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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
Everyone knows who's good and who's not good in the office. We know who is brilliant, we know who gets things done, and we know who has a great attitude. We also know who is slow, detached, or incompetent. The truth just comes out. The smaller the company, the more demanding our development cycles, the more we depend on each and every person, the faster the truth becomes revealed. Even if a person isn't given the axe, it doesn't mean that others are oblivious to his shortcomings; all it means is that despite the glaring and obvious negatives, there is a reason to keep him around [1]. It's not a matter of if, but when the inevitable occurs. Attempts to conceal one's lethargy, disinterest, or incompetence are futile. We work with each other every day for hours upon hours. We traverse the land of cubicles, and each person's posture, facial expressions, and attendance is noted subconsciously. The dust of evidence inevitably becomes a mountain of truth. When one person is convinced, it is eventually shared to others. Others' suspicion materializes as well, and additional evidence pours forth. Soon, it is spread to the group at large and is maintained as an accepted truth. At the bottom of it all is action and inaction. We know who is good and bad because of their actions, their words, and their output. Even the uncooperative guys are labeled accurately as "brilliant but lazy". The incomprehensible guy is respected as "I can't understand what he is saying, but he sure gets his stuff done." Actions speak lounder than words they say, but even the act of speaking is an action that forms the basis of our opinions. There is no concealing or embellishing our actions; they are what they are. We know who is unhappy, incompetent, smart, or fast. We spend far too much time with one another to not realize. Knowing this fact, how will we choose to act now?
[1] Keeping laggards around and paying them the same amount of others (if not more) damages morale like none other.
Crossposted from my main blog
 
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I've been told that office politics are unbelievably absurd and bothersome.
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Thats why i love being the only one in my office can spend all day reading TL.
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Sounds a lot like that show The Office. I think any job where the employees are crowded together, and everyone is making different bank, people start to build up these very carefully constructed ideas of the other peoples worth. Like you noted: posture, attitude, productivity- anything. As long as all of you are making money, but some are making more, and some less, its impossible NOT to look at that guy and think "I hope he dosent make more than me".
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On April 10 2012 01:18 Lexpar wrote:
Sounds a lot like that show The Office. I think any job where the employees are crowded together, and everyone is making different bank, people start to build up these very carefully constructed ideas of the other peoples worth. Like you noted: posture, attitude, productivity- anything. As long as all of you are making money, but some are making more, and some less, its impossible NOT to look at that guy and think "I hope he dosent make more than me".
I think its more about that in the long term when you have peers it becomes very difficult to hide your strengths and weaknesses. Eventually in office people get labeled as someone who can get stuff done or someone who is a fuck up. My mother works for the goverment in a office and there are several people that get paid more than her who by all reports and my own viewing are completly inept. You know your awful employee when people avoid asigning you stuff cause they know your gonna mess it up. So i dont think its just jelously that rises up because of diffrent pay.
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There is a confidence in this blog that I find concerning. Everyone knows what their perceptions are and can find out the perceptions of others. Together, they form a consensus. What does this have to do with truth? It has a lot to do with truth if people are good at assessing it, but most of the time, quite honestly - truth is blurred by the boldfaced confidence each person has that his own individual way of doing things is the best.
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Nail on the head.
I work in the games industry and this is so true it hurts. You're very right about slackers killing morale. I bust my ass at work, so it's quite damaging to see someone making the same pay as me who does 1/6th of my work output (quite literally).
The general idea is that one's hard work will eventually pay off, but until that payoff hits, it's a bit demoralizing.
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On April 10 2012 01:12 Azera wrote:
I've been told that office politics are unbelievably absurd and bothersome.
Imagine a politically correct version of high school.
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On April 10 2012 01:38 TheToast wrote:Show nested quote +On April 10 2012 01:12 Azera wrote:
I've been told that office politics are unbelievably absurd and bothersome. Imagine a politically correct version of high school.
Politically correct when someone is around that doesn't like politically incorrect jokes. The office can be worse than High-School because those rumors can make you lose your job. The cliques are funny, because of the forced communication between parties because of well, your job.
[sarcasm]Working IT for a large building is always fun... You get to hear every little rumor.[/sarcasm] Office people never shut up.
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On April 10 2012 01:38 TheToast wrote:Show nested quote +On April 10 2012 01:12 Azera wrote:
I've been told that office politics are unbelievably absurd and bothersome. Imagine a politically correct version of high school.
Oh god kill me now.
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The important question is: How can you change the image that you have created in your colleague's mind?
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On April 10 2012 01:52 tenacity wrote:
The important question is: How can you change the image that you have created in your colleague's mind? Any advice on that? If you start an internship or a new job and you screw up in the beginning but you try really hard and give your best. Can you become a winner?
Of course you can, but you're going to have to put in a lot more effort than you would have had to otherwise. I've known people that started off an internship poorly but worked hard to improve and ended up getting the full-time offer. I've also known people that started off on a bad note and spent the rest of their time at that company constantly under scrutiny and working overtime to no avail before rage-quitting.
It's like bombing your first midterm for a class -- you can still do well, but you're going to need to be near-perfect. It's also a lot more stressful to be playing catch-up, whereas if you start off strong it requires much less effort to maintain your lead.
