Being a Go-Getter Is No Fun
February 9, 2021 5:37 PM   Subscribe

 
See also: The Peter Principle
posted by gwint at 5:49 PM on February 9, 2021 [6 favorites]


This is especially fun in an environment where the CEO has no clue about what's actually going on but likes to spin up and, later, fire entire officefuls of people -- then assign their taskload to whoever was depending on getting those things done.
posted by runehog at 5:54 PM on February 9, 2021 [6 favorites]


This describes my meltdown today yes
posted by sepviva at 5:55 PM on February 9, 2021 [17 favorites]


Yes, generally speaking I have found the reward for doing your work is getting more work. On the other hand, if you do enough to stay in the middle of the pack but not get fired, you're valued. With a little socializing in the right spots, you're an extremely valuable employee everyone loves but, crucially, they give all the work to the poor souls burning themselves out.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 6:03 PM on February 9, 2021 [76 favorites]


And then you get to the point where it’s physically impossible to do the ever-increasing workload, at which point you’re no longer viewed as competent.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:07 PM on February 9, 2021 [86 favorites]


See also: immigrants on a work permit who are always under pressure to be better than their American colleagues or lose their work status and be deported.
posted by bl1nk at 6:13 PM on February 9, 2021 [23 favorites]


Yes, I get this. My last employer threw horrible tasks at me and I lumbered through it. "SPrintF, do your magic!" "Magic" is defined as "product without process," so no one ever understood how many sleepless nights I spent thinking about how to save the enterprise. I'm not a wizard, I'm a worker.
posted by SPrintF at 7:03 PM on February 9, 2021 [14 favorites]


Part of this is a factor of our culture's misunderstanding of 'productivity' (technically, according to the economists, a simple factor of outputs to input), which instead of just calling it a ratio of work, gives 'production' moral qualities relating to hardness of the work and one's personal virtues. Being a 'go-getter'. Self-control. Ingenuity, initiative, 'hustle'. Aptitude, competence, being a high-priced man. Why wouldn't people resent this characteristic—getting more hard work as the reward for effort, more difficult work as a reward for skills—when turning the screws on the human input is the only thing anyone ever imagines matters about production?

I used to have one boss who'd walk around shouting 'productivity, productivity', when what he really meant was 'work faster'. Of course he hired the cheapest and least experienced and motivated workers, i.e. me when I was 17, paid the lawful minimum, and got exactly what you'd expect, shit work, and he had to go around rewarding the 'hardest workers' with flattery and more shifts, because there was no other way to maintain the pace. I had another boss, a much wiser older man, who, true, worked long hours but not very hard, who explained his philosophy of business—if your model of making a living depends on work pace, or unusual competence, high levels of training, or pushing luck, you're a sucker, because those things will run out. 'Why can't we just hire hard-working competent people' is the same question as 'why can't every runner win the race'.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:03 PM on February 9, 2021 [43 favorites]


I especially enjoy this phenomenon when you discover that on top of being given more work you are being paid less than lower-performing workers who are junior to you. ASK ME HOW I KNOW
posted by Anonymous at 7:23 PM on February 9, 2021


Yes, generally speaking I have found the reward for doing your work is getting more work.

"When you're smart, you get all the work. When you're really smart, you get out of all the work."
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:27 PM on February 9, 2021 [12 favorites]


"When you're smart, you get all the work. When you're really smart, you get out of all the work."

That's how certain people born into wealth and privilege learn how to get ahead by having others do their work for them and then claim that all you need to do to get ahead is hard work. The perfect pyramid scheme.
posted by NotTheRedBaron at 7:33 PM on February 9, 2021 [27 favorites]


In a survey of more than 400 employees, they found that high performers were not only aware that they were giving more at work—they rightly assumed that their managers and co-workers didn’t understand how hard it was for them, and thus felt unhappy about being given more tasks. Further, in a survey that was completed by more than 100 couples, partners who had greater self-control said they also felt burden and fatigue from being relied on more at home. (Interestingly, the results of these studies were not broken down by gender, though this certainly opens up a new angle for future study.)

I got to this part in the article and almost screamed in frustration; why not include any of the excellent research from the last five years about the unequal distribution of domestic and emotional labor across gender?! Then I took a closer look at the byline and noticed the publication date...of 2015. Doh.

