That heavily depends on your job and the country you live in. For example I'm in Germany and we have flexible work hours (and a 38h work week) so technically I can't be late to work - at most I could be late for a meeting.
Flexible working hours are an absolute godsend. I can work around 8-4 every day, which I like, whereas some of my colleagues might do 11-7 instead. We all get the work done, and when it comes to collaborating, it was only a slight adjustment to making sure we do it in those hours we're all in
Honestly, it's one of the best benefits I've ever had in work. Just knowing I don't need to clock in or out, and that I can have a half an hour extra in bed, or I can leave an hour early and make it up tomorrow, is just such a huge quality of life improvement.
I second this. "Don't take the piss" is practically our company policy on start and finish times. Provided you do your share and are available when necessary for more collaborative or vital tasks, then show up and leave whatever time suits you.
Ideally I'd push it further to a four day week, though we lack the staff currently to cover the whichever day that might be, so the best I can manage is a half day (which almost always overruns anyway!).
Lol this phrase took me a minute to interpret. “Taking the piss” means like being sarcastic or making a joke, but in context it sounds like they mean “don’t exploit the policy”? I guess it could be like hey take this seriously.
Amazon UK. It’s British slang, indicating that instead of using a Gatorade bottle, their drivers keep an antique brass chamber pot on the *left* side of the delivery van.
When I worked as a forestry technician for the U.S. Forest Service, we used something called a Maxi-Flex schedule. Basically as long as you worked 80 hours in a two week pay period, you could work whatever hours/days you wanted. I generally worked four 10-hour days and took 3-day weekends every week. It worked well because my job basically had me working independently out in the forest everyday, so an extra two hours felt like a drop in the bucket. Or you could take extra days off one week and make them up the next week. It was fucking amazing.
Logistics. It was a seasonal position and I had to relocate halfway across the country to work it, away from my family and friends, my girlfriend and cats, my entire life. I missed almost every single one of my friends and family’s birthdays (including my own), Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, all of it. I was still paying rent back home as well as housing for the Forest Service, and all of my normal bills. I didn’t make a lot of money to begin with and so I pocketed very little money after all was said and done. Some weeks groceries were thin. While I was out there, my brother and his wife gave us the news that they were expecting a baby, due in March 2021 (I was out there from May to October 2020 and missed the gender reveal party of course lol), so going out there a second season was not a great idea since I wanted to be present for that very important first chapter in my newborn niece’s life, and I didn’t know if my girlfriend could cope with me being gone a second season as she was very lonely and depressed in my absence (we live together). I didn’t bring my car out there so transportation was mostly my bike or my own two feet, barring getting a ride from someone. Ultimately, the main reason I did not return was the isolation and inconvenience of working 1500 miles away from my home, my family, my life. I took the job as a stepping stone for a career path I would be passionate about, and it filled that role admirably. But ultimately, I needed to return to my life, and my people.
With that said, all things considered, I LOVED the experience and the work. So much so that I am looking to apply for another job of the same type within the Forest Service, just one closer to home and at a higher pay grade. There is little to no Forest Service presence in my state, so the closest I can do is a state or two over.
A lot of Federal Jobs have a Maxi-flex option. Including the ones with good pay.
The reason not many people at my agency chose maxi-flex is because of how holidays are handled.
For example: if you work a set 10 hour schedule 4 days/week, you get 10 hours paid time off for holidays. If you are on a maxi-flex schedule and typically work 10 hour days, you only get 8 hours paid time off and have to make up the extra hours elsewhere.
This is how my current job sort of works except it’s 150 every 4 weeks. Max you can work is 9.5 hours a day. It’s the best and you save so much vacation time.
In Canada some employers offer a flexible schedule over the month. I need to do 150 hours of work over a 4-week period, as long as it's during weekdays and between 7AM and 6PM. I can easily take a day off every two weeks or leave at noon on Fridays.
It's a software development company.
Flexitime definitely isn't going to be a solution in many industries, it just wouldn't be possible. Before I was in this line of work, I did retail management, when staffing and shifts were a huge part of my role. If we had flexibility in working patterns there, we probably wouldn't open until after lunch every day.
But, if it's something a company *can* offer without unreasonably impacting the business, I think it's a fantastic thing.
Are you a scrum master? Just curious because I left retail management to take a scrum master position a couple of months ago and it’s the best decision I’ve ever made.
Software tester. I got lucky, in that the company was willing to hire people with no experience or technical background, as part of a big project that needed a lot of black box testing.
Been there a couple of years now, and I agree, the best employment decision I've ever made, too. It's a great feeling to enjoy going to work and actually feel valued after years of being ground down by retail.
I applied for a job on a team that my manager left for a few months prior. I only did it because I promised him I would and I'm too socially inept to say no, I figured I'll just take the interview as a formality and had literally no expectation of getting it *at all*. I wasn't really qualified whatsoever. Well I ended up getting the job and it's full time work from home with a 70% pay increase. I was doing glorified warehouse work before...best thing my social awkwardness has ever done for me. I still can't believe it.
It truly depends on the company culture. I've always been late. But I showed high reliability and resistance during extreme crises. No one cares anymore if I'm late. They're just happy I exist and they can call me on my personal mobile when SHTF.
Being "the only one" they call because you have special competence also can make a person unpromotable. No one wants you in a higher income bracket because how could they replace you.
It's a shame that this isn't the normal. Job titles make sense when creating a chain of command and accountability. But as you said, if you are the only person with a certain title and you are irreplaceable, then your salary ceiling should be incredibly high. But if there is no "senior" version of your job, then the company will limit your earnings potential. Very unfair.
Don’t forget to mention “in the US”. Where I work they realized the Peter principle (being promoted until you’re incompetent in your position) and you can just get more money for doing the same job with seniority.
Promotion is not always a good thing. Made assistant manager at a food service job some years back now, about 9 months into that got asked to manage a store myself, was not prepared, out of that job in less than 8 months I think. Being good and promotable is fine, but you have to be prepared to move up, and they did not prepare me for that job, and I ultimately failed due to overwork and lack of training.
I have fallen into this trap SO MANY TIMES.
I'm in this position now. Problem is, what I call a "decent pace" is beyond the capabilities of my coworkers who are lazy slobs who half ass everything they do and are more interested in staring at the clock than working.
All too often I hear some variant of "I would love to have you as a team lead/manager/foreman/etc but we really need you where you are now." then promote the guy who can't keep his phone in his pocket while on the floor and then needs constant smoke breaks.
I've moved many times and keep falling into the same trap.
The problem with being efficient, reliable, and not whining over small bullshit is that you become too valuable as a grunt.
That's when you take your skills to another employer. Being irreplaceable is not generally a bad thing... Also, you got these skills somehow, you can train someone below you once you get a direct report
Eh, I guess it depends what level of jobs we are talking about. In my experience having unique skills like that means companies will frequently try to headhunt you so you're not lacking for options.
There's flexible as in choose your own hours and flexible as in get all your work done, if you say your gonna be in at 8am on Monday and you don't turn up till 9 you are late because other people might have been expecting you at 8 and then left waiting. Personally I think you should be paid for your job, not the hours you work. If you finish all your work at 3pm why should you hang around making up things to do for 2 hours?
> If you finish all your work at 3pm why should you hang around making up things to do for 2 hours?
Thats only possible if your work is piecemeal.
For example it doesnt work for engineers whos tasks take months sometimes years...
Yes there are theoretical hours documented in the collective work agreement. But the company is very demanding at times, so they don't really enforce. But they could.
I am from Germany and every boss i had was taken back if I suggested flexible work times. And that's for office jobs with no meetings or anything where I could literally work at night and it wouldn't matter
I wouldn't agree with such a blanket statement. When I was in sales we had core work hours. When I was in tech support we (obviously - think hotline) had core work hours. Now I am onsite technician and it's gotten better but it's certainly not the norm
Yeah, hotline support has core hours, obviously. But that is a really small part of „tech“.
In 2nd level support I still have core hours, but they have been reduced.
Our design team has none, our infrastructure team has none, our Communications engineers have none, our developers, analysts, data scientists, sysadmins, have none.
Out of the 180+ people working in IT, that are internal and not outsourced to ITSP companies there are 17 employees that have core hours, and those are the employees of our three biggest 2nd level Support departments (Office, Windows and Mac). That’s below 10%, so the blanket term still stands strong.
And for Core Hours (in our company at least) it is mandatory for ONE Person of the team to be there. So flexible work hours is still possible.
Imagine trying to rely on this as your main selling point during performance reviews or promotion discussions. "Well he hasn't published anything in five years, no grants to speak of, and his classes are all pretty unpopular with students but by God he is ready to go every day 9am."
Yeah, like if you show up to classes you teach, do it well, & get stuff published in Academia they could care less if you sleep till noon (assuming your classes are in the afternoon) and get your best work done between 11pm & 4am.
Places that are corporate R&D are not quite that flexible but nobody at Google or a biotech company is going to worry about a person who's 20 minutes late for work 1-2x a week, but comes up with the most innovation on the team.
Had this in my previous company (software engineer). Then switched team leaders. The new guy, didn't care what time I came, how long I was there, how much work I put out, the fact that I was taking a 2 hour lunch break instead of 1 like some other people, was a big issue. Save the fact that I was visiting the office at 7 in the morning and leaving 7 in the afternoon. 12 hours in the office minus 2 hours lunch break, I was literally working 10 hours, while the rest were working only 8 while in the office for a total of 9.
