There are a lot of questions and practices that aren’t illegal in and of themselves, but have the potential to get you into hot water in the long run. Asking someone if they have reliable transportation to work is fine. If you have a habit of excluding people from a particular zip code where a high percentage of African Americans live, you might run into some problems with disparate impact in your hiring practices.
My team at work went from three people at the beginning of pandemic, to fifteen or so currently, with more being actively recruited. One of the original three got promoted to another team, and one of the new hires left after a year for a better job opportunity, but other than that, we haven’t seen anything like the turn over you’re reporting, and I’m in an industry with a historically pretty high turn over.
k9bfriender seems to be in a relatively specific situation where he is hiring for jobs that anyone can do and no one wants to do. Many (if not most) jobs, whether you are a nurse, welder, accountant, computer programmer, lawyer, or whatever, people go into because they decide to go into them. So unless a job is surprisingly horrible, most people won’t take a job just to get a few weeks of pay and then kick back for a few months until they can run the scam again.
I’m mostly seeing the “Nahployment Crisis” or “Great Resignation” from the perspective of relatively high paying finance/technology corporate jobs. But it’s basically the same thing. Corporations treating staff like “cogs” instead of valuable employees contributing to the long-term growth of the company. And when I say “cogs”, I don’t mean just the money. Companies basically treating employees like they are interchangeable parts, based on some profile or set of skills. And because these are highly specialized skills, the employees don’t feel compelled to get stuck in roles they don’t like or otherwise eat management shit, hoping management fulfills some vague promise of “career growth” (which they don’t seem to do anymore). It makes employment very transactional. Which companies like when they can bring on a contractor or consultant at will to work on some new project and then get rid of them once it’s over. They don’t like it as much when their people quit after 18 months for more money and/or better conditions.
Take this example at my firm - a mid-size management consultancy (which tends to be very transitory by nature anyway). One of our promising young senior consultants (might have even been a manager) recently quit. He was placed on a client that had nothing to do with his interests or skills. He did his job like a good employee, but after a reasonable amount of time, he wanted another client. For months, our manager worked to get him reassigned, but leadership kept blowing him off. Eventually he said “fuck this” and took another job. And the reason leadership allowed this to happen was because they are lazy. It’s easier to say “sorry, our consultant quit” than it is to say “sorry, we need to replace our consultant with a different one because he’s been working with you too long.”
And these things have a compounding effect. People like me see this and think:
- I work for a manager who has no real power or authority in this organization
- Does this extend to other areas of our group? Like our whole department is a sort of “tail wagging the dog” effect in that the company doesn’t actually give a shit about what our team is doing as a business? How does that impact my career?
- The company clearly doesn’t care about my (or anyone else’s) long term career path
And my current client assignment is coming to an end. I have new ones lined up, but I don’t know if they are in line with what I want to do. And with our yearly bonus/raise/promotion cycle coming to an end soon, maybe it’s a good time to start seeing what else is out there. And I’m clearly not the only person feeling this way.
Yep. I work(ed) a lot of overtime, because the project I’m on has too much that needs to be done and not enough engineers to do it. The program management loves me because I get stuff done. But the functional management is upset because while I’m working overtime, there are engineers who are between assignments*. They look at the headcounts and see some engineers twiddling thumbs and others are doing double shifts. Of course, engineers are not fungible, and none of those on overhead can do what I do (nor could I cover for them).
But until program management and functional management figure out what the company’s priorities are (program execution or low overhead), there’s no more overtime.
*My company keeps engineers on the payroll even when they’re not working on a contract. Even in the before times it was hard to find people with the right skill sets to do the work. So we get stability even as contracts come and go–engineers get paid to wait it out.
Sure. There’s all kinds of problems with that, both from a project as well as a functional management perspective. Namely what I call the “superhero paradox” (I’m sure there is some actual business term for it). Basically your superior skill and expertise makes you irreplaceable in your role. Sure it prevents you from being laid off or fired. It also prevents you from getting promoted or transferring to a different group, if just for some variety. Because you can do it better and faster, you will always be the first choice over other engineers who will require more ramp-up and hand-holding. So IOW, your “reward” for your competence is more work.
Eventually you will get fed up working overtime and not getting compensated/promoted accordingly and probably quit.
Likewise, while this guy requested a change, there are folks who are ready for one but haven’t fully internalized it yet. We had someone leave recently for a position that we could have offered her. But she hadn’t really thought of it until someone else dangled something new and shiny. And we hadn’t thought to offer anything new. Our loss. So I’m a broken record at the rest of the leadership team re: probing for new opportunities for people.
My boyfriend runs into this a lot, so does my brother. They’re the type of guys who do exceptionally well at their mid-tier positions and make themselves invaluable to the company at that task, carrying along their teams. They both desperately wanted managerial roles and managerial pay but the company would have big big holes to fill if they lost these guys from their non-managerial positions. They kept applying to the managerial positions but would get passed over for outside people when it came to the higher paid managerial jobs. Eventually they took their talents elsewhere.
We were just talking about how stellar the cart guy is at boyfriend’s Wal Mart, and lamenting the fact that that guy will never be more than a cart guy if he stays with Wal Mart because he’s just too damn good at being the cart guy.
I don’t know how it is at other places but at least in these places there was no reward for being good at your specific task.
I’ve seen it stated as
Denniston’s law
Virtue is its own punishment: do something right once and they’ll make you do it again.
- though I can’t seem to find exactly that formulation online anywhere. I saw it in a very old dead tree collection of Murphy’s-type laws.
That’s been my catch phrase for years. 
