If you ask for a raise and they say “maybe in two to three years” thats simply a polite no.
> “you know the world outside is hostile to job seekers and a steady paycheck beats the unemployment line”
You can search for a new job while employed. Unless you are stuck on an underwater submarine playing hide-and-seek you can always fire off a few inquiries.
yellow_lead 3 hours ago [-]
I've been told to wait for a pay increase/promotion twice. And I got it both times (luckily). The time periods were only a few months or a year each time.
I think it's a judgement call but making such a long-out promise like 3 years in the tech industry is a huge red flag. Even at one year you should be skeptical and asking how/why as the author suggests.
hnlmorg 2 hours ago [-]
Being told you have to wait until the next pay review cycle, is normal. It’s how a business with healthy and defined processes should operate.
But you should only be waiting at most a year. If you get told “wait 2+ years” then that’s usually a sign that they’ve already decided you’re not eligible (for whatever reasons they decide) but don’t want to be candid with you.
If you get told to wait for any duration beyond the next pay review cycle, then take that as a sign that you’re not going to progress under the current regime.
3 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
jimnotgym 25 minutes ago [-]
I like the other employment 3 year problem.
In this the company fills jobs with keen but cheap young people to save money. These people work hard, get experience and take qualifications. Three years later you have a cohort of young people with excellent CVs and qualifications above their peers... that the company can't afford to pay the market rate for! Then it loses a whole cohort of great staff.
yfw 4 hours ago [-]
Theres some false dichotomies here. Not getting a promotion might not be as intentional as the author seems to believe. Often orgs are slow to change and headcount is one of those hard to challenge issues.
100% agree with the timing point, often the promotion has very little to do with what is within your control.
decimalenough 3 hours ago [-]
You've got the causality a bit off here. A promotion is always intentional: somebody with power has to actively decide that getting you promoted will advance their interests.
Not getting promoted, on the other hand, is the default state of affairs. Are they doing work above their level? Will they keep doing it even if they don't get the promotion? Great, then there's no need to promote, move onto the next thing or person.
kittbuilds 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hnlmorg 2 hours ago [-]
As a hiring manager who’s worked at various different scales of organisation, I think the original article is a fair warning.
Headcount doesn’t take 2+ years to resolve. Even in heavily bureaucratic organisations, it’s a few months at worst.
Organisation wide restructures can take years and changes to departmental structure can be suspended while the org restructure happens, barring any unusual and typically director approved circumstances (like scoring major new project with a key client).But any employee would be well aware of such restructures and client projects.
Changes to pay will typically be postponed until the next pay review cycle. So could be up to a year. But if it’s longer then that’s typically a sign that your manager (or above) has already vetoed any such pay increase and they’re not being truthful with you about it.
Ultimately, if you get told to wait 2 years and the reasons are not “company wide restructuring” then there’s some shadow politics going on and you should definitely be reviewing your job prospects. And if there is a company wide restructure happening, then you should also be updating your CV just in case too.
If you get told to wait 3 years the just assume it’s never going to happen. Because you can guarantee even if your management has the best of intentions, priorities will shift multiple times within those 3 years.
JackFr 53 minutes ago [-]
Losing your job sucks. Typically, there is no silver lining. I’ve been laid off 2x and those were both among the worst experiences of my life.
> rawness is an excellent time to reflect on what went right and what I could've done better, before the brain starts coping with the trauma of the event in question.
But that isn’t what he’s done in the essay. I don’t think he’s doing an honest assessment of what he could have done better. Rather there’s a thin patina of “I should have realized . . .” and then a litany of complaints about the company. And the complaints about the company are the same usual ones that everyone makes. I HAVE BEEN THERE. I HAVE MADE THEM TOO.
But I would advise, in six months in a year when you’re in a new job, to take a HARD look at yourself. Try not to cast people as villains and thus can be a learning experience.
