I‘ve found that the „high expectations“ were acutely stressful because they were concealed: there was no way to match them. This story wonderfully expresses the dread of trying to guess what’s expected of you by an employer. Yes, a middling wage might be more sustainable when it’s compensating obvious work tasks that demographically average people can perform.
> I‘ve found that the „high expectations“ were acutely stressful because they were concealed: there was no way to match them.
That's a very good point.
I remember the first time I was in a cycle of trying to meet impossible expectations. We kept putting in a lot of effort and doing some very impressive things, but every time we got close to delivering something the goalposts would move.
After far longer than I'd like to admit, I realized that those lofty expectations weren't designed to be met. They were designed to keep us perpetually insecure. Always feeling like we needed to try a little harder. And it was working on us, at least for a couple years.
The illusion was briefly shattered when a manager gave us a goal that numerically meant that one of our vendors would have to serve us at a loss. He wanted us to negotiate a contract where they paid us to be their customer, when you added up all the factors. When we showed him, he did a pretend-angry routine and lectured us on how we should be thinking bigger all the time. We "failed" to meet that impossible expectation, to the surprise of absolutely nobody on the team. After that, it was like the team had been freed from the shackles of impossible expectations. We did our best and shrugged off the disappointed manager routine when it didn't meet the arbitrary expectations. It was interesting to watch as the manager realized his power over us had been broken, which quickly gave way to a slow-motion process of sidelining us for younger replacements who were more receptive to the disappointed manager routine.
I miss many of those coworkers, but I do not miss that job.
This was a compelling story for me to read, after leaving a tech job so abusive that I didn’t work full-time for five years. When you envy the cashier at the minimart for their ostensibly more straightforward work day, it’s time to resign. I appreciate that the author found humor in so many inexplicable details of typical corporate office life.
I think we've all had jobs where we were paid much more than we ever expected, that on paper looked like "dream jobs," where our acquaintances would gently rib us about how fortunate and pampered we were, yet working there we felt like an abused puppy until we finally resigned. This story really brought back that weird combination of dread and gratefulness that I simultaneously felt while working such a job.
I have lingering bitterness for the irresponsible New Math experiment in my elementary education. I couldn't tell time on an analog clock until I was 12, thanks to the blithe dismissal of "rote" multiplication tasks.
Just out of interest and if it's not too personal, what's your age/generation? I'm in my mid twenties and I don't have any peers that couldn't more or less always read analog clocks as far as they remember.
edit: I just googled it and apparently New Math was during the 1950s-1970s. This confuses me even further since reading an analog clock seems even more important in those times?
I certainly learned New Math in the sixties. And neither myself nor anyone else I knew had any trouble with analog clocks which is most of what existed.
Hour 6 is also minute 30. There’s some arithmetic for you! Six times five, if you like, or six times ten divided by two if you prefer.
Many don’t have numbers at all, so you’ll need to build a good intuition for fractions and converting those to hours and minutes if you want to read them fast. Most of us do it so automatically we don’t notice, but some of that’s plausibly fraction multiplication.
No, the usual case, where the minutes aren't printed on the clock itself, is that you've memorized the positions of :00, :15, :30, and :45, and you report the time by reference to that.
It's disappointing that California's Bureau for Private and Post-Secondary Education (BPPE) continued to approve this boot camp. I thought the rationale for creating the bureau was to discourage scams in job training.
At first I found it weird that the BPPE can't discipline a company until it's registered and operating legally. So for the first few years, it couldn't do anything. The twist is that until the BPPE approves a school to operate, any student debt obligations up to that point are not valid. In theory, anyone in California who enrolled before August 2020 owes them nothing.
The problem is that Lambda School still tries to service those debts. The victims are usually low-income, so they lack the resources to lawyer up. If they do lawyer up, they end up being forced into arbitration due to an arbitration clause in their student agreements.
So in the end, it does feel like the BPPE is a half-measure that doesn't fully tackle predatory companies.
> If they do lawyer up, they end up being forced into arbitration due to an arbitration clause in their student agreements
You’re literally describing why arbitration works. Someone low income can just file for arbitration with minimal work by a lawyer. Contrast that with the tens of thousands they’d need to pay a litigator.
They split the students to take away their power. They kicked people off Slack, wiping the incriminating message history, and then re-adding students (woopsie), they allowed rampant racism to be posted in the channels. They did so many shady things with arbitration, it was absolutely harmful.
> I went to a lawyer and was told it wasn't worth suing, because they required arbitration in NYC, which would cost more than I would save.
It sounds like arbitration does not work, according to people who had their lawyer look into it for this exact case. What are your thoughts on it given this new information available to you?
That looks like a biased source, concluding in the first sentence of its introduction that "pre-Dispute Arbitration agreements force people into a form of ‘Rustic Justice’ whose primary purpose to evade meaningful accountability for violations of contract or statutory rights" [1].
