I had a coworker like this. Not only would he not get anything done but at standup he would say clear BS to our manager who seemed to not understand it was BS. The BS was the thing that really got under my skin. Because his BS seemed to pass the test with the manager but was such elementary BS to the other engineers.

Finally one day I flipped out and called him out directly and wrote a long lengthy email to the managers. In my head I thought maybe this is what high performance teams do, like Apple and Microsoft, and I needed to step up.

I lost the job, and I still have regret three years later.

And it was my fault. Getting angry was very dumb.

I don't know what the right move is, but I had to create this account to urge you not to do what I did. I picked that battle and it was a mistake.

Let me add, in his defense, he was nice and didn't get in the way, and I had no idea what was going on in his situation. For all I know he went on to be a star employee (I have no idea). I screwed up.

Both of these things can be valid at the same time. She was certainly technically in the wrong and made some questionable choices (with the huge caveat that it’s possible context we don’t have may change the story entirely), but I still think the company is overbearing to the point of absurdity.

If she slacked off for 50 hours over 6 weeks, that’s like an hour and a half a day (which may not have been contiguous). I can’t think of a job I’ve ever had where I didn’t have an hour of down time a day on average. Even working crappy manual labor jobs I’m sure I dicked around with my coworkers for like an hour a day.

She may be a bit on the high end there, but not so much that I wouldn’t have worked with her to correct it before firing her.

Spot on. Exactly the reason for quitting my last job. Boss(manager) comes and adds his 'suggestion' to every task.Even though, I tried to stick to my way to going about the task. He continued to insist that I should give this view a trail run first. After a week or so, When thing go wrong, I'll go back original method and finish the task.

Later, he will complain about I'm being slow to respond to task. When I point out the unnecessary time-wasted due to his suggestion. Now he will backtrack & put it as 'I was only giving suggestions, it was your baby anyway'. It happened 3 or 4 times & I had enough.

Funny thing - During my last day, I took this issue to CEO. To my surprise, he said, 'Yeah, employee has to take my suggestion, since I'm their boss'!

[to those bosses if you are reading this:] - I don't have any issue with trying out your ideas - but when thing go wrong, take the responsibility for your _stupid_ idea.

This has been a practice of mine for a long time now. A boss of mine once told me “the guy taking notes will never have any sway in the conversation, you’re handicapping yourself”, and I said something like “the guy taking notes actually knows what’s going on, though”. He wasn’t very receptive at first, but it stuck, and he actually began to use me as a reference to know what was going on.

I love talking to people and keeping tabs on what’s up. Teams tend to be awful at it, but it’s no specific person’s fault. Making a point of doing it is like a relatively inexpensive super power. You can help your coworkers a lot, and you rarely end up doing unnecessary work. That’s one of my favourite parts I think; I really can’t stand wasting my or other people’s time.

I think my boss was wrong, too. When you’ve got a good grasp on what’s going on, you’re in a far better position to weigh in after initial conversations. I’d prefer to hear people out and only interject if I see obvious issues with their ideas. Otherwise I’ll just listen.

6 weeks of wasted work is much better than 12 weeks of wasted work.

And how exactly did you know what work to do in the first place?

That hit home for me. I once got called down to HR to find my boss there. I discovered at that moment that she was frustrated with how long it was taking me to do my job. Part of my job is pulling data for mailings out of our database. We have ~1 million constituents, and regularly send mailings with tens of thousands of recipients. She had performed that role before me, and she felt that it could be done much more quickly that I was performing it.

Turns out, I could perform the task as quickly as she expected, but I had totally misunderstood a conversation we had months earlier. Word had gotten to my boss that a person had called in because of a factual error on a piece of mail we had sent them. She came by my desk and asked me about the error, as I had specifically said the file was 99.5% error free. I mentioned that the incorrect information had been put in the database by someone else, and the error rate was about what I had expected. She told me that she wanted 99.9% error free mailings from then on.

Later on, I sent her data for another mailing. She came by my desk and asked if the data was 100% correct. I said I was confident it was 99.9% correct. She said we couldn't have any errors this time, and we needed to make sure that the data was 100% correct. I told her that it was fundamentally impossible to be 100% sure the data was correct. She said that she understood, but she wanted it 99.99% correct, as we couldn't mail constituents information that was wrong. I said it would probably take 10x longer to run the data, but I could do that if she wanted it. She did, so I proceeded to make sure the data was 99.99% correct.