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
One of the notable things about FAANG processes that I've observed from my friends there is that roles and processes are mechanized[0]. Individuals are placed like precision robotics in a bigger machine. This kind of structure means that you have a defined process for promotion or pay raises and you know what your role is. In fact, one might even posit that the ability for these large organizations to create a machine to extract surplus from labour in a systematic fashion is the reason for their success.
For most people, this is wonderful. Knowing what you will be valued for is very useful. It says "do the things that are useful to us" and "stop doing the things that are useless to us" and tells you "these are the things that are useful and those are the things that are not useful". At their scale, rare errors in the process will inevitably show up, but smaller companies often have these errors at higher rates. All that to say, success often comes from identifying what is useful to the organization and what is not, and then what is useful and what is not to the person who has control over one's role in the organization.
In mechanized organizations, this should be easier. In unmechanized organizations, one's skill at this will dominate one's technical skill at determining success. But it's just a skill, and if you cannot find a way to train it, the easiest workaround is to ask the person making the decision: "if I wanted it in 3 months, what would I have to do?".
You may get an answer that was untrue 3 months later, but you just shrank your timeline in a way that is much more meaningful, and perhaps more likely is that you'll either get an unrealistic timeline (which is useful signal), or you will hit it and get what you wanted (which is also desirable).
0: A classic example of this is that no one can "get you into Google/Facebook/whatever". This reveals the other non-obvious purpose of their interview process besides quality-control of hires: quality-control and rules compliance on interviewers.
mkl95 1 hours ago [-]
In the zero-interest rate economy, it was easy for early to mid-career engineers with average skill to switch to a company that paid them 20%+ more money. I did it myself multiple times.
The current economy and AI have turned the tables. Even today, waiting for three years is pushing it for most folks, but understandable. Career growth is being decimated across the industry, and opportunities simply aren't there anymore like they used to be. You can be dedicated and above average, but you are still stuck in the same industry as everyone else.
2 hours ago [-]
fyredge 4 hours ago [-]
Reading this article reminds me of all the advice in university on the importance of soft skills. The OP sounds like a competent technical worker but lacked the soft skills to secure his position.
All organizations have a consensus that guides it's decision. While heavily skewed towards leadership, even the consensus of the lowest hierarchy worker is important.
From what I saw in TFA, OP correctly identified that there was a need for FinOps but did not do the work to get buy in from the organisation. Even though I find it absolutely tedious and sickening. Some amount of politicking is inevitable for survival.
dpe82 4 hours ago [-]
There's also a corollary to this: if the organization does not recognize some work as needed or useful, you could well be actively wasting your time putting effort into it. There might be a good reason the company doesn't care that you just don't see, and leadership could be (at best) confused about why you would spend time on it.
nine_k 3 hours ago [-]
Given enough soft skills, you can persuade your boss that what you are doing is important, and help him/her represent the department as uncovering and proactively addressing an important issue. Ideally it should align well with the boss's boss agenda.
dpe82 2 hours ago [-]
For sure, but sometimes what you or I think should be important really isn't in the grand scheme of things. An example could be focusing on cost or efficiency - generally very reasonable things to care about - but if all a company cares about right now is growth at all costs, then that focus would be wrong. This can happen - the company leadership might see a market that they absolutely must enter and be dominant in no matter the cost. That may not filter down well 3-4 layers of management; so the soft skill in that instance would be in sussing out what several layers of management above you actually care about and surfacing to them things that align with those concerns.
4 hours ago [-]
throwaway290 35 minutes ago [-]
> I was given a warning because said proposal was (unknowingly) opposed to a Senior Director's vision
Warning? Wtf. Even if knowingly opposed, you pay this dino to provide expertise not lick your ego. I'd start looking at that moment... bigger red flag than promotion delay.
helloplanets 2 hours ago [-]
> On your way out the door, you hear the rumors: someone else did your thing years after you showed yours off. They got the credit, the bonus, the promotion, the recognition. They're a Senior now, or a Lead, or a Director, or a VP.
