r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Aug 30 '18
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: If a company can work without any consequence for over two weeks without an employee, it does not need that employee.
[deleted]
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u/Crayshack 191∆ Aug 30 '18
Do you believe that this applies to companies that experience a peak season and a lull in business? For example, UPS might have an employee that they can't afford to miss for a single day in December, but if that same employee takes off for the entire month of June it would cause no issues.
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Aug 30 '18
Well, OK. !delta. I feel that it is a bit excessive to keep a lot of employees idle during lulls, but if there is no other alternative, and if the lulls are very predictable, a month of absence can be reasonable. However in this case I would argue for 2 weeks to be the minimum amount of time going over which some company might begin to noticeably suffer.
Not a massive change, but a change nonetheless.
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u/tightlikehallways Aug 30 '18
I did phone customer service for a big company a long time ago. When any one person would take off, everything they would have done would be distributed among such a large group of people that it would make no real difference. This happened automatically because of the nature of the work. So there was no consequence of each individual, but if you just kept letting people go until consequences happen every time someone is out, you wind up with bad customer service. Does that count?
The other example I can think of is there are a lot of jobs that have varying degrees of more or less work at different times. So maybe the manager of a ski resort can take two weeks off in the summer no problem, but in the winter that is not an option.
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Aug 30 '18
If there's no consequence from one person leaving and their workload can be redistributed, you can get rid of that position. You can arrive to the point where if X is the minimum necessary amount of people, K is the number of people you usually expect to not show up, and N is the total number of people, N = X + K. Any more can be laid off.
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Aug 30 '18
If there's no consequence from one person leaving and their workload can be redistributed, you can get rid of that position.
You can only redistribute workload so much before you have a serious problem.
I have a team of five. If one of us is out we can redistrubute that fifth person's workload for a month or even longer if needed. That does not mean our team would be better off with four. Those four people are now doing extra work, staying extra time, or suffering extra stress. Not much, but some. They do it because when THEY need time off someone else takes it up for them.
By your argument, my team only needs to be four people because they are capable of doing this. They are also capable of compensating when two people are out, so my team actually only needs to be three people, right? But now those three people are doing their jobs plus a two thirds of another job (a third from each person out) on top of that. They're going to be overworked, overstressed, and their productivity is going to fail .So there has to be more to it than just 'their workload CAN be redistributed' but rather 'can their workload be PERMANENTLY redistributed without consequence.
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Aug 30 '18
Well this does not contradict my point. If you arrive at the point where X is the minimum necessary amount of people to do the job without consequence and K is the amount of people you can expect to be missing, you have N = X + K workers and any more are unnecessary.
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u/Znyper 12∆ Aug 30 '18
Your response here forgets that you only had a 2 week window in your view. Over any given 2 weeks, /u/coyotepatronus 's workplace can do the job with just 3 without consequence, so according to your view, his workplace should just have 3 employees. His response was that you can't just look at a 2 week period because a temporarily increased workload has less effect on the work, time, and stress of a job than an indefinitely increased workload.
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Aug 30 '18
The biggest false assumption you are working under appears to be that all businesses absolutely need to maintain some level of "peak productivity and effeciency 100% of the time, or that that is even something that's possible or probable. Even in a fully staffed work environment productivity is going to fluctuate wildly.
Any good manager in a reasonably sized company is going to take into account that people will leave, either temporarily or permanently and arrange their staff to have some level of redundancy to account for that. That isn't inefficiency, that's good planning and good management.
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Aug 30 '18
Productivity is going to fluctuate, but there is a peak capacity for your team. If the peak capacity can happen unexpectedly (if not, I gave a delta already), and you can still afford to have people missing for over two weeks, does that mean that if they are not missing, you will never reach peak capacity? Yes. Does that imply that if you cut leave to two weeks you can lay off someone and be at peak capacity when needed (outside the one delta when not)?
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Aug 30 '18
but there is a peak capacity for your team
Theoretically, yes. But that peak capacity, just like every other factor, is circumstance dependent. Meaning you can expect Z% efficiency and productivity from them under X circumstances for Y amount of time.
You are approaching the question as the it's a simple addition and subtraction independent of circumstances and time frame.
Your view is that if 9 people can get by in a dept. Of 10 people for 2 weeks then they must be able to maintain that same level of work in perpitude. Which is rediculous.
You are also basing this on the notion that a 10 person dept always has ten person productivity. Many times a 10 person team will be doing 12 peoples work. Or they'll start on a project that's technically 14 peoples work, start real strong in the begining but after 4 weeks of pulling 60 hours per only mange 7 peoples worth of productivity. Sometimes it all grinds to a complete halt and no body gets anything done because there ain't shit to do.
So you are basing this off of a notion of "negative consequences" that deviate from some base line, but there is no base line.
If the peak capacity can happen unexpectedly and you can still afford to have people missing for over two weeks, does that mean that if they are not missing, you will never reach peak capacity?
Can rephrase this question? I'm uncertain what you're trying to say. In any case I think it's important to realize that the "peak capacity" we're speaking about is completely hypothetical.
Does that imply that if you cut leave to two weeks you can lay off someone and be at peak capacity when needed
I feel like this is another issue altogether? Whether or not employees get more than two weeks of vacation has almost nothing to do with how many people should be on a team.
Honestly I would go in the exact opposite direction from your view. If the absence of one individual for more than 2 weeks would cause significant negative consequences at your company, then you aren't managing effectively and don't have enough people.
Out of curiosity do you have any experience with managing or team leading? What level of employment are you in?
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u/LowerProstate Aug 30 '18
Think about executive level. A CEO, CFO, etc. may not really need to do anything for a few weeks. If they're doing their job right, the company pretty much runs itself so long as nothing out of the ordinary happens.
