"Most jobs training today is: Figure it out yourself. It's amazing. 30 years ago we had trainers,"
"Most jobs training today is: Figure it out yourself. It's amazing. 30 years ago we had trainers,"
Nobody fucking knows how anything works. Nobody knows who is supposed to know. Your boss pays $300/hr for a consulting firm to send another fresh-out-of-college-kid to tell you why the system you bought from a vendor who has produced exactly zero application guidance is malfunctioning, and that kid will spend the next two weeks learning how the damned thing works right alongside you.
This has been my life implementing the latest edition of RightAngle for the last two years. Just a stack of expensive third-party 20-somethings saying "Ah, fuck, never seen that before, let me get back with you in a week."
I feel like our society forgot that you're supposed to pass your knowledge down to the next generation, but boomers decided that it wasn't their job. Every man is an island instead of standing on the shoulders of giants like we are supposed to, and the result is everyone has to rediscover how to do anything themselves.
The management understands that labor costs money but don't seem to understand why, so they just keep firing or not re-hiring until all the institutional knowledge is gone and the firm collapses.
To be fair, why should a long-term employee spend months of their productive time training a short-term contractor who may not last the year?
Ignore for a moment how few to no actual "employees" are being hired, and thus everyone is a short-term temp.
It's just a consequence of wanting maximum gains for little to nothing, i.e. corporate greed i.e. late-stage capitalism.
Bonus points if managers who do spend time training contractors get removed and replaced by those more willing to get in line with the company vision, being more "productive" in the ways that those in charge (Bezos, Musk, Huffman, etc.) can understand and agree with.
Literally why the US can't make certain missiles any more lol. So it's not all bad. Turns out none of the managers realised making weapons is skilled work until all the skilled workers retired.
Because they don't retire. They just fucking die at their desk and the knowledge goes with them.
The best part is that after all that expensive experience-gaining, when the project is over the consultants leave and the company is left with nothing. So they can just rinse/repeat in a year or three
imagine my shock getting burned out of grad school because the guy i worked for had absolutely zero technical skills in anything that interfaced with the research equipment. just a noggin full of papers and shit. even academia is this fucked up about a lot of stuff.
RightAngle is a commodities trading and risk management solution for liquid hydrocarbon companies, such as producers, crude marketers, refiners, fuel marketers, and fuel consumers
Wall. Unless you sabotage their business.
How can I compete with their own incompetency?
Well fuck, I could have told them that 10 years ago.
I remember when I was a teen looking for my first job. "Why don't you try a coffee shop, easy first job" was what I was told by boomers.
Every single one did not want to hire anyone who didn't already have years of experience.
I once asked one of the baristas "Well, how did you get experience then?" he sheepishly said, "Well... my parents owned a cafe business so..."
I am fast learning that most of what boomers say translates into "Sounds like a whole lot of not-my-problem". They managed to get theirs by climbing the latter built by the previous generation or two, so now you are asked to do the same... and without the ladder.
The trick is that brainwashing techniques are strong, so they don't see the hypocrisy inherent in those positions. Nor do they care. The TV man says jump, and they ask how high.
It's funny when people give you general advice, but then you ask about their experiences and it doesn't line up with their advice at all.
Everyone wants to be helpful but don't realize that they're not really helping
Starting new jobs is like the worst experience. Not a clue how anything works, no idea who to ask, everyones busy and you have no work to do, or the work you are given makes no sense.
Everyone is either pretending to be busy or legitimately busy carrying most of the workload
This. At my spouse's job, they're kept so absurdly busy that there isn't a single day they don't have tasks leftover in their queue when they close up and go home after a 10 hr shift. Meanwhile there were managers who just talk all day and shop online.
in every functioning organization there's one person that knows how everything works, and they're too busy being abused by management to teach anyone else.
Do too poorly and you get fired, do too well and you become too indispensable to ever receive a promotion or go on vacation.
Yeah if you want to be promoted you need to coast by doing the exact average amount of work and licking boots, causing no problems for your managers (keep head down, don’t bring up problems or ideas or improvements)
accurate. You either become a knowledgeable underpaid employee, or you get promoted despite not knowing basic shit about the company.
My workplace keeps firing the one person in charge of important tasks and then doesn't replace that task because no one in management understood the task was necessary. They fired the person who counts inventory, now no one does inventory and we're all expected to just live with it. I think the idea is someone is supposed to take initiative and do the inventory tasks on top of their normal job, but why would they?
