Decency and respect in general is a two-way street. If your boss is an asshole and the company doesn't give a single lonely shit you don't owe it "common decency".
It's not like that sort of company puts a single dime in "common decency" when time comes for layoffs or firing people, instead they get company security and their stuff shoved in a cardboard box.
If the company is decent and you're quitting because you've found a great job or you think you deserve a raise and they don't agree, sure put in your two weeks and everything. The article specifically talks about bad bosses though, so that probably ain't the subject.
No it isn't. Decency and respect is a way you choose to conduct yourself.
I treat everyone with decency and respect. I choose not to associate with people that are immoral or toxic, but I will treat them with decency and respect because I will not let someone else's conduct dictate how I act. If your boss is bad, resign as soon as possible with 2 weeks notice and wipe your hands of it.
People seem to forget that quitting with no notice also screws one's co-workers. And often times it's the "innocent" co-workers that are affected the worst. I've learned far too late in life that there is never a justification for being a jerk, especially as the unintended and unwanted side effects will reap subtle mayhem around you.
You should always act in a way that optimizes your own desirability as an employee or a person to be associated with in order to keep your options open. It's very rare to find yourself on a hill worth dying on, and to have that hill be clearly seen by others. For me, that standard is not letting an employee go to a funeral, or be at the birth of your child, or something timeboxed and will cause similar extreme emotional/mental pain and duress.
Of course, the flip side is to not have your internal judgments skewed by constant interactions with said boss or bosses. I'm guessing that's how you become a bad boss or employee over time.
No. If you have a morality which says you can act as badly as the worst life throws at you, then your moral conduct isn't stable. You can't have a morality like that, and have something like human rights. Human rights are supposed to be inherent. You can't take them away simply because you're ticked off, or you're practicing tit-for-tat. You can't simply nominate yourself as judge, jury, and executioner.
If you would advocate for human dignity, you not only have to advocate for yourself. You have to do it for others. You have to advocate for human dignity for people you do not like, and for people who you might find offensive or who may even have offended you. If you don't, then you don't believe in human dignity as a principle. You just believe in dignity for yourself and what you can get through whatever power happens to be in your reach.
The important word here is "common". Precisely and pedantically, if you think it's only earned by some, then decency is uncommon for you.
There is indeed a common decency regression in the current tech workforce. It used to be, that not making an appointment, not making a phone call appointment, and the like were simply not done when it came to job interviews and the hiring process. Lots of tech professionals (as corroborated by people saying so here on HN) seem to think it's okay...stuff happens...maybe they just got busy.
Hiring and job interviews are serious business. People's livelihoods are an important issue. It's not the kind of place where it's okay...stuff happens...maybe they just got busy. An attitude like that just strikes me as lacking empathy and awareness of how one is affecting other people. That's not how I think good people behave.
(EDIT: I'm not talking about interviewees blowing off the call. I'm talking about interviewers! With great power comes great responsibility.)
After all, if I was scheduled to interview someone and they don't turn up, that just means I get a free hour to work on something more interesting!
You can also quit with no hesitation or mercy. However, basically no employers on earth will simply stop sending you your paychecks and let it sort itself out, office space style. Which is the equivalent here of 'ghosting' someone.
the examples used in this article were all poor. they picked obviously underpaid hourly positions where walk outs and no shows are not an uncommon exit method. hell in some areas and jobs you can walk out one month and get hired a few weeks or months down the road
Last three times I gave written two week notice I was detained immediately until a security guard could search my pockets and bag, confiscate my company id, and escort me out of the building. All times I was on very good terms with management up to the minute before that.
"I regret to inform you that I must terminate my employment, effective immediately." is the phrase I use now, mailed Saturday morning from the post office so it gets there Monday morning. Friday I stay late, clear out all my personal belongings, and commit-in all my in-progress projects.
Having seen several mass "firing-squad" style layoffs where there's a meeting and some go right while others go left, I've always wondered why two-weeks notice is so engrained culturally when an employee decides to leave on their own.