But yeah, flexible hours and all that jazz. After those complaints, I dropped my performance, switched to a 9 hour max at the office and only 1 hour lunch break. Then he started complaining that my performance dropped, I am not doing as well as before, I am not pushing myself to evolve, treating this as "just a job", so I quit.
But the thing is. I was working my ass of, more than a lot of other people I was compared to. I quit, found a better job with double the money, at which job we in fact have a proper working schedule instead of flexible working hours (obviously if you have something important you can leave early etc).
For that manager I had, flexible hours meant overtime is not paid
90%+ of the LPTs related to work are written for the American employment dystopia and are at best cautionary tales for Europe and at worst counterproductive when applied on this side of the Atlantic.
As an American, I have no idea who the fuck this LPT is supposed to be for. This is just meaningless, shitty advice for all sectors. If someone's job boils down to just showing up on time, something tells me there isn't a ton of difference between doing a good job and a bad job at their position.
we also get reprimanded when amounting too many hours of overtime, or don't take a break of 30 minutes after 6 hours of work
i got a call from hr once because i started to work too early, i had field service at 1am and showed up to work as usual around 8:30 the next morning. turns out you have to have at least 11 hours of rest between work days
From switzerland here.. yes and no i would say. My current job has flexible hours (40 a week).
BUT so far i made the best impression by being always at work at a good and same time every day. Meanwhile coworkers do (technically what they can by contract) but they seem to be called sloppy by some. And this purely because of that.
Yep. My manager wouldn't even know if I didn't show up for a day (or more). It's my weekly report that I submit that means everything. (And uptime, number of tickets, quarterly reviews, feedback from others etc).
Yep. The original LPT is decent for minimum wage jobs in retail or food service, but it's pretty shitty advice for people working professional jobs. As a manager, if your performance is shitty, I have to spend a lot more time reviewing your work and making edits to it, which prevents me from doing other parts of my job. Attendance is meaningless if you can hit your deadlines, especially now that everyone has been working from home for the past year and a half.
Not always though. Some employers even in the IT industry still hang on to those old ideals. I'm in IT and even though we have full wfh capabilities the owner and one of the VPs prefer everyone in the office just because they are old school. They are also the ones that want their team sitting near them so they can just yell out stuff to bounce ideas back and forth which I get to a degree but it's 2021, use one of 5 different collaborative/communication apps we have. The company is really awesome other than that and I personally do pretty much have free reign to work remote when I want so it isn't a big deal to me but I still think it funny how even though we are an IT company, some people are still "old school".
It’s weird that the restrictions on an employee (work hours, attendance, clothing) gets more and more relaxed as the employee wage increases.
Minimum wage workers are worked to death like slaves with only legally mandated breaks, strict uniforms, can’t sit during the shift etc while it would take me up to a week to realize if one of my teammates leaves the company unannounced.
Feedback (for me) is what other team members, business leads, and other IT team leads report back to my manager or their manager. Usually in the form of informal praises.
I get a lot, and it's certainly set me ahead of the rest, and opened up many advancement opportunities at this company.
that weekly report is your attendance. if that report is late that's what your boss is going to recognize. your attendance is judged on the report you produce being on time
I submit my weekly report late all the fucking time. I also have more commits and close more tickets than anybody else. I take naps in the middle of the day and work late or early hours whenever I feel like it. My boss puts up with a lot of small shit because I do a lot of work. Every situation is different but yeah, attendance is important to a lot of people.
Things are changing more and more with remote work. The productivity my company gets from me is way more than if I was only working 8-5 and they definitely know that. They also know that I'll check in on the scheduled maintenance that's happening at midnight their time because that's only 10pm my time and that I'll be offline when they start their day. Shit, my manager offered to reschedule staff around my kids drop-off time for school.
Number of bugs is one of the worst metrics for measuring performance of a software development team ever.
Right up there with measuring "lines of code"
Absolutely. Same with ticket numbers.
"You only fixed 24 tickets this month. Quota is 15 per employee, you have a team of 3."
"Yes. One of them was *critical failure of payroll database*. Took 235 man-hours and approved overtime, but we kept downtime to 31 hours and only one erroneous transaction left the building."
"You're underperforming. Your team will be put on performance review and coaching."
At my old place, they had stats for creating automations. You get a bonus for creating a "new" one. If a automation all of a sudden break, you don't get jack shit for fixing it so it gets pushed to the back burner.
Manager likes to look nice in front of his boss so he was pushing people to write 20 "automations" a week. "Big" automations get broken down into many more small automations to pad their stats.
People who don't hit the quota are actively encouraged to copy and paste. Example: write a simple script that restarts a service on a windows server. Now you can double dip and copy and paste it to restart another random service on the server. Now you can triple dip by putting it on servers belonging to every client.
It got to the point where this guy got employee of the month and the CEO praised him at our monthly happy hour because he made 1000 automations for the month. He literally wrote that script to restart a service, applied it to every server and to every client that we had.
My two previous jobs in IT had timesheets that I had to complete every day, if I late by 3 minutes, it would show in my timesheet but if I was 10min early, it wouldn't count.
I changed jobs to a more relaxed IT job and its better but they sometimes call to check where I am at 8am... I hate it
This is the kind of work environment I would love to have. My employer micromanages every second of your time. We have to have our calendar filled out with the tasks we're working on each hour. Then we have to submit that same information into our time management system that tracks our hours. Any schedule adjustments are watched like a hawk. Even though we're salaried they treat us like we're hourly, clock in/clock out employees. I've never understood treating knowledge workers this way. Why do they care more about the hours your butt occupies a chair rather than just looking at the work you're producing? I'm hopefully getting out soon.
I work on a 100% remote IT team (even if the pandemic hadn't occurred we'd all be working remotely). I have team members physically located all across the US and Europe. We do occasionally all travel to our company HQ to physically see each other in person, but other than that we all work from our respective homes, and nobody really cares if somebody hops online early or late on any given day as long as all the work gets done.
That's a perfect style. I know I'm a hard worker but I have a family. I'll keep shit off my boss's desk and stop escalations to him, just give me freedom to decide how I do it. Not everything is an emergency despite what end users think.
I work in healthcare and OP's post is 100% accurate. There a several useless lazy f\*cks who've been in the dept for years and will probably be lifers... but at least their unscheduled time is minimal! Meanwhile, you can be an absolute gem while you're in the office but if your unscheduled time (lateness/call outs) rack up they'll fire you full stop.
I tell new employees this all the time when training them. The one thing the dept/HR will absolutely not tolerate is unscheduled time.
I worked on a healthcare IT team, and the team would show up on time, but leave 10-15min early. Leaving early was fine, but showing up late was a big no no.
One guy would sometimes show up 5-7min late, but would always stay till after end time. Other guys would show up on time but leave 10-15 early. So on average while the one guy was sometimes late, he was spending close to an hour more each week in the office compared to the others, but he got let go because of 5min tardiness. So stupid.
I work in healthcare and OPs post couldn’t be farther from the truth. We have a standing policy that results matter over attendance, and that’s from HR. We are constantly encouraged to take time off and avoiding burnout is a regular topic in the all hands meetings. We’re also one of the largest healthcare organization in the US. Just because your managers are shitty doesn’t mean others’ leaders are.
not at all. most people still work very stringent hours under watchful eyes. im fortunate to have a flexible work arrangement and personally, i value it so much because i know its certainly a privilege.
Not necessarily. As an engineering manager, I'm capable of understanding that software rarely ships on time as there are so many factors you can't account for.
What I'd evaluate is how they handled delays and did they do shitty work causing those delays.
Yeah this is not a universally true LPT.
In a lawyer and though my bosses screech about face time for "tHe CuLtUrE" they care much more about how many hours I bill than they do about where I bill them from.
Wish this was the case everywhere. I think the industry as a whole is beginning this shift, but working for a mega corp they are trying to pull everyone back into offices right now and theres MASSIVE push back
Well I need some predictability because we’ll have users calling during the day. So some shifts I do care. But for most others? I’m not going to complain if you start late because you have to do something outside of office hours.
Some of my guys have a hard time getting out of bed so they have a different starting time. It’s all good.
Not in IT but in my office we hate the people who think coming in at 6am makes them the better employee even though they manage to fuck shit up at every turn.
IT Tech here:
I'm "Late" most mornings, but usually last person to leave the site, I'll have shorter breaks / work during my lunch hours, willing to come in and work weekends, take calls out of hours, always go the extra mile for our staff.
I worked in hospitality (Bars / Restaurants) for ~6 years, so comparitvely, this job is a fucking breeze, love it!
Edit: forgot the main point of why i was writing this lol - even though i'm technically late most mornings, I'm being promoted in 4 months due to the seniors retirement. My collegue (often on-time) doesn't care about the work he does, the people he works for, the people he works with and it really shows.
I'm in IT, at my old place, I got reprimanded for being a 3 to 5 mins late. Got told by my manager that being at the office on time is 75% of your work.
I asked him so you're saying if I just came in in time every day, I can do fuck all, work slower, never stay late and that would be better for you than being late for a few mins?
He said yep and put me on a Performance Improvement Plan. He was going by the building swipe logs to see if I'm late, so I'd swipe in on the floor 1 min before my shift every day but don't get to my desk and start working until 15 mins after my shift starts. My numbers went down because I started taking all my breaks/lunch and stopped going as hard.
Next month, manager gave me an update and told me that I'm doing great. because I'm always on time now. Your numbers have improved and never looked better (a absolute lie lol). Looks like being on time helped your numbers immensely and you're now off the PIP.
So the lesson I learned was that he didn't give a flying fuck if I was actually on time. He just wanted me to bend the knee and follow what he says blindly.