In general, though, this article is hitting entirely too close to home today. I’m at the point The Underpants Monster describes, where it’s physically impossible to do the work, I have so much on my plate, and I feel like I’m drowning and everyone is standing on the edge of the pool with life rings, refusing to throw them, chiding me that if I just treaded water a little more efficiently I’d stop drowning. It fucking sucks.
posted by stellaluna at 8:02 PM on February 9, 2021 [22 favorites]


“The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches, they gave you a bigger shovel.”

― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
posted by mikelieman at 8:03 PM on February 9, 2021 [23 favorites]


Oh look another opportunity to bring up that time I asked a question here on mefi about what salary I should ask for since I was taking on an entire additional role at my already full time job and was told that I should shut up and be grateful because I was already overpaid for the easy but deadend pink collar job I had and now I would have a full day of work to do. Terrible advice which I did not take.

I will die on the hill of 1. always demand to be paid for your work and 2. know when your plate is full.

My boss asked me several months ago if I'd be interested in taking on [new responsibility] and I said yeah I would love that, that sounds great, which of my current responsibilities would you like me to drop so I am able to take that on, and that's why we pay for third party leave administration now.

Never stop advocating for yourself, ladies.
posted by phunniemee at 8:06 PM on February 9, 2021 [144 favorites]


and I said yeah I would love that, that sounds great, which of my current responsibilities would you like me to drop so I am able to take that on

you are my new hero
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 8:16 PM on February 9, 2021 [23 favorites]


That's how certain people born into wealth and privilege learn how to get ahead

I don't doubt you're right. But I was coming from a very much non-privileged perspective and posted the quote to point out that with a touch more forward thinking, one might manage to avoid getting run roughshod over and preserve one's sanity + work-life balance by figuring out how to avoid taking on yet more of a workload.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:27 PM on February 9, 2021 [3 favorites]


Of course, as with most aphorisms, it over-simplifies; but it still gives me hope that I can maybe avoid being over-burdened and burning out.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:42 PM on February 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


Greg_Ace, I wasn't disputing the quote at all but was merely building onto it. It just got me thinking about how some rich people claim that all poor people need to do is work harder when really they benefitted from the hard work of others.
posted by NotTheRedBaron at 8:54 PM on February 9, 2021 [3 favorites]


True dat, as the kids say.

Do the "kids" still say that?
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:09 PM on February 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


"If you want something done, give it to a busy person."
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:15 PM on February 9, 2021 [5 favorites]


Do the "kids" still say that?

No, they say "fuck you, pay me" because gen z don't play
posted by phunniemee at 9:16 PM on February 9, 2021 [48 favorites]


I just recently left a job where I had to deal with the one-two punch of having the amount of work required to do the job properly underestimated by management and having a catastrophically slacker colleague coddled and favored whose poor quality/lack of work directly dragged down one of my teams ("that's just [x] being [x]"). I got the impression in my last substantive meeting with my boss that it was maybe beginning to dawn on her just how much of a gap I was leaving--but even that wasn't satisfying, because it also sounded like she was considering curtailing my biggest project as a result, and it's an important, publicly-beneficial one that I'd hate to see crippled or tossed.

I'm sure I didn't handle the interpersonal aspects of the slacker colleague all that well, but my former boss is actually very capable in our field and I was perpetually baffled by the way she simply refused to take on information about the demands of working in the specific mode I was working in, which she herself was relatively inexperienced in (our office was going through a shift in focus) but could easily have picked up. I was simultaneously expected to do very sophisticated work in an area she didn't understand and not believed about what was required to do so. If she had actually been incompetent, in some ways it would've been easier to take.
posted by praemunire at 10:23 PM on February 9, 2021 [6 favorites]


New research suggests that competent employees are assigned more work—but

so all of this incompetence I've mustered over the years is good for something after all. My dad would be proud.

[or as that guy in Slacker said, "Every minute you work is a piece of your own death." or something like that.]
posted by philip-random at 10:35 PM on February 9, 2021 [6 favorites]


@Fiasco de Gama, reading that link out of context, I was frankly amazed that it turned out to be Frederick frickin' Winslow Taylor. Because it read like a clear view of economic class relations. Maybe he had that and that's how he used it, in service of the capitalists.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:57 AM on February 10, 2021


I especially enjoy this phenomenon when you discover that on top of being given more work you are being paid less than lower-performing workers who are junior to you. ASK ME HOW I KNOW

That was my BIL's experience working IT at Wal-Mart. They kept "promoting" him which meant giving him more responsibility, more people to manage and more hours on-call but without any commensurate increase in pay. Eventually he figured out that the freshly-hired IT people he was supervising were being paid more than he was so he hit the bricks and went elsewhere.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:23 AM on February 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


As I read this article I went from quoting parts of it out loud to my partner as we both nodded in agreement, to WHITE HOT FURY at the end where the conclusion is a mealy-mouthed "recognize the stress it puts on competent employees" and "giving rewards."

