No, they’re not.
Every hour I bill to a given contract is an hour I work on that contract - and nothing else.
I bill up to, but no more than, eight hours per day to the various contracts I work. I arrive at work about 6 AM and I leave about 7:30 PM every day, as a rule. And while I’m reasonably prolific here at the SDMB, I doubt even my most ardent critic could argue that I’m reading and typing replies here for five hours per day.
I’d like an apology.
Only if he’s a salaried employee of the government. Since he has specifically said that he is with a company contracting with the government, your assumption is fairly stupid.
Strangely enough I find myself OK with Bricker’s decision here, and I’m rarely OK with a firing. But so long as she understood the terms of her work – that she was to interview the client’s employees and produce an original document detailing how the client’s employees actually worked that might suggest how they could streamline their activities. And instead she took a couple of existing documents, melded them together and presented that instead. Pretty feeble, really.
And the crime isn’t plagiarism here, it’s failure to deliver, and misstating hours. If she had been able to cut and paste a document that did what the client needed in a couple of days, she would have lost income but no one would accuse her of doing wrong, so long as she only billed for what she did.
I can’t speak to the employee’s state of mind, but obviously there has to be some reason why she did the work. It would be interesting to know if she interviewed the clients’ employees or not – that would speak volumes about whether or not she had ever intended to produce the document as ordered. If she did interview the clients’ people, you have to assume she meant to write the doc (I mean, she did the research) but for some reason couldn’t manage to. If she didn’t interview the clients’ people, she’d not have much of a defense.
So Bricker did right to let her go, but having said that, I have no patience with those who subsequently criticize her. Firing is the harshest penalty an employer can, um, employ. It’s the workplace equivalent of putting a .38 slug through someone’s brain. The message is, we don’t want you around any more. It’s brutal – just ask The Gaspode. I’m sure it’s brutal on the firer, but it can hardly be as brutal as it is on the firee, who is subsequently left without income. In a society where we have working homeless people, that’s a nasty situation to be in.
Can you explain this statement further? I’m curious as to why you feel this way.
It’s brutal. It hurts people a lot, economically and psychologically. I’m also against beatings, torture, running over people with cars, etc. It should only be used as a very last resort.
Do you feel it’s okay to keep an incompetent employee on the job because firing them would hurt them financially? What about the financial effect their incompetence is having on the rest of the company?
There’s only been one firing in my department, several years ago. This girl would not, could not learn the job function, and despite being told the work day started at 8a, she’d wander in at 10a. My boss told her that after the Xmas vacation she would expect her in at 8a, no exceptions.
She wandered in at 8:30a and was promptly fired., She’d been warned, she’d made so many mistakes it was easier for us to fix them ourselves rather than explain things AGAIN to her. She was having a negative effect on our department, both in morale and in work efficiency.
I don’t care about her financial security. She was making all the other good workers’ jobs harder, while increasing their work load to cover her ass while she was drawing a paycheck for being a goof-off. Tell me, where does that make financial sense to a company?
I have never fired an employee. I have avoided it due to concerns (real/imagined) about unemployment compensation costs. I have had bad employees who have quit after I’ve made their life a living hell, though. 
vetbridge, I’d be careful about that. Could you be leaving yourself open to a harassment suit?
Given that she was warned, still didn’t report to work on time, and had trouble learning to do the work, I’m OK with the firing so long as some effort was made to teach her how to do the work and to find out why she was late and how it might be fixed so she could get to work on time, prior to firing.
That said, do you not think the firing and loss of income hurt her? What is she supposed to live on after being fired, magic fairy dust? Wonder how her kids (if any) fared there? And how do you suppose being fired made her feel, great? Suppose she was truly incompetent and trying … that had to hurt, being fired.
But I notice people like to gloss over that part of the working world. We live in a brutal society, might as well acknowledge it.
You need to find out the truth about the unemployment situation for your business. If you force someone to quit, they might still be able to collect unemployment, which means that you’ve simply paid them more and longer than you would have had you bitten the bullet in the first place.
