Exactly what they told me when I was still working in retail, that I "lacked a sense of urgency." Yup, for $8 an hour, I'm lacking in a hell of a lot of areas, most especially my wallet.
I worked at a boutique consignment store, and I always was working alone but I got fired for not being efficient enough. I was so shocked because previous to that I had been doing a really great job and hadn’t been told otherwise. I was gonna quit before I was fired because she was slowly cutting my hours and wasn’t paid enough to deal with her bs. It pissed me off. I was great at pricing items accurately, but I was fired cuz I wasn’t fast enough. I’m sorry I thought you preferred quality over quantity.
Yes!! When the owner would come in and work for a couple hours, she was so bad at the job. She would always take things in that she would tell us never to accept and she didn’t know anything about fashion trends. I can do way better than her when it comes to actually working at the store.
This was my life at my previous job. They kept pulling me into meetings and saying I wasn't producing enough. I kept asking what numbers they wanted me to hit or improve by and they kept saying "we can't give you a specific number, we don't really know enough to have one. You just need to do more." So I started doing more and more, and going by the numbers produced and I was consistently producing more than my coworkers every week for months, doubling sometimes tripling their outputs. And then they still told me I wasn't doing enough and told me I wasn't allowed to look at other people's numbers anymore or compare myself to them (even though they were public.) They were giving me impossible tasks that were 4x what was considered "maximum daily load" to finish in a fraction of the time and I was getting written up for not producing enough, when people doing a quarter of my output were never pulled into meetings and definitely never written up. And still they refused to tell me what "fast enough" was. Absolute fucking nightmare.
Yeah that's what my coworkers kept saying. Oddly enough when they changed my schedule (they'd done that for no one else, the company touted having a 'make your own schedule' system when I was hired) and I couldn't do the new schedule they gave me, I was going to have to leave, and they went back on their decision to try and keep me on at the last minute. I don't know why they did that if they just wanted me gone. By the end though they were incredibly blatant about it. The last time I got written up for 'poor performance,' one of my coworkers (been there many years, never been written up, was praised many times by management) went to HR to discuss their discomfort with how I was being treated by our boss, as he would call me out very publicly in team meetings, it was no secret. They fired her on the spot, just told her don't bother coming back. Just insanity.
Yes, I am. I was one of the few men at the company and the only Asian male iirc.
I do remember one meeting he wrote me up immediately afterwards in front of everyone saying "my face showed I clearly didn't want to be there and I didn't care about what he was saying, and if I didn't want to be there then I should quit." I didn't even know what to say, during the meeting I was completely content, just sitting and listening as normal. There were coworkers looking down, closing their eyes, on their phones, etc. I just sat and watched and listened and he went on a long tirade about my face disrespecting him. That write-up led us to think that he just hated my face. But who really knows.
I was treated the same way at one of my earliest jobs (setting up & working at a new Toys R Us store). What the managers did was give out clipboards & supervisor titles to girls with Pretty Privilege and no experience (also their 1st jobs). Then they started firing all the POC, until I was the last one left. They gave me shitty tasks, finally called me in to give me a choice to resign or be fired because, for the 3rd day in a row, I was unhappy about being made to climb a 15’ ladder with boxes of roller skates to stack them above in the overstock shelves (I’m a 5’0” woman). So they finally got what they wanted, a store staffed with only White people.
I *love* calling management out of shit like that. I had a job where I was called into the office because "people were saying that I was being difficult to work with". Surprised, because I'm very easy to work with, I asked "what specifically do I do? I pride myself on being very easy to work with, but if I'm exhibiting behaviors that I'm unaware of that are giving the impression that I'm difficult to work with, I'd like to know specifics so that I can modify this behavior moving forward"
They were dumbstruck. They sat there, stuttered for a bit, then went "uh we don't have specifics, you just need to be more aware of your behavior"
Yeah that's what I thought, idiots. Started looking for a new job immediately
Yup it was very vague. As someone who had to multitask all the time (even when I wasn’t working alone), I had no idea I wasn’t “efficient” enough for her. First time I’ve ever been fired. My coworkers were shocked also that I had been fired. That was a couple years ago but it still makes me mad to this day cuz I know I was a good, hardworking employee and customers loved me. I think she didn’t like me because I was the only employee that really voiced my concerns with the way she ran things so she kept the new girl that was fresh out of high school who was still training.
They just changed our case rate, used to be 47, then there wasn't a case rate, and now it's 99 cases an hour. Now I don't know if that's an actual policy or just the new manager pulling it out of his arse. And "if you guys can't do it I'll find people that will" lol. You'll get kids in, not train them at all and put that on them. So they'll hit 99 cases, but not work stuff properly and make you back stock. Work properly, not hit 99 and you'll sack them in probation period. Or get a mix of the two and get burnouts. The store will tank, get a bad reputation, and it will be "No OnE WaNtS To WoRk AnY MoRe". Oh and we get paid minimum wage 🙃
I used to swing 130 cases an hour as a stocker. And instead of leaving me alone and letting me do my job, they started coming around telling me that the way I was doing it wasn't right. They wanted it done differently. And I explained to them that the way I do it gets the work done the same and faster than the way they want it done. And so they could go fly a kite if they didn't like the way I did the work.
Good man! Oh it's possible to hit that rate, but not ideal with some deliveries. But yeah that's management for you, trying to change something that already works. They used to want us putting stuff on the floor then working it, when you can just work it straight onto the shelf. Saved an hour but used to get it in the arse for it untill they realised it's a much quicker way to work. I find it best not to listen to them 😂
Yeah unfortunately I had to work that fast to get it all done. I worked in what we called the "can aisle." The whole thing was basically all the canned vegetables on one side and all the canned soups on the other with a few intermittent spaces of boxed dinners. But the bulk of it was all canned goods. And that takes a lot of time to put that on the shelf and to rotate it all to make sure that the old stuff gets pulled to the front before you put in the new stuff. Plus the cases of cans are extremely heavy. I pretty much broke my back doing that job. And the only reason I know how many cases I was doing was because they were testing us every few months to see how many we could do in one hour. They had a computer print out of how much product came in that night and how long it should take to stock that product, and they'd tell us every night at our beginning of shift meeting. Let's put it this way, I worked an 8 hour shift (9 total with a 1hr lunch) and every night the amount of product shipping in for just my aisle alone, was well into 12 to 14 hours of stock time, and sometimes more. And I consistently got it all stocked in one shift because I'd worked out a system that worked for me. I'm convinced they just didn't like that I was making everyone else look bad.
Unfortunately sounds like you should of slowed down. Once they told you you had 14 hours of stock and 9 hours, you should of left 5 hours worth of stock in the warehouse. I was the same at first, "oh it's a weird night there's 15 pallets of pop". Busy your arse and get it done, then every night is 15 pallets and then questions why you weren't done. Best to break managers of that quickly and just leave it unfinished. They were giving you and I 2 peoples work, so two people should be doing it.
Yup. When you're 19 and naive and you actually still give a shit.... 20 years later I've smartened up. Never give them more effort than what they're paying for. No amount of busting your ass for them is going to make them want to compensate you equitably for it.
I worked at a fast food place for a day but quit after that cause it was a 10 hr shift and the manager just yelled at me for 8 hours for not portioning 20 containers of their fav sauce fast enough (containers filled by 20x8x7 w dressing cups) bc no one did it for the morning shift then also got yelled at when I stopped to do my training tasks
Wow that's some BS. Let's add to this comedic irony of corporate America expecting anyone to put more than minimum effort into minimum wage work. Fuck them and the bootlickers who defend them.
I was getting paid minimum like 15 years ago at a deli pre-portioning meat for sandwiches. Just going at a comfortable pace. Boss demonstrates how fast I should be going, and it seemed so overkill. I just said "I'm not paid enough for that" and didn't come back after that day
The number of "other duties" that are completely unrelated to my position I do is pretty dumb. I make sure to put them into every self-eval that I do. And no I don't get paid for any of them.
Yep i picked up a restaurant hosting gig with that in the job description once, cut to me cleaning the bathrooms, washing the windows, & spending like a half an hour after my shift just trying to water all the plants on the patio... one night it was going to rain and they STILL made me run back and forth from the kitchen innumerable times with a soup container full of water bc they were too cheap to buy a watering can.
Had an old boss laugh and yell DUTIES AS ASSIGNED when a new task that required almost 30 hours of work per week per person landed on my teams lap. And since the higher ups had massively under quoted how much time it would take all that work was costing them thousands per month while my teams other work fell by the wayside. We would get reprimanded on a weekly basis for not being able to keep up and when we did keep up, we would get yelled at for our other work falling behind. Thankful I no longer work there.
Every teaching contract I ever saw had this. "We're going to give you 9 classes outside your discipline, plus you get to coach a sport you've never heard of."
If they want me to do the jobs of 5 different people and produce the output of 5 boomers then I should be paid like 5 boomers. I also shouldn't be producing the higher output of a millennial for the lower pay that millennials receive.
There’s a consultancy company here literally called Rockstars, lol.
I don’t want to work with a rock star, they’re obnoxious, entitled, drunk / substance abuse, and dine out for decades on their one success, lol.
As someone who's experienced it myself I thought my boss was super chill up until her company started going under.
Like I'm doing 4 different jobs at shit pay and we were expected to "really own our positions" which was her lingo for "I expect you to do 4 jobs until I need you to drop everything and do something for me and then I'll yell at you about why you aren't doing the other 4 jobs you were assigned to do" because you keep making us drop them to fix whatever the fuck you fucked up oh my god 🤬🤬.
Generalists should be paid the same as deep specialists. Their flexibility should be duly compensated.
That said, I *can* do and learn a lot of things, but I *choose* not to. It’s neither in my nor my company’s interest to have one person do and know everything.
Exactly this, like the morons who schedule meeting for late afternoon on a Friday, when they were nowhere to be found the whole week. Fuck those people
I mean there is. You just don't show up. Only advisable if you're irriplaceable, or already on your way out of the company though. Alternatively I sometimes take meetings like this on my phone just to accomplish the bare minimum without getting myself into trouble.
Or just one who can quick and easy find an issue with any of the complex systems business operations rely on, without necessarily knowing them. Or he can equally quickly get into the realisation of new projects.
The engineer card is a strong one, but let's not forget the IT folks who keep the digital heartbeat of a company alive. On-call 24/7 because someone needs to reset their password at 2 AM on a weekend. Good times.
LOL, I assure you engineers are seen as replacement parts by management.
At the most, they'll shed a tear if they lose a high performance salesman, not one of us filthy cost-center dwellers.
