The longevity of his employment is likely a result of the company's willingness to promote him instead of hiring externally, despite his start at the entry level. This is not likely to happen anymore, at least nowadays.
From the article: "After getting his first position as a shipping assistant, Walter showed outstanding skills and willingness to learn, always doing more than expected. [...] Shortly after, he was promoted to a position in sales. Then, he became a successful Sales Manager."
I once spoke with a professional baker who started off as a machine operator for a bakery in his late teens, then earned promotion to become a production supervisor and then distribution manager. He then moved companies to become a plant manager, and later an operations director involved in baking formulation, until becoming an account manager (sales) for large baking firms.
The commonality between these stories is that loyalty and hard work at a job has historically enabled people to earn a good quality of life. Nowadays, it intuitively seems like internal promotions from the very entry level are harder to come by, as many firms prefer to hire people with degrees for management or hire externally.
Instead of promoting internally like in the past, I read and heard from managers they prefer to recruit externally for management positions. They perceive that internal candidates lack "leadership qualities" from past interactions with them, and/or perceive that they produce more value in their current positions. When asked how they account for these people changing jobs for promotions to lead elsewhere, the response was that they would say they understood the former employees' positions and would wish them well (without openly reconsidering whether they were under-weighing the value of internal promotion).
The dad started as a draftsman apprentice at the phone company when he was 19. He retired at 52 as the Director of Engineering for Illinois at the same phone company (after turning down more promotion offers in this mid 40s as he didn't want to move again). He never went to college.
He loved his job until the early 1980s when, as he said, "the MBAs took over". The company took care of its employees before that, promoting from within and thinking long term. One of his final "fights with the MBAs" was their idea to replace the company apprentice linemen program with contractors as it would move costs around and look better on the balance sheet. He told me he stood up in a high level meeting and asked something like "do you think you could get contractors to come out in the middle of the night in a storm and climb on a pole to help restore service? What about 20 years from now, who is going to teach the apprentices then?".
He was a "company man" and I think he was both happy and sad to retire after nearly 35 years of service when those same MBAs offered a buyout for executives like him.
> The dad started as a draftsman apprentice at the phone company when he was 19. He retired at 52 as the Director of Engineering for Illinois at the same phone company (after turning down more promotion offers in this mid 40s as he didn't want to move again). He never went to college.
Almost everything in this story is impossible to reproduce today (we can definitely reproduce just the "don't go to college part").
I disagree that it's impossible... Airlines comes to mind as an example where you can start shucking bags, and if you're a go getter probably end up getting an operations job pulling six figures.
That being said, I agree that many corporate mindsets make it seem like this is impossible. A lot of us here at HN are likely going to end up in leadership positions, so a thought for everyone is, if you don't like the idea of "the MBA's" outsourcing everything, or contracting, push back against it.
Even small things like pushing to train someone on your team instead of hiring externally can start to snowball when everyone does it, and you've got more power than you realize to change your company culture.
A lot of us here at HN are likely going to end up in leadership positions, so a thought for everyone is, if you don't like the idea of "the MBA's" outsourcing everything, or contracting, push back against it.
It's not going to happen. Every time there's a working conditions post on HN like the recent one about Nintendo, half the comments are to the tune of "if you didn't want to get treated like dirt you shouldn't have been a contractor" as if they foolishly pushed the wrong button on the career vending machine.
A lot of people get pushed into contracting because it's the only option. I 100% agree with this.
But it's the only option because leadership makes it that way. And saying it's not going to happen is a good way to make sure it never does. Airplanes ain't gunna fly, you can't never land a rocket standing up, and there's no way you can fit a mobile phone in something smaller than a brief case.
I'm not saying it's easy but if you think it's a problem, you can work to change it. I personally think it's a problem, and now that I'm a Manager I'm doing what I can to try to change. Will I be successful? Maybe not perfectly but already the company is better than it was.
A lot of low level jobs are starting to require BAs, though. And the number of super low level jobs like cleaning that don't is at best constant or maybe even shrinking due to automation.
Jobs like the proverbial mailroom don't exist or exist to nearly the same degree any longer. A lot less physical filing and moving paper around at most companies. And the super low-level jobs are mostly all outsourced to, e.g. janitorial services companies.
> if you don't like the idea of "the MBA's" outsourcing everything, or contracting, push back against it
Having an MBA on your resume is a slight negative for me when I'm on hiring committees for peer positions. It's likely to remain the same when I start hiring reports.
Post frozen edit correction: I just realized I started this with "The dad" instead of "My dad". I originally had a couple of sentences starting with "The article ...". I guess I shouldn't post so early in the morning.
Funnily enough, my own dad had a quirky idiolect where he referred to every family member with 'the' definite article: 'The wife', 'The son', 'The daughter' etc. Your mistyping sent me down memory lane!
Working as a contractor wasn't bad - you had full control over your tools, training, ways of working and so on. Unfortunately agencies that source workers thought this is a threat to their business model so they lobbied governments around the world to end any benefits of working as a contractors - e.g. not being able to deduct legitimate business costs from the tax.
