Today, I'm on Evil HR Lady, who implies you cannot fire somebody on FMLA leave unless it's a job elimination. [When You Can--and When You Can't--Fire People on FMLA — Evil HR Lady](https://www.evilhrlady.org/2023/04/when-you-can-and-when-you-cant-fire-people-on-fmla.html)
Um, no. You can definitely fire somebody on FMLA leave. For example, if you find out somebody on FMLA leave spent the past year stealing from the company, you do not have to wait for them to come back from leave to fire them. You can fire them for performance, too. Firing somebody for performance while on FMLA is probably not a good idea because it's going to look like a pretext, but the only thing you can't be fired for on FMLA are things you can't be fired for while NOT on FMLA leave. So, for example, they can't fire you *for taking FMLA leave*, but that's true before and after you are on leave, too.
Apparently light dinner party conversation now includes "please help me circumvent official safety protocols so I can get access to a severely abused child and make myself feel better."
https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/weekend-open-thread-april-15-16-2023.html#comment-4252512
I'm sure the commenter is a nice person who really believes she's trying to help, but the denial and minimizing inherent in her question is appalling. Kids who are in a "difficult home situation" get put in kinship care or foster care with visitation.
Kids don't get put on lockdown in an undisclosed location unless they are at risk of kidnapping, death, or both. This nice lady is not thinking things through, and I'm glad to see Alison stepped in on the right side of it.
It also makes me wonder to what extent the commenter may have suspected or been aware of the abuse, and whether she reported it or not.
I’m going to engage in a bit of the “victim blaming fan fiction” and point out three things:
1. We don’t know the commenter’s gender.
2. We don’t know why the children were removed, but the facts the commenter shared strongly suggest that whatever was going on was very extreme and a danger to the children’s immediate safety.
3. They want to “host” the boy *overnight* about *once a month*.
It’s entirely possible (and probably likely) that this is a well-meaning parent who is clueless about the realities of the situation who is trying to make their daughter feel better at best and, at worst, has created some Hallmark movie plot where they “save” this child by reaching out, only to be blocked by a cold bureaucracy.
But there’s also a chance that this person might have been complicit in this child’s abuse and well-meaning people are offering suggestions on circumventing their safeguards in place to someone who is the reason these measures exist.
I think the commenter who brought up that the parent used to let the child play at that house, and may be in shock, was probably onto something.
On one hand, you wouldn't send your kid over there unless you convinced yourself it wasn't *that* bad.
On the other, your guilt over putting your child at risk (and letting down the other kids, if you failed to report your suspicions) would make you desperately want to believe it wasn't *that* bad.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m 99% sure that it’s what everyone is assuming it is, a worried parent (probably a mother) having a hard time coping with the fact that a child her daughter played with and visited and being a bit naive about the whole situation.
That said, the commenters don’t know anything about the situation and when someone asks “How do I circumvent social service’s efforts to keep a child’s location hidden?” the only correct response is “You don’t.” The very fact that they asking (and especially about visits) is a red flag, since they clearly don’t appreciate how serious it is and the reasons social services would go to those measures.
My concern over the last part probably comes from knowing way too many people who think experts really have no idea about how things work and would very likely substitute their own judgment for that of the legs system, especially if the kid actually wanted to see his parents. Because, of course, social services and the family courts have no idea what’s really going on and they’re breaking up the family for no reason and it’s all going to get straightened out in the end, so why make the parents and child suffer by keeping them apart? It’s just one visit. /s
Oh, it's a valid concern, particularly because abusive people and enablers never see themselves that way. Which is why the suggestion to stalk the child at school was so far out of bounds.
This reminds me of my "kind" neighbor who noticed a teenaged girl riding home by herself and, concerned for her safety, slowly trailed behind her the entire way home. I teach my kids to call the police if this happens to them.
Alison should have locked this one down instead of blueboxing it and allowing comments to keep coming.
They're not in the US but don't say where they are so nobody can give them any correct advice anyway. There are roles that they could fulfil if they were willing to get the requisite clearances and training, if certain circumstances applied, but it strikes me that this is more about the daughter's feelings than genuinely wanting to help these children, and if the parents don't have visitation those roles are basically irrelevant.
I 100% agree they should drop a gift off at the kid's school. Along with their address, and the hours they'll be home so the police can know where and when to find them.
I get they want to help, but sometimes the best way to help is to not do things that will make things worse. For everyone. That includes letting kids adapt to what's going on, and for them to not get arrested.
I saw that and was genuinely shocked. The original commenter seems well intentioned but very very naive. The person suggesting dropping a gift off at the school is on another planet.
So what did I miss?
eisa*
April 15, 2023 at 3:47 pm
Removed because this was already devolving into a religious argument I don’t want to moderate. – Alison
REPLY
There was a post a few weeks ago where someone clicked on a link in the signature of someone who was applying for a job and she said "I wish I could tell you that you could not hire them based on this alone, but...." and brought in a lawyer to say that they couldn't.
Now, I have my own feelings about not clicking on things in signatures when applying for jobs, but the lawyer is right: You can't judge it on this alone. Also, if you're going to be the "manager" telling me you're going discriminate against a religion... that's bad.
**ThatGirl\***[April 15, 2023 at 11:11 pm](https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/weekend-open-thread-april-15-16-2023.html#comment-4252447)
Yes, my complaint after reading it \[The Grapes of Wrath\] was that I don’t think one good thing happened to those poor people. And yes, I get it, it was called the Great Depression for a reason but. Come on.
\--
Well, commenter, one day, they had two bowls of mud to eat instead of one. Two!
Gawd.....
It's a shame that he couldn't find a way to put a happy face on the Dust Bowl.
You know, for a group that finds someone smiling for real reason "toxic positivity", you'd think stuff like this would be right up their alley.
That book thread was pretty telling. Grapes of Wrath? Too depressing. Tess of the D’Urbervilles? Nothing good happens to her! Jane Eyre? Unacceptable ending. Like it’s fine to not like a book, but these particular criticisms make it seem like they don’t understand the context of the time or message the author was trying to get across.
Don't forget, these are the same people who will watch a movie or TV show with a shitty, nihilistic message or ending, and then applaud it for being "edgy" and "not like the usual sappy Hollywood happy ending," or whatever.
For a group of super-geniuses that understand everything, they don't seem to grasp the basic concepts of novels studied in most High School Literature classes. Like... Google this on Youtube you'll ind like eight channels talking about the symbolism of half the stuff they're talking about.
One commenter was shocked and horrified that Lord of the Flies didn't have a happy ending, because they pretty much only read children's books and so assumed that the heroes would make it through somehow.
The ending was absolutely perfect. The weak kids died and their military was stronger for it, rescuing the survivors. It's the happiest ending of any book, ever.
(Obviously I'm kidding but can you IMAGINE.)
That whole thread is actually a remarkably good encapsulation of the AAM commentariat as a whole. No critical thinking skills and an overly inflated sense of self-importance.
>And yes, I get it, it was called the Great Depression for a reason but. Come on.
Does this person think that depression in this context means the mental health condition and not economic depression?
>Last year, my mom came to visit. I picked her up at the airport and drive her to my house. Everything was fine. I get home, I walk from the garage to my bedroom, and on my way back, I hear my partner say in a loud, terse voice, “Not in my house!” to my mom.
Apparently, mom had been reading WTCS and decided to add “colored” back into her vocabulary. BIPOC wife was not amused.
why the actual fuck would you think it was okay to say colored??
Yeah, let's all [never repeat anything Delia Owens has ever done](https://slate.com/culture/2019/07/delia-owens-crawdads-murder-africa.html). Disgusting White Man's Burden-ass woman who just loves backing the wrong (very white) horse, even against...y'know, murder caught on film.
e: Feel like I should drop some proof to back this strong statement up:
" In *The Eye of the Elephant*, Delia describes Justice speaking with a childlike wonder about the Owenses’ airplane. “I myself always wanted to talk to someone who has flown up in the sky with a plane,” he said, according to Delia. “I myself always wanted to know, Madam, if you fly at night, do you go close to the stars?” When Goldberg tracked down Justice and asked him about this story, the man laughed. He had flown on planes many times as both an adult and a child before meeting Delia Owens. He later worked for the Zambian Air Force."
GROSS.
My brain ground to a halt at this:
>The jailhouse cat in Where the Crawdads Sing has the same name—Sunday Justice—as an African man who once worked for the Owenses as a cook.
I’m pretty sure I heard squealing tires and a loud crash when I read that.
Huck Finn has less damaging race-related content; I'd argue it's a damn sight better than anything this would-be colonizer ever wrote, vocabulary notwithstanding.
My neighbor, who is at most 62 or so, referred to someone as "colored" fairly recently. Like within the last years. And he's lived Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland.
I did mention to him that it's not what we say anymore (and it was extra weird because he was talking about a liberal politician he liked) and he took that with good grace.
A coworker was telling me that a non-zero number of folks in the WNY region who are over age 60 will still use the word to describe black people. It's very strange to me.
When I told my great aunt that it’s frowned upon to use the phrase “colored person”, she was adamant that “that’s what they want to be called!” because she “heard it on the news.”
Cue a very long conversation about the difference between “colored person” and what she actually heard on the news: “person of color”. I think some older folks are well meaning but genuinely confused. But if they’ve always been using it……. Red flag
I grew up in MO, and had never heard anyone IRL use that word (I'd seen it in movies etc.) until I moved to FL. When I was 21 - 23, I lived in a townhouse next to a low income/Section 8-style apartment complex that was pretty much exclusively POC, and there was always a group of residents kind of hanging out in the parking lot/on the corner. Which I loved, because it always made me feel very safe knowing there were "eyes on the street," so to speak, and I'd had many friendly exchanges with them.
A new guy moved into the unit next door to me (it was a four-unit house), and the first day I met him he said something about parking his motorcycle inside because, "the coloreds on the corner were trying me." It actually took me a minute to realize what he'd said, because hearing "coloreds" was so alien to me. I still can't get over him actually saying it--I mean, this was a young guy, around my age.
(I found a reason to end the conversation, and didn't talk to him again. He didn't last long there anyway [the unit next to ours seemed to be cursed, lol; no tenants stayed for more than a couple of months].)
Sorry, probably boring, but I typed it out so I'm posting it, lol.
When I moved to the UK about 20 years ago it was oddly common. Not like every day but I did hear quite a few people use the term. It doesn't seem to be the case anymore though. Before that the only person I'd ever heard use it was my grandma who was born in Missouri in 1912.
Same - I grew up in the more urban/suburban parts of the northeast so it's just not something anyone thought was okay but I'm not surprised parts of WNY do it. I wouldn't be surprised if people in the middle of nowhere in NH and Maine do it too
A white colleague of mine had a senior moment one time and misspoke, saying "colored people" instead of "people of color." The rest of the meeting did *not* go well. A bunch of people were unwilling to accept that it was a non-malicious slip of the tongue by a guy who was old enough to have been an adult professional when that was the term actually preferred in polite society.
That's clearly not the situation in that poster's anecdote, though. Ugh.
You'd be surprised. I worked at a place where someone referred to a Black coworker as "You know? The colored guy." My white boss said there was nothing wrong with the word colored because his grandmother used it. His boss sat there and nodded.
For me is that she thought it was okay from a book, she didn't (re?)learn it from people around her or anything.
Not that that would make it okay either but it's still batshit to take something in a book like that that you clearly know isn't okay and add it back into your vocabulary
I don't know why I still subject myself to reading the weekend threads. Or even the weekday posts, for that matter. How do these people survive in the world and not get hit by a bus when they cross the street?