If it actually went down like this, that's pretty horrible, and that someone else is a grifter. Very harmful for any organization in the long run, because that behavior will be applied to anyone who's "ripe to be taken advantage of" (from his point of view), burning them out of the way.
That is, if they were aware that you made the thing that they picked up later. Though I wonder why the original didn't go through. The other person pushed harder for it to go through, or showed it off with a different sort of demo? Or was it a different sort of technical implementation / design?
dupdup 1 hours ago [-]
>grifter
blatantly naming ,the part you mention was under timing section I guess the grifter didn't just copy paste what our guy did. it did have more impact and well timed
helloplanets 24 minutes ago [-]
> blatantly naming
Not sure if you mean that I'm being hostile for no reason towards this 'someone else'. The second section in my original post is the big conditional.
> I guess the grifter didn't just copy paste what our guy did. it did have more impact and well time
This is more than likely correct.
Either way, I do think it's grifter behavior to not mention/include anyone else who was involved in the project if you pick it up halfway through. Unless the code (or whatever else) is actually bad, and you have to do extra work to redo it. And, if you are actually aware who even worked on the project to begin with.
But it very well might've been a case where some higher up passed the project off to another programmer (months/years later) with no malicious intent whatsoever, and the programmer just did the thing as requested. Or a myriad of other explanations.
4 hours ago [-]
sneak 3 hours ago [-]
> The pink slip comes as a total surprise. It always comes as a surprise. You did everything you were told, even waited patiently like you were asked. You trusted the organization to reward you in turn - and now you've lost your job.
Your reward is your paycheck. On Friday night, the balance anyone owes anyone is zero.
You didn’t “trust” them at all. They had no further obligations to you, nor you to them. You seem to have invented obligations that don’t exist.
keiferski 3 hours ago [-]
The fact that so many companies operate this way is really depressing. I want to work with people I trust to have some genuine respect for my future, personally or career wise.
There is nothing more destructive than talking to people daily, having a good working relationship with them, and then randomly getting laid off with no warning or explanation. Years of positive interactions go up in smoke overnight, because the company couldn’t bother to treat you like a human with needs, and instead act as if you’re just a mercenary.
And to be clear, I’m not talking about budgetary or performance issues that lead to layoffs. I mean when you’ve done good work for a company for years, then out of the blue, get a meeting request for a Friday afternoon.
It makes for a cold, mercenary world that I want no part of.
azthecx 3 hours ago [-]
Not all companies operate like this, but many large ones do. Smaller chops can have exactly the kind of culture that you describe, but they're also quite often hard to find as they tend to have some stable business and long employee retention, it's unlikely you will find them at the same time you're looking for a job.
keiferski 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah I am lucky enough to be in a company with a solid culture now.
I definitely think you need to avoid companies with 1) large turnover, 2) investor-driven growth metrics, and 3) a hostile or passive approach to company self-criticism.
Like the guy in the article, I have found that companies which hand-wave away legitimately good ideas or criticism in favor of some vague “strategy” reason tend to be untrustworthy. Well-run companies want to improve themselves, even if they don’t have the resources to make that improvement quickly.
zelphirkalt 2 hours ago [-]
It is also a good way, if one doesn't care about the whole company going to shit. The onboarding cost and experience cost of letting someone with multiple years of experience go can be huge. There might even never be someone able to really replace that person.
sneak 3 hours ago [-]
> The fact that so many companies operate this way is really depressing. I want to work with people I trust to have some genuine respect for my future, personally or career wise.
I disagree. It’s not depressing, it’s business. Treating people as if they are business professionals is showing them respect. This is why we negotiate salary.
(Separately: your coworkers treating you as a business professional is in no way a lack of respect for your future or your career.)
It’s passive aggressive and unprofessional to think that you are somehow owed something additional and undefined after your paycheck is paid and options assigned.