So the contracting will be dead in the near future. Your only choice will be working for a big consultancy or directly with the company (if you are lucky).
It's a shame, because this is a road to serfdom.
Here in the UK there is something called IR35 that has recently been changed so that if you run a business your client actually can decide whether you are a business or the so called disguised employee. If they decide the latter, all the money they pay your company, you have to draw as a salary through an intermediary (fee payer) and it means your company gets no profit (so there is no way to deduct any costs).
The catch is that if your client don't declare you as a disguised employee, they risk being investigated by HMRC (equivalent of IRS) and getting fined.
This has created a chilling effect and basically it's very difficult to find a client that is willing to take the risk.
Basically for all intents and purposes you become an employee, but you get no employment benefits and you still have to pay for your own tools etc, but it comes from your salary not from the business. It's like a company required their workers to buy all their equipment from their salary. Madness.
edit:
So some people try to compensate this by increasing rates and that means their rates become on par with what big consultancies ask. So some bigger clients see this as no longer worth bothering with and they simply get managed teams from big firms rather than taking independents.
The guy who pushed these changes in the UK has a wife that owns substantial shares is Infosys ;-) also the biggest consultancies were involved in crafting the legislation...
I'm curious what challenges there would be to form a consulting agency of just one, to basically continue behaving as an independent contractor but have a sort of umbrella "company" that is just you?
I imagine it's extra overhead but if it's not too much extra it seems worth it?
Obviously it's just an anecdote, but I work for a large(one of the largest) AAA video games companies, and that's literally our entire modus operandi - hire early, usually before people even finish uni, and then get them up through the ladder. It promotes career growth, loyality, personal development and job satisfaction - I'm literally surrounded by people who have been here for 15+ years(29 is the record currently) - personally I'm at 8 years, went from intern to junior to intermediate to senior to lead in that time, and I have no plans on going anywhere really.
>>I read and heard from managers they prefer to recruit externally for management positions.
That's absolutely not the case for us, in fact I'm struggling to think of examples when this happened recently.
> Obviously it's just an anecdote, but I work for a large(one of the largest) AAA video games companies, and that's literally our entire modus operandi
Interesting, because the public perception of gamedev companies is opposite: "hire-crunch-downsize-repeat"
Because it's true for a lot of places. We do have an extremely strong anti-crunch culture and value work life balance a lot. In those 8 years here I worked maybe like.....2 weeks of overtime? Around launch of one of our biggest games, I stayed in longer to make sure things were running smoothly. But like outside of that? 8am till 4pm every day. Never worked weekends or anything like that, and I don't know anyone who has.
(well, that's not strictly true - I know from those old timers that 20 years ago that was pretty much bread and butter and people lived in the office more or less. But that was before I ever started here).
Most of the actual large game studios are just normal places to work, and any of them that have been around for more than a few years will have "lifers" for want of a better word. This isn't unique to games at all.
Ubisoft - just(disclaimer) keep in mind that we have studios in (almost) every European country and all of them can approach this differently. Here in UK the policy is what I explained above.
I'm not 100% sure about Ubisoft, but I think Gameloft is part of the same group. At least in Romania, Gameloft definitely does not have a good reputation concerning overtime and such.
"reputation" is a hard thing to assess. In a company with 20k employees, there are goign to be teams and offices that differentiate from the norm, in both good ways and bad ways.
Clearly depends of where you work, and what you do Inside Ubisoft. My rule of thumb is that the closer you are to the game itself (Dev, gameplay designers, sound designers...) the more you will crunch and the less you get paid. As if the labor was a perk in itself.
Again, only talking about my own experience - I'm a programmer myself and I don't crunch, and no one in any other team that I know does. Programmers also tend to be most well compensated out of everyone(in my experience).
There are some old school companies left in the world. Almost everyone at my company has been here at least eight years. I'm currently at 28 years myself, there are several who have been here almost 40 years, and the longest run employee we've got currently is at 51 years (although, to be fair, he's the founder, and at 83 years old now only works a few hours a day, a few days a week).
Part of this is due to the increased career-orientation of higher education. A century ago, someone could start in the mailroom and gradually learn how a company worked; maybe at some point they would take a night course in accounting or some similar business skill, but the vast majority of what senior management needed to know was learned from experience -- and experience at that company in particular.
Now business undergraduate students don't just sit in classrooms learning about accounting practices and labour law; they're expected to study existing business, take co-op positions, and otherwise gain "real world" experience. A student graduating from a 4 year Undergraduate business program should know far more about business than someone who started in the mailroom 10 years ago.
Meanwhile the other side of business schools -- research -- has also acted to reduce the advantage of gaining experience at any specific business. Researchers study successful businesses, learn what works, publish papers... and eventually teach it to their students. Whereas a century ago, businesses fundamentally did things in different ways, most large businesses follow the same general approaches to things, because those are what the PhDs say are the best ways of running a business. As a side effect, the experience someone gains in one company becomes far more transferable to another; for all that companies talk about getting "fresh ideas" from external hires, external hiring has increased because external hires are now less fresh than they used to be.