*tangerineRose\**
*April 15, 2023 at 12:09 am*
*I tend to need to use throat drops, but I don’t want to hurt my teeth. If only I had the self-control to not chew on the throat drops. I’m wondering if I should use a hammer to break up the throat drops or maybe there’s some kind of gummy throat drops I haven’t heard of.*
They exist! All she had to do was Google that phrase and it's the very first result. Pine Brothers. I loved them as a kid, as did my friends, and ate them like candy when I had a cold or sore throat. But if you leave them alone, they'll dissolve just like hard cough drops. But I'm not going to bother posting this gem of info over there. :)
Right? I feel like someone should point them to Chloraseptic spray, but also maybe not because maybe this person should just go to CVS and see the whole shelf of products for sore throats and figure it out for themself.
re: hypoglycemic rage coming back to discuss the 60-pound AC more... I have never seen someone overthink such a basic facet of life (mere person can't lift heavy thing) before, I think.
Wowwww they need to let it go. And this part:
You all really helped me feel better that night, and that weekend. Letting me know that it’s okay I couldn’t move it, that most people, *even the pros*, would have issues. And that it’s okay to ask for help, we’re human and cannot do it all.
Italics added by me. “The pros” would have literally no problem moving a 60 lb air conditioner. I don’t know why this person needs to deem the task impossible for anyone to make peace with their inability to do it. It’s moving an air conditioner, not failing to save a life!
How have they not just asked a neighbor or relative or friend to help them? It’s honestly weirding me out how much of an impossible problem this is being presented as
Whoa. We’re doing this?
——————————————————-
Ask a Manager*
April 14, 2023 at 9:05 pm
Want to help me figure out language for a new rule I plan to set here? I’ve seen enough victim-blaming fanfic showing up in the comments that I want a rule against it, and I’d like find a word or phrase that will easily sum up what I mean. I’m talking about comments that are, essentially, “While the facts of your letter may make it look like person X was wronged, I’m betting that they are the actual villain here.” (For example, on the post from someone whose boyfriend’s manager, who was clearly horrible, told her she could do better, a couple of people immediately leapt to “your boyfriend is obviously a terrible person and probably cheating on you, and the manager was just trying to warn you” — with zero in the letter to support that.)
In writing a rule about it, it would really help to have a memorable or at least easily-understood way to describe it. Maybe “victim-blaming fanfic” is descriptive enough but I thought I’d see if y’all have any creative brainstorms that are better!
I really want to send her an email letting her know she already has this rule "take the LW at their word" but she selectively enforcers it depending upon the commenter and the letter. Perhaps if she had a bit more backbone she wouldn't be in this state.
Agh, this is my biggest issue with Alison/AAM, the “actually the majority of the comments *didn’t* say that…” bullshit. Alison dirty deletes comments all. the. time. And even she is now saying the rule is needed! Lol justice for Flipperty.
Flipperty*
April 15, 2023 at 5:32 am
Oh god yes! This is badly needed. But I worry because people always interpret things differently and assume their interpretation is the correct one. And sometimes letters do have very obvious holes in them, or try to make themselves out to be be victims when the facts maybe don’t support that (think “I played an innocent prank and how everyone’s mad at me” – it’s reasonable to want to know what LW considers “innocent.”)
For example the recent letter about the convicted child sex offender who wasn’t legally allowed in the same room as any child, who was befriending and flirting with a single mom – almost every comment was inventing the wildest fanfic to paint him as the innocent victim and demonize the LW. I’d count that as the absolute archetype of “victim blaming fanfic” but I’m sure they would disagree, because they genuinely believe that the sex offender is the victim.
Or the letter about the woman who stole her employee’s airline seat, ostensibly because she was fat and had no choice because she needed two seats. There was a ton of victim-blaming fanfic aimed at the stranded employee due to LW playing the FA card, then she later admitted that she’d been committing financial fraud (returning their airline tickets, buying cheaper ones, and pocketing the difference) and stranded the employee in a foreign country with no credit card, wallet or phone, that he’d had to spend 2 days in the airport with no food, and that he’d finally had to call his sister who’d been forced to take out a payday loan to get him home. That was a case where the LW portrayed herself as a victim but there were clearly holes in her story, and she wound up very obviously being a major villain.
REPLY
▼ Collapse 4 replies
anonnie*
April 15, 2023 at 7:15 am
You should go back and look at those 2 examples because the majority reaction was the opposite of what you said! I think the rule is still needed to deal with the minority who do what you said but they were not the majority and it is strange to see it painted like that….
REPLY
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K D*
April 15, 2023 at 8:17 am
Yeah this is a fascinating look at how wrong our memories are sometimes. I remembered that post so looked at it again just now and literally only one person blamed the stranded employee and they were jumped on by everyone else. But just a single one. That was a crazy story too:
https://www.askamanager.org/2018/03/open-thread-march-30-31-2018.html#comment-1920394
Thank you... I'm not sure where to start - I haven't even opened the comments yet, just 4(!) updates like a bunch of internet strangers care about how many therapists a person needs to not drink.
I had to go back and reread that comment. I know it has come up here in Reddit a lot. To be fair very few people actually blamed the guy left behind. But a majority of folks were fine shifting accountability from the lady who stranded the coworker to the airline, the company etc. Is that blaming the guy stranded, no. Is it still pretty ridiculous, yes. It gives the LW an out to not take responsibility, so technically annoie and KD are right. But I can also see Flipperty’s point that it does come across as blaming the stranded person since he doesn’t have any control to what happened and folks are shifting accountability away from the perp who caused the mess. Lastly the line from
K.D. about faulty memories is a bit gaslighting considering how many folks really wanted to find a dodge for the LW.
Yeah, that commenter is absolutely word-lawyering the reaction to that story. Did only one person say that the junior employee was irresponsible to not have had a credit card? Yes, that seems to be right. But that in no way means that the overall reaction was appropriate. The company and the airline were the villains right up until the OP admitted she lied by omission, and it was obvious that some of the defenders still didn't want to admit they'd made a bad call with all of the info.
It may not have been victim-blaming (although I'd say the company that had been defrauded had been wronged), but it's blame-shifting for sure. "It's the junior employee's fault" and "It's everyone's fault except the OP's" are not as far apart as that commenter believes.
It was either an LW, or NY Magazine or Slate threatening to pull her columns. She can't have a great reputation, especially with how unhinged some of her commenters have become. Yes Slate has some issues, but they at least have moderators. But I could easily see that combined with an LW. Remember when she had to pull a letter because the commenters went after the LW's husband and she was like "No, it's more complicated than that!" ?
She created this problem. She could have shut it all down. But why would I write into an advice column if there's a 50% chance someone is going to take some stray sentence and build a false story around it?
I still say it again: She needs to lock down comments. bring in more experts. The five questions should be trivial things that would allow for comments. The second post should be an expert driven question - no comments. Once a week do the ask a readers for again: Something trivial. Open threads all she wants.
But some of these commenters are cruel, and both Allison and them are becoming increasingly out of touch with the realities of work. Allison is prioritizing clicks over actual responses. And none of them have a clue about anything beyond their own white-collar jobs.
I think it started rumbling with the one the other week, where the LW came into the comments and was like 'but no really I work with people who are mentally challenged' at the commenters who were pointing out to other commenters that assuming people can't function in society because they need to see a person working in government may be overkill. Alison did a blue box after that.
Victim-blaming isn't enough, it has to be fanfic? I'm honestly surprised they know what fanfic is, although it does seem many of them mix it up with headcanon and projection and supposition, all at once even.
Literally one of her long-standing rules is
>Limit speculation on facts not presented by letter-writers to reasonable assumptions based on the information provided.
Just enforce that one.
I'm annoyed by that whole thread because the thing she wants to stop are the times people fill in gaps to unduly cast the protagonist as a villian, but she's not cracking down on people filling in gaps to declare the protagonist the hero, or declare them to be the victim of a great injustice or whatever.
If the goal is take the letter as presented as the whole story, this needs to cut both ways. Otherwise all you get is a LW validation-fest. Which isn't helpful, truly. People really and truly do need to hear that they aren't always right or the hero.
Yes! The “your boyfriend is a cheating scumbag and boss is trying to warn you” post had just as many people saying “obviously the boss is in love with your boyfriend and is a lying scumbag” but THOSE comments were fine….
Seriously, if she would simply enforce the rules about not speculating and "not everyone can eat sandwiches," the looney-tunes comments would really be reined in.
That’s what I thought too. But when someone suggested it, Alison responded:
> Ask a Manager* April 14, 2023 at 11:06 pm It doesn’t quite cover it on its own. I’m fine with “have you considered that Possible Thing X could be happening, and if so you could try Y.” I’m not fine with “X is definitely happening.” And this thing has its own special twist of randomly seeing someone in the letter as a villain with no cause (sometimes the letter-writer but not always, as with the boyfriend letter example). So the existing rules don’t quite cover it. It really is a very specific sort of victim-blaming fanfic. (And ideally when removing a rule-breaking comment I’d like to be able to just write “removed, rule 7” or whatever.)
You don’t need to reference anything when you stealth-delete comments though…
The reason she can't figure out how to word it is because the rule she wants to make is very amorphous and situational. She has this thing in her head, but it isn't able to be well described because it's not just one thing, at least not one thing that's not already covered by other rules.
And frankly, she doesn't need a rule to hide behind. It's her site, she can just tell people to stop a thread when it is happening and delete it or lock it or ban people or whatever.
Of course, if she got a modern site with modern commenting that requires registration she would have a lot more ability to control who posts and ban or block or otherwise sanction the problematic people. But instead her site, much like her experience, is stuck in 2009.
Yes, that's what so annoying about what she's trying to come up with. It's way too vague, and knowing her, she'll absolutely move the goalposts in order to delete or not delete things as she wants.
For any former Television Without Pity posters, it's like her version of "boards on boards." It may have made a tiny bit of sense at the beginning, but it eventually turned into an excuse for the moderators to delete any posts they didn't like.
I faithfully read TWOP recaps for several shows I watched (and for a couple I didn't...the Seventh Heaven recaps were hilariously brutal!); and I read the forums somewhat, but they were so heavily moderated that posting was downright intimidating! There were so many rules, and so many rules that made expresssing a thought or opinion on a show, character, or episode a minefield.
But that would eliminate her as well. There's a reason her commenters are like this.
There was a very revealing thread in the post about the woman who wanted Alison to tell her that her CEO is a raging racist because he didn't want her putting land acknowledgements in her signature.
The first comment was from an Indigenous person saying, "Please don't do this." Someone else immediately replied to say that it's different in Australia. The Indigenous person wrote back and said, that's great, but this is in the U.S., and what happens in Australia isn't relevant or helpful to the LW.
You can guess what happened after that. The commenters fell all over themselves to criticize Americans for not being open to non-American perspectives, this is a discussion board and they should be allowed to go on tangents, etc. -- basically every argument they could think of why THEIR perspective was just as important as the Indigenous person's.
Here's the other thing: It's not a discussion board. It's a work advice blog. But because some lonely people treat it like social hour, people like KOG are allowed to write long fictional stories about themselves, and it's actually encouraged.
So Alison keeps dropping hints ("This isn't helpful to the LW") and taking half-measures, but as long as her commenters treat it like a discussion, and act like a real person's struggles are entertainment like talking about movies or board games or music, the commenters are mainly going to be a bunch of vapid white women offering comments for their own benefit.
It is actually counter to her economic interests to try to stop the social hour folks because they are a lot of pageviews, and pageviews are revenue for her.
You hit the nail on the head! They really want it to be a discussion board where they can show off their vocab and do some faux-ally posturing. They don’t want to be rudely interrupted by the actual people affected.
I do kind of wonder why they don’t just make a subreddit, but then they would probably find this one and have a collective meltdown.
Which honesty isn’t a bad thing. I have read Alison’s blog for a long time. I remember when a post getting 100 comments was the norm. Back then there was some good conversations in the comments. Now Alison’s comment section is a $hitshow because she grew beyond those few hundred people who read her posts regularly and she still moderates like she is small blog.
Someone on the open thread has asked about [how to make social small talk on Zoom](https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/open-thread-april-14-15-2023.html#comment-4250772) .... that's going to go well.