"If someone is doing more than his [sic] fair share, compensate him [sic] for it." Maybe this is the Gen X slacker in me, but no, I do not want to do more work for more money. I want to do a reasonable amount of work that doesn't burn me out, for more money because of the strategic value my high level work brings to the organization. If there's more work to be done HIRE MORE PEOPLE.

I am so tired of organizations constantly operating on these razor-thin staffing margins where even when we push back about capacity and workload, the response is "distribute the work to other staff" and never "hire more people." And the demands in this regard vary by how respected the department/role is in their expertise. Our IT/development team? Gets to fill every empty position immediately. I'm in communications (and for my non-profit this is a HUGE chunk of our work and our comms team is full of skilled people who do way, way more than most and are consistently the ones working long hours AND still putting out quality work) and we have several unfilled positions right now. Let's see, based on the amount of work we are being asked to do and previous staffing levels, my marketing team that should be 8 people is currently 5. Our digital/multimedia team that should be 5 is currently 3. Our policy team that should be 4 is currently 2. Our c-suite is obsessed with finding "efficiencies" in our processes (while still being collaborative, natch) and then freak out when someone's parent dies of COVID and they have to be out for a couple weeks because they've efficiencied-out any redundancies in the work and are panicked that there's no one able to pick up the slack or who even knows what needs to be done.

I could go on and on. It's disrespectful, it's demoralizing, it's burning people out and I have outright said this to my boss, her boss, and my CEO and nothing changes.
posted by misskaz at 4:44 AM on February 10, 2021 [48 favorites]


Maybe this is the Gen X slacker in me, but no, I do not want to do more work for more money. I want to do a reasonable amount of work that doesn't burn me out, for more money because of the strategic value my high level work brings to the organization. If there's more work to be done HIRE MORE PEOPLE.

Right there with you, fellow Xer. I am a graphic designer who was hired to do company collateral design. I have also taken on all of the website admin stuff. It's not really unreasonable, those often go hand-in-hand these days.

This past year, my boss wanted me to also start thinking in terms of "strategic marketing" and urging me to "learn SAP" so I could come up with marketing promotions.

I don't mind doing the website admin stuff, but I have no expertise in properly done Marketing (strategy, research, etc) work, and they definitely need to hire someone who does.

I find SAP horrible to use and opaque to my understanding as well
posted by Fleebnork at 4:57 AM on February 10, 2021 [6 favorites]


I used to have one boss who'd walk around shouting 'productivity, productivity', when what he really meant was 'work faster'.

No - what he meant was 'LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!'
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:03 AM on February 10, 2021 [6 favorites]


I'm sure I didn't handle the interpersonal aspects of the slacker colleague all that well

Don't ever feel bad about that. It's perfectly right and normal that we should find ourselves unable to be kind, patient and tolerant to someone who is spoiling the workplace for everyone else.

(Of course, you might have meant 'I didn't tell them to f*** off as quickly as I should have', in which case I heartily agree.)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:09 AM on February 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


so all of this incompetence I've mustered over the years is good for something after all.

One of the more pleasant surprises about immigrating to the UK is that my barely-adequate, out-the-door-by-5 American-style work ethic makes me look like a raging workaholic over here. It's one of the many reasons I'm clinging to this country with all four limbs like a furious cat.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:41 AM on February 10, 2021 [30 favorites]


As an follow up to this previous comment:

At said job more people came on and one day the boss asked if I could take on some of the overflow of another employee who claimed to be swamped. Yeah, sure, put it in the inbox. Done and done. Next day more of the same. Third day, I put the extra influx back on swamped one's desk, unworked upon.

Employee comes to me that afternoon in high dudgeon, why had I not done the work as asked?

I'm happy to help, I said, but not so you can take a two hour lunch. Do you really want to take this up with our boss?

