> Flexibility works one way there
A former boss put it like this, "Sure we have flex time! You can arrive any time before 8 and leave any time after 6."
A former boss put it like this, "Sure we have flex time! You can arrive any time before 8 and leave any time after 6."
At my second to last job I put up with a manager that had severe anger management issues and would swear at employees and throw things at staff. I left over 2 years ago. Since then he's been promoted. The company had also won several "Best place to work" awards in the past.
As someone who has done, and still does, a lot of recruitment over the years I think people maybe worry about this too much.
What I mean is perhaps best illustrated with some examples:
- When you're fresh out of college/uni, it can be hard to find a job you really like, so in your first few years you might change job several times. No big deal.
- You leave a job you've been in for several years where you may have been happy and productive for quite a long time, but perhaps you're getting bored, need a new challenge, have been enticed away, or whatever. But then your next job turns out to be not so awesome, and neither is the one after that, so again you change jobs two or three times in a short period. Again, no big deal.
- The company your with restructures/gets taken over/relocates/makes redundancies and, without necessarily wanting to, you find yourself in a position where you need to find work fast. Again, you might not find a job you really like out of the gate and, again, no big deal.
These things don't bother me as a recruiter. What does bother me is a 20 year career where I can see you've changed jobs every year or two. It bothers me even more for management and leadership hires: I start to wonder if you're actually any good at anything, or whether your main talent is schmoozing and jumping ship just before the shit hits the fan (or just in time to take all the credit).
I want some evidence of periods of stability in your employment history, because this shows me that you're capable of committing to something for the longer term, which is when you can really make a positive impact. You're expensive to hire, and when I have hired you, I'm going to invest in your development and success (whatever that means for you), so I'd like to see some return on that investment.
DISCLAIMER: I'm fortunate to work in a tech hub that, whilst not large as a place, certainly has a lot of options in terms of companies to work for (Cambridge, UK).
Because choices go down, companies choose to engage in substandard behavior because of captive populace. And those that can leave, do, thus slowly sapping the area of money and population.
I've seen a few places in the Midwest that did have potent industry. But through similar reasons, most of the people who positively contributed to their community are now gone.
I am guessing you don't work in tech in the US though? I was a bit worried about doing a third "three and out" while looking, and 10 years prior in finance, it may have been an issue, when I was looking at tech companies, no one even batted an eyelash. One HR recruiter even quipped that these would be relatively long tenures in the startup world.
That does look not so good to me tbh. 2 jobs in 2 years would look ok to me. But I guess it depends.
But in your case I wouldn't even put all those jobs on a resume' -- it's too far back.
Doing my exit interview I stated that the reason I was leaving was because management had this goofy view of the world and it was the reason why we struggled finding talent. They felt that because there was no physical competition in the area they could pay a fraction of what their competitors in the field pay and still retain talent. They also felt that it was appropriate to create a convoluted scheme where you could never really get a promotion, just be given more responsibility w/ almost no increase in pay. (You can only move up a level if you have 1 or fewer "needs improvements" while the managers were told that all employees should have no less than 2 "needs improvements" as they should have things to work on over the coming year).
Most people I talked to about that whole situation would offer the "well why didn't you just move" advice not understanding that the pay was just enough to pay for room and board, college loans, and then choose to put the last few dollars into a 401k or into savings to escape that job. I opted for the former hoping I would work my way up to not have this problem. I made the wrong choice.
This is a really interesting comment, thanks for sharing.
I seem to be able to get $250k+ in Silicon Valley and ~$200k in Seattle (which is almost the same after cost of living and state tax), but last time I looked in Tokyo I couldn't get any offers for over 15M JPY/year and even that was a stretch (150k USD at a 100-1 exchange rate, but more like 130k USD at the time)
Likewise, I haven't been able to rustle up any remote job offers for over $150k. I'd LOVE to work from home on a giant ranch out in Flyover, USA for the same mortgage cost as a grungy condo in San Jose, but not if it's going to set back my retirement plans by 10 years
And I've got a news flash for you remote-friendly entrepreneurs: You're competing with people paying $250k/year in the bay area whether you like it or not. Sooner or later some top-paying behemoth is going to put an elite 5 man team on it and make a product that puts your 50 person company out of business. By all means, try to lowball people into $120-$150k/year offers if you can, but if they're not having it, you should consider ponying up.
In the first case, the boss was quite explicit about abusing the scarcity of office jobs in the area (a cluster of small villages and towns). Forced overtime, late paychecks, bad working conditions and verbal abuse were all maintained by a simple threat - "where else will you go?".
