The GF took an HR college course many years ago. It was taught by an HR person from a Fortune 500 company here in town. The first thing this woman said in front of the class was, “I’m going to tell you how to avoid 90% of your HR problems. Don’t fuck with people’s pay. Pay them when they expect to be paid and what they expect to be paid.”
KevinC
2737
Wow. That one made me angry just reading it!
I won’t reveal the company, but it’s a Fortune 500, and for most of my career there I was in sales mgmt and we had a standing meeting with comp every week because they chronically had something wrong all of the time. And this wasn’t isolated, I’ve been there 25+ years and it happened the entire time.
And as Mark mentioned about the HR comment above, this did not endear the company to sales in any way whatsoever.
Good lord, I was getting so angry reading that one. And something like that has never even happened to me. Ugh.
And remember, folks: wage theft is handily the largest property crime in our society.
It sounds a little like the manager was afraid a very competent “Jane” might end up displacing him.
I worked in the IT department of an insurance company many moons ago when COBOL was king. There were many important jobs in the overnight month-end batch processing, but none more important than the commissions run. Those cheques had to be issued correctly and on-time to the brokers come hell or high water because a pissed off broker was a broker who would be steering more policies to a rival.
That manager needs to get demoted or fired. What an asshole.
Her work is great and she needed very little training but she’s got very big britches.
It’s upsetting for Jane, I understand, but I think she was out of line about the whole thing. People make mistakes.
The payroll manager was heavily in agreement, but I was speechless that she’d speak to management like that.
I’m just kind of floored that she’s getting gift cards after speaking to her superiors like that.
I’m getting tired of the respect gap I’m seeing with younger staff. I think Jane would be better suited in a different department. I’m not comfortable having her on my team since it’s obvious she doesn’t understand she’s entry-level and not in charge.
Seriously. Asshole.
Oh, man. This one is good too:
Maybe I’ve grown too skeptical about everything all the time but I’m getting a whiff of made-up letters from both of those.
Menzo
2743
Yeah, I’m skeptical that any of these are real. They sound like fiction to me. Who would submit these stories, and why?
I remember, a few years ago, hearing a software developer on a podcast I listened to describe a job where the company decided to delay payroll by three weeks so that it could report better results. He was fired on the spot for pointing out that this was illegal.
Timex
2745
Assholes are assholes because they think that they are correct in their assholish treatment of others.
Thrag
2746
When I read things like this the notion “no competent company/HR dept. would possibly…” does pop into my mind before thinking “oh right” about what word is doing all the work in that sentence.
These stories do straddle the divide a bit. I can believe they are fake but I can’t discount that they are real.
Either way, they make me feel a lot better about my own occasional failings as a manager.
Enidigm
2747
Those stories make me think that many people fall closer to the talking ape side of the spectrum. The lack of imagination, flexibility, inability to see beyond the end of their nose, ect, and just general lack of emotional intelligence.
A long, long time ago I had a job that involved multiple extended trips to and stays in Paris, all charged to my own Amex card and then expensed. The expense checks came quite slowly and eventually I was caught between Amex, who wanted to be paid every month, and the small company I worked for, who I thought were clearly slow-walking expense reimbursement in order to smooth over their own cash flow problems. When I said this to the CFO and told him to cut it out, he was enraged and threatened to have me fired. But he also paid me, and my expense checks were never again late, so draw your own conclusions about what he was doing.
I think Timex nailed the answer. I would think it is made up too if it weren’t for my own encounter with egregiously stupid management.
I got a placement as a student programmer while in university. As you might guess, I got a lot the small “fix / modify this report program” type work. I had to make a change to a program that one of the other programmers wrote, but I couldn’t for the like of me figure out how it could even run.
Read record
DO While End-of-File
Write report stuff
Read record
END DO
Reading it, the main processing loop would only execute if the file was empty, at which point it goes into an endless loop. Yet it ran and processed a file generating a report. After some time puzzling over it, I discovered that the reason it worked was that the guy had defined true to be false and false to be true for the end of file flag reversing the logic so that two wrongs made a right. I asked the senior programmer who gave me the assignment about this and he told me a little story.
