Comment by dbshapco

When I was in university I took a lot of courses in management science, which is basically a lot of applied psychology, and learned a lot of stuff like this.

Then I went out into industry and watched as all these principles about managing employees effectively were ignored, or at best received lip service.

It led me to the conclusion that actually effectively managing employees to motivate better performance wasn't a priority. Not in the top ten anyway.

Most corporations and therefore managers operate using resource extraction principles. How do I extract maximum labour from this resource at lowest cost?

The 'R' in HR always bothered me, and others judging by the companies that used nomenclature like 'talent' or 'people'.

However that was whitewash. Underneath the nomenclature resource extraction continued unimpeded.

The irony being that treating people like resources is counterproductive and hurts performance.

Companies extracted the illusion of more resources, more hours, while productivity largely plateaued or decreased.

Somehow corporations expected to hire smart people, smart enough to do an intellectually challenging and technical job, and not have them do the math that the additional pay for performance generally amortized lower than the hourly rate, and that by doing more employees were actually lowering their effective hourly rate -- i.e. discounting labour for the employer.

The wag in me would observe the reason companies were so eager to portray everyone as family is that's the only model where this is marginally acceptable. Family taking advantage of family, like a family farm. Working more hours to get paid less certainly doesn't work as a business model for the employees. They'd be better off with a second salaried job -- and there were apocryphal stories about employees doing actually that, hanging up a coat on the door hook, throwing a newspaper on their desk, then leaving to go to their other job.

This is all observational and anecdotal however, but over a three decade career with a dozen plus companies, some of them Fortune N (where 20 <= N <= 500) in both contractor, IC, senior leadership and C-level roles.