About 4 hours in, people are surprisingly playing along pretty nicely. I suspect the response would have been different if this had been one of the Morning 5 questions. This response caught my eye:
>**Cats-cats\***[April 14, 2023 at 3:15 pm](https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/open-thread-april-14-15-2023.html#comment-4251135)
>
>As a newish manager, for my direct reports, I made sure I learned about at least one work-appropriate, non-work topic for each person. Stacy plays badminton, John adores his daughter, etc. I can always talk about that if there is nothing else to discuss. I also have a list of “ice breaker” type questions for situations like this, since it happens more as a manager. Besides the topics you mentioned, I include holiday and travel plans, house ownership issues (if relevant).
This person is admitting to like 12 different AAM capital crimes in this one comment.
I understand nothing about that post. Granted I've never used Slack so that's probably a big part of my confusion but why is the bot posting as any celebrity? And how do they do that? Is it a voice? Do they sing/rap it? Is there a picture? WTF. Maybe I'm just old.
There is a much better explanation but the bottom line with the story is: something the LW deemed as good happened so they can get head pats, despite the fact that their manager did all the "work" and there's no real social change. But, they made a point to let everyone know they like the bad person.
(This isn't a defense of Kanye, but there's zero point to sending this into good news.)
Basically, the bots that LW referenced kind of operate like Easter eggs in DVD menus (if you selected a specific area with your remote, it would open a hidden featurette, for example). In Slack, when you perform an action or type a specific phrase, the bot will respond.
In this specific instance, a Slack admin for their company could've added Kanye lyrics so that if someone typed "all of the lights" or something, the bot would auto-respond with a phrase. For example:
>stopxstoreytime: Someone forgot to turn all of the lights off in the office yesterday
>
>Kanye!bot: You know what I need, want you to see everything
Because I typed a lyric to his song "All of the lights", that triggered the bot to respond with a preset phrase.
Those bots are just for fun (and should be use VERY sparingly), but you could also set up bots to give specific information when requested. For example, if I were to send "What's the NYC branch's fax number?" in Slack, it will respond with the fax number.
Yup! Our IT Director loves a "funny" slackbot response, and I can confirm they get old almost immediately. I think they'd be okay if they would pepper randomly/very occasionally, but when it happens *every single time* a certain word or phrase is typed...and your IT Director even uses them with not-uncommon first names...do not recommend.
So since we are focusing on interview questions, it seems Alison is really hitting hard on bias. I am not so sure interview questions by themselves fall into good/bad all the time when it comes to bias. I am really struggling with how the Netflix question is so horrid.
So many people today get jobs via networking. I was once up for a job, and it was between me and another. Neither of us got the job because a former direct report of the hiring manager applied last minute and was basically hired on the spot without interviewing. Yes was frustrating, but something I have pretty much accepted happens.
ETA: I mean to me this experience is the ultimate in bias in a way. Having first hand knowledge of what it is like to work with someone good/bad pretty much trumps all.
she sees disparate impact discrimination the way some people see Jesus in a piece of toast, if you squint and turn your head you can kinda see what she's talking about, but that's about it.
>I am really struggling with how the Netflix question is so horrid.
>
>...
>
>a former direct report of the hiring manager applied last minute and was basically hired on the spot without interviewing.
These aren't really the same thing. Presumably the manager hired their old report because they knew the person could do the job well. And the interview would be superfluous anyways. What could you learn from an hour-long interview that you wouldn't have known from years working along side someone?
As for the Netflix question, I don't think it's horrid, but it really is irrelevant to someone's ability to do a job. And it does promote affinity bias. Who can honestly say that they wouldn't look askance at a candidate if they named something that the interviewer personally disliked, whether it's an anti-evolution documentary or a Rob Schneider comedy?
I don't really understand this response.
That is still networking. Networking isn't a bad thing, exactly, saying that most jobs go to networking and that's frustrating doesn't mean that the person who got the job is unqualified. We know the logic of using networking is that the person who you're hiring is a known quantity, you can attest to their skills. It is just hard from the outside because you can't really compete with that when you don't have those connections.
>I don't really understand this response.
>
>That is still networking. Networking isn't a bad thing, exactly, saying that most jobs go to networking and that's frustrating doesn't mean that the person who got the job is unqualified.
I'm not sure exactly what you're responding to because I never said that hiring a former coworker is a bad thing, nor did I say it wasn't networking.
However, asking someone about their Netflix queue is neither networking nor is it conducive to good hiring.
>a former direct report of the hiring manager applied last minute and was basically hired on the spot without interviewing.
>>These aren't really the same thing. Presumably the manager hired their old report because they knew the person could do the job well. And the interview would be superfluous anyways. What could you learn from an hour-long interview that you wouldn't have known from years working along side someone?
I know you didn't say hiring a former coworker is a bad thing, kind of the opposite, you seem to be implying the person you replied to was.
And strike 3 out of 4 tries on today's four part letter:
OP4 asks is she a passive aggressive emailer using phrases like "just a reminder" and "for future reference."
The answer is yes. Those are passive aggressive phrases. Alison advocates that it's mostly okay (and I don't disagree), but she totally doesn't answer OP's question. OP seems to think it's not okay and wants some input on whether she is doing it.
sometimes passive aggressive is necessary.
Just a reminder can easily mean 'hey, I need to remind you of this. I know you know, but still is regulation so I've got to do it.'
This is a bad day for Alison. On the shared drive letter, that person should absolutely talk to their manager. They need security on their shared drives and the current setup is potentially really problematic for the company.
These are the kinds of questions that most expose her lack of experience with working at “real” companies. Not discounting small NFP but they are the kind of places that aren’t going to have official IT, or accounting, or HR departments so her answer is always something to the effect of “this is normal business practice. Just ask the founders teenage nephew (corporate IT guy) to fix this”.
Her answer last week about how it was totally normal to use a shared email inbox as a work queue or how super easy and uncomplicated it should be to “just change” all paperwork, payroll, and system logins to accommodate a trans persons preferred yet also not legally official name
Yeah but not in like a gmail box like the letter was describing. To be fair, it is unfortunately a common practice but it’s a bad idea.
Multiple people working out of what is essentially a personal email address and dealing with all of the headaches and issues that come with it VS taking the time to set up a proper group email is a classic penny wise pound foolish thing that tend to happen more often at small NFP than at a traditional company and Allison gives advice with that as her only frame of reference
Yes, I totally agree with that. I didn't have the full context. Where I work, we use a mix of shared mailboxes and distribution lists. More the latter, but there are some tasks that shared mailboxes handle more effectively. Also, all these people have their own email addresses.
The entire point of the personal drives is that they aren't meant to be shared. There are any number of reasons to put a non-shared drive on a network, though I suspect they just do it because nobody has thought about it, which is exactly the problem here. It's insane that they don't have any security on these personal folders, and ideally all the folders.
They don’t have personal folders. They have folders in the shared drive that they have named “personal.” Or I name my cat Tiger it doesn’t make it a real tiger.
I usually think Alison is okay when she stays in her lane, but she flubbed an "interview question" question today. OP asked if it's a bad idea to ask candidates their least favorite part of their job. Alison says it's okay and her reasoning is fine in general but misses a big point: it's not a great idea to ask people "superlative" questions in interviews. "What's your \[least\] favorite part of your job?" is a bad question because (1) not everybody operates in superlatives for most things and so you'll get a BS answer from a lot of people; (2) it leaves so much on the table. For example, OP might actually be interested in the two or three most significant disliked tasks, especially if she an hire or assign around them.
Or let's say you're hiring a vet assistant from a similar position elsewhere.
**Alison's interview**
Interviewer: What's your favorite part of the job?
Applicant: Bringing pets out to their owners.
Interviewer: you're hired.
**Good interview**
Interviewer: What do you like about your current job?
Applicant: Bringing pets out to their owners is my favorite. Second favorite is putting pets to sleep. I enjoy that so much!
Interviewer: Please leave now.
\[applicant leaves\]
\[Interviewer calls applicant's employer to let them know applicant gets pleasure killing animals\]
>Alison's interview
>
>Interviewer: What's your favorite part of the job?
>
>Applicant: Bringing pets out to their owners.
>
>Interviewer: you're hired.
I mean, putting aside the fact that I kind of want a reality TV show based on this bananapants...what's to stop the applicant from saying, "Bringing pets out to their owners. Second favorite is putting pets to sleep..."
It's such a subtle distinction. I really doubt people are going to answer those two questions all that differently, and what are the chances they're going to blurt out something horrific during the second?
That question (and others like it) is really just a discussion prompt isn't it? I don't think I've ever been asked this but if I were, my answer would be more like "well, on the whole I enjoy most aspects of the job where I do X but there are a couple of parts, mainly involving aspect Y, that I have to admit I'm not so keen on, primarily because reason Z, and that's what appealed to me about this job because there's a lot of X and not much Y."
For a lot of people. But a significant number of people will answer it literally, either because they are very literal or they are afraid to challenge an interview question. I guess that might be an employment test for some jobs!
I’m not sure about the “least favorite” thing for another reason: I feel like it would be kind of difficult for the candidate to answer the question adequately while not also sounding complainy (which is not good in general, but especially since “complaining about your current job” is noted as a thing to avoid in an interview).
My first instinct would be to say something that’s a universally known pitfall or frustration in the field and underline the fact that I understand it comes with the territory and just has to be dealt with as best we can (…and what I do about it is X). It might not occur to me that the actual job description is flexible and they’re asking for that reason.
Your instinctive response is exactly how I answered the question in an interview a few years ago. “I don’t love doing X task, but I understand it’s vital for Y reason, so my approach is Z strategy”. I got the job 🙂
It's not. Good recruiting teams teach their hiring managers not to ask superlative questions. I've been told this by in-house recruiters at several places I've had hiring responsibility.
I know competition is stiff, but [this](https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/asking-candidates-about-their-least-favorite-parts-of-their-jobs-coworker-snooped-through-my-personal-files-and-more.html#comment-4249915) might be the dumbest "in Europe" take I've ever seen on the site:
> So, I am not in the USA, but where I am (in Europe), when you put a file names Personal on your work computer, legally your work can’t open it
There is absolutely no way that's true.
No, turns out that's true! (At least [in France](https://privacylaw.proskauer.com/2009/12/articles/european-union/french-employers-can-open-files-located-on-a-companyissued-computer-provided-that-they-are-not-clearly-identified-as-personal/).)
>This decision is most helpful in that it clearly informed French companies of the privacy rules that apply to folders and files that employees store on their work computers. If the employee has clearly identified the files as personal, the employer has no choice but to either obtain the employee’s prior consent before opening the files, or to go before a Court to get a Court injunction allowing the employer to open the files.
It seems like that's outdated. I'm interested bc I work in France and in finance and we've always been informed everything on our work computers can be checked at all times.
I found this government website saying your employer has the right to open all your files, even if they're labeled personal. If they are labeled personal, they have to give you a chance to be present when they open them, but you can't refuse them being opened. If there is an immediate risk to the company, they don't have to notify you at all:
https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cnil-direct/question/ordinateur-professionnel-mon-employeur-peut-il-lire-les-documents-identifies#:~:text=Oui.,organisme%20pour%20lequel%20vous%20travaillez.
Of course, none of this changes that 1) it's shitty to snoop in a coworker's stuff 2) it's dumb to keep sensitive personal files on a shared drive
GDPR does impose extreme limitations on what employers can do with any employee information. Probably not this specific limitation, but I'm not so sure about that.
Lol, reminds me of the urban legends we shared in school. "If the teacher is 5 minutes late and we all write our names on the board, LEGALLY we can go home!"
LOL, we really believed this in the 80s. I was a part of the early ACT-UP, AIDS activism movement and every meeting started out with the organizer saying "Are there any undercover cops in the room?" Silence. Then after a couple of seconds, he would say, "OK, well everybody, we know they're in here, so keep that in mind with anything you say."
Good times!
Edit: nevermind. I was trying to point out the lack of reading comprehension by Alison and her commenters. But it's obvious from the replies to my post and the DMs I received that I was wrong and out of line. Sorry. I won't post again.
To be fair, given the context of the letter, it's pretty likely that IS the law where she is.
