7 ms·

I did confront them and ask them to stop, but I still had to work with them, and they didn't entirely stop .. Unless you expect women to have taken Harassment 1

I did confront them and ask them to stop, but I still had to work with them, and they didn't entirely stop .. Unless you expect women to have taken Harassment 101 as a college course, they are really flying blind with this one .. when more than one person is involved or supervisors are involved, it's not that easy to say oh here, let me pull so many people into HR .. legalities aside, it's the end of a happy working relationship ..

aedron 10y ago
I have been in adversarial relationships at my workplace that took a huge toll emotionally and eventually physically, just as you described. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I think it's good that you are talking about it and hope you recover - I still get stressed just thinking about those situations, years later. I did learn the hard way how to deal with it, which I think is mostly about attitude. I think part of your ordeal was that you had certain expectations from the people around you, and a lot of the grief was having those broken. So first of all, I guess you get a little more realistic (or disillusioned...) about workplace relationships, leadership and company policies. Sad as it may sound, loss of innocence and thicker skin will help the next time. Second thing is to nip things in the bud and not let anything fester. At this point I will straight up confront anyone if I feel treated unfairly and not let it rest. More often than not this solves the situation. If not, I will move on. Life is too short to stick around and being miserable somewhere, as long as you have the freedom not to. It sounds from your writing like you've already learned these lessons, but I just wanted to share my experiences.
- AJ007 10y ago
  Workplace abuse is definitely a massive problem. Like personal relationships, it isn't something that the abused party can simply walkaway from without a major impact on their own life. I would guess a double digit percentage of jobs globally are abusive. A big chunk of which wouldn't even qualify as consensual employment - either through unpaid slave labor or misleading information about wages and work conditions. There needs to be more transparency about employment and the people involved in them. I think we will eventually see something like LinkedIn but which provides both positive and negative feedback about people and doesn't require a user to sign up for a profile to exist. There is a hard question as to where to draw the dividing line. Without robots, some jobs are just abusive - period. Many jobs lower the life expectancy of the workers, and I suppose the alternative would be (without robots) that no one does them. In the West we kind of get to firewall ourselves off from this, and we get to use, sell, or consume the product after all of the dirty work is done. At the minimum, reducing non-consensual employment will help push the true economic costs of produced goods closer to reality and eliminate the market forces which benefit non-consensual labor (basically cheating.) In terms of adversarial work environments, which if not addressed can easily become mutually abusive, no matter what the policies of a company are, the fired workers are going to end up working somewhere else. A big company like Apple may be capable of implementing ideal processes and eliminate those workers, but what happens at the next company they show up in? Should an employment blacklist exist at the federal level, or should employers only allow known abusive employees just to work in isolation?
762236 10y ago
I recently joined a new team and company, and the senior person became threatened by me (I am stronger and would have become the tech lead), and he started bullying me. I switched teams. It cost me time and reputation. I didn't know what else to do, since bullying is a covert aggression and designed to be felt but not witnessed (e.g., he arranged a group after-work get together, in front of me, without asking me the newcomer to join). People don't believe when you point out that someone is aggressing unless it is overt. You get all of the asinine replies that people are writing to your article here. My company gets to reap the reward though: they have someone that is protecting his position of poor performance through bullying, causing us to lose users due to his buggy product, and since he is friends with the management, they don't seem to understand his poor performance. BTW, good article, kudos for publishing it, and you are correct to have those feelings.

aedron 10y ago

I have been in adversarial relationships at my workplace that took a huge toll emotionally and eventually physically, just as you described. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I think it's good that you are talking about it and hope you recover - I still get stressed just thinking about those situations, years later. I did learn the hard way how to deal with it, which I think is mostly about attitude. I think part of your ordeal was that you had certain expectations from the people around you, and a lot of the grief was having those broken. So first of all, I guess you get a little more realistic (or disillusioned...) about workplace relationships, leadership and company policies. Sad as it may sound, loss of innocence and thicker skin will help the next time. Second thing is to nip things in the bud and not let anything fester. At this point I will straight up confront anyone if I feel treated unfairly and not let it rest. More often than not this solves the situation. If not, I will move on. Life is too short to stick around and being miserable somewhere, as long as you have the freedom not to. It sounds from your writing like you've already learned these lessons, but I just wanted to share my experiences.

AJ007 10y ago
Workplace abuse is definitely a massive problem. Like personal relationships, it isn't something that the abused party can simply walkaway from without a major impact on their own life. I would guess a double digit percentage of jobs globally are abusive. A big chunk of which wouldn't even qualify as consensual employment - either through unpaid slave labor or misleading information about wages and work conditions. There needs to be more transparency about employment and the people involved in them. I think we will eventually see something like LinkedIn but which provides both positive and negative feedback about people and doesn't require a user to sign up for a profile to exist. There is a hard question as to where to draw the dividing line. Without robots, some jobs are just abusive - period. Many jobs lower the life expectancy of the workers, and I suppose the alternative would be (without robots) that no one does them. In the West we kind of get to firewall ourselves off from this, and we get to use, sell, or consume the product after all of the dirty work is done. At the minimum, reducing non-consensual employment will help push the true economic costs of produced goods closer to reality and eliminate the market forces which benefit non-consensual labor (basically cheating.) In terms of adversarial work environments, which if not addressed can easily become mutually abusive, no matter what the policies of a company are, the fired workers are going to end up working somewhere else. A big company like Apple may be capable of implementing ideal processes and eliminate those workers, but what happens at the next company they show up in? Should an employment blacklist exist at the federal level, or should employers only allow known abusive employees just to work in isolation?

762236 10y ago

I recently joined a new team and company, and the senior person became threatened by me (I am stronger and would have become the tech lead), and he started bullying me. I switched teams. It cost me time and reputation. I didn't know what else to do, since bullying is a covert aggression and designed to be felt but not witnessed (e.g., he arranged a group after-work get together, in front of me, without asking me the newcomer to join). People don't believe when you point out that someone is aggressing unless it is overt. You get all of the asinine replies that people are writing to your article here. My company gets to reap the reward though: they have someone that is protecting his position of poor performance through bullying, causing us to lose users due to his buggy product, and since he is friends with the management, they don't seem to understand his poor performance. BTW, good article, kudos for publishing it, and you are correct to have those feelings.