Anyone who thinks most companies do things the same ways has never worked more than 1-2 places.
The only thing that's the same across companies is some broad generalizations, basically coming down to GAAP and HR. Everything else varies a whole lot.
Even with GAAP there is a large degree of variance, like - how does project accounting work, is it paid at the end or percent of completion? Do you capitalize engineering costs, or is it considered an operating expense?
Ordering and ERP is another huge source of variation, do you use dummy (sales) part numbers? Is internal listed cost fully burdened - or is that accounted for separately? How are part numbers organized?
Expense and reimbursement policy is another source of variation, a wild amount. Just nuts and bolts about how you book, are all different. Do you use a corporate credit card or get reimbursed?
Nevermind entertainment policy.
Basic stuff like is your org chart people orientated, job oriented or process oriented?
IT policy, internal communications styles and policy, how sales works, it's all different.
> Expense and reimbursement policy is another source of variation, a wild amount. Just nuts and bolts about how you book, are all different. Do you use a corporate credit card or get reimbursed?
>Nevermind entertainment policy.
You’re describing incredibly superficial differences because you’re used to a world where businesses all operate very similarly.
Those “broad generalizations” like GAAP you hand-waved over did not use to be standard. One of the early appeals of a company listed by the NYSE was an attempt to standardize some of that so you could even try to guess what you were buying into. That still had to be tweaked after Enron with SOX.
The fact that you can generally count on there being an HR or accounting department/role at companies is a form of this standardization.
Before HR there was a Personnel department, and before Accounting there was a comptroller, accountant, or some other person doing the books (even if it was the President of the company.
GAAP based on my reading is as much an outgrowth of regulation post 1929 as it is anything else. It's less about standardization and more about accountability. Even now though, with good reason one does not have to comply with GAAP, so long as you have a good reason to depart from it.
I've studied business histories, a bunch of them - they're not just frameworks, they're entirely different ways of thinking about the problem.
Business have needed to solve mostly the same internal structural, reporting, accountability and accounting issues since the industrial revolution - none of this is really new.
The first great change was double entry bookkeeping, then the telegraph and telephone increased the size and scope of businesses, and allowed centralized control, then tabulating machines allowed easier data processing and statistical analysis, computers came and allowed higher complexity, then teleconferencing allowing more distribution, and so on.
If you have an example of what you're talking about I'd love to read it.
> Businesses reporting GAAP vs before GAAP existed.
> Businesses working towards ISO / SOC type certifications vs before these existed
Just those two things, financial regulations and compliance frameworks have made businesses operate much more similarly in broad strokes than before these existed. The original argument you replied to is that over time, businesses have become more similar, and I think these things have made businesses way more similar. You're a public company you report on the same metrics now. Before there was any regulation or even a stock market, businesses operated way more differently and you would have to learn everything by being there.
I've worked in ISO companies and non-ISO companies.
ISO 9000 (I think 9000, it might be 9001) is less about standardization and more about documentation - you can use any process you want to produce a result provided it is adequately documented, and reproducible, the process can be anything you like so long as its a documented one. Similarly, you can deviate from that process all you like, provided you document those exceptions and why they were made.
The biggest reason why promotions are becoming rare is because it actually isn't in the interest of the company to do them.
If you're filling an opening by promotion you'll still have to find someone new to fill the position that has been vacated with that promotion: and now you've got 2 new people vs 1 when hiring from outside.
This is a great example of missing out on third order effects. What do you think happens to your existing employees if they have no avenue to advance their careers internally? They will leave for another position elsewhere leaving you with that same need to fill 2 positions. And now you are in a situation where instead of retaining your best people you are losing your best people.
Unfortunately, many employees won't leave a job, even when career advancement is shut off, or pay rates don't match what a competitor would offer. Changing jobs is risky; you're trading a known for an unknown.
In the last year as RTO has started to replace WFH, I've begun to consider whether it's worth looking for a new position. My minimum calculus is that is has to at least pay me as much as I make now, be remote, provide me with the amount of autonomy I currently have, and have workers and managers I enjoy working with.
Remote isn't hard to satisfy now, at least for the near-term future. Pay, I can probably get a 10-15% raise. Coworkers and managers I like? Who knows. Autonomy? Who knows. Both of those are a roll of the dice, no matter how carefully you investigate prior to taking a position.
So for a 10% raise? That's a pretty big risk. Now if your current compensation sucks, or you hate your boss, sure. But I think that most people are risk-averse (at least I am), and most will stick with a less than optimal situation.
Very true. I've found myself in places where I'm pretty sure I wasn't promoted despite being a very high performer simply because I was filling a role that would have been hard to re-fill. Though at the end I left and the company had to find a replacement for both positions anyway.
It is only good for the company if you stay and don't take the position you're earned.
