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Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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...

"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...

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