Constant carousel of firing an important person, learning that person did an important task, management rearranges people to do extra tedious stuff, then management pats themselves on the back.
Less workers doing the same amount of work = more profit. That's why they pat themselves on the back. They think they're geniuses for making the company more profitable, failing to realize that little trick has its limits as everyone gets worn down, loses sleep, performs worse, etc.
Places hate taking inventory because they realize they have less stock than the computer said, meaning they "lose" money when they correct it. They'd rather just keep pretending. Literally fictitious capital.
The inventory I mean are supplies we use for manufacturing the products. We have no central database for incoming raw materials, no inventory to know what we have, and no one in charge of tagging incoming supplies. It makes no sense and we realize we're depleted on something important at least once per week.
Maybe I'll find it later but this reminds me of the reddit thread from last year where a GenZ kid made a post asking people how his desk phone worked, what all the buttons did, and so on.
No one told the poster how it worked at the time they were hired. They didn't want to admit to coworkers that they had no idea how it worked.
I think this extends way beyond just work though. People just don't know how anything works. They buy phones and have no idea how they work, cars, computers, everything is a black box to most people.
People just don't know how anything works. They buy phones and have no idea how they work, cars, computers, everything is a black box to most people.
This isn't entirely their fault; the makers of these products have deliberately made them harder and harder to tinker with and learn from over the years.
But even the people who are supposed to know how things work don't know how they work - my experience hiring people is that basically anyone who grew up with home wifi, cell phones, online gaming instead of LAN parties, etc. doesn't know anything about how networks or computers actually function, no matter what degrees or certifications they claim to have.
I've asked people applying for network engineer positions to explain how the Internet works, and they thought I was being philosophical. Like, woah, man, how does the Internet work? The conceptual map just isn't there, even if I try to gently lead them through it.
I'm always terrified I'm going to accidentally hang up on a caller when I attempt to transfer them. Chalk it up to "was never trained on it, just used intuition and hope"
People just don't know how anything works. They buy phones and have no idea how they work, cars, computers, everything is a black box to most people.
This is why I say at minimum, learning how to solder and what basic electronic components are and do is an important skill in the times we live in. I've fixed so many things I would've otherwise thrown out and bought another, if I didn't know the basic stuff. They should really teach it to the younger folk in school.
I literally found the instruction manual for the pile of phones at a store I worked at and figured out how to make it do things that were useful.
One of which, was changing the fucking time after Day-Savings-Time because the phones were fancy enough to have it hard coded into them, but not fancy enough to be updated after the date of Daylight Savings changed. So for YEARS the phones would spend like four months with the wrong time until the time changed happened again.
It's not just corporate jobs either. I was "training" (in quotes because they taught me fuck-all) to be a server at a fancy restaurant and show venue, and they let me go after my second day. Mind you, they only "trained" me for 4 hours tops my first night, and then threw me in for a full regular shift on my second day. Fired me because I didn't nail absolutely everything perfectly first try. Made me want to commit arson.
Probably a blessing in disguise, considering the owner was a massive creep, but holy shit.
For restaurant server jobs especially that’s a big reason they really only want to hire people that have tons of experience. That shit is really hard work, not intuitive at all, and especially for my introvert ass, very mentally exhausting, as well as physically draining. Most restaurants I worked at never had any sort of training plan, they just double up the new person with whoever has a slow section and wing it. It’s also not the type of job that incentivizes doubling people up on a shift, due to tips, which I think negatively affects any training program. Pairing someone up with a senior employee has been the fastest onboarding in my experience.
Even at my current job I only get a month, maybe 6 weeks if I’m lucky, to have someone shadow me on the job and get direct training before they’re expected to be pulling shifts alone. And my phone is blowing up for months with questions when they first start solo, so I know that time should be extended.
It's extremely rough. I had 4 years of serving experience at the time, had served in a variety of settings from nice sushi restaurants to dive bars. They fired me because of specific niche little things that their establishment specifically does a certain way, which makes it all the more frustrating.