That would be a no.
posted by BWA at 6:50 AM on February 10, 2021 [18 favorites]


they give all the work to the poor souls burning themselves out

Sigh - this is me - and I am not an employee, but hourly contract consultant (and - out of 30-years in IT, have only been an "employee" for about 5). I have built a solid reputation for "getting shit done" and "going above and beyond" - and while it pays well, I am always extremely busy.

So... hire more people on the project? Sure... but can they do the work? Unfortunately not for about 90% of the time, it ultimately funnels back to a core group of specialists - all of which are going non-stop.

It would be nice to mentor and train them - but, I(we) are already the bottleneck on most projects - or, there isn't any interest on their part. And by the time I(we) have completed the work, it is time to move on to another client/project - and their employers typically have no interest in paying for a training initiative.

It used to be better - in the 90's, there was room to breath - organizations took internal training and job-skilling seriously. Now, they push it to "your own time", if you were serious about "X", you would be learning it at home, right? (Don't even get me started about the craziness of tech interviewing techniques for programming/software development these days)
posted by rozcakj at 6:56 AM on February 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


And never, never, ever admit that you know how to change the toner cartridge, because then it will be your job and yours alone for evermore.
posted by JanetLand at 7:36 AM on February 10, 2021 [25 favorites]


misskaz, I believe what you're describing is what the higher ups always call "doing more with less." Which translates into "you will need to stay longer or take work home but don't expect to be compensated for it."
posted by drstrangelove at 7:56 AM on February 10, 2021 [5 favorites]


My other BIL is an engineer and his company started forcing the staff to work 50-hour weeks due to the volume of work they had. My BIL is very much a "quality of life" kind of guy who values being there for his family and spending time outdoors so he just figured out a way to condense those 50 hours into a regular 40 hour week. The net effect? They just gave him even more work to do so he was still stuck there 50 hours a week.

I ran into a similar situation a few years ago. When I was hired the part that appealed to me most was that it was four 10-hour days and a 3-day weekend every week. But then the dreaded "mission creep" happened and I was voluntold to work an additional 10-hour day on Fridays. To make matters worse this 10 hours was at a facility 70 miles away which meant an additional 2 hours of uncompensated drive time. It took a while to extricate myself from that but eventually I did only for the issue to keep returning. Each time my director basically told me that I wanted the extra money and seemed genuinely puzzled when I said I would rather have more time off. (Imagine his consternation when he said he was also trying to get me a raise and I said I would rather have a few extra vacation days a year.)

(And yes, I am Gen X along with my BILs.)
posted by drstrangelove at 8:04 AM on February 10, 2021 [7 favorites]


I am so tired of organizations constantly operating on these razor-thin staffing margins where even when we push back about capacity and workload, the response is "distribute the work to other staff" and never "hire more people."

Something that's been really interesting about being in HR at a company that's trying to do progressive choices is how RESISTANT so many people are to this very basic concept. We're at the point where we're practically begging certain departments to hire more people with their discretionary personnel budgets--HR provides all the support to source the hires, set up the interviewing, allocate training hours, and will also go to finance to request more personnel budget if needed--they just have to say "yes more people please." But we've got several department heads who just...won't? They'd rather see the personnel budget get spent toward bigger raises for the people on their teams now, and to an extent I get that, but the reality is the people on their teams now are overworked. Everyone likes getting time and a half, but if you're doing 30 hours of OT a week...when are you even gonna spend that money?

It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
posted by phunniemee at 8:05 AM on February 10, 2021 [13 favorites]


I'm not going to lie, I haven't been applying for new jobs as hard as I probably should (I have a spot as a glorified TA for an instructor I have been working with literally since she started professionally teaching and who thinks I rock, but she doesn't teach in the summer and I would like to continue receiving a paycheck in May) because having a boss who doesn't know how to manage... sucks. The worst thing is that from my observation, there's not actually anything you can necessarily do about being the competent one, because only some people are allowed to be incompetent and that usually depends on those people being the kind of people your boss likes to make friends with and think nicely of. I have used the "okay, so which responsibilities would you like me to drop?" scripts and planned out my time and politely made reasonable timelines and all the rest of it, and really all you can do is get the hell out as fast as you can.

