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Your Boss Is Not More Stressed Out Than You, Science Says (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Work under capitalism is a brutal psychological gauntlet -- low pay, long hours, and little to no safety net. But bosses usually expect you to take some solace in the fact that you're not doing their (supposedly more difficult) job, even if they make more money. Some part of you might think that's bullshit, but hey, what do you know? Well, according to new work from researchers from the University of Manchester, University College London, and the University of Essex, it probably is bullshit. According to their study, published on Friday in the Journals of Gerontology, people lower on the corporate ladder are, on average, more stressed than people higher up. Worse, according to the study, the elevated stress continues into retirement for average working people. 'Workers in lower status jobs tend to have more stressful working conditions -- they have lower pay, poorer pension arrangements, less control over their work, and report more unsupportive colleagues and managers,' Tarani Chandola, a professor of medical sociology at the University of Manchester and one of the paper's authors, wrote me in an email.
Maybe being better at dealing with stress is what allows you to climb higher up the corporate ladder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (began in 1967)
"The studies, named after the Whitehall area of London and led by Michael Marmot, found a strong association between grade levels of civil servant employment and mortality rates from a range of causes: the lower the grade, the higher the mortality rate. Men in the lowest grade (messengers, doorkeepers, etc.) had a mortality rate three times higher than that of men in the highest grade (administrators). This effect has since been observed in other studies and named the "status syndrome".[3]"
Getting a start on the clickbait lying right with the first sentence, I see:
"Work under capitalism is a brutal psychological gauntlet -- low pay, long hours, and little to no safety net."
Compared to what? And when? Lord knows no one under feudalism, mercantilism, socialism or communism ever worked "long hours for low pay."
Life in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Capitalism, and the technological progress it helped engender, is the system that helped lift those out of the poverty that previously plagued all but a tiny hereditary elite since time immemorial until a period just two centuries ago.
If you want to see what life is like without capitalism, trying looking at Venezuela, where they're rioting because socialism can't provide enough food for them to eat.
But enough. This is just another example of Slashdot leftwing clickbait, because evidently covering actual News For Nerds is evidently too boring compared to launching yet another left vs. right flamewar.
Is msmash the designated leftwing agitprop admin now?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Responsible Owners of companies and high level executives are burdened with the fact that they are responsible for the livelihoods of their employees. I have worked for several companies where I have personally seen a manager or owner stress to the point of depression when facing the task of laying off an employee.
Contrary to what people think, most managers are good people and have the back of their employees.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He probably thought, "If a black man can do this job, how hard can this job be?"
Of course it's all BS and it's always been. You get fired - you usually get nothing and then break your neck trying to find a new job. Oh, and your wife may divorce you in a process 'cause you've become insolvent.
Guys who are upper in the corporate hierarchy enjoy golden parachutes and resumes which say that they've got experience in managing other people, so they move to other management positions in other companies where they continue to manage while those at the lowest rank get all the flak for the company's failures or misfortunes and get fired whenever the quarterly goals are not met.
And don't get me started on their salaries and benefits.
Seriously. I've worked INCREDIBLY hard, and voluntarily submitted myself to WAY more stress than my peers through my earlier years. My friends thought I was nuts. But where are they now compared to where I am? You can likely figure that out on your own. The stress should be your driving force to move up. You're constantly presented with challenges that you need to accept in order to get to where want to be. What's that old saying? Ain't nothing in life free. I continue to work very hard, although now I work on different and more broad projects than those under my direction. My stress level is indeed lower than it was in past years, my salary is much higher, my debt to income is very low, and my retirement accounts are looking pretty nice. I worked really hard to get here, and I make no apologies for those who merely "come to work and do their job." You have to go above and beyond, you have to look forward and look upward in order to succeed. If your idea of a promotion is doing the minimum to not get fired long enough to "deserve" a raise, you will be stuck forever as one of the people bitching about "those rich people." Money opportunities are astoundingly abundant in America (and many other countries). But you have to put forth the effort to go out there and get it. I'm now, and have been for quite a while, at the point in my life where I have the flexibility to relax more. I built my home closer to work, both are in an area where I'm not wasting my time in traffic or spending a fortune to merely exist. I'm 15 minutes door to door and earned the ability to take time off to be with my family pretty much any time I wish. That is worth more than money at this point in my life, and I built that by not partying my ass off and blowing off work during my 20's. Life is what you make it. If you make it about doing nothing, you'll have nothing. If you make it about setting and achieving goals, you'll have success. It's a simple concept that has always and will always work. Further, if you read this and made a mental excuse for my success, you just answered every question about not being where you "deserve" to be.