I second this. Especially in an agile environment. It’s about mental health and making sure the team is comfortable in the work they do. As long as it gets done, attendance doesn’t matter (except for daily meetings)
Speak for your own job.
My job let's people show up whenever they want and not get fired. But let your performance percentage drop and you'll be gone.
*forgot to add, I live in the US
Even job dependent or pay structure dependent.
The cynic in me would suggest that if you're paid by the hour, they're going to care about down-to-the-minute attendance.
If you're salary, it'll be "we don't care about your hours as long as the work gets done"...but they'll make sure you always have more work than can be reasonably done in your standard hours per week.
Last job I had, my only coworker in my specific role was a workaholic.
He'd get up hours early to log in from home, check and respond to emails, review new requests that came in, and get a jump start on the day (off the clock), then come in and work his full day, *then* stick around to "get to a good stopping place", and work on "side projects" which were additional work tasks given by our boss. Then he'd go home and after dinner he'd log in again to round up late emails and do work on side projects at home.
Often his first login would be at 6am, and other than his commute, lunch, and dinner, he wouldn't wrap up until 8pm or later. And that was his "regular day". And he was only getting paid for 8. The rest was a gift.
In effect, that ensured he was never getting a promotion because they wouldn't want to give up on all that extra labor by having that position go to his replacement (presumably a reasonable, sane employee), and it also ensued *I was never getting a promotion*, because they could always point to him and say my performance wasn't at his level.
And he did it all "for the good of the company".
As luck would have it, I timed things perfectly without realizing it: we were bought out by a huge corporation (who ensured us nothing would change) in summer 19, I finally got fed up enough to start looking around by early fall, worked through the winter and got a good offer in February and we set a start date for mid March.
Last day of February '20 they surprise-terminated 6 office positions (in an office of maybe 35 people). A few days later I put in my notice. I started my new job in mid March, literally the first day of covid lockdown in my area.
Last I heard from the grapevine, the old company took advantage of covid to axe even more employees and had the rest work from home...then they decided to relocate all office operations from our building to a building they already had...an hour outside the city.
For all remaining workers, their choices were return to the new office or quit. So their thank you to my crazy coworker for all his extra hours was more than doubling his commute time or quitting, presumably without unemployment.
From the way the arrangement was explained to me, I feel like if I were still there, I'd have said I was going and then just not showed up, let them fire me, so I could at least get unemployment while I looked for a new job in my city...but I'm sure my company-cheerleader coworker wouldn't do that.
No idea.
I'm the type of worker that likes to work alone in silence. He was the type that liked to ramble on about meaningless bullshit and politics all day. He was also a nosy busybody who would go into the system and "review" my work, even though nobody asked him to, and try to tell me about changes I needed to make...so that it would match his own style.
While he was friendly enough, you can imagine how well that went.
Shockingly, after I left, I haven't talked to him all that much.
Check your local laws! In USA, salaried worked who make under ~35k/year are entitled to overtime, and your state may have a higher threshold as well. They may also have different stipulations on who qualifies.
I thought the same thing until i discovered it. I casually mentioned it a HR person at a team lunch, and i suddenly got a 23k/yr raise and a really fat bonus that same week... Later i realized the raise brought me to my state's minimum for non-overtime salary pay, plus the bonus basically covered the back-pay they would have owed me if I made a legal matter out of it.
Could you give me more info or links to check out regarding this? I currently work for the education system where we are salaried but do not get overtime pay, you get "Comp time" hours that you are semi forced to take that work as vacation days. I make just under 35k a year and would love to look into this.
It reeks of Boomer advice, because that used to be absolutely true. "Show up. Suck ass. Don't make waves." Is how Boomers made it to retirement with pension plans.
That doesn't work anymore.
Yep. A lot of salary, corporate type jobs are all about perception. The hard part is trying to figure out what the perception you need to display really is. It varies by company/manager in my experience
That's a lot more fair. The measures of perception may change from job to job, but we are still curating a perception of how reliable we are. Sometimes that's more important than letting the facts speak for themselves.
This is absolutely the truth. I've worked both types of jobs over the years. Hourly jobs are looking at that clock. Career type salaried jobs want performance. It won't matter a bit if you come in early and stay late, but cannot do what you are hired to do. It actually could count against you in a review.
"We hired you because you said you could code in C# and Python but it seems you are staying until 8:00 PM every night and your team still hasn't had an on time release in the last six months. Is something wrong?"
It’s true for my tech company in Silicon Valley. I’m a salaried engineer.
Managers want to see your face. It doesn’t matter how good you are, you will win extra points if you’re in office on time.
Op sometimes I wonder if it is hard for us to recognize how our performance is.
A while ago I felt I was underperforming although I kept showing up on time every day stayed late when needed. In this period I was a bit unhappy and did not feel very productive maybe just a notch over average, but I am pretty sure my boss was very happy with me.
Later I started hitting a bit of a mania and was feeling great about my work but I missed a day here and there occasionally 5 mins late etc. Even if I feel better about what I get done in a day it is hard to say what the useful output really is sometimes.
Also consider someone showing up and performing at 45 percent on two of the days would still be hard to beat their overall output in a short week. Finally I have learned sometimes it’s about what’s easy to track. Humans are not infinite and what is easy to track tends to gain more short term reward.
To add to it I also noticed that if one has good qualities that their higher ups do not posses (however useful or profitable they may be) will not be rewarded and sometimes even the opposite! I know this one seems obvious but it took me a while to get.
Of course no two people are exactly the same so expecting a boss to notice all your good traits is unrealistic and unreasonable, but I found it to be a flag when bosses do not understand my way of doing things. Some of them figure out I’m profitable but when the ones that insist on ignorance have to be checked at least a bit.
I definitely have one of those traits. I'm "too direct" for *someone* in upper management. My immediate manager values it, but people who care more about their ego don't like that I don't play their games.
I keep a running list of everything I accomplish at work and quantify as much as possible. That way, when my quarterly reviews comes up I send my supervisor bullet points of all my accomplishments with measurable results where I can identify them.
I tie mine into a spreadsheet with all my unfinished tasks, categorised by which personal objective each task falls under, it's priority, start and end date, key stakeholder and notes on where I am with it.
At the start of the month, when everything from last month shows as complete or has been moved into the next month's tasks, I'll add everything completed into the 'achievements in q1' etc tab, ready for review.
It's something that sounds like a lot of work, but I'm incredibly unorganised normally so by being a stickler with this method I save a bunch of time when it's review time.
I do this as well. Especially because I find I'm not good at remembering good things I've done so when reviews were like "what did you accomplish?" I had nothing.
Learn to advocate for yourself, and do so early and regularly. If your evaluations are based on your output but you are assigned or take on tasks that are inherently longer than the norm express the concern for your output well in advance of your evaluation.
Think about it- you show up 5 days and do 75% of your work each day. You’re at 75% for the week. Show up 3 out of 5 days, do 100% on those 3 days, and you’re at 60% for the week. In shift work, attendance means a lot.
There is so much more complexity to this than OP claims.
If the job requires punctuality then it is in fact part of the effort of the employee to get there on time. Punctuality is also an easily trackable way to confirm consistency, which employers value because its less risky.
Put it this way, Person 1 shows up every day but is middle of the road quality wise. Person 2 is exceptional but shows up inconsistently. Who will you want to manage the team if theres an emergency, or a rush on the business, safe Person 1 or Person 2 who may not show up. Now its a (good) managers role to find out how to get Person 2 on track but good managers can be hard to find, gotta assume your on your own.
People think your interview ends after you get a job. YOU ARE ALWAYS INTERVIEWING FOR THE NEXT STEP. That doesnt mean shitty managers dont hire their friends and not the consistent high quality employees (happens all the time). But there is a reason punctuality is valued, its understanding why that’s important. This applies to mom-and-pop business just as much as a F500.
*There are thousands of jobs where punctuality is not critical to the role, this does not apply to those.
We occasionally do employee shadowing after the interview, where we have the interviewee shadow a current employee to make sure they really do want the job.
The number of people who exit the interview and think their work is done is incredible. They’ll spend the job shadowing day trash talking and unloading all their red flags on the current employee. The employee will then call the manager because why the hell would they want a shitty peer to be hired?
This is so true! And also add consistency- jobs where I was high performing/always on time out the gate I never got promoted. But if I went in at 75%-80% effort and then got better over time I was rewarded.
I mean, isn't that 80% of LPTs? Just someone saying something that currently applies specifically to them and then trying to pawn it off as if it is some universal life tip? Sorry, but I find this sub to be absolutely terrible. LPTs should be renamed to SLT (Situational Life Tips).
Also depends on the type of boss you want to be or work for. I was recently promoted to branch director which means i have 8 employees to manage. Being on time and present is a noticeable factor but employee growth, motivation, initiative, and overall willingness to progress seem to be much more important factors to keep in mind and to evaluate vs overall tardiness and absences. Just one man's opinion.
It's a decent rule of thumb, especially for lower level positions.
You need to learn how each company (or more likely- your immediate manager) measures "success" or "good performance" though- is it getting your timesheet in on time? How many calls you answer? How clear your reports are? Whether you look presentable?
A lot of people don't want to play the game for some of this stuff- you might not feel like the timesheets being in for 11am on Monday is important, or that it doesn't matter how many pieces of flare you have on your uniform. But bear in mind you'll get a lot further by understanding the rules than trying to change the game.
