I am fresh off a rather interesting conversation with my boomer boss. I’m a new manager and I’m working on policy and process. I was basically shut down, told to not bother documenting, that we have a way of doing things and he would spend every day with me for weeks to get it right if he had to.
I asked again, wouldn’t it be easier and more efficient to have these processes documented and accepted rather than force muscle memory? I even offered to document the process during our training sessions but was told that were a small company and no one will look at documentation if we create it (we’re a 2000 employee manufacturing company).
Oh well, I know how to work around obstinance and he’s pretty old.
Both of you are right.
You meed to document processes. The minute you put them to paper they will be out of date. No one will read them. It has always been so.
That’s precisely what I’m after, and what I’m proposing. I don’t care about the outputs, I care about the process that gets them to us.
Also why they need to be living documents, but if we have to reinvent the wheel every time we need a new one, it slows things down. I should mention, I’m on the IT side.
There are Process people and there are Get It Done people. Both are necessary. In their extremes, both are bad. When they work together they can do great things.
But it does allow you to go, “Ah here’s where the process went wrong, step 6 in the SOP. Why don’t you use it as a guide for the next one?” It then isn’t me vs them, it’s me helping them understand the documented process collaboratively.
I just started at a new company that really invests time in documenting their processes, but the are poorly made by people that don’t understand the process itself and, in some cases, the process itself is poorly planned and has to be changed over and over again, to the point where the DTP looks nothing like what’s actually done…
I was instructed to review the documentation you twin myself, but advised the process did not actually describe the process itself…
That’s crazy. Anyone who is against documentation should not have a job that requires literacy.
Think that’s a balance.
Work at a company where they have a documented process for everything. The thing is once some thing is in a document, it’s like some written in stone mandate that becomes unchangeable and inflexible. The stuff in the “oral tradition” remains flexible.
Every so often new bloid comes along, sees how dysfunctional the documented processes are, and proposes to fix the processes. Now in principle, they are right, but those of us who have been through a few iterations dread the outcome. Invariably the changes they propose to replace stupid existing processes are instead just added to existing processes, because some folks recognize the improvement but no one wants the blame for a mistake caused by leaving the old process behind. So each time we end up with more redundant stupid work.
So while in principle, documented processes are right, sometimes the political reality is stupid.
The. Your company is doing lean six sigma wrong…if at all. Processes are supposed to improve and change all the time.
What’s a sigma?
Maybe if the fucking workplace wasn’t so fucking far from home, or if public transportation was decent, people would be much less likely to arrive late at work.
The other thing is, as soon as you realize that your job could be remote, which is true for a lot of office stuff, being “on time” matters fuck all.
Force employers to pay hourly wages for at home prep and commuting and they will suddenly start caring about hiring people in their area
I’ve always thought not compensating for commutes was ridiculous. Ive demanded 15k raises for jobs because they wanted me to drive.
All of the neighborhoods within walking or cycling distance of my workplace are literal crack dens where I’d be mugged and/or robbed within a week.
Fuck what baby boomers think. Bunch of greedy and selfish cunts.
You’re not getting a raise for being on time and people that are on time every day are being laid off too. In practice it doesn’t seem to matter that much.
10 minutes is on time. Unless you work with shifts, where other people need to wait for you.
Yeah, 10 minutes where I work can snowball if just the right ingredients are in play. But at least the pay isn’t total shit. Just a bit shit. ($25/hour should be the national minimum, dammit!)
I’m Gen X and the last job I had that required me to work a specific shift was in the kitchen of a pizza place in 1988.
In my first job after college, I asked the business administrator what hours I was expected to work, and she was noticeably confused by the question. She told me most folks show up around 9.l, but made it clear that it was up to me.
In my next job, I asked how to request PTO, and my boss told me he doesn’t care about the record keeping. He said just let him know when I won’t be there, and as long as everything keeps working he doesn’t care if I’m ever there.