You think her changes made it more valuable? All the value was in foreign stock that she had no part of.
But she deals with a bunch of garbage that I don't have to care about because she insolates me from it so I can get my work done. I see some of the E-mails about the issues she's keeping off my plate and I shudder to think what my life would be like if she didn't do what she does. She takes the stress so I don't have to and I owe her both my loyalty and thanks.
But I can assure you, my current manager isn't typical.... No sir. In my 25 years of having all sorts of managers, she's in the top 5% and I will be sad when she retires. My previous manager was totally opposite, visited his scorn for failure to meet real and imagined (by him) requirements when he demanded (regardless of if they'd been communicated or not). I'm sure he was stressed too, given all his direct and indirect reports generally didn't care one bit about keeping him out of trouble given the likelihood of getting your head handed to you when you raised an issue. He was a moron of a manager and I am lucky I escaped with my self respect from that place. I find this kind of manager much more common....
So, Yes, my managers ARE more stressed than I am.... I'm guessing the good managers are LESS stressed though than the ones who should have never taken the job in the first place.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That's strange, because times have changed for anyone outside the very senior executive levels of a company. Previously, promotion into middle or upper management was like being admitted into an exclusive club, where everything was basically taken care of for you and you were just the public face of your organization. You had a high salary, a whole staff to manage every aspect of your life, etc. Now, flatter organizations push a lot of things onto lower numbers of managers that they wouldn't have to deal with in the past.
I think it's the flatter organizations that cause more stress...the managers are responsible for more than they used to be, and the speed/pace of business has wound up to levels that are beyond healthy.
Work under capitalism is a brutal psychological gauntlet -- low pay, long hours, and little to no safety net.
Average wages in the US are among the highest in the world. "Brutal psychological gauntlet"? As opposed to what? The rainbows and daisies that come from living under a dictator?
Capitalism does not imply the lack of a safety net either. There is nothing about capitalism that prevents a safety net from being put in place.
But bosses usually expect you to take some solace in the fact that you're not doing their (supposedly more difficult) job, even if they make more money.
Which bosses? "Usually"? This is a straw man argument. Some managers are more stressed than those who report to them. Sometimes it's the other way around. Furthermore stress is not an easily quantifiable state so comparisons of any sort are fraught.
'Workers in lower status jobs tend to have more stressful working conditions -- they have lower pay, poorer pension arrangements, less control over their work, and report more unsupportive colleagues and managers
In other news water is wet.
People lower on the ladder make less money. Less money means more stress.
There could be some personality filtering going on: those who can accept heavier pressure are more likely to move up into management.
It's more or less the Peter Principle: you raise up until you hit your pressure limit.
My wife rejected a management position that paid more than her current position because it was more stressful. She used to do that kind of work so she knows what's involved. She prefers to save some energy for family and friends. Because we have 2 white-collar incomes, we don't have significant financial pressures (knock on wood). Time is a scarcer resource than money for us.
For example, when in management, she had to deal with problem employees, sometimes stay late to resolve logjams, get urgent vendor/shipment-related calls on the weekend, etc. Her non-management job has a fairly narrow role such that she's not nearly as often thrashed around by miscellaneous issues popping up.
