I had an employee review with my manager this week, at my request. She told me she wasn’t comfortable uptraining me right now even though they badly need the help in the position I asked to be crosstrained for, because they’d rather hire someone just for the role; but we could talk about it again in two months. After a little digging, I found that (A) they can’t afford to lose me from my lower-paid role and (2) they know I’m looking for another job and don’t want to train me until I demonstrate I’m planning to stay.
My response is that (A) well you’re definitely gonna lose me now and (2) I’m definitely no longer willing to stay.
If they communicated better, and offered the training/position/salary increase as incentive to stay, that would (imo) be a better course of action. This just feels rude and incompetent
Well I mean I am awful with people, but this problem even I could solve. They had about 3 possible holes to fit the peg through, but no, they just threw the toybox out of the window.
MAYBE OP is just awful at their job. But if they wanted to keep him where he was, that makes little sense.
Additional info: I typically work the least desirable shifts because of family obligations. Me leaving this position or even dropping to part time would leave a hole in the schedule, and she’s very lazy when it comes to the schedule. I’m offering to take the same shift in a different role.
Somewhat related, advice about being irreplaceable is bad for this exact reason. The more replaceable you are, the easier to promote you and take longer vacations. Sure you might be able to get fired more easily, but most managers won’t put forth the effort.
Not trying to be an asshole, but this is privilege in action. For low paying jobs, managers will fire you at the drop of a hat. Jobs that pay better are more secure.
I asked questions during the review. My.manager was evasive but it wasn’t hard to put together. In the restaurant industry, everyone is hiring right now as they expand for patio season. That won’t be the case as much in two months and we both know it; if I’m going to leave it’ll likely be in the next two weeks.
I remember doing self assessments before reviews, I just gave myself 5s because they were going to change everything to 3.5 anyhow unless you invented cold fusion and sucked everyone’s dick
Well, Mr Chalupapocalypse, your breakthrough on cold fusion is really profitable for the company, but the VP of marketing was disappointed you didn’t cup his balls during last week’s blowjob session, so…best we can do is a 3.9
Similar situation on my end awhile back. Location had begun losing people. I was in a bottom rung management position, more title than authority, and the team knew it. However, I was also the only manager willing to be consistently on later shifts. Due to pretty intense compartmentalization issues were often isolated and fixed by managers within each department. Except later on at night I was alone with a smaller team. This presented a bit of a situation:
If a problem came up I was expected to text or call a manager. As you can imagine, they did not often reply or pick up.
Many problems require rather immediate solutions.
I wasn’t being trained to receive the skills necessary to deal with many situations so I began enabling key members of the evening team and standing in front of them if mistakes were made, acting as a wall.
Due to all of this, and a lot of work being handled by a smaller team, (and some issues going consistently ignored by senior management) we saw several people leave. In the middle of all this I was isolated and made out to be the reason for some systemic issues, told I could no longer take the initiative to help, and the team caught wind.
Eventually I began looking for other jobs. When I let my bosses know boy were they surprised. By the time I left one manager had claimed to have started having anxiety attacks during their shift, the whole unreachable during situations thing became a problem for upper, and well…long story short shit and fan began to meet.
If a problem came up I was expected to text or call a manager. As you can imagine, they did not often reply or pick up.
Many problems require rather immediate solutions.
These are not your problems. If management has enacted a procedure that doesn’t work, don’t change it or you will be blamed for any failure.
Send a few emails to document your opinion that there are problems. Otherwise, do exactly what was recommended. You want the policy to fail. Don’t try to improve it without management support.
I learned this in my previous job. We were a city-owned theater, which came with all of the trappings of government bureaucracy. But we were also open after hours, and did a lot of technical work for our shows. The city’s IT would log off on Friday at 5pm, and not log back in again until 8am on Monday. We were one of the few departments that was open over the weekend and after hours, (often until 1 or 2am when loading shows out.)
So naturally, we butted heads with IT a lot. Because we didn’t have access to change things we often needed to change. Whenever we needed to urgently troubleshoot something before a show started, our hands were almost always tied by IT. And IT’s given solution was always the same. Submit a ticket, and we’ll get to it when we get to it. But when you have 2000 people waiting on a show to start at 7pm on a Saturday, you can’t wait for IT to get back into the office on Monday.
Historically, the solution was to use our own gear. Every technician had their own personal laptop, so they could use that instead of the city laptop. But this caused issues of its own, because we couldn’t connect to any of the city-controlled gear as the city network was MAC filtered, (and IT obviously wasn’t going to allow our personal devices to connect to their network.) We worked with what we had, worked around problems we couldn’t fix, and it was a lot of extra stress for no extra benefit; The higher-ups didn’t see a problem because the shows were never visibly impacted. And IT didn’t see a problem, because the higher-ups weren’t complaining.
