Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

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As a young person I had a job at a computer repair shop. I might have been 19 years old. They did a 1 day working interview. I impressed them heavily with 10 repairs in the day, all of them solid and billable. They hired me. I was alarmed when they also hired a guy that blew up a customer's motherboard by plugging in the PSU cables incorrectly (This was the in the mid 90's).

It went downhill from there. I became the target of a lot of bullying and harassment from the alpha jackass, leader of the coked up jackasses that worked there, and eventually he gave me a degrading nickname that implied that everything I touched broke.

I was constantly stressed out, felt like the worst employee in the world (at that age I didn't know I was the victim at this point) and this self-fulfilling prophecy just made things worse. Suddenly I'd become bad at my job. I couldn't fix 5 computers a day, and they often came back with problems.

Was this issue me? No. the issue was a highly toxic workplace where I was berated for my successes ("Oh look, he fixed one, must be a F****n miracle") and expected to fail.

I'd have quit, but I needed the work. The manager, a lowlife cokehead and strip club aficionado, mercy fired me 2 months in. He saw the problem but didn't care to fix it. Of course, I was better off. They were a crooked shop to begin with and my reputation was at risk for having worked there even 2 months.

Many years later I am a well respected manager who never treats employees like this. I am well aware that if my employee is failing me, then in some way I am failing them. I work on the relationship with the employee as much as I work on the issue. I encourage their successes, help them work through any issues, and show confidence in them until they start showing confidence in themselves.

I can honestly say this approach has worked wonders, and I've seen huge HUGE turnarounds in employees who thought they could never make it. Now they're rock stars.

> I am well aware that if my employee is failing me, then in some way I am failing them.

I have had to fire people over the years, of course, but whenever it gets that far I feel terrible that it got to that point, that how this person was managed is a failure for the company and the departing employee. I hope it’s obvious that none of this is expressed to the person being fired — they are miserable enough about their situation and don’t care about the company any more, if they ever did.

Always there is a post mortem: did we hire the wrong person — if so what could we have done better? As for the management — again, what could we have done better?

BTW I’m sorry you had to deal with that horrible experience. At least it was only two months.

I was a rockstar at each of my previous employers except the last one, and consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to quit before being fired. So naturally, during my exit interview I had only positive things to say about the experience but it was by far the most restrictive and toxic workplace I've worked at. How was it toxic? A general lack of respect, or interest, for people's time and ability/talent which was made clear through various policies and the behavior of a few assholes.

You won't find the answers you need by doing a post-mortem.

> You won't find the answers you need by doing a post-mortem.

It's really the only opportunity since if you had the answers beforehand perhaps the person would not have been "let go".

If your point is that post mortems aren't that great, I agree. It's like debugging a crash dump rather than a live process. But sometimes the core dump is all you have.

Sometimes a crash course on how not to do things is a most effective form of education...

Definitely not in this case.

No follow up?

"I was constantly stressed out, felt like the worst employee in the world". Doesn't sound like a good education. I've been told what not to do before in a way that doesn't make me feel worthless - something was clearly wrong with that "alpha jackass", as they so succinctly put it.

Never claimed it was 'good'

> Many years later I am a well respected manager who never treats employees like this.

Sounds like it was effective to me.

Sorry, no, it wasn't effective at anything except making me miserable. I didn't become a good manager because of that experience. I became despite it. I have had great mentors along the way and I've learned the right way to treat people even when they aren't at their best. I've never reflected on that experience in any kind of positive light. I appreciate what you're trying to say, but you are wrong.

Fair, we disagree then. The way it looks from the story and the way it feels from your experience can certainly be different and without control talking about "sorry you're wrong" is more ego than reason.

No ego, friend. Just being straightforward about it.

You’re saying that you didn’t understand that place was badly managed until you experienced good management elsewhere? I can see that as a young employee. I have trouble believing you had no motivation to be a kind coworker after being mistreated, though, since their behavior repulsed you. Thanks for sharing in any case. 90s computer repair shops were a bit Wild West!

I knew it was badly managed, but I didn't realize how badly I was being treated until it was over. The experience didn't have any immediate effect. Rather, it took me years to unravel the damage that was done in that short time. Time to understand what the people around me were going through (such as drug addiction coupled with severe ignorance) and to understand why I let myself be treated like that in the first place.

I came to realize after it was all over that the shop had been selling used parts as new, overcharging customers for billable time, and who knows what else that I've forgotten by now.

The point of me sharing my experience was to corroborate the article. A bad environment can turn a good employee bad by eroding their self confidence and making them feel small. I experienced that to an extreme degree. I survived it, not unscathed. And I'm proud to have not propagated the atrocious way I was treated.

Indeed to be well respected by the incredible team of people that I work with means the world to me. But, my desire to help others has always extended to my coworkers, and then the people I managed either as a supervisor or a manager. Customer service is priority one, and my first customers are the people I work with. If I'm not giving them the best customer service possible, how can I expect them to reciprocate that to others, nevermind our paying customers.

Good education, no. Important education, yes.

School, and often our parents do not teach us that there are plenty of narcissistic greedy assholes that will eat you alive. Instead too often we find that the leaders of the organizations that should be teaching us what to look out for, ARE what to look out for.

This person learned that lesson and got out rather than many people I see trapped in situations like that.

Then I would not call it an education, because that gives more credit to the asshole. Maybe at most it would be a learning experience for the victim.

> I couldn't fix 5 computers a day, and they often came back with problems.

Totally possible they were sabotaging your work. Good riddance!

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