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Employers Who Hold Back Their Employees?
greggman asks: "So, I'm watching 'Tonight 2', the night news program here in Japan and they are showing E3 coverage. I guess one game that hit it off was a game by KOEI called Dynasty something or other. They visited KOEI here in Yokoyama Japan but they had masked out all faces from the team. When the interviewer asked why, the company rep said 'because other companies would try to steal our employees'. That's messed UP!! I consider that to be akin to treating your employees like slaves. If you can't afford to keep your employees and therefore have to make sure they don't find out about better opportunities then you deserve to go out of business. It's their life not the company's. It almost seems like there'd be a law against action like that. All I can suggest is that you don't support companies that actively prevent their employees from bettering themselves." Couple this with the long hours, the draconian employment contracts, and the insane deadlines, and I begin to wonder if this guy has a serious point. For all the money that programmers make, do Employers do more to make their jobs harder than most?
"What do you think? I'm not saying a company should go out of its way to find opportunities for their employees but deliberately getting in the way seems to cross some kind of line to me.
I've actually run a company before and these kind of questions came up. At least once somebody called and actually asked permission to recruit somebody from us. He was a friend but had a good opportunity. I talked to one of my partners and he said we shouldn't get in the way. We were lucky our employee chose to stay as we were not big enough to really offer more but there was no way we were going to prevent him from deciding for himself which we felt like would be immoral and un-ethical."
I hear the same gripes from insecure programmer peons about their team leads, and from team leads about architects. Or nurses about their supervising physicians.
Every cog in the wheel depends on the others. Some are rewarded with higher pay than the others. There is a place to argue the merits of this... it's called the job market.
Any system administrator that bitches about the hours required shouldn't have job. It's your job to be on call to keep machines up. You get paid to support programmers, so STFU and do your job. Some system administrators get paid to support financial analysts, or scientists, or surgeons. Accept the nature of your role, or get another job. Support staff is not inherently less talented than development staff, but it's just that... support staff.
Of course, I'm just an anonymous, cowardly developer gloating that I have zero-stress job that only requires fifteen hours a week to pull down six figures. Go get a higher paying job doing something else and leave sysadminning to those who love it.
The more I think about this the less I agree with the questioner. The company is not doing anything to hold the employees back. The employees know full and well who the competitors are and if they were interested in leaving, they would contact them.
I do think it is unfair that the employees are not getting personal credit for their work. If, note the IF, they do get full credits when the game is released, I don't see this as unfair. when you are in major crunch time few things ruin your day like the non-stop ring of moronic recruiters who are sure they can offer something better.
If you don't like your job, leave! Sometimes people can't leave though. My girlfriend works in a very specialized security position, but is currently in the middle of a workers-comp claim and can't leave her job without giving up the claim. The company has abused her through this for over 2 years and pays her 40% less than her co-workers because she can't leave. As soon as the legal paperwork is settled she is sending out her resume to every competitor they have.
The message I have is that if the people get the credit when the game is released then more power to them and the company - they will get poached when the game is _finished_ with major kudos, and until then they don't have to put up with 13 calls a day from pain in the ass recruiters.
* not all recruiters suck, but they do tend to be annoying.
- Chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
That during the insanity of the 1999-2000 dot com craze (remember back then ;-) ) one company I contracted with wouldn't connect anyone calling up a developer when rung through the main receptionist. Unless you already knew the employee's extension, you were instead routed by the receptionist to their manager who would check that you weren't a head-hunter.
One developer's girlfriend got **really** pissed off when she was grilled over who she was, where she was calling from, where did her boyfriend lived, etc. When finally asked why she wanted to speak with him, she told the manager that she wanted to know what time he would be home so she could properly f*ck him. The developer went ballistic and stormed the CEO office and threaten to quit. The company's policy soon changed after that.
>>Maybe their employees were extremely ugly or hideously deformed, and they were just trying to spare us the horrror.
I thought the slashdot crew was US based...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
> we respect your work... but programming is creative
Then you obviously haven't run into an excellent systems administrator.
The application programming team has quite a bit investested in a single-threaded billing code that is horribly inefficient and can't get the bills out on time. What does the creative systems administrator do after the obvious tuning efforts? Looks at the way your processes hit the CPUs, then adjust the time slices of the scheduler, disables interrupts on specific system boards, and errects processor sets to get you that 25% boost because your team has programmed itself into a corner.
He then goes on, after a process trace, to tell you where your programming efforts have failed, beyond the obvious single-threaded issue. You pull information from the database via TCP/IP, and you only pull a single record at a time, so you're stuck in the overhead of database transactions. And yes, he has the metrics in hand to prove it. Fix your code, he says!
A good systems administrator is proactive. He anticipates things before they are going to happen, and either solves them before they happen, or has a solution ready for when it does happen. And he keeps the programmers honest. Do you want me to throw more hardware at this, or do you want them to fix their code, Mr. Corporate Accountant?