In the second case, the job had decent working conditions, but the management had constant troubles finding wood workers (leading them to shutting down a promising department, in which my wife was doing design work), mostly because they tried to low-ball salaries - thinking that in this part of the country, there are lower costs of living and few other jobs for this kind of production, so they can offer below-market pay.
Both businesses are still thriving to this day, and still have mentioned problems.
I keep telling her to quit, we can live on my salary indefinitely while she finds another job but she won’t.
What makes it doubly annoying is that she is conscientious and has a work ethic.
I fucking hate it to be honest, you’d think by now large companies would have figured out the trickle down effects of bad management and have better systems in place to weed it out.
The first thing I’d look at as the boss of a large company is a) department sickness rates, b) department turnover rates
It takes 2 to make an employment relationship. The employee has just as much if not more power than employer.
Personally, I can't put up with a sliver of bullshit from anyone without going postal on them. This is the reason I stay in consulting, setting my own rules.
I used to think that I could encourage and/or browbeat people into taking charge of their own destinies, but after years of a good 99.9% failure rate I'm not so sure any more. (For every 1000 downvotes/insults I eat on Reddit or elsewhere when I tell people to stop putting up with HR's BS, I get about 1-2 people who heed my advice and actually find a new job)
I think regular people just naturally can't fend for themselves, and maybe they need some form of protection..
Oh they can, but for regular people, a job is a privilege. It's not easy to find one, and a lot of people don't have enough financial reserves to afford a long search. The risk/reward analysis ends up leaning heavily towards staying.
> The first thing I’d look at as the boss of a large company is a) department sickness rates, b) department turnover rates
Oh, yes. If one of her bosses did that, he might discover that there's a high turnover rate + pretty negative opinion of the workplace in the region now, caused by one particular manager that's verbally abusive. But employees don't dare complain, because he and the boss are family. They just transfer or quit.
Had a medical issue at work, asked work for temporary and minor adjustments while I recovered and was told "if you don't like it then leave". Things got worse, and worse.
Ended up having a full-on anxiety attack, doctor said there was nothing they could do to help. "The best thing you can do is look for a new job".
I put it off for a bit more, then the boss started making a HR complaint every week. They were always dismissed as baseless "but we have to investigate every one". Imagine what spending two out of five days a week responding to HR complaints did to my work performance.
Went from "Exceeds expectations" to "Consider whether this team member is a good fit for the company" in the space of four months.
In cases like this, leaving is literally the best thing you can do. Take some vacation days to interview elsewhere, then hand them a resignation with the minimum notice period you can. Don't negotiate. Whatever offer or promises they make, stand your ground. Minimum contracted notice period, do a staged handover, leave.
My only regret is that I spent 2 months over my base notice period helping them do a managed hand-over. Didn't want to burn bridges but in hindsight, they'd already burned to ash anyway. I was just too far away to see that.
I wish you and your wife all the best, hopefully either her boss will see sense or she'll find something better.
It's not quitting. It's taking care of yourself.
And after spending years doing embedded systems, industrial control, communications...I was pretty much the opposite of a Web/Mobile developer. Trying to get a remote gig while having none of those skills was difficult (yes there are other industries that can do remote too, but what I was "good at" was not remote friendly tech). I had to create a side job, make a real world project and go around showing that I knew the tech just to get my foot in the door to places that would allow remote work.
I had close to $30K of devices and ancillary equipment in my home office.
On the other hand, there are lots of less-productive companies out there that don’t generate billions of dollars through carefully-tuned funnels, but who still need to employ software engineers. They can’t afford to pay $300k+ to thousands of people like the top companies do. But if they can find some solid talent who happen to have attachments to a lower cost of living area, or maybe are worse at interviewing, etc. they can get away with paying a lot less.
they got you for 15yrs on half the pay!
sadly the world is run by bean counters :(
If the pay was half, we might expect the cost of living to be a third. Was it? (that is: by moving you doubled your salary and tripled your costs)
(I like severity as a sorting mechanism too, which is 3 dimensions of data then)
In a year at that place no one finished anything.
Literally, they had 18mths on a project with less than a 1000 useable lines of code and a team of five.
I wrote a similar system on my own in 3mths doing it after work and weekends for a customer as a side gig.
With the hope that he/she will see their mistake and not treat the remaining employees that way.
The problem with this strategy is you can never go back.