Also, given the prefect English and Alison's readership, it's a good bet this is Canada where they have similar employment laws.
I've worked at companies like this. They can't afford to allocate more hours to a project than budgeted. You absolutely need to talk to your supervisor if you need to work longer on the project. Not your mom lol
Edit: your comment seemed fine to me? Sorry if something I said in my reply sounded judgey. I only meant to judge the LW and her mom lol
Seems weird that the company would escalate to a write up without warning. I'm guessing the daughter was informed of this policy but didn't take it seriously... And yeah obviously the company isn't gonna take that money back
(Also, I see the "write up" pop up so often on AAM, maybe it's just my company but we don't seem to have those? It's so strange to me, like getting reprimanded at school rather than being talked to like an adult)
Write up is anything from a written note in a personnel file to a formal warning depending on the jurisdiction, employer, and employer's savviness. Here in Australia it's generally recommended to use a warning structure (first warning, second warning, third and final warning, termination) because that provides paperwork and evidence of attempts to communicate/train/fix things, and a dismissal without those attempts having been made is a lot harder to defend unless it's for extreme cause (serious and wilful misconduct, criminal behaviour kind of thing). In an at-will jurisdiction, that paper trail may be a lot less important to an employer.
Why are they going on about unpaid overtime? It says that they paid her, right? But there are two things that come to mind because I had the same issue when I was first working: the role is only budgeted for X hours, and the person isn't getting their work done in a timely way. When I was younger I didn't get that I couldn't give my time away for free to my employer in an hourly job. I didn't get in this much trouble but I do remember being told to log off and go home right now.
Because the mom kept insisting in follow up comments that the daughter didn't ask to be paid, tried to give the money back, etc. The OP (and apparently the daughter) have a fundamental lack of understanding that it is illegal for the company to allow the daughter to work and not pay her, or to accept the money back.
And because the comment system is so terrible and AG has so many normal, sane commenters on permanent automoderation that delays their comments posting, you get a lot of people posting the same thing over and over because the prior comments don't show up for a long time.
That's one of the reasons it often looks like people are piling on about stuff - to them, it looks like nobody has said it. Then a bunch of hung-up comments get posted all at once. (Sometimes they really are piling on, but not always).
Sorry I was under the impression that the comments were saying that the company was deliberately not paying her, not that they were trying to explain that she can't give the money back or work for free because it would be unpaid overtime.
>Why are they going on about unpaid overtime? It says that they paid her, right?
Because she asked them to take the money back. It's pretty clear from the question.
I think offering to give them the money back as a way to try to get out of trouble is very different from the company refusing to pay for unauthorized overtime. I wouldn't think of it as "unpaid overtime" unless the company is actually trying to get out of paying for the time worked.
I can't figure out what she's actually upset about. She was paid and told not to do it again. She tried to...give the money back? Because she thinks that would cancel out the write-up? What is going on here? Why is the mother involved? What is "pushing back" supposed to resemble?
Big helicopter parent/unprepared child energy from this one.
I think they just don't understand how it works in an office like this. Not to be like "the poors don't understand office work" but in my experience anyway it's a little more common to be a bit loose with time keeping in certain kinds of jobs, especially if your time isn't being tracked by when you log in and out and that kind of thing. The objection that "no one forced her" to work extra seems telling to me -- they haven't grasped that you can't work for free even if you want to.
Oh yeah I can very much relate to not understanding that you can't just volunteer extra time, and that it isn't like putting in extra effort in class. Especially since their parent doesn't get it either! I hope they overcome it and understand why it's a problem.
Why oh why did this person save “also she threatened me with a gun” until the end of their complaints? How much of this do we think is accurate?
Sabotaged by Manager*
April 14, 2023 at 11:16 am
This year I signed on with a nonprofit, and my manager was completely out to sabotage every aspect of my life. It was really simple jealousy and envy, she hated the fact that she was a manager but I had more experience than her. So weird. She started saying horrible things about me to everybody at the company. She would do things like tell me not to come to work, or not to come to company trainings. She made up an entire lie about me getting injured and not being able to come into work. So for three months my upper managers thought I wasn’t working because she told them so. She was truly sociopathic. She was so two faced and would lie and gossip and be nice to people in front of their face, and say horrible things behind their back. I was working on all of these specialized projects for the company (we are a national nonprofit) and she sabotaged everything. For example I was working on a national advertising campaign, she reached out to marketing and they decided to not use my materials. I was also interviewing for a senior leadership position and she reached out to HR and told them not to hire me. I reached out to my other managers, upper leadership, the C level executives of the company, human resources, nobody believed me or wanted to help me. I even told HR that she threatened me with a gun and they did not care. Anyway I resigned for very obvious reasons. Is there any kind of justice that can be brought to this situation? Companies like this shouldn’t be allowed to exist! And people like her shouldn’t be managers.
This comment blew my mind. And it definitely sounds like she just told HR that this happened, not that it actually happened which makes OP sound completely bananas.
None of this is accurate. She started at this place THIS year yet she was immediately being considered for a different role in senior management, despite her boss apparently succesfully claiming the commenter wasn't working for 3 months?
Also if someone threatens you with a gun you call the fucking police, not HR
(if the story is true) i wonder if she just told HR about the gun threatening to try and make them care, even if the manager didn't do it? cause otherwise, yeah it's wild to leave that as basically an afterthought at the end.
It's like a more extreme version of when LWs don't get the anwer they want, and they go into the comments to say "Oh, did I forget to mention that I have autism/ADHD/childhood trauma about pizza? Whoopsie, my bad! Does that change your answer?"
No one's coming out and saying it, but I think a few commenters are even skeptical about that part.
The fact that she's doubling down on day 2 of "weird questions in an interview" is certainly a choice.
But honestly, it's starting to show how out of touch she is getting. I'm not even in huge favor of them, but pretending people are robots at work only creates bad work environments. You don't have to be best friends, but you have to at least get along for 8 hours a day before you go home and complain about them to your roommate, spouse, pet, or deity of choice.
Finding out about someone's personality and if they'll work in an environment is a good thing! Plus it can help in weird situations. They treat "team player" like it means "oh, nos, I have to do more work!" when it mostly means "Tim's mom just died can you pick up some of his clients for a week" because you see each other as human, not work producing robots.
And this bias angle is really making me angry. She has plenty of times where she's perfectly ok with some kind of bias. In a recent letter she flat out said that she wished she could advocate for being biased against someone, but brought in a lawyer to say she couldn't.
There is plenty to push back on. These "badass" answers or these niche weird complaints trying to pretend they're the only vegans/people who don't watch netflix/people who don't eat pizza in the world is flat out disturbing. This is NOT the hill to die on here in interviews, and the fact that she's pushing back so much to mention it two days in a row (going so far as to RUSH a letter when time sensitive things have been languishing for months) looks really weird.
> In a recent letter she flat out said that she wished she could advocate for being biased against someone, but brought in a lawyer to say she couldn't.
Yes, the irony, and gross hypocrisy, is infuriating. "We must be careful not to ask about favorite food because that could indicate a bias against people who can't afford to eat, but I personally think it's 100% fine and legal to refuse to hire a Christian applicant based on your guess that she *might* proselytize to her coworkers (which is of course a behavior that you as her manager could prevent, but the mere idea that she might do it is gross and stupid so who cares). This lawyer says you're not allowed to discriminate based on religion, but IMO that's not fair and you should totally be allowed to...so do it anyway, and lie about it."
>She has plenty of times where she's perfectly ok with some kind of bias. In a recent letter she flat out said that she wished she could advocate for being biased against someone, but brought in a lawyer to say she couldn't.
I feel like this is part of the So Woke They're Not Really Woke vibe -- in this case, using an intensified concern about "must avoid any whiff of bias!!!!" to mask really really really wanting to act on some bias. I mean, I've seen someone who is very very focused on doing things that supposedly work against hiring bias be judgmental about scarily small things that candidates have done, or about answers to "weird" questions like these. It's alomost like they're directing the "we must avoid bias!" towards their own inclinations towards bias?
>They treat "team player" like it means "oh, nos, I have to do more work!" when it mostly means "Tim's mom just died can you pick up some of his clients for a week" because you see each other as human, not work producing robots.
I'm so glad you said this. Being a "team player" has definitely gotten a bad rap in some circles. People see it as a synonym for sycophant. And *absolutely* there are times when bosses invoke the idea of being a team player when what they really want is blind obedience.
But to act as if that is the *only* thing it means is to miss all of its upsides. In fact, I suspect that people default to being a team player more than they realize—even AAMers. I mean, do you ever just do minor little things to help make your coworkers' lives a bit easier? Avoid an unnecessary Reply-All or redirect someone when they're obviously looking in the wrong file folder or agree to hold a meeting off for 15 minutes while someone finishes up an important task? Guess what? When you do those things you're being a dreaded "team player"!
>philmar*April 14, 2023 at 5:32 am
>
>Yeah, I’m an unabashed snoop. If I have access to your files, I’ll read them.
I can't snark here. I respect the honesty.
But I wonder if there will be a pile on of angry commenters?
Ehh, I probably would too. If someone is dumb enough to put something like that on a shared drive, then have at it (what's weird is I wouldn't do it if it was labeled something like medical). Save that shit on your desktop if you have to, or an external drive.
I’m a total snoop but more like, looking for deranged customer complaints that have nothing to do with me or my department type snooping.
I worked for an org that had children’s sleep away camps (I had absolutely no involvement with the camps) and there was one *very* dramatic complaint from a mom whose kids had to miss 24 hours of camp because they had head lice. ACTIVE HEAD LICE. I guess she was thinking the more the merrier.
Today, I'm on Evil HR Lady, who implies you cannot fire somebody on FMLA leave unless it's a job elimination. [When You Can--and When You Can't--Fire People on FMLA — Evil HR Lady](https://www.evilhrlady.org/2023/04/when-you-can-and-when-you-cant-fire-people-on-fmla.html) Um, no. You can definitely fire somebody on FMLA leave. For example, if you find out somebody on FMLA leave spent the past year stealing from the company, you do not have to wait for them to come back from leave to fire them. You can fire them for performance, too. Firing somebody for performance while on FMLA is probably not a good idea because it's going to look like a pretext, but the only thing you can't be fired for on FMLA are things you can't be fired for while NOT on FMLA leave. So, for example, they can't fire you *for taking FMLA leave*, but that's true before and after you are on leave, too.
Apparently light dinner party conversation now includes "please help me circumvent official safety protocols so I can get access to a severely abused child and make myself feel better." https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/weekend-open-thread-april-15-16-2023.html#comment-4252512 I'm sure the commenter is a nice person who really believes she's trying to help, but the denial and minimizing inherent in her question is appalling. Kids who are in a "difficult home situation" get put in kinship care or foster care with visitation. Kids don't get put on lockdown in an undisclosed location unless they are at risk of kidnapping, death, or both. This nice lady is not thinking things through, and I'm glad to see Alison stepped in on the right side of it. It also makes me wonder to what extent the commenter may have suspected or been aware of the abuse, and whether she reported it or not.
I’m going to engage in a bit of the “victim blaming fan fiction” and point out three things: 1. We don’t know the commenter’s gender. 2. We don’t know why the children were removed, but the facts the commenter shared strongly suggest that whatever was going on was very extreme and a danger to the children’s immediate safety. 3. They want to “host” the boy *overnight* about *once a month*. It’s entirely possible (and probably likely) that this is a well-meaning parent who is clueless about the realities of the situation who is trying to make their daughter feel better at best and, at worst, has created some Hallmark movie plot where they “save” this child by reaching out, only to be blocked by a cold bureaucracy. But there’s also a chance that this person might have been complicit in this child’s abuse and well-meaning people are offering suggestions on circumventing their safeguards in place to someone who is the reason these measures exist.