I work logistics now, this reminds me of a while back, around late 2020 when a truck driver showed up to pick up a load. He had never been trained to back into a loading dock so he asked to be loaded by forklift, easy request to oblige. He was also never trained on how to roll back his curtainside trailer so we looked up a youtube video and got it done together. He apparently was also never trained on securing loads because I got a call from the destination with pictures where he must have had to hit the breaks hard and one pallet shifted and squished so many cans of paint. That poor dude must have been having a terrible fucking time at that outfit, and they definitely did him dirty. The first email I get after my manager files an insurance claim is from that trucking outfit saying they fired the guy and that mistake won’t happen again. So quick to cut him loose to save their contract.
Dude needed some fucking training and some shadow shifts or something, not getting thrown to the wolves and hung out to dry.
Wait, a truck driver was never trained to back into a loading dock? That's like...truck driving 101.
: "Do everything yourselves, peasants.So, why are you taking so much profits again? You do literally nothing and miraculously still end up doing less and less. You said it yourself, we don't need you. Even by your own capitalist standards, the fact that you get all the money and do zero labor means it piles up to never be spent. Having idle billionaires is just leaving money on the table.
no expenses, only profits
I worked at a place that would hire random people for 13 dollars an hour and sell their labor to small businesses for 120 an hour and say they were marketing/SEO experts. The job posting was basically "copywriter" and the training there consisted of "figure it out"
One client saw how bad his site was written, and yelled at the director and accused him of hiring busboys, rhetorically really, as he didn't know any of it
The director incredulously retold this story to us, as if it was the most absurd accusation. Like dude, he didn't mean you handed your laptop to your waiter at Applebee's. He means you hired busboys and didn't train them in the skills you're selling. That's... That's half the team. The client couldn't have been more right
The more companies I have to talk to for my job, the more I realise that 80% of being a business is trying to pretend that you have a good product and good internal processes, and the other 20% is putting out some crap from not having a good product or good internal processes.
It's so fucked to start a job. Before training even comes into it, you start with a broken setup that no one knows how to get working.
Then you just sit in limbo with no help wondering if things will get fixed before you get fired, and wondering if there will ever be any help or training coming.
“On the job” training these days is like a fuckin’ poorly designed game. It’s mostly fail at something they don’t explain to you properly and assuming you don’t die you kind of extrapolate from there. Yes, trial and error is a way to learn, but with any sort of technical skill or task (or even social behavior), it’s a lot easier and better when you are instructed or better yet paired with a teacher of some kind.
In my experience, having an experienced colleague is often the fast way a new hire can get up to speed, but that requires a job to prioritize workers in some meaningful way.
They are treat us all as individual node utterly unconnected to other nodes. they want you to learn on your time not theirs. Also I hate “upskill-ing” being totally outsourced but also is kinda mandatory these days. They all wonder why we all hate work, and never take a second to look at how work is done and more importantly HOW THEY made it worse
Explained what I was thinking perfectly.
When I did my work placement in college at a long term care home, I had basically 1 day of orientation and that was it. I was expected to do 1-1 counselling sessions with residents immediately, it was absolutely terrifying.
I was once the 6th person in a row to be hired and fired within a few days in an accounting role for a Chinese home appliance manufacturer. My onboarding consisted of a brief introduction, getting sat down with a fat stack of Amazon invoices, and given a shitty laptop with a shitty trackpad and no mouse. Nobody bothered to set up my account, so I didn't have any emails. Nobody explained how to use SAP, which I still hate for being the shittest bit of accounting / enterprise resource management software I have used, and nobody explained how the fuck to interpret the mish mash of disorganised Amazon delivery notes. I waved my predecessor goodbye as she was fired the day I started (she had been there for 2 days herself), and 2 days later I was fired myself. I am pretty sure the reason I got fired is that I left work on time, while my manager was in a meeting going on god knows how long. I had spent the whole afternoon twiddling my fingers with nothing to do, no resources, and no way to get started by myself. Good riddance. Hopefully my former manager is still hopelessly overwhelmed working 16 hour shifts to this day.
Permanently Deleted
American society giving up on training on literally everything from everyday work to government is a really cool good decision that will have no negative ramifications for anyone when situations arise
lmao yep.
I am constantly being asked basic shit by newer coworkers. "Umm can we refund this?" No - you need to send it through the corporate Salesforce pipeline and hope the Accounting team (of which there are 2 people - who aren't even certified accountants, they just have access to the corporate Stripe account) hits the Refund button within the 1-5 business day timeline we give to clients. "Wow no one told me that" yeah sorry, you're expected to search through the last 8 years of Slack messages and also you're supposed to compile your own repository of information like this - don't ask for a corporate Evernote license to facilitate this either.
