Antiwork/Work Reform

I was promoted, but told I will be paid 17% less than the average for my new position. Instead they gave me a bunch of stock options, which I don't care about. They said this was because of the current economic market and didn't have the budget for it.

I am pissed. I am supposed to sit in meetings and lead projects with all these other dudes (I am a woman) and be paid less for it. On top of that my company is rubbing salt in the wound by making us all sigh a diversity and inclusion pledge. I am all for diversity and inclusion, but maybe ... ACTUALLY DO IT instead of just pledging it.

I immediately sent out my resume and applied to several jobs because fuck this. But the more I think about it the more I think about how cushy this job is and how chill my manager and team is. I get unlimited PTO that is actually unlimited, we almost never get called when on call, I get to work on whatever I want and work whatever hours I feel like, plus it's fully remote. My team has good rapport and I like working with them.

So here's what I'm thinking, if I work for 83% of the pay I work 83% of the hours. So I am thinking of bringing this up with my manager and requesting that I am given 1 day off a week since that would be 80% of my current schedule. I value time off and getting to work on what I want over money, even if they are being sexist trash. I will accept their sexism at the rate of 3 day weekends every week lmao. I don't want to fuck up things before I find another position though, so I'm not sure when to bring this up or if it's even worth trying.

Been at this company for 4 months as a data engineer. When I started their codebase was a mess. All the code was in one folder with subfolders, the scripts were dependent on one another even if they didn't share the domain problem, their version control was "call the IT guy to grab the backup". In the first few months I set up a Github organization for them, put all their code into a git repo to start version control, got them to install and use IDEs instead of just VS Code, refactored some of the codebase to use SOLID standards, automated some tasks, transitioned them to a new Snowflake warehouse, and fixed several issues that was breaking their workflow. Today the CEO told me that this is an at-will state and he let me go. Didn't explain why, just asked for the equipment back.

I didn't get any write-ups, no one complained about my work, I was always looking for improvements, even the CEO thanked me a couple months ago for writing a word document to my managers on how I think the team can make improvements. They actually followed that doc and have been happy with it. This came from nowhere because no one brought any complaints. Today I am lost. I just need to vent and let this out.

avoid burnout! quit your job!

https://elk.zone/med-mastodon.com/@luckytran/110735820821445415

I sympathize with the barista here, but mindset that customers need to cover 10 to 20% of his income is symptom of decades of brainwashing of employees and customers alike. In this case NPR is part of this brainwashing. I will not tip someone for doing their job. I will only tip when I feel it is needed based on the service provided.

Better Title:

A few rich people that refuse to pay living wages could cost the US economy &7.1 billion.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/620668

Original title: Stop thinking tenure gets you promotions — it doesn't. A former senior leader at Amazon explains what actually works.

I don't understand today's companies that don't recognize their longevity in their employees. When they hire someone to do a job, it's at the current hiring rate. Looking back at history, my grandparents went to work for the same company that their parents worked at. My parents only worked for 2-3 companies during their professional careers. I have only a handful of employers that fills my resume. Yet, my children need to change jobs every 2-3 years in order to ensure that they are making what they are worth. There are only so many reasons why today's worker will stay at the same company for longer than a few years: belief in the company/product/cause; comfortable life; fulfilling job; or feeling stuck in the situation and unable to move to better opportunities.

Per the article, "To get a raise or promotion, you're going to need more than tenure — you're going to need to create additional value or increase your scope of work." The they go on to state "For example, if you're currently paying $50 for someone to mow your lawn, you wouldn't likely be willing to pay that person $60 to do the same job, simply because they've been mowing your lawn for the last three months or the last three years. This is because they didn't provide you with any additional value." Unfortunately this just doesn't ring true to me. If I hire a new lawn person each time, the cost of the job goes up, even though it's the same lawn. It should be the same of the employers. If it would cost more to hire a new employee to do the same job, then the pay rate should rise too.

Maybe I have a tainted view of the situation. The company I work for is very formulaic about pay. Every job has a defined pay scale with a defined start and end point. Every year, the company reinvests in it's employees equally. Everyone from the lowest and newest employees to the CEO all get a pay raise on the same date at the same percent. In addition, the pay scale also moves to acknowledge the face that it would cost more to hire someone new, yet seniority earns you just a bit more. If this years annual increase is 3% per person, then the pay scale (cost to hire someone new) will go up by 3/4 of that rate, 2.25% increase. We also perform regular audits to make sure that we are at/above median pay for the surrounding area. There are no lowball starting wages. There are also no merit raises because the company believes that you are performing your best every day.