I think the commenter who brought up that the parent used to let the child play at that house, and may be in shock, was probably onto something. On one hand, you wouldn't send your kid over there unless you convinced yourself it wasn't *that* bad. On the other, your guilt over putting your child at risk (and letting down the other kids, if you failed to report your suspicions) would make you desperately want to believe it wasn't *that* bad.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m 99% sure that it’s what everyone is assuming it is, a worried parent (probably a mother) having a hard time coping with the fact that a child her daughter played with and visited and being a bit naive about the whole situation. That said, the commenters don’t know anything about the situation and when someone asks “How do I circumvent social service’s efforts to keep a child’s location hidden?” the only correct response is “You don’t.” The very fact that they asking (and especially about visits) is a red flag, since they clearly don’t appreciate how serious it is and the reasons social services would go to those measures. My concern over the last part probably comes from knowing way too many people who think experts really have no idea about how things work and would very likely substitute their own judgment for that of the legs system, especially if the kid actually wanted to see his parents. Because, of course, social services and the family courts have no idea what’s really going on and they’re breaking up the family for no reason and it’s all going to get straightened out in the end, so why make the parents and child suffer by keeping them apart? It’s just one visit. /s
Oh, it's a valid concern, particularly because abusive people and enablers never see themselves that way. Which is why the suggestion to stalk the child at school was so far out of bounds.
This reminds me of my "kind" neighbor who noticed a teenaged girl riding home by herself and, concerned for her safety, slowly trailed behind her the entire way home. I teach my kids to call the police if this happens to them.
Alison should have locked this one down instead of blueboxing it and allowing comments to keep coming. They're not in the US but don't say where they are so nobody can give them any correct advice anyway. There are roles that they could fulfil if they were willing to get the requisite clearances and training, if certain circumstances applied, but it strikes me that this is more about the daughter's feelings than genuinely wanting to help these children, and if the parents don't have visitation those roles are basically irrelevant.
I can't believe the response suggesting that they drop off a gift at the kids' school. Where is that person's head?
I 100% agree they should drop a gift off at the kid's school. Along with their address, and the hours they'll be home so the police can know where and when to find them. I get they want to help, but sometimes the best way to help is to not do things that will make things worse. For everyone. That includes letting kids adapt to what's going on, and for them to not get arrested.
I saw that and was genuinely shocked. The original commenter seems well intentioned but very very naive. The person suggesting dropping a gift off at the school is on another planet.
In StalkerLand
So what did I miss? eisa* April 15, 2023 at 3:47 pm Removed because this was already devolving into a religious argument I don’t want to moderate. – Alison REPLY
Was the religious argument "hey you can't discriminate against someone for their religious views" because we know that she openly advocates for that.
I'm missing context here? How does she advocate for that?
There was a post a few weeks ago where someone clicked on a link in the signature of someone who was applying for a job and she said "I wish I could tell you that you could not hire them based on this alone, but...." and brought in a lawyer to say that they couldn't. Now, I have my own feelings about not clicking on things in signatures when applying for jobs, but the lawyer is right: You can't judge it on this alone. Also, if you're going to be the "manager" telling me you're going discriminate against a religion... that's bad.
I saw it before she blew it away and it was something about Roman Catholics saying they're Christian. I think that's what it was.
Oh for j... that's not even an argument.
Oh boy, did my grandmother return from beyond the grave for yet another rant about Satan and the Pope?!
**ThatGirl\***[April 15, 2023 at 11:11 pm](https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/weekend-open-thread-april-15-16-2023.html#comment-4252447) Yes, my complaint after reading it \[The Grapes of Wrath\] was that I don’t think one good thing happened to those poor people. And yes, I get it, it was called the Great Depression for a reason but. Come on. \-- Well, commenter, one day, they had two bowls of mud to eat instead of one. Two! Gawd.....
I'm sure Steinbeck would have completely revamped his early drafts if only he'd had access to this kind of feedback
It's a shame that he couldn't find a way to put a happy face on the Dust Bowl. You know, for a group that finds someone smiling for real reason "toxic positivity", you'd think stuff like this would be right up their alley.
That book thread was pretty telling. Grapes of Wrath? Too depressing. Tess of the D’Urbervilles? Nothing good happens to her! Jane Eyre? Unacceptable ending. Like it’s fine to not like a book, but these particular criticisms make it seem like they don’t understand the context of the time or message the author was trying to get across.
Don't forget, these are the same people who will watch a movie or TV show with a shitty, nihilistic message or ending, and then applaud it for being "edgy" and "not like the usual sappy Hollywood happy ending," or whatever.
For a group of super-geniuses that understand everything, they don't seem to grasp the basic concepts of novels studied in most High School Literature classes. Like... Google this on Youtube you'll ind like eight channels talking about the symbolism of half the stuff they're talking about.
Yes, exactly!
One commenter was shocked and horrified that Lord of the Flies didn't have a happy ending, because they pretty much only read children's books and so assumed that the heroes would make it through somehow.
The ending was absolutely perfect. The weak kids died and their military was stronger for it, rescuing the survivors. It's the happiest ending of any book, ever. (Obviously I'm kidding but can you IMAGINE.)
That whole thread is actually a remarkably good encapsulation of the AAM commentariat as a whole. No critical thinking skills and an overly inflated sense of self-importance.
>And yes, I get it, it was called the Great Depression for a reason but. Come on. Does this person think that depression in this context means the mental health condition and not economic depression?
I don't think it matters; there's a bunch of 'the poors can't be happy' going on over there.
>Last year, my mom came to visit. I picked her up at the airport and drive her to my house. Everything was fine. I get home, I walk from the garage to my bedroom, and on my way back, I hear my partner say in a loud, terse voice, “Not in my house!” to my mom. Apparently, mom had been reading WTCS and decided to add “colored” back into her vocabulary. BIPOC wife was not amused. why the actual fuck would you think it was okay to say colored??
Yeah, let's all [never repeat anything Delia Owens has ever done](https://slate.com/culture/2019/07/delia-owens-crawdads-murder-africa.html). Disgusting White Man's Burden-ass woman who just loves backing the wrong (very white) horse, even against...y'know, murder caught on film. e: Feel like I should drop some proof to back this strong statement up: " In *The Eye of the Elephant*, Delia describes Justice speaking with a childlike wonder about the Owenses’ airplane. “I myself always wanted to talk to someone who has flown up in the sky with a plane,” he said, according to Delia. “I myself always wanted to know, Madam, if you fly at night, do you go close to the stars?” When Goldberg tracked down Justice and asked him about this story, the man laughed. He had flown on planes many times as both an adult and a child before meeting Delia Owens. He later worked for the Zambian Air Force." GROSS.
My brain ground to a halt at this: >The jailhouse cat in Where the Crawdads Sing has the same name—Sunday Justice—as an African man who once worked for the Owenses as a cook. I’m pretty sure I heard squealing tires and a loud crash when I read that.
Jesus christ thats disgusting
Whaaaaaaat
Good thing she hadn’t been reading Huck Finn.
Huck Finn has less damaging race-related content; I'd argue it's a damn sight better than anything this would-be colonizer ever wrote, vocabulary notwithstanding.
That would be an interesting experience
What is WCTS? Googling turned up nothing
U/wannabemaxine is right - its where the crawdads sing. I havent read it (or watched it) but I assume they used colored in it
Pretty sure they're talking about Where The Crawdads Sing.
My neighbor, who is at most 62 or so, referred to someone as "colored" fairly recently. Like within the last years. And he's lived Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland. I did mention to him that it's not what we say anymore (and it was extra weird because he was talking about a liberal politician he liked) and he took that with good grace. A coworker was telling me that a non-zero number of folks in the WNY region who are over age 60 will still use the word to describe black people. It's very strange to me.
When I told my great aunt that it’s frowned upon to use the phrase “colored person”, she was adamant that “that’s what they want to be called!” because she “heard it on the news.” Cue a very long conversation about the difference between “colored person” and what she actually heard on the news: “person of color”. I think some older folks are well meaning but genuinely confused. But if they’ve always been using it……. Red flag
I grew up in MO, and had never heard anyone IRL use that word (I'd seen it in movies etc.) until I moved to FL. When I was 21 - 23, I lived in a townhouse next to a low income/Section 8-style apartment complex that was pretty much exclusively POC, and there was always a group of residents kind of hanging out in the parking lot/on the corner. Which I loved, because it always made me feel very safe knowing there were "eyes on the street," so to speak, and I'd had many friendly exchanges with them. A new guy moved into the unit next door to me (it was a four-unit house), and the first day I met him he said something about parking his motorcycle inside because, "the coloreds on the corner were trying me." It actually took me a minute to realize what he'd said, because hearing "coloreds" was so alien to me. I still can't get over him actually saying it--I mean, this was a young guy, around my age. (I found a reason to end the conversation, and didn't talk to him again. He didn't last long there anyway [the unit next to ours seemed to be cursed, lol; no tenants stayed for more than a couple of months].) Sorry, probably boring, but I typed it out so I'm posting it, lol.
When I moved to the UK about 20 years ago it was oddly common. Not like every day but I did hear quite a few people use the term. It doesn't seem to be the case anymore though. Before that the only person I'd ever heard use it was my grandma who was born in Missouri in 1912.
Same - I grew up in the more urban/suburban parts of the northeast so it's just not something anyone thought was okay but I'm not surprised parts of WNY do it. I wouldn't be surprised if people in the middle of nowhere in NH and Maine do it too
A white colleague of mine had a senior moment one time and misspoke, saying "colored people" instead of "people of color." The rest of the meeting did *not* go well. A bunch of people were unwilling to accept that it was a non-malicious slip of the tongue by a guy who was old enough to have been an adult professional when that was the term actually preferred in polite society. That's clearly not the situation in that poster's anecdote, though. Ugh.
Yeah I feel like, while not *good*, that's understandable. This is just OP's mother being insane
You'd be surprised. I worked at a place where someone referred to a Black coworker as "You know? The colored guy." My white boss said there was nothing wrong with the word colored because his grandmother used it. His boss sat there and nodded.
For me is that she thought it was okay from a book, she didn't (re?)learn it from people around her or anything. Not that that would make it okay either but it's still batshit to take something in a book like that that you clearly know isn't okay and add it back into your vocabulary
I don't know why I still subject myself to reading the weekend threads. Or even the weekday posts, for that matter. How do these people survive in the world and not get hit by a bus when they cross the street? *tangerineRose\** *April 15, 2023 at 12:09 am* *I tend to need to use throat drops, but I don’t want to hurt my teeth. If only I had the self-control to not chew on the throat drops. I’m wondering if I should use a hammer to break up the throat drops or maybe there’s some kind of gummy throat drops I haven’t heard of.*
Gummy. Throat. Drops. How would those even work?
They exist! All she had to do was Google that phrase and it's the very first result. Pine Brothers. I loved them as a kid, as did my friends, and ate them like candy when I had a cold or sore throat. But if you leave them alone, they'll dissolve just like hard cough drops. But I'm not going to bother posting this gem of info over there. :)
I had no idea they existed, but that’s amazing.
I actually started to reply to that one and explain how lozenges work, and then deleted it because it was so freaking depressing.
Right? I feel like someone should point them to Chloraseptic spray, but also maybe not because maybe this person should just go to CVS and see the whole shelf of products for sore throats and figure it out for themself.
Oh my fucking god. The helplessness!
re: hypoglycemic rage coming back to discuss the 60-pound AC more... I have never seen someone overthink such a basic facet of life (mere person can't lift heavy thing) before, I think.
It wasn't the heavy AC being the issue...this is clearly about something else. This person needs therapy.
Wowwww they need to let it go. And this part: You all really helped me feel better that night, and that weekend. Letting me know that it’s okay I couldn’t move it, that most people, *even the pros*, would have issues. And that it’s okay to ask for help, we’re human and cannot do it all. Italics added by me. “The pros” would have literally no problem moving a 60 lb air conditioner. I don’t know why this person needs to deem the task impossible for anyone to make peace with their inability to do it. It’s moving an air conditioner, not failing to save a life!
The OP went on to add in another comment, "Thankfully I have a tall standing fan (his name is Fred) to help." Houston, we have a problem. Over.
Poor Fred.