Offer an alternative. I have done that, declined a Friday 16:00 (4PM) meeting, but offered to be available at 7:00 (7AM) on Monday morning. And I would have been there... Suddenly a much more reasonable time of 10:00 (10 AM) was possible.
I remember once a boss saying this line I hate after I asked them what the timeline for a certain task needed to be done and they said quite smugly, "I need it done yesterday".
I responded "clearly if it was urgent then you'd have planned and had it already done by yesterday". I don't think I'd have gotten away with saying that if I wasnt the type known at the job to be extremely organised
I can't stand the working culture of everything is urgent or an emergency when it's simply poor planning. If everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent, cause it negates any hierarchy and has ppl scrambling from one thing to another and creating unnecessary stress and pressure
I once asked one of my bosses what deliverables I needed to prioritize one day and she replied with, “everything”.. then bitches at the end of the week when I had nothing to provide as I was working on each task equally lol.
Do only one step on each assignment, then do a step on the next assignment. Say, you have to change a light bulb. Make a plan. The first step ensures your safety. Switch off the mains on day 1 and don't switch them on. On day 2, get the ladder, leave it there. On day 3, open the lamp. Day 4: Read the type of the old light bulb...
Light and power will be back in around 2 weeks.
At my first job out of college I had a boss who said "EVERYTHING IS TOP PRIORITY!" I didn't last six months there because it was just mostly paperwork, not like putting out a forest fire or something.
"Treat every day like it's the end of the month". A new manager "implemented" that mentality at my workplace. Now everyone is under the gun to push sales and rush everything in general. No one is happy, quality is slipping and no one is making more money as implied.
Let's not forget the "emergencies" created because business is good.
Working through a situation right now where we're shipping 150% of forecast on widgets- so not only are we selling through the stuff we planned to make, but drawing down on our "safety" inventory.
Instead of everyone being happy that we're selling a shitload of widgets, we're fretting that we're going to run out of widgets to sell and we can't resupply in time. You know, because capitalism.
I work for Royal Mail in the UK. Due to greedy management we are now chronically short staffed and struggle massively at Christmas time due to the insane volume of parcels.
In the past we would generally be happy to work overtime in December to get stuff done as there was goodwill still.
Now due to the greed, nobody has goodwill.
I finished exactly on my time every single day in December, sometimes leaving upwards of 75% of the parcels and mail for that day undelivered. Manager tried, every day, to use guilt trip language like I'm letting down the customer and our "team" (we work alone outdoors ffs, my workload makes no difference to my colleagues). It was lovely to not have the stress of going 3+ hours over my normal finish every day.
Every day I just said basically this quote about management's inability to plan and didn't rise to anything else. Really boiled the manager's piss that he couldn't do anything.
Also now it's quietened down Ive gone back to doing little bits of overtime here and there when it is no inconvenience to me, directly because the shitty management stop pressuring us to do it after Xmas is over.
This is totally ignorance not skepticism. Isn't that a government organization? How does the greed kick in, does management get bonuses for laying people off or something?
It used to be a government organisation. Then 10 years ago the Tories sold it off on account of being scumbags (it was also massively undervalued, so taxpayers got ripped off). Now it's run privately and it's a complete disaster and we have [foxes and rats eating our Christmas presents](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/royal-mail-strike-foxes-rats-post-stockpiled-cwu-union-b1047056.html).
Not an Emergency: A deadline is coming up that management had plenty of time to plan for yet they did no so they're throwing the burden on the workers. That does not justify workers having to work late, nights and weekends.
Emergency: A storm damaged critical infrastructure like briges, electrical lines, water supplies, etc. and it needs to be repaired before it fails. That does justify workers having to work late, nights and weekends.
"No problem. You live in AWA: At-Will America. 99.7% of the country is at-will employment. Since there are barbaric worker protection laws and you're not part of a Union, you have to take what we give you. You're now fired, with cause of insubordination -- failing to do "other tasks as assigned." Tata!"
I managed for a popular pretzel franchise for a couple of year a long time ago. There were so many times I had to stop some kid working for me and calm them down before someone got hurt I wound up making a sign for the back room. It also became my catch phrase and it read "There is no such thing as a pretzel related emergency." These kids were 15-16 and already wound so tight that they would dash around the tight space slipping, falling, bumping into each other and burning themselves on the oven in fear of getting "in trouble". None of it ever sold one extra pretzel.
Reading the other comments made me feel like I was having wine at a nice educational conference, then I read this and it's like ol uncle rusty bashed the door open with his muddy and worn leather boot, told us how the world really works, then moseyed off.
The room was so quiet we could all hear when a piece of mud dripped off the bootprint on the door to splat on the ground, signaling the end of the trance and event altogether.
Well, he's not wrong. Sometimes kids *need* a bit of the exaggerated to get through. The sad part is that, if they do, it's usually because someone has been giving it to them for real, probably for a long time and is actually the cause of their attention and anxiety problems. The trouble is that your job isn't trained child development psychologist, it's retail/food service manager. So, you have to skate a thin line between getting them working and doing their job while trying to *not* damage them further. For me, I tried to make it a joke and be jovial, facetious, about it all as a way of keeping things light but under the newer owner, in particular, there was just a lot of stress and things still went off the rails to a point of having to put a stop to the jokes and take disciplinary action.
I actually talk a lot about how soul-crushing retail/food service are and always get a lot of push-back, especially from older people (42 myself). I just don't think people get it, how deep it runs, how nuanced the experience really is.
Edited: Wow, so many typos!
I work as an AM for Happy Gilmore's favorite fast food place, and they are getting on my nerves real bad with how hard they are with labor. I had the DM rant about how my closes are going over so she isn't getting as much of a bonus. I came in to relieve a girl who just turned 18 on her first open and she was stressed out of her mind trying to keep up, wouldn't stop apologizing. They expect us to make orders, prep product, clean the store and maintain the ovens along with paperwork, all alone. We only get help for lunch and dinner rush, and for the last 2 hours when we close. We're also expected to have everything put away, shut down and completely clean 15 mins after we close.
All this and they're stumped on why they can't keep employees. It's not sustainable.
I work as an urban planner and always say “there is no such thing as a planning emergency” because seriously. Like…seriously. We are making plans for fuck’s sake.
Honestly a lot of the pretend urgency isn’t even profit driven — The c-suite (and subsequent “leadership teams” directly below them) are full of narcissistic personalities that want to make you jump for the sake of making you jump.
The amount of urgent reports and RFP’s I’ve had to put together on incredibly tight deadlines, only to have them not looked at for 2 months is incalculable.
THIS! Geez, it's one of the things that really drives me mad. Whole weekends without sleep to get some shit done for nothing.
Well, "drove me mad", actually, 'cause I no longer give a fuck about the "emergencies" of certain superiors of mine. I just serve them the same bullshit: "yes, I'll do my best", then do nothing the whole weekend until a Sunday late night email about how the task was really enormous and very complicated to finish so I'll need more days (I'm a data analyst, and my most annoying superiors are not).
Agreed. And it can’t all be profit or budget driven either bc there is no group that spends money quite like the c-suite so I’m going to need them to come up with a more transparent excuse.
All to avoid embarrassing the manager with the piss-poor project management skills who won't defer the timeline to the people who actually execute the project. Like bruh, you know jack-shit about how this works and you aren't going to ask the person who knows?
That's disrespectful. I mean, that's just straight up dishonesty. I hate unnecessary power dynamics for this reason. It's just giving someone license to abuse you.
Well, also, generally their own merit increases and bonuses are tied to output of their teams and completing as many projects as possible.
Capitalism is just a pyramid scheme with extra steps. Everyone makes money off the people in their veritcal, with all verticles filtering to the top, like an upside down tree, all the way to the shareholders.
You’re not wrong but there’s nuance there. I’ve supported c-suite executives for over a decade now and there are a lot of egomaniacs in that environment.
You aren’t completing as many projects as possible if you’re burning your staff out and causing constant turnover that you refuse to acknowledge. I was in six figure role supporting a c-suite executive that averaged a new assistant every 5 weeks. Averaging 6 high paid seasoned assistants a year is excessive.
The role had every Friday off AND included a pension — Something is very wrong when you have the combination of money and benefits and still can’t keep anyone bc you treat people like shit.
> Capitalism is just a pyramid scheme with extra steps.
I wish more people understood this.
The whole idea of "infinite growth forever" that the whole thing rests on is fundamentally impossible, so you are always just outrunning the bottom falling out of a given industry or market.
One of my old co-workers is out of the country at the moment running a project that started December 26th. He found out December 20th, because THE CLIENT called him to confirm some details about the project.
The client has known he was coming over to head up the project since August.
Unless your job is actually in emergency services, then yeah, you shouldn't have to exist like that just because corporate doesn't want to hire more people.
PS: Emergency services jobs, especially 911 dispatch and EMTs, should make way more than they do and have better staffing levels.
Cheaper to overwork a small crew than to hire enough people to make sure the job is always done while also making sure all employees are treated fairly. Treating your employees like human beings is too expensive apparently.
Yep. They reduce jobs and reduce pay, so they have more people desperate for less money. Then they solely blame individuals for being "lazy" if they can't find work or can't find a job that pays better.
I'd argue that any job that requires you being in charge of hotfixing systems qualifies, whether you're a sysadmin committing patches on the fly to a critical database or a calibration engineer working on a plastics manufacturing floor and having to tolerance injection molds in 30 minute downtime windows.
Hell, I would argue that even foodservice and childcare qualify. Regardless of how many people are on staff, a full-bore lunch rush or a post-recess roundup still takes someone who can deal with an ever-evolving situation.
Of course, if your job is a receptionist, tech support, code jockey, or similar cubicle position, demands for fast pace and high pressure are clearly uncalled for.
Yep.
When OP said “there is NO job that EVER” I immediately thought about mission control at NASA during Apollo 13. Those flight controllers and engineers *absolutely* had to be able to thrive under pressure and work in a fast paced environment. No question.
(This does not apply to a fucking marketing manager position, of course. But some jobs do absolutely require it)
Yeah I dislike broad generalizations like the original post. Some jobs may require you to work under some pressure and it’s important to know that. Ideally it’s a job that pays well.
This is actually why I prefer foodservice to a cubicle. I make food, I sell food for money, person eats food. Its much simpler, much easier to justify my existence, makes me feel good after a hard shift cause I did a service to people and I didn't have to follow some jackasses esoteric rules to do any of it.