You can't say that a systems administrator isn't creative. If they're not creative, either their job doesn't place weighty demands on them, or they're not very good at what they're doing.
That aside, a systems administrator keeps your systems alive. Do you want a good one, or a bad one?
Actually some colleges do have courses in systems adminstartion. As for creativity, a good sysadmin is that just like a good programmer is.
A good unix sysadmin is really a jack of all trades. You need to know bits and pieces of many things, as well as be a good troubleshooter and be able to keep up with the information glut and fast moving industry. Maybe you see htat sysadmin playing a game at 3 in the afernoon, but if something needs to be done at 3am who does it? The sysadmin, everyone's job is important and everyone contributes doesnt matter what you do (unless your a llama).
And DeVry/ITT tech will train a monkey not a sysadmin.
this space for rent
It's unfortunate that you are unfamiliar with other countries' business practices and can get modded up for an exagerated but boldly-stated dismissal. The job situation in Japan is not what it is in America. In fact, it's my impression that no other country pampers their IT the way we get pampered, but I'll stick to what I know.
In Japan, when you join a company, the job is your life. Your friends and family are distant second. 10-12 hour days are the norm. You skip lunch and dinner not infrequently. If you leave at 5, they look at you funny, as though you're not a team player. And, if you're not a team player, you don't get promoted or get raises.
It's virtually impossible to get fired, but I can think of better things to do than languish in an entry level position my entire life. Moving to a new job is difficult, because a primary virtue is Loyalty, and if you quit your old job, how can they expect you to be Loyal to them?
The Japanese are in the process of westernizing to a more individual society. People are just now daring to try to change jobs, and wondering exactly why the hell they're spending so much time on the job. Management is starting to notice this, and I expect they're a bit panicky. Which is unfortunate.
They have a long way to go before they arrive at America's freedom. When I leave work at 8, at least half my office is still here chugging right along. There's nothing like working in Japan for a while to make you appreciate American Corporate Culture. I'm more than looking forward to getting back home.
Couple this with the long hours, the draconian employment contracts, and the insane deadlines, and I begin to wonder if this guy has a serious point.
First off let's get real about the situation, no one is forced to work anywhere, well at least not in the United States. If a company you're working for places you in situations like these, then you are the idiot for staying there at any case. There are jobs out there and anyone who says there aren't is probably under qualified to move along unto another company that is going to treat them better.
As for Draconian contracts, again taking a look back to just two years ago, and even with some companies up to date, one has to stop and give themselves a reality check, scenario: You drive a truck all day breaking your back lifting heavy boxes for 14 hours, salary about 40,000.00. You run around all day trying to catch criminals, average salary for a cop 35,000.00.
Take a look at a typical programmer, Unix admin, network engineer; 50,000 - 150,000.00 without having to break your back, duck bullets, etc. Atop that most companies give you healthy benefits, cool offices, gizmos galore.
Having my fair share of being `around' sometimes I stop and wonder how I even get paid my salary when things have become so easy for me. One thing I always am is humble about the situation since I see how much worse things could be. So to this guy and his write up, I think he took a specific situation overboard without looking at the entire picture.
Want Root?
As somebody said in another post, no matter how good you're treating your employees, someone can always give them a better offer, if they really want them. A lot of employees don't really understand that, and that's why they don't actively search for another job when they are happy at the current one. But when a headhunter grabs hold of their phone number, they immediately start to doubt whether they are really happy or not.
That's why there aren't many tech companies that don't try to keep the list of their employees secret.
Sure, blacking out their faces might be a little extreme, but you can understand their reasoning. They might be treating them very well, but they are afraid someone will offer them double the salary just to get them out of there, and they can't afford to double everyone's salary to keep them.
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
If the company wants to blank-out the faces, what the hell is wrong with that? How's that "keeping them back"? Employees are free to find other work through whatever means they can. Is it the employer's job to advertise their employees to others? Absolutely not!
The employer's duty is to pay the employee the negotiated salary, stock options and benefits for services rendered. It was a consentual transaction.
Comparing this to slavery only insults those who have been and still are subject to slavery in its true form, and illustrates just how ignorant you are.
In case you need a refresher on what slavery is: slaves are those who are forced to work and produce without consent. They are forced. They have no choice. Attempts to escape captivity results in force, often deadly.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
There is still a very strong opinion in Japan that you should spend your whole life in a single company. Sure, that way of thinking slowly changing, but it is still a cultural part of Japan. Change, esp. in Japan, happens slowly. Japanese compaines, which are well known for their high quality (and TQM, etc), value their employees as assets to the company. So, it is in the company's best interest not to broadcast their identities, especially in the current Japanese economic climate. The company is not holding the employess back. They have every right to go and ask different compainies for an offer. Basically, the Japanese managers value lifetime employment. Japanese employees are beginning to value it less.