I'm torn. On one hand, just not showing up is a pretty crappy thing to do to anyone in any situation. On the other, you're right; a company may be perfectly fine leaving you high and dry without notice. Sometimes people in our position get severance or even a heads up, but often times people don't. It's not fair, but I suppose the reality is that many will want a good recommendation, but no one pegs the boss with a layoff.
If, in general, things are going good, I'm just moving on, I'm not going to drop projects that I'm in the middle of. This is especially the case if I like my co-workers and would want to work with them again.
In theory, at-will U.S. employers don't have to give any notice for termination, but in practice, is that actually very common?
2. If you think a corporation gives no-warning layoffs is wrong, then don't reciprocate, take the high road. It's nursery school level life advice: "two wrongs don't make a right"
3. If you are young, the world may seem big. It is not. It is small. There's a good chance you'll run across your boss or a friend of their's in future. Don't burn bridges.
4. It is generally considered polite to offer 2 weeks, offer extra time to ensure an orderly transition, to do as much as possible to make sure there are no difficult loose ends for a successor, and to leave your contact info with an offer to help if any questions come up.
Just be decent and you will live a happier life.
That's relevant how?
> 2. If you think a corporation gives no-warning layoffs is wrong, then don't reciprocate, take the high road. It's nursery school level life advice: "two wrongs don't make a right"
Here's more nursery school level life advice: respect is a two-way street.
> 3. If you are young, the world may seem big. It is not. It is small. You may run across your boss or a friend of their's in future. Don't burn bridges.
Or do, life's too short to keep building bridges into raging tire fires.
> 4. It is generally considered polite to offer 2 weeks, offer extra time to ensure an orderly transition, to do as much as possible to make sure there are no difficult loose ends for a successor, and to leave your contact info with an offer to help if any questions come up.
Meanwhile the company's happy upending your life overnight with no forewarning and not giving a damn about "orderly transition". If it wants orderly transition, how about it pays for it?
Treat people well, and they generally will in return. Sometimes they don't - but does that change who you are?
In every tech industry lay-off I’ve been around, the company has paid severance equal to or longer than any typical employee quitting notice period. IOW, IMO, they are paying for it in general.
2. Taking the high road would be giving employees at your corporation notice. Giving notice to an employee that doesn't give notice is fear-driven, codependent conformism.
3. I'm old. The world is fucking huge.
4. If you want to leave on good terms, leave on good terms. But don't just do it because it's expected. Otherwise it gets taken for granted, and is not reciprocated.
...And gather anything you need before you give your notice, just in case they're the kind of douchebags who will have security frogmarch you out 5 minutes later.
Right. And never tell them the real reason why you left or tell them anything negative in an exit interview (if they have one). Just keep it positive and tell them how you just loved working there and there so many opportunities though etc etc.
Burning bridges might feel good, but it's better not to do it. Even for purely selfish reasons as the industry might be huge but it's super connected. You might find yourself working with the same people again in the future, isn't worth leaving a trail of smoke behind.
2. Treat me better than i treat you. I have to look at the big picture here.
3. You'll be sorry if you run into me again! Better than being a pushover.
4. Don't leave me this way. I can't keep carrying your baggage.
If someone is bad enough to work for that you're ready to walk off the job there is absolutely no reason to continue enabling their toxic behavior. And if you run into them or their friends in future, guess what, they will probably still be toxic.
You should absolutely be decent, but don't smooth talkers exploit that.
As in no warning, no severance, or no warning with severance?
A no warning layoff with severance might result in some hurt feelings, but it's the best way to handle it. Otherwise, emotions could result in the situation turning very sour.
Let's be clear, you don't know how a company will lay you off until they do, and then it's too late to consider the terms of your resignation (of course).
However, if I worked for a company that did a round of layoffs that didn't include me and they gave less than 4 weeks of severance to the most junior person there then I would start looking for a new job. I'd give 2 weeks when I quit. If a company laid me off without severance, and subsequent dire circumstances required me to take me a job there again, I'd still give 2 weeks notice if I resigned. The question of whether they "deserve" it is not meaningful, it's a question of how I choose to act.
Someone elsewhere mentioned legal issues, fear of safety, or gross breach of trust (not getting paid). I'm talking about normal circumstances, not exceptional ones.