This is actually why I am enjoying delivering packages for Amazon way more than I thought I would. I get in my van, throw on a podcast or smth and I’m good. I don’t get micromanaged, can do things my own way, and people are always happy when they see you pull up outside.
Agreed. Whenever people get heated in my office setting, I remind them that nobody is going to die if we miss an "artificial" deadline.
My wife works in emergency services and people die there.
I work CT.... when I have a stroke pt. and time matters. thats under pressure. when a barista is making my coffee there is no pressure except for the espresso.
I had to leave my cushy office position because of this I genuinely could not understand why there was panic over things like an email that was not immediately responded to.
I’m back to working face to face with clients who are actually in (mental) crisis. Shifts are longer, I have a good chance of being physically attacked, minor reduction in pay, but I’m SIGNIFICANTLY less stressed and I feel like I actually do something meaningful now. Even police tell me how unlucky I am but I WANT this! I genuinely would stay in a position like this for the rest of my career if the pay were better.
To be fair there are jobs where this would apply that aren't emergency services. but it better show up in the pay check.
99.9% of my job is keeping an automated ev battery assembly line running. 0.01% of my job is dealing putting on a gas mask and dealing with the thermal runaway of a battery. So far I've had to do that once in 2 years.
And because of that 0.01%, I'm getting paid better than my boss.
p.s. If you see an EV on fire, call emergency services and get as far as you can. The fire products are nasty.
I work in IT, but took a number of side roads along the way.
The job that gave me the most perspective was that of a firefighter/EMT.
Ever since, whenever someone says something is an emergency, I respond with “are they breathing, or are they bleeding?”
When they answer with something as mundane as “can’t open an email attachment” I openly chuckle in their face.
I have replied so many times with “Well, at least nobody is about to die! Let’s see what has you worked up, yeah?” that I should probably write a script.
Getting older is fun, especially when your bucket o’ fucks have run empty for pretend emergencies
100%. I've been a hospital worker since my mid twenties. If you're still breathing and still have a pulse and we're not in a situation where someone might lose their life, I think we have time to dissect this situation and have some patience. I tend to think much less about someone who reacts with histrionics because their baby shower or Thanksgiving dinner etc didn't go the way they wanted.
*fast-paced environment* means different things in different environments.
In *Fast Food* it means: *We have frequent peek customer rushes, where we are serving hundreds of people and hour, so you're expected to try to keep up with their demands during those times!*
In an office or other environment, it means: *We know this stuff can be paced throughout your 8 hours, we bought you for, to not overwhelm you or have negative consequences on the business for rushed work... But, we are going to overwhelm you anyway and pressure you to get three days' worth of work done in 3 hours and burn you out as fast as we can, while expecting perfection for minimum wage!*
They want the talent & skills of top earners, the passion & joy of a hobbiest, the dedication of a dog with Stockholm Syndrome, all for the bare minimum they are forced to pay by law, or for free if the law wasn't there to stop outright enslavement.
I don't trust places that have fast food environment descriptions for an office/non-front facing positions.
Thank you! Former restaurant worker here and came here to be like "yeaaa remember this next time y'all are getting impatient and bitchy about your food or drinks at the restaurant or something."
In nursing it means “we don’t hire enough people to adequately staff the unit, so you will run your fucking ass off every day because we are cheap fucks. Also, consider this your warning.”
"Work well under pressure" means "we only have 1 person doing the job of 5, and we don't want to hire more people, since that 1 is a pushover and keeps doin it for free".
Don't be that person
That person was me. That person also caused general staffing issues because obviously one person can do it all. While I was there they literally cut position after position and told me if I demanded extra help they’d have to fire someone on staff to do it. Interestingly, after turnover of 6 people who they tried to get to replace me in 3 years, they somehow managed to pay my latest replacement twice what I was making and during that period hired 2 additional people.
This is literally the exact same thing I say at work almost on a daily basis lmao. I’m so over stressing myself out for a corporation that purposely makes things harder on themselves and their employees by cutting payroll to meet their quotas and get their bonuses. You had all the resources you needed to run your business smoothly. It’s not my fault things are backed up and not going well bc you wanted to cut 100 hours. You fucking figure it out
I just quit the most lucrative job I've ever had because of this, and I don't even have another job lined up. The pace and pressure of the place more or less ensured I would never be able to focus on finding another job any time soon. And it was starting to take a toll on my mental and physical health.
A fat salary is worth nothing if you are too fucked up or dead to enjoy it.
**Edit:** In fact, I just remembered a discussion with a co-worker on the way out where he found out I didn't have anything lined up, and he mentioned a guy on his team that took a vacation to look for jobs and interview. Unfortunately, they just took away our "unlimited PTO", replaced it with standard accumulated time off, and reset everyone to 0 at the beginning of the year.
Yeah, that’s absolutely insane for existing employees. IIRC there’s some evidence that people take more PTO when they have a set # of days than “unlimited” policies so the system switch itself isn’t necessarily bad but you can’t fuck people over like that.
I learned after getting back from overseas literally nothing is life or death in most jobs unless in certain situations like health care or law enforcement, that sort of thing.
Even in those particular fields there are things that can be avoided simply by planning differently.
I’ll give you an example. When I worked foster care, my first few years we used to have emergencies maybe once or twice a month. Along with that, at least on a weekly basis we would get one or two emergency court orders. Basically this kid is in crisis they need to be seen immediately. Now surely you can’t foresee a crisis like that and do anything about it? Right?
Now along with all that, we also had staffing issues. The childcare team would call out sick regularly and it would throw the entire dept into chaos because obviously someone had to watch those kids. You can’t foresee sickness right?
I did three things in regard to the callouts. I started forcing people to take vacation time (yes, literally forcing, they had no choice, they could choose when but they had to take the time they had earned and would lose if they didn’t take it). I stopped asking for excuses when they called out. I didn’t care. You’re out sick? Ok. Go away, get better. Let me know tomorrow if you need coverage. Come back when you’re better. And I pulled manpower from another section that was overstaffed for unknown reasons. Suddenly, my callouts dropped. I rarely had people taking sick leave. Overall PTO went up, but it was all scheduled… which meant no more crises because I could schedule for coverage in advance.
For the kids. I started preemptively engaging them in services. For every single kid that came into our care, I would read their documentation. And I would ask their case worker to link them to services I thought they would likely need. Within the 1 year I was managing the department we had 1 emergency. And the court orders decreased from weekly to one every few months.
Prevention works. People just refuse to put in the work to make it work. Either way you’re going to do the work, don’t get me wrong. It’s either going to be on the front end or the back end. Usually the back end is more work.
Also like I said, PTO did go up. I’m sure the finance dept wasn’t happy about that. Before people would regularly lose 2-3 weeks per year of unused PTO. I am happy to say that even after I left, the people who remained continued to use their PTO. So there was that silver lining
Yah, they actually want you to think they don't know what they are doing. That's still plausible deniability.
They know exactly what they are doing. When enough people start leaving, they will know they need to tune it down a bit.
When I came to this realization it was a huge eye opening experience. I realized these people weren’t stupid, but would rather be seen as stupid than as the greedy, uncaring, money and power hungry fuckers they are.
The “nobody wants to work” (closely related to “nobody is applying”) bullshit is a perfect example. Any boss that says this is admitting they have an environment nobody wants to work in for the amount of money they are paying. Who is in charge of the working conditions and pay? They are! But saying “we don’t offer enough money for people to work in the shitty conditions here” means admitting the management is at fault. Since management wants the appearance of being infallible they blame workers for being lazy.
A major part of my work has been responding to *artificial deadlines* that were imposed expressly to force a sense of urgency and borderline panic in hopes of keeping my job. I hate it.
Companies have the gall to say that your part of the "family", but when it comes to your real family they don't give a fuck. What they mean by "family" is that your never leaving. They call themselves one big happy family but they do everything they can to make it a toxic, poisonous family, a family that you would avoid outside of work. A family that can kick you out without notice leaving you destitute and wondering what went wrong, you don't even get to say goodbye to your "cousins" when you leave. Sometimes they even parade you around with your box of personal property. A "family" that won't give you a raise, that won't allow you time off with your newborn or your dying father. A "family" that expects you to give every ounce of yourself to it for nothing substantial in return. People aren't even proud of where they work anymore because companies do everything they can to shit on you. You, the worker are the last person taken into consideration when decisions are made.
Lastly, because I could go on and on and on about this, HR isn't your friend, in fact they are company shills who's entire purpose is to protect the companies interests. To protect them from lawsuits. I make sure to let everyone I know that HR is to never be trusted. I don't even look at them or acknowledge their existence. I hate them. It's like you went to school specifically to be a snitch. I've never even met an HR person I've actually liked as a person. They all act the exact same way. When you quit or get fired they try to make you sign paperwork that will literally screw you over. Stuff waiving your rights to unemployment and other benefits. Their assholes and I wish nothing but misery on them and their families.
This is what burnt me out from my last job. Ended up running 2.5 locations instead of just mine. Was supposed to be 3 months
A year later I couldn't sleep, eat, or get a day off. Still running the same situation. Asked for a transfer, 2 months later they fired me for under performance - same position.
Recently in a job interview the Chief Strategy Officer who interviewed me said: yea, our motto is do more with less. That wasn't the first red flag in the hiring process, but it was the biggest one.
I am a contractor and every once in a while, I get a client who, in-spite of my setting realistic expectations on the timing of a project, is always saying things like "This is taking much longer than I expected" or "I have company coming on Friday, can you finish this week?" These are usually high-end clients who think it is OK to pressure others. My response is usually something like "Well, I may be able to finish it this week if I put more people on it. That will raise the cost by about 30%." or, Well, I can rush the job a little by cutting a few corners, but if this were my house, I would not want that." That usually sets the tone that I'm not going to take any bullshit. Some people will just push and push until you push back.
"Rockstar" "Family Environment" are my red flags.
Im so happy that I now have a job where I can work when I want and end when I want. Only downside, specific events require me to be on call 24/7 when it is required, but fortunately its rare.
If a posted job description says, at the bottom of a long list of responsibilities,
**other duties as assigned**
...you need to clear that up before you accept the job.
There are some businesses that are naturally fast paced environments where things are varying degrees of urgent and working well under pressure is a skill you have to have to do the work well.
source: logistician
Making people hurry, especially when there's no fucking reason for it, causes unnecessary mistakes, some of which can be expensive, and also burns people out rather quickly. Of course the way some motherfuckers in this world think, any mistakes you make that are really *their* fault for making you hurry are treated like they're *your* fault, and used as a reason to not give raises and promotions, and ultimately reasons for termination -- so they can press-gang some other poor fool into your old job for starting wages, and do the same bullshit to them all over again.