I enjoy business relationships specifically BECAUSE the obligations of each party are formally documented. Nobody can legitimately be mad when everyone does what the contract says, because everyone read it before signing and everyone voluntarily signed it. There’s even a clause in there that explicitly states that the contract is the full and complete agreement between the parties and supersedes all other agreements, written or verbal.
They’re not joking when they put that in. The cake is a lie.
Nobody has to guess at what is expected of them. It’s written down. Contrast Aunt Judy giving you socks for Christmas: does this mean you owe her a birthday present? At what age does it change? It’s all so fuzzy and context-specific and people are so cagey about giving firm answers about what the rules (and there ARE rules) actually are.
Business has none of that. It’s great.
duskdozer 9 minutes ago [-]
It is depressing, it's business.
fuzzy2 3 hours ago [-]
> It’s not depressing, it’s business.
That's exactly what GP said.
If that's your jam, great! It certainly isn't mine either. Indeed, my theory is that the world is going to shit because of doing business like that. Where's the humanity in that? We're not automatons.
grebc 2 hours ago [-]
The jokes on you if you think the written piece of paper means anything.
keiferski 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is a cold attitude and it’s also not somehow inherent to business. It’s a reflection of the decaying social fabric of American business culture. Wanting to work in a place with some civility and decency isn’t passive aggressive.
Having that opinion 50 years ago would get you fired from any company immediately. Because social mores were less eroded then.
When Aunt Judy gives me a gift, I try to get her one too. It’s not a transaction I need to keep in my head, worrying if I owe her something. That sounds like an extremely depressing way to interact with other people.
sneak 2 hours ago [-]
Pretending that there aren’t unwritten social rules around gift giving and obligation is disingenuous. There ARE rules and there are consequences for not following them. It isn’t about a transaction, it’s about the expectations placed on participants by others in the system.
It’s not depressing at all, it’s how our society works. Most people have no problem intuiting most of these unwritten rules, or are quietly taught by their parents or relatives.
The point wasn’t about transactions, but about whether or not the rules of the system are written down and accessible or not. Both social circumstances have rules.
If you come at it from the idea that businesspeople are cold and unfeeling sharks, and that everything is a transaction, then naturally you would think it’s sad and depressing that someone must apply rules in the workplace and rules in other social settings too. But that’s a vast oversimplification that misses the point: that business professionals carrying out a task directly and efficiently is neither cold nor unfeeling, nor is it some portent of a decaying social fabric. It’s simply professionalism.
Most working people aren’t professionals and have no desire to be, so it comes across as hostile and insensitive, but it’s not.
keiferski 1 hours ago [-]
It’s perfectly possible to be professional and not come off in the way you’re describing as desirable.
In fact, acting in the way you’re describing is itself a negative social rule that will lose someone business opportunities. Because people with value that don’t want to operate in a coldly transactional environment will be turned off by it.
“I don’t owe you anything other than money for the task you’re doing,” is a good way to eliminate a sizable portion of potential high-quality employees.
The further up the economic chain you get, and the more relationship or service oriented the work is, the more important this becomes.
It doesn’t make you seem professional, it just makes you seem like a difficult person to deal with, and thus someone to avoid.
enugu 2 hours ago [-]
This is not about employer vs employee and job security. In fact, the post mentions that there could be good reasons for layoffs. What the post highlights is -
1. Trust - When an employer tells the employee something and then ignores it - then a truth based culture gives in to cynicism. Communications in the company become suspect. Even when there are win-win situations, where cooperation could lead to positive outcomes for both management and workers, a lack of trust means the company cant execute.
Also, this will affect communications with customers and shareholders.
2. Regardless of being right, the author is helping others in similar situations, who can adjust their expectations.
3. The post isn't so much about company vs employee, but competing factions within the company, who are invested in alternative tools/proposals. Promotion is used as a means of making one's faction stronger. This need not be for the benefit of the company or customers. Lobbying will also, of course, affect truth.