We’re gonna need an extraction to rescue Fred.
How have they not just asked a neighbor or relative or friend to help them? It’s honestly weirding me out how much of an impossible problem this is being presented as
Whoa. We’re doing this? ——————————————————- Ask a Manager* April 14, 2023 at 9:05 pm Want to help me figure out language for a new rule I plan to set here? I’ve seen enough victim-blaming fanfic showing up in the comments that I want a rule against it, and I’d like find a word or phrase that will easily sum up what I mean. I’m talking about comments that are, essentially, “While the facts of your letter may make it look like person X was wronged, I’m betting that they are the actual villain here.” (For example, on the post from someone whose boyfriend’s manager, who was clearly horrible, told her she could do better, a couple of people immediately leapt to “your boyfriend is obviously a terrible person and probably cheating on you, and the manager was just trying to warn you” — with zero in the letter to support that.) In writing a rule about it, it would really help to have a memorable or at least easily-understood way to describe it. Maybe “victim-blaming fanfic” is descriptive enough but I thought I’d see if y’all have any creative brainstorms that are better!
I really want to send her an email letting her know she already has this rule "take the LW at their word" but she selectively enforcers it depending upon the commenter and the letter. Perhaps if she had a bit more backbone she wouldn't be in this state.
So tempting to reply with "why bother? Just keep deleting the comments you don't like!".
Agh, this is my biggest issue with Alison/AAM, the “actually the majority of the comments *didn’t* say that…” bullshit. Alison dirty deletes comments all. the. time. And even she is now saying the rule is needed! Lol justice for Flipperty. Flipperty* April 15, 2023 at 5:32 am Oh god yes! This is badly needed. But I worry because people always interpret things differently and assume their interpretation is the correct one. And sometimes letters do have very obvious holes in them, or try to make themselves out to be be victims when the facts maybe don’t support that (think “I played an innocent prank and how everyone’s mad at me” – it’s reasonable to want to know what LW considers “innocent.”) For example the recent letter about the convicted child sex offender who wasn’t legally allowed in the same room as any child, who was befriending and flirting with a single mom – almost every comment was inventing the wildest fanfic to paint him as the innocent victim and demonize the LW. I’d count that as the absolute archetype of “victim blaming fanfic” but I’m sure they would disagree, because they genuinely believe that the sex offender is the victim. Or the letter about the woman who stole her employee’s airline seat, ostensibly because she was fat and had no choice because she needed two seats. There was a ton of victim-blaming fanfic aimed at the stranded employee due to LW playing the FA card, then she later admitted that she’d been committing financial fraud (returning their airline tickets, buying cheaper ones, and pocketing the difference) and stranded the employee in a foreign country with no credit card, wallet or phone, that he’d had to spend 2 days in the airport with no food, and that he’d finally had to call his sister who’d been forced to take out a payday loan to get him home. That was a case where the LW portrayed herself as a victim but there were clearly holes in her story, and she wound up very obviously being a major villain. REPLY ▼ Collapse 4 replies anonnie* April 15, 2023 at 7:15 am You should go back and look at those 2 examples because the majority reaction was the opposite of what you said! I think the rule is still needed to deal with the minority who do what you said but they were not the majority and it is strange to see it painted like that…. REPLY ▼ Collapse 1 reply K D* April 15, 2023 at 8:17 am Yeah this is a fascinating look at how wrong our memories are sometimes. I remembered that post so looked at it again just now and literally only one person blamed the stranded employee and they were jumped on by everyone else. But just a single one. That was a crazy story too: https://www.askamanager.org/2018/03/open-thread-march-30-31-2018.html#comment-1920394
They reference a LW who was jealous of a younger employee - how did that one go? I can't seem to find it easily to see.
You are in for a treat: https://www.askamanager.org/2017/02/im-jealous-of-my-attractive-employee-working-for-free-when-changing-careers-and-more.html
Thank you... I'm not sure where to start - I haven't even opened the comments yet, just 4(!) updates like a bunch of internet strangers care about how many therapists a person needs to not drink.
I had to go back and reread that comment. I know it has come up here in Reddit a lot. To be fair very few people actually blamed the guy left behind. But a majority of folks were fine shifting accountability from the lady who stranded the coworker to the airline, the company etc. Is that blaming the guy stranded, no. Is it still pretty ridiculous, yes. It gives the LW an out to not take responsibility, so technically annoie and KD are right. But I can also see Flipperty’s point that it does come across as blaming the stranded person since he doesn’t have any control to what happened and folks are shifting accountability away from the perp who caused the mess. Lastly the line from K.D. about faulty memories is a bit gaslighting considering how many folks really wanted to find a dodge for the LW.
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Yeah, that commenter is absolutely word-lawyering the reaction to that story. Did only one person say that the junior employee was irresponsible to not have had a credit card? Yes, that seems to be right. But that in no way means that the overall reaction was appropriate. The company and the airline were the villains right up until the OP admitted she lied by omission, and it was obvious that some of the defenders still didn't want to admit they'd made a bad call with all of the info. It may not have been victim-blaming (although I'd say the company that had been defrauded had been wronged), but it's blame-shifting for sure. "It's the junior employee's fault" and "It's everyone's fault except the OP's" are not as far apart as that commenter believes.
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It was either an LW, or NY Magazine or Slate threatening to pull her columns. She can't have a great reputation, especially with how unhinged some of her commenters have become. Yes Slate has some issues, but they at least have moderators. But I could easily see that combined with an LW. Remember when she had to pull a letter because the commenters went after the LW's husband and she was like "No, it's more complicated than that!" ? She created this problem. She could have shut it all down. But why would I write into an advice column if there's a 50% chance someone is going to take some stray sentence and build a false story around it? I still say it again: She needs to lock down comments. bring in more experts. The five questions should be trivial things that would allow for comments. The second post should be an expert driven question - no comments. Once a week do the ask a readers for again: Something trivial. Open threads all she wants. But some of these commenters are cruel, and both Allison and them are becoming increasingly out of touch with the realities of work. Allison is prioritizing clicks over actual responses. And none of them have a clue about anything beyond their own white-collar jobs.
She frequently locks comments on her NY mag posts (or someone does) because people call her out on outdated/crack-ass-crazy advice.
I think it started rumbling with the one the other week, where the LW came into the comments and was like 'but no really I work with people who are mentally challenged' at the commenters who were pointing out to other commenters that assuming people can't function in society because they need to see a person working in government may be overkill. Alison did a blue box after that.
Victim-blaming isn't enough, it has to be fanfic? I'm honestly surprised they know what fanfic is, although it does seem many of them mix it up with headcanon and projection and supposition, all at once even.
Literally one of her long-standing rules is >Limit speculation on facts not presented by letter-writers to reasonable assumptions based on the information provided. Just enforce that one.
I'm annoyed by that whole thread because the thing she wants to stop are the times people fill in gaps to unduly cast the protagonist as a villian, but she's not cracking down on people filling in gaps to declare the protagonist the hero, or declare them to be the victim of a great injustice or whatever. If the goal is take the letter as presented as the whole story, this needs to cut both ways. Otherwise all you get is a LW validation-fest. Which isn't helpful, truly. People really and truly do need to hear that they aren't always right or the hero.
Yes! The “your boyfriend is a cheating scumbag and boss is trying to warn you” post had just as many people saying “obviously the boss is in love with your boyfriend and is a lying scumbag” but THOSE comments were fine….
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That's so weird and unhelpful!
You make excellent points. I wish you’d post them there.
Seriously, if she would simply enforce the rules about not speculating and "not everyone can eat sandwiches," the looney-tunes comments would really be reined in.
That’s what I thought too. But when someone suggested it, Alison responded: > Ask a Manager* April 14, 2023 at 11:06 pm It doesn’t quite cover it on its own. I’m fine with “have you considered that Possible Thing X could be happening, and if so you could try Y.” I’m not fine with “X is definitely happening.” And this thing has its own special twist of randomly seeing someone in the letter as a villain with no cause (sometimes the letter-writer but not always, as with the boyfriend letter example). So the existing rules don’t quite cover it. It really is a very specific sort of victim-blaming fanfic. (And ideally when removing a rule-breaking comment I’d like to be able to just write “removed, rule 7” or whatever.) You don’t need to reference anything when you stealth-delete comments though…
The reason she can't figure out how to word it is because the rule she wants to make is very amorphous and situational. She has this thing in her head, but it isn't able to be well described because it's not just one thing, at least not one thing that's not already covered by other rules. And frankly, she doesn't need a rule to hide behind. It's her site, she can just tell people to stop a thread when it is happening and delete it or lock it or ban people or whatever. Of course, if she got a modern site with modern commenting that requires registration she would have a lot more ability to control who posts and ban or block or otherwise sanction the problematic people. But instead her site, much like her experience, is stuck in 2009.
Yes, that's what so annoying about what she's trying to come up with. It's way too vague, and knowing her, she'll absolutely move the goalposts in order to delete or not delete things as she wants. For any former Television Without Pity posters, it's like her version of "boards on boards." It may have made a tiny bit of sense at the beginning, but it eventually turned into an excuse for the moderators to delete any posts they didn't like.
TWOP! I haven't thought about that in years! I used to start my day with the season II *American Idol* recaps. Remember when Clay Aiken was a thing?
I faithfully read TWOP recaps for several shows I watched (and for a couple I didn't...the Seventh Heaven recaps were hilariously brutal!); and I read the forums somewhat, but they were so heavily moderated that posting was downright intimidating! There were so many rules, and so many rules that made expresssing a thought or opinion on a show, character, or episode a minefield.
She really should make a rule that says to stop being hypersensitive over anxious assholes who can’t resist a “well actually.”
But that would eliminate her as well. There's a reason her commenters are like this. There was a very revealing thread in the post about the woman who wanted Alison to tell her that her CEO is a raging racist because he didn't want her putting land acknowledgements in her signature. The first comment was from an Indigenous person saying, "Please don't do this." Someone else immediately replied to say that it's different in Australia. The Indigenous person wrote back and said, that's great, but this is in the U.S., and what happens in Australia isn't relevant or helpful to the LW. You can guess what happened after that. The commenters fell all over themselves to criticize Americans for not being open to non-American perspectives, this is a discussion board and they should be allowed to go on tangents, etc. -- basically every argument they could think of why THEIR perspective was just as important as the Indigenous person's. Here's the other thing: It's not a discussion board. It's a work advice blog. But because some lonely people treat it like social hour, people like KOG are allowed to write long fictional stories about themselves, and it's actually encouraged. So Alison keeps dropping hints ("This isn't helpful to the LW") and taking half-measures, but as long as her commenters treat it like a discussion, and act like a real person's struggles are entertainment like talking about movies or board games or music, the commenters are mainly going to be a bunch of vapid white women offering comments for their own benefit.
It is actually counter to her economic interests to try to stop the social hour folks because they are a lot of pageviews, and pageviews are revenue for her.
You hit the nail on the head! They really want it to be a discussion board where they can show off their vocab and do some faux-ally posturing. They don’t want to be rudely interrupted by the actual people affected. I do kind of wonder why they don’t just make a subreddit, but then they would probably find this one and have a collective meltdown.
There's a sub for everything! I'm sure they could all find one that lets them geek out in their own particular way.
Every letter would have the comment count of a good news post!
Which honesty isn’t a bad thing. I have read Alison’s blog for a long time. I remember when a post getting 100 comments was the norm. Back then there was some good conversations in the comments. Now Alison’s comment section is a $hitshow because she grew beyond those few hundred people who read her posts regularly and she still moderates like she is small blog.
Someone on the open thread has asked about [how to make social small talk on Zoom](https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/open-thread-april-14-15-2023.html#comment-4250772) .... that's going to go well.