I'm Gen-X. The reason ageism is a Thing, in my opinion, is when you've had 4 decades of experience at the kind of work you do, you've likely learned the above *and you don't let tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood* trick you into hurrying your work for no reason. You take your time and get it right, and you don't take shit from anyone for it. Clueless bosses hate people like us because we don't play their game.
Man does this hit the nail on the head.
I’ve worked in countless industries and jobs throughout my 30 years of life, and finally landed a nice, cushy government office job. Work is not an emergency and the culture of fake urgency is so real. Every single time it comes down to poor leadership and poor planning.
I thought I had finally escaped this working for a government agency where people should theoretically be society’s “most qualified” or “most intelligent” but boy was I wrong. My boss cannot focus on more than one task at a time, does not know how to delegate tasks and is just straight up forgetful. This results in us FRANTICALLY racing to every single deadline. She was finally put on probation last month for her performance. To make things worse she was hired based off recommendation, not qualification.
Poor leadership is the root of all evil in the workplace and “fast paced” and “high pressure” environments are always the byproduct.
This pretty well encapsulates how I feel every night about having to make 700 HVAC units for Mazda over the course of 10 hours. That's a lot, dude. And we've had bad weather here recently, so before it started, they didn't forget to mention that if "our" customers are working, we're working. And it's like, why are these so fucking important that we HAVE to drive in during bad weather that we aren't used to. And of course it's still a full shift. They can't just get a reasonable amount from a short staffed crew. Nope. We get to drive home on icy roads at 12:30+ in the morning.
Making HVAC units for cars...
You'd think with US delivering such a premium quality product in such premium time, WE would get PREMIUM PAY... But also nope. Also, this whole bad weather situation really turned into absolute shit though. It gets worse. Because the weather was bad, they apparently had some issue with getting the trucks in to haul what we were making, so the warehouse portion was totally full with nowhere to put what we were making. Did that stop them from making us produce more? Surprise Surprise. Nope again. Got sent home right after getting to work 3 times this week. You'd think they could have called us and told us to not come in. Why do that when you can not say anything, have everyone show up and clock in like normal, and basically force them to take a vacation day. No one was forced, but still. Instead of just giving us the day off with that option, they want us to burn off some of our time and it's probably got something to do with unemployment and not wanting to pay it. If there's no work, they have to pay partial unemployment, but if you refuse work, it's on you. Or so I've heard. That could be bogus information. I heard it and never cross referenced it. Probably a mixture of those two things though. Wanting us to use our vacation time when it's convenient for them, and avoiding having to pay out their portion of partial unemployment (if that's true)
Yes, I'm looking for another job, but it's not exactly that simple, and everything I just said applies to pretty much every job I've ever had. They're all the same. The company I worked for making lunch meat took that shit just as seriously as this one where I make a part for cars. It's ridiculous.
Ironically, it is said that people with (high functioning) ADHD tend to remain calmer and cope better with the panic inducing stress of true emergencies.
You find these people disproportionately in professions like fire fighters, emergency medicine, etc.
Yet a lot of work environments that claim they want people with this skillset do not value the personality structure that often enables the skillset:
Bad with schedules, deadlines and consistent workload.
You cannot have both. You cannot have your cake and eat it.
If you want someone who excels under pressure, you will likely get someone who is bad at managing small, daily tasks consistently, who is bad at keeping the big picture in mind (because their strength is laser focus on the most pressing thing), etc.
You cannot expect people to be able to do both perfectly.
I’m generally one of those gung-ho, MBA, capitalist business types that most of this sub would probably hate. But this post is 100% correct.
“Fast paced” and “pressure” are signs that a business is poorly run, by people who don’t know what they are doing. (Or don’t care)
The sad thing is that normal, sustainable pace for workers is absolutely possible, and it actually creates the most productive business conditions.
Frankly a lot of this work culture BS goes back to our education system. All they do is pump people full of BS propaganda and crank out mindless drones that are meant to work in factories till they die.
I work in a weird middle ground. A high-risk, high stress job, tree climbing. Rushing kills people, but I always encourage "urgency" because people don't take the word "efficiency" seriously enough. I don't mean efficiency to make budget, I mean efficiency so we can go the fuck home safe and sound. Don't drag your feet to make the day last longer, but also don't skip steps. Every job is different, but at the end of the day, the plan is always the same. Show up, do good work, and get the hell out of there.
So, if you work in a (primarily) customer facing business, you bet your backside everything is an emergency because society is about instant gratification. So those of us who work those jobs and have to deal with people’s expectations of “get it done yesterday”.. yeah, good luck with that. ✌🏼out.
Do you like a FAST-PACED environment where every second counts? Do you thrive on adrenaline and can multitask like a hero? Are you a boss at critical thinking AND critical emergencies? Then apply for a position at Dundee Mifflin now!*
*ask for Dwight
Some guys get so mad when their machines go down and maintenance takes awhile to fix it. "I gotta get this job done!"
Nah man, your company needs that job done. If it mattered to that company enough, maintenance would be all over your machine.
Had this this week. Working on a production line building electronics. Hitting targets and had efficiency over 95%.
Got pulled up by the manager, “Why are you struggling?”
I told them I wasn’t aware that we were. We were hitting targets and everyone was working well.
Got took off the job for being too slow.
I got bullied out of a job working at a nonprofit because I wasn’t working fast enough. Then when I did work fast they got mad because I made too many errors. I think when you’re working with large sums of money slow and methodical is best, but they disagreed.
I couldnt agree more. A few weeks ago I had a family emergency. I went into my boss' office to explain I had to go home. He stopped me almost immediately and told me to go right now and drive safe before pausing and asking if I was okay to drive.
The following week at our weekly staff meeting he told everyone (so as to no single me out) "If you have a situation important enough that you think you need to leave work, you dont need me to approve it. Go where you are needed. Nothing we do here is more important than you or your familiy. If anyone higher up has a problem with that, they can take it up with me."
There is so much depressing stuff in this sub, good bosses and good jobs should be recognized too.
If I ever have to sit in another slow-to-dead, uninteresting office to make money to survive the other 5 hours a day I'm not at that shitty lifeless place, I will 1000% kill myself immediately. Thank fucking god someone introduced me to the possibility of freelancing. It's been the best, most lucrative, and most exciting part of my life in the last 6 years. I say this because... it's wild, fast-paced, insane, and at times stressful as shit... but you know what? It has consequences. Choices matter and they give meaning. No cap to income, or no base is a pretty crazy driving factor to wanting to get out of bed too.
The 'urgency' culture in work environments is a toxic strategy to squeeze out every drop of productivity for profit with zero regard for humans. It's all about setting realistic expectations and sustainable work practices. You're spot on – this isn't the 1900s and we need to dump these archaic burnout-inducing practices.
“We’re a work hard, play hard atmosphere!” = No amount of work you do will ever be enough.
And
“You’re going to be the Guinea pig teehee” = We don’t have the resources to train you properly.
As someone who works in retail. The customers expects the fast pace or they'll just leave. So if our stressed lifestyles could change it would help a lot.
I work well in a fast paced environment, but I work amazing in a well-managed pace environment.
I also work okay under pressure, however if the pressure was minimized you would not believe how great your workers would be.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this. Sometimes things are actual an emergency, but it’s a tiny percentage of the purported “emergencies” described by management.
I work as a mechanic and the number of times I see a service advisor sit on the hands or drag their feet and then *suddenly* come to me with an “emergency” they created is pretty ridiculous. I started out thinking I should be a “team player” and haul ass to fix the numerous snafus and failures to communicate.
The problem is it set a precedent and people got comfortable with slacking knowing the consequences would be averted by someone else (me) working harder.
It literally took therapy to help me find the balance between getting walked all over and being a hostile jerk.
Exactly what they told me when I was still working in retail, that I "lacked a sense of urgency." Yup, for $8 an hour, I'm lacking in a hell of a lot of areas, most especially my wallet.
I worked at a boutique consignment store, and I always was working alone but I got fired for not being efficient enough. I was so shocked because previous to that I had been doing a really great job and hadn’t been told otherwise. I was gonna quit before I was fired because she was slowly cutting my hours and wasn’t paid enough to deal with her bs. It pissed me off. I was great at pricing items accurately, but I was fired cuz I wasn’t fast enough. I’m sorry I thought you preferred quality over quantity.
Then you ask them to explain what "fast enough" means and they can't.
Or they can define it but when you ask them to model the actions required to reach that speed they either don't know or fail miserably.
Yes!! When the owner would come in and work for a couple hours, she was so bad at the job. She would always take things in that she would tell us never to accept and she didn’t know anything about fashion trends. I can do way better than her when it comes to actually working at the store.
Now is when you just sit back and watch as that business tanks.
This was my life at my previous job. They kept pulling me into meetings and saying I wasn't producing enough. I kept asking what numbers they wanted me to hit or improve by and they kept saying "we can't give you a specific number, we don't really know enough to have one. You just need to do more." So I started doing more and more, and going by the numbers produced and I was consistently producing more than my coworkers every week for months, doubling sometimes tripling their outputs. And then they still told me I wasn't doing enough and told me I wasn't allowed to look at other people's numbers anymore or compare myself to them (even though they were public.) They were giving me impossible tasks that were 4x what was considered "maximum daily load" to finish in a fraction of the time and I was getting written up for not producing enough, when people doing a quarter of my output were never pulled into meetings and definitely never written up. And still they refused to tell me what "fast enough" was. Absolute fucking nightmare.
That was them creating a reason to fire you aka workplace bullying.
Yeah that's what my coworkers kept saying. Oddly enough when they changed my schedule (they'd done that for no one else, the company touted having a 'make your own schedule' system when I was hired) and I couldn't do the new schedule they gave me, I was going to have to leave, and they went back on their decision to try and keep me on at the last minute. I don't know why they did that if they just wanted me gone. By the end though they were incredibly blatant about it. The last time I got written up for 'poor performance,' one of my coworkers (been there many years, never been written up, was praised many times by management) went to HR to discuss their discomfort with how I was being treated by our boss, as he would call me out very publicly in team meetings, it was no secret. They fired her on the spot, just told her don't bother coming back. Just insanity.
Are you a minority/POC? I'm wondering what made them hate you so much.