Factions might be inevitable (and there can even be good reasons - people genuinely have differences of opinion). But, if the company has good leaders, they will prevent this from erupting into a strong zero-sum conflicts which drown other goals - company's profits, promoting competent people, a culture of trust.
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
I agree, which is why all that garbage that we are supposed to regurgitate during interviews about wanting to save the world, or why this company is so interesting, in reality it is a meaningless theather.
We sell our work, they give us a paycheck, done, lets not make it more than it is.
atleastoptimal 4 hours ago [-]
there r companies that scale 100x in 3 years
If you aren't scaling yourself as much then you're moving too slow
pierrec 2 hours ago [-]
I love this and will make it my motto. Scale yourself 100x every 3 years, or you're too slow. If I manage to keep it up roughly 11 years I will finally achieve planet scale.
trymas 2 hours ago [-]
I am now eager to see your track record and how did you personally scale 100x in last 3 years (or ~1 000 000x in last decade)
lukan 3 hours ago [-]
Does it count, if your belly size scales as much?
gib444 1 hours ago [-]
I could probably scale 100x with a $10-100m personal funding round
Rendered at 11:35:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> “you know the world outside is hostile to job seekers and a steady paycheck beats the unemployment line”
You can search for a new job while employed. Unless you are stuck on an underwater submarine playing hide-and-seek you can always fire off a few inquiries.
I think it's a judgement call but making such a long-out promise like 3 years in the tech industry is a huge red flag. Even at one year you should be skeptical and asking how/why as the author suggests.
But you should only be waiting at most a year. If you get told “wait 2+ years” then that’s usually a sign that they’ve already decided you’re not eligible (for whatever reasons they decide) but don’t want to be candid with you.
If you get told to wait for any duration beyond the next pay review cycle, then take that as a sign that you’re not going to progress under the current regime.
In this the company fills jobs with keen but cheap young people to save money. These people work hard, get experience and take qualifications. Three years later you have a cohort of young people with excellent CVs and qualifications above their peers... that the company can't afford to pay the market rate for! Then it loses a whole cohort of great staff.
100% agree with the timing point, often the promotion has very little to do with what is within your control.
Not getting promoted, on the other hand, is the default state of affairs. Are they doing work above their level? Will they keep doing it even if they don't get the promotion? Great, then there's no need to promote, move onto the next thing or person.
Headcount doesn’t take 2+ years to resolve. Even in heavily bureaucratic organisations, it’s a few months at worst.
Organisation wide restructures can take years and changes to departmental structure can be suspended while the org restructure happens, barring any unusual and typically director approved circumstances (like scoring major new project with a key client).But any employee would be well aware of such restructures and client projects.
Changes to pay will typically be postponed until the next pay review cycle. So could be up to a year. But if it’s longer then that’s typically a sign that your manager (or above) has already vetoed any such pay increase and they’re not being truthful with you about it.
Ultimately, if you get told to wait 2 years and the reasons are not “company wide restructuring” then there’s some shadow politics going on and you should definitely be reviewing your job prospects. And if there is a company wide restructure happening, then you should also be updating your CV just in case too.
If you get told to wait 3 years the just assume it’s never going to happen. Because you can guarantee even if your management has the best of intentions, priorities will shift multiple times within those 3 years.
> rawness is an excellent time to reflect on what went right and what I could've done better, before the brain starts coping with the trauma of the event in question.
But that isn’t what he’s done in the essay. I don’t think he’s doing an honest assessment of what he could have done better. Rather there’s a thin patina of “I should have realized . . .” and then a litany of complaints about the company. And the complaints about the company are the same usual ones that everyone makes. I HAVE BEEN THERE. I HAVE MADE THEM TOO.
But I would advise, in six months in a year when you’re in a new job, to take a HARD look at yourself. Try not to cast people as villains and thus can be a learning experience.
