- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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How is being a contractor relevant here? A normal employee could say exactly the same things
And get fired without pay. Contractors have some problems of their own, but their contract usually guarantees a certain amount of pay and if they’re any kind of smart, specific job duties.
I mean, only if you live a country that hates people and refuses to pass any laws about worker protection. If a dutch employer wants to fire you for “Not doing things that aren’t in your contract”, they’re going to have to a hard time.
Even in the USA I don’t think that companies can get away with that.
I have worked for US employers and they are generally aware that contracts are somewhat more enforced than worker rights.
That’s what I said. Contracts protect their named contractors. It’s the regular employees who would get fucked here.
Ah, I kinda meant that in places with proper employee protection, everyone has a contract.
If only everywhere were so fortunate.
Independent contractors, by definition, control their own hours and method of work. If a company tries to control their work, the contractor is actually an employee. This matters because companies have to pay FICA taxes for W2 employees, but not for 1099 contractors. It’s a type of tax fraud called employee misclassification that the IRS has been cracking down on.
Yeah and a normal employee can actually be fired. But independent contractors are usually on completely different contracts so unless the contract actually says they have to start at 9:00 a.m. they don’t have to do anything. Refusing to start at 9:00 a.m. is not a breach of contract like it would be for an employee.
I’m a contractor because the company that I contracted for is far too cheap to actually pay full-time staff, I tend to get in around 10am ish (although one time I started at 4:00 am because for some reason I had loads of energy and couldn’t sleep but then I finished it like 11am so I still did short hours).
As long as a contractor does the work there isn’t really much else they can complain about unless the employer puts other stuff into the contract. It sounds like in this case they didn’t.
In the US requiring a schedule is one of the factors that’s considered when determining if a contactor should be an employee. Other factors include if you’re telling them how to do the job, or who provides the equipment. You can get in trouble if you’re hiring people as contractors that should be employees.
The freelance contractor sounds like a complete child. This is not behavior to admire and will absolutely fuck you up professionally.
Yeah I kind of agree, but it’s hard to say anything without a lot more context. I think daily meetings for staff isn’t a bad idea as long as you keep it to the point, projects can develop daily and it’s a good way to keep things on track. Having meetings doesn’t mean you’re micromanaging. At an old job of mine we had weekly start of week meetings about our plans for the week. These meetings weren’t from management, in fact we had to pull management into the meetings because we had stuff to discuss and needed input and approvals.
Also, not sure what sort of position it is, but I am surprised they said they were sleeping at 9. Everyone lives different lives and I know some jobs have different needs. I frequently login or arrive at work at 9, but I’m not sleeping at 9. I’m not hating on sleeping at 9, but if everyone else is working at 9 I’d wonder if this person is a good match for our work environment. Typically a stand up meeting means it’s either in person or call in from the field, if this is an entirely work from home position than fuck it let them do what the want as long as deadlines are met.
Finally, why does this manager fucking care? It’s a contractor, contractors are the lowest rung on the totem pole. Give them all the work they are required to do, if they don’t finish it then follow the contract. If you don’t like them, or they don’t fit, or their contract needs renegotiation, or literally anything else just don’t renew the contract. You hire contractors so you don’t have to keep them. Being a contractor has the kinds of perks you see here, but you also have a ton of downsides.
Also don’t forget timezones. Just because the employees could be having meetings at that time doesn’t mean the contractor is not in a different TZ and that could be fucking early or late and not fit their defined work hours if they even had a specific time to start and end work, they could just have a “core hours” thing and manage their day time as they see fit.
Totally agree, if that’s the case it’s an excellent reason to be asleep or miss the meeting. If this is the case the manager should also know this and not be surprised. This also goes back to my other point of why do they fucking care, it’s a contractor. Just let the contract run out, add this to the next contract and put it out to bid.
Do you, boo.