I used to work at a company like this. Only hired new grads, and promoted mostly from within. It was great in some ways but you would definitely have "blind leading the blind" moments and it was very frustrating. I came to see the value in hiring externally for some roles. If you're in a startup or even a small business, really great to have at least a few people around with deep, external experience in the industry to help build context and point out solved problems.
We had the same experience when starting to use AWS/Azure. Our in-house team was all experienced with using VMware on-prem, with some mainframe and a few legacy physical servers. So we had a broad depth of knowledge for running our own datacenter.
So when we started using AWS, we really made a lot of mistakes by trying to replicate how we did things on-prem. And there was a lot of resistance to using cloud services; some people viewed it as a threat to job security. Others simply had a difficult time adjusting to the change in operations/procedures and philosophy.
This held us back quite a bit until we hired a few contractors who helped us better understand where we needed to change, which features worked well in the cloud (and which sucked). We brought the best contractors onboard as FTEs, and it's been a much better experience.
The "we've never seen it done any other way" problem is 100% a real thing.
One of my employers 60% of the company had spent all or most of their professional career there - and things were scrolerotic at times - because there was a huge amount of group think, and a strong NIH/"the way we do it is fine" problem - simply because of a lack of indexing to how other players did it.
You ideally want around 50/50, 50% lifers, and 50% new blood, its even helpful to encourage employees to leave go get knowledge elsewhere and then come back later if they desire.
I think one would want a mix of both. You want to promote internally so you have some people higher up who understand the business deeply in ways that an external hire would not as well as promote retention and reward going above and beyond by having career growth opportunities available, but you also want to hire externally to ensure you are getting an influx of new ideas that have been working at other companies.
> It turns out the inefficient places tend to get out-competed
It turns out that a lot of 'efficiency optimisation' is done inconpetently, like removing 'un-needed' parts from a car: seatbelts, airbags - they just add extra weight!
Lika federal aviation authority hiring engineers from boeing to check their own work to 'improve efficiency'
I think the 73-Max issue is even worse than that. It was likely Boeing DERs (FAA-authorized Designated Engineering Representatives, but employed and paid by Boeing) who signed off on most of the root cause issues.
That's because lean companies can leverage either price, regulatory moats, etc to avoid externalities. JIT has been demonstrated to be incredible profitable in good times, yet extremely brittle in bad times.
We invented this thing a long time ago that we call warehouses. We store stuff in them, and when needed, we ship from them to stores. Warehouses are no fun anymore, everyone wants things shipped overnight etc. So they outsource their distribution.
Oh and greed? Yup. Look at the profit margins for the Exxon this year. For any of the Fortune 500. Last year and this year will be banner years for big corporations that have raised prices either directly or through "shrinkflation." They're loving it, while consumers get the shaft, and the Fed gets the blame.
I think it has to do with what people think university is. It used to be academic training, now it's seen as job training, and I'm not sure it's justified, having done time at a business school. Really, it's so different studying business to doing business there should be some sort of advertising standards label on the course description.
So now people think that you need to have gone to university to work in ordinary shops, and it cuts out a huge swathe of people from certain jobs that they'd be totally fine at. Sales type jobs like this centenarian was doing is one of them, you really don't need a degree to do it, but now there's a gate.
I think (and this is not based in reality at all, I'm just guessing) that a lot of the jobs mentioned - like mail room - either no longer exist, or have been outsourced to 3rd party providers where there simply is no upwards mobility beyond supervisor, but only at that 3rd party provider. I'm thinking things like administration, call centers, accountants, etc.
A lot of work has been compartmentalized, and it's created additional barriers.
> A student graduating from a 4 year Undergraduate business program should know far more about business than someone who started in the mailroom 10 years ago.
When one of my friends did her work placement at a large bank she said the only useful thing from the 2.5 years of business undergraduate study she’d done before that was knowing what Sarbox was. As evidence that business degrees aren’t that useful consider that GS and similar bulge bracket banks have no discernible preference for business undergrads. They assume that by the end of six weeks of analyst training everyone is at the same level.
Can't say for sure but I think the industry and time has a lot to do here. My father is a mechanical engineer who worked for a well known plastics company in the early 70s. He had a technical supervisor who started as a casual labourer at the same company.The supervisor couldn't write and used a thumbprint instead of a signature. However, he could interpret and analyse the designs for the moulds very well and was highly respected for that. It was the reason he was promoted to that level from that of a labourer. Perhaps his illiteracy was the reason he didn't rise any higher but the fact that the company was able to recognise his skill in a certain area and promote him to a level where it could be completely utilised says something about management philosophy. Equally, his ability to teach himself technical skills to be useful without a formal education says a lot about him too.
My grandpa (also in Brazil) studied until he was 11.
He started his carrer cleaning the floor of a store that sold radio equipment.
Learned radio electronics, started fixing stuff for the store, was hired by an airline, travelled the country designing and fixing communication systems for airports.