Even in my current position when they introduced time clocks and we had to clock in before our start time, we were allowed to specify our start time. I chose 10:00am. I normally get in around 7am, so I figured if I’m not going to be in by 10, I’ll just take the day off.
Damn, what field are you working in that has that much flexibility? That’s pretty unheard of, at least in the US.
University IT for the first two jobs, now healthcare IT.
University is definitely the place to work if you get into the right department. In my first job I was a db admin for a medical research center. Then I moved to a job as IT support for a robotics lab.
Pay is crap, benefits are fantastic.
Prolly High end professional type jobs although those require experience before daddy will permit this level of autonomy
My last job for a software company was like this. We had to file for PTO, but we got so much I took nearly every Friday off and didn’t bother looking at my totals.
Sound like you have had some good, human bosses.
A good boss makes the job. A bad boss with a stick up their arse loses good staff.
The C-suite boss where I work complained about being in the office at 7 am and seeing empty desks.
This was pre-pandemic.
The thing was, policies in place at the time allowed employees to work from home up to two days per week, and flex hours were permitted as long as the core hours of 9am to 3pm were covered. It just sounded insane to everyone.
If you need to be there at a specific time, be professional and be there. If other workers are depending on you to be there, be there. Being tardy just ‘cause, is pretty pathetic. In an ideal world, none of us would have to work. But we do, so show up.
AND if someone is late because of traffic, etc, you shouldn’t sweat it.
I think that depends on the nature of the work, but also whether it’s a regular pattern of being late.
And likewise, any employer unexpectedly asking you to stay late is just as unprofessional.
Depends entirely on the job.
If you are interacting with people or have meetings, sure, promptness is important and polite.
If you are doing design work, or coding, or data driven jobs where you don’t really interact with anyone and just work for 8 hours, then who gives a shit if you work from 8-4 or 8:10-4:10? Fuck off if you think that makes a difference. 8 hours is 8 hours. End of story.
My last “not odd jobs to make ends meet” job I had was project manager of a job shop. I had days where I was meeting with customers, and days when I was building what my customers asked for.
When I had a customer to meet, I showed up early. I considered it a personal demerit if the customer arrived on site before I did.
When I had a thing to build and the customer wanted it on the 18th I’d turn up when I felt like it. Research, ordering parts, CAD design, programming, coordinating with my team and correspondence could and usually did happen from my house. A lot of brain storming took place in the shower. When it was time to show up in the shop I turned up when I felt like it and left when I felt like it. I cannot think of a time when I missed a deadline that was my fault. The deadline I blew the worst was the one I wasn’t told. “I needed it by the 26th.” “Well the 28th was a great time to tell me that.” “I thought you’d get right on it!” “I had five other customers’ projects going, you were 6th in line.”
I genuinely miss the "Here’s a weird goddamn thing to build. I want a radar guided hammer dulcimer. I need the right handlebar shroud of a 1994 Yamaha FSF-400XF. They only made 400 of these bikes, the part fell off somewhere in Wyoming, here’s the left one. You know that scene in spy movies where they need to steal the diamond launch codes from a room full of laser beams? Make an arcade attraction out of that. I need a 3D scan of my stillborn baby.
Actually no I’m never doing that last one ever again god chestnut-roasting dammit.
Further, if you don’t need 8 hours to finish the work, then nobody should care if you’re there or not, as long as your outcomes are achieved.
Depends a little on the type of work (contract work is different), but generally disagree. Just because you can do the work in less time doesn’t mean everyone can. You can use your spare time to do other things, but if you’re only showing up 20h/week for a full time job, there’s no reason to pay you full time wages.
There’s something off kilter with the labor system when some people are doing the work of several workers while others are doing the work of half.
I’m gen x. I’m always anxious about being on time because of how I was raised (thanks Mom). My partner is older than me and she’s ok with being late. This isn’t an age thing. It’s a personality thing.
They’re trying to divide us by sowing division amongst generations. The most wealthy are the enemy. They own everything and we must join together to take it back.
