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Comment by noahc | Hacker News Reader

How would you have handled it differently? We can all get handwavey and say, "I wouldn't let it happen on my watch!"

But, let's say it did happen. Something that you feel is fundamentally important to the companies core and culture hasn't occurred in six months, how do you handle it?

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In general you talk about it. So if over the course of 6 months you have been raising the 'temperature' of the requirement with your report and not getting the results you want, then at some point you have to 'call the vote' as it were. You say "OK, we've talked about this for 6 months, you and I disagree clearly. Rather than waste any more time on this you have a choice to make, you either implement the policy as I've asked you to do or you go work somewhere else, which do you want to do?"

It would be a challenge if out of the blue you had to take this position, and generally as a report to the CEO you won't, although I could imagine that to Steve's manager its going to come as a huge surprise when Steve gives him the requirement that he meet with his employees or be fired, because clearly Steve hasn't been passing along this requirement. For that guy, the unnamed manager for Steve, its going to feel very arbitrary and I feel bad for him.

> How would you have handled it differently?

The way Ben had intended to - by explaining things. He ended up pulling authority and threatening to fire everybody involved, for some reason.

"Some reason" being that they were failing to do the job he had hired and trained them to do. Don't be a prima donna--many working people would get fired just for showing up 30 minutes late, what makes you think you're any more special than they are?

There is a massive difference between knowledge workers and hourly workers at Walmart. I have never met anyone in my life in the tech industry who would 'be fired for showing up 30 minutes late'. This isn't a minimum wage job where you can simply be replaced by the next idiot that walks in the door, so the norms are slightly different. If people want to manage highly skilled workers as if they were replaceable cogs they certainly can, I just suspect it will lead to them having a staff full of replaceable cogs and not much success.

No, there is no difference. Behind every occupation lies a human with dignity, just like you.

I wasn't speaking of a difference in basic humanity, I was speaking of a difference in skill level and options. I also wasn't trying to justify treating anyone poorly, but when your job takes a minimum of skills and you are easily replaceable then, realistically, you have less bargaining power than someone with a much higher skill level or cost of replacement. It would be nice if everyone treated everyone with basic respect and dignity, but on lower wage jobs (trust me, I have held a number of those prior to my going to college, which I did later in life than most peers) you are more easily replaceable because the skills necessary for the job are easily acquirable by most anyone. That translates into less understanding/leeway from a management perspective. This shouldn't be license for management to be a dick, but it does mean that things like getting written-up/disciplined for being 20 minutes late is the norm, whereas in my experience in the tech field being 'late' doesn't even make sense since there aren't really set hours (the presumption is you will get your work done by some deadline, regardless of what hours you choose to work in order to accomplish that). The idea that someone who expects to be treated like a competent adult is being a 'prima donna' is just a strawman insult used by management, likely due to insecurity which drives the need to try and pull power trips to 'show who's in charge'.

Thanks for elaborating.

> There is a massive difference between knowledge workers and hourly workers at Walmart. I have never met anyone in my life in the tech industry who would 'be fired for showing up 30 minutes late'.

There's a massive difference in that specific example, sure. Though not necessarily--lots of knowledge workers are on-call and expected to respond quickly to pages, and repeatedly missing the expected response time would be a firing offense.

But in any business, there are certain non-negotiable requirements that an employee has to meet to keep his job. Showing up on time may or may not be one of them, but the requirements exist. And while it's shitty for any manager to treat his workers as replaceable cogs (even at Wal-Mart--they don't exactly have the best retail employees), it's equally shitty for an individual worker to act like he's irreplaceable and that the rules don't apply to him. As I said, don't be a prima donna.

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