Big tech companies were apparently hiring workers to keep them from joining rival firms:
Many former employees at big tech companies are admitting that they had very little to do at their jobs, despite earning high salaries. One such under-worked and overpaid former tech worker is 33-year-old Madelyn Machado, who left Microsoft to join Facebook's parent company Meta as a recruiter in the fall of 2021.
In a viral TikTok video, Machado claimed she was hired for a $190,000 yearly salary, but had basically nothing to do during her stint at the company. "I do think a lot of these companies wanted there to be work, but there wasn't enough," she said. Talking to The Wall Street Journal, Machado said that on most days, her work included attending virtual meetings from noon until 3:30 pm before logging off for the day.
Curiously, Machado says she was told by her recruiters at Meta that she wouldn't be hiring anybody during her first year at the company. She also claims that some of her colleagues told her that they had spent two years at the company without ever hiring anyone. Unfortunately for her, she only worked for six months at Meta before being fired last year for posting TikTok videos that the company said posed a conflict of interest.
Another former Meta worker who recounted a similar story is 35-year-old Britney Levy, who says she joined the company in April 2022 but received her first and only assignment shortly before being laid off in November. Since then, companies across the tech industry, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, PayPal, Yahoo, Zoom, IBM, Spotify, and others, have announced massive layoffs, affecting tens of thousands of employees.
Talking to the WSJ, experts said they believe companies overhired during the pandemic-era boom not because they needed more workers, but to hoard talent from rival companies. According to Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, the hiring spree was initially fueled by a shortage of tech talent but eventually became a competition, which led to companies "hiring ahead of demand." He also pointed out that that the situation was very similar to what happened in the finance industry in the early 2000s, when companies overhired during periods of high growth, leaving many workers with not enough work.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Frosty Piss on Thursday April 20, @07:34PM (5 children)
Hired to nothing for 190k and screwed it up after 6 months ...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by richtopia on Thursday April 20, @08:40PM (3 children)
Pro-tip for anyone who finds themself at a desk with seemingly nothing to do: take the initiative. Learn a skill or find an opportunity to contribute. You are lucky, and you can craft this activity to benefit you as a person along with your career. Best case: this continues forever. Worst case: you get fired and you have something transferable for your resume beyond the job title.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday April 21, @12:08AM
Here's an even better advice: learn a skill that an AI won't be able to do anytime soon.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday April 21, @02:43AM (1 child)
At the very least, try to figure out why you were hired, because there probably was a reason. It might be "bad manager wants to boost their head count", but there's usually more to it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @06:18PM
Your job is to do nothing (and maybe help make up the necessary gender/minority ratios). As long as you don't "row backwards" your job is safe till the next round of staff cuts. Then after a few months they will rehire replacements to make up the gender/minority ratios etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @09:50PM
Put differently... You had zero jobs and still failed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 20, @07:45PM (2 children)
When do all the tech companies start admitting that they are vastly overrated, not to mention over valued? While not the leading metric, companies do value themselves based on number of employees, and the wages paid. And, lobbyists, among others, make full use of those metrics when talking to congress critters.
Stock prices will probably take a hit based on this information. No, I'm not making any guesses how big a hit, but smarter investors will be saying "hmmmmmmm".
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Thursday April 20, @08:41PM
It's very possible I'm massively misunderstanding what's going on, this is sooo not my lane. When I started dabbling in the stock market I was surprised by how it moves, but when I started dabbling in crypto I was NOT surprised by the gambly shenanigans there. I suppose that shows where my expectations were.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @01:30PM
They were overvalued because of all that Wall Street bailout money. They have to burn that money somehow. Don't worry, today's inflation and future "crises" will pay it all back
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DadaDoofy on Thursday April 20, @08:00PM (2 children)
While it might seem unusual for private companies to do this, it is standard practice in government work. Many employees are kept on board simply to maintain current levels of departmental funding. In my experience, there is shockingly little accountability, other than for work directly tied to the leadership's political goals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @01:33PM
Not "shocking" at all. There has to be sufficient demand at election time. Stop reelecting the same old crooks over and over
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @03:35PM
Seem fairly common practice particularly higher up.