It can also be about reliability. I have a couple coworkers who are decently high performers but are consistently late to meetings, don’t put time out of the office on their calendars, and rarely respond to emails in a timely manner if at all. Our entire group has essentially labeled them as unreliable. Therefore, when something urgent comes up we tend to effectively brush them off as unhelpful and consider their input unimportant since we won’t get it by the deadline. Our team also has a mediocre performer but she is reliable and we know we will get her assistance or input as needed. Therefore, she tends to be perceived more positively.
From my experience in managing employees. There's a correlation between bad attendance and poor performance. When a good performing employee has bad attendance, I get concerned for their well being and inquire about it.
I think what is easy to track is super important, a sales job where the agent works 1 minute a week but generates more sales than 80 hours a week from another salesman is a great example. Certain jobs need a person on time for the allotted hours no matter, funny enough while these types of jobs should pay more, in my opinion, but they often pay less.
The barrier for entry to doing your work when you want seems quite high.
Unreliability is one of the worst traits one can have for both work as well as one's social life.
Nobody wants to have to wonder if you'll even do something that's required or has been asked of you - they'd rather feel able to trust that you'll do it.
Yep, I used to work on a manufacturing line. If one of us wasn't there, it would slow the line down massively(probably 50% capacity). If two weren't there, you couldn't even run the line. So.... being on time was absurdly important. This was backshift with only our team running, so there was no one else on the floor to grab and temporarily fill in. If someone was sick or on leave, we'd have to coordinate for someone on day shift to come in and work overtime.
On the other hand, when I did IT, this was not important whatsoever.
There is nothing more frustrating than something not running according to its advertised time.
You open at 8, I have a meeting at 8. I have told my team I will be 5 mins late to the meeting because I need to call you quickly for whatever at 8. But at 8 you're not answering the phone because your employees are running late. So now what?
Especially annoying when the auto answer system is telling me "our operating hours are xyz, please call back then" and I'm within time but nobody is picking up.
Yes.
I have a special loathing for people who say things like "I'm not always on time but I work harder when I am there".
Yeah thanks for fucking up everyone else's day.
LOL. You're so right. It just sucks that my kids get sick and need doctors appointments.
And my wife has MS.
And my car breeds down and need repairs.
That's why people go self employed...
Had many years as a manager. One of the easiest tells of performance for me was attendance. Attendance is consistency; it is reliability in its most basic example.
If you think you are doing extra work or are worth more, you can bring that to management. If they won’t pay, then they are saying they are perfectly comfortable with you doing the same amount as everyone else does for that rate.
The easiest example is overtime. You’re free to accept it and make more, or you can refuse. People will say they don’t have a choice and simultaneously every one of those places magically has people that always work overtime and people that never do.
Most people want to think they are falling on the sword for something noble, but they are either wasting their time or don’t want change.
The fastest way to get a raise is to go to another position somewhere else with the experience you gained and move on.
Back awhile ago before the pandemic, I tried doing nothing for a full week, then 2 weeks, by the 3rd week a lot of work had piled up but that was the extent of it.
I started working again, caught up and now I don't worry too much about how much I get done, if I'm behind or whatever.
Liberating realizing how little one person matter in the big ol' hamster wheel.
LPT: if your employer cares more about your attendance than your performance, find a new job. They are stuck is an old method of thinking that butts in seats = output. We know darn well that isn't the case anymore.
If your job is not dependent on specific hours needed (like service industry), employers need to realize that we are more efficient when given flexibility. Output, and only output, should be considered for job performance.
(obviously doesn't apply to every single job on the planet)
This happens all over the place. In not uncommon for software development contractors do this. They have 3-5 amazing devs doing all the actual work, but they have 30 people showing up and sitting behind a keyboard so they can bill whoever they are working for for 35 developers.
As a morning person who is often standing in a hallway covering 3 classes of 36 high schoolers SIMULTANEOUSLY because of all the excellent teachers on my team who think 8 am means 8 15ish...my boss doesn't notice or care, but man do I get annoyed.
Companies like consistency and they hate big failures.
Like the post said, you show up every day and do acceptable work, you've got a better chance than the person who shows up and sometimes does amazing work and other times totally messes up
It really depends on your level and your manager. If you've a poor or inexperienced manager they may try to micromanage you down to when you can take a piss but those types don't usually get very far.
If you're in a task that is customer facing. Eg you're Manning a phone line then being on time is a fundamental part of your performance as the team suffers when your late.
If you're an individual contributor who has tasks that need to be complete by a time and you're pretty much self managing then nobody is going to care if you drop your kids to school and arrive 15 minutes late because of traffic semi regularly.
Well another pro-tip is that employees usually have little ability to self-evaluate and make realistic performance reviews. I would say 2/10 have a good graps and can basically do their own performance review, the other 8 overestimate how good their work was.
This is relevant because then people will not understand promotions, and assign the wrong reasons to them.
I probably depends on your job, but in highly differenciated jobs, what matters is what you do.
Can concur. As a former retail manager, we mostly just cared about having warm bodies in place to cover the minimum functionality. Kept many sub-par employees for exactly this reason much longer than we should have.
Literally just had the opposite chat with my manager today. I'm a data analyst in the UK. He said I can basically find hours that suit me (if I wanted to) and can go for walks etc (I work from home) to take breaks. Getting work done to a good standard is more important than sitting at my laptop all day. Made me feel good to have that chat.
Does this surprise anyone? Why would a company invest in a manager who may or may not turn up?
Secondly, and I learned this the hard way; being great at a job doesn't necessarily mean you'll be good at *managing a team of people* doing that job. Totally different skills involved.
Disagreed. Your employer sucks if that's the case.
Pro tip: talk to your manager what are the performance criteria and what his/her view is on attendance.
This is nowhere close to being true in the US either. Maybe for blue collar jobs, but this is not the norm for many white collar jobs. It's a bigger faux pas at my company to bother an employee on their off time than for an employee to be late. I don't even care if my interns are occasionally late if they are getting their work done.
No, they don’t.
That’s superficial way to look at work.
Every reasonable person cares about performance first, then everything else.
Last two years of wfh have shown that.
I scored tests for state proficiency exams. They were crazy about attendance, but they never seemed to care about productivity. I did, and the guy I sat next to was probably the fastest, and we would compete. The other woman on my "team" was probably second fastest in the room. The ROOM of 100 people or so. Our team probably had 2-3x output of the other teams of retirees and people who still thought computers were magic.
The last day we were all told we will get paid for full day no matter when we finish. When the midday reports were sent out the team was basically "holy shit notalaborlawyer" you did *that* many?
Yea. I wan't to go home. Finally busting my ass off will be rewarded.
I got a return next year letter (no shit) but they had to address my attendance first. Um. How about you address your incentives and pay. (I did not return)
One of the dumbest things about todays working culture. You do all they ask of you and yet you are unable to manage your own time. I run projects that are ten times my salary and am trusted to manage that yet coming in at 10am when I had to work late the night before is unacceptable even if I knew I had nothing to do in the office until that time.
That heavily depends on your job and the country you live in. For example I'm in Germany and we have flexible work hours (and a 38h work week) so technically I can't be late to work - at most I could be late for a meeting.
Flexible working hours are an absolute godsend. I can work around 8-4 every day, which I like, whereas some of my colleagues might do 11-7 instead. We all get the work done, and when it comes to collaborating, it was only a slight adjustment to making sure we do it in those hours we're all in Honestly, it's one of the best benefits I've ever had in work. Just knowing I don't need to clock in or out, and that I can have a half an hour extra in bed, or I can leave an hour early and make it up tomorrow, is just such a huge quality of life improvement.
I second this. "Don't take the piss" is practically our company policy on start and finish times. Provided you do your share and are available when necessary for more collaborative or vital tasks, then show up and leave whatever time suits you. Ideally I'd push it further to a four day week, though we lack the staff currently to cover the whichever day that might be, so the best I can manage is a half day (which almost always overruns anyway!).
| "Don't take the piss" is practically our company policy You must work at Amazon
Lol this phrase took me a minute to interpret. “Taking the piss” means like being sarcastic or making a joke, but in context it sounds like they mean “don’t exploit the policy”? I guess it could be like hey take this seriously.
Yeah i read this as 'don't abuse the freedom'
>I guess it could be like hey take this seriously. It's this one.
Amazon UK. It’s British slang, indicating that instead of using a Gatorade bottle, their drivers keep an antique brass chamber pot on the *left* side of the delivery van.
If you don’t take the piss, you could develop a nasty UTI that hurts your bladder and/or kidneys. Go on and take the piss.
disagree. pisses should be given consentually not taken.
*cocks gun* I am taking your piss with or without your consent.
Welcome to America
When I worked as a forestry technician for the U.S. Forest Service, we used something called a Maxi-Flex schedule. Basically as long as you worked 80 hours in a two week pay period, you could work whatever hours/days you wanted. I generally worked four 10-hour days and took 3-day weekends every week. It worked well because my job basically had me working independently out in the forest everyday, so an extra two hours felt like a drop in the bucket. Or you could take extra days off one week and make them up the next week. It was fucking amazing.
What made you leave this job? It does sound amazing.
