Bad managers are making the labor crisis worse | Hacker News Reader

Bad managers are making the labor crisis worse

bloomberg.com

33 pointspaulpauper14 comments

There is the aphorism "Employees don't leave companies, they leave managers".

That article points to a long list of possible explanations, also points out the "bad manager" explanation but doesn't develop that explanation substantially, which is a disappointment.

The most interesting fact presented is that workers are particularly scarce in the "Leisure & Hospitality" which would be a chance to point out that bad management is endemic in that industry, but they never get to the punch line.

As someone who worked hospitality for much of their 20s, it's the worse. High-end banquet catering pays decent but is rife with sexual harassment. Working in a more casual environment tends to involve a great deal of disrespect. The whole thing runs on being able to treat people like shit. There were two places I didn't feel treated like shit, but coincidentally these were the places where there were women in management, one of these was the notorious Montage in Portland, which I'm sure a number of people on this board have been to drunk at some point as its one of the few places you can get something to decent to eat after 2AM there. Ridiculous customer base, very humane managers.

From a quality perspective catering operations tend to be bad.

I've seen people who have run a well-regarded restaurant serve horrible food while catering.

I've seen mass casualty incidents happen at weddings from food poisoning.

This was the kind of high-end catering where you had weddings with a $50,000/night harpist playing blissfully on the staircase, we servers were 100% looking forward to getting at the leftovers afterward/during work since it all had to be thrown out in the garbage by law.

I've had a mixed bag of women managers. Some are straight up sociopaths, others are just utter morons, and some really got their shit together. Men though typically I've found are much more forgiving and overlook things if they can chew you out or something. But it's far more of an abusive environment.

All of this stopped though the moment I got into a major company. It's as if everybody who earned their way into the company knew how to appropriately act and treat people.

Oh man, RIP montage, I loved that place. Glad to hear they treated their employees humanely (and sad that that word even needs to be used), and it’s a shame that it had to shut down.

Didn't know it was gone now, had worked there some 7 years ago or so at this point. Fond memories of being taught how to make aluminum animals and genitals. In its defense though (I'd moved around the country working low-level jobs like this), Portland as a whole seemed to have a very human hospitality culture, much unlike everywhere else I'd worked. When I was there, a lot of places used mandatory gratuity to front healthcare for its workers, which was unheard of in the big cities IME.

Is the problem sexual harassment from the customers or the co-workers or both?

Co-workers/Managers, but usually a cook as far as co-workers rather than server-to-server. The reigning manager had multiple warnings about his unsolicited behavior and after I'd walked out on the job for a second time after being so fed up I found he'd finally been fired for his behavior but still failed forward onto a another management job at a 5-star hotel.

A simple solution to labor scarcity would be to relax HR processes (including hiring times) and elimination by automated software. In addition there are a number of absurd non-competes in the blue collar markets in many states. Luckily in California it is illegal.

I really wish I could see an industry/education level cross tab. Anecdotally, we're seeing a lot of churn in tech where education levels are typically quite high, but in the data in the article, if you don't break down by sector, the numbers would suggest quit rates should be lower than normal...

There's clearly a very complex dynamic going on, here, and I have a very strong suspicion that while the macro numbers say one thing, what's going on at the ground level actually varies significantly from sector to sector, geography to geography, and demographic to demographic.

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