The rule seems to be if you touch something you own it, so everyone skillfully avoids touching anything. Hence all the long-winded meetings with lots of talking and hoping that somebody (junior) will make the error of accepting an task. Once Junior does that, the machinery for supervising, training and assessing performance kicks in and everyone gets a piece. Junior is now subject to the whims and requirements of 7 overseeing managers who regard themselves as experts and mentors who all require weekly progress reports up to the Highest Possible Standards (because they are so seriouz).
For the most part, these parasites bury into the organization and feed off the energy and naivity of young kids - turning them into hollow husks that themselves need the blood of young fresh victims. The cycle repeats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @08:03PM
They were trying to figure out if they should relocate us.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @08:19PM
I could use a little (like couple months) break right now. Or interesting tasks with clear specs. Either way would be better than being left floating (that's a small electronics joke right there) like this.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday April 20, @08:39PM (5 children)
Tech workers? They both appeared to have worked in HR. That you are doing it for a tech company doesn't, or shouldn't, make you a tech worker. Or am I wrong here?
Also YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB! ... or your job where you do very little but get paid very much. It would seem stupid. After all both of them now just admitted that they are overpaid HR hacks that don't do anything worthwhile.
The idea that you hire people just so your competition can't hire them is an interesting idea. For productive or at least potentially productive staff that do things. Not HR drones.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday April 20, @08:46PM (4 children)
I can't really say you're right or wrong but I can tell you that I work in a niche industry and that makes finding good PR people difficult because some knowledge of how we do our job is really important, otherwise we're stuck having to do much deeper training all our new hires. I'd be surprised if HR people that kick ass at a place like Intel could also kick ass at a place that engineers food additives.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday April 20, @08:55PM (3 children)
I would argue that hiring for tech might be a specialization within HR, but it wouldn't make someone a tech worker.
Janitorial work in a hospital probably requires a few special procedures as well but the janitor still isn't medical staff.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @11:18PM (1 child)
I like how you managed to make both janitors and HR staff feel insulted by being compared to the other one.
(Score: 5, Touché) by sjames on Friday April 21, @12:40AM
My apologies to the janitors :-)
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday April 21, @12:51AM
Yeah, but we can always dream [youtu.be].
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 20, @08:47PM (3 children)
As long as your agreement with your employer doesn't prohibit this.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @08:51PM (2 children)
Ummm, whoosh? Subject of tfa was in human relations, aka the B Ark.
Who hires an HR consultant? They might engage an employment agency or head hunter, but I've never heard of an HR consultant, have you?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @09:07PM
I don't know the answer to your first question. But for the second, the answer is "yes, I have heard of an HR consultant" and at least some people must pay real money for this as there is an HR consulting firm on the first floor of the same office building as my company that's been there for at least a decade.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday April 21, @02:32PM
Usually a company that is either about to be or already has been sued for mistreating their employees in some way, and is looking to create a PR story that amounts to "we're really pretending very hard to do something to fix the problem".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by EJ on Thursday April 20, @09:25PM
Don't use social media.
If you feel compelled to use social media, then simply do not use social media.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday April 20, @09:34PM (1 child)
That's about £152k at the current exchange rate ($1 = £0.80).
If I found that I had been hired to "do nothing" with the expectation that I would just keep my head down and be quiet, naturally I would assume something fishy was going on, and I would look for my next opportunity, however at that level of salary I would be leaving on good terms, not "getting myself fired." There are hundreds and hundreds of things I could be doing and learning in the meantime. That's an enormous salary by my standards, and I wouldn't want to give prospective future employers a reason to offer me less money (you were fired and are therefore incompetent/desperate/untrustworthy...).
Do only stupid people get these salaries? Is there something we should be told?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @09:47PM
Just a guess, but people got those salaries because FB (et al) were nearly printing money, they didn't know what to do with it all.
It may be lucrative, but an HR job is still (IMO) a B-Ark job. Often, what I've sensed is that HRs are hired as eye candy for the bosses...and these days eye candy could be any of the available genders. Maybe the eye candy requirement also extends to meeting diversity targets?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @10:31PM (3 children)
Been there.
I worked for a company that did a bunch of government contracting.
We had to account for every moment of our day in some shitty PHP web app that asked you to enter your time with a resolution of one tenth of an hour. The smallest amount of time you could enter was 0.1 hours.
