Hiring standards are dropping

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Neither of my parents being there would have improved my odds at any interview I can remember. :D
 
TCABM said:
It’s also a condition of employment written in the law for federal workers and federal contract holders.

Not to mention most safety critical roles, such as railway workers, bus drivers, and airline pilots, among others.
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I have worked for federal government and never took any drug testing during this tenure.
 
TCABM said:
Not to mention some jobs have an on-call requirement, so you’re never really ever not at work.

Personally, I find mandatory OT and shift work much more draconian than being subject to drug testing as a condition of employment.
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Mandatory OT isn't too bad, if used in the right circumstances. In industries where large fluctuations in activity occur (Oil & gas), you can avoid over-hiring in headcount (and then subsequently having to lay them off) by working additional hours to meet production demand. When a slowdown hits, you just walk everyone back to 40hrs without having to hand out pink slips. However, forcing everyone to work 60hr weeks for 9 months because you didn't want to increase headcount is a good way to cause burn out and introduce safety problems. Good managers know how to balance those business and employee needs.
 
Half Fast said:
the bigger concern is that it puts you in a vulnerable position where you can be leveraged or blackmailed into obtaining and providing info. And yes, that really does happen.
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Makes me think of this DuffelBlog article that came out in the wake of the Jack T guy.
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mandm said:
I have worked for federal government and never took any drug testing during this tenure.
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Doesn’t mean you weren’t subject to a random program, unless it was prior to 1986 when Executive Order 12564 was signed.

It also does not mean the agency was complying with the EO, either.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Mandatory OT isn't too bad, if used in the right circumstances. …Good managers know how to balance those business and employee needs.
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I’m not disagreeing, just stating it’s one of the lines in the sand I refuse to cross to take a job; I’ve been there, done that, and have enough t-shirts for a quilt.
 
TCABM said:
I’m not disagreeing, just stating it’s one of the lines in the sand I refuse to cross to take a job; I’ve been there, done that, and have enough t-shirts for a quilt.
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IMHO, the hours you are willing to work is a trade-off. If you have sufficient skills in a field with high demand, then you can, and have every right, to dictate your hours/shifts/time-off etc. Of course though, the company has every right to meet your demands; or not.

But if you are entry level, or "skills limited" then you will find your opportunities severely limited if you take that stand. You are not entitled to anything you haven't earned.'

By the time I quit working for corporate America I had negotiated pretty a pretty good package that included 8 weeks/year of PTO, but that was only because I was able to contribute more to the company than I was receiving.

My brother on the other hand refused to work nights or weekends, he refused to be on-call or do overnight travel.
He is also unemployed and basically unemployable.
 
mandm said:
I have worked for federal government and never took any drug testing during this tenure.
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I've never worked for the federal govt, but I was still federally required to take drug and alcohol testing based on my job assignment at a private aviation company when requested. And any refusal to take a test either led to termination, or worse, suspension/revocation of any federal certificates held, if applicable. So I guess you may want to steer clear of most vocations that fall under the FAA or DOT.
 
As a salaried engineering professional I expect and am willing to work occasional unpaid overtime and have done so when necessary without complaining. OTOH, I've been in situations where a company was badly behind and announced that everybody would work overtime just because some departments were behind... that's just poor management and horrible for morale. At my current job, I've had to work late precisely once in 22 years... the company is [mostly] well run.

My current employer does not drug test, other than pre-employment, though they have the right to if deemed necessary. Never heard of it happening, not that I probably would, though I did know one guy who got fired for drinking in the parking lot on break... after doing it for years, and everybody knew it. He was actually pretty good at his job, but as the company grew that kind of once-tolerated behavior became unacceptable. We don't build airplanes, but we sell components to Boeing, Airbus, LM, SpaceX, all the big aerospace companies, as well as Ford, Stellantis, GM, etc.
 
mandm said:
I have worked for federal government and never took any drug testing during this tenure.
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I am not sure if ALL Fed employees are subject to them. But if you are, you should have signed a paper that said you understood that you were when you were hired.

