then you have made a mistake. A vague and unenforceable promise to employ me forever and then pay me money in the distant future (a company-administered pension plan) will be discounted to near-zero. You don't like that I don't trust you? Tough. If you view your employer as a "surrogate parent" then I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Grow a spine and you might not get so effortlessly abused in future.

See, this is the trouble with trying to talk to a homo economicus: parts of his brains are missing. The homo economicus is unable to full grasp what "society" means, or how it evolves over time, or how pressures that are not strictly economic (or at least not measured in dollar bills) might influence actions that are economic.

It seems like you are honestly unable to mentally process the idea that I might be talking about other times and places, or about how expectations and culture evolve over time. Because the only thing he sees is the spherical frictionless vacuum he imagines 'reality' to be.

Energiewende, part of your problem is that you do not pay attention to details, if it lets you get in a few more shots about how much smarter and more cynical being a homo economicus makes you. That turns you into a sad parody.

My blue collar grandparents thought much the same way and never had a 'job for life'.

Reread my post until you see why this statement of yours is meaningless in the context of my statement.

[Broomstick]

Why on earth would one be "loyal" to an employer? I gave years of my life to some employer in exchange for money, much of which I still possess. Not for any other reason.

Well, you just proved you're under 30.

Believe it or not there WAS a time when people could reasonably expect to keep the same job at the same company for their entire working lives and thus there was some reciprocity between employers keeping on long-term employees and those employees. Very last century.

Ah, they joined the army.

No, kiddo, it was common with large employers at one time, such as the Big Three Auto companies (Ford, GM, and Chrysler), major steel mills in Pennsylvania and Indiana, IBM, and so on.

[JME2]

Sounds like that bit I rambled about psychopaths (or sociopaths, or whatever, they're both informal terms and sometimes I have trouble remembering which is which). People who don't understand why they shouldn't screw over others, but who are accustomed to not being screwed in return, and who start whining when someone makes them bleed their own blood.

He definitely has sociopathic tendencies, though it could also be (at it's best) extreme narcissistic personality disorder.

Even after 4.5 years, I still haven't made up my mind.

[energiewende]

Your relationship with the abstracted legal entity that pays your wages is purely professional. If you ever treated your employer like a friend or a relative then you have made a mistake. A vague and unenforceable promise to employ me forever and then pay me money in the distant future (a company-administered pension plan) will be discounted to near-zero. You don't like that I don't trust you? Tough. If you view your employer as a "surrogate parent" then I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Grow a spine and you might not get so effortlessly abused in future.

See, this is the trouble with trying to talk to a homo economicus: parts of his brains are missing. The homo economicus is unable to full grasp what "society" means, or how it evolves over time, or how pressures that are not strictly economic (or at least not measured in dollar bills) might influence actions that are economic.

It seems like you are honestly unable to mentally process the idea that I might be talking about other times and places, or about how expectations and culture evolve over time. Because the only thing he sees is the spherical frictionless vacuum he imagines 'reality' to be.

Energiewende, part of your problem is that you do not pay attention to details, if it lets you get in a few more shots about how much smarter and more cynical being a homo economicus makes you. That turns you into a sad parody.

To me, society is the relationships I have with people and voluntary agreements I have entered into. To you, society seems to be a bunch of demands you make of total strangers that would make your life better, at the expense making their lives worse, and which they never actually promised to satisfy. I will enter into no armchair psychiatric spiel about which of these views makes for a better human being. I will only point out that, even if you don't like my view, it's the view taken by senior management and shareholders, who consider you a stranger, and if you take a different one this asymmetry of expectations is going to leave you open to abuse.

[Broomstick]

To me, society is the relationships I have with people and voluntary agreements I have entered into. To you, society seems to be a bunch of demands you make of total strangers that would make your life better, at the expense making their lives worse, and which they never actually promised to satisfy.

What you don't seem to understand is that several billion people have been on this planet before you emerged from your mother's crotch and they already have long-standing agreements in place. The past imposes on the present in the form of things like "custom" and, even more importantly, "law". No one asks you to agree to law, it's not voluntary. You can reject custom, but there will be social consequences to doing so because of the other several billion people with different views who are also on this lump of rock and water. There are already laws/customs/agreements between others that make demands of you, made with no concern as to your well being or interests.

I will only point out that, even if you don't like my view, it's the view taken by senior management and shareholders, who consider you a stranger, and if you take a different one this asymmetry of expectations is going to leave you open to abuse.

Unless you are "senior management" or a "shareholder" adopting their viewpoint may or may not be in your self-interest. You need to make decisions based on who you are, where you sit in society, and based on your own resources.

Um... what, exactly, do you do for a living...? Or are you going to dodge that question again?

[Lolpah]

To me, society is the relationships I have with people and voluntary agreements I have entered into. To you, society seems to be a bunch of demands you make of total strangers that would make your life better, at the expense making their lives worse, and which they never actually promised to satisfy. I will enter into no armchair psychiatric spiel about which of these views makes for a better human being. I will only point out that, even if you don't like my view, it's the view taken by senior management and shareholders, who consider you a stranger, and if you take a different one this asymmetry of expectations is going to leave you open to abuse.

Wtf? Simon is talking about how things were in the past, and you are trying to refute those claims about the past by stating "It isn't so nowadays". Is the concept of history foreign to you?

[Simon_Jester]

Sort of.

