chapotraphouse

Nobody fucking knows how anything works. Nobody knows who is supposed to know. Your boss pays $300/hr for a consulting firm to send another fresh-out-of-college-kid to tell you why the system you bought from a vendor who has produced exactly zero application guidance is malfunctioning, and that kid will spend the next two weeks learning how the damned thing works right alongside you.

This has been my life implementing the latest edition of RightAngle for the last two years. Just a stack of expensive third-party 20-somethings saying "Ah, fuck, never seen that before, let me get back with you in a week."

Well fuck, I could have told them that 10 years ago.

I remember when I was a teen looking for my first job. "Why don't you try a coffee shop, easy first job" was what I was told by boomers.

Every single one did not want to hire anyone who didn't already have years of experience.

I once asked one of the baristas "Well, how did you get experience then?" he sheepishly said, "Well... my parents owned a cafe business so..."

Starting new jobs is like the worst experience. Not a clue how anything works, no idea who to ask, everyones busy and you have no work to do, or the work you are given makes no sense.

in every functioning organization there's one person that knows how everything works, and they're too busy being abused by management to teach anyone else.

My workplace keeps firing the one person in charge of important tasks and then doesn't replace that task because no one in management understood the task was necessary. They fired the person who counts inventory, now no one does inventory and we're all expected to just live with it. I think the idea is someone is supposed to take initiative and do the inventory tasks on top of their normal job, but why would they?

Constant carousel of firing an important person, learning that person did an important task, management rearranges people to do extra tedious stuff, then management pats themselves on the back.

Maybe I'll find it later but this reminds me of the reddit thread from last year where a GenZ kid made a post asking people how his desk phone worked, what all the buttons did, and so on.

No one told the poster how it worked at the time they were hired. They didn't want to admit to coworkers that they had no idea how it worked.

I think this extends way beyond just work though. People just don't know how anything works. They buy phones and have no idea how they work, cars, computers, everything is a black box to most people.

It's not just corporate jobs either. I was "training" (in quotes because they taught me fuck-all) to be a server at a fancy restaurant and show venue, and they let me go after my second day. Mind you, they only "trained" me for 4 hours tops my first night, and then threw me in for a full regular shift on my second day. Fired me because I didn't nail absolutely everything perfectly first try. Made me want to commit arson.

Probably a blessing in disguise, considering the owner was a massive creep, but holy shit.

I work logistics now, this reminds me of a while back, around late 2020 when a truck driver showed up to pick up a load. He had never been trained to back into a loading dock so he asked to be loaded by forklift, easy request to oblige. He was also never trained on how to roll back his curtainside trailer so we looked up a youtube video and got it done together. He apparently was also never trained on securing loads because I got a call from the destination with pictures where he must have had to hit the breaks hard and one pallet shifted and squished so many cans of paint. That poor dude must have been having a terrible fucking time at that outfit, and they definitely did him dirty. The first email I get after my manager files an insurance claim is from that trucking outfit saying they fired the guy and that mistake won’t happen again. So quick to cut him loose to save their contract.

Dude needed some fucking training and some shadow shifts or something, not getting thrown to the wolves and hung out to dry.

: "Do everything yourselves, peasants.

So, why are you taking so much profits again? You do literally nothing and miraculously still end up doing less and less. You said it yourself, we don't need you. Even by your own capitalist standards, the fact that you get all the money and do zero labor means it piles up to never be spent. Having idle billionaires is just leaving money on the table.

It's so fucked to start a job. Before training even comes into it, you start with a broken setup that no one knows how to get working.

Then you just sit in limbo with no help wondering if things will get fixed before you get fired, and wondering if there will ever be any help or training coming.

I worked at a place that would hire random people for 13 dollars an hour and sell their labor to small businesses for 120 an hour and say they were marketing/SEO experts. The job posting was basically "copywriter" and the training there consisted of "figure it out"

One client saw how bad his site was written, and yelled at the director and accused him of hiring busboys, rhetorically really, as he didn't know any of it

The director incredulously retold this story to us, as if it was the most absurd accusation. Like dude, he didn't mean you handed your laptop to your waiter at Applebee's. He means you hired busboys and didn't train them in the skills you're selling. That's... That's half the team. The client couldn't have been more right

“On the job” training these days is like a fuckin’ poorly designed game. It’s mostly fail at something they don’t explain to you properly and assuming you don’t die you kind of extrapolate from there. Yes, trial and error is a way to learn, but with any sort of technical skill or task (or even social behavior), it’s a lot easier and better when you are instructed or better yet paired with a teacher of some kind.