For most people, this is wonderful. Knowing what you will be valued for is very useful. It says "do the things that are useful to us" and "stop doing the things that are useless to us" and tells you "these are the things that are useful and those are the things that are not useful". At their scale, rare errors in the process will inevitably show up, but smaller companies often have these errors at higher rates. All that to say, success often comes from identifying what is useful to the organization and what is not, and then what is useful and what is not to the person who has control over one's role in the organization.
In mechanized organizations, this should be easier. In unmechanized organizations, one's skill at this will dominate one's technical skill at determining success. But it's just a skill, and if you cannot find a way to train it, the easiest workaround is to ask the person making the decision: "if I wanted it in 3 months, what would I have to do?".
You may get an answer that was untrue 3 months later, but you just shrank your timeline in a way that is much more meaningful, and perhaps more likely is that you'll either get an unrealistic timeline (which is useful signal), or you will hit it and get what you wanted (which is also desirable).
0: A classic example of this is that no one can "get you into Google/Facebook/whatever". This reveals the other non-obvious purpose of their interview process besides quality-control of hires: quality-control and rules compliance on interviewers.
The current economy and AI have turned the tables. Even today, waiting for three years is pushing it for most folks, but understandable. Career growth is being decimated across the industry, and opportunities simply aren't there anymore like they used to be. You can be dedicated and above average, but you are still stuck in the same industry as everyone else.
All organizations have a consensus that guides it's decision. While heavily skewed towards leadership, even the consensus of the lowest hierarchy worker is important.
From what I saw in TFA, OP correctly identified that there was a need for FinOps but did not do the work to get buy in from the organisation. Even though I find it absolutely tedious and sickening. Some amount of politicking is inevitable for survival.
Warning? Wtf. Even if knowingly opposed, you pay this dino to provide expertise not lick your ego. I'd start looking at that moment... bigger red flag than promotion delay.
If it actually went down like this, that's pretty horrible, and that someone else is a grifter. Very harmful for any organization in the long run, because that behavior will be applied to anyone who's "ripe to be taken advantage of" (from his point of view), burning them out of the way.
That is, if they were aware that you made the thing that they picked up later. Though I wonder why the original didn't go through. The other person pushed harder for it to go through, or showed it off with a different sort of demo? Or was it a different sort of technical implementation / design?
Not sure if you mean that I'm being hostile for no reason towards this 'someone else'. The second section in my original post is the big conditional.
> I guess the grifter didn't just copy paste what our guy did. it did have more impact and well time
This is more than likely correct.
Either way, I do think it's grifter behavior to not mention/include anyone else who was involved in the project if you pick it up halfway through. Unless the code (or whatever else) is actually bad, and you have to do extra work to redo it. And, if you are actually aware who even worked on the project to begin with.
But it very well might've been a case where some higher up passed the project off to another programmer (months/years later) with no malicious intent whatsoever, and the programmer just did the thing as requested. Or a myriad of other explanations.
Your reward is your paycheck. On Friday night, the balance anyone owes anyone is zero.
You didn’t “trust” them at all. They had no further obligations to you, nor you to them. You seem to have invented obligations that don’t exist.
There is nothing more destructive than talking to people daily, having a good working relationship with them, and then randomly getting laid off with no warning or explanation. Years of positive interactions go up in smoke overnight, because the company couldn’t bother to treat you like a human with needs, and instead act as if you’re just a mercenary.
And to be clear, I’m not talking about budgetary or performance issues that lead to layoffs. I mean when you’ve done good work for a company for years, then out of the blue, get a meeting request for a Friday afternoon.
It makes for a cold, mercenary world that I want no part of.
I definitely think you need to avoid companies with 1) large turnover, 2) investor-driven growth metrics, and 3) a hostile or passive approach to company self-criticism.