My job was keeping a large virtual server cluster up-to-date. That's it.
About a month in, I said "I have a firm grasp of everything going on here. Your cluster is wildly out of date. The running software was something like 1.0.2 and the latest version was 8.7.0. We need to update."
The response was "Ok. Put a plan together and we'll have a corporate meeting."
I put a plan together. It was really simple since it was a redundant cluster. "Migrate traffic away from one node at a time, update the node, migrate the traffic back". If there was a problem, we had plenty of head room to run with 1/2 the nodes in service while we dealt with everything.
A few hours later I was told "Ok, we'll probably meet about this next week."
I replied "Ok. What do you want me working on in the mean time?" "Ask Bob" "Bob said he doesn't have anything". *crickets*
I sat there for a week. The woman who kept track of the time software started complaining to me that "you can't put all your time under 'administrative', we have to be billable".
I told her I was doing what my bosses wanted, but she kept bitching. A few hours before the "big upgrade meeting", it got cancelled. I kept asking what I should be working on, and I kept getting referred to various other people who said "we don't have anything".
Anyways, during the ensuing 8 months, I launched my own business, gave my 2 weeks notice, then was asked by the company to stay on for another 2 months part-time but with the same full-time salary to do some sort of transition.
I stayed on another 2 months, but no one ever had work for me to do. At the end of the 2 months, they abruptly stopped selling the product. I asked the boss if I could "buy" the customers. He let them go for a paltry $4,000, and now I'm making ~$30k/mo off those same customers.
It was one of the best years of my life. At one point, there was a 2-month stretch where I single-handedly brought in $8k/mo from my "former employer", $21k from a large client I landed, and $30k off the new customers I bought.
$60k/mo for two months because of corporate incompetence is fun. I wish I was making anything even remotely close to that now...and I really wish I had put that money into paying off my house and car instead instead of computers and gadgets, but oh well.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 20, @10:49PM (2 children)
Wise men invest in wine, women, and song. You don't need any of that other stuff!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @12:47AM
> Wise men invest in wine, women, and song.
Might have been true once, but these days wise people buy long term care insurance (or save low 7-figures in $,$$$,$$$) because if you get old and want reasonable care at home (not in an impersonal facility) it costs a shit ton of money.
Or, you can take the default gov't funded route--just read up about all the nursing home scandals before you decide.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday April 21, @02:50AM
"I spent all of my money on women and drink... and the rest I squandered." - George Best
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, @01:28PM (8 children)
- A person ran their own ebay business during work hours from their desk where they specifically told people to bugger off because they had to go send their parcels so come back later
- A team manager who spent most of the day playing with their phone
- A senior manger who constantly forgot what they are supposed to be doing to spend far too much time trying to find out in a slew of emails
- A person who spend hours every day standing next to people's desk talking
- A person who was in a team for years but could not do the basic tasks the team handled daily
- A person who claimed they worked too much in another job a decade earlier and therefor can take time off now whenever they want to as they were not paid overtime
- A person who claimed to be qualified in their job took over six months to read in a file for data to produce a PDF
- A person for whom after working in a job for 10 years still could not quote the very basic policy for the system
- A person who worked in a position for over two years for whom was asked daily to study the system and learn it who still could not describe the parts of the system nor understood how it worked
- A person who worked in a job for years who would not do any self study to learn the technologies and systems required for the job
- A person who had the highest level of system administrator access without a level of understanding of how to use it
- A person who spent months failing to get basic access to a system who just chased the same query around in circles only to find out that they had been sending emails to unmanned or dead mailboxes and even then still could not request and have applied the access needed to do their job
- A person who falls asleep at their desk repeatedly
- A person who turns up to work coughing and sneezing for years
- A person who could not make a minor code change taking months to implement it and did not realize someone else did the fix in a very short time
- A person who claimed to be an expert at a time of key corporate system but when they talk about it the words they use make it obvious they have no clue
- A person who had a job that amounted to very little administration who then spent their days upsetting other people out of sheer boredom
- A person who disrupted an entire floor to the point where people moved teams to get away and management still did nothing
- A person who physically attacked other people in the office then just went to work like everything was normal
- A person who tried to stab someone in the office and then just went back to their desk and carried on like nothing happened
- A person who spent their days sending funny jokes to people in emails but would then when asked to curate the team mailbox would mostly spend their team asking other people in the team to do the work instead of doing the routine well known tasks themselves
- A person with very limited technical ability and a very poor history in the workplace publicly ranted and raved at the people holding the team up about minor matters
- A person who was not very good technically cried their way into becoming a team leader only to be demoted a few months later due to bad behavior
There is more. So so much more. This is just the start. I know of at least ten people who should have been fired on the spot. Problem is, that just doesn't happen.