Nobody on my team even knows how to do the task I've been figuring out this week. No documentation from the experts to guide us. It should be a 5-10 minute thing but it's taken me like 7 hours so far. If people could sit down for half a day to work on documentation without worrying about their deliverables, it would never be an issue again
On the other hand, less documentation means more job security for the people that failed to produce said documentation.
this is almost certainly why the company has never done layoffs
Permanently Deleted
Uh, no. This is reactionary. Management doesn't want to do what they literally claim to exist for and push the blame onto workers. Fuck that
I once worked at a "consulting" place that would crap out some e-commerce code or copywriting or marketing campaigns and whatnot. One of my coworkers, who started at the same time I did, had zero client tasks for 6 months and quit. She got paid salary either way but it was exhausting to come into work every day and just have to look like she was doing something productive. And I've had times like that as well where my work is meaningless and nonproductive. It's classic Bullshit Job stuff and it's bad for your soul.
hello i would like to do a job for you for money does that sound good yes that sounds good come do a job for us for money ok im here to do the job what should i do idk man ok well when you need me to do something in exchange for the money you're giving me let me know
wtf you're doing nothing why so lazyNever worked a job before behavior tbh.
Hopefully it was radicalizing or something.
My onboarding at one tech company was literally being handed 2 flatpack boxes to build my own desk and chair.
Literally nothing else. Just expected to get on with what my job was supposed to be independently. No meetings, no setting of goals or expectations, no nothing. I did all of that myself.
Slowly started taking on the work of multiple other roles in the company all put together and once it became 3 jobs in one I got the fuck out of there.
My last job was basically that. I got the computer, they set up some accounts and stuff, and then nobody talked to me for about a week after the introductory zoom calls and whatnot. I was pinging teammates and my manager with questions about what the f i should be doing and got cold responses or no responses.
I basically did jack shit at that job for a whole year. It sounds great, but it was actually hell.
It sounds great, but it was actually hell.
Pretending to be busy while also being chronically bored out of your mind for 8 hours a day is physically taxing. Nobody expects it when they come in from, say, a retail job where they’re on their feet all day. But you can feel the toll it takes on your body to do that shit. If the pay was the same, I’d take factory work over office work any day. Office work just tends to pay way more.
I agree entirely. I've worked in a couple different factories and I actually love that kind of work. You get really quick and good at stuff without it requiring any thought whatsoever but everyone is working in unison and getting shit done. But you're right, they don't pay that great at all.
I spent just over two months at a new job unable to do anything because everyone was too busy to give me the required training session. Hated it. Can't imagine sitting around like that for a year.
To be fair, I learned what we do and got myself involved in stuff but nothing ever quite clicked all the way. Their decisions never really made sense and they fought me on things I thought were absolutely common sense -- like not letting people copy all their files from their laptop to their personal google drive or a usb drive before wiping their laptop after we just fired them. Just insane shit.
I can at least do the onboarding for the techs, but I'm also pretty much expected to do it for the people that are supposed to be my managers as they often don't know what they're supposed to be doing and they keep coming and going. Having to teach my commercial manager to read a contract was a bizarre experience.
Nobody knows what they're doing, and if they do they just keep getting responsibilites until they don't have enough time to do their jobs and burn out. I've found a fairly happy medium of not giving a shit while being overworked.
This is the result of MBAs being sent into the world like a flock of demons.
Training people is hard i guess
Permanently Deleted
yeah, at this point i'm an underpaid "manager" with no actual authority so i could be let go if i make a decision my borderline nonexistent two actual managers don't like. this includes being in charge of "training" (i was never trained ofc) which largely consists of shadowing me for a day and then getting tossed into the deep end because we don't want to hire people.
all of this and it's still better than what i could get elsewhere (woman with phone answerer on resume has exactly one usable skill according to any middle manager in the US) because i at least am allowed to basically do whatever i want as long as i'm here and the machine runs smoothishly
Why don't people want to do extra extra work that I don't specify or teach?
Was once handed the keys to a front end loader, without any form of training. Like at all. It was a government job as well. Good times
🖥️🐿️?