But just because you are in the program does not mean you will be tested. I worked for Fed gov for some 25 years in positions that were subject to it. I got called ONCE. Others were never called in the time I worked there.
 
I feel like talking arrogantly to men (and women) much my senior about topics I feel they know little about.

And with that jerkery said, there are many people campaigning on multiple social media platforms to people my age (20-35) the foolishness of devoting one's life to nameless (faceless) corporations. Simultaneously, sexual relations have rarely been as unhealthy as they are currently. A group of women advertise promiscuity and hatred of men to other women. A group of men advocate the total abandonment of all women because of the advertised promiscuity of some women.

If meaning is not to be found in work, why devote excessive time to it? If there is no meaning at home that requires the money of excessive work, why work excessively?

No, this does not describe every person. I've joked at work that I'm the laziest man in my family. My father, his father, and my mom's father all worked many more hours per week than I do. My FIL works more than I do. I like the work I do, so why not work more? Put simply, OT is disallowed. Furthermore, the work I do is more akin to maintenance than anything else, so there are no projects in need of crunch or goals that require more than (and frequently less than) forty hours in a week to meet.

Beyond this, if I was living on the edge of solvency I would take a second job, but I'm not.

I suspect that many my age believe that everything they want should be affordable while working simple full-time hours, regardless of the job. I had a coworker who thought forty hour weeks were too much and "Why couldn't it be lowered to thirty? Or twenty-five?" He had no clue about the history of labor laws or the factory workers that worked 80 hours or more per week. He thought of the forty hour week as a great burden imposed on him by a malicious company instead of a limitation imposed on the company by a government trying to spare women and children- that was later expanded to men.

It seems that this is a symptom of different issue. There is little guidance on finding meaning in one's life. If there is no meaning, even the slightest effort becomes too great a burden.
 
2-Bit Speed said:
And with that jerkery said, there are many people campaigning on multiple social media platforms to people my age (20-35) the foolishness of devoting one's life to nameless (faceless) corporations.
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And how exactly do you now that these "many people" are not largely composed of those who have a vested interested in weakening and crippling the country? There are people in this world whose job it is to do precisely that, and some who would do it just for fun or to advance their own agenda. How many of them? We really don't have any way to know, but it's a pretty large number.

If you hear something from a family member or friend (an actual friend, as in someone whom you have met and know personally) then you have a fairly good idea of how seriously to take it. I have never quite understood the willingness many people have to accept things as fact when they have no way of knowing for sure what the source of the information might be.
 
2-Bit Speed said:
I suspect that many my age believe that everything they want should be affordable while working simple full-time hours, regardless of the job. I had a coworker who thought forty hour weeks were too much
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There is a lack of perspective evident in this view, which is evident in a significant share of our younger generation.

The young people who believe this are only seeing this from their personal (selfish) perspective. What they are not considering are the other people who work to build and provide the things they want to be affordable. Those people - people just like they are - also want life to be affordable, and the only way that those other people can earn a living is for the goods and services they produce to be priced at a level that allows them to be paid well....which means that you will have to pay more for their products. Put another way, someone flipping burgers in a fast-food shop wants to be paid more. That same person will complain loudly when prices increase for everything that they purchase - prices raised so that other people may be paid more.

Sooner or later, you must realize that you can only be paid as much as the customer is willing to pay for the product or service that you are providing. This simple relationship is true regardless of whether you work for an employer, operate as a individual contractor, or employ others. Thus, if you want to be paid more (and have a more luxurious lifestyle), there are only three options: 1) Produce more, 2) Produce something of higher value, or 3) Consume less than your income and invest the difference to create an asset base that will eventually generate additional income. In general, each of these three takes time and effort to execute, though some people figure out #2 rapidly.