Reading all these stories about bad managers and stuff, do managers and employees take things personal in the US?
So if you leave for a better deal you actually will make personal problems between employer end employee?
Whenever someone under me quits for a better deal or another job that I can't match I tell them "good luck and thanks for the time you shared with us, if you change your mind, welcome back".
Same with salary negotiations, I usually ask them to give me "ammunition" that I can use against the higher-ups to get them raises, that is job offers at other companies, lists of stuff they have done and statements from other departments. Usually I manage to get them 5-10% raise but sometimes even more.
People work so much better if they are happy about their situation from what I can tell.
If you joined, people on the team are helping get you up to speed on new tech, and you quit within two months before we even had a chance at a payoff for the work the team put in, that's off-putting because it's inconsiderate.
It's not illegal, and you have a right to it. But my team likewise has a right to work with people who are considerate of their time. And the business likewise has a right to ask me for positive value from hiring. So I'm going to pass on rehiring that guy.
Now, insta-quitting on being told that you're getting "a kick in the ass" instead of a raise is easily justified and if someone were mismanaged so egregiously previously I'd have no problem rehiring them. To be honest, no software engineer in their right mind would ever go back to a company where that was said unless it was for "fuck you money" so the situation just never arises.
Leaving for more money or a different kind of job is not a big deal. That's life and I'd expect a decent transition with work hand-offs and whatnot. No one will be upset about that.
When we hire someone there is a six months probation period where both parties can terminate the contract without any questions or obligations. This is mainly to make sure that the new members are compatible with the rest.
So when I hire I do so with the knowledge that it might not work out but they won't be blacklisted by the whole company for that reason.
If course if someone would scream at me and curse and storm out I'd likely not want to hire them again, but luckily that's never happened :)
Admittedly, it may take me longer to find a full time salaried job making what I make now, but I’m sure I could find a W2 contract job that pays sufficiently in a month by calling a few local recruiters that I’ve worked with.
I’m no special snowflake. Jobs are plentiful for software developers who have kept their skills in line with the local market in most major metropolitan areas.
I think you might be my new hero: that's a fantastic response to a dick move. I just don't get people who treat employees like crap: it's no road to long-term success or satisfaction. Hope you managed to find something better afterwards.
My experience of being a manager and leader is that these roles, if anything, expose your own human fallibility like nothing else so there's no mileage at all in acting like a smartass to the people who work for you. A little humility goes a long way.
Also, thanks for making me laugh.
You: "The boss?"
HR: "No, you."
New Boss: "So, what time will you be here every day?" Me: "I thought we had discussed that being flexible as traffic can be unpredictable?" New Boss: "We are flexible on the time, but you have to be here by that time every day."
I made it 6 weeks.
Edit: Some companies misrepresent their cultures because they know their actual behavior is unattractive to workers. Bolstering Glassdoor reviews by encouraging unusually satisfied (or otherwise motivated) employees is just another form of this. The strategy is successful at tricking employees into accepting poor working conditions while also demonstrating that the employer isn't worth trusting.
The way the place was run I was expecting one of them to suggest I just skip lunch.
Everything that meetings at the places I've worked at, my entire life, should have been sent out in advance in /some/ format (today it'd be email) for review.
When you do that, you can also have a deadline for rounds of comments... 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, up to a decision deadline where whomever's allowed to make the decision can make their choice with all the views and objections/opinions laid out.
There's literally no reason to ever /actually/ have a meeting of the kind that I've been a part of.
Catbert: "Alice, the experts say you need to balance work and home life. You worked 80 hours last week... that's less than half of the hours in a week. Give us some balance, you selfish hag."
Alice: "This conversation took a nasty turn."
I've started steering very clear of any company that talks about how important loyalty is, or how the employees are all 'like a family'. Biggest red flags for toxic management imo.
There's lots of other imbalances as well like how you have to tolerate being mistreated so you can get a good reference, and you have to actively avoid mentioning negative reasons you left a company in job interviews to avoid being labelled a trouble maker.
Glassdoor was suppose to help with the above I guess.
I've just been giving out former coworkers' contact info instead, and usually they don't even get called. I'm guessing they call the former employer just to verify I actually worked there, but that's it
Steve (manager/owner): "I gave you a break when I hired you!"
Has stuck with me lo these 30+ years...
If you’re meeting your expectations, taking a 10 minute break to take a shit at work doesn’t mean you need to work 10 minutes at home.
"Work is a vacation. From poverty"