My mother raised me on the saying that (with occasional exceptions, such as dinner and parties) “if you’re not ten minutes early, you’re late.”
I don’t entirely agree with it, but it did result in me taking other people’s time very seriously and me being a very punctual person. It also caused anxiety about being punctual.
taking other people’s time very seriously
This is a kind thing to do, but I also put it squarely in the “respect is earned” category.
I wouldn’t give someone hell for being 10 mins late because traffic or whatever, but if their standard is expecting me to be there half an hour early, just staring at the clock, won’t let me clock in early and just get to it, burning time I’ll never get back, anxiously awaiting to clock in on the dot and not a minute more or else…
…They clearly don’t think much of my time and therefore the relationship is going to be adversarial in nature.
It also caused anxiety about being punctual.
Exactly. If I’m running late I get pretty stressed. It’s physically uncomfortable.
As a millennial I’m on team, “Work starts at 9, show up at 9”… but if you’re a little late here and there, whatever. So long as the work gets done.
I show up 30 minutes early because everyone at my job is incompetent so I have to see how things are going so I can plan my day. Im mid 20’s
I’m paid to solve problems, not warm a chair and let my manager look over my shoulder constantly.
I would be this way but I started my career in Boston and the T and the busses and the tunnels there make anything close to this impossible. If you actually wanted to be on time you’d be showing up 20 minutes early just as often as 15 minutes late. To truly always be on time would mean planning to get there an hour early every day.
Companies downtown here know just not to put meetings between 9 and 10 because it’s just impossible that every single member of a team will make it to work without issues even once a week. I’d guess even hourly jobs give more flexibility than you’d expect from a standard employer here because it’s just such a clusterfuck to transit in Boston
The further into the burbs you get, the more hardcore companies are about enforcing a 9-5.
They can fuck off with that. Everyone else is there on time because they’re adults, why are you special? All those people left 10 minutes earlier than the absolute minimum of time in order to account for traffic problems, etc. So can you.
This article is just the same sentence over and over again. Must be those lazy millenials copy-pasting in their computers again.
Sorry, but if you’re expected at 10 you should arrive at 10. Doesn’t matter if it is work, a meet-up with friends or family, a date, or whatever. People schedule things around you, they’ll expect you at 10, not 10 minutes later. So if you come late, it means you’re not respecting other people’s time, which means you don’t respect other people.
You said it yourself: arrive to scheduled things on time. Meetings with others, for example. If you’re going to do desk work, ten minutes more or less is irrelevant.
If you don’t have anything to do with me on Tuesday morning but get uppity because I came in at 9:07 instead of 9:00 even though it affected nobody at all, that’s a you problem, and please respect me by keeping it to yourself.
It’s work, not elementary school. Just don’t be late for your first meeting. But also don’t throw meetings on people’s calendar at 8am. It’s a dick move.
Try working at a company that has staff on the opposite side of the planet. I’ve missed meetings scheduled for 7am (I start at 8) that were sent in the middle of the night. That’s what I call a dick move.
Been there (worked with offshore in India). No getting around it, scheduling meetings just fucking sucks when you’ve got a 12 hour offset.
Both are dick moves
Bullshit, life happens. If you judge someone for their bus running late then you’re just a sanctimonious prick.
That’s a completely different scenario than intentionally coming in late.
Assuming people are intentionally showing up later is kind of the problem. They signed for the job, they want to get paid. Evidence would point to them not intentionally being late.
If it happens frequently then it certainly is intentional.
I see you’ve never met a toddler or a bad bus system.
If you have a toddler or a bad bus system then you need to account for that and take a bus earlier.
Are you paying them to wait around? Or have someone watch that toddler an extra hour? They don’t get a personal bus.
I don’t think the conversation is about outliers or occasional lates, but about a habitual disconcern for being on time.
I’m sensitive to the issue as i work for a company that delivers stuff. 10 minutes of staff not being on time causes actual problems that can snowball and cause people to be late all day long. We are very schedule oriented so it matters.