Simply put, those who believe that they should be allowed to live a life of luxury without having to put forth an extraordinary effort to produce goods or services simply are not seeing the big picture. This is not unique to the current generation, BTW. Young people lacking perspective have always been part of society, and likely always will be. Those who gain perspective end up doing well; those who do not generally continue complaining for the rest of their lives, living with the mistaken belief that their lack of means is somehow the fault of others who have worked to build themselves prosperity. The harder you work, the "luckier" you get.
 
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2-Bit Speed said:
I suspect that many my age believe that everything they want should be affordable while working simple full-time hours, regardless of the job.
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^This, 100%.

There's been a few threads about this on PoA in different contexts (like budgeting/finance/etc), but that theme frequently re-emerges. There's this seriously misguided notion that if you work 40h a week as, say a dentist's office receptionist, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to buy a $50k car. Afterall, you are employed and that's the average price for a car. Why shouldn't you have that? You've earned it. Incessant commercials and perverse financing solutions encourage people to think like this, too.
 
2-Bit Speed said:
I feel like talking arrogantly to men (and women) much my senior about topics I feel they know little about.
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Yeah, IIRC that started when you were about 12 or 13.
:)

2-Bit Speed said:
If there is no meaning, even the slightest effort becomes too great a burden.
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Yet somehow you managed to acquire a little wisdom anyway.

2-Bit Speed said:
If meaning is not to be found in work, why devote excessive time to it? If there is no meaning at home that requires the money of excessive work, why work excessively?
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In that situation, perhaps finding meaning becomes its own work. Surprisingly, sometimes in doing that, one finds there is meaning in work. Sometimes seeing the same thing from a different perspective is all that’s required.

Sam Florman told the story of visiting the Sistine Chapel. It was a hot day and the place was miserably crowded and noisy. Amid the bedlam, his guide called out, “Look up! Look up! Ignore the crush around you and look up!” In doing so, Florman beheld Michelangelo’s fabulous, inspiring work, and all the misery of the crowd and the hot day faded.

Sometimes any job can become miserable. That’s the time to “look up,” to see the bigger picture, to focus on the impact of the work on others.

Inward focus often brings misery; outward focus often brings meaning.


2-Bit Speed said:
There is little guidance on finding meaning in one's life.
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Perhaps it can come from those “senior men (and women),” no?
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
There's this seriously misguided notion that if you work 40h a week as, say a dentist's office receptionist, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to buy a $50k car. Afterall, you are employed and that's the average price for a car. Why shouldn't you have that? You've earned it. Incessant commercials and perverse financing solutions encourage people to think like this, too.
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There is also this misguided notion that all a business has to do to pay their employees a "living wage" is for the owners to not take so much and to raise prices to whatever it takes to cover those salaries for people that don't want to work OT or Weekends.
 
2-Bit Speed said:
I had a coworker who thought forty hour weeks were too much and "Why couldn't it be lowered to thirty? Or twenty-five?" He had no clue about the history of labor laws or the factory workers that worked 80 hours or more per week. He thought of the forty hour week as a great burden imposed on him by a malicious company instead of a limitation imposed on the company by a government trying to spare women and children- that was later expanded to men.
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Or, maybe, he and others like him, are aware of that and remember also that back in the day companies refused to make changes without being forced to. Maybe he's aware of proposals in congress to change it again. Maybe he's aware of studies showing 32 hour weeks to be highly effective. Maybe he thinks that "but it used to be worse" isn't a good reason to stop trying and improve the present.
 
172andyou said:
Or, maybe, he and others like him, are aware of that and remember also that back in the day companies refused to make changes without being forced to. Maybe he's aware of proposals in congress to change it again. Maybe he's aware of studies showing 32 hour weeks to be highly effective. Maybe he thinks that "but it used to be worse" isn't a good reason to stop trying and improve the present.
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Or maybe we had an hour long discussion where I blew his mind with the actual history of labor laws. Maybe he later got fired for excessive laziness and nearly lost his security clearance. Maybe.
 