(Score: 3, Funny) by GloomMower on Friday April 21, @03:29PM (2 children)
> - A person who was not very good technically cried their way into becoming a team leader only to be demoted a few months later due to bad behavior
This one is not like the other ones. Something changed with this one.
Was this all one place you worked at, government, big company, small business?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 23, @02:47PM
Big government.
Yes, that one was different. Normally people like that would be promoted to move them on. The line was crossed. Again. Again. Again.
If you want details, then basically this person was in a small team for years. After 10-15 years an incident occurred that they could not overlook. It involved another team. So the result was the person was kicked sideways. All shushed over and forgotten. The new team they were kicked to put up with them because they were known and basically handled them like a child.
Two buddies in the team protected them. All sorts of crap happened. You would believe it.
Eventually, after several incidents, another team in the area lost their team leader. This person had already been promoted to a senior position. Think senior tech. They really wanted to prove themselves. Even after years of examples of terrible behavior and awful incidents, some of which involve crying and others involve illegal actions, they thought of themselves as being a person who can be a team leader. They put their hand up and were transferred immediately.
Sadly, in this case, the team they went to was hard core IT. They were at the heart of the enterprise service delivery. Their work mattered. A lot. It had to be done. It had to work. People had to do their jobs, get it right, and fix it quick if it went badly. This is not a place to scum around in. If things went wrong then the upper exec would be on it fast.
Without saying exactly what happened, let's just say that a member of the this team was less than impressed. They could not believe a person like that had been promoted to senior rank. Let alone team leader.
From what I can tell, from several bays away and without being involved at all, what happened is that this person treated their new team they were managing just like they treated people in their previous teams.
You can guess what happened next. These people don't know this person. There is no leeway or slack given because you know someone for years. The ah ha mentor this person had ran scams for years without being jailed. I guess that area didn't even involve HR. Just did a reshuffle inside the team. All I know is that one day that team had a different team leader.
I can kind of feel sorry for this person. In a way. The examples they had of leadership were just terrible. Horrible people doing terrible things and getting way with everything. You watch that for years, I guess, and you think that it won't happen to you. Then it did. This person caught the flak for their actions. They could not be demoted. They were just put in a hole where they could do the least amount of damage.
Years later they were still at it. As it happened I changed teams and then merges happened and we found ourselves back together on the same team. This person was running an old con for claiming overtime. Had been doing it for years. Eventually the day came when they no longer turned up to work. The new administrators looked at the overtime and fixed the system so overtime was not required. The con is that there is a system problem that reoccurs that needs to be fixed, so they fix it outside of hours and claim for it. What they should do is identify the system issue and fix the root of the problem.
There are several people now in the area who have worked with this person. Every single one believed that this person should be fired. Problem is, people are almost never fired. Even if they break the law.
There is so much I can say about this person. What they did. How they did it. Years worth. Many people impacted. Many examples of what not to do.
I still remember meeting them for the first time. I was a junior. They were in the support team. I needed to get something done. They took the form I filled out, jumped into the system, and just did it. Back then I just needed to get my work done. Perhaps I should have noticed that even then they were ignoring the protocols and procedures.
Yes. This person is indeed Special. When they left no one really noticed or cared except the team who cleaned up after.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @04:12AM
Holding on to your manager's arm and crying is a legitimate method of winning the day when someone does something completely utterly terrible awful to you like expect you to actually do work during the day instead of pretending to work.
I know, it's cruel. Expecting people in an office to actually complete tasks. We can work on the Complete Tasks On Time as soon as we get past the Can Complete A Task phase.
Just you wait though, the future is bleak. It is terrible. Just imagine, think about it, employees having to identify the next job to do out of a queue, scope it for time and resources to complete, tag it in the queue as being worked on, and then actually work on it. Frightening. Shocking. Terrifying. Who would believe that anyone can ask employees to do this? Who, just who.