Given the headcount and resource reduction we had to make because we were being sold to make us look lean, and now they are asking for even deeper cuts, its really bad for my crew when someone just isnt there making everyone else having to compensate.
Its very different for different environments/cultures and sometimes they dont mix well.
Don’t compensate. That is the solution. Work normally, and if the bosses lose money, remind them to fix the staffing situation. Being a hero won’t solve anything.
THIS.
Man I had to double-check what Lemmy community I was in. There’s a lot of boss-apologists in this thread. O.o
Then you’re running below minimum staffing and that’s your fault, not theirs.
My favourite is when the person who we’re all working around sets the time and then doesn’t show up on time of the meeting. That’s the epitome of entitlement to disrespecting everyone’s (and the company) time. And this is a millennial that pulls this shit regularly at my job. It also costs the business a stupid amount of money when all those people aren’t producing revenue just to come sit in a meeting that isn’t going anywhere.
I manage Gen Z, Millenials, Gen X, and Boomers. Yes, all of the above. My experience is that the Gen Z types strive for quality of work and will give you their best once they understand the mission and accept it. The Gen X and Boomers very often get stuck int he performative parts of work: dress, dates and times, etc, and focus less on the quality of work. Millenials are a bit of a mix.
One of my best jobs I was consistently late to, and eventually I asked my manager about it.
She said I was outpacing the other workers in productivity (editing pages of copy) and she wasn’t going to push the matter.
That’s pretty much how I operate. I don’t sweat the high performers but I will hold it against those who don’t perform.
I was either 10 minutes early or 20 minutes late
A bus ride taking 40 minutes to go to work sucks
But the workplace was great so I don’t have much to complain about
Are we really trying to make this of all things a generational thing? Why?
It depends on the job, if you have to say open a store then 10 min late is a problem. You have to say make a thing, then 10 mins is not an issue as long as the thing is done.
I have seen people with no respect for other peoples time (so they where late often) and they where not of a single generation but more commonly of a class (the people with means tend to think they can be late).
In the 80s and 90s, Gen X were coming in late and the Greatest Generation was firing their our asses. It’s generational because every generation becomes more concerned with punctuality.
Time clocks have been around since 1888 and people have been getting fired for being late even longer.
Stop trying to make this a generational thing.
I used to have to open a fishing pier at 5:30am. A line of angry fisher people at the gate will tighten you up real quick. I let everyone in for free if I was 10 minutes late, but I was more so motivated not to be late.
These were the people who were fishing as a source of food and/or bait for later fishing for food. I got to know them and wasn’t late often because that would be shitty. They got to know me and knew I was working 3 jobs and going to college. So, they were sympathetic when it did happen.
Life, man, turns out it ain’t all simplistic generational platitudes.
I wish more people saw the world this way.
Every time someone divides an attitudes by generations.
Every time someone divides driving capabilities by make of car.
Every time someone divides work ethic by race.
Every time someone divides action by class.
There are good people and bad people and everything in between and they are not tied to specific demographics.
You can witness a trend, but it does not define anything.
People are just people.
Tesla drivers are shit tho
even before I wanted to translate that over to “Elon’s dickriders”
For real though, it’s super annoying when people say bs like what you did about things you have a choice over. Dividing by race, bad. Dividing because you decided to get a raised short bed pickup truck with HIDs…well those people chose to be assholes. Same with Matt gaetz supporters of which there are thousands. They chose to support a rapist in multiple elections despite the evidence. I’m cool dividing people up by choices.
In this case parent poster chose to overcommit and the people at his work chose to forgive that. I got no issue with that.
I just can’t agree with that. Your choice of car doesn’t make you a dick head. Maybe a lot of dick head buy teslas, but so do none dickheads. I’ve heard the same thing said about audi drivers, and bmw drivers, and mercedes drivers and range rover drivers. There is no neat little box you can put all dick heads in when it comes to what car they drive. There is no venn diagram that would cover this.