Intellectually I know that a new boss probably won't be the same level of shitty as the one I have navigated around for the past eight years. On a purely emotional hindbrain level, I am not really looking forward to having my work micromanaged underneath me again, though.
posted by sciatrix at 9:41 AM on February 10, 2021 [9 favorites]


FWIW, sciatrix, when I left (lol was fired from) my completely toxic job and went to a new place, one of the things I did was establish myself as a person who would not tolerate your bullshit immediately, from the very beginning, even in what was at the start a deadend pink collar job. Having that fresh start, clean slate, and new people meant that I could be that person early and often and no one ever knew I had ever been any different.

So it's not just that you'll have a new manager who won't be so crap, but you can set yourself up for better expectations, too. It literally changed my life.

Sometimes the best answer is to just burn the whole thing down and start over.
posted by phunniemee at 10:01 AM on February 10, 2021 [25 favorites]


They'd rather see the personnel budget get spent toward bigger raises for the people on their teams now, and to an extent I get that, but the reality is the people on their teams now are overworked. Everyone likes getting time and a half, but if you're doing 30 hours of OT a week...when are you even gonna spend that money?

We've been through so many rounds of layoffs, and every round was a percent of people from the various teams, so a blanket (and short-term) round of hiring would have my managers gun-shy about adding a percent that is going to turn around and be laid-off in the near-ish future. Especially when specific hiring requests (for really good people from other teams that were laid off) fell on deaf ears.

We've been through so many rounds the only people left are the go-getters so adding regular employees would also be a risk.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:44 AM on February 10, 2021 [2 favorites]


This has been the situation at my workplace for the past 6 months, except it's my 3-person team that's gone from killing it at our specific job, to increasingly holding up the weight of the entire company. My one coworker is an inherent people pleaser and the other is too young / inexperienced to feel comfortable arguing with management, so it has fallen to me to loudly and unsympathetically push back against their progressively outlandish expectations. And let me be clear, I am not at all resentful about taking on this role for my team--I love these guys and we've settled into kind of an unspoken division of labor that keeps us all sane. People pleaser coworker goes more extra miles than I have patience for, green coworker does more of the tedious annoying tasks that I hate, and I shout at the stubborn men in the office and try to slap the buckets of shit out of their hands before they get a chance to pour them into the fan. It's a win-win-win.

Somehow, one side-effect of my complaining has been management valuing, trusting, and respecting me more than basically anyone else. Did I mention I am also the only woman in the company? Yeah, it's bizarre. I realize this is a very rare situation, and I do not recommend shouting at management as a universal solution to this problem. It's why I've found myself in the confusing position of both wanting to run screaming from this job to never return, and also wanting to never work anywhere else again.
posted by gueneverey at 11:04 AM on February 10, 2021 [7 favorites]


but if you're doing 30 hours of OT a week...when are you even gonna spend that money?

For me? Paying towards my student loans.

I'm fortunately in an actually pleasant job right now. But in previous jobs where I was overworked adding new people didn't necessarily make the load easier in the long run (bosses hiring friends, new hires just not working out) and it would always add work in the short term. The work may be worth it if everything panned out, but usually training gets added on top of current work. So you're adding on more stress now, stress that best case cuts your pay.

And honestly, there's a solid chance that once I'm burnt out on a place I'm not bouncing back. Not unless they give me a 6 month paid vacation. This clearly won't apply to everyone, but if I've had an extended period of running myself ragged I'm never going to trust that it won't happen again and I just can't reset. So I'm going to keeping running full speed getting as much as I can until I collapse.
posted by ghost phoneme at 11:16 AM on February 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


misskaz, I believe what you're describing is what the higher ups always call "doing more with less." Which translates into "you will need to stay longer or take work home but don't expect to be compensated for it."

drstrangelove, it's funny you say that, because they are trying to make "do more OF less" a thing here, as part of a whole song-and-dance about better focus and prioritization. but that focus and prioritization never seems to trickle down very far, and it's really easy for a determined program manager to argue that their program fits into the vaguely worded priorities that everyone has been handed. So ultimately we are doing exactly what you say.

Right now we're in a pandemic-induced recession that is deeply impacting my org's revenue and will likely keep the squeeze on us for at least a couple years, so I understand not hiring for all open positions right this minute, although it's interesting what positions are still being filled... But these problems existed before 2020, so leaning on that as an excuse only goes so far. All three of the open positions in my department were open months to a year before the pandemic and we were asked to "hold" on filling them; then finally given the ok to fill one and my boss took so long to get around to starting the hiring process (we have no HR) that she had just scheduled in-person interviews when everything shut down.

