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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

I get as angry with recruiters as everyone else, but then I remember then time where I worked for a company that shared a floor of a serviced office building with a recruitment company. They were brutal in their treatment of staff - they were too cheap to get rooms for staff appraisals so they would do them in the coffee area we shared with them so we could hear how they were treated by their management - seeing people (men and women) in tears was pretty much a daily event.

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Used to work at a place that shared a kitchen with a recruitment company and the same thing would happen. Very awkward to have to make a coffee right next to someone in floods of tears getting absolutely monstered by their manager.

Like Lord of the Flies in shiny suits.

A colleagues referred to one of their managers as the Terminator because of the warmth and charisma she displayed.

Most of my friends from university who went into recruiting burned out and quit within 6 months. The turnover (especially in temp agencies) is insane

It's a sales job and a hard one and most people are crap at it,hence the churn. I've spoken to a few in their early 20s that were very good but then they aren't your usual Java is the same as JavaScript type of people.

Jeez louise, imagine working somewhere where coworkers are regularly abused to tears. I really hope that that's an isolated case.

My sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and basically described the same. They set targets for everyone that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and more hours.

She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets (obviously wrong.) She is very much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got fired.

Recruitment companies will literally push their employees to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or they break you and fire you.

Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common and frequent.

Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech.

Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)

At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.

In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem.

This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....

That's actually a genius idea. I wonder how much money is wasted on such things.

I wasn't entirely serious and short of surgically grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)

In repair shops, one used now and then to see a sign running something like

Hourly rates:

$30 $60 if you watch $120 if you help

Next time that happens ask him/her to bring you a coffee, works most of the time...and you can have e little "secret" chuckle.

Heh. Fortunately, I don't work there anymore.

oh that’s fantastic! keeping this in my back pocket

Great advice. Another variation on that is just getting them to look something up for you that is at least tangentially related to your work. Anything where they are now helping you changes the power dynamic and will make them super uncomfortable.

A good project manager will be confident in their position and in doing whatever they can to help the project and won't mind. But that type of person wouldn't be looking over your shoulder unless invited.

"She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets "

But what have they done to deserve the truth?

More or less this is how we get thinga like Chernobyl, when the entire chain is lying because the cost of tellong the truth is too high and there is no incentive to do so.

"and there is no incentive to do so. "

Still, after the accident some of the engineers went for a literal suicide mission to open some ventil to make it all less catastrophic. And unlike the poor construction workers, who died, too, they knew what they were doing.

I doubt they did it just for the postmortal fame. Some people have actually moral standards and can stand by it, even if it means disadvantages.

Worth having a read of the list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

Entries like "received fatal dose of radiation during attempt to manually lower the control rods as he looked directly to the open reactor core."

Absolutely, but the events are not comparable. Sacrafice at Chernobyl might save thousands, sacrafice at %xcorp% saves a fat bonus for the guy responsible for the whole mess in the first place!

if anything saving that man's bonus, just mean that you endorse/enable such practices.

> It is curious--curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.

— Mark Twain in Eruption

Just FYI, those 3 heroes didn't die right away like it hinted in the show. They lived normalish lives.

HBO Chernobyl makes it very clear that the 3 men survived for many years after the accident and that at the time the show was made 2 were still alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHrVlyU3suk&t=132s

Edit: Everyone at the time probably thought that they were being sent to their deaths so they were staggeringly brave - but that's not how things turned out.

I don't know the show you are talking about:

I am talking about actual voluntary suicide missions in chernobyl, like Lelechenko, Aleksandr Grigoryevich:

"in order to spare his younger colleagues from radiation exposure, he went through radioactive water and debris three times to switch off the electrolyzers and the feed of hydrogen to the generators, then tried to supply voltage to the feedwater pumps. "

And he and others did pretty much die right away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

> She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time

This is an example of what universal basic income is intended to prevent.

Also anti-trust laws.

Also strong independent labor unions.

Why on earth would anyone downvote this?

I think HN has been recently overtaken by a lot of very neoliberal people who preach unregulated capitalism very hard.

A world where basic income isn't downvoted, but strong trade unions or anti-trust laws are is a weird one.

Unions definitely have their upsides, but also some rather strong downsides (c.f. most police unions).

Basic income has many of the same upsides, but the downsides are mostly about the dollar cost.

It's not unreasonable that some people prefer to pay (eg) higher taxes than suffer various forms of corruption.

We think unions and laws tend to distort markets much more than honest straight cash transfers.

UBI doesn’t mess with the price system and ruin market efficiency. Unions totally screw it up.

I will take UBI or negative income tax every day of the week over unions.

It's not particularly recent or even surprising, this is basically a SV startup forum after all. Or at least directly adjacent to one.