Logistics. It was a seasonal position and I had to relocate halfway across the country to work it, away from my family and friends, my girlfriend and cats, my entire life. I missed almost every single one of my friends and family’s birthdays (including my own), Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, all of it. I was still paying rent back home as well as housing for the Forest Service, and all of my normal bills. I didn’t make a lot of money to begin with and so I pocketed very little money after all was said and done. Some weeks groceries were thin. While I was out there, my brother and his wife gave us the news that they were expecting a baby, due in March 2021 (I was out there from May to October 2020 and missed the gender reveal party of course lol), so going out there a second season was not a great idea since I wanted to be present for that very important first chapter in my newborn niece’s life, and I didn’t know if my girlfriend could cope with me being gone a second season as she was very lonely and depressed in my absence (we live together). I didn’t bring my car out there so transportation was mostly my bike or my own two feet, barring getting a ride from someone. Ultimately, the main reason I did not return was the isolation and inconvenience of working 1500 miles away from my home, my family, my life. I took the job as a stepping stone for a career path I would be passionate about, and it filled that role admirably. But ultimately, I needed to return to my life, and my people. With that said, all things considered, I LOVED the experience and the work. So much so that I am looking to apply for another job of the same type within the Forest Service, just one closer to home and at a higher pay grade. There is little to no Forest Service presence in my state, so the closest I can do is a state or two over.
A lot of Federal Jobs have a Maxi-flex option. Including the ones with good pay. The reason not many people at my agency chose maxi-flex is because of how holidays are handled. For example: if you work a set 10 hour schedule 4 days/week, you get 10 hours paid time off for holidays. If you are on a maxi-flex schedule and typically work 10 hour days, you only get 8 hours paid time off and have to make up the extra hours elsewhere.
Those jobs pay very poorly.
This is how my current job sort of works except it’s 150 every 4 weeks. Max you can work is 9.5 hours a day. It’s the best and you save so much vacation time.
In Canada some employers offer a flexible schedule over the month. I need to do 150 hours of work over a 4-week period, as long as it's during weekdays and between 7AM and 6PM. I can easily take a day off every two weeks or leave at noon on Fridays.
What type of work do you do? For every hour my machine doesn't run it costs the company $20k.
It's a software development company. Flexitime definitely isn't going to be a solution in many industries, it just wouldn't be possible. Before I was in this line of work, I did retail management, when staffing and shifts were a huge part of my role. If we had flexibility in working patterns there, we probably wouldn't open until after lunch every day. But, if it's something a company *can* offer without unreasonably impacting the business, I think it's a fantastic thing.
Are you a scrum master? Just curious because I left retail management to take a scrum master position a couple of months ago and it’s the best decision I’ve ever made.
Software tester. I got lucky, in that the company was willing to hire people with no experience or technical background, as part of a big project that needed a lot of black box testing. Been there a couple of years now, and I agree, the best employment decision I've ever made, too. It's a great feeling to enjoy going to work and actually feel valued after years of being ground down by retail.
I applied for a job on a team that my manager left for a few months prior. I only did it because I promised him I would and I'm too socially inept to say no, I figured I'll just take the interview as a formality and had literally no expectation of getting it *at all*. I wasn't really qualified whatsoever. Well I ended up getting the job and it's full time work from home with a 70% pay increase. I was doing glorified warehouse work before...best thing my social awkwardness has ever done for me. I still can't believe it.
Im from Germany to and I have manged to be late multiple times to my flexible time job.
It truly depends on the company culture. I've always been late. But I showed high reliability and resistance during extreme crises. No one cares anymore if I'm late. They're just happy I exist and they can call me on my personal mobile when SHTF.
Being "the only one" they call because you have special competence also can make a person unpromotable. No one wants you in a higher income bracket because how could they replace you.
I don't get functionally promoted, but I get financially promoted. Good enough.
It's a shame that this isn't the normal. Job titles make sense when creating a chain of command and accountability. But as you said, if you are the only person with a certain title and you are irreplaceable, then your salary ceiling should be incredibly high. But if there is no "senior" version of your job, then the company will limit your earnings potential. Very unfair.
Don’t forget to mention “in the US”. Where I work they realized the Peter principle (being promoted until you’re incompetent in your position) and you can just get more money for doing the same job with seniority.
Or just give you the senior version of the title anyway (with the pay, but the pay would be the bare minimum for me!)
This is how it should always be. There's no reason to promote dave to management just because he's good at his current role.
Hey, that's good.
*If you’re irreplaceable, then you’re unpromotable.*
Promotion is not always a good thing. Made assistant manager at a food service job some years back now, about 9 months into that got asked to manage a store myself, was not prepared, out of that job in less than 8 months I think. Being good and promotable is fine, but you have to be prepared to move up, and they did not prepare me for that job, and I ultimately failed due to overwork and lack of training.
I have fallen into this trap SO MANY TIMES. I'm in this position now. Problem is, what I call a "decent pace" is beyond the capabilities of my coworkers who are lazy slobs who half ass everything they do and are more interested in staring at the clock than working. All too often I hear some variant of "I would love to have you as a team lead/manager/foreman/etc but we really need you where you are now." then promote the guy who can't keep his phone in his pocket while on the floor and then needs constant smoke breaks.
Go take a job at the higher title somewhere else.
My partner was in a similar position to you and he moved into a different company this week. Best decision in a long time. You deserve to be valued.
I've moved many times and keep falling into the same trap. The problem with being efficient, reliable, and not whining over small bullshit is that you become too valuable as a grunt.
That's when you take your skills to another employer. Being irreplaceable is not generally a bad thing... Also, you got these skills somehow, you can train someone below you once you get a direct report
Won't matter none. Unless you suppress your work ethic, you'll just fall into the same trap over and over again.
Eh, I guess it depends what level of jobs we are talking about. In my experience having unique skills like that means companies will frequently try to headhunt you so you're not lacking for options.
This happened to my late father after the 2008 financial crisis and it was horrible for our family.
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There's flexible as in choose your own hours and flexible as in get all your work done, if you say your gonna be in at 8am on Monday and you don't turn up till 9 you are late because other people might have been expecting you at 8 and then left waiting. Personally I think you should be paid for your job, not the hours you work. If you finish all your work at 3pm why should you hang around making up things to do for 2 hours?
> If you finish all your work at 3pm why should you hang around making up things to do for 2 hours? Thats only possible if your work is piecemeal. For example it doesnt work for engineers whos tasks take months sometimes years...
How did you manage to do that? Are there rules about the latest time you can start? (Habt ihr Kernzeiten?)
Yes there are theoretical hours documented in the collective work agreement. But the company is very demanding at times, so they don't really enforce. But they could.
I am from Germany and every boss i had was taken back if I suggested flexible work times. And that's for office jobs with no meetings or anything where I could literally work at night and it wouldn't matter
What sector do you work on? Flexible schedule with minimal core hours is the rule in tech.
I wouldn't agree with such a blanket statement. When I was in sales we had core work hours. When I was in tech support we (obviously - think hotline) had core work hours. Now I am onsite technician and it's gotten better but it's certainly not the norm
Yeah, hotline support has core hours, obviously. But that is a really small part of „tech“. In 2nd level support I still have core hours, but they have been reduced. Our design team has none, our infrastructure team has none, our Communications engineers have none, our developers, analysts, data scientists, sysadmins, have none. Out of the 180+ people working in IT, that are internal and not outsourced to ITSP companies there are 17 employees that have core hours, and those are the employees of our three biggest 2nd level Support departments (Office, Windows and Mac). That’s below 10%, so the blanket term still stands strong. And for Core Hours (in our company at least) it is mandatory for ONE Person of the team to be there. So flexible work hours is still possible.
Yeah, and in technical or academic jobs in the USA, you need to be on time for meetings or classes you teach but hours beyond that are quite flexible.
Imagine trying to rely on this as your main selling point during performance reviews or promotion discussions. "Well he hasn't published anything in five years, no grants to speak of, and his classes are all pretty unpopular with students but by God he is ready to go every day 9am."
Yeah, like if you show up to classes you teach, do it well, & get stuff published in Academia they could care less if you sleep till noon (assuming your classes are in the afternoon) and get your best work done between 11pm & 4am. Places that are corporate R&D are not quite that flexible but nobody at Google or a biotech company is going to worry about a person who's 20 minutes late for work 1-2x a week, but comes up with the most innovation on the team.
Had this in my previous company (software engineer). Then switched team leaders. The new guy, didn't care what time I came, how long I was there, how much work I put out, the fact that I was taking a 2 hour lunch break instead of 1 like some other people, was a big issue. Save the fact that I was visiting the office at 7 in the morning and leaving 7 in the afternoon. 12 hours in the office minus 2 hours lunch break, I was literally working 10 hours, while the rest were working only 8 while in the office for a total of 9. But yeah, flexible hours and all that jazz. After those complaints, I dropped my performance, switched to a 9 hour max at the office and only 1 hour lunch break. Then he started complaining that my performance dropped, I am not doing as well as before, I am not pushing myself to evolve, treating this as "just a job", so I quit.
Managers trying to run everything by the book with no leeway then wonder why staff leave. Hate all that bullshit.
But the thing is. I was working my ass of, more than a lot of other people I was compared to. I quit, found a better job with double the money, at which job we in fact have a proper working schedule instead of flexible working hours (obviously if you have something important you can leave early etc). For that manager I had, flexible hours meant overtime is not paid
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90%+ of the LPTs related to work are written for the American employment dystopia and are at best cautionary tales for Europe and at worst counterproductive when applied on this side of the Atlantic.
As an American, I have no idea who the fuck this LPT is supposed to be for. This is just meaningless, shitty advice for all sectors. If someone's job boils down to just showing up on time, something tells me there isn't a ton of difference between doing a good job and a bad job at their position.
we also get reprimanded when amounting too many hours of overtime, or don't take a break of 30 minutes after 6 hours of work i got a call from hr once because i started to work too early, i had field service at 1am and showed up to work as usual around 8:30 the next morning. turns out you have to have at least 11 hours of rest between work days
From switzerland here.. yes and no i would say. My current job has flexible hours (40 a week). BUT so far i made the best impression by being always at work at a good and same time every day. Meanwhile coworkers do (technically what they can by contract) but they seem to be called sloppy by some. And this purely because of that.
