The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over-asking, but I suppose that's really too much to expect in an age so degraded that all the obligations across lines of social class are understood to run in only one direction.
It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Speaking up when something is wrong, open door policies, and work-life balance are the usual suspects. Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
It's all aggrandizement with very little critical thinking about how these policies and values would actually change the workplace. And the companies often hate when they do.
These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
Hmm, I wouldn't say so. In many countries it is illegal for an employer to prescribe what their employees should do on evenings and weekends, including up-skilling. Handing out promotions based on what an employee does outside work hours would quickly lead to labor disputes and penalties.
I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines. And even in countries where this doesn't matter from a labor law perspective, a continuous improvement grindset culture (where employees work to improve for their work duties on a significant percentage of evenings and weekends) would often lead to morale loss, employee self-neglect and burn-out. Imagine how it would feel to have responsibilities after work (spouse, kids, parents, community commitments, chores, etc) when everyone is grinding to get ahead. You'd have no career prospects, too - a recipe for disengagement. Once again, a company would not actually want the consequences of enforcing this team value.
A better value would be that the company should provide improvement opportunities for their teams (conference tickets, time off work for professional certificates, etc), but same as before - they wouldn't want the real consequences (additional time off work) for having the team actually live such values.
I don't think anyone in most companies truly meaningfully lives those values, nor do they work with these values in mind. They may be slightly swayed towards doing something in line with the values ahead of their next performance review, but beyond that - not really. And that's best for everyone, including the company.
Right - it's left "between the lines". In the US - salaried employees don't have any protections here AFAIK, so even if it became formalized, they wouldn't get fines.
I truly cannot tell if this is sarcasm.
But we don't get any dedicated time to actually do that training during business hours. The implication of course is that managers expect it to happen on evenings and weekends.
Along with "giving back" to "the community" in the form of unpaid labor. There is a class system at play where the owners and financiers--not the builders--benefit the most. And they make sure of it. They've effectively co-opted everything that made the early (mid-late 90s) Internet many of us grew up on good and turned it into a money printing machine. Acknowledging that you the worker are a skilled person worth investing resources in, rather than an interchangeable component in the money printer, would give you power they're not comfortable with you having.
Has your manager actively asked you what you want to work on or do?
Sure, same here. What I don't understand is the idea that such pervasive mendacity and self-delusion should acceptably characterize a kind of culture that anyone is expected to regard as worthy of respect.
I realize it has a lot to do with the difference between organizational desiderata and organizational incentives, or put otherwise between asserted and revealed preference. Still, this is a problem in design susceptible to methods of analysis and adjustment recognizably derived as much from engineering as sociology, and it is not a novel field; I first learned of it from books published in the 1960s. The regression in ambient knowledge since then is remarkable, not to say shocking.
So I'd say the amount of attention and rigor applied to values and management principles is roughly commensurate with the amount of attention and rigor applied to product and engineering concerns. That is to say, just barely enough to get by. Yet somehow we print money...
Finance is a cancer in the body of the industry. This is why we say so; this is what it does.
Waiters wait. If you need anything you make eye contact and they come over.
Servers are overly friendly and will interrupt conversations to ask if the food is up to standard, etc.
I've always thought it was due to tipping. Servers need to be active and show they're being attentive in order to get tips.
I've been bothered far more by wait staff in Australia than I ever have in the US. Must be down to the location and the restaurant.
I'm super american, born and raised and now living in the western Midwest. When the wait staff talk to me, I'm genuinely interested in hearing about them. I like meeting new people, even if those people are being paid to meet me. I legitimately enjoy learning about the lives of the people I meet, even briefly.
Is that an American thing? Is that a bad thing?
Possibly it was because it wasn't very crowded and the junior waiter was trying to look busy in front of their supervisor.
The median American in any restaurant with chairs not bolted to the floor can be assumed to operate on roughly the level of a marginally clever, but ill-parented and intemperate, four- or five-year-old child. Even nice places have to deal with this, because neither the child nor the American recognizes any such distinction.
The waitstaff need you to convince them they won't deal with this with you, which you can quickly and easily do by dressing appropriately - I know, but an American would need to be told - and comporting yourself in the correct fashion you described. A place worth eating at will recognize this and leave you pretty much in peace thereafter.
Coincidental, even the ghettos of Baltimore/Detroit likely have a higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe, and this is validated by the increasingly hilarious US-euro monetary exchange rate.
I'm comforted by seeing lots of snapbacks and "SUPREME" printed on clothes by the five-year-old minded Americans around me, because the alternative is hollier-than-thou European mentality of 1. requiring money to use public bathrooms, 2. not giving water by default at many restaurants (and being too poor for ice when asked for it), and 3. spitting in the food of/protesting the existence of the expats/tourists/immigrants who bankroll your entire nations existence in the first place.
Reap what you sow. Watching the UK get flung deeper and deeper into its recession as a result of one of the most hilariously stupid and preventable economic self-pwns ever (brexit) is especially delicious to watch. Reminds me why we threw off our tyrannical monarchists in the first place.
> higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe
> increasingly hilarious US-euro monetary exchange rate
But barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people. And you're right, every barber I've ever had has pried into my life. But I've also been more willing to share life experiences with barbers, and listen to their experiences than any other profession. Not sure why.
It is like going out for a smoke on a party to talk with some prospect partner.
Having an excuse to talk other than talking makes it easier.
You are not flirting. You are smoking.
It's a pity that when we realised the cancer sticks[1] aren't so healthy, we just got rid of them instead of trying to replace them with an activity that also allows colleagues to down tools and socialise for a well-determined short time.
(in the Old Country, anyway: over here, many businesses have a coffee break/round of snacks at ~9 and ~16)
[0] apparently one of the prereqs of becoming a welding instructor is knowing all the places in a booth lazier students will attempt to hide their unwelded rods
[1] see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41318314
¹ /watch?v=j58V2vC9EPc ² /watch?v=P_dza9y6cg0
> barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people.
There's someone on staff at my local grocery who once told me she likes working the register because of the human contact, so whenever she's there and there isn't already a line I head for the register instead of the self-checks.
"Intimacy" is a word and concept much misunderstood in this culture as relating only to sex, but at root it has to do with the passage of social and personal boundaries; its root intima refers to the inside of something, and so "intimacy" more usefully describes a spectrum of closeness or a point thereupon.
In that frame, the work of a barber is very slightly more intimate than that of many professionals. I don't know whether it's for having helped create that context - nobody makes you sit down in the chair - in which folks feel a little easier about speaking of things they never ordinarily would. But if I wanted to explain the "barbershop effect" I think it's something I would want to investigate.
Nosy people are a fact of life, and their existence shouldn't invalidate norms against over-sharing in inappropriate contexts.
(And then there are moral reasons, too.)
The moral consideration carries real weight, as you note; lying in a survival situation is one thing, but this kind of problem relatively rarely meets that standard. But even if the potential moral iniquity and certain hazard is entirely ignored, the policy as a practical matter simply cannot work for long.
They just define lying such that the shielding and misrepresentation they do don't count.
Nobody brings their "whole selves" to work, let alone their "selves." I had a lot of blue collar jobs as a teenager and still pick up the occasional shift at my uncle's shop for a call-out. They're guarded but somehow also make professional office life on the west coast rn look like a pearl clutching competition hosted at a flooded blanket factory.