I'm just so tired. And mad that I'm getting resentful about what should be a dream job for me, at least on paper.
posted by misskaz at 11:32 AM on February 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


My workplace is in the process of completely collapsing due to all the people who do the essential but less-visible work getting buried in more and more work until they finally burn out, fail at something critical, and get fired. My boss has no idea what he's doing and refuses to listen to anyone who tries to tell him; this problem has been brewing for years, but when we tried to tell him we need more personnel to address these issues, he directly accused us all of being lazy and told us we needed to work harder. Very soon there will be essentially no institutional knowledge remaining to carry out even the most basic functions. I've put most of my adult life into this place, possibly even sacrificed my opportunity to have children, and my commitment to keeping this place functioning has probably cost me my career. And yes, my boss is a man, and most of the employees trying to tell him there is a problem were women.
posted by biogeo at 11:53 AM on February 10, 2021 [12 favorites]


I think the first time I ran into this was in fifth grade, when the "reward" for having tested out of all the spelling worksheets was to "tutor" the other students who were still working on them. Given that I was a weird (undiagnosed autistic AFAB) kid who the others already didn't like, you can imagine how well this went over and the effect it had on my already non-existent popularity.

I would have loved to have been able to use that time to read a book.
posted by Lexica at 12:05 PM on February 10, 2021 [16 favorites]


It used to be better - in the 90's, there was room to breath - organizations took internal training and job-skilling seriously. Now, they push it to "your own time", if you were serious about "X", you would be learning it at home, right?

OMG the "your own time" thing is so true.

That is why so-called "Lunch and Learn" sessions are bullshit. If employers truly believe the knowledge is important for employees to have, they would not schedule it during the employees' lunch breaks.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 12:11 PM on February 10, 2021 [16 favorites]


Why not? I've worked with many who interpret 'lunch break' as the daily opportunity to go out and take care of personal business, including the quick purchase of some take-out, which is then brought back into the office and consumed at their desk, while "working."
posted by Rash at 12:28 PM on February 10, 2021 [1 favorite]



My boss asked me several months ago if I'd be interested in taking on [new responsibility] and I said yeah I would love that, that sounds great, which of my current responsibilities would you like me to drop so I am able to take that on, and that's why we pay for third party leave administration now.

Never stop advocating for yourself, ladies.


When I had essentially this same conversation with my boss last week she literally just stopped responding to the slack and to my emails, and the subject never came up again. I have no idea if I'm responsible for [new thing] or not; I suspect I am, but I won't know until I don't do it and just someday get yelled at about it. hashtag EMPOWERED.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:49 PM on February 10, 2021 [9 favorites]


daily opportunity to go out and take care of personal business

So - am I reading this uncharitably, but it seems to me that are you not in favor of taking actual breaks? Getting out of a chair, leaving the office to grab some food is not a bad thing. A little exercise and a bit of a mental break - even if the result is eating it back at your desk, while catching-up on email.
posted by rozcakj at 12:52 PM on February 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


No, I'm quite in favor of mandatory lunch breaks, set aside for actual eating. Like I read somewhere, if you always eat lunch at your desk, especially when lunchtime is over, somebody at work hates you. That would be me.
posted by Rash at 12:57 PM on February 10, 2021 [7 favorites]


Honestly, it's hard to compare isolated actions by different employers. I like lunch and learns at my current job. But that's because my employer actually respects my time. They pay for my licensing, credentialing, and continuing education and pay me to do my continuing ed. I work 40 hrs a week, and that's it. I've had one weekend phone call from my boss to manage an actual emergency. It lasted all of 20 minutes but she had me flex out an hour the following week to make up for the inconvenience. So if I have a working lunch now and again? Not a big deal.

Other places where "lunch" was really catch up time? Lunch and learns were the worst. At least during my catch-up time I could close the door (if I was lucky enough to have one) and have some quiet time.
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:00 PM on February 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


Is it because of the smell? Or you resent someone for working because they should not be working on this time, it's time theft because they are not being paid for it?
posted by cape at 1:25 PM on February 10, 2021


I'm someone who hates chewing sounds, particularly when I'm trying to concentrate, so I can totally understand the frustration*. It's still not really a reason for people (especially at other jobs) to have to have lunch and learns.