He's aware that the world has a past, and often speaks of it (in rather ignorant ways). But this is not because he lacks information about events that occurred in the past, which is what we usually mean when we say "doesn't know history."

His problem is that he cannot seem to grasp the idea that different people think in different ways.

He reminds me of this one poster we have (used to have?) who has this very... hardcoded model for how people ought to behave and what it is objectively right to do. And who was just unable to process the idea that other people bringing other philosophies to the table might have a point. If you didn't follow his methodology of deriving all moral laws from the "basic moral intuitions" he chose to believe would be present in cavemen,* he had literally no grasp of what you were talking about. He would constantly reject and denigrate anything you said.

So he was profoundly ignorant of basic concepts of anthropology and philosophy, because he could ONLY comprehend those subjects by thinking about them in a single way... and his single way did not include those basic concepts.

Amusingly, that other guy was a hardcore FREEDOMIZING free market fundamentalist too.

*Of course, there was lots of 'state of nature' bullshit in his beliefs about cavemen, hence his thinking that cavemen would, say, value personal freedom over collective security. Which is idiotic if you actually know anything about Stone Age conditions. But libertarian dolts tend to think they know it all, I guess.

---

Anyway, like this autistic guy, energiewende can analyze history, but he can only do so in terms of his own frame of reference. Introduce any concepts from outside his frame of reference, and you've totally lost him.

Now, I am talking about webs of human relationships, and communities, and the idea of things like a social contract of expectations between old and young. And I'm talking about these things in societies where these things were often enforced informally by things like being cast out of your community, or mob violence. But energiewende cannot grasp this, because his brain does not work in a way that would allow him to function in such a society.*
_______________________________________

*Hm, that's interesting. Just had a thought. I submit that homo economicus would be poorly adapted to survival in a preindustrial society.

Here, homo economicus is being defined as the hyper-rational humanoid that only cares about maximizing whatever handful of variables are measured on its utility function. The sort of thing that exists in economists' models, but often fails to model the behavior of real humans because real humans aren't as insane and limited and asocial as homo economicus, but also don't have perfect knowledge of the market conditions in their areas and routinely make unprofitable and even stupid decisions about money. Homo economicus is VERY good at anything that can be measured in units of money.

The catch is, if you live in the Stone Age or Iron Age, what matters isn't so much the economic goods you personally possess. It's the social capital of your community. Every person routinely experienced disasters that could wipe out any amount of physical capital they could accumulate- but larger communities at least stood a chance of survival by mutual support. And by having enough labor that even if the village was burned down and the fields trampled into muck by invading Huns, they could still begin to rebuild and have some kind of a village restored to functionality in time for next year's planting.

But a homo economicus specimen will tend to predictably piss off his neighbors, and systematically devalue social capital in terms of physical capital, by thinking about all transactions in terms of the physical capital. Villages of homo economicus would experience a lot of centrifugal tendencies. Extended families would break up because of "what's in it for me?" A lot of people would calculate that it was in their self-interest to become bandits, which was actually a pretty profitable model back then, but taken to extremes it meant nothing ever got built and in the long run the society remained mired in poverty and desperation.

So, to sum up... if we actually had a species of homo economicus specimens, they would probably have been outcompeted and killed off by homo sapiens in the Stone Age past.

[Scrib]

Does anyone have experience of the same employer simultaneously thinking employees should operate like a business AND being surprised when they show no loyalty?

The asshole I was alluding to earlier, while not quite a textbook example, has shades of this.

He likes to go on and on about his company is a family, tightly knit, and loyal to each other.

But the truth is that he cares about his workers as long as they're useful to him.

He expects absolute loyalty and takes it as a personal betrayal if someone leaves.

Sounds like that bit I rambled about psychopaths (or sociopaths, or whatever, they're both informal terms and sometimes I have trouble remembering which is which). People who don't understand why they shouldn't screw over others, but who are accustomed to not being screwed in return, and who start whining when someone makes them bleed their own blood.
.

Or it sounds like every entitled asshole in the world, a greater percentage of the populace than psychopaths. No need to indulge this desire to make the assholes other conveniently done under the cover of modern psychology now. It's...tedious.

[Broomstick]

Wtf? Simon is talking about how things were in the past, and you are trying to refute those claims about the past by stating "It isn't so nowadays". Is the concept of history foreign to you?

He doesn't have a voluntary agreement with history so by his reckoning it doesn't exist and doesn't affect him.

[Darmalus]

On a side note, it's probably not healthy for a society that the only organization that maintains the model of long term mutual trust, respect and obligation is the military.

[Ralin]

On a side note, it's probably not healthy for a society that the only organization that maintains the model of long term mutual trust, respect and obligation is the military.

Judging from what I've heard about veterans with health problems are being treated the military isn't doing so hot at that either.

[Simon_Jester]

At least they're trying. Unfortunately, being the ONLY part of American society which supplies single-payer health care, they have a tough row to hoe in that respect.

[JME2]

Or it sounds like every entitled asshole in the world, a greater percentage of the populace than psychopaths. No need to indulge this desire to make the assholes other conveniently done under the cover of modern psychology now. It's...tedious.

You know, I'll concede that in the case of my asshole, I could be misreading his behavior.

I may be too close to the situation view his actions objectively. What appears to me to be extreme narcissism and egotism really self-entitlement (albeit extreme).