True story: My (Japanese) girlfriend decided to quit her first job after getting serious sexual harrassment (also very Japanese). When she applied for her next job and had been tentatively confirmed, management changed their minds very quickly in the interview when she told them she left her last job, and they didn't care that it was sexual harrasment.
I think a story like this is almost insulting to the Japanese culture. Before you critisize, try to figure out why. The rest of the world isn't like the US. There is something outside the little box you live in.
Better to stay silent, and let people think you're an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt
You're right. Now that you mention it, it does make sense for something like this to come from Japan. I admit I've never spent time there, but Japan was used frequently as an example in my International Business class about a group-minded/oriented culture where people act for the good of a group or collective instead of trying to help their own arses.
I actually just posted a statement in agreement to the poster of the story, but now that you mention the cultural context it makes sense. And I know that my views are probably skewed by my American culture. I still don't think it's 'right', but that should be quailified as being 'right' from my perspective as an individualistic American.
Thank you for pointing this out, if I had some mod points, I'd give you at least one or two for being insightful.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
This is JAPAN. The culture CANNOT GET MUCH DIFFERENT than the United States.
Corporate Culture in Japan is something totally different than going to the bar after work with a few coworkers, and is much more akin to citizenship in a very patriotic country. Health Club, medical, dental, living spaces, restaurants, movie theaters, all of this can and in some cases usually is provided by the company for their employees. Read up on the RPG Shadowrun to get an example of Japanese Corporate Culture taken to an extreme, then realize it isn't too extreme.
Furthermore, the corporate world of Japan is very much their replacement for the warriors of old. Employment with a corporation borders on feudal vassalship, and this is not only accepted, but considered normal by many. Sitting over here stateside, where an employer wouldn't dare try a stunt like that, and saying that it should be illegal in a society that doesn't match ours is a little bit ridiculous.
Your Mileage May Vary, but that's the reason *I* see for these particular actions, and I don't see what the big deal is.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
No matter what you pay your programmers or how well you treat them someone will always have a better offer for them. Especially if they have an insight into your new gaming engine. Hiring people like this in not just hiring a developer it is also getting alot of R&D that the other company has paid for.
If I was manager at a high profile game company I would go out of the way not to broadcast the identity of my programmers.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
True way to happiness
Maybe their employees were extremely ugly or hideously deformed, and they were just trying to spare us the horrror.
More likely, thought, that the management is comprised of a bunch of assholes....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Ack!
Never, never, never take a counter offer. You'll be gone within 6 months.
Once you prove you're looking elsewhere, your boss *knows* you're not happy, and therefore could leave at any time. So, it's in his best interests to replace you on his terms, while he can, rather than scramble when you do leave.
And of course, once he's replaced you... he doesn't need disloyal old you anymore. Wave good-bye.
If you want to job hop, find a good recruiter. They do exist. Talk to them, explain what you're looking for, and be picky. But don't let on that you're doing this. Sheesh.
I can see it now...you beat the game and get this:
Produced by: Three Guys Graphics by: This one tall guy, and maybe a girl.
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Let me give you the lowdown
...just apply the Golden Rule.
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.
This case of blacking out the programmers faces is clearly a violation of the Golden Rule, and therefore, unethical.
In my case, I was looking to move from call center flunkie doing technical support for voicemail (a job I took because I needed a paycheck, doing what it took to earn a living) into the sort of IT position for which I was much more suited, both in terms of experience and temperment.
I couldn't get so much as an interview for an internal promotion, and my requests for use of the company's training materials were turned down because the "request is not related to job functionality." Correct. I had already learned everything I needed to know to do my particular job.
Here's the funny part: My annual review with the company was excellent; my merit raise was higher than average, and in fact, my manager RAISED the raise suggested by my direct supervisor.
Yet they wouldn't let me out of the call position. When the stress of the inbound call line flaked me out, I pleaded to be moved to a non-call job, even with a pay cut, even if that meant pushing a broom and cleaning toilets. "Well," they said, "it's a call center."
Unable to retain me, I left the company, bitter and disappointed about their promise of offering growth and opportunity (in a company with 50,000+ employees!) that translated into being pigeonholed into taking calls for the rest of whatever life I chose to spend with them.
While this particular case was extreme, I've seen promises of growth in other companies as well, and have never once seen them deliver. I wonder if the whole idea of "growth opportunity" is nothing but a b*llsh*t ploy designed to recruit, and then we hope we can string 'em along long enough to make our money off the OJT we did.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Notice that this is in Japan. The company mentality is so different from the one here that you are misunderstanding the statement of "Other companies will steal our employees". The working conditions for technical workers are far better than what you will find in America.
Things like company picnics, baseball teams, and retreats and seminars are looked forward to by all employees. That's right. Their concept of yamato means that they put the company before themselves, and then the company takes care of them. Maybe we could learn a thing or two.
This