And having switched jobs quite a few times, the next one is always better for you, regardless.
It's not an equal relationship. One side usually has significantly more power than the other.
* The irrational biases of other companies (even if we didn't care about you being a university grad, our commensurately lower wage offering reflected the fact that other companies did).
* If the employee telegraphed an air of needing the job (e.g. people with a debts), they got offered commensurately less.
It's an ugly process, truth be told.
People assume that that is all about skills but it isn't necessarily. An employee with a serious debt problem and a mortgage payment due soon will be more likely to accept a bad deal than an equally skilled employee who doesn't.
Apparently they did not.
At the end of the day, the people working at the company are the ones who are doing the work, and who have control of the means of production. The ex-admin's bosses probably thought they were the important ones, and that this worker was a replacable cog, but they found out the hard way that this was not the case.
I worked at a Fortune 100 investment bank where this happened. Everyone knew layoffs were coming. One week after layoffs came, a digital "bomb" went off wrecking many servers. So security went through, trying to find evidence (nothing incriminating from what I heard, although they had a strong suspect) and also looking for more bombs. They missed out on finding and defusing one, because another one went off a month later.
The view from the pinnacle, people counting the dividends on the checks that they inherited is that they're the job creators, and everyone else is dispensable. This company just found out that is not the case.
Therefore, to behave with integrity, you must have formulated your own set of values about what is "the right way" to behave.
Every minute of every day, we all have the option to behave with or without integrity in a whole range of ways.
You earn respect by demonstrating behaviours over time where you have taken the interests of others into consideration, generally people consider someone who behaves like this to have "integrity", especially when they continue to behave that way when no-one is looking.
Saying things like "The ex-admin's bosses probably thought they were the important ones" indicates a childish set of values where there is a power struggle between employers and employees ........ of course the "bosses" are the important ones, they act for the business which is an independent legal entity, upon which many people depend for their lives to work effectively. If, as an employee, you feel poorly treated or otherwise dissatisfied, then the right thing to do is leave in a polite and respectful manner, even if you feel you were not treated in that way. Depending on the circumstances, if you were actually treated really badly, then the right thing to do is pursue your complaint through the appropriate legal channels.
Someone important in my life once said to me "the only thing you have is your reputation". Take that reputation, defend it, enhance it, nurture it and earn the respect to grow it. Don't throw it in the garbage by smashing other people (or their business) in a childish tantrum. I admit this is hard to do - I regret many things I have done in my life, but I try to lead a life consistent with my own sets of values that I think are meaningful and I get rid of people from my life who I think don't have integrity, or whose values are different from mine in critically important ways.
I get rid of people from my life who I think don't have integrity, or whose values are different from mine in critically important ways.
On this, however, we agree entirely.
I think if everyone treated others the way that they would like to be treated, then the world would be a better place.
Maybe that is too cynical, but it works well as a rule of thumb.
That belief was created and pushed by religious, political, and business elites who themselves did not give equally to other people or treat them fairly. They always schemed out more for themselves. Your rule is best modified to do onto others as they would actually do onto you to the best of your knowledge. Otherwise, your rule will result in more evil happening overtime as the good people will work within the schemes created by the bad people. That's already happening.
Illustrated nicely in Hawk-Dove game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)
http://www.oocities.org/hawkdovegame/simulation.htm
Even includes retaliators which are relevant here.
The large majority of the population will succumb to "what's normal" vs. "what's for the best" to avoid being casted unfavorably. Your regimented approach to seek out the carved out channels of recourse, dictated by authority, suggests you won't combat for change.
We live in a society, yes, and we have norms to abide to. But when we propagate the notion that everyone should put their heads down for the sake of reputation, then the world will never progress.
Especially when considering the asymmetries involved in interactions between a corporation and an individual, i would even suggest that it is a form a bias people can have which could be considered to be a conformity excuse[0].
[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/06/conformity-excuses.htm...
The relationship in most companies is entirely asymmetrical. If times are tough, employees are expected to work unpaid overtime, to sacrifice on pay and perks, to accept layoffs. If times are good, shareholders and executives see all the profit. Employees are expected to show absolute loyalty, but are shown not one shred of loyalty in return. Productivity is soaring across the economy, but wages have been stagnant since the 1970s.
Most employers will never truly respect their employees, ever, under any circumstances. Employees aren't people, they're a "human resource", a cog in the corporate machine as interchangeable as any hardware. More so, in fact - a piece of machinery would be hired on a fixed-term lease, but most employees can be dismissed at will.
I don't endorse vandalism, but I think that it's utterly naive to expect that you can earn the respect or loyalty of corporate America. It doesn't matter how honest you are or how hard you work, you'll still be discarded like an oily rag if you're surplus to requirements. You'll still be lowballed on every pay rise while executives and shareholders make record earnings.
> I don't endorse vandalism, but I think that it's utterly naive to expect that you can earn the respect or loyalty of corporate America. It doesn't matter how honest you are or how hard you work, you'll still be discarded like an oily rag if you're surplus to requirements. You'll still be lowballed on every pay rise while executives and shareholders make record earnings.
You are absolutely correct about corporate America, the executives, and the shareholders. The hard thing is that you can earn the respect and loyalty of the other cogs that you work with, which can be difficult to disentangle from that underlying truth.
The solution to this, should it become a regular occurrence, is to make the folks with the keys to the kingdom replaceable.
It's doable, companies just don't do it because most people don't want to destroy their high paying and relatively comfortable careers committing felonies and getting sent to prison because they had to spend a few weeks or months looking for a new job.
I don't think this really indicates that at all. Maliciously inflicting damage on the company when you're fired is very different from being irreplaceable. It makes it risky to replace you, but that's not the same thing.
Sabotaging servers doesn't mean you're unreplacable any more than a terrorist attack means Western culture is depraved.
I'd believe you if the servers simply started falling apart without this person around, but that wasn't the case.