In my experience, having an experienced colleague is often the fast way a new hire can get up to speed, but that requires a job to prioritize workers in some meaningful way.

They are treat us all as individual node utterly unconnected to other nodes. they want you to learn on your time not theirs. Also I hate “upskill-ing” being totally outsourced but also is kinda mandatory these days. They all wonder why we all hate work, and never take a second to look at how work is done and more importantly HOW THEY made it worse

When I did my work placement in college at a long term care home, I had basically 1 day of orientation and that was it. I was expected to do 1-1 counselling sessions with residents immediately, it was absolutely terrifying.

I was once the 6th person in a row to be hired and fired within a few days in an accounting role for a Chinese home appliance manufacturer. My onboarding consisted of a brief introduction, getting sat down with a fat stack of Amazon invoices, and given a shitty laptop with a shitty trackpad and no mouse. Nobody bothered to set up my account, so I didn't have any emails. Nobody explained how to use SAP, which I still hate for being the shittest bit of accounting / enterprise resource management software I have used, and nobody explained how the fuck to interpret the mish mash of disorganised Amazon delivery notes. I waved my predecessor goodbye as she was fired the day I started (she had been there for 2 days herself), and 2 days later I was fired myself. I am pretty sure the reason I got fired is that I left work on time, while my manager was in a meeting going on god knows how long. I had spent the whole afternoon twiddling my fingers with nothing to do, no resources, and no way to get started by myself. Good riddance. Hopefully my former manager is still hopelessly overwhelmed working 16 hour shifts to this day.

I've felt like this basically my entire life. Half the time I got in trouble at my previous job it was because of something that wasn't explained and that I didn't know I should ask about. My current job literally put my in charge of a project doing something I had never done before on my first real work day - at least they also gave me a pretty detailed instruction manual for the project, so I was able to figure it out, but it was still pretty weird.

American society giving up on training on literally everything from everyday work to government is a really cool good decision that will have no negative ramifications for anyone when situations arise

lmao yep.

I am constantly being asked basic shit by newer coworkers. "Umm can we refund this?" No - you need to send it through the corporate Salesforce pipeline and hope the Accounting team (of which there are 2 people - who aren't even certified accountants, they just have access to the corporate Stripe account) hits the Refund button within the 1-5 business day timeline we give to clients. "Wow no one told me that" yeah sorry, you're expected to search through the last 8 years of Slack messages and also you're supposed to compile your own repository of information like this - don't ask for a corporate Evernote license to facilitate this either.

Nobody on my team even knows how to do the task I've been figuring out this week. No documentation from the experts to guide us. It should be a 5-10 minute thing but it's taken me like 7 hours so far. If people could sit down for half a day to work on documentation without worrying about their deliverables, it would never be an issue again

My onboarding at one tech company was literally being handed 2 flatpack boxes to build my own desk and chair.

Literally nothing else. Just expected to get on with what my job was supposed to be independently. No meetings, no setting of goals or expectations, no nothing. I did all of that myself.

Slowly started taking on the work of multiple other roles in the company all put together and once it became 3 jobs in one I got the fuck out of there.

My last job was basically that. I got the computer, they set up some accounts and stuff, and then nobody talked to me for about a week after the introductory zoom calls and whatnot. I was pinging teammates and my manager with questions about what the f i should be doing and got cold responses or no responses.

I basically did jack shit at that job for a whole year. It sounds great, but it was actually hell.

I can at least do the onboarding for the techs, but I'm also pretty much expected to do it for the people that are supposed to be my managers as they often don't know what they're supposed to be doing and they keep coming and going. Having to teach my commercial manager to read a contract was a bizarre experience.

Nobody knows what they're doing, and if they do they just keep getting responsibilites until they don't have enough time to do their jobs and burn out. I've found a fairly happy medium of not giving a shit while being overworked.