Eventually, we just started letting it burn. Shows suddenly started 15 to 30 minutes late, (which was unheard of in a building where even 2 minutes late was considered unacceptable.) Clients didn’t get equipment they had paid for, because it was broken on Friday evening and we couldn’t troubleshoot it over the weekend. Projectors didn’t have video feeds, because techs stopped using their personal laptops for shows. Et cetera, et cetera. Instead, the techs simply started noting every time they wanted to fix something but couldn’t because their hands were tied.
And wouldn’t you know it, the system got fixed. IT was suddenly required to keep someone on call for weekend tickets. Because when people stop propping up the broken system, all of the flaws get discovered and heads roll until shit gets fixed.
“Jill, I’m afraid we have a problem. Your quality of work is very high, as always. But you don’t look enough like your job isn’t soul crushing. I’m not saying you look like you’re bored out of your mind or that I think working here is depriving you of your will to live. I’m just saying that there are times when you’re not smiling like a completely unhinged person and that makes me question whether you really want to be here.”
Reminds me of my art professor’s story about getting her doctorate, in which a bunch of tenured professors came together to review her work to give her the degree. One professor disagreed with giving her doctorate because apparently she didn’t look like she had a tough time getting it. That sent my art professor over the edge because she’d worked so hard and suffered so much for it so she started crying in front of the professors and told them she wasn’t going to bother getting her doctorate anymore and that she was quitting right there and then. The other tenured professors were quick to convince the other to change their mind and eventually gave the degree, but my art professor still remembers how shitty it was to decide something so important to her on the basis that she suffered much less than her peers in producing something good or better work.
The article defines working one’s contract hours as a form of quitting, a contortion of fact that I have struggled to grasp since laying eyes on it.
It is asserted that employees are obliged to put in extra hours, do additional work and recalibrate their work-life balance for the “benefits” of social capital, “wellbeing” and career success.
I have a novel proposal. Pay employees in actual capital for the additional time they are expected to work.
Dispense with the relaxation classes on their lunch breaks and the sweet treats and the tokenistic attitude of management to the labour that drives their business.
Instead, resource staff sufficiently to complete work within business hours, respect the rights of staff to a fulfilling life not defined by their day jobs, and stop using gaslighting terms like “quiet quitting” for fulfilling the terms of their contract of employment.
This may seem radical to those managers who have been around the block, but KPIs (key performance indicators) don’t spend time with my loved ones nor do they put food on the table. – Yours, etc,
That letter is way too polite for the “go fuck yourselves” that I had in mind… I honestly think we should start actually spitting in the faces of managers of that kind that we happen to know in private life, be it family or neighbors, just show them disdain and disgust coming from people whom they have no power over.
This has got to be made by the same type of shitheads who churn out clickbait excrement every five minutes, in a different section of the clickbait excrement factory, opposite side of where they churn out “Physicist Brian Cox’s terrifying reveal - CERN at Switzerland unlocked demon forces, world’s end by 2025”.
Or you’re being trolled and got those big red shiny buttons pushed.
Unionize people. I joined a union and there’s no “we’re a team” bullshit or the boss going “do me a favor”. 4pm hits, you drop what you’re doing and go home. You get paid for your job, and the union fees are nothing considering the pay is way higher for union workers in my field.
Depends on the Union, sadly. My wife was a Union rep, she had a grievence, the higher up union leaders and the employer met ahead of her scheduled meeting and screwed her over in the grievance meeting. I’m not sure if she was more mad at losing the grievance, or having to pay dues to be screwed by the union.
This happens at my job too. Overall the benefits of my union far outweigh how shit they are and the union dues. I’d rather have a crappy union than none at all.
I know my company would screw me over much worse than my union and company combined if there was no union.
I’ve found having a spine is much more beneficial than remaining at a job a person hates and expected some union rep to do the looking out for yourself on your behalf.
Being in a union is as much about sticking up for your fellow workers as is it is about “looking after No1”.
Sure, if you don’t like your job you could just quit and move on, but that’s not always a choice. You could organise as a workforce that fights to make work better not just for yourself and your colleagues, but for your fellow countrymen and your children’s generation too.
My unionized company changed our mandated hours from 45 hours a week to 50 hours a week like 2 weeks after I joined it was one of the shittiest jobs I ever had. Pay was good but only because I was forced to sit there for 10 hours a day lol
It’s fine though I quit it and got a normal non union job that’s incredible. Better starting pay better benefits more time off no forced OT while I can work as much OT I want. Gravy job so glad I quit.
I don’t think these problems should be dismissed out of hand. There is guidance out there on how to take back a shitty union.
The UAW has long been neutered with poor leadership, and sometimes leadership that gets thrown in jail for good reasons. They’ve recently rebuilt and are making huge gains.
I’m in the UAW, we used to not be able to vote on leadership. Now we can, and with a guy like Shawn Fain in the big chair I feel like we’ve already come a long way. I voted for him and I’ll do it again.
One of the very few interviews in my life that I ended early was the one where in the third hour of it, they usually mentioned that the (competitive) salary was based on a 45 hour work week, with “occasional” mandatory overtime as the needs of the company dictated.