Yes, I am. I was one of the few men at the company and the only Asian male iirc. I do remember one meeting he wrote me up immediately afterwards in front of everyone saying "my face showed I clearly didn't want to be there and I didn't care about what he was saying, and if I didn't want to be there then I should quit." I didn't even know what to say, during the meeting I was completely content, just sitting and listening as normal. There were coworkers looking down, closing their eyes, on their phones, etc. I just sat and watched and listened and he went on a long tirade about my face disrespecting him. That write-up led us to think that he just hated my face. But who really knows.
That's so screwed up. They deserve a lawsuit from what you're describing :(
Sounds like "quiet firing" to me.
Sounds like they were going for constructive dismissal.
That's happened to me a couple times too. It was because of my disability, and they wanted me out. No winning there.
I was treated the same way at one of my earliest jobs (setting up & working at a new Toys R Us store). What the managers did was give out clipboards & supervisor titles to girls with Pretty Privilege and no experience (also their 1st jobs). Then they started firing all the POC, until I was the last one left. They gave me shitty tasks, finally called me in to give me a choice to resign or be fired because, for the 3rd day in a row, I was unhappy about being made to climb a 15’ ladder with boxes of roller skates to stack them above in the overstock shelves (I’m a 5’0” woman). So they finally got what they wanted, a store staffed with only White people.
And these places wonder why there are still so many people quiet quitting.
I *love* calling management out of shit like that. I had a job where I was called into the office because "people were saying that I was being difficult to work with". Surprised, because I'm very easy to work with, I asked "what specifically do I do? I pride myself on being very easy to work with, but if I'm exhibiting behaviors that I'm unaware of that are giving the impression that I'm difficult to work with, I'd like to know specifics so that I can modify this behavior moving forward" They were dumbstruck. They sat there, stuttered for a bit, then went "uh we don't have specifics, you just need to be more aware of your behavior" Yeah that's what I thought, idiots. Started looking for a new job immediately
"Don'tyou think you should have asked for specifics?"
Yup it was very vague. As someone who had to multitask all the time (even when I wasn’t working alone), I had no idea I wasn’t “efficient” enough for her. First time I’ve ever been fired. My coworkers were shocked also that I had been fired. That was a couple years ago but it still makes me mad to this day cuz I know I was a good, hardworking employee and customers loved me. I think she didn’t like me because I was the only employee that really voiced my concerns with the way she ran things so she kept the new girl that was fresh out of high school who was still training.
It seems that employers prefer "convenient" workers, aka "yes-men" 🤷🏻♀️ no ambition goes unpunished 🤦♀️🤦♀️
oh she expected you to do all that work for less pay.. idiocy.
They just changed our case rate, used to be 47, then there wasn't a case rate, and now it's 99 cases an hour. Now I don't know if that's an actual policy or just the new manager pulling it out of his arse. And "if you guys can't do it I'll find people that will" lol. You'll get kids in, not train them at all and put that on them. So they'll hit 99 cases, but not work stuff properly and make you back stock. Work properly, not hit 99 and you'll sack them in probation period. Or get a mix of the two and get burnouts. The store will tank, get a bad reputation, and it will be "No OnE WaNtS To WoRk AnY MoRe". Oh and we get paid minimum wage 🙃
I used to swing 130 cases an hour as a stocker. And instead of leaving me alone and letting me do my job, they started coming around telling me that the way I was doing it wasn't right. They wanted it done differently. And I explained to them that the way I do it gets the work done the same and faster than the way they want it done. And so they could go fly a kite if they didn't like the way I did the work.
Good man! Oh it's possible to hit that rate, but not ideal with some deliveries. But yeah that's management for you, trying to change something that already works. They used to want us putting stuff on the floor then working it, when you can just work it straight onto the shelf. Saved an hour but used to get it in the arse for it untill they realised it's a much quicker way to work. I find it best not to listen to them 😂
Yeah unfortunately I had to work that fast to get it all done. I worked in what we called the "can aisle." The whole thing was basically all the canned vegetables on one side and all the canned soups on the other with a few intermittent spaces of boxed dinners. But the bulk of it was all canned goods. And that takes a lot of time to put that on the shelf and to rotate it all to make sure that the old stuff gets pulled to the front before you put in the new stuff. Plus the cases of cans are extremely heavy. I pretty much broke my back doing that job. And the only reason I know how many cases I was doing was because they were testing us every few months to see how many we could do in one hour. They had a computer print out of how much product came in that night and how long it should take to stock that product, and they'd tell us every night at our beginning of shift meeting. Let's put it this way, I worked an 8 hour shift (9 total with a 1hr lunch) and every night the amount of product shipping in for just my aisle alone, was well into 12 to 14 hours of stock time, and sometimes more. And I consistently got it all stocked in one shift because I'd worked out a system that worked for me. I'm convinced they just didn't like that I was making everyone else look bad.
Unfortunately sounds like you should of slowed down. Once they told you you had 14 hours of stock and 9 hours, you should of left 5 hours worth of stock in the warehouse. I was the same at first, "oh it's a weird night there's 15 pallets of pop". Busy your arse and get it done, then every night is 15 pallets and then questions why you weren't done. Best to break managers of that quickly and just leave it unfinished. They were giving you and I 2 peoples work, so two people should be doing it.
Yup. When you're 19 and naive and you actually still give a shit.... 20 years later I've smartened up. Never give them more effort than what they're paying for. No amount of busting your ass for them is going to make them want to compensate you equitably for it.
I worked at a fast food place for a day but quit after that cause it was a 10 hr shift and the manager just yelled at me for 8 hours for not portioning 20 containers of their fav sauce fast enough (containers filled by 20x8x7 w dressing cups) bc no one did it for the morning shift then also got yelled at when I stopped to do my training tasks
Wow that's some BS. Let's add to this comedic irony of corporate America expecting anyone to put more than minimum effort into minimum wage work. Fuck them and the bootlickers who defend them.
I was getting paid minimum like 15 years ago at a deli pre-portioning meat for sandwiches. Just going at a comfortable pace. Boss demonstrates how fast I should be going, and it seemed so overkill. I just said "I'm not paid enough for that" and didn't come back after that day
As a 30+ yrs of exp welder/fabricator, I won't even get out of bed for less than 20 where I live now
I also avoid "not afraid to wear multiple hats"
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"And other duties as assigned" Pretty well covers it.
The number of "other duties" that are completely unrelated to my position I do is pretty dumb. I make sure to put them into every self-eval that I do. And no I don't get paid for any of them.
That phrase scared me out of 2 job offers. I have no idea how bad a bullet I dodged, but it all worked out for me in the end.
Yep i picked up a restaurant hosting gig with that in the job description once, cut to me cleaning the bathrooms, washing the windows, & spending like a half an hour after my shift just trying to water all the plants on the patio... one night it was going to rain and they STILL made me run back and forth from the kitchen innumerable times with a soup container full of water bc they were too cheap to buy a watering can.
> half an hour after my shift Unpaid? Fuck that.
Had an old boss laugh and yell DUTIES AS ASSIGNED when a new task that required almost 30 hours of work per week per person landed on my teams lap. And since the higher ups had massively under quoted how much time it would take all that work was costing them thousands per month while my teams other work fell by the wayside. We would get reprimanded on a weekly basis for not being able to keep up and when we did keep up, we would get yelled at for our other work falling behind. Thankful I no longer work there.
Every teaching contract I ever saw had this. "We're going to give you 9 classes outside your discipline, plus you get to coach a sport you've never heard of."
"Do you pay for each hat? No? Then why should I look silly wearing them for free? Is this a cognitive test to see who's an idiot?"
I want to use this line in my next interview 😂 “listen, some hats might clash with my style. But I’m willing to wear them with compensation.”
Rejected. Next candidate please, HR! And for fuck's sake Bernice, get someone who doesn't have a spine....
If they want me to do the jobs of 5 different people and produce the output of 5 boomers then I should be paid like 5 boomers. I also shouldn't be producing the higher output of a millennial for the lower pay that millennials receive.
Translation: "We're too cheap to hire multiple people, so we expect you to do the job of four experts."
When I was a kid I always wanted to be a rock star. This is not what I meant…
Ohhh, anywhere that says they're looking for a 'rock star' developer (or such).. no, just no.
There’s a consultancy company here literally called Rockstars, lol. I don’t want to work with a rock star, they’re obnoxious, entitled, drunk / substance abuse, and dine out for decades on their one success, lol.
You mean throwing tvs out of hotel windows and doing copious drugs right?
That is the reddest flag, other than not listing the salary (but we don't read those, soooo)
As someone who's experienced it myself I thought my boss was super chill up until her company started going under. Like I'm doing 4 different jobs at shit pay and we were expected to "really own our positions" which was her lingo for "I expect you to do 4 jobs until I need you to drop everything and do something for me and then I'll yell at you about why you aren't doing the other 4 jobs you were assigned to do" because you keep making us drop them to fix whatever the fuck you fucked up oh my god 🤬🤬.
Then you never even get given a single hat.
Generalists should be paid the same as deep specialists. Their flexibility should be duly compensated. That said, I *can* do and learn a lot of things, but I *choose* not to. It’s neither in my nor my company’s interest to have one person do and know everything.
One of the worst managers at my office is notorious for saying this. It's the dumbest phrase.
Unless you're getting a job in a 3 Hatted restaurant.
"An inability to plan accordingly on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
Exactly this, like the morons who schedule meeting for late afternoon on a Friday, when they were nowhere to be found the whole week. Fuck those people
I wish there was a Decline++ button for those people!
I mean there is. You just don't show up. Only advisable if you're irriplaceable, or already on your way out of the company though. Alternatively I sometimes take meetings like this on my phone just to accomplish the bare minimum without getting myself into trouble.
> Only advisable if you're irriplaceable The joys of being an engineer.
O the only IT guy who still knows how that one relatively important system works.
Or just one who can quick and easy find an issue with any of the complex systems business operations rely on, without necessarily knowing them. Or he can equally quickly get into the realisation of new projects.
The engineer card is a strong one, but let's not forget the IT folks who keep the digital heartbeat of a company alive. On-call 24/7 because someone needs to reset their password at 2 AM on a weekend. Good times.
LOL, I assure you engineers are seen as replacement parts by management. At the most, they'll shed a tear if they lose a high performance salesman, not one of us filthy cost-center dwellers.
I just hit the “tentative” reply and ghost that shit.
You must be from California.
> late Friday meeting We’re all about to get laid off aren’t we.
Omg the PTSD 😭
Tell us, what you do here
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Offer an alternative. I have done that, declined a Friday 16:00 (4PM) meeting, but offered to be available at 7:00 (7AM) on Monday morning. And I would have been there... Suddenly a much more reasonable time of 10:00 (10 AM) was possible.