Don't worry though. If this happens, or anything like it, you can just go have a heart to heart talk with your boss, cry out your pain, really shed tears, and your utterly useless senior manager will front your abus..bull.erm.. team leader and sort them out.
Of course, the week after that when the same useless senior manager walked around for an update for work completed they can just accept an answer like 'We're working on it. Will get back to you. kkthkxbai'. That works, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @02:59AM
Application made for a senior technical position on paper with pencil.
The senior manager took the person aside to explain how this not appropriate and to point them in the direction of the instructions on the intranet for applying for jobs.
The next job submission was still on paper in pencil. This time it was a lot neater and had nice ruled lines around and words in bold.
Several years later this person somehow was promoted to a senior technical position.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @03:33AM
For several years a person spent most of their day laughing and carrying on. The rest of the floor around them had to just put up with it. Another special person.
This person acted like they were an IT god. They had the ability to remember the names of servers and what they were used for. They helped their team establish a remote connection to the machines and reminded them of such things of how to elevate access to execute administrator commands. They even had a list of commands to run on these machines and locations where the software stored logs. This is extremely impressive considering the people in the bays around them were working on core system IT keeping the main essential IT systems online and working.
For years every third word was swearing. F this and S..t that. You ram the f..k..r in there. Get the idea?
Someone on the floor took a reading of how loud this person was. Estimated at over 100db. Yes. This person was shouting. Swearing. Laughing. For most of the day.
This person's desk was right in the middle of the foot traffic for senior management. Some of the higher levels of management walked past this person's desk on an hourly basis. A scrum team held their meetings just around the corner. I can't imagine what the people on the end of the video conference calls thought.
Then the person moved with their team to the other end of the floor. For a few months it was good. It was great. So nice. You could hear yourself think. Then our team moved down to near where they moved and it all started again.
One day management announced that our years long stalled project needed to be done in three months. The good news was that we had a solution ready to put in place. The bad news was that it was not production ready, needed to be tested, and there was a lot of work to do. We had no choice but to start it immediately and fix it as it progressed. Every. Single. Day. This person laughed their head off for hours. Shouted. Ranted. Stormed around. Every single day. Meanwhile I had to made code changes on the fly. I had to test and prove the solution. My team had to run and complete the project. For over six months we worked 10 hour days to get it done. Listing to someone laugh their head off and swear. I tried earplugs. I tried headphones. I tried music. I tried industrial headphones. I tried industrial headphones with music and earplugs. The sound just goes right through you. The whole area on the floor was a sea of people with headphones on.
The place had a social media channel where you could post articles and discuss work topics. Eventually I posted about it on there. Several replies came back saying where others were like this in the organization. It seems that every main location had at least one.
Eventually a solution was found. Based on their claims of being a highly competent and technically advanced employee, the person was transferred to a key IT administration team. There they were tasked with system maintenance, user support, upgrades. It took a few months for it to dawn on them that their IT skills were fairly basic, their ability to learn was limited, and their ability to perform was mediocre at best. A year later they were transferred to another admin team with a less of a user facing service front and with far less demanding and stressful duties.
Perhaps one day I will walk by where their desk is just to see if they still spend their time shouting, laughing, swearing. It is not high on my list of priorities.
For reference, this person is a full time employee who earns more than 100K.
To this day I ask myself why I have worked so hard, done so much, learnt so much, when I could have just turned up to work, done next to nothing, and just cruised. Every day I find more to do, more to learn, and more that should be done. I don't know how people do what that person did. I really don't. I have seen it so many times. How do they look at themselves in the mirror.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @04:06AM
I was walking down the corridor between the bays one afternoon when most people had packed up. One of our mid tier support was still at their desk industriously laboring away. I said hello on the way past. I noticed that they did not have anything on their screen that was recognizable. A while later I walked back down the way and the person said hi. They wanted some help with something. I provided them with answers and asked what it was for.
This person was working on a game.
The advice was for solving an issue with the game code.
I learned that this person had spent the better part of the last two years working on this game and other activities at work during work hours.
Due to their culture their family had chosen a partner for them and prompted them to get married young. Now with young children and probably more on the way they wanted to do more than be a corporate drone. This was to be their escape.