While the break up/quit might be initiated more often when one has "market power", there is no reason people should become less or more polite while doing so.
To put it another way, you might job hop more if the market is hot just as you may date more if you are very attractive, but that doesn't mean you can or should be less polite.
There's nothing wrong with ghosting acquaintances or colleagues, especially those that have slighted you in some way, but it's definitely not polite to do it to friends or family, which you're connected to at a deeper level. Just know that there's a potential trade-off in that it may come back to bite you someday, such as when the person they just hired to be your new boss turns out to be your old boss.
It can be a real dick move to the worker bees when someone up and walks with a bunch of domain knowledge without warning, especially if they now have no way to recoup it from you.
I believe it goes back to pre-internet days in order to give the payroll department time to pull you out of the process for the next round of checks, and has just become customary since then.
Put it another way, it's not my job to be polite. It's nice, and helpful, and might help me do my job. But that isn't the job itself. All employment is transactional. Period.
(edited for grammar)
Sure it isn't your "job" and nothing bad may happen to you. Just as nothing bad will happen to you if you berate a small child without reason.
Even if there is no punishment or heaven/hell, and there are not legal issues, that doesn't mean you should not be a kind person.
If it doesn't cost you anything and it will make the life of your employer (or a complete stranger for that matter), I suggest you go ahead and do it.
I don't have an argument for why. I assume as a fellow human being you just see that it is a good (TM) thing.
I'm not saying that thinking of jobs as fluid is a bad thing. But I was raised in the mindset that "you find a good job and you stick with it", even if that mindset really doesn't fit with today's job market. (unfortunately, to my mind...I'd love nothing more than to be able to give a company my loyalty in return for theirs)
Am I the only one concerned about the lack of respect this shows to customers? Some families might have travelled a long way to get there as a special day out, there would certainly be large numbers of disappointed children, etc. Having a grievance with your boss and/or employer is one thing, but making innocent bystanders suffer as a result is something else completely.
Would you have any sympathy for management that purposefully made sure they had a "bus factor" of one and then blamed that person when they inevitably got hit by our theoretical bus?
Maybe apply the same logic the hardware resources if it helps to think of things with less of the emotion in talking about a person; The company has a single consumer grade PC running linux in the corner of a cubicle serving up the entire companies suite of applications, no load balancing or backups at all. Many devs and admins have come and gone recommending a more robust solution but management refuses to consider other options. Whose fault is it when it falls over?
The ex-employee contains some blame. But what they did was probably rational and _just_ from their point of view. As a manager you need to not stack up abuse on the employee to make this rational. And you need to have people you trust to open the park, if one missing person can shut down the park.
Ghosting and rejecting are not immediately synonymous to someone who's never been ghosted before. In fact, ghosting is still a relatively new term, in this sense, confined to originating within this decade (I believe). Stating for someone to simply accept the rejection without complaint is expecting it to be a standard everywhere, when that most probably is not going to be the case.
Ghosting seems to specific to the American culture and, even then, this doesn't implicitly mean that everyone will "get the hint", as it were, if they've never been exposed to it before.
In the vast majority of cases, it's really much better all around to at least try to close the loop properly and decently -- even if it runs the risk of some "cost" to yourself (which in most cases - such as having someone argue with you - really is quite trivial).
It was an amusing non-event but the VP continually gave my boss grief for not taking the new hire out to lunch on his first day, as if that were the cause. I'm pretty sure the guy had another offer and was just sort of trying this one out. But my boss was diligent after that about taking new hires out to lunch on their first day.
Employers should learn how to respect their employees if they don't want this and other things to happen to them. Otherwise, they deserve this and worse. They could have paid the couple thousand Kris requested and was promised in raises instead of losing $20k but they were assholes. They got what they deserved those fucking pieces of shit.
I fear that this will be another term that LinkedIn recruiters can throw in your face to make you respond. "Are you ghosting me???"
People who work for minimum wage generally have no leverage when it comes to how they're treated and often put up with a lot of abuse because if they quit and miss that next paycheck chances are they won't be able to make rent or buy food. Their bosses know this and the worst of them know exactly how to exploit it.
