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My 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, a
by slimsag 6y ago
My 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.
- dunefox 6y agoHeh. Fortunately, I don't work there anymore.
- jtxx 6y agooh that’s fantastic! keeping this in my back pocket
- ballenf 6y agoGreat advice. Another variation on that is just getting them to look something up for you that is at least tangentially related to your work. Anything where they are now helping you changes the power dynamic and will make them super uncomfortable. A good project manager will be confident in their position and in doing whatever they can to help the project and won't mind. But that type of person wouldn't be looking over your shoulder unless invited.
- 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.