So the car you drive doesn’t make you a dick head. Being a dick head makes you a dick head.
If you’ll note the for real statement, the example I provided was much more specific. If you can find me a single soul on this earth with a raised short-bed w/ hid (or equivalent LED since HIDs are old now) who isn’t an asshole I’ll take it back. But I doubt you’ll be able to.
As for the teslas in particular, I’d say it’s more like 60% than 100% who just don’t know how to drive. And our brains are probability engines.
It depends on the job,
I am surprised how much this point is lost on the other commenters
Its wild that people can think a whole ass batch of people (a generation) thinks being 10 min late to anything is not a bad thing. Like if you show up to meet someone and they are 10 min late, its not the end of the world but if it happens every time you are going to judge that person.
I don’t think jobs should be tied to timecards (I hate time keeping systems, I had to fix some) but to job requirements.
Some examples: Office work normally does not matter until it does. I once worked in a banks head office and had to at or shortly before 7:30am tell all the ABMs to change to the next business day (this would cause them to go offline briefly) and pull the reports for that day. If I was 10 min late the reports would not be there on time for 8am where they are needed for another task a co worker is expected to do before the bank opens (at 8am in some places).
Any retail store that has some respect for their employees and customers needs people to not be late, showing up 10 min late might just mean rushing to open or relieve some co-worker but that also is likely increasing the risk of accidents. I don’t think its fair that someone gets to work an extra 10 mins or wait to buy whatever for 10 mins just because some one thinks “eh, 10 mins is close enough”
Task based jobs on the other hand (say programming, maintenance, sales, repair centres, etc.) should not really matter as much. When you start is less important then if you meet a deadline when finished. I used to work a job that wanted me to “start” every day at 7:42 AM (we used time units of 1/10th an hour) but would get real pissy when I did not leave my house until 8:30 or so since the stuff I was working on was in places that did not open until 9 or 10 am. They told me I should go to an arbitrary location (a warehouse or McDonalds where the examples they gave) by 7:42am to log in “in order to show I was ready for work”. That was stupid and irrational, so I did not do it. But I would also not show up 10 min late if I could help it for any appointment (work or otherwise) since I value my time and the peoples time I am interacting with.
You seem not fun to be around tbh
Odd response, it is mildly insulting yet brings nothing to the discussion.
Oh, I was figuring you would take it right at face value. Not everyone you meet in life will find your weird obsession with time and schedules to be particularly fun or positive, and your personal obsession isn’t how everyone else is gonna live their life just because you want it. Seems simple enough. You’ve taken a very hard line stance on something that wildly large swaths of the population will disagree with you on (whether verbally or just in practice)
Dumb article trying to make laziness a feature (not a bug), and shit on boomers.
laziness is a feature, not a bug, and it’s literally how our brains are wired.
(e: also it’s literally a study into generational differences. empirical data showing there is a difference in mindset. if you think that’s shitting on boomers then it’s you who made the value judgement in the first place. also if you read the article, if anything, it’s shitting on gen z for not getting work done on time.)
Being late is laziness? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Why?
It’s a Fortune article. Their whole thing is keeping the class war active and right now a great way to do that is to make the older, capital owning generation, pissed off at the young ones so that they don’t think for a second this whole “widening wealth gap” thing might be unfair and oppressive.
I think the issue is they are not “keeping the class war active” but trying to make the class war into a generational one. I have worked with, for and had worked for me people who are often late and never did I see one age group of people show up more late then another. Hell I have had issues with staff showing up over an hour early and that was only people under 25 so far (not an issue with them doing it, just an issue with feeling I am taking advantage of them).
Sorry yeah I used badly unclear language there you are absolutely correct.
I should have said “It’s a Fortune article. Their whole thing is keeping the class war at less than a simmer. They do this here by providing distracting ammo to fuel other wars and blaming [age/race/gender/migrant status] for economic troubles rather than the true oppressive force that is capital.”
Thanks for understanding what I was trying to say before I even wrote it 😅