She was absolutely flabbergasted when I brought these conversations up. To her, she thought 100% confidence meant "pretty damn sure" and 99% confidence was somewhere around "It's probably right, maybe." From my perspective, 99.5% correct meant we'd have 5 or fewer bad rows for every 1000 rows in the data.

It was so weird for both of us, because we both thought we had been incredibly clear with the other person. I thought I had been very clear with my point -- I had spoken with her about how long it would take to ensure the data was 99.99% correct several times, because I was concerned about the delay. She had thought she was being emphatic, ad I was just being a pain in the ass. The thing is, that I'm generally not particularly hung up on the difference between literal meaning and figurative meaning, and she generally pretty clear when expressing what she wanted in technical conversations without hyperbole. So she hadn't even considered that I was interpreting her comments literally, and I hadn't considered that she was being hyperbolic.

It was definitely a huge learning experience for both of us. We had both been really stressed for months because we failed to communicate effectively with one another, despite both of us recognizing the same problem and trying to bring it to the other person's attention.

>"As my workload is quite heavy, can you help me understand what I should reprioritize to accommodate this new task?"

I've used this one a lot and it helped quite a bit. Eventually the boss saw it as obstructive to his demands and started saying "it's all top priority". So I just arranged my priorities as I saw fit based on what I observed his own priorities to be, and it mostly worked out fine. When he'd ask me about all the other tasks he'd assigned, after I reported on what I'd accomplished at the weekly meeting, I'd say "I haven't had time to work on that". It's what he always said to everyone, that he was "so strapped for time, had so many meetings on his schedule" so how could he not accept it? Or he'd say "this other stuff is important, you need to work on it", I'd say "ok, I'll put off THE IMPORTANT THING for a day to do that", and he'd back off. In essence there is only so much time, and when you get to the details of scheduling what you are going to work on, it becomes extremely obvious how long things take to do. Maybe someone more brilliant could do it faster than you, but it will take a year to bring them in and get them up to speed, and they will cost more. If your boss refuses to recognize that and demands more, just do what you can, and reserve some inviolable time for yourself. It's basically a management failure and has nothing to do with you, let them fail. You know your value, you are accomplishing the most important of the work.

Oh, and when the boss stops wanting to prioritize, start looking for a better place to work.

Tell me about it. On one of my previous jobs I would constantly speak out about what we were doing would cause people to lose hundreds of thousands of USD, and every time I was laughed out of the meeting for "overthinking" things (I guess that's what wanting to do things right is called these days). When one of our customers lost US$200k and nobody had any idea why or how or when I knew that company would be the death of me, and coincidentally I was on the same meeting I planned to use to quit my job.

If anything it taught me that working in finance is not for me :p

You obviously thought about this and got it into account. But being a bit smarter ape that we are all, you decided on what way of going about this is best for you. As a rational ape you should at least understand this much.

The thing is, we are all mature apes and we understand possible problems and we can decide for ourselves if the risk is worth it in a specific situation we're in at one time or another. And we do so, and we have every right to do so, and you trying to take it away from us is very apish and understandable, but unacceptable behaviour.

When a colleague asks me about my salary I think about what to tell him for myself. I consider how well I know him, how long we've been working together, how likely he is to be underpaid, how likely he is to get angry because of it and so on and on. I then decide to either tell him or not, and also on how specific my answer should be, and so on.

Sorry, but I'll trust my own judgement over your arbitrary decision you made without taking into account any of those situation specific things, and - not to forget - for your benefit.

An obvious sign that you would be a shit employer to work for. OP is probably exaggerating here (at least I hope so), but if you were to fire someone over this without educating them in the ways of how your mind works to create better efficacy between you two, then you don't deserve employees.

Context...means...everything. People make the most basic of mistakes all the time. Teach them the preferred outcome, and move on. Making a fuss over it shows your lack of maturity and ability to lead anyone.

Reminds me of kids who are in the "in" making of kids who aren't. "What??? You've never seen Star Wars??? GUYS! Timmy's never seen Star Wars! I bet he doesn't even know who Obi Wan is. What an idiot..."

smh...

I'm not going to say you should never work extra hours but 9 times out of 10 this is a HUGE red flag. The company is responsible for managing timelines and setting priorities for what you should work on. I have occasionally put in a few extra hours (I'm talking <10 in a week) in a crunch period but never for more than 1 week in a row. Anything after 1 week starts to become the norm and that's not what I agreed to when I joined. Salarried does not mean they own you.

