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Jeez louise, imagine working somewhere where coworkers are regularly abused to tears. I really hope that that's an isolated case.
by dmos62 6y ago
Jeez louise, imagine working somewhere where coworkers are regularly abused to tears. I really hope that that's an isolated case.
- slimsag 6y agoMy sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and basically described the same. They set targets for everyone that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and more hours. She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets (obviously wrong.) She is very much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got fired. Recruitment companies will literally push their employees to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or they break you and fire you. Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common and frequent.
- eecc 6y agoOutside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech. Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)
- dunefox 6y agoAt my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.
- arethuza 6y agoIn a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem. This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....
- dunefox 6y agoThat's actually a genius idea. I wonder how much money is wasted on such things.
- arethuza 6y agoI wasn't entirely serious and short of surgically grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)
- cafard 6y agoIn repair shops, one used now and then to see a sign running something like Hourly rates: $30 $60 if you watch $120 if you help
- nix23 6y agoNext time that happens ask him/her to bring you a coffee, works most of the time...and you can have e little "secret" chuckle.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago"She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets " But what have they done to deserve the truth? More or less this is how we get thinga like Chernobyl, when the entire chain is lying because the cost of tellong the truth is too high and there is no incentive to do so.
- hutzlibu 6y ago"and there is no incentive to do so. " Still, after the accident some of the engineers went for a literal suicide mission to open some ventil to make it all less catastrophic. And unlike the poor construction workers, who died, too, they knew what they were doing. I doubt they did it just for the postmortal fame. Some people have actually moral standards and can stand by it, even if it means disadvantages.
- arethuza 6y agoWorth having a read of the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... Entries like "received fatal dose of radiation during attempt to manually lower the control rods as he looked directly to the open reactor core."
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoAbsolutely, but the events are not comparable. Sacrafice at Chernobyl might save thousands, sacrafice at %xcorp% saves a fat bonus for the guy responsible for the whole mess in the first place!
- gryn 6y agoif anything saving that man's bonus, just mean that you endorse/enable such practices.
- macintux 6y ago> It is curious--curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare. — Mark Twain in Eruption
- grey_earthling 6y ago> She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time This is an example of what universal basic income is intended to prevent.
- david38 6y agoAlso anti-trust laws.
- einpoklum 6y agoAlso strong independent labor unions.
- dmos62 6y agoWhy on earth would anyone downvote this?
- jason0597 6y agoI think HN has been recently overtaken by a lot of very neoliberal people who preach unregulated capitalism very hard.
- dmos62 6y agoA world where basic income isn't downvoted, but strong trade unions or anti-trust laws are is a weird one.
- morei 6y agoUnions definitely have their upsides, but also some rather strong downsides (c.f. most police unions). Basic income has many of the same upsides, but the downsides are mostly about the dollar cost. It's not unreasonable that some people prefer to pay (eg) higher taxes than suffer various forms of corruption.
- solveit 6y agoWe think unions and laws tend to distort markets much more than honest straight cash transfers.
- arethuza 6y agoIt was a branch office of one of the big UK recruitment companies - I can't remember their name (it was ~10 years ago). I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!
- ezconnect 6y agoI once coded for a recruitment agency and they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit.
- goatinaboat 6y agothey get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for more senior hires. The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher pay
- estaseuropano 6y agoJust like the real estate agent is incentivised to get you a higher price for your home? No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a repeat customer their incentives are to get decent candidates quickly into a role without causing any issues.
- giantg2 6y agoI think a lot of people aren't aware of the studies that support your real estate claim. Velocity and volume are the name of the game.
- chrisbennet 6y ago"The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivized to help you negotiate higher pay" Not really. Like realters, "Real estate agents do not generally represent the buyer," says Florida real-estate attorney Barry Ansbacher. "But buyers think they do."
- projectileboy 6y agoNope. Sales is sales is sales. It’s a pretty harsh world. If you’ve been a solid performer for years, maybe you can miss one monthly quota. Lots of abuse.
- arethuza 6y agoI used to know a chap who was a successful partner at a top UK law firm - he had a very successful run of work that lasted for years and made a lot of money for everyone. However, eventually he it came to an end and he had a less than successful month - he got the same bollocking about performance as everyone else, and in front of his entire team too. Some organisations are just run like that.
- slt2021 6y agothe thing with sales is one you develop a sales skill and network - you go and set up your own shop and become an equity owner. consider sales as a learning experience to set up your own shop
- toyg 6y agoGlengarry Glensales, basically...
- ghaff 6y agoI imagine a lot of people here would consider it pretty awful if they would be routinely punished because something happened totally out of their control--like a decision maker at a customer changing jobs tanking an "in the bag" deal. Yet that sort of thing happens all the time in sales. Sales is especially harsh in some environments. I knew someone who ran the business side of a small company. They thought they were really good at sales. But they were really just handling client service, billing, etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through their own relationships. They ended up going on to do "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't pretty.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoMy brother worked in commission-based sales for a while. He said the performance bonus structure was awful. It was basically based on your performance increase, rather than your absolute performance. So the top performer would likely get the lowest bonus because it's hard to improve when you're already at the top. If 100% of your calls led to a sale, you might get a good bonus the first year, but you will have made it impossible to get anything in subsequent years. It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when you first start so you can "get better" every year and get a bigger bonus. What made it worse was that each year, they would "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went down while expectations on sales went up.
- hutzlibu 6y ago" I really hope that that's an isolated case." On a global scale? Sadly no. I rather suspect the tech sector is a very safe space, in that regard. Because of demand and supply. But overall life is cheap on this planet.
- acdha 6y agoSadly, it’s not as rare as it should be. Most of us here have limited experience with jobs where the company doesn’t respect you much and is confident that you can easily be replaced. Unless there’s a union the odds are pretty good that you can find a manager like that at a large organization once you get out of the high-status areas - especially when it’s something like an outsourced labor company where margins are low and replacing people doesn’t have much visible impact on customers. At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.