Thread by @patio11

Goodness do I have so many thoughts about this exchange, which is more worth reading than most gossipy exchanges because there are large portions of economy that operate this way and you may want to select out of working for them.

https://twitter.com/tiffmc1013/status/1475931237285961729

One: it’s healthy that the economy have a mix of jobs where people can both be expected to drop everything the week after Christmas if required and where approved time off is sacrosanct, and it is important both sides of each job understand what agreement they’ve struck.

Two: if you’re a manager, and you have a critical business process which absolutely positively requires a particular person and will SPOF without them, you have at least two problems and should start fixing them with some urgency.

It is clearly outside of the bounds of professional behavior to call members of an ex-employee’s family to attempt to coerce them into rejoining employment with you. I can’t believe that needs to be said, but can believe that needs to be said.

There are many people who believe engineers must deliver a basket of goods to their employers, and that one important component of that basket is subservience itself. This historical market expectation has been negotiated away in some places. Prefer to work in those places.

Subservience is required extremely unevenly in those places where it is required, and notice that the people who made all the poor decisions here are not being asked to make a socially meaningful demonstration of it, even though they are actually in breach of obligations.

One could imagine, for example, a call from the CEO of the client at risk of losing $700k, begging for the forgiveness of the lapse around the holidays on behalf of his ground level managers who allowed it to happen, and asking if the contracting company could please assist.

Or one could imagine that person making a similar phone call to the regulators or to investors, asking for a waiver or an equity injection.

Neither of those phone calls is likely to have happened. Which, OK, that *is a choice.*

There’s an important lesson here about the need for boundary setting, on behalf of many parties. With regards to the employee, bully for him for clearly communicating requirements and then following through when those requirements were not met.

This will frequently be interpreted as an aggressive or uncouth action. Regardless of whether that interpretation is sincere or tactical, I’d counsel people to assign it very little moral weight.

Once in the salt mines at a Japanese megacorp, a manager informed me that I was scheduled to work Christmas.

I told him we had agreed that the one thing I would not do that a salaryman would is skip Christmas with my family (in the U.S.) He said he had assumed that was one-off.

I said “Christmas is the same time every year, and this fact is well-known here. I appreciate this makes the December schedule harder for you, but that was part of the price and we agreed on it. If we do not agree on it, you will not have to worry about scheduling me.”

“You’re upset and saying things that you do not mean.”
“I am perturbed but explaining to you an extremely predictable bottom line given my social position. Neither of us has yet said anything we need to remember after today.”

Go figure, Christmas happened, but not the point of that story.

And note that most people model their jobs as being far more willing to negotiate than Japanese megacorps and yet view their ultimatums as if they were not negotiable.