I've heard plenty of horror stories, mostly including your typical verbal abuse and sexual harassment, but a surprising amount were more extreme. Things like threats of violence and extortion. This pales in comparison to some of the things I've heard, but at one job I was called "retarded" by my boss on my first day and it only got worse from there. I didn't ghost, but I did quit on the spot once I had my fill. That employer didn't deserve a 2 week notice, and 13 years later I still stand by that.
Due to the power dynamic people will put up with this for months, even years, on end. When a worker has had enough is it really any surprise they would ghost? Can you really blame them?
But it sounds like you had a truly abusive manager, and you still didn't ghost, to your credit.
I've quit two jobs with notice. I'm a little bit conflict averse, and had a hard time doing it. Like many things its not easy to tell your boss you are leaving, especially if they job wasn't particularly bad and your boss is decent. For one I was going back to school, thats easier.
The first one I actually said the company will survive without me, which got a chuckle.
It is bad practice, but it seems it is justifiable sometimes (like the water park case)
It’s 2019 and it appears this headline was better fit for 5 years ago.
I work as a dev, and I still have to climb through hoops and spend money on multiple technical interviews to get hired. Friends in other industries will sometimes even have it harder.
Where are these plentiful jobs? Where is this labor market so great that employees can just walk out on a whim? This seems like NPR is out of touch.
Wages, however, are not growing at the same rate, which is probably more related to your experience.
Let's say you worked at a Theranos, your options are a) to quit amicably with the real risk they will try to discredit you to protect their reputation, b) stay and become compromised until you are thrown under the bus and fired, or c) cut off all contact and create uncertainty about how much leverage you could have while you move on and rebuild.
Barring martyring yourself as a whistle blower with or without evidence, c) looks pretty good. Looking back viewed through a lens like this, I can say people could even regret not-ghosting some former employers.
Despite it’s brutal distortions, the labour market does sometimes work in the advantage of workers.
I get the arguments about a bad boss and such, but be the adult and tell them. Hell telling them might be the best part.
I sorta suspect some of this is actually social awkwardness and folks avoiding an uncomfortable discussion more than it is some big social commentary about "bosses bad we have the power now".
People in places with crippled labor laws should consider coordinated ghosting. If the bargaining power attainable through a union has been whittled away to the point that ghosting provides more leverage, then ghosting should be adopted. The more common the tactic becomes, the less potential downside for people who adopt it.
I wondered if it was an old colleague of mine with a 15+ year reputation for ghosting employers when he was burned out, so I asked, and of course it was.
I usually leave on good enough terms to have a conversation with my boss, but I ghosted an incredibly abusive employer once, and it felt pretty good.
I have seen co-workers simply vanish. This did not necessarily have to do with their disagreements with the employer. It was disconcerting. Did the guy fall off the face of the earth?
But still - given the overall narrative of the situation, it sill would be been a lot classier to have given proper notice in this case. Something short and sweet like:
"I've been trying for several weeks to work with bring my compensation in line with the very clear promises you made several months ago, but unfortunately you've been consistently unresponsive. I am now left with no choice but to terminate my services immediately. Sincerely, Kris
would be a lot easier to look back on (and explain to future employers) - and would have definitely gotten the message across.
As with bad service at a restaurant, I still leave a normal tip, because it reflects more on me than on the server.
First one - We were both hired as FED's. It was at a large corporation. We got about a week in and he tells me was put on active duty (he was in the Army) and just ghosted. Never told the manager, myself, nobody. Manager starts pressing me because the recruiter can't get a hold of him. I tell the manager I don't have any contact info for him and told the manager he told me he got put back on active duty.
Second one - "Hey bud, we're together again at XYZ company!!" Was the email I got from him over LinkedIN. First day I ask the manager where he was as we were friends and worked together before. Manager says he has no idea where he is. Three days later, three more no calls/no shows. Disappears again. I can't get him on gmail chat, linkedin, nothing. Just gone again.