Weekends are 100% out of the question except for production emergencies (and if there is an emergency every weekend then no, there's not, don't be tricked into that BS). The business can decide to move the deadline or cut out some of the features but they can't decide to just get more hours from you for free (or rather they can but don't put up with that shit, find a better job).

I have a friend who was in this situation and he hadn't talked about it with anyone until he was nearly at his breaking point. He was telling us (we had met up for drinks) that he was working till 8-9pm if not later almost every day, every week and still feeling like he wasn't getting enough done. He was having regular breakdowns and crying at his desk. Sometimes you are in so deep you don't realize how absurd the requests from your company are and they were guilting him hard about it. This is someone I greatly respect and I would have never expected him to allow himself to be treated this way. We set him straight and told him to set boundaries, only work till 5pm, tell his boss to set the priority but he wouldn't be working overtime. He was in a contracting situation so his actual boss wasn't really involved in what the client was asking him to do but his boss was not a good boss and didn't help him out at all (meaningless platitudes were all he gave, he should have stepped in and set boundaries with the client). He set the boundaries, pulled himself back from the brink of despair, and started looking for a new job. He found one and he is much happier now.

Companies will take (and sometimes guilt you into) every hour they can get from you and rarely tell you to work less. Set boundaries and if they balk then start looking (though it sounds like you should start looking immediately no matter what).

One job I had, my manager decided early on that I was a complete idiot and insubordinate. Freely asking any "dumb" question that came to my mind was a no-no, and even more so was asking other people to verify what my manager told me - it was seen as undermining their authority.

A later job, my manager formed the opinion that I was really smart in the beginning, and so when I fail to understand something, they blame themselves for not being able to explain. Sometimes I feel bad they are so self-critical.

"Fish can't teach you about water"

Even if people are not consciously intending it, though, being bad at knowledge transfer is in everybody's self interest. Perfect communication would facilitate workers being interchangeable cogs.

This hits me hard now. I was considering whether I should hit the gas at work trying to meet some completely unrealistic metrics, only to be in a conference call where some guy from another team basically did the same (missing a lot of events with his family), only to get a bunch of those stupid animated emoji things in Teams as his only compensation (I asked him offline if he got any bonus from it).

I'm leaving work early to hit the ski slopes tomorrow. Life is too short to be rewarded by digital clapping hands and hearts.

Given that you felt the need to say that, you might want to reconsider whether your powers of self-diagnosis are as accurate as you previously thought.

> I just don't have the kind of bullshit budget required...

> ...if I'm going to have to start dropping things on the floor...

...then you've already failed. The goal is to never get to that point in the first place. Perhaps if you spent some of your "bullshit budget" sooner, it wouldn't have even occurred to you to make plans for throwing a tantrum.

Civility is incredibly cheap and has a multiplier effect on most other human resource metrics—such as productivity, enthusiasm and loyalty.

Take a management class or three, it'll save you a lot of money.

Seriously. If that needs to figure into the evaluation of the service, something is deeply broken in the culture of your company. Not because employees goof off - it happens, and only some amount of that is under your control. But because you assume that given any chance, people would goof off more.

That's far from normal. It usually happens if employees feel mistreated, or if they're not given a fair share of the value they create. Possibly if they're already halfway to leaving.

Man, this. I was dealing with the same shit and just did what you did.

I stopped to show what I was doing in a low level, because he is a super technical guy and would try to find issues in things that don't matter and/or were not high priority.

And then I started to show and discuss only what matters. My mental health had a 100% improvement.

One of my very worst bosses had this quality. Perversely, it was about the only thing I admired about him.

The guy could walk into a meeting of NASA flight engineers and engage in conversation without uttering a single fact that would betray his total lack of any knowledge/qualifications.

n.b. He was fired not long after I left the company.

In my case, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be better than the ones I've been under (maybe I would be better than one or two, but not the majority). I'm also more likely to get fired as a manager, due to a tendency to say what I think.

If you're a better manager than the managers you've been under, you may be of more value to your company as a manager (even if you hate it). I may be selling myself short, but my value as a manager could be less than zero...

I've had this feedback too and I feel like it is likely not true. Really what it is is that your managers aren't paying much attention to your output and have sort of written you off for promotions, raises, etc.

This was feedback I got a couple of months after I had been working my ass off trying to impress management and then a couple of weeks before getting fired. C'est la vie.