He had copies of technical books and manuals originally written in English, German and Japanese he translated himself.
Everytime I see modern hiring pipelines I think why the fuck we don't believe in people anymore.
The funky thing is that companies blaming it on "being hard to fire people". Even in the US, where many jobs are "at will employment", where people can just be fired on a moments notice...
Have you ever been an employer or otherwise responsible for hiring/firing people?
Even in "at will" states you'd be a moron to not dot your Is and cross your Ts. The cost of fending off a wrongful termination suit is high enough the wages you pay in the meantime are usually the sensible way to go even though a wrongful termination suit is not a sure thing while the wages are.
The only people who can fire fast anymore are big national franchises who can incur the high up front cost of having a legal department figure out how to streamline the dotting and crossing process for their specific case.
Learning on the job: it's cheaper to outsource that to (publicly funded) schooling/academia. Also, which co is actually keeping people for that long nowadays anymore?
Like everything there are pros and cons. If you only promote from within, you create a barrier for anyone wanting to join. This makes the culture conservative and fragile due to lack of change. Imagine if the only way to get a job is by starting in the mail room and working your way up to CEO. On the other hand, loyal workers who are treated right by the company, have a good chance of maintaining the company's values and strong relationships with customers.
There is no solution to the Peter Principle. That's actually the thesis of the book. I'd argue that management that can't promote from within has likely already reached the position of their incompetence as well.
There are lots of reasons and every situation varies, but my experience is that the reason people don't get promoted has way more to do with bad management than bad potential managers in the pool.
That is still better than promoting to management as a mean to increase compensation, which is kinda common in the EU tech scene and sucks big time. Unless the promoted people are humble enough and try to actually learn the new job, which in my experience is a rare occurrence.
Many people are suggesting this is due to culture change. I think that’s wrong.
The lat century was a period of intense growth which was coupled with growing headcounts.
This century is growing much less, while tech is reducing headcounts across the board. And lowering skill requirements and skill acquisition on the job.
A shipping assistant when Walter began probably did a lot more than a shipping assistant starting now. A baker machine operator too, potentially.
My cousin George did exactly this. He started his career working the overnight shift at a regional bank in the lowest level position, sorting and processing checks. (Remember those?)
When I asked him about it back then, his answer was a bit like Willie Sutton: "I want to learn how money works."
Over the years he rose through the ranks, and a couple of mergers and acquisitions later, he became president of Wells Fargo!
- Ransom M. Cook, 1962-1964
- H. Stephen Chase, 1964-1966
- Richard P. Cooley, 1966-1978
- Carl E. Reichardt, 1978-1984
- Paul Hazen, 1984-1995, 1997-1998
- Richard Kovacevich, 1998-2007
- John Stumpf, 2007-2016
- Timothy J. Sloan, 2016-2019
- C. Allen Parker (Interim), 2019-2019
- Charles Scharf, 2019-present
While this is true - there's a lot of "magpie developers" out there that will jump ship before they have to live with the consequences of their own technology decisions - there's other factors at play as well, like changes in management (because they too want to move up the ladder) or corporate reorganizations.
I once worked for a company - a big bank - that during a three year stint did three reorganizations, forcing every team to work as scrum, then in devops teams. They forced the 'old timers', people in their fifties and sixties who had been working there for all their life, to learn Java and to reapply for a job.
And for the project I worked on, the original was built in Flex but that didn't work on the new ipads at the time. We rebuilt it in Backbone, then Angular came out and we slowly transitioned to that one - that took nearly two years all told.
Then some new CTO came around, an ex-googler so of course his words weighed more heavily, who Decided everything should be rebuilt in Polymer. Of course, right when they were almost finished with making their existing Polymer components work with v2, they introduced v3 and lit-html and everything was Different again. Gee, switching to experimental software has Issues, who would've thought? But it's proven technology because McDonalds used it in their menu screens. Sigh.
Anyway, that's the kinda thing that will make people walk out as well.
Reminds me of the eternal sage of the Duke Nukem follow up.
First their own 3D engine - then a version of the Doom engine which they needed to "improve" - then Unreal - then by the time the game was close to done Unreal shipped a major upgrade which they needed to "upgrade" to.
I would argue that this is fundamentally fine, because "management" is itself a unique job with unique responsibilities... except for one problem.
Managers are (almost) always paid significantly more than individual contributors, in every industry, and are given power over the employment prospects of those ICs.
There is no inherent reason for this. Product owners and agile delivery leads (scrum masters) are both types of managers, but they don't have that power and they're not paid disproportionately to ICs. This relationship works really well! Why can't all management work this way?
> The longevity of his employment is likely a result of the company's willingness to promote him instead of hiring externally, despite his start at the entry level. This is not likely to happen anymore, at least nowadays.
I call BS on that. Yes there's sometimes this pattern of favoring external hires, but most people nowadays are unwilling to just do the work and be patient. Especially in tech, most people switch jobs every few years to get a promo and salary bump. Everyone wants immediate results nowadays and end up with mediocre careers.