172andyou said:
Or, maybe, he and others like him, are aware of that and remember also that back in the day companies refused to make changes without being forced to. Maybe he's aware of proposals in congress to change it again. Maybe he's aware of studies showing 32 hour weeks to be highly effective.
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"Highly effective" from what perspective? Crashing the economy?

That may make sense for a few under-loaded salaried professional positions, but it's absolute hogwash when looking at direct production or service roles. When you operate a manufacturing or direct service business, reducing production by 20% means reducing output by 20%, which in turn means reducing revenue by 20%. If you honestly think that you can pay people the same net wages/salary with a topline revenue reduction of 20%, then you're smoking something that would invalidate your med cert for life.

Add to that the fact that we don't have a large enough workforce in the US to meet production demand as it is, and its pretty darned obvious that this sort of approach just isn't sustainable without doing a lot of economic damage.
 
Without knowing what 2-Bit does, no way of knowing if an 32 hr work week would be as productive as a 40 hr week. Some sort of office work? Sure, you could get just as much done at 32 hrs but plenty of jobs require workers to physically be at work. A reduction of hrs for a service based industry means reduced service hours. That affects productivity. I’d love to either have a reduced work week or work from home but that just ain’t happening.
 
Have a friend who is an RN.. well really a DPN... she does the 4 day 10-hour shifts in the Urgent Care Clinic and she jumps at the opportunity for overtime. Tells us the younger nurses, do their time and are done...

She had explained to a few that for a couple of hours a week they could almost double thier check. As she put it they looked at her like she was crazy...
 
Velocity173 said:
Without knowing what 2-Bit does, no way of knowing if an 32 hr work week would be as productive as a 40 hr week. Some sort of office work?
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Right now? From Thanksgiving through about Valentine's we could probably get away with a 16hr week and careful scheduling. For the rest of the year, we range from bored to death to working to death from one week to the next with no real rhyme or reason. There have been some weeks I felt like I needed another ten hour to finish my work, but no OT allowed.

P.S. Yes. Some sort of office work. I (pretend to) fix computers.
 
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172andyou said:
Or, maybe, he and others like him, are aware of that and remember also that back in the day companies refused to make changes without being forced to. Maybe he's aware of proposals in congress to change it again. Maybe he's aware of studies showing 32 hour weeks to be highly effective. Maybe he thinks that "but it used to be worse" isn't a good reason to stop trying and improve the present.
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Why bother with hours to begin with? Indeed doesn’t care how much or how little you work so long as your assigned work is completed at the acceptable level each week.
 
Velocity173 said:
Without knowing what 2-Bit does, no way of knowing if an 32 hr work week would be as productive as a 40 hr week. Some sort of office work? Sure, you could get just as much done at 32 hrs but plenty of jobs require workers to physically be at work. A reduction of hrs for a service based industry means reduced service hours. That affects productivity. I’d love to either have a reduced work week or work from home but that just ain’t happening.
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I could work from home… “Hop in the sim, fly for a couple of hours, and I’ll have a Notice of Disapproval in your email inbox when you’re done.”
 
I'm all for people who want to work 4d/32h a week and get the same amount of work done. Or 3. Or even 2 marathon work days. Don't care. I'm a strong believer that you shouldn't be penalized for being more efficient than your peers.
And at most jobs parking your ass in a chair at the office (or at home) for a fixed amount of time is not why a smart employer signs your paycheck. It's for a certain amount of work output.

But I think it's obvious not all jobs can do that, maybe even most can't. That's really limited to time-insensitive, salaried, relaxed office jobs where there isn't a strong sense of urgency. Or academia research. etc...
If you're in a tech job working on a long term development project where hours sitting at your desk isn't necessarily correlated to quantity of good output? Yeah, sure, that might work fine. But if you're operating a grocery store, an assembly line, a landscaping business, etc... less time inputted = less revenue = employees are not going to get paid the same.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
If you're in a tech job working on a long term development project where hours sitting at your desk isn't necessarily correlated to quantity of good output? Yeah, sure, that might work fine. But if you're operating a grocery store, an assembly line, a landscaping business, etc... less time inputted = less revenue = employees are not going to get paid the same.
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It might also be worth pointing out the people working on production lines, working in hospitals, emergency services staff, construction crews, food service professionals, military, and the rest of the regular workforce who have to show up every day and work their hours.