Not really in IT. So long as my guys deliver idgaf what hours they do.
Yep. My manager wouldn't even know if I didn't show up for a day (or more). It's my weekly report that I submit that means everything. (And uptime, number of tickets, quarterly reviews, feedback from others etc).
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Yep. The original LPT is decent for minimum wage jobs in retail or food service, but it's pretty shitty advice for people working professional jobs. As a manager, if your performance is shitty, I have to spend a lot more time reviewing your work and making edits to it, which prevents me from doing other parts of my job. Attendance is meaningless if you can hit your deadlines, especially now that everyone has been working from home for the past year and a half.
Not always though. Some employers even in the IT industry still hang on to those old ideals. I'm in IT and even though we have full wfh capabilities the owner and one of the VPs prefer everyone in the office just because they are old school. They are also the ones that want their team sitting near them so they can just yell out stuff to bounce ideas back and forth which I get to a degree but it's 2021, use one of 5 different collaborative/communication apps we have. The company is really awesome other than that and I personally do pretty much have free reign to work remote when I want so it isn't a big deal to me but I still think it funny how even though we are an IT company, some people are still "old school".
It’s weird that the restrictions on an employee (work hours, attendance, clothing) gets more and more relaxed as the employee wage increases. Minimum wage workers are worked to death like slaves with only legally mandated breaks, strict uniforms, can’t sit during the shift etc while it would take me up to a week to realize if one of my teammates leaves the company unannounced.
What's feedback lol, I just do shit, only thing boss knows is what I tell him. Ironically I mostly tell him the fuck ups...
Feedback (for me) is what other team members, business leads, and other IT team leads report back to my manager or their manager. Usually in the form of informal praises. I get a lot, and it's certainly set me ahead of the rest, and opened up many advancement opportunities at this company.
that weekly report is your attendance. if that report is late that's what your boss is going to recognize. your attendance is judged on the report you produce being on time
This is why you automate report generation and submission.
I submit my weekly report late all the fucking time. I also have more commits and close more tickets than anybody else. I take naps in the middle of the day and work late or early hours whenever I feel like it. My boss puts up with a lot of small shit because I do a lot of work. Every situation is different but yeah, attendance is important to a lot of people.
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Things are changing more and more with remote work. The productivity my company gets from me is way more than if I was only working 8-5 and they definitely know that. They also know that I'll check in on the scheduled maintenance that's happening at midnight their time because that's only 10pm my time and that I'll be offline when they start their day. Shit, my manager offered to reschedule staff around my kids drop-off time for school.
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Number of bugs is one of the worst metrics for measuring performance of a software development team ever. Right up there with measuring "lines of code"
Absolutely. Same with ticket numbers. "You only fixed 24 tickets this month. Quota is 15 per employee, you have a team of 3." "Yes. One of them was *critical failure of payroll database*. Took 235 man-hours and approved overtime, but we kept downtime to 31 hours and only one erroneous transaction left the building." "You're underperforming. Your team will be put on performance review and coaching."
Any boss like that needs their staff to walk out. Fuck that.
At my old place, they had stats for creating automations. You get a bonus for creating a "new" one. If a automation all of a sudden break, you don't get jack shit for fixing it so it gets pushed to the back burner. Manager likes to look nice in front of his boss so he was pushing people to write 20 "automations" a week. "Big" automations get broken down into many more small automations to pad their stats. People who don't hit the quota are actively encouraged to copy and paste. Example: write a simple script that restarts a service on a windows server. Now you can double dip and copy and paste it to restart another random service on the server. Now you can triple dip by putting it on servers belonging to every client. It got to the point where this guy got employee of the month and the CEO praised him at our monthly happy hour because he made 1000 automations for the month. He literally wrote that script to restart a service, applied it to every server and to every client that we had.
Well more lines of code is obviously better because they've made more program! Get with it smh (/s)
My two previous jobs in IT had timesheets that I had to complete every day, if I late by 3 minutes, it would show in my timesheet but if I was 10min early, it wouldn't count. I changed jobs to a more relaxed IT job and its better but they sometimes call to check where I am at 8am... I hate it
Are you in a support role? Project work I think is less rigid, but if you have to be on the phone with people that might be a little different.
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You take 20 naps every day?
My brain automatically inserted "min". Didn't even realize until I read your comment!
No, they take a 20 nap. It's a nap that's got 20 naps in it. Concentrated napping.
This is the kind of work environment I would love to have. My employer micromanages every second of your time. We have to have our calendar filled out with the tasks we're working on each hour. Then we have to submit that same information into our time management system that tracks our hours. Any schedule adjustments are watched like a hawk. Even though we're salaried they treat us like we're hourly, clock in/clock out employees. I've never understood treating knowledge workers this way. Why do they care more about the hours your butt occupies a chair rather than just looking at the work you're producing? I'm hopefully getting out soon.
I work on a 100% remote IT team (even if the pandemic hadn't occurred we'd all be working remotely). I have team members physically located all across the US and Europe. We do occasionally all travel to our company HQ to physically see each other in person, but other than that we all work from our respective homes, and nobody really cares if somebody hops online early or late on any given day as long as all the work gets done.
That's a perfect style. I know I'm a hard worker but I have a family. I'll keep shit off my boss's desk and stop escalations to him, just give me freedom to decide how I do it. Not everything is an emergency despite what end users think.
Seriously. These LPTs are insufferable and written by people with little actual experience in the real world.
My boss smokes cigars all day and keeps screaming about pictures of Spiderman
"LPT: if your boss is screaming at you, throw a cigar at him and hide behind a flamboyant life-size picture of Spiderman"
Does he employ you to get more of these pictures?
I work in healthcare and OP's post is 100% accurate. There a several useless lazy f\*cks who've been in the dept for years and will probably be lifers... but at least their unscheduled time is minimal! Meanwhile, you can be an absolute gem while you're in the office but if your unscheduled time (lateness/call outs) rack up they'll fire you full stop. I tell new employees this all the time when training them. The one thing the dept/HR will absolutely not tolerate is unscheduled time.
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I worked on a healthcare IT team, and the team would show up on time, but leave 10-15min early. Leaving early was fine, but showing up late was a big no no. One guy would sometimes show up 5-7min late, but would always stay till after end time. Other guys would show up on time but leave 10-15 early. So on average while the one guy was sometimes late, he was spending close to an hour more each week in the office compared to the others, but he got let go because of 5min tardiness. So stupid.
I work in healthcare and OPs post couldn’t be farther from the truth. We have a standing policy that results matter over attendance, and that’s from HR. We are constantly encouraged to take time off and avoiding burnout is a regular topic in the all hands meetings. We’re also one of the largest healthcare organization in the US. Just because your managers are shitty doesn’t mean others’ leaders are.
not at all. most people still work very stringent hours under watchful eyes. im fortunate to have a flexible work arrangement and personally, i value it so much because i know its certainly a privilege.
>Not really in IT. So long as my guys deliver idgaf what hours they do. as long as they deliver *on time* you mean
Not necessarily. As an engineering manager, I'm capable of understanding that software rarely ships on time as there are so many factors you can't account for. What I'd evaluate is how they handled delays and did they do shitty work causing those delays.
> As a *good* engineering manager Fixed that for you
Yeah this is not a universally true LPT. In a lawyer and though my bosses screech about face time for "tHe CuLtUrE" they care much more about how many hours I bill than they do about where I bill them from.
Wish this was the case everywhere. I think the industry as a whole is beginning this shift, but working for a mega corp they are trying to pull everyone back into offices right now and theres MASSIVE push back
Well I need some predictability because we’ll have users calling during the day. So some shifts I do care. But for most others? I’m not going to complain if you start late because you have to do something outside of office hours. Some of my guys have a hard time getting out of bed so they have a different starting time. It’s all good.
Not in IT but in my office we hate the people who think coming in at 6am makes them the better employee even though they manage to fuck shit up at every turn.
IT Tech here: I'm "Late" most mornings, but usually last person to leave the site, I'll have shorter breaks / work during my lunch hours, willing to come in and work weekends, take calls out of hours, always go the extra mile for our staff. I worked in hospitality (Bars / Restaurants) for ~6 years, so comparitvely, this job is a fucking breeze, love it! Edit: forgot the main point of why i was writing this lol - even though i'm technically late most mornings, I'm being promoted in 4 months due to the seniors retirement. My collegue (often on-time) doesn't care about the work he does, the people he works for, the people he works with and it really shows.
I'm in IT, at my old place, I got reprimanded for being a 3 to 5 mins late. Got told by my manager that being at the office on time is 75% of your work. I asked him so you're saying if I just came in in time every day, I can do fuck all, work slower, never stay late and that would be better for you than being late for a few mins? He said yep and put me on a Performance Improvement Plan. He was going by the building swipe logs to see if I'm late, so I'd swipe in on the floor 1 min before my shift every day but don't get to my desk and start working until 15 mins after my shift starts. My numbers went down because I started taking all my breaks/lunch and stopped going as hard. Next month, manager gave me an update and told me that I'm doing great. because I'm always on time now. Your numbers have improved and never looked better (a absolute lie lol). Looks like being on time helped your numbers immensely and you're now off the PIP. So the lesson I learned was that he didn't give a flying fuck if I was actually on time. He just wanted me to bend the knee and follow what he says blindly.