I’m actually at my perfect level. The problem at my company is the “Peter principle”, where employees get promoted until they’re incompetent in their role. Been there and done that, I’ve stepped down to where I know what I’m doing.
I’ve been taking advantage of a quirk of the payroll system, where overtime hours can be deferred to a future week. Basically, extra hours can be converted directly into additional paid time off. I extract my value. 
Edited to add: this company has always been focused on keeping its skilled engineers happy, but the current labor market has made it downright panicked about losing people. The gave out large flat bonuses (that is, not a percentage of your salary) to everyone who worked on-site.
I’m late to the party here, but I agree with this.
In addition, I know that many young people are not working retail, fast food, server positions because their parents have specifically forbidden them from working in a high risk environment, having to put up with abusive, potentially sick customers.
Another anecdote; I know several young (under 20) people that have quit jobs during the pandemic, specifically because they were treated like shit (eg, how the bosses used to treat people). One had specifically said that he would not work Sundays. Period.
After one month of work, the boss scheduled him for a Sunday. He refused. Boss said take the shift or else. He chose “or else”, and had another job within 3 days. Incidentally, that business (pizza) is now out of business, and the owner is blaming “The government” for his failure.
I know a fouteen year old boy who got a job at a suoermarket as a box boy. He told them he was in school and could only work certain days and hours. They scheduled him for every evening and weekend for fourteen days straight. He quit.
If he’s in the U.S., that’s a violation of child labor standards. He, or his parents, should turn them in.
Is it? My poster says,
Minors 14 & 15 – Under 14 years old MAY NOT WORK
Florida & FLSA: May not work during school hours (some exceptions
apply)
Florida: May work up to 15 hours per week. Not before 7 a.m. or
after 7 p.m. and for no more than 3 hours a day on school days, when
a school day follows. May work up to 8 hours on Friday, Saturday,
Sunday, and on nonschool days, when school days do not follow, until
9 p.m.FLSA: Daily maximum of 3 hours on school days, 8 hours nonschool
days; weekly maximum is 18 hours; not before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m. Note:
Application of both state and federal laws allows this age group to work
up to 8 hours on Saturday, Sunday and nonschool days, when school days
do not follow, until 7 p.m.
So for example a 2 hour shift starting at 5pm every day would be okay.
~Max
I bet he got more money in his other job. I might have said this 800 posts ago, but a student in a class my daughter teaches had the same experience. She said she couldn’t work certain hours because it conflicted with class, and the boss in no day assigned her those hours or else. She quit and got a new and better job almost immediately.
And then we get to hear these bosses bitch about how “kids these days don’t want to work”.
No dude. They don’t want to put up with your shitty management practices, and they don’t have to.
For many of them, I believe, it’s not about the money. It’s about being treated with a modicum of respect.
Fourteen days in a row, not so much.
The claim was a violation of law. Did he cite the wrong one?
These things are state and county specific. Indiana is one of many states which prevents minors from working more than 6 days in one week
Silly me. I was thinking from the employees’ point of view.
Just talked with my sister, and thought y’all might find an update amusing. She’d given her office a full month’s notice and, amazingly, they actually managed to hire her replacement in only two weeks, so there was some overlap/training time.
After the first shift with the new women, my sister told me she wouldn’t work out. “Little” things. Like she insisted she need “background noise” to keep her from being distracted, and her chosen “background noise” was continuously playing youtube videos on her private tablet. Plus she had her cellphone practically glued to her ear.
And not just for answering calls. Like, my sister would be in the middle of explaining some program and exactly how the firm needed certain records stored and indexed…and the newbie (let’s call her Sadie) would pick up her phone and call her hair salon to set up an appointment because she’d just remembered she needed to look especially good for next Saturday and didn’t want to let it slip her mind by waiting.
Plus she left a full hour early the very first day! Yeah, how to make a good impression.
And it didn’t improve from there. Sadie was SURE she already knew everything so no need to listen to what my sister was trying to explain to her. She would roll her eyes and sigh…and actually just got up and walked away, once even in the middle of a joint meeting with my sister AND the lawyer (partner) she was supposed to mainly work for!
Anyway, my sister’s time to leave came, and she did so, happy at the idea of never having to interact with Sadie again.
Less than two weeks later her old boss called her. Uh, Sadie had decided the job ‘wasn’t as much fun’ as she’d expected and had given notice. Two days notice! Could my sister PLEASE come back for a couple of weeks to fill in and train Sadie’s replacement when they found her? Well, sister is a nice person, she agreed.
The newer replacement seemed to be a better fit, and once more sister ‘retired.’ (Hey, they gave her a second retirement party, almost as nice as the first one.)
But in the weeks since then, she’s been hearing off and on from her old friends at the firm that things weren’t going at all well with the new woman. (Sadie2, why not?) Like she’d almost never been in on time – there was always some reason, mostly ‘domestic emergencies’ with her husband or kids or pets. Like how she didn’t grok the backup system and tended to do entries on whichever version of the records she’d stumbled across first…
So at 10:30 today she got a ‘head’s up’ text from her old best buddy. Saddie2 had left a ‘farewell forever’ note(!) on her desk last Friday which no one had noticed until they’d realized she was actually more than the usual one hour late this morning. She knew they’d be calling my sister in desperation, begging for her help, and wanted to give her a chance to think about how she wanted to respond ahead of time.
Which desperation call came in about 15 minutes later! Could my sister come in, whatever conditions/hours/length she wanted while they find Sadie3? What she found more ominous was the bit “and maybe while they get things caught up(!) and straightened out(!!!)”
Yowza.