Knowing from earlier that they were very short at the position I was interviewing for, I asked for a more specific answer on what I could expect as “occasional” and the response was, “Well the work for your position has been backlogged since the previous employee quit, so for the first 3 to 6 months you can expect to work 50-60 hours each week, every week. After that, it will probably only be two weeks a month. But you can work those extra hours on the weekends too, so it’s not as bad as it sounds!”
I was already done but I did some quick mental math and realized that dividing even their higher salary by that many more hours, not only was it insanely more work but was actually like a 15% pay cut, in terms of hourly rate, than the job I currently had.
I explained this to the guy and asked how much wiggle room there was on salary and he basically said something to the effect of, “Maybe in a few years you can negotiate salary, but coming in you’re really in no position to argue for more pay.”
So I thanked him for his time and told him the interview was over.
Irish Times is known for their clickbait articles. Not too long ago, an article that was written just to generate outrage (fake tan is cultural appropriation), was found to be generated by AI, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was also the case. My advice is to ignore anything Irish Times is writing. (I’ve been living in Ireland for well over a decade, and I learned to regard IT as the low end of the already poor media landscape here.)
I was just going to say, of all places, this gets published by an Irish news outlet? Hah! It has been my experience moving there that in workplaces in Ireland is you go there, do your job and go home. No bullshit, the workplace is not a family, your colleagues are not your friends. In and out. Very efficient while on the clock, couldn’t give a fuck immediately after.
As organized labor gains more steam, this is the kind of bullshit that’s going to be thrust in front of our eyes on the “news” more, and more, and more.
is there a stat somewhere that agrees with this? please say yes and share a link; i would like to believe this is true, but evidence suggests that a union’s biggest hurdle is still convincing white people that non-white people need to be in their union too.
I think there’s also the problem of certain sectors of work, like tech or retail, which should be unionized but aren’t. Either because a lack of a history of unionization or because companies can too easily close a location and open another one across the street.
Overall, it shows union rates being mostly a wash in 2023, but that’s due to a large increase in total jobs that year; raw number of members went up, rate slightly declined. Black workers made up almost the entire grid increase.
The point that maybe relates most to what OP was saying:
These statistics don’t capture the number of workers who want to join unions. Evidence suggests that in 2023, more than 60 million workers wanted to join a union but couldn’t do so.
This reply came more from the big wins Labor has experienced the last two years, such as the auto, rail, and writers’ strikes being resolved, not individual stats.
I love the desperate calls. But not instantly, you get them like a week later, every single time. Sometimes they schedule a super important meeting where they HAVE TO talk to you and just cancel it a day or two before it because they realize it’s futile.
You are right, I assummed it was like the onion, but appears the irishtimes business section plays to the businesses it attracts ( of shitty companies avoiding taxes in their own country)
Because people cannot like you and you still feel obligated to earn your paycheck and you have honor. Unlike the dip shits you are quitting from because they are drunken assholes that can’t see past their whiney little emergencies.
Yeah I always thought ‘quiet quitters’ referred to people checking out of their jobs emotionally and doing just barely enough to not get fired, so actually underperforming, not because they couldn’t do better but because they stopped caring at some point. In that sense they have already quit, quietly. But now it seems that anyone who doesn’t go above and beyond can be a ‘quiet quitter’? Doesn’t make much sense to me.
They’re just toeing the line for their corporate masters. Capitalists want 150% effort for 100% pay since the profit margin on that extra 50% alone is huge.
I’ve known people who are the best workers on their team, but put in like 40% effort. Does that count as quiet quitting? IDK.
To be clear, I’m not excusing the article, which is a bad joke. That being said, there are plenty of people out there that are really good at their jobs, but don’t put in full effort. I don’t have a problem with these people at all (really who does 100% effort all of the time?).
Nah, quit quitting is just the new term for it. Boomers called it working to the letter of your contract. Quit quitting isn’t doing less than your job duties. It’s simply refusing to bend over backwards and give your employer all of your free time. You don’t take on extra responsibility. You don’t come in early or stay late. You come in on time, do your exact job duties as written, then you go home.
But this terrifies employers, who have historically relied on manipulation and coercion to get employees to work beyond the scope of what they were hired for. So they’ve started calling it “quit quitting” in an effort to rebrand it as something negative.
They don’t just want your work output; they want your soul.
They want the old days where people were 100% believers in their jobs at places like WeWork, Uber, Tesla, and Facebook…before the general public became disillusioned with tech companies specifically and companies in general more broadly. They want “evangelists” and the belief of the mid-Obama years back…
The only problem is that many have looked at things over the last ten years and found that the euphoric promises made by the management of companies were lies.
It’s companies gaslighting us that we are either looking for new roles, or we are working hard to make more money/ask for a raise or else we’ll find a new role.
Managers see both these things as “not being part of the fam”, but really they just want to take more and give less while playing the victim.
When “line go up” mentality gets applied to your workforce. God forbid they keep working to the same standard they always have, must be moar! Always moar!
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