(I’ve only worked in the US, so I can’t contribute meaningfully to the actual topic. But)
I cannot watch the US version of The Office – I wanted to like it (I’ve watched several episodes), but Steve Carell’s boss character was my (then) boss.
I don’t mean Michael Scott at Dunder Mifflin was a comical or satirical exaggeration of my boss. I mean that every time I watched an episode, I saw Scott do or say something* that my boss actually HAS done or said. To a T.
that displays how awkward, arrogant, clueless, incompetent, insensitive, etc. the character is.
It wouldn’t have been so successful if people couldn’t relate to the characters.
People come on here to moan about their relationships far more than the say everything’s going great, too. And their kids. And the weather. And their health. Point is, it’s not just work. It’s just the way it is - if it’s all going well then there’s just not that much to say, and if it’s not going well you might need to vent.
A lot of people I know would find it difficult to change jobs, and some are finding it hard to get a job at all. I’m glad it’s always been so easy for you and all your friends, but I don’t think that’s common.
(The UK messageboard I go on does have a similar cross-section to here, except with fewer right-wingers).
Not necessarily A sitcom can be about anything.
I mean:
Fawlty Towers was apparently based on a real-life hotel, but it would be absurd to imagine that many or most hotels were ever like that.
The IT crowd contains a concentrated, condensed, caricatured version of what geeks are like, but no real-world geek does all of that.
Father Ted - hardly needs discussing. Not realistic.
If you’re finding it fairly easy to change jobs when you want, that probably says more about the sector you’re in and you personally than it does about the UK job market as a whole. I’m at the other end of the spectrum- I work a 0 hours contract for a terrible employer, who has broken the majority of the UK employment laws it’s possible for him to break (fining employees for random stuff, refusing to pay for hours worked, shifts with no toilet facilities, scheduling for 13 hours shifts with no breaks, or two 10+ hour shifts with only a 4 hour gap… Etc.)
The lack of any decent company records make any of this hard to prove, and the majority of employees are unaware of their rights, or unwilling to rock the boat, as, due to it being a 0 hours contract, you don’t gwt fired, you simply stop being offered shifts if you complain.
In over a year of trying pretty well everything short of standing by a junction with a sign saying ‘job wanted’, I’ve been unable to find anything but a few casual hours elsewhere, and I’m basically sticking with it because it looks better than unemployment on my CV. This despite probably over 200 applications for entry-level positions or stuff I’m experienced in, and 10 or more interviews.
If you’re in a good position in the UK job market, it’s fine, I’m sure, but if you’re not, it’s very hard to get anywhere.
It’s not just about the process of changing jobs (I do know I have been very lucky this time because the exact right job in the right place came up at the right time) - it’s also about (my perception of) job satifaction in situ, relationship with management and HR, attitude towards work, etc.
I am fully prepared to write it all off against some sort of cognitive bias though.
I’ve been in IT on both sides of the pond for nearly 30 years, in the UK for nearly 20 now. I’ve found changing jobs easy, but that’s probably to do with the sector and the specialties I was in. I’ve been laid off once in both the US and UK and both times managed to get a new job within a couple weeks.
Things I like about UK working:
More holiday. 25 days not including public holidays or sick days.
Employment contracts. If it’s not in the contract we can’t be compelled to do it. An example is being on-call 24x7.
Generous redundancy packages. I’d been at the company 8 years and ended up with nearly 3 months salary.
NHS. No panicking about getting sick between jobs or not getting insurance for pre-existing conditions.
Things I don’t like: Open plan offices.
Things I liked about the US: Cubicles
Things I didn’t like (though I didn’t know it at the time): lack of contracts. If you’re not doing 50 hour weeks you’re a slacker who won’t get a good review.
Redundancy/layoff. It was “don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out”.
I’ve been lucky to never have worked in a toxic workplace.
The level of complaint about one’s job seems pretty normal to me. And obviously, as already stated, people who have nothing to complain about aren’t starting threads.
Regarding the fear of not finding a new job, then indeed you’re a happy man (or a deluded man) if it doesn’t worry you. You might be representative of your coworkers, but I doubt you’re representative of the British population at large.
However, I do notice too a peculiarity on this board : a massive lack of trust and loyalty towards employers. Never trust your boss, always assume the HR people are out to get you, never give anything more than you’re strictly obligated to, assume the worst, and so on. Look the recent thread about giving more than a two weeks notice, for instance. Pretty representative of what I read here.
But this might be a bias of this board rather than of Americans in general. For instance advices given here re relationships are generally : “cut your losses and drop the sucker”. quite similar to advices given re work : “assume the worst and start searching for a new job”.
Mmmmm, no. In the USA an HR department is hired by the company, for the company, and is there to protect profit, not employees. Their job is to get you to work as much as possible, for as little money as possible. I have many times lost good workers because HR stood in the way of perfectly reasonable and deserved salary increases, simply so that they could show the savings on their own progress reports.
If a manager is doing something that could get the company sued, they’ll put a stop to it, but only insofar as they need to document a response for CYA purposes.
I once called for help with an employee who was suicidal, only to see her marginalized and pushed out as a “liability” within a few weeks. I’m sure that helped.
I had a boss who found out that an employee was about to start chemotherapy for cancer. He called HR and found out that she hadn’t yet registered the health problem with them. So he quickly drummed up a few performance complaints and fired her before she could go off on disability.
I could give you about fifteen more of these including a couple that happened to me.
Most of the people I have known who went into HR did it to help people. They got out again pretty quickly.
I’ve been in the Oil and Gas sector, on the upstream making a hole in the ground side of things , both UK, US and some other places in the world. US and UK workplaces were pretty similar. Probably the biggest thing I saw was in terms of mobility. In the UK there were a lot of people who were planning on staying in that geographical area and also with that company. In the US people seam to move companies and geographical location a bit more. The O&G industry is pretty mobile in the first place (Ok I exclude people from Louisiana from this) . In the education side of things, I would see the standard mech eng, elec eng, civil eng back grounds in the UK, in the US you would see a more mixed bag of degrees, I think due to the different structure of the US degrees and masters. I think the size of the companies seams to be a bit more diverse, In the UK it seamed there were either small mom and pop companies, or large (>10million rev) companies. The US seamed to have a much larger % of intermediate companies. Then again, we are comparing a 16.2 Trillion to 2.6 trillion dollar economy. UK employment laws I think are a bit stricter, harder to fire someone, and in the UK you get more vacation when starting with a company. That said one has to be pretty careful about firing someone in the US , lawyers are always ready to help out. Probably the other major difference I have seen is that in the UK there does seem to be a bit more of a ‘that’s your job, this is my job, and that’s their job” attitude, in the US people seamed more likely to step outside of their defined role. More specifically thinking of office type jobs there, trades jobs are sometimes unionized so you can’t help and obviously in specific technical areas you don’t really need well intentioned amateurs helping out.
British person living in the US, lot’s of opinions, probably could be backed up or refuted with some data if I bothered to look.
My boss was complaining of something similar this week, regarding some of our American coworkers. The American clients don’t do another person’s job but will say “that’s Joe’s job, let’s call him”; the American consultants won’t lift a finger if they can avoid doing so, and their response to something coming up that they consider “not my job” is “u-hu”. Same location, two different attitudes re “not my job” - the first one is fine, the second one makes her want to join the NRA.