As someone of a more libertarian bent myself, I find the opposition to unions slightly puzzling. It's clear the disdain is driven by opposition to socialism, as so many unions are subverted by socialists and their influence, but as a general idea they are perfectly acceptable if not ideal and should be championed - free association, individuals coming together to use their bargaining power to provide corrective balance to a part of the market suffering from power and information asymmetry… there's so many good things about unions.

In fact, if they were championed by - shall we call them economic liberals? - then they might be a damned sight harder to subvert and be a whole lot more effective and palatable. I know Sweden has strong unions and workers on boards (something I learnt from the very readable though still arguable book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism[1]), with restricted power (the employees can never become a majority in any vote on the board) and it seems to me to be an obviously good idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Things_They_Don%27t_Tell_Yo...

It was a branch office of one of the big UK recruitment companies - I can't remember their name (it was ~10 years ago).

I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!

I once coded for a recruitment agency and they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit.

they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit

It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for more senior hires. The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher pay

Just like the real estate agent is incentivised to get you a higher price for your home?

No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a repeat customer their incentives are to get decent candidates quickly into a role without causing any issues.

I think a lot of people aren't aware of the studies that support your real estate claim. Velocity and volume are the name of the game.

"The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivized to help you negotiate higher pay"

Not really. Like realters, "Real estate agents do not generally represent the buyer," says Florida real-estate attorney Barry Ansbacher. "But buyers think they do."

Nope. Sales is sales is sales. It’s a pretty harsh world. If you’ve been a solid performer for years, maybe you can miss one monthly quota. Lots of abuse.

I used to know a chap who was a successful partner at a top UK law firm - he had a very successful run of work that lasted for years and made a lot of money for everyone. However, eventually he it came to an end and he had a less than successful month - he got the same bollocking about performance as everyone else, and in front of his entire team too.

Some organisations are just run like that.

the thing with sales is one you develop a sales skill and network - you go and set up your own shop and become an equity owner. consider sales as a learning experience to set up your own shop

Glengarry Glensales, basically...

I imagine a lot of people here would consider it pretty awful if they would be routinely punished because something happened totally out of their control--like a decision maker at a customer changing jobs tanking an "in the bag" deal. Yet that sort of thing happens all the time in sales.

Sales is especially harsh in some environments.

I knew someone who ran the business side of a small company. They thought they were really good at sales. But they were really just handling client service, billing, etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through their own relationships. They ended up going on to do "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't pretty.

My brother worked in commission-based sales for a while. He said the performance bonus structure was awful. It was basically based on your performance increase, rather than your absolute performance. So the top performer would likely get the lowest bonus because it's hard to improve when you're already at the top. If 100% of your calls led to a sale, you might get a good bonus the first year, but you will have made it impossible to get anything in subsequent years.

It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when you first start so you can "get better" every year and get a bigger bonus.

What made it worse was that each year, they would "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went down while expectations on sales went up.

It's funny, you actually see this broken incentive system everywhere once you start looking for it. Here's a quick example from outside the business world.

I've been playing with Duolingo. The main incentive is seeing your "streak" increase (the number of days in a row you complete a lesson). You are allowed to make five mistakes total every day on the free version. If you struggle with a lesson, you might use up all five of them, in which case your streak will die. Duolingo allows you to spend points to buy a new thing of five "hearts" (the traditional video game lives). So you have a fairly strong incentive to make sure you always have a cache of points.

Once you blow through some easy incentives in the first few weeks, there aren't that many ways to get points (besides completing more lessons, which you can't do if you run out of hearts). One of the main ways to get points is to do well in the bracketed competition system, where you are compared to 49 other users you are grouped with every week.

Unless you're in the top 3 (hard, because there are a handful of people who treat Duolingo like a full time job), you don't earn any points from your bracket placement. You only earn points from going up a bracket at the end of a week (top 10). Once you reach the top bracket, you don't get any more points. So the system is actually incentivizing you to repeatedly drop down one bracket so that you can climb it again.

(Interestingly, there's a very easy time-zone based trick to get yourself much easier competition because their matchmaking algorithm is unintelligent. All weekly competitions start at midnight UTC on Monday morning, which is what allows the trick to work. I managed to get top three finishes in a pretty high bracket without much work. Been meaning to write this up...)

" I really hope that that's an isolated case."

On a global scale? Sadly no.

I rather suspect the tech sector is a very safe space, in that regard. Because of demand and supply. But overall life is cheap on this planet.

Sadly, it’s not as rare as it should be. Most of us here have limited experience with jobs where the company doesn’t respect you much and is confident that you can easily be replaced. Unless there’s a union the odds are pretty good that you can find a manager like that at a large organization once you get out of the high-status areas - especially when it’s something like an outsourced labor company where margins are low and replacing people doesn’t have much visible impact on customers.

At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.

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