How do you think they feel when they hear these young people whine that they should be paid full salary for 32 hours, spent sitting at home? Has it occurred to the whiners that perhaps they are coming across as more than a bit self-centered and entitled? Just maybe?
 
mandm said:
Being asked to take a drug test is demeaning and disrespectful. I understand the reason behind it, but I would never want to work for an employer who asked me to pee in a cup.
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3 per year maximum random with 1 hour notice. Job that paid 25% more than others. Working in an industry where inattention would kill me and others. Not demeaning and disrespectful at all, a point of pride to be able to take and pass it. I’m 57 years old, maybe generational?
 
StraightnLevel said:
How do you think they feel when they hear these young people whine that they should be paid full salary for 32 hours, spent sitting at home? Has it occurred to the whiners that perhaps they are coming across as more than a bit self-centered and entitled? Just maybe?
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To be honest I'm careful about not pushing this point.

I don't think we should adopt an economic model that promotes mutual misery, where people can't try to get a more favorable work arrangement only because that's not open to other people. I don't consider it whining if people recognize their contributions at work and try to get paid "At-Value" for their work. And if part of the compensation they request comes in the form of reduced hours or flexible arrangements, more power to them.

Sure, some people elsewhere in the economy may be envious or feel they've got an unfair deal compared to those folks, but that's not a sufficient reason to force people throughout the working world to deal with longer hours/needless commuting/etc. Each company/employee's situation can be unique.
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
Not demeaning and disrespectful at all, a point of pride to be able to take and pass it. I’m 57 years old, maybe generational?
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MauleSkinner said:
I’m 57 and I don’t consider not doing things that are illegal and may be harmful to myself and others in my job as a point of pride.:dunno:
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I'm older than you by a few years, and personally feel that it is indeed demeaning to be made to pee in front of someone like a three year old, and disrespectful to assume that without being forced to do that I'll be off doing drugs. I take no more pride in not smoking dope or whatever than I do in not robbing liquor stores, breaking into my neighbors' houses, or embezzling money.

If my employer trusts me and I trust them, then we'll get along fine. If either of those two things are not true, then I'm looking for somewhere that they both will be.

Now get off my lawn.
 
DaleB said:
I'm older than you by a few years, and personally feel that it is indeed demeaning to be made to pee in front of someone like a three year old, and disrespectful to assume that without being forced to do that I'll be off doing drugs. I take no more pride in not smoking dope or whatever than I do in not robbing liquor stores, breaking into my neighbors' houses, or embezzling money.

If my employer trusts me and I trust them, then we'll get along fine. If either of those two things are not true, then I'm looking for somewhere that they both will be.

Now get off my lawn.
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May be different with some companies, but our drug testing isn't done "while someone is watching". You are handed a sample cup, you go into a bathroom and do your business, then come out of the bathroom with a filled sample cup. One person in, one person out. The 3rd party testing staff do all of the interactions, and they are pretty good at detecting synthetic urine both by visual and temperature analysis.
 
SoonerAviator said:
May be different with some companies, but our drug testing isn't done "while someone is watching". You are handed a sample cup, you go into a bathroom and do your business, then come out of the bathroom with a filled sample cup. One person in, one person out. The 3rd party testing staff do all of the interactions, and they are pretty good at detecting synthetic urine both by visual and temperature analysis.
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It's a pretty formal process here. You empty your pockets, go into the bathroom and squirt into a cup, and tell the person when you are done. You leave the sample and do not flush the toilet. You wash your hands outside of the bathroom while the other person inspects the area and puts the sample into a small window in the bathroom wall.

In the Air Force, we had to do it in front of a witness, which turned out to be very difficult for some of the men.
 
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