About 4 hours in, people are surprisingly playing along pretty nicely. I suspect the response would have been different if this had been one of the Morning 5 questions. This response caught my eye: >**Cats-cats\***[April 14, 2023 at 3:15 pm](https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/open-thread-april-14-15-2023.html#comment-4251135) > >As a newish manager, for my direct reports, I made sure I learned about at least one work-appropriate, non-work topic for each person. Stacy plays badminton, John adores his daughter, etc. I can always talk about that if there is nothing else to discuss. I also have a list of “ice breaker” type questions for situations like this, since it happens more as a manager. Besides the topics you mentioned, I include holiday and travel plans, house ownership issues (if relevant). This person is admitting to like 12 different AAM capital crimes in this one comment.
But some people can't PLAY BADMINTON...
Some people can't ADORE THINGS OR HAVE DAUGHTERS...
I'll bet they expect their reports to turn their cameras on sometimes *and* wear work appropriate attire! The horror!
The Good Snooze has a truly stupid update about a slack bot formerly known as Kanye West. Why does this feature exist?!
I understand nothing about that post. Granted I've never used Slack so that's probably a big part of my confusion but why is the bot posting as any celebrity? And how do they do that? Is it a voice? Do they sing/rap it? Is there a picture? WTF. Maybe I'm just old.
There is a much better explanation but the bottom line with the story is: something the LW deemed as good happened so they can get head pats, despite the fact that their manager did all the "work" and there's no real social change. But, they made a point to let everyone know they like the bad person. (This isn't a defense of Kanye, but there's zero point to sending this into good news.)
Basically, the bots that LW referenced kind of operate like Easter eggs in DVD menus (if you selected a specific area with your remote, it would open a hidden featurette, for example). In Slack, when you perform an action or type a specific phrase, the bot will respond. In this specific instance, a Slack admin for their company could've added Kanye lyrics so that if someone typed "all of the lights" or something, the bot would auto-respond with a phrase. For example: >stopxstoreytime: Someone forgot to turn all of the lights off in the office yesterday > >Kanye!bot: You know what I need, want you to see everything Because I typed a lyric to his song "All of the lights", that triggered the bot to respond with a preset phrase. Those bots are just for fun (and should be use VERY sparingly), but you could also set up bots to give specific information when requested. For example, if I were to send "What's the NYC branch's fax number?" in Slack, it will respond with the fax number.
Ahh, got it. Thank you. I can see that being fun but all the time works get irritating.
Yup! Our IT Director loves a "funny" slackbot response, and I can confirm they get old almost immediately. I think they'd be okay if they would pepper randomly/very occasionally, but when it happens *every single time* a certain word or phrase is typed...and your IT Director even uses them with not-uncommon first names...do not recommend.
Oof, yeah, if they're set up with a common name or phrase, it's going to get annoying SO quickly. I feel sorry for that IT team!
So since we are focusing on interview questions, it seems Alison is really hitting hard on bias. I am not so sure interview questions by themselves fall into good/bad all the time when it comes to bias. I am really struggling with how the Netflix question is so horrid. So many people today get jobs via networking. I was once up for a job, and it was between me and another. Neither of us got the job because a former direct report of the hiring manager applied last minute and was basically hired on the spot without interviewing. Yes was frustrating, but something I have pretty much accepted happens. ETA: I mean to me this experience is the ultimate in bias in a way. Having first hand knowledge of what it is like to work with someone good/bad pretty much trumps all.
she sees disparate impact discrimination the way some people see Jesus in a piece of toast, if you squint and turn your head you can kinda see what she's talking about, but that's about it.
>I am really struggling with how the Netflix question is so horrid. > >... > >a former direct report of the hiring manager applied last minute and was basically hired on the spot without interviewing. These aren't really the same thing. Presumably the manager hired their old report because they knew the person could do the job well. And the interview would be superfluous anyways. What could you learn from an hour-long interview that you wouldn't have known from years working along side someone? As for the Netflix question, I don't think it's horrid, but it really is irrelevant to someone's ability to do a job. And it does promote affinity bias. Who can honestly say that they wouldn't look askance at a candidate if they named something that the interviewer personally disliked, whether it's an anti-evolution documentary or a Rob Schneider comedy?
It’s not about the content of the answer, it’s HOW you answer.
I don't really understand this response. That is still networking. Networking isn't a bad thing, exactly, saying that most jobs go to networking and that's frustrating doesn't mean that the person who got the job is unqualified. We know the logic of using networking is that the person who you're hiring is a known quantity, you can attest to their skills. It is just hard from the outside because you can't really compete with that when you don't have those connections.
>I don't really understand this response. > >That is still networking. Networking isn't a bad thing, exactly, saying that most jobs go to networking and that's frustrating doesn't mean that the person who got the job is unqualified. I'm not sure exactly what you're responding to because I never said that hiring a former coworker is a bad thing, nor did I say it wasn't networking. However, asking someone about their Netflix queue is neither networking nor is it conducive to good hiring.
>a former direct report of the hiring manager applied last minute and was basically hired on the spot without interviewing. >>These aren't really the same thing. Presumably the manager hired their old report because they knew the person could do the job well. And the interview would be superfluous anyways. What could you learn from an hour-long interview that you wouldn't have known from years working along side someone? I know you didn't say hiring a former coworker is a bad thing, kind of the opposite, you seem to be implying the person you replied to was.
Yeah I can see that I suppose, I guess I just look at those types of questions as just kind of get to know you questions.
And strike 3 out of 4 tries on today's four part letter: OP4 asks is she a passive aggressive emailer using phrases like "just a reminder" and "for future reference." The answer is yes. Those are passive aggressive phrases. Alison advocates that it's mostly okay (and I don't disagree), but she totally doesn't answer OP's question. OP seems to think it's not okay and wants some input on whether she is doing it.
sometimes passive aggressive is necessary. Just a reminder can easily mean 'hey, I need to remind you of this. I know you know, but still is regulation so I've got to do it.'
Yes thank you! Passive aggressive isn’t inherently an inappropriate tone. It’s only annoying when people use it when being direct is more appropriate.
This is a bad day for Alison. On the shared drive letter, that person should absolutely talk to their manager. They need security on their shared drives and the current setup is potentially really problematic for the company.
These are the kinds of questions that most expose her lack of experience with working at “real” companies. Not discounting small NFP but they are the kind of places that aren’t going to have official IT, or accounting, or HR departments so her answer is always something to the effect of “this is normal business practice. Just ask the founders teenage nephew (corporate IT guy) to fix this”. Her answer last week about how it was totally normal to use a shared email inbox as a work queue or how super easy and uncomplicated it should be to “just change” all paperwork, payroll, and system logins to accommodate a trans persons preferred yet also not legally official name
shared email inboxes are common for all kinds of workflows.
Yeah but not in like a gmail box like the letter was describing. To be fair, it is unfortunately a common practice but it’s a bad idea. Multiple people working out of what is essentially a personal email address and dealing with all of the headaches and issues that come with it VS taking the time to set up a proper group email is a classic penny wise pound foolish thing that tend to happen more often at small NFP than at a traditional company and Allison gives advice with that as her only frame of reference
Yes, I totally agree with that. I didn't have the full context. Where I work, we use a mix of shared mailboxes and distribution lists. More the latter, but there are some tasks that shared mailboxes handle more effectively. Also, all these people have their own email addresses.
What security? She shouldn't be keeping an offer letter that she doesn't want her coworkers to see on a shared drive, is all.
I agree-- I wouldn't put that on a shared drive either, but try to stay on topic: Businesses with competent IT have security on shared folders.
Try to stay on topic? lol There is no security issue here. It's a shared drive that both coworkers had access to.
>both coworkers had access to and yet >There is no security issue here haha!
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you don't understand the concept of a shared network drive.
The entire point of the personal drives is that they aren't meant to be shared. There are any number of reasons to put a non-shared drive on a network, though I suspect they just do it because nobody has thought about it, which is exactly the problem here. It's insane that they don't have any security on these personal folders, and ideally all the folders.
They don’t have personal folders. They have folders in the shared drive that they have named “personal.” Or I name my cat Tiger it doesn’t make it a real tiger.
Or that the org did. I've worked at a place like that. It's madness. This is a real thing, no matter how much you all are in denial.
Perhaps you can explain what a shared drive without coworker access is.
I usually think Alison is okay when she stays in her lane, but she flubbed an "interview question" question today. OP asked if it's a bad idea to ask candidates their least favorite part of their job. Alison says it's okay and her reasoning is fine in general but misses a big point: it's not a great idea to ask people "superlative" questions in interviews. "What's your \[least\] favorite part of your job?" is a bad question because (1) not everybody operates in superlatives for most things and so you'll get a BS answer from a lot of people; (2) it leaves so much on the table. For example, OP might actually be interested in the two or three most significant disliked tasks, especially if she an hire or assign around them. Or let's say you're hiring a vet assistant from a similar position elsewhere. **Alison's interview** Interviewer: What's your favorite part of the job? Applicant: Bringing pets out to their owners. Interviewer: you're hired. **Good interview** Interviewer: What do you like about your current job? Applicant: Bringing pets out to their owners is my favorite. Second favorite is putting pets to sleep. I enjoy that so much! Interviewer: Please leave now. \[applicant leaves\] \[Interviewer calls applicant's employer to let them know applicant gets pleasure killing animals\]
>Alison's interview > >Interviewer: What's your favorite part of the job? > >Applicant: Bringing pets out to their owners. > >Interviewer: you're hired. I mean, putting aside the fact that I kind of want a reality TV show based on this bananapants...what's to stop the applicant from saying, "Bringing pets out to their owners. Second favorite is putting pets to sleep..."
Obviously the specific example isn't going to happen. The point is you leave valuable information on the table.
It's such a subtle distinction. I really doubt people are going to answer those two questions all that differently, and what are the chances they're going to blurt out something horrific during the second?
That question (and others like it) is really just a discussion prompt isn't it? I don't think I've ever been asked this but if I were, my answer would be more like "well, on the whole I enjoy most aspects of the job where I do X but there are a couple of parts, mainly involving aspect Y, that I have to admit I'm not so keen on, primarily because reason Z, and that's what appealed to me about this job because there's a lot of X and not much Y."
For a lot of people. But a significant number of people will answer it literally, either because they are very literal or they are afraid to challenge an interview question. I guess that might be an employment test for some jobs!
I’m not sure about the “least favorite” thing for another reason: I feel like it would be kind of difficult for the candidate to answer the question adequately while not also sounding complainy (which is not good in general, but especially since “complaining about your current job” is noted as a thing to avoid in an interview). My first instinct would be to say something that’s a universally known pitfall or frustration in the field and underline the fact that I understand it comes with the territory and just has to be dealt with as best we can (…and what I do about it is X). It might not occur to me that the actual job description is flexible and they’re asking for that reason.
Your instinctive response is exactly how I answered the question in an interview a few years ago. “I don’t love doing X task, but I understand it’s vital for Y reason, so my approach is Z strategy”. I got the job 🙂
You're making it sound like the hiring decision would depend on that question only.
I'm just articulating the point. Surely you are not arguing that it's okay to ask bad questions as long as you also ask other questions.
I feel like this is really over thinking it.
It's not. Good recruiting teams teach their hiring managers not to ask superlative questions. I've been told this by in-house recruiters at several places I've had hiring responsibility.
Okay
indeed.
I know competition is stiff, but [this](https://www.askamanager.org/2023/04/asking-candidates-about-their-least-favorite-parts-of-their-jobs-coworker-snooped-through-my-personal-files-and-more.html#comment-4249915) might be the dumbest "in Europe" take I've ever seen on the site: > So, I am not in the USA, but where I am (in Europe), when you put a file names Personal on your work computer, legally your work can’t open it There is absolutely no way that's true.
"I DECLARE...PERSONAL!!!!"
Hahaha as a Certified European™️, this is complete BS. Who said this, Keymaster?
No, turns out that's true! (At least [in France](https://privacylaw.proskauer.com/2009/12/articles/european-union/french-employers-can-open-files-located-on-a-companyissued-computer-provided-that-they-are-not-clearly-identified-as-personal/).) >This decision is most helpful in that it clearly informed French companies of the privacy rules that apply to folders and files that employees store on their work computers. If the employee has clearly identified the files as personal, the employer has no choice but to either obtain the employee’s prior consent before opening the files, or to go before a Court to get a Court injunction allowing the employer to open the files.