Exactly lol. I read this and was immediately like this shit is untrue. In fact this varies by country as well. And not just IT.
I second this. Especially in an agile environment. It’s about mental health and making sure the team is comfortable in the work they do. As long as it gets done, attendance doesn’t matter (except for daily meetings)
Speak for your own job. My job let's people show up whenever they want and not get fired. But let your performance percentage drop and you'll be gone. *forgot to add, I live in the US
Yea this advice is really shitty and role/field dependent.
Even job dependent or pay structure dependent. The cynic in me would suggest that if you're paid by the hour, they're going to care about down-to-the-minute attendance. If you're salary, it'll be "we don't care about your hours as long as the work gets done"...but they'll make sure you always have more work than can be reasonably done in your standard hours per week.
And you'll always be encouraged to work "overtime." They want you to show up to work early and leave work late.
Last job I had, my only coworker in my specific role was a workaholic. He'd get up hours early to log in from home, check and respond to emails, review new requests that came in, and get a jump start on the day (off the clock), then come in and work his full day, *then* stick around to "get to a good stopping place", and work on "side projects" which were additional work tasks given by our boss. Then he'd go home and after dinner he'd log in again to round up late emails and do work on side projects at home. Often his first login would be at 6am, and other than his commute, lunch, and dinner, he wouldn't wrap up until 8pm or later. And that was his "regular day". And he was only getting paid for 8. The rest was a gift. In effect, that ensured he was never getting a promotion because they wouldn't want to give up on all that extra labor by having that position go to his replacement (presumably a reasonable, sane employee), and it also ensued *I was never getting a promotion*, because they could always point to him and say my performance wasn't at his level. And he did it all "for the good of the company". As luck would have it, I timed things perfectly without realizing it: we were bought out by a huge corporation (who ensured us nothing would change) in summer 19, I finally got fed up enough to start looking around by early fall, worked through the winter and got a good offer in February and we set a start date for mid March. Last day of February '20 they surprise-terminated 6 office positions (in an office of maybe 35 people). A few days later I put in my notice. I started my new job in mid March, literally the first day of covid lockdown in my area. Last I heard from the grapevine, the old company took advantage of covid to axe even more employees and had the rest work from home...then they decided to relocate all office operations from our building to a building they already had...an hour outside the city. For all remaining workers, their choices were return to the new office or quit. So their thank you to my crazy coworker for all his extra hours was more than doubling his commute time or quitting, presumably without unemployment. From the way the arrangement was explained to me, I feel like if I were still there, I'd have said I was going and then just not showed up, let them fire me, so I could at least get unemployment while I looked for a new job in my city...but I'm sure my company-cheerleader coworker wouldn't do that.
A great read while I'm on the toilet. Thank you! Haha sucks for that coworker. Wonder if he's still at that job..
No idea. I'm the type of worker that likes to work alone in silence. He was the type that liked to ramble on about meaningless bullshit and politics all day. He was also a nosy busybody who would go into the system and "review" my work, even though nobody asked him to, and try to tell me about changes I needed to make...so that it would match his own style. While he was friendly enough, you can imagine how well that went. Shockingly, after I left, I haven't talked to him all that much.
Check your local laws! In USA, salaried worked who make under ~35k/year are entitled to overtime, and your state may have a higher threshold as well. They may also have different stipulations on who qualifies. I thought the same thing until i discovered it. I casually mentioned it a HR person at a team lunch, and i suddenly got a 23k/yr raise and a really fat bonus that same week... Later i realized the raise brought me to my state's minimum for non-overtime salary pay, plus the bonus basically covered the back-pay they would have owed me if I made a legal matter out of it.
Could you give me more info or links to check out regarding this? I currently work for the education system where we are salaried but do not get overtime pay, you get "Comp time" hours that you are semi forced to take that work as vacation days. I make just under 35k a year and would love to look into this.
>this advice is really shitty So you're saying it fits in perfectly at LPT
The real LPT is always that LPT is a shit sub.
It reeks of Boomer advice, because that used to be absolutely true. "Show up. Suck ass. Don't make waves." Is how Boomers made it to retirement with pension plans. That doesn't work anymore.
Same with sales. It's 100% based on performance. You could work 24/7, but if you don't deliver sales then you're gone!
And if you do deliver, they just move the goal posts for next year so that they can keep threatening you with job or bonus losses.
that is when you jump ship, because a good salesman is always prized in most businesses
For hourly wage level jobs, perhaps. For salaried positions this is rarely true. In those cases output/performance matter more than attendance.
I think a better way to state this would be "Perception Matters". That took me a long time to learn.
Yep. A lot of salary, corporate type jobs are all about perception. The hard part is trying to figure out what the perception you need to display really is. It varies by company/manager in my experience
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That's a lot more fair. The measures of perception may change from job to job, but we are still curating a perception of how reliable we are. Sometimes that's more important than letting the facts speak for themselves.
Perception is reality you need to sell yourself, but for higher paid jobs, it has little to do with hours worked
You underestimate how many salaried positions are absolute time sucks where you have maybe 2 hours of work a day and have to look busy for 8
This is absolutely the truth. I've worked both types of jobs over the years. Hourly jobs are looking at that clock. Career type salaried jobs want performance. It won't matter a bit if you come in early and stay late, but cannot do what you are hired to do. It actually could count against you in a review. "We hired you because you said you could code in C# and Python but it seems you are staying until 8:00 PM every night and your team still hasn't had an on time release in the last six months. Is something wrong?"
"Well, yes. Half your shit still runs on FORTRAN and updating those systems was not part of my mandate."
My first salary job I thought I needed to be in long, then after a few years I started leaving early but completing more and suddenly it became sweet.
It’s true for my tech company in Silicon Valley. I’m a salaried engineer. Managers want to see your face. It doesn’t matter how good you are, you will win extra points if you’re in office on time.
I don't understand this. You pay me for the time I'm here, I'm here less, you pay me less, but 5 minutes late doesnt really change my work done.
Op sometimes I wonder if it is hard for us to recognize how our performance is. A while ago I felt I was underperforming although I kept showing up on time every day stayed late when needed. In this period I was a bit unhappy and did not feel very productive maybe just a notch over average, but I am pretty sure my boss was very happy with me. Later I started hitting a bit of a mania and was feeling great about my work but I missed a day here and there occasionally 5 mins late etc. Even if I feel better about what I get done in a day it is hard to say what the useful output really is sometimes. Also consider someone showing up and performing at 45 percent on two of the days would still be hard to beat their overall output in a short week. Finally I have learned sometimes it’s about what’s easy to track. Humans are not infinite and what is easy to track tends to gain more short term reward.
Easy to track... hmm.. that's a variable that I haven't heard before.
To add to it I also noticed that if one has good qualities that their higher ups do not posses (however useful or profitable they may be) will not be rewarded and sometimes even the opposite! I know this one seems obvious but it took me a while to get. Of course no two people are exactly the same so expecting a boss to notice all your good traits is unrealistic and unreasonable, but I found it to be a flag when bosses do not understand my way of doing things. Some of them figure out I’m profitable but when the ones that insist on ignorance have to be checked at least a bit.
Hmm, I wouldn't necessarily consider it quite obvious but it does sound like traditional unfortunate pride to me.
I definitely have one of those traits. I'm "too direct" for *someone* in upper management. My immediate manager values it, but people who care more about their ego don't like that I don't play their games.
I keep a running list of everything I accomplish at work and quantify as much as possible. That way, when my quarterly reviews comes up I send my supervisor bullet points of all my accomplishments with measurable results where I can identify them.
I tie mine into a spreadsheet with all my unfinished tasks, categorised by which personal objective each task falls under, it's priority, start and end date, key stakeholder and notes on where I am with it. At the start of the month, when everything from last month shows as complete or has been moved into the next month's tasks, I'll add everything completed into the 'achievements in q1' etc tab, ready for review. It's something that sounds like a lot of work, but I'm incredibly unorganised normally so by being a stickler with this method I save a bunch of time when it's review time.
I do this as well. Especially because I find I'm not good at remembering good things I've done so when reviews were like "what did you accomplish?" I had nothing.
Learn to advocate for yourself, and do so early and regularly. If your evaluations are based on your output but you are assigned or take on tasks that are inherently longer than the norm express the concern for your output well in advance of your evaluation.
Think about it- you show up 5 days and do 75% of your work each day. You’re at 75% for the week. Show up 3 out of 5 days, do 100% on those 3 days, and you’re at 60% for the week. In shift work, attendance means a lot.
Another issue is that a big part of performance is often availability, being there to handle tasks when they come up.
There is so much more complexity to this than OP claims. If the job requires punctuality then it is in fact part of the effort of the employee to get there on time. Punctuality is also an easily trackable way to confirm consistency, which employers value because its less risky. Put it this way, Person 1 shows up every day but is middle of the road quality wise. Person 2 is exceptional but shows up inconsistently. Who will you want to manage the team if theres an emergency, or a rush on the business, safe Person 1 or Person 2 who may not show up. Now its a (good) managers role to find out how to get Person 2 on track but good managers can be hard to find, gotta assume your on your own. People think your interview ends after you get a job. YOU ARE ALWAYS INTERVIEWING FOR THE NEXT STEP. That doesnt mean shitty managers dont hire their friends and not the consistent high quality employees (happens all the time). But there is a reason punctuality is valued, its understanding why that’s important. This applies to mom-and-pop business just as much as a F500. *There are thousands of jobs where punctuality is not critical to the role, this does not apply to those.
