Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

A few anecdotes collected from social media combined with an interview doesn’t constitute a widespread trend.

Regardless: Rage quitting a bad job may feel good, but it almost never accomplishes anything positive. Bad employers see a rage quit episode not as an indictment of their management practices, but as confirmation that the employee was a bad apple whose opinions can be disregarded.

If you must escape a company ASAP for whatever reason, submitting a calm resignation with little or no notice is going to send a stronger message than performing one last childish act on the way out. Nobody likes losing a good, professional employee. But if your last act is immature and difficult, they will be glad you’re gone.

View on HN

Do these workers care if anything changes? I think they just want to be out of the situation.

Retail workers individually have 0 sway in corporate anything. They're just a cog.

And if your (mental) health is in jeopardy at your job, quit. Literally. Clock out and walk out. You're not a slave, although with the screaming fits I've been subjected to and seen, they certainly think so.

Workers in general have zero sway. Every company I have worked with has had high turnover. Every company has had management complain about it.

That generally is the end of the conversation, not by employee choice.

Quitting is how you get out of a situation; rage quitting is making some kind of point.

Their definition of rage quitting is

> So Kendra walked out, and never went back.

> The phenomenon of rage-quitting is as old as work itself. Some people prefer to end things with a bang, not a whimper. So things like bridge-burning, walking off sans a two weeks' notice, or even making a scene are nothing new when leaving a workplace.

So it seems to include just leaving immediately as well as making a scene.

Seems like they needed to come up with a bogus definition to increase the stats for their story. The scene is the "rage" part.

Have you ever worked retail/restaurant trade?

It is thankless, poorly managed, tenuously stable, randomly scheduled work.

No one writes resignation or gives much advanced notice.

It's a good idea for parents to make sure their kid does this kind of work for a summer in their teens at least, gives a bit of perspective.

> It's a good idea for parents to make sure their kid does this kind of work for a summer in their teens at least, gives a bit of perspective.

Interesting that this is pointed out, since I noticed they linked to this article, describing these sorts of jobs being a "teenage rite of passage" to be a myth.

https://www.businessinsider.com/five-huge-myths-about-workin...

> According to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, about half of the families of front-line fast-food workers depend on public programs, compared with 25 percent of the American workforce.

That being said... the "bit of perspective" likely holds some weight. Many adults having no experience in this kind of hourly work simply do not know what it is like, and make judgements that demonstrate the lack of perspective.

I think it used to be, but has become a form of more regular employment for older people over time.

People are now busy forcing their kids through various pre-college resume polishing activities/clubs/sports/courses/etc rather than making some minimum wage over the summer..

Anyway one could do a little google instead of just replying in the negative without backing.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/07/during-the-...

"In 2019, 35.8% of teens worked over the summer. As recently as 2000, more than half (51.7%) of U.S. teens could expect to spend at least part of their summer vacation lifeguarding, selling T-shirts, dishing up soft-serve ice cream or otherwise working for pay."

I did not intend it to be negative - just something worth exploring in more detail. Not every response is wild disagreement!

But yes - it is common for teenagers to take on hourly jobs.

> Interesting that this is pointed out, since I noticed they linked to this article, describing these sorts of jobs being a "teenage rite of passage" to be a myth.

The hyperlink's text claims it is a myth, but the linked article does not refute the idea that working this kind of job is considered by our culture to be a significant growth step for teenagers.

Spoken like a true boss who can’t even begin to understand the emotions conveyed by employees at the bottom of the chain.

Spoken like a true impulsive employee who can't even begin to understand how strategic decisions are made or how humans organize in larger organizations such as corporations.

I imagine that his point is that workers aren't trying to bring about change. They just want to be done.

Yeah that's a fair point that I didn't consider; you're probably right.

Unfortunately, workers are still shooting themselves in the foot by doing this. Having emotional outbursts is always the wrong move and it's one that might haunt you well into your professional future.

The workers being referred to here have no professional future in the types of employment sectors they are in.

I thought everyone understood the strategy is to use the excess supply of labor to push people to their limit and squeeze them as much as possible. And in commodity businesses with low profit margins, businesses that do not squeeze as much as possible get crushed by those that do.

You know, that could be made illegal. It's called labor law and kind of missing in the USA. Also insufficient in many other places.

Ah yes, you can fire the employee at any time without severance, but how dare we not give two weeks notice, or be more understanding about why the owners schedule late and pay next to nothing, and treat us like disposable trash (spoiler alert- its profit).

That's fine, you can sit high and mighty on your chair. I'm sure as in most things life, it will reward you with a fresh batch of what you call suckers (aka people who have no other choice) to exploit. Generally speaking though, I don't think over large swaths of time your point of view has proven to be sustainable. It did and will crumble eventually, being a sucker (see definition above) has an expiration on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com