That said, I do know bank lobbying group who want to outlaw arbitration for unaccredited investors. Will pass this along.
I wrote that page after reading every one of those sources. In full. Including all cited supreme court cases. I actually initially felt that mandatory arbitration was fine and somewhat pro consumer. I changed my mind as a direct result of the research.
To the extent possible id like to strongman arbitration but need to find sources.
That true, but this ends up being a game of whack-a-mole, and even a few thousand dollars is too much for a lot of victims. Recently there was an attempt to mount a class action lawsuit, which would have settled things for everyone in one fell swoop, and it was rejected due to the arbitration clause.
> even a few thousand dollars is too much for a lot of victims
Someone angling to go into coding should be able to do the research to draft an arbitration claim on their own. In most cases that isn’t a fair assumption to make, but given the cohort, they should be able to collaborate on a draft.
The gating part isn’t doing the work. It’s knowing you have the option to.
> Do you think they should have listed “draft an arbitration claim,” on their enrollment prerequisites?
Unless you’re a total numpty, you can learn online how to draft an arb claim. And even if you are a numpty, you should be be to find—in a half-decent cohort—someone who can do this.
The issue is rarely ability. It’s learned helplessness in the face of the legal system. The anxiety, not ability, is the limiting factor.
The company targeted the poor, single mothers, reformed convicts, and other disadvantaged groups. They tend to lack the free time or guidance to navigate these situations. If this work is trivial to you, I am happy to connect you with them to provide your services.
> If this work is trivial to you, I am happy to connect you with them to provide your services
It is. I won't because this isn't something I care deeply about. The question is whether they would have been better off without arbitration, and the answer is no.
The problem is never arbitration. The problem is mandatory pre-dispute arbitration agreements which have, after considerable research, shown to be a negative for consumers. If it were really better you could always select arbitration as a part of the ADR process during during a standard Civil suit.
This is also an area I care deeply about. And have read north of 2000 pages of cases, analysis, and position papers on the topic.
I also have a list of about 90 more documents to read. Slow but steady progress.
In January, a class action lawsuit was rejected by a judge due to the arbitration agreement in the contracts. The whole reason class action suits exist is to save thousands of people from having wage individual fights. If it had gone through, the victims could have done nothing and woken up one day to an email saying, "Your debts are clear."
I honestly can't think of a clearer example of arbitration agreements screwing people over.
Reminder: California passed a minimum wage law for fast food workers that exempts places that make their own bread (ahem, totally unrelated coincidence: Panera which bakes their own bread is a big donor to CA's governor).
There's a short book that covers this period of British computing history: Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, by Mar Hicks.
It's more history than sociology, though the title suggests otherwise. There are interesting anecdotes from women who worked from the 1940s-1970s for British intelligence, the General Post Office, and, yes, Dame Steve Shirley.
The Conspirituality podcast episode "Coaches Coaching Coaches" discusses how the wholly unregulated "life coaching" trend operates very much like network marketing, and cons buyers with similar claims to freedom from wage work.
What seems constant is how many people dislike being employees.
Of course it's the CxOs who tout their companies' onsite "culture"--they're not the ones crammed into open-plan, surveilled work stations, discouraged from leaving for non-work appointments, and subjected to mandatory social events.
Given even the relatively modest perks of the last onsite C-suite I worked with, hell, I'd be in the office too.
As someone in my early twenties, I don’t live with my family and don’t own a house. The assumption made by a lot of work from home proponents is that all workers have a great home office space, which just isn’t the reality. I do have a desk in my bedroom, and I can take my laptop to a library, so I can work remotely. But I when job hunting I definitely prefer companies that have created quality in-office space.
You made a comment elsewhere that working remotely gives you access to a bigger talent pool. While this is a big advantage, people who prefer in-person work do exist.
I have a very reasonable home office space in a pretty nice house. But it's still being in one house like literally all the time, and being in one room of that house almost all the time, and being alone all the time, and that's not actually fun.
Working from home is isolating and boring. Open-plan offices are completely fine for me, I don't have a hard time focusing in them, and enjoy the long sight-lines/windows, and opportunities to talk to coworkers more organically.
I can imagine people who like open-plan offices instead of WFH. It may be commentary on how poor their home environment is for work. It may be that they're extroverts. And it could be that their work involves collaboration more than focus time. Or maybe they enjoy slacking off at the office and chatting with their coworkers, but it FEELS like they're working because they're at the office. There are lots of possibilities.
My parents had a similar experience in their idyllic exurb, where affluent retirees can afford lengthy home renovation projects. A neighbor's multi-car garage had noticeable traffic to and fro, on a country road in a small town where everybody seems to know each other's vehicles. It turns out the contractor was dealing heroin from the garage. I think the scheme worked for as long as it did because, like your case, nobody suspected anything like that in such a location.