I don't know if they followed through with the plan to make their own company, make games, and publish them. I never got back to this person. For years I walked by their desk, noticing that they were spending a lot of their time looking at something other than work. The manager knew. The team knew. Everyone knew.
Recently I passed by this person in the street with their family all in tow. They looked as unhappy as ever. They are still in the corporate IT support job. Nothing much has changed. Who knows what they are really doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @01:46PM
It had been months of excuses, lack of response, and no remorse.
It had reached the point where the employee became aggressive and antagonistic for even the most basic of tasks. I had tried everything. Emails. Todo lists. Breaking down tasks. Setting a high level task and then asking the employee to work out how to it and ask for assistance if required. No requests for help. No completion of tasks. Three days passed. I asked for an update. Task was not completed. Issues with working on what to do.
I created a list of tasks. Each one was very specific. Each one should take less than 30 minutes to do. I could do it off in less than an hour. Cal it 40 minutes. Each task was specific enough that it could just be done. Each task had a breakdown of what to do. An email was sent to the person stating that they are to do this as their work tomorrow. They must complete all tasks. They can ask for assistance if required. Them must close all tasks in the system. Just tick a box and mark it as done. The employee was called on the phone, the tasks were described, the location was given for where everything was. It was made clear that they can ask for help and that these tasks were to be completed by COB.
The next day, nothing. Right at the end of the day, the tasks were mostly updated to be marked in the system as complete. Except one. No comments. Just tasks marked off.
When I spoke to the employee I said that if any task was not doing then I would take it out of the list as a basic task, break it down to steps, and post it as a separate task. So, I did. That last task was created as a new item, with every single step laid out. Anyone could have done it. I then sent the employee an email saying that the list of tasks was not completed that day. The task that was not completed was not broken down to steps. This was to be done as soon as possible.
At the end of the next day the employee still had not finished the task.
I called and asked why. The employee could not explain. I broke it down. The task was to download a file from one location, and then put it into a specific backup location, and close the task in the system. That's it. Literally a five minute job. I asked what the employee had done all day that they could not finish this task. The only task on their queue. The only task to do. They could not explain.
The happened a number of times. When directly asked why tasks were not done they just had no answer.
I stayed on the phone and walked them through it. Step by step. Then had them close the ticket.
How long did that take? 10 minutes. Ok. It should probably have much less. What will you do next time?
Answer: I don't know
...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @02:34PM
The One Hour Email
The task was to send an email to another team to have them undertake a task for our team.
Estimated time: 5 minutes
Actual time: One hour and still not done.
After this happened repeatedly, and watching this person try to send an email and just not getting there, I decided to try this method. I would set the task, and a time, and step in if it took too long.
The requirement was sent to the employee in an email so they could take their time to read the requirement and understand it. I spoke to the person face to face. The person read the requirement and agreed that they knew what to do. This was set as their only task to do. Nothing else.
They started. I watched from a distance. I gave the employee time.
After 20 minutes I was concerned.
At 45 minutes it was terrible to watch.
At an hour I went over to the employee's desk to ask how they were going.
The email was sort of drafted. It was not good. Nowhere near what can be sent. The draft content showed that the employee did not know how to ask for what was needed in written form.
The employee suggested that they could just call the team. I asked where the written record would be then of the request. Right. Email is needed for a history of the exchange.
I spent around 20 minutes to teach this employee how to send an email. I asked how long they thought it would take to draft it and send it. They thought an hour. This is probably about right considering that they just took an hour and still did not complete the task.
I lost it. I just really lost it. No screaming or yelling. I just stood there. I counted backwards from 100 silently.
Having had enough I asked the employee politely to open a new email. With a new email open I dictated what the email could be. Three lines. Then spent one minute cleaning it up. Then added an extra line for clarification (making the third line two sentences). I asked the employee to read the email and if it looked correct. It was. Send. Done.
Total time was around 8 minutes. 8. Minutes.
I asked why the employee thought it would take them at least an hour to write a three line email. They did not know.
People kept telling me I looked stressed. I realized eventually that this employee does not stress, they are a carrier. They provide stress for others.
Don't ask how much this person gets done per year. It is terrible just thinking about it.