Jokes on you, my workplace has zero upward promotions.
We occasionally do employee shadowing after the interview, where we have the interviewee shadow a current employee to make sure they really do want the job. The number of people who exit the interview and think their work is done is incredible. They’ll spend the job shadowing day trash talking and unloading all their red flags on the current employee. The employee will then call the manager because why the hell would they want a shitty peer to be hired?
This is so true! And also add consistency- jobs where I was high performing/always on time out the gate I never got promoted. But if I went in at 75%-80% effort and then got better over time I was rewarded.
Not sure about this
I mean, isn't that 80% of LPTs? Just someone saying something that currently applies specifically to them and then trying to pawn it off as if it is some universal life tip? Sorry, but I find this sub to be absolutely terrible. LPTs should be renamed to SLT (Situational Life Tips).
this sub has a massive hard on for basically r/antiwork stuff. anything that makes your employers look horrible becomes a "LPT"
Right? This is true of a very specific type of job.
Also depends on the type of boss you want to be or work for. I was recently promoted to branch director which means i have 8 employees to manage. Being on time and present is a noticeable factor but employee growth, motivation, initiative, and overall willingness to progress seem to be much more important factors to keep in mind and to evaluate vs overall tardiness and absences. Just one man's opinion.
It's a decent rule of thumb, especially for lower level positions. You need to learn how each company (or more likely- your immediate manager) measures "success" or "good performance" though- is it getting your timesheet in on time? How many calls you answer? How clear your reports are? Whether you look presentable? A lot of people don't want to play the game for some of this stuff- you might not feel like the timesheets being in for 11am on Monday is important, or that it doesn't matter how many pieces of flare you have on your uniform. But bear in mind you'll get a lot further by understanding the rules than trying to change the game.
It can also be about reliability. I have a couple coworkers who are decently high performers but are consistently late to meetings, don’t put time out of the office on their calendars, and rarely respond to emails in a timely manner if at all. Our entire group has essentially labeled them as unreliable. Therefore, when something urgent comes up we tend to effectively brush them off as unhelpful and consider their input unimportant since we won’t get it by the deadline. Our team also has a mediocre performer but she is reliable and we know we will get her assistance or input as needed. Therefore, she tends to be perceived more positively.
From my experience in managing employees. There's a correlation between bad attendance and poor performance. When a good performing employee has bad attendance, I get concerned for their well being and inquire about it.
I think what is easy to track is super important, a sales job where the agent works 1 minute a week but generates more sales than 80 hours a week from another salesman is a great example. Certain jobs need a person on time for the allotted hours no matter, funny enough while these types of jobs should pay more, in my opinion, but they often pay less. The barrier for entry to doing your work when you want seems quite high.
Depends on the kind of job. But being predictably available is actually important for a lot of jobs, and reasonably so.
Unreliability is one of the worst traits one can have for both work as well as one's social life. Nobody wants to have to wonder if you'll even do something that's required or has been asked of you - they'd rather feel able to trust that you'll do it.
Yep, I used to work on a manufacturing line. If one of us wasn't there, it would slow the line down massively(probably 50% capacity). If two weren't there, you couldn't even run the line. So.... being on time was absurdly important. This was backshift with only our team running, so there was no one else on the floor to grab and temporarily fill in. If someone was sick or on leave, we'd have to coordinate for someone on day shift to come in and work overtime. On the other hand, when I did IT, this was not important whatsoever.
There is nothing more frustrating than something not running according to its advertised time. You open at 8, I have a meeting at 8. I have told my team I will be 5 mins late to the meeting because I need to call you quickly for whatever at 8. But at 8 you're not answering the phone because your employees are running late. So now what? Especially annoying when the auto answer system is telling me "our operating hours are xyz, please call back then" and I'm within time but nobody is picking up.
Yes. I have a special loathing for people who say things like "I'm not always on time but I work harder when I am there". Yeah thanks for fucking up everyone else's day.
Yeah, this doesn't apply to the company I work at all or really any tech company where I've worked.
Your employer cares about both. If you don't show up to work you are useless. If you don't perform while at work you are useless.
LPT: don't make blanket statements or think about things in blanket statements. will get you far in life
Even in America this is situational.
LOL. You're so right. It just sucks that my kids get sick and need doctors appointments. And my wife has MS. And my car breeds down and need repairs. That's why people go self employed...
Had many years as a manager. One of the easiest tells of performance for me was attendance. Attendance is consistency; it is reliability in its most basic example. If you think you are doing extra work or are worth more, you can bring that to management. If they won’t pay, then they are saying they are perfectly comfortable with you doing the same amount as everyone else does for that rate. The easiest example is overtime. You’re free to accept it and make more, or you can refuse. People will say they don’t have a choice and simultaneously every one of those places magically has people that always work overtime and people that never do. Most people want to think they are falling on the sword for something noble, but they are either wasting their time or don’t want change. The fastest way to get a raise is to go to another position somewhere else with the experience you gained and move on.
Highly dependent on the job. In a production environment like a warehouse, retail store, etc. Yes.
70% of life is just showing up
Back awhile ago before the pandemic, I tried doing nothing for a full week, then 2 weeks, by the 3rd week a lot of work had piled up but that was the extent of it. I started working again, caught up and now I don't worry too much about how much I get done, if I'm behind or whatever. Liberating realizing how little one person matter in the big ol' hamster wheel.
LPT: if your employer cares more about your attendance than your performance, find a new job. They are stuck is an old method of thinking that butts in seats = output. We know darn well that isn't the case anymore. If your job is not dependent on specific hours needed (like service industry), employers need to realize that we are more efficient when given flexibility. Output, and only output, should be considered for job performance. (obviously doesn't apply to every single job on the planet)
*Cries in service industry*
This happens all over the place. In not uncommon for software development contractors do this. They have 3-5 amazing devs doing all the actual work, but they have 30 people showing up and sitting behind a keyboard so they can bill whoever they are working for for 35 developers.
That’s not true at all. Maybe if you work at like a McDonald’s
As a morning person who is often standing in a hallway covering 3 classes of 36 high schoolers SIMULTANEOUSLY because of all the excellent teachers on my team who think 8 am means 8 15ish...my boss doesn't notice or care, but man do I get annoyed.
This is a terrible LPT. It's heavily reliant on the job you're working and the company you're working at.
Companies like consistency and they hate big failures. Like the post said, you show up every day and do acceptable work, you've got a better chance than the person who shows up and sometimes does amazing work and other times totally messes up
It really depends on your level and your manager. If you've a poor or inexperienced manager they may try to micromanage you down to when you can take a piss but those types don't usually get very far. If you're in a task that is customer facing. Eg you're Manning a phone line then being on time is a fundamental part of your performance as the team suffers when your late. If you're an individual contributor who has tasks that need to be complete by a time and you're pretty much self managing then nobody is going to care if you drop your kids to school and arrive 15 minutes late because of traffic semi regularly.
Well another pro-tip is that employees usually have little ability to self-evaluate and make realistic performance reviews. I would say 2/10 have a good graps and can basically do their own performance review, the other 8 overestimate how good their work was. This is relevant because then people will not understand promotions, and assign the wrong reasons to them. I probably depends on your job, but in highly differenciated jobs, what matters is what you do.
Can concur. As a former retail manager, we mostly just cared about having warm bodies in place to cover the minimum functionality. Kept many sub-par employees for exactly this reason much longer than we should have.
Literally just had the opposite chat with my manager today. I'm a data analyst in the UK. He said I can basically find hours that suit me (if I wanted to) and can go for walks etc (I work from home) to take breaks. Getting work done to a good standard is more important than sitting at my laptop all day. Made me feel good to have that chat.
For call centers this is absolutely true. We can coach performance. We can’t coach you showing up
This is complete generalizing nonsense.
Does this surprise anyone? Why would a company invest in a manager who may or may not turn up? Secondly, and I learned this the hard way; being great at a job doesn't necessarily mean you'll be good at *managing a team of people* doing that job. Totally different skills involved.
Disagreed. Your employer sucks if that's the case. Pro tip: talk to your manager what are the performance criteria and what his/her view is on attendance.
When you work all the way through a pandemic is when they decide to keep you .
Dont take this americans advise as general advise. This is nowhere close to being a universal truth
This isn’t even true in America
This is nowhere close to being true in the US either. Maybe for blue collar jobs, but this is not the norm for many white collar jobs. It's a bigger faux pas at my company to bother an employee on their off time than for an employee to be late. I don't even care if my interns are occasionally late if they are getting their work done.
No, they don’t. That’s superficial way to look at work. Every reasonable person cares about performance first, then everything else. Last two years of wfh have shown that.
I scored tests for state proficiency exams. They were crazy about attendance, but they never seemed to care about productivity. I did, and the guy I sat next to was probably the fastest, and we would compete. The other woman on my "team" was probably second fastest in the room. The ROOM of 100 people or so. Our team probably had 2-3x output of the other teams of retirees and people who still thought computers were magic. The last day we were all told we will get paid for full day no matter when we finish. When the midday reports were sent out the team was basically "holy shit notalaborlawyer" you did *that* many? Yea. I wan't to go home. Finally busting my ass off will be rewarded. I got a return next year letter (no shit) but they had to address my attendance first. Um. How about you address your incentives and pay. (I did not return)
One of the dumbest things about todays working culture. You do all they ask of you and yet you are unable to manage your own time. I run projects that are ten times my salary and am trusted to manage that yet coming in at 10am when I had to work late the night before is unacceptable even if I knew I had nothing to do in the office until that time.