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| How to deal with manipulative coworker |
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| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: nctnico on September 19, 2022, 10:17:47 pm --- --- Quote from: tszaboo on September 19, 2022, 10:09:07 pm --- --- Quote from: fourfathom on September 19, 2022, 06:27:05 pm ---Is a better job so hard to find? From here it sounds like an unpleasant, dead-end environment. --- End quote --- Oh, I started looking. But I also like to keep my options open. That's why I'm not burning bridges. I also notified upper management, that I'm not satisfied with their resolution of the problem. No threats or anything that's pointless. --- End quote --- That is a good idea. If you happen to find another job, just say you got a very good offer somewhere else and thus resign. Keep things positive. Maybe someday your current employer may come to their senses and asks you back. --- End quote --- Or you may later encounter a current coworker in a different company. It is a surprisingly small world. |
| bdunham7:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 20, 2022, 05:55:25 am ---I will repeat what has already been said because it's so important: No one is irreplaceable. Always remember this. --- End quote --- I'll disagree a bit because I've seen this sort of drama unfold more than once. Well-run companies will actively avoid situations where they become too dependent on key employees for ordinary functions. An employee cannot make themselves 'irreplaceable' by being the only one that knows the keycode for the forklift or something silly like that. But in some small and medium sized companies, an employee can easily become important enough that they cannot be fired without significantly affecting the operation of the company. A small business owner--say Joe's Pet Food and Dogwash--may employ one very good dogwasher that is known and loved by customers and dogs alike. The result of that employee leaving may be that the business becomes just Joe's Pet Food, or even goes out of business entirely. Being irreplaceable doesn't mean that you can't be fired, but rather that in some cases there are consequences that cannot be mitigated. Small businesses are often run by stubborn, angry people that might otherwise be unemployable. Being irreplaceable won't keep you from being fired. Oddly, being a 'top performer', especially in areas like sales, often makes that person almost immune from firing even though they often achieve that top performance at the expense of other employees and the company itself. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: bdunham7 on September 19, 2022, 10:24:26 pm ---I've seen cases where people were confident that they wouldn't be fired because they believed that a complete fucking disaster would ensue if they were. And, they were fired and while a complete fucking disaster did ensue (in one case, major disaster with fireballs and wreckage and people killed due to the incompetence of the replacement) they weren't asked back, the companies still exist and the managers that did the firing are still there, or were for as long as I paid attention. --- End quote --- I have also seen people fired, some for rather dubious reasons, that resulted in something that could be similarly described as "a complete fucking disaster", no fireballs or deaths but in at least one case a rather successful business tanked, one of their two locations closing permanently due to the total incompetence of the person brought in to replace the person that got fired. Incidentally they were fired for reporting something to HR on behalf of another employee who was being treated very poorly by the former owner. He sold the business he'd built to a corporate entity and was not adjusting well to being an employee who had to follow rules. |
| tom66:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on September 20, 2022, 05:55:25 am ---I will repeat what has already been said because it's so important: No one is irreplaceable. Always remember this. --- End quote --- Hard disagree. Let's call this person 'Phil', not their real name, but I know them tangentially. They left their company for a better offer. It was a small firm - five engineers or so, another ten or so in various admin/production/etc roles. They knew exactly how system X worked (a complex arrangement of hardware, embedded software, Linux and FPGAs in a three-SoC system), and hadn't properly documented it. The project was abandoned - four years of work lost as a result - easily several hundred thousand pounds of economic impact to the company. The result was the company had to hire contractors to implement the project in a different manner. Like it or not, many engineers suck at documentation. Some of that is out of fear that documentation will make it easier to replace them, but I think it's more because writing documentation well is *boring* and feels unproductive. Does the lack of replaceability guarantee immunity towards being fired? Hell no, sometimes corporate leaders have no idea how significant certain members of a team can be. Can it end up being a really bad move to sack someone who is integral to a project's completion? Absolutely, and that can make them irreplaceable, and bosses that are aware of that will often let these employees get away with bloody murder, within the limits of HR. |
| pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: tom66 on September 20, 2022, 05:24:50 pm ---Like it or not, many engineers suck at documentation. Some of that is out of fear that documentation will make it easier to replace them, but I think it's more because writing documentation well is *boring* and feels unproductive. --- End quote --- Making proper documentation is also a skill. And yes it is boring and not part of the things an engineer likes to do. I don't know how it is nowadays, but managers used to think that it was just like opening a can and hopla 10 engineers pop out to replace the one that got fired. |
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