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I wasn't recently laid off, but I quit. In retrospect, my manager handled 1:1 meetings extremely poorly. He always asked me to lay out any aspects that I could
by selfmodruntime 4y ago
I wasn't recently laid off, but I quit. In retrospect, my manager handled 1:1 meetings extremely poorly. He always asked me to lay out any aspects that I could improve. I confided in him that I wish I could be more organized, but the amount of work I had made it hard to focus on improvement task rather than problem solving in the code base.
When I quit (due to stress, in a high work load phase of a project), he included my phrases verbatim in my written job reference (these are common in Germany).
He literally wrote that I was unfocused and easily overworked. When I complained, he made sure to let me know that the stated issues were just what I told him in our 1:1 meetings. I can only assume malice, since they were really unhappy about me quitting and they expected the project deadline to be missed because of it.
- patatino 4y agoI hope you fought back on that. That is a personal attack and nothing more.
- Archelaos 4y agoYou should have insisted on a corrected job reference and in the extreme case gone to court. According to German regulations a job reference must comply with the principles of "clarity", "truthfulness", "completeness" and "goodwill".[1] [1] See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitszeugnis#Zeugnisgrunds%C3%A4tze https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitszeugnis#Zeugnisgrunds%C... (in German).
- selfmodruntime 4y ago> You should have insisted on a corrected job reference and in the extreme case gone to court I did. The court couldn't do anything for me, because the company had my own evaluation on paper and used those words verbatim. It's genius really, but also pretty damn petty.
- Femtiono 4y agoGood to know. Tx for sharing
- gardenhedge 4y agoWow, a lesson in not speaking the full truth to our managers. Thanks for sharing.
- mejutoco 4y agoIf they reacted like this when you quit I can only say: congratulations for quitting that job.
- hnfong 4y agoThis sounds like the HR version of "don't talk to the police"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
- NoboruWataya 4y agoThat is insane. In my experience explicitly negative job references are unheard of and I think they may even be illegal (or at least legally risky) - a bad job reference would be something like "I confirm he worked here" without more.