*To be clear, that's my thing to deal with even when I'm at a place where you can go off and eat. Chewing sounds are a part of life.
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:34 PM on February 10, 2021


Yeah an occasional working lunch is one thing in an environment where your time is respected, your workload is reasonable, and the goal of the working lunch is real and tangible. But too often in places I've worked, "working lunch" is code for "actually just a regular meeting that we had to cram into your lunchtime because we're all so overscheduled that this was the only free space" and it happens *constantly*.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:55 PM on February 10, 2021 [10 favorites]


I remain amazed that corporate america has this far< failed to completely implode into a singularity of bullshit. Probably only because of the people who take on more than they can or should while being denied any kind of support from upper management.

I was going to tell an illustrative story, but I realized that it isn't mine to tell so I'll just leave it at that.
posted by wierdo at 5:17 PM on February 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


I got the impression in my last substantive meeting with my boss that it was maybe beginning to dawn on her just how much of a gap I was leaving,,,

Leaving is the final power. When your skills and internal knowledge are undervalued, there is no way in heck that management will come come to jebus and reimburse you for years of undervalue when it's time to go... hey, is this AskMeFi?
posted by ovvl at 6:05 PM on February 10, 2021 [6 favorites]


To be clear, that's my thing to deal with even when I'm at a place where you can go off and eat. Chewing sounds are a part of life.

misophonia is a real thing. I spent a year sharing an office with an habitual nail-biter/celery eater who took every meal and snack (he was a devoted snacker) at his desk 6 feet away. shitting and pissing is a part of life too, but context matters.
posted by logicpunk at 7:49 PM on February 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


I'm forever greatful to the majority of the science dept, and half the math dept for quitting a few years ago. Treatment of remaining staff has improved so much since then.
posted by subdee at 2:51 AM on February 11, 2021 [3 favorites]


I have been at my job for 9 years this month - and it's changed drastically. We have finally gotten to the point where they just keep handing me more and more, with tighter deadlines, and yes, things are getting dropped (unintentionally) and mistakes are being made. On the one hand, I'm furious with myself for those mistakes, and on the other, I think "well, what did you expect?"

I'm changing positions within the company this spring, and while I am anxious about it, because I don't have all the details, I will be so very glad to hand over part of my responsibility and be able to focus on doing a great job on the rest of it.
posted by needlegrrl at 6:19 AM on February 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


The first and only real professional advice my mom ever taught me was “don’t make coffee for the office. You’ll become the coffee girl.” I don’t really like coffee anyway, I maybe have an iced one from Dunkin every month or so but gosh darn THATS just about the best advice I’ve ever gotten.
posted by raccoon409 at 10:58 AM on February 11, 2021 [5 favorites]


I just want to tell you guys that in 1980, my mother, who was making $13K at a real estate company managing multiple Section 8 housing projects, had to train TWO people to take her place when she left. To give context to that salary, 2 years later I was making $11K as an assistant manager in fast food. She was worth twice what she made, but they wouldn't pay her. I'd like to blame the turn of the century but that shit is not new.

Also, reading these comments makes me incandescent with rage.
posted by corvikate at 1:57 PM on February 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


Not sure if I posted this anecdote previously.

When I was doing my MBA in the late 80s, one of my classmates had a reasonably successful accounting practice. We were discussing staffing issues, and his comment was, "I only hire married women. They are competent, happy to the work and don't ask for salary increases."
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 3:13 PM on February 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


"If someone is doing more than his [sic] fair share, compensate him [sic] for it." Maybe this is the Gen X slacker in me, but no, I do not want to do more work for more money. I want to do a reasonable amount of work that doesn't burn me out, for more money because of the strategic value my high level work brings to the organization. If there's more work to be done HIRE MORE PEOPLE.

For whatever it's worth I am an elder millennial but I also feel this in my bones. I feel like some folks in management think they have now solved this problem by pivoting away from "Doing more with Less" to "OK what can we STOP doing?" without realizing that a lot of the mission critical work that cannot stop being done due to legal/compliance/etc reasons.... really truly can't be stopped and isn't just the flavor of the month bullshit. And the staffing problem persists. And they get paid 6 figure salaries to theoretically make "the hard decisions," and yet the rank and file are expected to lay out all the reasons we need more staff (isn't that management's job? why do we even have management anyway?!). It's insanity.
posted by mostly vowels at 3:52 PM on February 11, 2021 [6 favorites]


mostly vowels, I think you might work at my workplace. We have the exact same thing happening - including the questions about "what can we stop doing?" And including the people making the big bucks not making those decisions, and instead making those of us in middle/lower management positions have to be the ones to tell someone several levels up that there isn't capacity for their request or that it doesn't align with priorities? And let me tell you, no matter how I phrase it, it either sounds like I'm complaining about my workload (not great for one's professional reputation no matter how true it may be) or the person argues me into submission that in fact their project IS an organizational priority and I'm just not clued in to the latest constantly shifting conversations.