Like the guy in the article, I have found that companies which hand-wave away legitimately good ideas or criticism in favor of some vague “strategy” reason tend to be untrustworthy. Well-run companies want to improve themselves, even if they don’t have the resources to make that improvement quickly.
I disagree. It’s not depressing, it’s business. Treating people as if they are business professionals is showing them respect. This is why we negotiate salary.
(Separately: your coworkers treating you as a business professional is in no way a lack of respect for your future or your career.)
It’s passive aggressive and unprofessional to think that you are somehow owed something additional and undefined after your paycheck is paid and options assigned.
I enjoy business relationships specifically BECAUSE the obligations of each party are formally documented. Nobody can legitimately be mad when everyone does what the contract says, because everyone read it before signing and everyone voluntarily signed it. There’s even a clause in there that explicitly states that the contract is the full and complete agreement between the parties and supersedes all other agreements, written or verbal.
They’re not joking when they put that in. The cake is a lie.
Nobody has to guess at what is expected of them. It’s written down. Contrast Aunt Judy giving you socks for Christmas: does this mean you owe her a birthday present? At what age does it change? It’s all so fuzzy and context-specific and people are so cagey about giving firm answers about what the rules (and there ARE rules) actually are.
Business has none of that. It’s great.
That's exactly what GP said.
If that's your jam, great! It certainly isn't mine either. Indeed, my theory is that the world is going to shit because of doing business like that. Where's the humanity in that? We're not automatons.
Having that opinion 50 years ago would get you fired from any company immediately. Because social mores were less eroded then.
When Aunt Judy gives me a gift, I try to get her one too. It’s not a transaction I need to keep in my head, worrying if I owe her something. That sounds like an extremely depressing way to interact with other people.
It’s not depressing at all, it’s how our society works. Most people have no problem intuiting most of these unwritten rules, or are quietly taught by their parents or relatives.
The point wasn’t about transactions, but about whether or not the rules of the system are written down and accessible or not. Both social circumstances have rules.
If you come at it from the idea that businesspeople are cold and unfeeling sharks, and that everything is a transaction, then naturally you would think it’s sad and depressing that someone must apply rules in the workplace and rules in other social settings too. But that’s a vast oversimplification that misses the point: that business professionals carrying out a task directly and efficiently is neither cold nor unfeeling, nor is it some portent of a decaying social fabric. It’s simply professionalism.
Most working people aren’t professionals and have no desire to be, so it comes across as hostile and insensitive, but it’s not.
In fact, acting in the way you’re describing is itself a negative social rule that will lose someone business opportunities. Because people with value that don’t want to operate in a coldly transactional environment will be turned off by it.
“I don’t owe you anything other than money for the task you’re doing,” is a good way to eliminate a sizable portion of potential high-quality employees.
The further up the economic chain you get, and the more relationship or service oriented the work is, the more important this becomes.
It doesn’t make you seem professional, it just makes you seem like a difficult person to deal with, and thus someone to avoid.
1. Trust - When an employer tells the employee something and then ignores it - then a truth based culture gives in to cynicism. Communications in the company become suspect. Even when there are win-win situations, where cooperation could lead to positive outcomes for both management and workers, a lack of trust means the company cant execute.
Also, this will affect communications with customers and shareholders.
2. Regardless of being right, the author is helping others in similar situations, who can adjust their expectations.
3. The post isn't so much about company vs employee, but competing factions within the company, who are invested in alternative tools/proposals. Promotion is used as a means of making one's faction stronger. This need not be for the benefit of the company or customers. Lobbying will also, of course, affect truth.
Factions might be inevitable (and there can even be good reasons - people genuinely have differences of opinion). But, if the company has good leaders, they will prevent this from erupting into a strong zero-sum conflicts which drown other goals - company's profits, promoting competent people, a culture of trust.
We sell our work, they give us a paycheck, done, lets not make it more than it is.
If you aren't scaling yourself as much then you're moving too slow