Naa this is the attitude needed for ass in chair management that only does one thing and that’s micro manages people. People like this know their only existence is to be a over the shoulder back seat driver who has no other ability than to tell people what to do. Good managers let their people do what they were hired to do. If your projects are getting done and the customers aren’t pissed, then I don’t care if you’re watching reruns of always sunny and drinking beer on a Wednesday at noon. These micromanaging shits are done for now that WFH has basically shown very little of them are needed, and they all know it.
I really wish these were true.
Why do so many of you Redditors think everything is fake? Like, really, where’s the evidence or even “tall tale” tone that makes this sound fake to you? Just because it’s not common? Do you only accept things that are rarer if you see them in photos or something?
I have seen soooo many people win their tribunal like that because the bosses didnt read the contract or assumed everyone was on the same terms. A LOT of money wasted.
Yeah that’s still no reason to act like a dick
Nah stand up meetings are unnecessary bullshit and a wet dream for managers and some team leads. Also I know multiple freelancers that all had stories about weird team leads that wanted to control them while literally not being their boss. They just crave the power over employees, they should just join some bdsm Scene and act out their fantasies there.
I do a stand up meeting for my graveyard shift as infrequently as possible. The day shift in my workplace has one every day.
My guys have more important things to do then listen to me update them on bullshit they are going to forget as soon as it goes in their ear.
This is how I know they are pointless, we would be wasting precious time getting work out on time while day shift obviously has too much time on their hands.
No reason for a manager to have 0 understanding of how employment works.
You are talking about the manager, right? Then you are correct.
They didn’t act like a dick until the employer started getting power trippy though, they didn’t say anything rude before that, just told them what the contract stated. The rudeness was definitely justified here after that though
The guy who texted him was a dick to start off. He didn’t start of being an ass until the manager started getting uppity about a meeting that doesn’t even matter. I have a weekly stand up on Mondays, and honestly we could do without it.
Well he wasn’t a dick from the beginning, like you said, but he was unprofessional. Yeah dude, I was asleep, I basically never go to those… Could be worded in a different way.
Professionalism meaning anything other than honesty or not going out of your way to be rude is just performative ball fluffing. The absence of casualness is just a way to communicate to your superiors that their whims are soooper seeerius and impooorrrtant, and that they shouldn’t be questioned or challenged in any way that doesn’t give them an easy out that makes them feel like they’re in the driver’s seat.
For most of us, there’s no point in pretending we aren’t all a bunch of oversized chimpanzee children playing make believe. Just because some asshole has money and is playing in a big office upstairs doesn’t mean it isn’t just some bullshit game.
No, you can be professional and honest. Not mutually exclusive, or necessarily “ball fluffing”
“Unfortunately, a higher priority task was scheduled at the same time as the standup meeting. This is a recurrent daily task that cannot be postponed and therefore I will not be attending any standup meeting. What’s the task? Oh, its a restorative maintenance session for continued service availability assurance. What’s that mean? I’m sleeping, it means I’m sleeping.”
Ooo that’s the right lingo
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Generally true. We have a daily 30m “standup” but mostly it’s just us shooting the shot because we’re all remote, and it’s a way to socialize a bit. It’s pretty much optional but most of us usually show up just to chat a bit.
We do our real meeting on Monday mornings
I disagree, we’re all remote so most of the time we have no idea what’s going on with other people. Dailies are basically “Ok where are we? What are we doing?” and we’re done in 10-15 minutes. Daily really is one of the most useful meetings for me. We experimented with thread approach but it was horible, no one was reading it and we became desynchronized really quickly
My experience is similar; the projects with daily stand-ups are well coordinated and people remain informed while projects without become chaotic and the people become clueless rapidly.
Yeah, had a similar experience in a place I worked where people wrote in slack the things for the day. It was too much and too noise too and people would not read or care. It’s too annoying and people felt disconnected anyway.
The important thing is really to have a strong arm and focus on the time. I think all the problems I ever had and they were solved in dailes was exactly because someone was enforcing time and not allowing others to say too much or derail the daily in useless details of their tasks or problems.
I’d probably ask people to literally stand (and not walk) while they’re talking. You obviously don’t have to do so, but it’ll give you a better guideline for how long you should be talking.