Third one - I recommended him to a hiring manager who was desperate for bodies. I wasn't happy, and told Alex this gig is a dumpster fire and not to take the gig. He didn't listen. Shows up the first day, gets his laptop, and is constantly at my desk, "Dude, why are they doing stuff this way? This is so stupid." Second day worked a half day and just left out the blue and that was it. Took his MacBook Pro with him and ghosted everybody again. I left a few weeks later so I'm not sure they ever got their laptop back.
Fourth one - He was already working at a cool gig and got me an interview and then I landed another FED role with him. The two projects they were banking on evaporated and got canceled. They started laying off people in droves. The area we sat in had maybe 25 contractors. Within a week, we were down to 12. After that first week, he figured he was next so he just stopped showing up, but he kept filling out his timesheet. Found out later they paid him for three weeks he never showed up for.
Last one - in 2013, we both were hired at this sweet startup. First month things are peachy. I figure maybe this is it, Alex finally got his shit together and he'll actually stick around. Nope. Second month, things started getting harder. Crunch time was coming around. Longer days, nose to the grindstone, all that. The following week Monday he's a NC/NS again. By Wednesday, I start hearing things. By Friday, in a 1:1 with my manager, he asks me if I can get a hold of Alex for him. I ask why. He tells me on Tuesday, he got a voicemail from Alex saying, "Loved working there, love you guys, but I'm fleeing the country, I'll mail my laptop back when I get to where I'm going." I just told the manager, "While that is pretty crazy, I'm not really surprised."
That was the last time I heard from until a recruiter called this year me asking about him because he was putting him in for an interview at one of the clients, a big Fortune 500 company. I honestly had no idea how to respond to the idea he could continue to be gainfully employed after all the shit he's pulled on multiple companies and multiple recruiters.
- Ghosting is w/e but seems kinda petty or social awkward depending on the circumstance. People have ghosted before, and the office still went on pretty much as normal. It's only annoying to other employees when the person ghosting drops a huge unexpected load of work on their old coworkers or project team. Then it screws over innocent bystanders more than bosses.
- Employers/Employees sometimes try to go tit-for-tat on being an asshole to each other. Usually nobody wins in this case. Sometimes it gets quite childish where employees complain about bosses to management, then bosses come back and complain about employees, and there's a cycle of bitterness until one side wears down the other. Get out if that happens.
- Instances of asshole behavior:
1. There was an issue from upper management to a manager, who then passed off the project to his team. The manager and the team put in a lot of work on the project (stayed late some days to get a faster turnaround to the execs) saying this would make their team look really good. After the project was complete, the manager passed it over to the execs and basically took credit for the entire thing without giving individual acknowledgement to the team. Total dick move.
2. A guy was laid off, and decided to give the boss a piece of his mind. It went from "Yea!" to "Yikes.." At first he summarized what was wrong with the workplace, which was cool. However, then it got into a diatribe about how personally awful the boss and management are. A lot of insults were said. He said the boss's daughter (who was a part-time intern) was a "slut-looking nepotistic dumbass", then pushed a bunch of stuff off a desk and said he would "mail, ring, and email" the boss everyday to tell him how terrible he was until he killed himself. Funny thing was after this was over, the guy left and put his hand up for a high-five from his coworkers like "I showed him!".
3. Another person really didn't like their job roles, and thought they would be totally different based on the interviews. He ended up taking another job a few months after being hired, but not before deleting all of his work and a repository that took hours to restore as a sort of "F U" for wasting his time with work he wasn't interested in doing. That was actually super annoying, and all of us remembered that guy for it.
4. Corporate "trialed" no timesheets by doing data analysis on badge detections to tell when employees were coming/leaving instead. It took no time before people realized it's a malicious convenience offering, and it was (supposedly) ended. The corporate thought behind it was pretty disrespectful and micro-managing.
Bonus: One time a manager and employee were fired for working together to sell credit card numbers from legitimate B2B sales on the darkweb as a "side hustle".
Because government regulations only allows past employers to verify that 1) yes the employee worked here 2) this was his job title and 3) these are the date ranges when he worked. Telling anything about "was he a good employee or not" is grounds for a lawsuit.
That has removed incentives for employees to give notice before they quit.