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On April 10 2012 01:01 thedeadhaji wrote:
all it means is that <em>despite</em> the glaring and obvious negatives, there is a reason to keep him around [1]
[1] Keeping laggards around and paying them the same amount of others (if not more) damages morale like none other.
i'm not getting this right i think, are you saying, destroying morale is a positive for which he is kept around? Oo
We with our team of 4 are in a very similar situation. There's two of us who get the work done good and then there's two others, one who OCDs on a lot of stuff and often does rather stupid things from a more large scale perspective (which he apparently can't see), and the other just doesn't get anything done and, recently, has taken over a more managing position rather than implementing, which pretty much has now lead to him digging through meeting protocols over a year old, misinterpreting them and with that information then confusing everyone and everything.
Now, we work as for individually employed people (only one day a week, so luckily not full time misery ^^) and all get paid the same (per hour). we each *should* roughly work the same, but i don't know how much hours they actually still put in, but in money wise, our time spend working has equal value, which in reality it just does not. The real problem though isn't, that i find this unfair, but that we frequently have to clean up heaps of shit they produced, so it feels a bit like they get the same money for throwing stones in our way 
The real problem though is, that our employee is rather detached from the team and we don't have a real boss so to speak. He is interested in the project getting done and so he does all those meetings for discussing requirements and stuff no problem. But he doesn't get involved on a personal level at all, although we are four individual direct employees of his and nobody else. So basically, we just run along without any supervision and implement the project and the only bad thing he sees on his end is, that progress seems rather slow, but apparently not slow enough for him to get involved more.
Internally, we have tried a bunch of stuff. Forcing the slower guys into doing more communication rather than working very isolated seems to help a bit output quality wise, but they are always slow and still always just slow down the other half of the team. But in the end, it takes about a month or maybe two until they just completely fall back into their old patterns and it's slowly becoming more and more frustrating to work "with" them. And just about nobody we ask has any idea on what we could do to improve the situation. Usually it ends up with "well usually, if someone is just really incompetent and can't be helped, the guy gets fired", but that's not happening any time soon.
It's quite sad because i really like the job besides the issues with the both of them. I really don't want to go to our employer and rat them out or something, that's not me. But we are totally at a loss of ideas as to what to do. Do you by any chance happen to have some? The most likely outcome i see right now is, that inevitably i become frustrated enough just to quit, which is just ridiculously stupid because everyone's worse off then, except i would be a little less douche towards my colleagues. That would be the equivalent of shooting me, the other guy who gets work done and our employee in the knee just to avoid being mean to these two guys.
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On April 10 2012 01:01 thedeadhaji wrote:
Everyone knows who's good and who's not good in the office. We know who is brilliant, we know who gets things done, and we know who has a great attitude. We also know who is slow, detached, or incompetent. The truth just comes out.
This is perhaps true at the horizontal level, but there are managers who have absolutely no idea who their best/worst people are.
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I feel the same way about highschool :O
Seriously its like its me vs the kids who never work! I'm an IB student here so I'm sequestered from the whole other part of my class and school. Its like a bubble if you want to think of it that way.
Basically it pisses me off when people have the same GPA as I do but take classes so much easier than me to get to that GPA. I know college say this, colleges say that, but really in the end, I'm just goingto call bullshit and say that I wish there were other ways of being rewarded for trying have the highest possible average when you hear rumors of people taking easy classes and still getting your grades.
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So who's that slacker in the TL office. 
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yeah being underpaid for your work does that to people you know...
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On April 10 2012 03:12 Psychobabas wrote:
yeah being underpaid for your work does that to people you know...
Yeah underpaid crappy jobs suck. That's why I spend all day on TL. I'm at work right now.
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I don't think this necessarily concerns just office work. Its just work all together where its not just a single persons responsibility but a group or teams. I work at a retirement home for masons and I serve them their meals. However since this is a lower end job it means its also a lot of peoples first job so everyone is like 17-25 (Me included). But the fact is about half of those people can't even pull their own weight. A lot of the bussers....are just god awful and lazy. It is their first job so why care I understand that perspective but they can't even be considerate enough for the other employees around since they would rather just converse amongst themselves. It becomes extremely frustrating...
Bussers don't get the same wage as servers...but no matter where you work. You are required to fulfill your requirements that were assigned to you and if you can't I feel you should just be let go. Or given less and less hours to the point where that person just quits so they can't even collect unemployment for being lazy..
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If you want to talk about underpaid, why don't we step into the world of a teacher?
But, on another thought...
I think it becomes even more obvious when your line of work is manual labor, like construction. I worked 4 seasons to pay for college and had the same 8 guys on my crew every season. You begin to notice who works when and finding everyone's specialty. Like Dave is really good at finishing the concrete while Tom is really good at shoveling it around.
I think you also start to notice that guy that you thought wasn't working right away, is actually working. Construction allows you to see the fruits of your labor, but it's not all back strength. I thought Dave was lazy for watching me shovel gravel, but after a while I realized he was actually calculating just how much more to bring in, even though it looked like he was just watching me.
I'm not saying there aren't bad employees out there, but like OP said at one point, the employees are still around for a reason. Even if not for long.
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EPT