I doubt people like the man in the article think like that.
I don't know what rock you've been living under, but licking the boot and bring patient leads you to be stuck in the same position because "you're too valuable right where you are" for 33 years until the company gets restructured and you get laid off with nothing more than a "sorry!" before you could get your full retirement package.
Where is your proof that in tech your career is better if you stay at a place longer than a few years? That hasn’t been the case in a decade or more imo. People who stay at a place a long time are looked at suspiciously at being incapable of leaving.
Maybe tech companies should provide their employees with pay raises so they are not forced to go to another company for that raise. New hires are often paid more than people that have been in the same role for years. You seem to argue that the employee should choose to accept a mediocre salary that does not keep up with inflation and the indignity of the new hire in the hope that just maybe in a few years a higher position will open up and that they will somehow out compete the other people vying for it. If they don't get it they should just continue to wait until the next opportunity. Or they could just go get a position doing the same thing at a new company and get a pay raise that would likely pay them the same rate as if they got the promotion. It has nothing to do with loyalty and everything to do with logic and not selling the years of your life at a discount to a corporation that does not even know you exist.
Note: I am about to start my 4th job in 6 years. My pay went from 55k to 200k in that time. Way less than many others on this board make but an unthinkable number for me and if I had stayed at the first job I would probably be making 70k maybe.
Yes. The "MBAs" saw cost cutting in draining worker loyalty and workers have been catching up slowly since loyalty and hard work is a cultural phenomena. When the workers catched up strategy wise there was a lobbying push for STEM crisis, "good people are hard to come by" or lazyness.
Instead of both way loyalty we see this push for "values" and cultural fit or what not. Very hallow compared to boring old 20 years of service.
My former employer a 100 yo company had these old rules for gifts to employees that had stayed 10, 20, 30 and 40 years. It was like a joke nowadays when engineers hardly stayed 3 years, including me.
> The commonality between these stories is that loyalty and hard work at a job has historically enabled people to earn a good quality of life. Nowadays, it intuitively seems like internal promotions from the very entry level are harder to come by, as many firms prefer to hire people with degrees for management or hire externally.
This could also be a difference in the country's working culture. Not all countries need to be the same in this regard, and it may still be common to rise through promotions in Brazil.
It could probably depend on other factors, like the industry, too.
It still happens at the company where I work. Of course it is a family owned business so they get to apply their own values without answering to outsiders.
I think it is very very very unlikely that he would earn more money switching jobs as a salesman in a small town in Brazil during the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. Almost no market is like software development in the 2010s and 2020s.
Raises and promotions were a much more certain path for better compensation in his circumstances.
He would probably be happy somewhere else as well. You can look at not switching jobs as paying your employer thousands of dollars each year to keep working there, and it gets more expensive for each year you stay.
Or, if you think your employer's business is worthwhile and you are looked after well, why would you?
It seems a common attitude these days that all workplaces are temporary and ripping you off if you stick around. Such ego.
Someday these job-hoppers won't be so lucky to have such a market available and will wonder what happened. They might find out they're not as desirable as they think they are.
Employees only started getting mercenary because the companies treated them like fodder. Listen to any union labor song to get an idea of how they were treated. Companies wouldn’t even pay you in money (only scrip) until the workers revolted. It’s really a bed made by companies, so they better lay in it.
I get that, but it's not quite the same as the sentiment here of 'change jobs every year or few or you're leaving money on the table' except also being based on greed and ego.
Well then maybe companies should be paying their workers better such that they don’t have to switch jobs to optimize their careers. There is no point in blaming employees for a lack of loyalty when employees don’t control their incentives. Workers are merely operating in the system the corporations set up.
If loyalty was that valuable, companies should reward that appropriately by paying them at least as much as an equivalent new hire, maybe even more because they’ve been around longer. Or companies can prioritize putting their most long standing employees in leadership positions, valuing the insight and knowledge of company operations. There are a bunch of things that can be done that often aren’t.
If he gets paid enough to support his envisioned lifestyle, maybe he doesn't need more money and changing employers is an unnecessary risk. Not everyone's main objective to maximize their lifetime earnings.
That's quite an achievement, and I'm even more impressed he was able to do so in the textile industry that suffered so much in the mid-nineties in the region.
Context: I'm from the Itajaí Valley (where Brusque is located), which has a strong textile industry - one of the main drivers of the local economy. It used to be much stronger until the disastrous Collor government caused a number of them to go bankrupt or severely reduce their production due to some serious mismanagement of the Brazilian economy.
The language evolves with society, Santa Catarina now is spelled like this. Brazilian Portuguese had a bunch of strange phonemes in the early XX century, to be honest.
> Walter broke his own record set in 2019 with 81 years and 85 days.
So not exactly news... still impressive, and some quotes worth considering:
> Walter believes that the best part about having a job is that it gives you a sense of purpose, commitment and a routine.
> He comments that the best professional advice he can give is to try to work for a good company and in an area where you feel motivated.