You kind of have to have "no life" to be a manager in most orgs, or the work-world ends up being your life, such as an enjoyment in shmoozing with customers, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
This is bullshit. Every other country just realizes that the amount of money that drug companies spend with their multi-million dollar ad spots and high paid executives and huge profits is not in line with their needs to take care of their citizens. If America wants to keep paying for it then fine, but don't get tricked into believing that there won't be cures for anything without all that money floating around.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The highest work-stress job, from the Wharton–Harvard perspective, is the star performer (software developer, sales person) promoted into their first management position, often without any prior psychological preparation for the change (how hard can it be to manage people doing what I so clearly excelled at doing? larvae in ointment: without actually doing their work for them?)
In a high-pressure setting, first year is hell, usually devolves into an unrelenting fire fight, with a high ultimate attrition rate. (Who new that hardball sales tactics don't translate well to daily proximity?)
Once the junior manager recovers from Boot Camp, the job remains difficult, but the compensation is pretty good, if you "manage" to hang around long enough to get promoted off the management front line.
Year one: learning how to delegate down
Year two: paying more attention to what lies above (and not just the marching orders)
Year three: fully investing in peer relationships with other managers at the same level, elsewhere in the organization
Someone who entered the work force intending to become a manager likely accomplishes this in less time. But these people have always been a small minority in the studies I've read.
A year into the job, there is nearly a 100% response rate that the new managers had failed to appreciate the importance of investing in peer relationships (not that they would have found the time during Management Boot Camp 101 in any case). Lateral politics. It's a thing.
Back to the article, at the bottom of the heap, how does one carve a reasonable line between general life stress and work stress?
I can't even imagine.
Dunderheads. Imagine having to manage the people who wrote this study. One can only imagine.
Look on my workers, troubled sea of mighty dunderheads, and despair!
Okay, let's say that's true. I'm okay with NOT subsidizing the rest of the world's research, so let's just move to a single payer system like a civilized nation. There are plenty of issues. We could certainly improve the FDA approval process, and work on global testing standards so we can distribute that cost as well, at least to economically similar countries. We can pour money into more advanced modeling to reduce the labor costs involved. There are a hundred things we could do to improve medicine globally and domestically.
However, none of those factors are in any way a halfway decent argument for not having Medicare-for-All. Furthermore, private R&D expenditures are only half what is spend on consumer pharmaceutical advertising, which other countries generally don't allow. Big Pharma in the US are crooks, and that's the main reason why it's hard for us to get decent healthcare.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Unions helped lift those out of the poverty that previously plagued all but a tiny hereditary elite since time immemorial until a period just two centuries ago.
Not only is my version correct, it's shorter.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Money is like gravity, the more you have, the easier it is to attract more of it. The less you have, the more likely it is your money will be sucked into the gravity well of a larger amount of money belonging to someone else. Example: My cousin was given a $100,000 4% interest loan at the age of 21 from his multi millionaire father. He also was given a job after dropping out of university (his university debt was wiped by his parents), as a forklift driver (aroun $55k) in his dad's company. Within 2 years he was making commission as a salesman in same company (around $65k BUT with commission around $85k). after 10 years he has bought 3 investment properties. This is due to his starting conditions. Now my situation: I went to university and dropped out after 2 years. This left a student loan debt of $10,000. I have been working entry level jobs for the past 4 years (averaging $50k and am finally breaking into an 80k role). My dad is not as successful as his brother so I was never offered a 4% interest loan at the age of 21 like my cousin. In Australia there has been a property boom/bubble and the average price of an apartment is $350,000, and a house is pushing $750,000 nationally. As a result I own 0 property and am still struggling to save for a deposit, those who got in earlier such as my cousin have had a massive leg up. I am currently being head hunted for a well paying job, but I still don't have that extra boost of a loan no bank would issue a 21 year old with. Capital matters. The sooner you start with a sum of money the further ahead you'll get. Start with 100,000 at 21, and it's easy to get a million dollars by 35.
Kindly point to a first world country that has zero medical research. More often than not, single buyer countries won't use a new product issued by an American drug company (if there is truly such a thing) because there are no significant improvements over generic drugs already available. How many silicone boobs or quit smoking solutions does a country need?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.