That was our meeting before covid, but suddenly it became a 2-3 hours meeting every Monday morning. It’s a nice way to drain your whole energy to start the week
I think the length is what’s important. For a long time, my team’s stand ups were going 30-45 minutes and most of it felt pointless (or were discussions that should’ve been on smaller meetings). When I got control over them, I made sure they’re 20 minutes max and I’ll cut people off if they’re talking too long about something only a few people need to input on. Now no one has an issue with the stand up and it’s helped us catch stuff that might’ve been missed otherwise.
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I mostly agree, but only because what people usually call “dailies” are actually morning meetings around half and hour. I also had those sometimes, it’s horrible.
But on the other side, when you have truly meaningful dailies that do what they are supposed and make the right people talk to each other and are short (5 to 10 minutes), those really are good. I’ve had those and I like them a lot.
There’s many mistakes people make, like letting a single person describe in detail the shit they were doing ( nobody cares about that, it’s not a status meeting with your manager), others like focusing on telling things to the manager there which is totally wrong since most times he shouldn’t be there or if there should be totally invisible.
The whole point is to make the people on the team talk with each other, either saying they need help on something or they found something that needs further discussion or deciding that another stakeholder on another team or manager needs to get involved to help unlock something. Most times not even everyone needs to speak, if everyone knows what was happening either because they were pairing or working on something already known, it just needs to be skipped ahead.
Anyway, truly most people are right in hating dailies because almost no one gets them done close to right.
I find them valuable to get a quick overview of what other people in the team are doing and maybe struggling since I could help and is a good way to start the day by knowing which priority I need to focus first (usually help in a review because some other colleague really needs to unlock their work). When working remotely one could spend the whole day sometimes focused on their own work and getting a quick overview with the team is good.
Now, don’t have dailies with managers or people not related to the team unless they were called specifically to help on some issue. And anyway that should just be a quick thing, like saying "hey I’ll need to talk with you maybe after the daily because X"and that’s it.
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It really depends on what is the size of the team, which according to many should not be more than 6 or 7 people. And one core point is not everyone should be forced to say “something”, one should speak if they have anything relevant to add.
I’ve had many meetings where it’s just opening the board, asking everyone if everything looks good or anything blocked, everyone says it seems good and the meeting is ended in 2 minutes.
I just want to point out that this may be true for IT or other remote positions (I don’t know, I’ve never worked in IT.) But in some other industries a quick 5-10 minute morning meeting can be essential. Especially in industries/jobs were everyone doesn’t have computer access. I know Lemmys all tech bros but I did want to point out that this approach works well in other work environments.
Yeah when I’ve managed more junior teams I didn’t have an official morning meeting but I would make a point to do 3 rounds a day. One in the morning, one before lunch, and one before leaving. People could obviously ask questions any time but you’d be shocked at the number of ‘well while you’re here’ questions you get that they never would have walked over with. Once they gained more experience half the time they wouldn’t even take headphones out, just give a thumbs up. Cost me maybe an hour or two a day but def made the team more efficient
Meeting per videochat with the whole team 1 or 2 times a week is enough.
Yup, this. My last job was nothing but meetings where everyone in the room knew what you were doing but everyone still went around the room to verbally reiterate what they were doing… that day! My brain was melting, it felt like grade 3!
You need as many meetings as you need as many meetings. If you need one, set one up. Don’t set them up just to fill them.
The worst part is they ate into all the work time. So leads were like why isn’t this done, well because you had me in a 3h meeting at end of day, that’s why. But that was apparently your problem, not theirs.
There’s a point. Usually it’s to stroke the ego of the managers and reinforce that they can make you do anything, regardless of how useless that activity is.
They can also spend the time interrogating everyone at the same time about how their output isn’t good enough and that they should try harder despite having most of their working time being sucked up with unproductive meetings and fucking TPS reports, and filling out time and completion information on their tracking system, all while you’re getting random ad-hoc untracked walk-up requests from anyone passing by.