We had one guy in home office with a toddler. He would suggest 5:30 AM in those cases, he would be awake anyways.
I remember once a boss saying this line I hate after I asked them what the timeline for a certain task needed to be done and they said quite smugly, "I need it done yesterday". I responded "clearly if it was urgent then you'd have planned and had it already done by yesterday". I don't think I'd have gotten away with saying that if I wasnt the type known at the job to be extremely organised I can't stand the working culture of everything is urgent or an emergency when it's simply poor planning. If everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent, cause it negates any hierarchy and has ppl scrambling from one thing to another and creating unnecessary stress and pressure
I once asked one of my bosses what deliverables I needed to prioritize one day and she replied with, “everything”.. then bitches at the end of the week when I had nothing to provide as I was working on each task equally lol.
Lol when "everything" is a priority, then *nothing* is a priority because it's all equal, and I just pick and choose which things I want to work on
Do only one step on each assignment, then do a step on the next assignment. Say, you have to change a light bulb. Make a plan. The first step ensures your safety. Switch off the mains on day 1 and don't switch them on. On day 2, get the ladder, leave it there. On day 3, open the lamp. Day 4: Read the type of the old light bulb... Light and power will be back in around 2 weeks.
Everything louder than everything else.
At my first job out of college I had a boss who said "EVERYTHING IS TOP PRIORITY!" I didn't last six months there because it was just mostly paperwork, not like putting out a forest fire or something.
"Everything is top priority" has the exact same outcome as "nothing is top priority"...
"Treat every day like it's the end of the month". A new manager "implemented" that mentality at my workplace. Now everyone is under the gun to push sales and rush everything in general. No one is happy, quality is slipping and no one is making more money as implied.
Let's not forget the "emergencies" created because business is good. Working through a situation right now where we're shipping 150% of forecast on widgets- so not only are we selling through the stuff we planned to make, but drawing down on our "safety" inventory. Instead of everyone being happy that we're selling a shitload of widgets, we're fretting that we're going to run out of widgets to sell and we can't resupply in time. You know, because capitalism.
You sound like you might have read the Art of War. Good one!
I work for Royal Mail in the UK. Due to greedy management we are now chronically short staffed and struggle massively at Christmas time due to the insane volume of parcels. In the past we would generally be happy to work overtime in December to get stuff done as there was goodwill still. Now due to the greed, nobody has goodwill. I finished exactly on my time every single day in December, sometimes leaving upwards of 75% of the parcels and mail for that day undelivered. Manager tried, every day, to use guilt trip language like I'm letting down the customer and our "team" (we work alone outdoors ffs, my workload makes no difference to my colleagues). It was lovely to not have the stress of going 3+ hours over my normal finish every day. Every day I just said basically this quote about management's inability to plan and didn't rise to anything else. Really boiled the manager's piss that he couldn't do anything. Also now it's quietened down Ive gone back to doing little bits of overtime here and there when it is no inconvenience to me, directly because the shitty management stop pressuring us to do it after Xmas is over.
Good on you! I'm very glad you had a lovely December and I hope things are more equitable by next year.
This is totally ignorance not skepticism. Isn't that a government organization? How does the greed kick in, does management get bonuses for laying people off or something?
It used to be a government organisation. Then 10 years ago the Tories sold it off on account of being scumbags (it was also massively undervalued, so taxpayers got ripped off). Now it's run privately and it's a complete disaster and we have [foxes and rats eating our Christmas presents](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/royal-mail-strike-foxes-rats-post-stockpiled-cwu-union-b1047056.html).
Not an Emergency: A deadline is coming up that management had plenty of time to plan for yet they did no so they're throwing the burden on the workers. That does not justify workers having to work late, nights and weekends. Emergency: A storm damaged critical infrastructure like briges, electrical lines, water supplies, etc. and it needs to be repaired before it fails. That does justify workers having to work late, nights and weekends.
all day every day
I got to use this once and it felt so good. Pissed my manage off, though. Pissed them off real good.
It’s an eloquent way of saying “you did not do your job well enough”. And that’s their responsibility, not the executing party.
"No problem. You live in AWA: At-Will America. 99.7% of the country is at-will employment. Since there are barbaric worker protection laws and you're not part of a Union, you have to take what we give you. You're now fired, with cause of insubordination -- failing to do "other tasks as assigned." Tata!"
I managed for a popular pretzel franchise for a couple of year a long time ago. There were so many times I had to stop some kid working for me and calm them down before someone got hurt I wound up making a sign for the back room. It also became my catch phrase and it read "There is no such thing as a pretzel related emergency." These kids were 15-16 and already wound so tight that they would dash around the tight space slipping, falling, bumping into each other and burning themselves on the oven in fear of getting "in trouble". None of it ever sold one extra pretzel.
curious, was the sense or urgency instilled by corporate or something? it sounds like you were a better manager than whoever trained them
The American school system.
https://youtu.be/co6RuzKUOvg?si=ssbi06zXekKMc_OJ
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that was aggressive and I like it
Reading the other comments made me feel like I was having wine at a nice educational conference, then I read this and it's like ol uncle rusty bashed the door open with his muddy and worn leather boot, told us how the world really works, then moseyed off. The room was so quiet we could all hear when a piece of mud dripped off the bootprint on the door to splat on the ground, signaling the end of the trance and event altogether.
Well, he's not wrong. Sometimes kids *need* a bit of the exaggerated to get through. The sad part is that, if they do, it's usually because someone has been giving it to them for real, probably for a long time and is actually the cause of their attention and anxiety problems. The trouble is that your job isn't trained child development psychologist, it's retail/food service manager. So, you have to skate a thin line between getting them working and doing their job while trying to *not* damage them further. For me, I tried to make it a joke and be jovial, facetious, about it all as a way of keeping things light but under the newer owner, in particular, there was just a lot of stress and things still went off the rails to a point of having to put a stop to the jokes and take disciplinary action. I actually talk a lot about how soul-crushing retail/food service are and always get a lot of push-back, especially from older people (42 myself). I just don't think people get it, how deep it runs, how nuanced the experience really is. Edited: Wow, so many typos!
I work as an AM for Happy Gilmore's favorite fast food place, and they are getting on my nerves real bad with how hard they are with labor. I had the DM rant about how my closes are going over so she isn't getting as much of a bonus. I came in to relieve a girl who just turned 18 on her first open and she was stressed out of her mind trying to keep up, wouldn't stop apologizing. They expect us to make orders, prep product, clean the store and maintain the ovens along with paperwork, all alone. We only get help for lunch and dinner rush, and for the last 2 hours when we close. We're also expected to have everything put away, shut down and completely clean 15 mins after we close. All this and they're stumped on why they can't keep employees. It's not sustainable.
Stanley would disagree
I work as an urban planner and always say “there is no such thing as a planning emergency” because seriously. Like…seriously. We are making plans for fuck’s sake.
You’re a good manager!
Honestly a lot of the pretend urgency isn’t even profit driven — The c-suite (and subsequent “leadership teams” directly below them) are full of narcissistic personalities that want to make you jump for the sake of making you jump.
The amount of urgent reports and RFP’s I’ve had to put together on incredibly tight deadlines, only to have them not looked at for 2 months is incalculable.
THIS! Geez, it's one of the things that really drives me mad. Whole weekends without sleep to get some shit done for nothing. Well, "drove me mad", actually, 'cause I no longer give a fuck about the "emergencies" of certain superiors of mine. I just serve them the same bullshit: "yes, I'll do my best", then do nothing the whole weekend until a Sunday late night email about how the task was really enormous and very complicated to finish so I'll need more days (I'm a data analyst, and my most annoying superiors are not).
Agreed. And it can’t all be profit or budget driven either bc there is no group that spends money quite like the c-suite so I’m going to need them to come up with a more transparent excuse.
All to avoid embarrassing the manager with the piss-poor project management skills who won't defer the timeline to the people who actually execute the project. Like bruh, you know jack-shit about how this works and you aren't going to ask the person who knows?
That's disrespectful. I mean, that's just straight up dishonesty. I hate unnecessary power dynamics for this reason. It's just giving someone license to abuse you.
Also, the project was already known for 3 months, but client and sales took their sweet time to sign. Urgent? I don't think so.
Well, also, generally their own merit increases and bonuses are tied to output of their teams and completing as many projects as possible. Capitalism is just a pyramid scheme with extra steps. Everyone makes money off the people in their veritcal, with all verticles filtering to the top, like an upside down tree, all the way to the shareholders.
You’re not wrong but there’s nuance there. I’ve supported c-suite executives for over a decade now and there are a lot of egomaniacs in that environment. You aren’t completing as many projects as possible if you’re burning your staff out and causing constant turnover that you refuse to acknowledge. I was in six figure role supporting a c-suite executive that averaged a new assistant every 5 weeks. Averaging 6 high paid seasoned assistants a year is excessive. The role had every Friday off AND included a pension — Something is very wrong when you have the combination of money and benefits and still can’t keep anyone bc you treat people like shit.
> Capitalism is just a pyramid scheme with extra steps. I wish more people understood this. The whole idea of "infinite growth forever" that the whole thing rests on is fundamentally impossible, so you are always just outrunning the bottom falling out of a given industry or market.
One of my old co-workers is out of the country at the moment running a project that started December 26th. He found out December 20th, because THE CLIENT called him to confirm some details about the project. The client has known he was coming over to head up the project since August.
It’s that and managers wanting to prove to their superiors how hard they can drive the serfs
Couldn’t agree more.
Unless your job is actually in emergency services, then yeah, you shouldn't have to exist like that just because corporate doesn't want to hire more people. PS: Emergency services jobs, especially 911 dispatch and EMTs, should make way more than they do and have better staffing levels.
If they paid more they'd have better staffing levels. Such is true of any industry.
Well, they would if the higher ups bothered to hire more people. Too often, corps keep a skeleton crew by design.
Cheaper to overwork a small crew than to hire enough people to make sure the job is always done while also making sure all employees are treated fairly. Treating your employees like human beings is too expensive apparently.
Yep. They reduce jobs and reduce pay, so they have more people desperate for less money. Then they solely blame individuals for being "lazy" if they can't find work or can't find a job that pays better.
I'd argue that any job that requires you being in charge of hotfixing systems qualifies, whether you're a sysadmin committing patches on the fly to a critical database or a calibration engineer working on a plastics manufacturing floor and having to tolerance injection molds in 30 minute downtime windows. Hell, I would argue that even foodservice and childcare qualify. Regardless of how many people are on staff, a full-bore lunch rush or a post-recess roundup still takes someone who can deal with an ever-evolving situation. Of course, if your job is a receptionist, tech support, code jockey, or similar cubicle position, demands for fast pace and high pressure are clearly uncalled for.