The manager had hired this Korean lady for a programming position who was outstanding. She moved up quickly and was herself the manager of another team in the department now. He hired this other Korean guy. He turned out to be a technical wiz and ended up moving into the technical support department and was the goto person for resolving big technical issues. So the manager got it in his head, hiring a Korean was a sure thing. Rather than documenting the incompetence to make a case for getting rid of him, he just ate the salary and kept this guy on giving him low level tasks that were mostly harmless.
I feel the same way about all the “/r/antiwork” anecdotes I’m seeing on twitter.
For context: 'I quit' - Reddit users are posting angry resignation texts to their bosses on an 'anti-work' subreddit
I’m torn (in an indifferent kind of way), because I can both completely believe there are managers and employers that awful, and completely believe that people would 100% make up anecdotes like this just to go viral on twitter. There’s no way to verify any of the anecdotes I’ve seen, it’s very low effort to make up some text thread screenshots, no real downside to making up a story like this that fits a popular narrative and hoping you get a bunch of attention online.
KevinC
2751
They very well might be, but I’ve had the misfortune of working for people that behave and think in that sort of way. In terms of why they would submit such a story that looks so bad, it’s because they don’t realize it. They’re filled with righteous indignation that the entry level employee didn’t know her place and likely assumes others of his/her “station” would feel likewise.
It absolutely could be made up, but I don’t have trouble believing such a thing is plausible.
100% plausible for sure. Over in the facebook discussion, I just mentioned being wary of online-things that make you angry or fearful but maybe I should’ve added self-righteous to the list. Although that’s a much less toxic kind of exploitation of our emotions so even if it is made up, I don’t see much downside.
But it is a total workplace fantasy to read about managerial bullies getting their comeuppance. At least the comments that I read in the first link were a lot smarter than you usually find… one reader said that the uppity manager was “high on her own farts” which is a pretty fantastic phrase. :)
Lantz
2753
I believe that there’s managers with this mentality, but these letters definitely feel fake to me. Like the lady in the second one is setup to be basically the most ideal and sympathetic employee ever to setup the letter writer to come off in the worst possible way. I can see the situation happening in real life easily, but this account of it seems fake.
The summer between high school and college I worked an hourly job with just absolutely no career path forward. I was by far the most productive employee because it was less boring to me to keep busy and knew it was short term. Even at that age I got why the other people were just doing the absolute minimum of what was needed to get done and thought they should be.
A few weeks before I was done to head off to college my manager legit pulled me aside for a meeting and tried to get my to delay going to school for a semester or more and she could get me an extra 50 cents an hour to do it. She hard sell it vs just like a token effort. Like how out of touch can you be to try and convince a kid not to go to college to work a dead end job?
Agreed that the second letter felt too forced, like the employee’s background was far too sympathetic and awkwardly shoehorned into the story. First one though is something I can completely see happening. In my 30 years of professional positions I’ve seen far too many owners, C-level execs and middle managers who were simply clueless and/or abhorrently out of touch with reality and who I could see making comments exactly like those about the “disrespectful entry-level employee” who just wanted to be paid.
Years ago I sat in an all-employee meeting at a company I worked for at the time (about 150 employees) where the President/Owner dropped a bombshell that the usual end-of-year bonuses everyone was accustomed to receiving (kind of a profit-sharing type thing) and were expecting in about 3 weeks (around the holidays) were going to be dramatically cut down due to the company “just not being as successful that year”. He then proceeds to “soften” that blow by telling us all about how excited he is that the construction on his second house on the coast is nearly finished, and describes in detail the perfect boat he’d found and purchased to dock in the slip in the marina that comes with said house. Even the other owners were looking at him in complete disbelief, but this guy saw nothing wrong at all about detailing his excess to a room full of people who were suddenly wondering if they would need to be returning some of the stuff they’d bought their families for Christmas.
Power (even the little bit of it that comes with middle management) and money change the way people think, especially if those people have never experienced life without power and money.
Everyone is super-subjective—it’s part of the human condition. Underperformers (whether they are managers or non-managers) rarely recognize that they are underperformers, or, at least that they are at fault for underperformance. I think one of the hardest things to accept as a manager is that in any team, there will be some degree of underperformance—it’s up to a manager to optimize results for that underperformer, rather than trying to completely transform them (it’s super hard to change anyone by more than a few degrees). Unless they’re super underperformers, replacing them isn’t a sure bet that you’ll pick up someone better.
I think these two stories are, more likely than not, fake or at least embellished. They’re simply not “messy” enough and are too simplistic.