I swear, I spend more time reporting and accounting for the fact that yes, I’m working, like I’m paid to do, and I’m expected to do, than I actually spend on doing the work I’ve been hired for. Now we have mandatory meetings about whether I’m doing work and why I’m so far behind and/or so slow at getting things done… maybe I’d be able to get my work finished faster if I didn’t have to stop every 10 minutes to report that, yes, I’m actually still working on the tasks I’m assigned, and dealing with Mark for the sixth time today because he walks by my desk and always has some inane complaint/request/question that he just needs to relay to me every time he goes to the bathroom. I’m not your therapist Mark, if you need me to do something, submit it through the tracking system so I don’t keep looking like a lazy-assed failure! But no, mark is the step nephew of some c-level and if I actually complain or deny him, he’s going to run off to my superior and then I’m going to have more meetings and shit on my plate. I just want to do my job. Leave me the fuck alone.
If your boss is checking in on you that much, that isn’t a good sign.
At minimum, I would let your boss know before you do anything for the nephew because it is their job to say your priorities. Hell, you can even blame your boss for doing this. “I’m sorry, but my boss won’t let me do that” is a great excuse which puts the responsibility on someone else.
Unfortunately there are many juniors that you give the job of doing A to C, and if you come back a week later they’ll report they’re still stuck at job A, point 1 and didn’t want to message anyone, and is something a senior can fix in 5 minutes. Even worse you message them and they just report everything is ok, they’re working on it. Of course they never update the status of the project so you never know if they’re stuck or just not updating.
That makes daily meetings necessary so they don’t lose the entire week and delay the project. Unfortunately more senior members also get dragged in those meetings. It’s a frustrating part of working with mixed teams and a “just let me code” mentality.
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There’s also the very usual problem of the scope of the tasks not being well defined and many times too big, so juniors get overwhelmed and it’s difficult for them to focus on small things to actually progress or identify that they are blocked.
I remember well that when I was junior and not having yet a proper notion of when to call it “I’m blocked” since many times it seems one is blocked but is not, like spending 1 or 2 days reading and understanding the code and how all things work are very legitimate things, which are needed to even know what to ask about. But other times I was actually blocked but could not understand that I was because it felt I was just trying to understand the code and was actually going in circles not knowing when to stop.
It’s all a balance, but the one important thing to do is communicate about it, not just a “I’m doing it”. Usually pairing with someone and take some time to explain the “thought process” and the “current understanding” helps a lot. But, a junior kinda stuck will many times not ask for that time. What I usually do is just after a daily be the one to approach the junior and ask him to pair for a while to help him, without him even asking. Many times this solves the problem.
When I was a manager of a small team it was all junior guys. I had to hammer into their heads to message if they had trouble making progress.
A few times I got the feeling one of the guys was having issues (based on messages). So I called them up on Friday afternoon and they admitted they were way behind because they couldn’t get past an issue. But they said “don’t worry, I’ll work through the weekend to get it done”.
I told him “no, you’re not working on the weekend. We’ll connect on Monday morning and work through the problem together. Just let me know sooner next time so we can get you back on track quicker.”
After a couple of those they got the message that it’s ok to ask for help and isn’t a sign of weakness and they’re not gonna get fired for asking.
As a junior engineer, wish management at my last job told me that. Since our team shrunk and lost basically all of our seniors, I felt like I was walking on thin ice with all the expectations I needed to meet. And when they have to train you + give half of the department processes to you and another junior, it can be paralyzing. Didn’t help that management was never around for me to ask for help too because they were too busy picking up other issues from people leaving the company in other departments. Ugh. Me being fired was always over my head
Yeah. I’ve gotten into the habit of checking up on junior engineers around the time they should be asking me questions. If they haven’t asked me anything, I know they are lost.
Kind agree. Daily standup is often only valuable if the team doesn’t do a lot of communication in other ways. In my team, there’s jira comments, pr comments, slack, project meetings. So our standup is just rote “I’m working on X” over and over.