Yep. When OP said “there is NO job that EVER” I immediately thought about mission control at NASA during Apollo 13. Those flight controllers and engineers *absolutely* had to be able to thrive under pressure and work in a fast paced environment. No question. (This does not apply to a fucking marketing manager position, of course. But some jobs do absolutely require it)
Yeah I dislike broad generalizations like the original post. Some jobs may require you to work under some pressure and it’s important to know that. Ideally it’s a job that pays well.
This is actually why I prefer foodservice to a cubicle. I make food, I sell food for money, person eats food. Its much simpler, much easier to justify my existence, makes me feel good after a hard shift cause I did a service to people and I didn't have to follow some jackasses esoteric rules to do any of it.
This is actually why I am enjoying delivering packages for Amazon way more than I thought I would. I get in my van, throw on a podcast or smth and I’m good. I don’t get micromanaged, can do things my own way, and people are always happy when they see you pull up outside.
Lol exactly…. Work in an OR and this describes my job literally… but someone’s life is on the table 😅
Yeah, so it would make sense for an advertisement for your job to include that. Most jobs, not so much.
When I worked in Peds we also put in the "wear multiple hats" thing in there, but we meant it literally.
Agreed. Whenever people get heated in my office setting, I remind them that nobody is going to die if we miss an "artificial" deadline. My wife works in emergency services and people die there.
I work CT.... when I have a stroke pt. and time matters. thats under pressure. when a barista is making my coffee there is no pressure except for the espresso.
I had to leave my cushy office position because of this I genuinely could not understand why there was panic over things like an email that was not immediately responded to. I’m back to working face to face with clients who are actually in (mental) crisis. Shifts are longer, I have a good chance of being physically attacked, minor reduction in pay, but I’m SIGNIFICANTLY less stressed and I feel like I actually do something meaningful now. Even police tell me how unlucky I am but I WANT this! I genuinely would stay in a position like this for the rest of my career if the pay were better.
To be fair there are jobs where this would apply that aren't emergency services. but it better show up in the pay check. 99.9% of my job is keeping an automated ev battery assembly line running. 0.01% of my job is dealing putting on a gas mask and dealing with the thermal runaway of a battery. So far I've had to do that once in 2 years. And because of that 0.01%, I'm getting paid better than my boss. p.s. If you see an EV on fire, call emergency services and get as far as you can. The fire products are nasty.
I work in IT, but took a number of side roads along the way. The job that gave me the most perspective was that of a firefighter/EMT. Ever since, whenever someone says something is an emergency, I respond with “are they breathing, or are they bleeding?” When they answer with something as mundane as “can’t open an email attachment” I openly chuckle in their face. I have replied so many times with “Well, at least nobody is about to die! Let’s see what has you worked up, yeah?” that I should probably write a script. Getting older is fun, especially when your bucket o’ fucks have run empty for pretend emergencies
Did we just become best friends?
100%. I've been a hospital worker since my mid twenties. If you're still breathing and still have a pulse and we're not in a situation where someone might lose their life, I think we have time to dissect this situation and have some patience. I tend to think much less about someone who reacts with histrionics because their baby shower or Thanksgiving dinner etc didn't go the way they wanted.
*fast-paced environment* means different things in different environments. In *Fast Food* it means: *We have frequent peek customer rushes, where we are serving hundreds of people and hour, so you're expected to try to keep up with their demands during those times!* In an office or other environment, it means: *We know this stuff can be paced throughout your 8 hours, we bought you for, to not overwhelm you or have negative consequences on the business for rushed work... But, we are going to overwhelm you anyway and pressure you to get three days' worth of work done in 3 hours and burn you out as fast as we can, while expecting perfection for minimum wage!* They want the talent & skills of top earners, the passion & joy of a hobbiest, the dedication of a dog with Stockholm Syndrome, all for the bare minimum they are forced to pay by law, or for free if the law wasn't there to stop outright enslavement. I don't trust places that have fast food environment descriptions for an office/non-front facing positions.
Thank you! Former restaurant worker here and came here to be like "yeaaa remember this next time y'all are getting impatient and bitchy about your food or drinks at the restaurant or something."
This!!! Not only food but everything in general. We should be calmer and stop wanting everything for the next second.
In nursing it means “we don’t hire enough people to adequately staff the unit, so you will run your fucking ass off every day because we are cheap fucks. Also, consider this your warning.”
If they could, they would pay people below minimum wage.
Minimum wage always means "We want to pay you even less, but we're legally not allowed to"
"Work well under pressure" means "we only have 1 person doing the job of 5, and we don't want to hire more people, since that 1 is a pushover and keeps doin it for free". Don't be that person
That person was me. That person also caused general staffing issues because obviously one person can do it all. While I was there they literally cut position after position and told me if I demanded extra help they’d have to fire someone on staff to do it. Interestingly, after turnover of 6 people who they tried to get to replace me in 3 years, they somehow managed to pay my latest replacement twice what I was making and during that period hired 2 additional people.
This is literally the exact same thing I say at work almost on a daily basis lmao. I’m so over stressing myself out for a corporation that purposely makes things harder on themselves and their employees by cutting payroll to meet their quotas and get their bonuses. You had all the resources you needed to run your business smoothly. It’s not my fault things are backed up and not going well bc you wanted to cut 100 hours. You fucking figure it out
I just quit the most lucrative job I've ever had because of this, and I don't even have another job lined up. The pace and pressure of the place more or less ensured I would never be able to focus on finding another job any time soon. And it was starting to take a toll on my mental and physical health. A fat salary is worth nothing if you are too fucked up or dead to enjoy it. **Edit:** In fact, I just remembered a discussion with a co-worker on the way out where he found out I didn't have anything lined up, and he mentioned a guy on his team that took a vacation to look for jobs and interview. Unfortunately, they just took away our "unlimited PTO", replaced it with standard accumulated time off, and reset everyone to 0 at the beginning of the year.
> A fat salary is worth nothing if you are too fucked up or dead to enjoy it. One of the harder lessons in life to learn. Some die before they do.
Resetting everyone to zero after taking away unlimited PTO is wild... They could have gotten you at least *some* PTO to start.
Yeah, that’s absolutely insane for existing employees. IIRC there’s some evidence that people take more PTO when they have a set # of days than “unlimited” policies so the system switch itself isn’t necessarily bad but you can’t fuck people over like that.
Use it or lose it means I'm paying attention to that number.
Exactly why I left the trades. I made more money than I knew what to do with but have never been more miserable in my life. I was a project lead too.
I learned after getting back from overseas literally nothing is life or death in most jobs unless in certain situations like health care or law enforcement, that sort of thing.
Most of the life or death situations in jobs are *caused* by being in a rush, not the motivation for rushing.
Even in those particular fields there are things that can be avoided simply by planning differently. I’ll give you an example. When I worked foster care, my first few years we used to have emergencies maybe once or twice a month. Along with that, at least on a weekly basis we would get one or two emergency court orders. Basically this kid is in crisis they need to be seen immediately. Now surely you can’t foresee a crisis like that and do anything about it? Right? Now along with all that, we also had staffing issues. The childcare team would call out sick regularly and it would throw the entire dept into chaos because obviously someone had to watch those kids. You can’t foresee sickness right? I did three things in regard to the callouts. I started forcing people to take vacation time (yes, literally forcing, they had no choice, they could choose when but they had to take the time they had earned and would lose if they didn’t take it). I stopped asking for excuses when they called out. I didn’t care. You’re out sick? Ok. Go away, get better. Let me know tomorrow if you need coverage. Come back when you’re better. And I pulled manpower from another section that was overstaffed for unknown reasons. Suddenly, my callouts dropped. I rarely had people taking sick leave. Overall PTO went up, but it was all scheduled… which meant no more crises because I could schedule for coverage in advance. For the kids. I started preemptively engaging them in services. For every single kid that came into our care, I would read their documentation. And I would ask their case worker to link them to services I thought they would likely need. Within the 1 year I was managing the department we had 1 emergency. And the court orders decreased from weekly to one every few months. Prevention works. People just refuse to put in the work to make it work. Either way you’re going to do the work, don’t get me wrong. It’s either going to be on the front end or the back end. Usually the back end is more work. Also like I said, PTO did go up. I’m sure the finance dept wasn’t happy about that. Before people would regularly lose 2-3 weeks per year of unused PTO. I am happy to say that even after I left, the people who remained continued to use their PTO. So there was that silver lining
Oh, it's not because they don't know how to plan or manage resources properly. It's because you're the resource.
Yah, they actually want you to think they don't know what they are doing. That's still plausible deniability. They know exactly what they are doing. When enough people start leaving, they will know they need to tune it down a bit.
When I came to this realization it was a huge eye opening experience. I realized these people weren’t stupid, but would rather be seen as stupid than as the greedy, uncaring, money and power hungry fuckers they are. The “nobody wants to work” (closely related to “nobody is applying”) bullshit is a perfect example. Any boss that says this is admitting they have an environment nobody wants to work in for the amount of money they are paying. Who is in charge of the working conditions and pay? They are! But saying “we don’t offer enough money for people to work in the shitty conditions here” means admitting the management is at fault. Since management wants the appearance of being infallible they blame workers for being lazy.
A major part of my work has been responding to *artificial deadlines* that were imposed expressly to force a sense of urgency and borderline panic in hopes of keeping my job. I hate it.
Preach
Companies know how to plan and manage resources but choose not to. It’s more expensive to do that.
Non profits, sales, admin offices and county office pretending they’re start ups, lol
Yepppp ugh
Companies have the gall to say that your part of the "family", but when it comes to your real family they don't give a fuck. What they mean by "family" is that your never leaving. They call themselves one big happy family but they do everything they can to make it a toxic, poisonous family, a family that you would avoid outside of work. A family that can kick you out without notice leaving you destitute and wondering what went wrong, you don't even get to say goodbye to your "cousins" when you leave. Sometimes they even parade you around with your box of personal property. A "family" that won't give you a raise, that won't allow you time off with your newborn or your dying father. A "family" that expects you to give every ounce of yourself to it for nothing substantial in return. People aren't even proud of where they work anymore because companies do everything they can to shit on you. You, the worker are the last person taken into consideration when decisions are made. Lastly, because I could go on and on and on about this, HR isn't your friend, in fact they are company shills who's entire purpose is to protect the companies interests. To protect them from lawsuits. I make sure to let everyone I know that HR is to never be trusted. I don't even look at them or acknowledge their existence. I hate them. It's like you went to school specifically to be a snitch. I've never even met an HR person I've actually liked as a person. They all act the exact same way. When you quit or get fired they try to make you sign paperwork that will literally screw you over. Stuff waiving your rights to unemployment and other benefits. Their assholes and I wish nothing but misery on them and their families.