What do you think? Should you get paid more to stay longer at a company or should you have to demonstrate how you've provided a significant increase in value to the company? Or do we need to follow in the footsteps of the younger generation and job hop to to the next company that will pay us today what we're worth, stagnate, then job hop again?

‪CHICK-FIL-A CAN SUCK IT, BUT THE FORMAT IS SOUND: https://media.mstdn.social/cache/media_attachments/files/110/724/781/052/402/434/small/c25d5cfb2bd52122.jpg‬ https://beige.party/@LRRRonEarth/110724780922996260

Support the workers! This will help a lot:

• Donate to the strike fund.
• Publicize and solicit more donations.

‪Inigo Montoya has joined the picket line 😊 https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/110/714/336/204/310/627/small/6b19b0fcff608463.jpg‬ https://mstdn.social/@ElleGray/110714346092351018

This banger.

CEO-to-worker pay ratio went from 20-to-1 in the 1960s to about 400-to-1 now.

Back in the 1980s when it was 58-to-1 you could still have a decent middle class life working at the grocery store....

#workers #workreform

Unhappy with the speed at which human workers prep avocados, Chipotle has introduced a robot to get the guacamole going.

The fittingly named Autocado (sigh) won't do all the work, however. It's an avocado prep machine that can cut, core and peel an avocado without the need for human hands but the rest of the mashing and seasoning process will continue to fall to Chipotle employees.

As anyone who's made guacamole can tell you, getting the good stuff out of an alligator pear is definitely where most of the prep time is spent, and Chipotle said its new prototype could halve that labor investment. Chipotle said the entire process of making a batch of guacamole takes approximately 50 minutes, but didn't specify how much of that time is spent prepping individual fruit.

Chipotle isn't calling it automation, however - it insists Autocado is a "cobot," or collaborative robot, that'll allow employees to focus on more important tasks. "The intensive labor of cutting, coring, and scooping avocados could be relieved with Autocado, but we still maintain the essential culinary experience of hand mashing and hand preparing the guacamole to our exacting standards," said Chipotle Chief Customer and Technology Officer Curt Garner.

Autocado, made by food industry automation company Vebu in partnership with Chipotle, can reportedly handle up to 25 lbs (11.3 kg) of avocados in a load. The machine moves and preps avocados, one at a time, depositing fruit in a stainless steel bowl, with peels and cores being dumped into collection bins.

Vebu said it eventually wants Autocado outfitted with machine learning and sensors that can evaluate the quality of each avocado in a bid to quantify waste reduction and improve efficiency. To be clear, these capabilities are planned for future Autocado iterations, meaning humans are hopefully still responsible for quality checks on the avocados before loading them into the machine.

Want some robo chips to go with that auto guac?

Autocado isn't the only way Chipotle is waging war on time sunk into appetizer prep. Early last year the company announced "Chippy," a machine that "integrates culinary traditions with artificial intelligence to make tortilla chips," the company said.

Unlike Autocado, Chippy handles the entire chip-making process from masa to final seasoning and is even designed to replicate human inconsistency in salting and lime distribution. "To ensure we didn't lose the humanity behind our culinary experience, we trained Chippy extensively to ensure the output mirrored our current product, delivering some subtle variations in flavor that our guests expect," said Chipotle VP of Culinary, Nevielle Panthaky.

Chipotle has since integrated Chippy into one of its restaurants in Fountain Valley, CA, where testing is ongoing.

So, will saving half the prep time translate to free or reduced-price guac when or if Autocado gets beyond the prototype stage? Sorry: The company told The Register that it intends to maintain the same pricing for the green stuff.

As for whether it plans to fully automate the guac process, à la Chippy, Chipotle told us that "maintain[ing] the culinary experience" is essential, and as such it'll continue to hand mash its guacamole "to our exact standards."

But all it took in 2022, to go back to Panthaky's description of Chippy last year, was the right AI "to ensure we didn't lose the humanity behind our culinary [chip] experience." By that measure, Autocado could certainly evolve given the right code.

Chipotle told us it sees additional uses of automation in other food prep areas, as well as dish washing, which are two areas it said store employees have expressed interest in. The company also sees future roles for AI assisting managers by, for example, calculating how much food the store actually needs to prep for a day to cut down on waste.