It makes sense if you’re in an industry with hotspot flare-ups. I work MSP IT and those morning meeting are the way my team asks for help on pressing issues, or rings the alarm bells on business impacting outages. Additionally, Tier I helpdesk and Tier III projects never communicate, so the SUM is where T1 hears about where projects are at (in case they get the breakfix for that item) and T3 knows how swamped T1 is and what mobile techs are out, and T2 gets a chance to tell us if the flow from T1 and T3 into the “escalation sandwich” is too much. And we genuinely have it down pat to 5-10min.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had shitty SUM requirements, but when they’re done right, it’s better than a state of the union email/Teams message.
Still could just be a slack thread or a dashboard. Putting people in a room every day is simply wasteful, even if it “works okay”. When I managed a team I hated them, but we did have a meeting each Friday afternoon to go over what we did well that week, so I guess you have to be tactical about when you pull everyone off task to huddle.
It really depends on the group, the workload, and the structure. I’ve got two fairly ADHD employees that love rabbit holes and one that’s great at focusing, but regularly needs some guidance. A daily morning touchpoint meeting like a standup does wonders for getting us all on the same page, making a few quick decisions, and unblocking them all. It’s honestly the best 15-20 min we could spend for productivity and engagement and our most productive meeting of the day.
We also just do it at our desk or virtually on WFH days because it’s a waste of time to walk 5 min to a room and back when we can use that time solving problems.
If we had less ticket churn, or less interruptions from on call/support work, we could probably do it just MWF, but that’s just not in the cards.
We also just do it at our desk or virtually on WFH days
So, it’s not actually a stand-up meeting.
We do in fact, stand up for it.
People working at home have to stand up? So, their cameras are pointed at their bellies?
Stand up desks are a thing!
Yeah similarly I have no idea what the fuck my boss is doing. Just no communication. That’d be fine if we weren’t the entire engineering department and I routinely have to deal with stuff he did without mentioning to me
we did have a meeting each Friday afternoon to go over what we did well that week
In my experience that highlights a difference in each of your “scales”; how long you can concentrate and focus; how often your interruptions are and how aligned your whole team is.
It sounds like you get less interruptions, more focus on items and your team is more aligned. Which means a lower cadence meeting works well, because you can spend more focus time.
For @[email protected] I suspect they are the opposite. More disruptions and less focus means you need a higher cadence and more chances to keep teammates up to date on who is doing what.
Personally, using teams/slack/whatever to keep up to date on this doesn’t work. As you can read on message, think someone is on one thing and miss the next message where they’ve changed tack. The DSU gives everyone a “reset” point. If you can get away with that weekly, absolutely great.
Where I currently work, SRE (but I’m much more tooling and product focussed and less on-call). My on-call teammates need a daily, I can comfortably join them 2 or 3 times a week on their DSU and not miss things.
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It makes sense if you’re in an industry with hotspot flare-ups
Only if handled properly, which a lot of supposed “stand-ups” aren’t.
I don’t see how you can have a meeting with members of 3 different tiers of support where progress on multiple projects is summarized in a way that someone not on the projects can get anything meaningful out of it, in addition to tier 1 gets to talk about how swamped they are, and tier 2 gets to talk about the flow from tier 1 into some delicious sandwich, and have that only take 5 minutes. I’m guessing that’s a minimum of 15 people in the meeting, if you have multiple tiers and everyone’s present. To get things done in 5 minutes means that on average everyone only gets to talk for 24 seconds. If you have people who aren’t talking, that suggests they don’t need to be in the meeting.
In addition, the whole concept of “standing up” for a meeting is stupid. Sure, it means meetings don’t last as long, but that’s because it’s uncomfortable. Plus there are social dynamics issues you introduce between tall people (often men) and short people (often women).
See, the previous MSP workplace I was at did one a week. If something was pressing the tech would inform the service manager, who would tap the correct resources to assist. The stand up was mostly just reviewing all service ticket requests and making sure nothing was falling through the cracks, so that if someone had a list of lower priority work but got slammed with something intense that took them away from their usual follow ups, those less important jobs could be reassigned to someone with the bandwidth to take them on. Also to ensure that any new tickets are being picked up in a timely fashion (not generally a problem, just doing a health check on it). Took ~1hr across all tickets and techs to review. Almost never longer, but frequently shorter.