In other words, don’t dick around with hiring and firing. It’s a dangerous game, and usually foolish.
IANAL. I’ve never harassed anyone who did not deserve harassment. 
Your points are good ones. I like my job and do it well, but I hate being the boss and do that poorly. Que sera sera.
By “brutal”, you mean “does not automatically provide to all members of the society everything they need in order to survive, regardless of ability or effort.”
Whoa.
Whose responsibility is it for her to be clothed and fed? Her own, or whichever company she demands to hire her?
I’m stunned that you think the company has any responsibility to determine why she is late for work and how to fix it. She has entered into a contract with the company by being hired, and part of that contract is showing up for work at certain times. The company is paying her to work there; it is not their responsibility to make sure she shows up to work on time.
Of course, I agree with what you’ve written here.
I should add, though, that there are times when it may be a wise choice for the company to make such inquiries. A company may save an otherwise valuable employee by making some flexible decisions regarding either time of arrival or handling of some temporary personal crisis.
Note that I don’t say that the company MUST do this, or has some duty to do this. But a company that judiciously exercises their compassion and felxibility in the right circumstances can end up retain valuable talent and creating great loyalty.
JThunder…that was funny.
Actually, firing an employee AND filing criminal charges would be the harshest. I could have done that on 3 separate occasions, but I chose not to since it only involved money and/or company property, not human injury or worse. If personal injury or damage of another’s property (other than the company’s) due to the employee’s deliberate actions to cause such injury or damage was the case, I would have no problem reporting it to the police, regardless of the person’s financial status. Nobody has the right to do that, homeless or not, kids or no kids. Nobody has license to do that.
Also, there is no comparison to what Bricker had to do and what Gaspode had to do…I would rather be in Bricker’s position 100 times rather than Gaspode’s position once. Layoffs are definitely brutal, and no boss takes any delight in that…well, at least I don’t.
And, of course, I agree with what you’ve written here as well. Let the mutual dick-suckin… er, handshaking begin.
Also, to add to Yeticus Rex’s post: while I was not involved in the process, I did see someone fired and arrested at a previous job; they had stolen the credit cards of a fellow employee and gone on a shopping spree over the weekend.
Jesus wept, Evil, exactly how much handholding do you think an employee needs? I show up to work on time, I do my job, I do it well, and my employer compsensates me for it. It’s not my job to help an incompetent employee “find herself.” She’s an adult, she has to accept the consequences of her actions (or nonactions, as the case may be.)
It’s not my fault, nor the fault of the other responsible employees, if, through the employee’s choices, they find themselves out of work. Yes, life is brutal, and no one is going to look out best for you but you. It therefore behooves you to put forth your best effort, to show that you are reliable and able to do a good job. I can assure you I did not lose any sleep over her termination. She was spoken to, given opportunities to improve, and she still chose to take smoke breaks every 15 minutes and wander into work two hours late and screw up what work she did do. I could care less how she felt. How aggravated do you think the other employees felt, having to pick up her slack?
At my company, we try to work through most things. Hell, we tried to work through the issue with the lap-dance-buying guy, but honestly? Most of the time it has come back to bite us. And that sucks.
How would you feel if you were working your ass off on a job, and saw a co-worker getting paid the same for you and doing nothing? I’ve had people complain to me about clearly slacking colleagues. It is hard to take, since in this case we were doing something but due to privacy can’t say anything except that we were aware of the issue.
We’re talking adults here. One assumes they know how to tell time and drive (or ride the train.) Many companies have some sort of assistance program for people with issues, but you can make them aware of it, not recommend they use it.
The other thing is that people usually know they are screwing up. One thing I learned is that if you give someone a 0 raise, they often don’t get upset, but are happy they aren’t being fired. For money there is unemployment, and there are other jobs - but sometimes a worker just has to grow up, and nothing but getting fired a couple of times will make that happen.
You’re going to cost your company a lot of money some day.
Letting a person know where he stands without pussyfooting around - yes. Enough so that they’ll be looking for another job if they have an iq over a turtle’s, yes. Harassment - no.
It ain’t funny, guy.