> "I don’t do much planning, nor care much about tomorrow. All I care about is that tomorrow will be another day in which I will wake up, get up, exercise and go to work; you need to get busy with the present, not the past or the future. Here and now is what counts. So, let’s go to work!"
I’m “retired,” and have never worked as hard, in my life.
It’s a joy. I work on the stuff I want to work on, at my pace, and using my development techniques.
Works a treat.
Throughout my career, I developed theories and opinions, on the best way to develop software, but was seldom allowed to put them into practice. On the few occasions that I was allowed to do so, things worked out great.
So a big part of “retiring,” has been putting these ideas into practice.
It’s worked out wonderfully.
I didn’t actually “retire” by choice. This industry is quite blatant about institutional ageism.
The Remains of The Day described one particular pathology quite well. Reducing one’s identity to one’s work and intentionally closing doors on experiences can lead to a life with regrets.
However my parents are in their late 60s and I can see that there is a joy to be gained from being able to put your skills to work. They’re both great parents but now we’re all grown up and they can do whatever they want and despite traveling the world and everything they are still most satisfied when they’re operating (apart from when they’re with us, obviously).
That’s definitely something I want for myself. It reminds me that the Polgar sisters still enjoy chess. Their parents early drive for them to excel at the game did not hurt it for them.
The definition of work is definitely important. What if your work, for example, is creating art. Would "retiring" mean no longer creating art, and just sitting at home all day doing nothing? Watching TV, eating and sleeping?
The issue is that a large portion of jobs are repetitive and uninteresting work that people only do as a way to get money. But for others, work can be something that gives them purpose and they enjoy. If anything, I would wager the reason he's lived so long is partly due to staying active with his work.
Irving Kahn is another example of someone who worked, I believe, until he died at 109. Famous investor, was a TA in Ben Graham's course when Buffett was a student (the latter is now 91), and worked in fund management from 1928 (good timing) until 2015 (87 years in all)...but not at the same company.
Not everyone finds themselves in the kind of job that they are happy to do through old age, but it is nice to see when it happens.
What astounds me, is not the time spent at the company but how much change and advancement he saw along the way. I'm not old enough to have experienced the absence of internet, smoking in offices, manually switched phone exchanges, no digital mail, fully manual processes, etc.
What an incredible amount of change to witness. I just get to see a continuous rollout of technical solutions to mostly questions not asked or understood :/
I always tell my kids how their great-grandfather was a real Renaissance man. He graduated with a degree in Engineering and learned to fly biplanes between the World Wars and ended up flying for Pan Am. The last plane he flew was the 707. Quite a bit different than the Curtis Jenny he started with.
Seriously, I'm 52 years old, last year I was interviewing for a new job and one company was asking me that same question.
My honest answer would have been 'retired' but this would probably have broken their HR system.
> "I don’t do much planning, nor care much about tomorrow. All I care about is that tomorrow will be another day in which I will wake up, get up, exercise and go to work; you need to get busy with the present, not the past or the future. Here and now is what counts. So, let’s go to work!"
That's something I want to do but find it extremely hard to do.
While this is obviously a way-way outlier, 10-25 years is not that rare (including in more traditional technology companies) and I'm not really sure 2-3 years is the norm in a lot of places.
Just as an aside, the longest serving employee at any of the Big Tech companies has to be Chris Espinosa. He started working at Apple in 1976. The only current Big Tech company that is as old as Apple is Microsoft and their longest serving employees started in the 80s.
Larry Ellison comes close. He founded Oracle in 1977 and he is still the CEO.
More common is companies like IBM and people who have continuous employment through acquisitions by IBM/HP/etc. My favorite long-term tech employee is Thomas Nies who co-founded Cincom, arguably the first ISV, in 1968 and is also still the CEO.
Oh wow. Finding Cincom mentioned here in HN is like a cognitive dysphoria for me.
I worked at Cincom between 2006-2012. Eliot Miranda summed it up best when he said “Cincom is where software goes to die.” It is the geriatric retirement center for aging software.
Either way, shouldn't be a big deal. It's a job not a marriage, there are no "till death do us part" vows which people still break because they "grew apart" or whatever. An unhappy employee staying only for loyalty harms both the employee and the employer and no one can be expected to know where they will be in life and as a person more than a few years into the future.
Oh. I don't disagree. Do what works for you. I've tended towards long tenures--dot-bomb aside--but certainly don't think there's anything virtuous in that. Just what worked for me.
> On 17 January 1938, Walter Orthmann started work as a shipping assistant when he was fifteen years old at a textile company in Santa Catarina
Hard to wrap your head around someone working at the same place from before 2. world war. Both him and his employer must have been quite good at adapting to a changing business landscape.
OK, I dunno if I can top that. Definitely not. But...