It was a small team and we would continually keep in contact throughout the day by phone and slack. Nobody needed baby sitting, we were all professionals and adults.
I only left that position because the owner was cheap and continually denied raises. I didn’t see a raise in ~4 years and decided to find something that paid better. I couldn’t keep paying my bills with all the COVID inflation; I’d still be there if I was paid better.
So glad I don’t work in IT, all I hear about are endless ‘standup’ ‘agile’ ‘blah blah blah’ meetings.
I work remote and message my manager if I need anything. We talk over Teams almost every day, why would we need a meeting. I work with providing support to a client for their Customs import activity. Just leave me alone and let me do my work!
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At my work they are necessary. I’m… I guess middle management, you’d say (supervisor in a shop). Our work changes from day to day, nobody doing the same thing from one day to the next, so there’s an upper and middle management brief where they outline all the work for the day, assign tasks to specific shops, give general information to be passed along (upcoming events and reminders), then I take that to my shop to assign individual tasks from our shop’s workload.
So I attend two of those daily meetings a day (about 5-10 min each) but they are definitely necessary for us.
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Theoretically a group phone call would work, but that would be even more challenging than the meeting. In my shop, I need to know what the other shops are doing to provide personnel if needed, a lot of work is shared between shops, and often plans for the day are not developed until that brief. It’s not just my shop directly being assigned work, it’s a collaborative meeting.
And the meeting that I lead can’t be emails, because we have 2 shared computers for anywhere from 2 to 8 people who will be in the shop any given day (and it takes 5-10 minutes to log onto one of our computers. At least.). And in general we don’t want them hanging out on computers, we want them tasked and heading out to work as soon as possible.
All in all, it’s 15-20 minutes and gives everyone direction for the day. I haven’t come across anyone that has found them to not be worthwhile in my workplace.
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I assure you, it is not.
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Look, man, I’m trying to be as polite as possible, but I’m telling you that you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re so invested in pidgeon-holing your solution into a problem that doesn’t exist because you lack the awareness of a workplace outside of your experience, and refuse to accept such a place could exist.
I absolutely hate wasting time and I am always looking for ways to increase efficiency. I make lists of required tools and consumables for each maintenance card to minimize walking to and from toolboxes and supply. I am constantly seeking out time wasters to remove them, to allow the guys who work for me to focus on their job and get what they need accomplished. I have also worked in my field, in this organization, from the lowest-level worker and every step up to where I am now, for 12 years.
So when I tell you, who don’t even know what field I’m in, that you are offering solutions in search of a problem, and that they wouldn’t work in my workplace, maybe you should show a tiny bit of humility and think I might know better than you how my own workplace works.
I’m not the person you were replying too but I believe that I work in a similar industry to them. Can I just say that you sound like an asshole with this response?
I work in manufacturing and automation does not yet exist for every job on our floor. Every day is different and people actually need to work as a team in our industry. You may be incapable of team work but some industries/jobs still require it. You may not work in a fast paced environment were requirements (sometimes even regarding people’s safety) can change in minutes but some people still do. You may be able to work remotely in your bubble using hands off email leadership that ignores the human element behind the screen but some people are still required to go to work in person and work with other humans face to face.
Telling someone they should layoff everyone by just adding automation is insulting. Telling someone they should be delivering instructions for complex systems, in an industry you clearly know nothing about, over text is asinine. The guy you were talking too is trying to do the best he can to make the people who work for him successful in a low tech enviornment with massive coordination requirements and you think he can be replaced with an automated text message? Fuck you.
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Manager: “Torrential rain at our customers location means we’re going to have to move priorities, I just got the email 5 minutes ago.”