I will say that things are getting slightly better lately, but it's happening so slowly, and meanwhile because our budget is not in great shape the staffing issues continue to get worse.
posted by misskaz at 4:27 PM on February 11, 2021 [2 favorites]


my mother, who was making $13K at a real estate company managing multiple Section 8 housing projects, had to train TWO people to take her place when she left.

At my last job in publishing, I was hired to do the work previously done by four people. (I found that out after I started.) Some years later they decided to make me half time, and they asked me to make a list of everything I did in my full-time position. The next day, they handed me back that list verbatim as the job description for my new half time position.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:31 PM on February 11, 2021 [3 favorites]


The first and only real professional advice my mom ever taught me was “don’t make coffee for the office. You’ll become the coffee girl.”

x10000

I love baking, I live alone so have very few opportunities to consume home-baked goods before they go stale/moldy, but I am also a petite woman, so I categorically refuse to bring in baked goods for my colleagues. Holiday gifts in my department are also extremely gendered -- all the faculty chip in to buy gift cards for the staff, but on top of that, only the women (faculty or staff) also bring in cookies/candies for the team. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

FWIW, I've never *not* worked through lunch. I would rather use it as either time for lunch-and-learns (my employer does provide food for these, or now boxed lunches that everyone eats alone while Zooming in), or to catch up on things so I can leave the office (work office or home office) at a reasonable hour. My boundary is no after-hours remote log-in unless I'm on call. The autonomy to set that boundary myself is really important to me.

Academia is a bit different from the corporate sector, but even so, if you are a woman or a person of color, you have to be 150% of your white male colleagues to even be considered for recognition, but of course if you point that out, you're playing the race/gender card. I got an accidental promotion last summer because my white male predecessor left under unsavory circumstances; in 6 months I've accomplished more than Mr. Charismatic White Guy did in 6 years of talk. Luckily, my supervisor sees that and is an actual advocate for protecting my time so that I *don't* have to do everything after-hours and weekends.
posted by basalganglia at 5:46 AM on February 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


I will die on the hill of 1. always demand to be paid for your work and 2. know when your plate is full.

This, always. I actually managed to change our (university) campus culture on this, when I was serving in some governance leadership roles, by consistently looking at the Provost in meetings and saying "how much assigned or release time will this project/role/set of tasks provide?" At first, he would laugh because what a funny joke! After a couple of times of me just silently, blankly staring at him while he took it as a joke, he realized that I wasn't joking and that I would absolutely derail whatever initiative or thing he was working on, if he didn't provide either workload adjustment or extra pay for extra work. (Not directly, of course; he simply would soon discover that, for some reason, no faculty members were volunteering for uncompensated extra work anymore, almost as if we'd collectively decided to start saying no for some reason. Why yes, on our campus all non-admin employees are unionized, why do you ask?)

Interestingly, this had the unintended downstream effect of helping various initiatives/reorgs/etc. toward success because 1) the people working on it were not doing "extra" work, it was accommodated as part of their core work assignment, or they accepted the extra paying gig on top of their normal workload; and 2) because the people working on the new initiative/reorg/project/etc. were formally compensated in some way, it made those roles institutional in a way that makes them sustainable. (For instance, one of the big things I worked on was connecting staff and faculty advising so that they're actually part of the same process instead of separate silos, and the reorganization we launched has grown into a new unit that is a significant resource for students, because at the start we created formal positions for faculty members to have release time to dedicate to working with advising staff in another building, and the advising staff had their job descriptions modified to account for the ways this new unit would work. Five years later, this unit will soon have a spectacular new home in our redesigned/rebuilt library space, and the faculty roles we created are now a regular, compensated part of that unit. Sometimes saying 'no' builds things.)
posted by LooseFilter at 6:42 AM on February 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


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