I went to work for Bell Labs in 1978 after getting MSEE,
then went to work for a start up with a bunch of Labs buddies about 5 years later
that company got bought out by one of the "baby Bells" that went on a spending spree of acquisitions after the break up of ma bell, they bridged my service as if I had never left, hey, thank you very much !
then, a few years later I went to work for another startup working on this new cool technology you may have heard of "cellular" wireless phones duh. K, again, guess what, airtouch bought us out, they bridged my service again, hey thank you very much dudes.
Then, (tired of this yet) after working for those dolts for a while I left and went to work for another start up which will go nameless but has to do with fiber stuff. Those guys got bought out by the Big V company, they bridged my service again ! thank you very much again (tons of vaca time).
I have worked for, but my count 5 different companies and yet, never lost a day of service! 44 years and counting.
So anyone out there who would like to get bought out by a big company, simply hire me and they will buy you to get me back. Probably, I am thinking that has to be it. right ? it's all about me :)
I have a couple coworkers that are up there but not quite to his level.
1 is a machinist started in 1962 and is half retired. Comes in Monday - Wednesday from 7am-11am.
The other is sales and works a full 40 hour week. Started in 1960.
Yeah, this is really about employees at a large company. There are probably quite a few family businesses where someone(s) have been connected with the store or whatever for a long time.
Am I the only one who notices that for a centanarian, he looks in a good shape. And I'm not talking health-wise but also mental-wise. You could tell from his posture, demeanor and gleam of his eyes that his mental capacity has not been dimmered by old age
There's a culture of forced retirement there too, so it's not at all surprising. Pay generally increases with age so Japanese companies want people to retire.
This year I left my previous employer with 15 and a half years of service shudder I can't imagine having worked another single day for them, let alone 84 years.
That's a record very unlikely to be broken anytime soon. Starting working before 18 is becoming more and more uncommon and staying at the same company is definitely unfashionable nowadays...
I learned from clever dad in Germany - employ your kids asap. So you will help them paying into retirement fund reach working year count needed for retirement faster.
South America in general was a somewhat popular destination for German immigrants in the 19th and early 20th century so it's probably not that surprising to see a German family in Brazil by 1938 when he started at the company.
Nowhere close to it. The early migrants were from Britain but they were vastly outnumbered by later migrants in the 19th century who came in their millions.
Just generally, the reason why people left Britain in the 17th century was of excess labour/crushing poverty. The English Civil War increased mortality so that by the end of the 17th century, few were willing to leave (which led to a change in labour supply for the US of some significance). Migration increased, again, in the early 19th century due to some fairly harsh recessions in textiles employment...but people fled Italy, Ireland, and Germany in far larger numbers because the economic issues there were more severe: crushing poverty, massive overpopulation, no economic opportunity or way to sustain life.
Just quantitatively though, I suppose Mexico is probably close to the biggest actual migrant flow...although that largely reflects the fact that the population is bigger than it was in 1850.
But, unless you know something that wasn't in the article, a scurrilous one.
To be born in Brazil in 1922, his parents must have moved at least a decade before Hilter had any sort of power. Nazis fled to Brazil because there was already a large German community there.
And Germans are actually all over South America. Chile, Peru, etc. And North America too (I believe Germans make up the largest migrant group to the US, although what areas that includes is obviously somewhat controversial as Germany didn't exist until 1871 and it's borders have changed dramatically over the years..it is the largest self-reported ancestry group in the US at least, although I suspect that include lots of what is now Poland).
Ironically, given the context of the accusation, many of these migrants to South America were Jewish. But many were not, many were Christians looking to start millenarian communities, many were looking to flee the poverty or lack of land, a new life, whatever.
Remember too that Argentina in 1900 was richer than the US. South America seemed like the next big thing. Times change.
This is a ridiculous accusation. He was born in Brazil in 1922, got his first job in Brazil in 1938 and seems to have lived in Brazil his entire life. Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Which is by the way impossible due to the timing (he was born in Brazil 100 years ago hence his parents must have migrated there before Hitler took power in 1933)
From the article: "After getting his first position as a shipping assistant, Walter showed outstanding skills and willingness to learn, always doing more than expected. [...] Shortly after, he was promoted to a position in sales. Then, he became a successful Sales Manager."
I once spoke with a professional baker who started off as a machine operator for a bakery in his late teens, then earned promotion to become a production supervisor and then distribution manager. He then moved companies to become a plant manager, and later an operations director involved in baking formulation, until becoming an account manager (sales) for large baking firms.
The commonality between these stories is that loyalty and hard work at a job has historically enabled people to earn a good quality of life. Nowadays, it intuitively seems like internal promotions from the very entry level are harder to come by, as many firms prefer to hire people with degrees for management or hire externally.
Instead of promoting internally like in the past, I read and heard from managers they prefer to recruit externally for management positions. They perceive that internal candidates lack "leadership qualities" from past interactions with them, and/or perceive that they produce more value in their current positions. When asked how they account for these people changing jobs for promotions to lead elsewhere, the response was that they would say they understood the former employees' positions and would wish them well (without openly reconsidering whether they were under-weighing the value of internal promotion).