Sup 1: Our new pioritizes mean we’re running the lathe. We cant pivot to project Y because the metal for that was cut incorrectly and the new order is on backorder. We can use that metal to make order K but well have to manually cut it down."
Sup 2: “Tim called out this morning, I can rearrange my department to cover most positions but not that one, can I get John from you to run the lathe? Gary is the most qualified but his sister filed for divorce from Doug on saturday. Doug has to interact with the lathe position all day and itll cause issues.”
Sup 1: “I can give you John if I can get Frank from department X to help cover down.”
Sup 3: " I can give Frank up but were having a baby shower for Rachel at 1400 and Ill need him back for that."
Sup 1: “Thats fine we have maint scheduled for today well just do that then.”
Manager: “Now that we’ve had our 5 -10 minute start up meeting no one do anything. Lets call the IT guy on the other side of the country who hates meetings and get him to program the details of todays resource allocation into joemos skynet. He says its way more efficient than us talking for 5 fucking minutes at the start of the day. It definitely has a section for you’re most experience lathe operators sister is divorcing the forklift driver in another department. Joemo skynet can then text its plan into the ether cause 10% of the floor doesnt even have a working phone number and 99% dont have computer access. Joemo definitely understands the manufacturing industry.”
If you know of a good way to automate leading humans out of manufacturing then youll make millions and CEOs will love you. Because if theres one thing computer systems are definitely great at its dealing with completely unique and non black and white information especially without a human having to manually input it.
Bruv, we have a Team meeting once a week on mondays and it’s basically useless. Once a month would be fine.
I don’t know, call me skeptical or whatever, but this feels like one of those “and everyone clapped” kind of stories
It does seem probably fake, but being able to set boundaries and say no is definitely a major saving grace of freelance work, even if you have strong reasons to be professional about it.
There’s “saying no” and then there’s “You guys really oughta read the contracts you have us sign sometime. Pretty wild stuff in there.”
The burning of bridges on a current contract makes it seem fake, but it could also just be that the guy is fed up and already has something else lined up.
It’s better to stay polite and not be a snarky asshole, but if someone fundamentally misunderstands the nature of their professional relationship with you, they need to be corrected. Yeah you might lose business by answering disrespect with disrespect, but if someone is really pushy with trying to manipulate you into doing free work you didn’t agree to, it’s likely you won’t part on great terms anyway. Being honest and straightforward is more important, and good clients won’t take it personally being told in clear terms how it is.
Ah, the Reddit experience. “Somebody did something cool, nobody ever does anything cool, time to put on my cynical curmudgeon cap and call it fake!”
Dude… you’re so butthurt about people assuming this is fake that you’re insulting them by calling them names.
I wonder what kind of person does that….
Hmmmmm…
It does, and it’s old, but it’s still a good story.
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Willy Wonka didn’t market itself as a documentary.
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I can.
I was stuck in a job I hated for over a decade, and not only that, I was the guy on the team doing the shit jobs no one else would do because many of the older, tenured people didn’t want to work weekend hours ever.
I remember the slight panic in my boss’s eyes when I put in my two weeks, but it wasn’t half as sweet as my former coworker’s panicking when they realized that they’d have to figure out how to do my job without my help. One even had the balls to say something to me about selfishness.
You see, they’d also declined my offer to train them on the functions I was involved in and the items I created.
Glorious.
I love it when people expect loyalty’s benefits without paying loyalty’s price.
The irony is that, for the job I have now (which I LOVE!) I spent the interview talking about the databases and resources I’d created in the former shit job, and that work got me hired. My new employers treat me like absolute gold.
Yeah culture is so important, you can work somewhere people are like whatever we used to do it by hand and nobody died, and then you move somewhere they realize the excel sheet you made saves them hours of time each day. It’s just sad so many people out there working at and owning businesses and they’re just not interested in pursuing best practices.
I always loved the “selfishness” take regarding jobs. It’s business not friendship.
You should be as loyal to your company as your company is to you.
A step further is anything an employer would do is fair game imo. Lie. Cheat. Deny that the sky is up. Their rules.