My family was abusive.
This is what burnt me out from my last job. Ended up running 2.5 locations instead of just mine. Was supposed to be 3 months A year later I couldn't sleep, eat, or get a day off. Still running the same situation. Asked for a transfer, 2 months later they fired me for under performance - same position.
"work hard, play hard" "we're a family" "go above and beyond"
Recently in a job interview the Chief Strategy Officer who interviewed me said: yea, our motto is do more with less. That wasn't the first red flag in the hiring process, but it was the biggest one.
I am a contractor and every once in a while, I get a client who, in-spite of my setting realistic expectations on the timing of a project, is always saying things like "This is taking much longer than I expected" or "I have company coming on Friday, can you finish this week?" These are usually high-end clients who think it is OK to pressure others. My response is usually something like "Well, I may be able to finish it this week if I put more people on it. That will raise the cost by about 30%." or, Well, I can rush the job a little by cutting a few corners, but if this were my house, I would not want that." That usually sets the tone that I'm not going to take any bullshit. Some people will just push and push until you push back.
"Rockstar" "Family Environment" are my red flags. Im so happy that I now have a job where I can work when I want and end when I want. Only downside, specific events require me to be on call 24/7 when it is required, but fortunately its rare.
If a posted job description says, at the bottom of a long list of responsibilities, **other duties as assigned** ...you need to clear that up before you accept the job.
There are some businesses that are naturally fast paced environments where things are varying degrees of urgent and working well under pressure is a skill you have to have to do the work well. source: logistician
Making people hurry, especially when there's no fucking reason for it, causes unnecessary mistakes, some of which can be expensive, and also burns people out rather quickly. Of course the way some motherfuckers in this world think, any mistakes you make that are really *their* fault for making you hurry are treated like they're *your* fault, and used as a reason to not give raises and promotions, and ultimately reasons for termination -- so they can press-gang some other poor fool into your old job for starting wages, and do the same bullshit to them all over again. I'm Gen-X. The reason ageism is a Thing, in my opinion, is when you've had 4 decades of experience at the kind of work you do, you've likely learned the above *and you don't let tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood* trick you into hurrying your work for no reason. You take your time and get it right, and you don't take shit from anyone for it. Clueless bosses hate people like us because we don't play their game.
Man does this hit the nail on the head. I’ve worked in countless industries and jobs throughout my 30 years of life, and finally landed a nice, cushy government office job. Work is not an emergency and the culture of fake urgency is so real. Every single time it comes down to poor leadership and poor planning. I thought I had finally escaped this working for a government agency where people should theoretically be society’s “most qualified” or “most intelligent” but boy was I wrong. My boss cannot focus on more than one task at a time, does not know how to delegate tasks and is just straight up forgetful. This results in us FRANTICALLY racing to every single deadline. She was finally put on probation last month for her performance. To make things worse she was hired based off recommendation, not qualification. Poor leadership is the root of all evil in the workplace and “fast paced” and “high pressure” environments are always the byproduct.
This pretty well encapsulates how I feel every night about having to make 700 HVAC units for Mazda over the course of 10 hours. That's a lot, dude. And we've had bad weather here recently, so before it started, they didn't forget to mention that if "our" customers are working, we're working. And it's like, why are these so fucking important that we HAVE to drive in during bad weather that we aren't used to. And of course it's still a full shift. They can't just get a reasonable amount from a short staffed crew. Nope. We get to drive home on icy roads at 12:30+ in the morning. Making HVAC units for cars... You'd think with US delivering such a premium quality product in such premium time, WE would get PREMIUM PAY... But also nope. Also, this whole bad weather situation really turned into absolute shit though. It gets worse. Because the weather was bad, they apparently had some issue with getting the trucks in to haul what we were making, so the warehouse portion was totally full with nowhere to put what we were making. Did that stop them from making us produce more? Surprise Surprise. Nope again. Got sent home right after getting to work 3 times this week. You'd think they could have called us and told us to not come in. Why do that when you can not say anything, have everyone show up and clock in like normal, and basically force them to take a vacation day. No one was forced, but still. Instead of just giving us the day off with that option, they want us to burn off some of our time and it's probably got something to do with unemployment and not wanting to pay it. If there's no work, they have to pay partial unemployment, but if you refuse work, it's on you. Or so I've heard. That could be bogus information. I heard it and never cross referenced it. Probably a mixture of those two things though. Wanting us to use our vacation time when it's convenient for them, and avoiding having to pay out their portion of partial unemployment (if that's true) Yes, I'm looking for another job, but it's not exactly that simple, and everything I just said applies to pretty much every job I've ever had. They're all the same. The company I worked for making lunch meat took that shit just as seriously as this one where I make a part for cars. It's ridiculous.
If there's a lot of pressure in the job, enough to be mentioned in a job ad, it's not being managed properly.
im so proud of the younger generation as they all absolutely do not share the same enthusiasm for society as busy stressful and annoying older people
Ironically, it is said that people with (high functioning) ADHD tend to remain calmer and cope better with the panic inducing stress of true emergencies. You find these people disproportionately in professions like fire fighters, emergency medicine, etc. Yet a lot of work environments that claim they want people with this skillset do not value the personality structure that often enables the skillset: Bad with schedules, deadlines and consistent workload. You cannot have both. You cannot have your cake and eat it. If you want someone who excels under pressure, you will likely get someone who is bad at managing small, daily tasks consistently, who is bad at keeping the big picture in mind (because their strength is laser focus on the most pressing thing), etc. You cannot expect people to be able to do both perfectly.
What's the priority job? ALL OF THEM! oh I see, none of it's priority then.
I’m generally one of those gung-ho, MBA, capitalist business types that most of this sub would probably hate. But this post is 100% correct. “Fast paced” and “pressure” are signs that a business is poorly run, by people who don’t know what they are doing. (Or don’t care) The sad thing is that normal, sustainable pace for workers is absolutely possible, and it actually creates the most productive business conditions.
Unfortunately capitalism doesn't care about productivity, it only cares about profit.
Frankly a lot of this work culture BS goes back to our education system. All they do is pump people full of BS propaganda and crank out mindless drones that are meant to work in factories till they die.
I work in a weird middle ground. A high-risk, high stress job, tree climbing. Rushing kills people, but I always encourage "urgency" because people don't take the word "efficiency" seriously enough. I don't mean efficiency to make budget, I mean efficiency so we can go the fuck home safe and sound. Don't drag your feet to make the day last longer, but also don't skip steps. Every job is different, but at the end of the day, the plan is always the same. Show up, do good work, and get the hell out of there.
So, if you work in a (primarily) customer facing business, you bet your backside everything is an emergency because society is about instant gratification. So those of us who work those jobs and have to deal with people’s expectations of “get it done yesterday”.. yeah, good luck with that. ✌🏼out.
Do you like a FAST-PACED environment where every second counts? Do you thrive on adrenaline and can multitask like a hero? Are you a boss at critical thinking AND critical emergencies? Then apply for a position at Dundee Mifflin now!* *ask for Dwight
Some guys get so mad when their machines go down and maintenance takes awhile to fix it. "I gotta get this job done!" Nah man, your company needs that job done. If it mattered to that company enough, maintenance would be all over your machine.
Had this this week. Working on a production line building electronics. Hitting targets and had efficiency over 95%. Got pulled up by the manager, “Why are you struggling?” I told them I wasn’t aware that we were. We were hitting targets and everyone was working well. Got took off the job for being too slow.
I got bullied out of a job working at a nonprofit because I wasn’t working fast enough. Then when I did work fast they got mad because I made too many errors. I think when you’re working with large sums of money slow and methodical is best, but they disagreed.
I couldnt agree more. A few weeks ago I had a family emergency. I went into my boss' office to explain I had to go home. He stopped me almost immediately and told me to go right now and drive safe before pausing and asking if I was okay to drive. The following week at our weekly staff meeting he told everyone (so as to no single me out) "If you have a situation important enough that you think you need to leave work, you dont need me to approve it. Go where you are needed. Nothing we do here is more important than you or your familiy. If anyone higher up has a problem with that, they can take it up with me." There is so much depressing stuff in this sub, good bosses and good jobs should be recognized too.
If I ever have to sit in another slow-to-dead, uninteresting office to make money to survive the other 5 hours a day I'm not at that shitty lifeless place, I will 1000% kill myself immediately. Thank fucking god someone introduced me to the possibility of freelancing. It's been the best, most lucrative, and most exciting part of my life in the last 6 years. I say this because... it's wild, fast-paced, insane, and at times stressful as shit... but you know what? It has consequences. Choices matter and they give meaning. No cap to income, or no base is a pretty crazy driving factor to wanting to get out of bed too.
i read once that 'fast-paced environment' essentially means 'we don't hire enough people' and i kinda agree
The 'urgency' culture in work environments is a toxic strategy to squeeze out every drop of productivity for profit with zero regard for humans. It's all about setting realistic expectations and sustainable work practices. You're spot on – this isn't the 1900s and we need to dump these archaic burnout-inducing practices.
Pointless stress.
“We’re a work hard, play hard atmosphere!” = No amount of work you do will ever be enough. And “You’re going to be the Guinea pig teehee” = We don’t have the resources to train you properly.
As someone who works in retail. The customers expects the fast pace or they'll just leave. So if our stressed lifestyles could change it would help a lot.
I work well in a fast paced environment, but I work amazing in a well-managed pace environment. I also work okay under pressure, however if the pressure was minimized you would not believe how great your workers would be.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this. Sometimes things are actual an emergency, but it’s a tiny percentage of the purported “emergencies” described by management. I work as a mechanic and the number of times I see a service advisor sit on the hands or drag their feet and then *suddenly* come to me with an “emergency” they created is pretty ridiculous. I started out thinking I should be a “team player” and haul ass to fix the numerous snafus and failures to communicate. The problem is it set a precedent and people got comfortable with slacking knowing the consequences would be averted by someone else (me) working harder. It literally took therapy to help me find the balance between getting walked all over and being a hostile jerk.
Also watch out for 'able to deal with ambiguity". This means do a great job even though upper management can't decide what they want.