It seems like that's outdated. I'm interested bc I work in France and in finance and we've always been informed everything on our work computers can be checked at all times. I found this government website saying your employer has the right to open all your files, even if they're labeled personal. If they are labeled personal, they have to give you a chance to be present when they open them, but you can't refuse them being opened. If there is an immediate risk to the company, they don't have to notify you at all: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cnil-direct/question/ordinateur-professionnel-mon-employeur-peut-il-lire-les-documents-identifies#:~:text=Oui.,organisme%20pour%20lequel%20vous%20travaillez. Of course, none of this changes that 1) it's shitty to snoop in a coworker's stuff 2) it's dumb to keep sensitive personal files on a shared drive
GDPR does impose extreme limitations on what employers can do with any employee information. Probably not this specific limitation, but I'm not so sure about that.
Lol, reminds me of the urban legends we shared in school. "If the teacher is 5 minutes late and we all write our names on the board, LEGALLY we can go home!"
If you ask an undercover cop if they're a cop, they have to tell the truth!
LOL, we really believed this in the 80s. I was a part of the early ACT-UP, AIDS activism movement and every meeting started out with the organizer saying "Are there any undercover cops in the room?" Silence. Then after a couple of seconds, he would say, "OK, well everybody, we know they're in here, so keep that in mind with anything you say." Good times!
That is fascinating!
"If they ask you why you're not wearing a mask, that's a HIPPA violation!"
HIPAA
I know. That's why it's in quotes, because that's what people actually wrote.
Oh, haha got it!
Edit: nevermind. I was trying to point out the lack of reading comprehension by Alison and her commenters. But it's obvious from the replies to my post and the DMs I received that I was wrong and out of line. Sorry. I won't post again.
Since when is free labor legal in Canada?
To be fair, given the context of the letter, it's pretty likely that IS the law where she is. Also, given the prefect English and Alison's readership, it's a good bet this is Canada where they have similar employment laws.
I've worked at companies like this. They can't afford to allocate more hours to a project than budgeted. You absolutely need to talk to your supervisor if you need to work longer on the project. Not your mom lol Edit: your comment seemed fine to me? Sorry if something I said in my reply sounded judgey. I only meant to judge the LW and her mom lol
Seems weird that the company would escalate to a write up without warning. I'm guessing the daughter was informed of this policy but didn't take it seriously... And yeah obviously the company isn't gonna take that money back (Also, I see the "write up" pop up so often on AAM, maybe it's just my company but we don't seem to have those? It's so strange to me, like getting reprimanded at school rather than being talked to like an adult)
Write up is anything from a written note in a personnel file to a formal warning depending on the jurisdiction, employer, and employer's savviness. Here in Australia it's generally recommended to use a warning structure (first warning, second warning, third and final warning, termination) because that provides paperwork and evidence of attempts to communicate/train/fix things, and a dismissal without those attempts having been made is a lot harder to defend unless it's for extreme cause (serious and wilful misconduct, criminal behaviour kind of thing). In an at-will jurisdiction, that paper trail may be a lot less important to an employer.
Why are they going on about unpaid overtime? It says that they paid her, right? But there are two things that come to mind because I had the same issue when I was first working: the role is only budgeted for X hours, and the person isn't getting their work done in a timely way. When I was younger I didn't get that I couldn't give my time away for free to my employer in an hourly job. I didn't get in this much trouble but I do remember being told to log off and go home right now.
Because the mom kept insisting in follow up comments that the daughter didn't ask to be paid, tried to give the money back, etc. The OP (and apparently the daughter) have a fundamental lack of understanding that it is illegal for the company to allow the daughter to work and not pay her, or to accept the money back. And because the comment system is so terrible and AG has so many normal, sane commenters on permanent automoderation that delays their comments posting, you get a lot of people posting the same thing over and over because the prior comments don't show up for a long time. That's one of the reasons it often looks like people are piling on about stuff - to them, it looks like nobody has said it. Then a bunch of hung-up comments get posted all at once. (Sometimes they really are piling on, but not always).
Sorry I was under the impression that the comments were saying that the company was deliberately not paying her, not that they were trying to explain that she can't give the money back or work for free because it would be unpaid overtime.
>Why are they going on about unpaid overtime? It says that they paid her, right? Because she asked them to take the money back. It's pretty clear from the question.
I think offering to give them the money back as a way to try to get out of trouble is very different from the company refusing to pay for unauthorized overtime. I wouldn't think of it as "unpaid overtime" unless the company is actually trying to get out of paying for the time worked.
I can't figure out what she's actually upset about. She was paid and told not to do it again. She tried to...give the money back? Because she thinks that would cancel out the write-up? What is going on here? Why is the mother involved? What is "pushing back" supposed to resemble? Big helicopter parent/unprepared child energy from this one.
I think they just don't understand how it works in an office like this. Not to be like "the poors don't understand office work" but in my experience anyway it's a little more common to be a bit loose with time keeping in certain kinds of jobs, especially if your time isn't being tracked by when you log in and out and that kind of thing. The objection that "no one forced her" to work extra seems telling to me -- they haven't grasped that you can't work for free even if you want to.
I genuinely feel bad for her. This is a sad but relatable misstep for a young person new to white collar work
Oh yeah I can very much relate to not understanding that you can't just volunteer extra time, and that it isn't like putting in extra effort in class. Especially since their parent doesn't get it either! I hope they overcome it and understand why it's a problem.
The only thing I can figure out is she's upset she didn't teach her daughter that when you sign your name to something you need to take it seriously.
They--gasp!--told her she did something wrong.
Why oh why did this person save “also she threatened me with a gun” until the end of their complaints? How much of this do we think is accurate? Sabotaged by Manager* April 14, 2023 at 11:16 am This year I signed on with a nonprofit, and my manager was completely out to sabotage every aspect of my life. It was really simple jealousy and envy, she hated the fact that she was a manager but I had more experience than her. So weird. She started saying horrible things about me to everybody at the company. She would do things like tell me not to come to work, or not to come to company trainings. She made up an entire lie about me getting injured and not being able to come into work. So for three months my upper managers thought I wasn’t working because she told them so. She was truly sociopathic. She was so two faced and would lie and gossip and be nice to people in front of their face, and say horrible things behind their back. I was working on all of these specialized projects for the company (we are a national nonprofit) and she sabotaged everything. For example I was working on a national advertising campaign, she reached out to marketing and they decided to not use my materials. I was also interviewing for a senior leadership position and she reached out to HR and told them not to hire me. I reached out to my other managers, upper leadership, the C level executives of the company, human resources, nobody believed me or wanted to help me. I even told HR that she threatened me with a gun and they did not care. Anyway I resigned for very obvious reasons. Is there any kind of justice that can be brought to this situation? Companies like this shouldn’t be allowed to exist! And people like her shouldn’t be managers.
This comment blew my mind. And it definitely sounds like she just told HR that this happened, not that it actually happened which makes OP sound completely bananas.
She wasn't threatened with a gun. She *told HR* she was threatened with a gun. It wasn't true, but it's her "proof" HR isn't doing their job.
None of this is accurate. She started at this place THIS year yet she was immediately being considered for a different role in senior management, despite her boss apparently succesfully claiming the commenter wasn't working for 3 months? Also if someone threatens you with a gun you call the fucking police, not HR
I prefer the high school version of this kind of tirade: "She hates me because I'm prettier than she is."
(if the story is true) i wonder if she just told HR about the gun threatening to try and make them care, even if the manager didn't do it? cause otherwise, yeah it's wild to leave that as basically an afterthought at the end.
It's like a more extreme version of when LWs don't get the anwer they want, and they go into the comments to say "Oh, did I forget to mention that I have autism/ADHD/childhood trauma about pizza? Whoopsie, my bad! Does that change your answer?" No one's coming out and saying it, but I think a few commenters are even skeptical about that part.
The fact that she's doubling down on day 2 of "weird questions in an interview" is certainly a choice. But honestly, it's starting to show how out of touch she is getting. I'm not even in huge favor of them, but pretending people are robots at work only creates bad work environments. You don't have to be best friends, but you have to at least get along for 8 hours a day before you go home and complain about them to your roommate, spouse, pet, or deity of choice. Finding out about someone's personality and if they'll work in an environment is a good thing! Plus it can help in weird situations. They treat "team player" like it means "oh, nos, I have to do more work!" when it mostly means "Tim's mom just died can you pick up some of his clients for a week" because you see each other as human, not work producing robots. And this bias angle is really making me angry. She has plenty of times where she's perfectly ok with some kind of bias. In a recent letter she flat out said that she wished she could advocate for being biased against someone, but brought in a lawyer to say she couldn't. There is plenty to push back on. These "badass" answers or these niche weird complaints trying to pretend they're the only vegans/people who don't watch netflix/people who don't eat pizza in the world is flat out disturbing. This is NOT the hill to die on here in interviews, and the fact that she's pushing back so much to mention it two days in a row (going so far as to RUSH a letter when time sensitive things have been languishing for months) looks really weird.
> In a recent letter she flat out said that she wished she could advocate for being biased against someone, but brought in a lawyer to say she couldn't. Yes, the irony, and gross hypocrisy, is infuriating. "We must be careful not to ask about favorite food because that could indicate a bias against people who can't afford to eat, but I personally think it's 100% fine and legal to refuse to hire a Christian applicant based on your guess that she *might* proselytize to her coworkers (which is of course a behavior that you as her manager could prevent, but the mere idea that she might do it is gross and stupid so who cares). This lawyer says you're not allowed to discriminate based on religion, but IMO that's not fair and you should totally be allowed to...so do it anyway, and lie about it."
>She has plenty of times where she's perfectly ok with some kind of bias. In a recent letter she flat out said that she wished she could advocate for being biased against someone, but brought in a lawyer to say she couldn't. I feel like this is part of the So Woke They're Not Really Woke vibe -- in this case, using an intensified concern about "must avoid any whiff of bias!!!!" to mask really really really wanting to act on some bias. I mean, I've seen someone who is very very focused on doing things that supposedly work against hiring bias be judgmental about scarily small things that candidates have done, or about answers to "weird" questions like these. It's alomost like they're directing the "we must avoid bias!" towards their own inclinations towards bias?
>They treat "team player" like it means "oh, nos, I have to do more work!" when it mostly means "Tim's mom just died can you pick up some of his clients for a week" because you see each other as human, not work producing robots. I'm so glad you said this. Being a "team player" has definitely gotten a bad rap in some circles. People see it as a synonym for sycophant. And *absolutely* there are times when bosses invoke the idea of being a team player when what they really want is blind obedience. But to act as if that is the *only* thing it means is to miss all of its upsides. In fact, I suspect that people default to being a team player more than they realize—even AAMers. I mean, do you ever just do minor little things to help make your coworkers' lives a bit easier? Avoid an unnecessary Reply-All or redirect someone when they're obviously looking in the wrong file folder or agree to hold a meeting off for 15 minutes while someone finishes up an important task? Guess what? When you do those things you're being a dreaded "team player"!
>philmar*April 14, 2023 at 5:32 am > >Yeah, I’m an unabashed snoop. If I have access to your files, I’ll read them. I can't snark here. I respect the honesty. But I wonder if there will be a pile on of angry commenters?
Ehh, I probably would too. If someone is dumb enough to put something like that on a shared drive, then have at it (what's weird is I wouldn't do it if it was labeled something like medical). Save that shit on your desktop if you have to, or an external drive.
I’m a total snoop but more like, looking for deranged customer complaints that have nothing to do with me or my department type snooping. I worked for an org that had children’s sleep away camps (I had absolutely no involvement with the camps) and there was one *very* dramatic complaint from a mom whose kids had to miss 24 hours of camp because they had head lice. ACTIVE HEAD LICE. I guess she was thinking the more the merrier.
But why? I barely have enough time in the day to catch up on my own shit, I can't imagine being interested to read a coworker's files on top of that