As loyal as they have been to you in the past, or as loyal as you expect they might be in the future? Because, that’s the problem, things can turn on a dime.
Contractor or not, he sounds like a douche. I was a freelance contractor for 7 years and never talked to anyone like this
Considering that they feel entitled to his time i think it’s fair. They also try to threaten him into submission to their rules. Some people are so accustomed to powertrip that they are genuinely surprised when they can’t do It.
This is great for Internet high fives, but it is an overly hostile/argumentative attitude right out of the gate. Obviously I don’t have any context or backstory, so maybe he already tried the more appropriate way and he was just over it. But if this was the first interaction like this it’s a pretty wild response.
But there is an art to telling people to fuck off that’s still “no(fuck you)” and less "sucks for you"disrespectful but professional.
"I don’t attend the morning stand-ups because they are for employees and not contractors (like me). "
“You need to attend!”
“Of course! I’m happy to renegotiate my contract to include the employee morning meetings when it expires on the 18th next month. Until then, I have other obligations and I won’t be attending those stand-ups. Just a heads up, my current rate reflects my current obligations. If you want me to attend a morning meeting on a regular basis, my rate with go up. Let me know if you want me to send over an updated rate. I should be able to turn it around before the 18th of next month.”
When I do freelancing as a engineer, I had to be like this too.
Lots of startups hire freelancers, treat them like shit and assume you’re part of their 80 hour workweek teams. Those companies often also never survive for very long, where I’m still here.
“I was just informed you weren’t on the morning stand up call this morning” implies that this person wasn’t there either.
They also may have just not checked to see if everyone was on the call, especially if that meeting has a bunch of people on it.
Then there is too many people on that meeting and its a waste of time.
Yeah any stand-up call that has more than like 4 or 5 people on it is automatically gonna be unproductive.
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It’s a middle manager whose presence isn’t needed in daily stand-ups, as evidenced by the attempted micromanaging. We don’t invite those fuckers to stand-ups because they just talk about useless metrics the whole time.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Yes, in most variations golf Agile, middle management should -‘not be in standups. This is the opposite of micromanaging
being absent from the standup is not micromanagement. Getting annoyed while texting a single employee who didn’t hit metrics for one day very much is.
You could have just stopped at “who’s presence isn’t needed.”. If they’ve got time to worry about standup attendance, then it’s extremely likely that all the useful parts of their job will fit into a short python script, and the company can save some money.
Where I am a contractor we have successfully petitioned to delay a “morning standups” until 1:30 p.m. - Which is a much better time to have it because it gives everyone time to A actually wake up, and be there, and B let’s me actually read emails.
So many times things don’t get covered in the morning stand up because no one’s read their emails yet, and then you have to have another meeting at about 11:00 in order to discuss the contents of the email.
Unless the email pertains to the whole team and will take less than 5 minutes to discuss, keep it out of standup!
Typical “manager”. Everyone show up to these useless meetings that don’t get work done or you can’t work here 🙃
There was a part 2 to this. They told him he wasn’t actually fired and to finish the job. He obviously declined
https://twitter.com/BirdRespecter/status/1483897633210974208
Fucking awesome lol. Sorry pal, you can’t just “forget I said that” and walk away 🖕
Bosses are too used to having 100% of power in the boss/employee relationship.
Sounds like it was some power tripping middle manager on a tirade. Oh did the door slam on your hand, be careful! 🖕
Here’s part 2 for those who don’t want to click links.
Legend. Thank you!
Appreciate it! I literally clicked on the link and got confused by all the spam comments promoting dick pills.
Only people really left on Twitter are old conservative men so it tracks that the spambots would tailor their messages to that target audience
Same reason you see a bunch of commercials for Cialis and piss beer during a NASCAR race
Nice, Nitter link in case someone prefers: https://nitter.net/BirdRespecter/status/1483897633210974208#m
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How to not get hired again
What part of that interaction makes you think they’d want to work there after their contract expires?
The next job he wants to get contracted for the previous guy will say don’t hire him here’s another more polite person