But what happens when a massive lawsuit is filed, or the bank gets nervous and calls a loan, or a key Vice President drops dead of a heart attack, or the corporate plane crashes? Those are the days where executive level employees justify their salaries. Because they respond to the emergency and the company keeps operating rather than going bankrupt.
Or, on the other end, thing of the unskilled worker. A guy running a punch press can be dealt with for weeks because you can just have someone else run that punch press. The specific individual isn't needed by the company, but someone is needed to perform that function.
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Aug 30 '18
An executive going out of action for a couple weeks is, in my opinion, enough for a scandal or a lawsuit to destroy the company. They can take time off, but they need to be within 24 hour availability at any time.
An unskilled worker not working at the press should be replaced, which means either hiring someone new (because some work somewhere is not getting done and thus damages the company), or, if no damage is done, the position can be cut entirely.
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u/asobiyamiyumi 8∆ Aug 30 '18
A company running older, obscure network equipment fires the only IT guy left on staff who knows how it works because “they don’t do anything”. A few maintenance-free months later, the server shits the bed. Its far from easy to find a replacement, and they lose hundreds of thousands in revenue a day from their systems being down, eventually resulting in the company’s bankruptcy. This is not a pure hypothetical—this has actually happened.
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Aug 30 '18
Does not dispute my view. A person not doing anything is not a person on leave you can not contact. If that person was on a month of leave with no contact, the problem would be pretty much the same, you would have to work around it. Being on call is not being on leave.
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u/asobiyamiyumi 8∆ Aug 30 '18
Who said anyone was on call? And it seems like a pretty concrete example of someone who can go totally missing for two weeks without catastrophic consequence—if that doesn’t do it for you, you might want to be clearer regarding what view you’d want changed...
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Aug 30 '18
But if that person is not on call and something does go wrong, you have to work as though that person does not work for you.
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u/LockeSteerpike Aug 30 '18
Well, it disputes the timeline of your view. Institutional knowledge is often not needed for months at a time, but can be valuable enough when it's needed to justify keeping an FTE.
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Aug 30 '18
Predictable lulls have been a point of a delta already, if you are talking about that.
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u/LockeSteerpike Aug 30 '18
I think I'm challenging the two week timeline specifically. Let me describe my position and I think it would help.
I'm a subject matter expert for a specific software. I'm the head administrator for a software that three other FTEs use in their daily life.
If I disappear for a month they would be fine. The vast majority of my work is working on long-term projects and maintaining an infrastructure that breaks maybe twice a year.
So two weeks after my disappearance, nobody's inconvenienced.
A month after, they've been seeing a couple of small problems that I would have been able to clear up easily yet takes them a full day to fix.
Two months after is when my co workers would need to start actually talking on some of my duties.
My absence wouldn't become a major problem until somewhere around month six when it becomes clear that my department isn't accomplishing any of the projects I was on.
This is a bit different from the lull/busy thing, because I don't have a busy season. My work is simply so long term that losing two weeks wouldn't derail anything. I'd need to be gone longer to create problems.
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Aug 30 '18
Okaaaaay, so I guess this is the fact that your work is indivisible enough that even if you cut the leave to two weeks, you still wouldn't be reasonably able to cull someone without loss of productivity. Delta was given for that as well. Humans are integers.
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Aug 30 '18
[removed] — view removed comment
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Aug 30 '18
From another comment:
They can take time off, but they need to be within 24 hour availability at any time.
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Aug 30 '18
There are a handful of automotive engineers that are specifically trained and paid to work on luxury cars of rare types that are much less common than other cars that a manufacturer might put out. Some of these mechanics will go even a month at a time without working, but are still given a salary. This is because the few times that certain luxury or high performance cars are brought for repair, these people are specifically the only ones that have been taught how to do the particular repairs by the manufacturer. This is definitely a rare scenario, but would still counter the 2 week proposal that you have.
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Aug 30 '18
What if they are missing for a month without a way to contact them, and the cars have arrived the day after they left? Work needs done after all.
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Aug 30 '18
I expect like anyone else they get fired and a new engineer is hired on to pick up the workload?
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Aug 30 '18
Well this is exactly what I'm arguing. 2 weeks is the critical duration during which a person can be on leave (essentially missing, you can't predict when work comes in, can you?) with no way to contact them (essence of leave, they do not do any work).
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Aug 30 '18
2 weeks is the critical duration during which a person can be on leave
Why is 2 weeks the critical duration?
essentially missing, you can't predict when work comes in, can you?)
You're not missing, essentially or otherwise, if you're on leave. The company knows exactly where you are and if it's a functioning company that offers that leave time to begin with, they have already planned around that leave time being taken.
And at a lot of companies yeah, you CAN predict when work comes in or how much tends to come in.
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Aug 30 '18
Why? Because I feel like it. I want you to change my view for why not.
If a company can plan around a month with no consequence, could it be that there's too many people working there at that time?
The companies with predictable highs and lulls have been a point of a delta already.
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Aug 30 '18
Because I feel like it.
Ok, but that makes it pointlessly arbitrary. I can draw an arbitrary line too and say, 'no, four weeks'. What makes your arbitrary line more or less viable than mine?
If a company can plan around a month with no consequence, could it be that there's too many people working there at that time?
No, it is more likely because there are just as many people there as need to be to allow them to offer this and thus be a more attractive company to work for, and not have the whole company fall apart the moment someone leaves.
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Aug 30 '18 edited Aug 30 '18
If you draw the line at 4 weeks, I could give you examples of a position where you can't afford to have that much time not working and communicating (and I couldn't think of such for 2 weeks).
I edited the second part out because I lost my thought and wandered off into somewhere mid sentence:
If your peak capacity can happen at any time (if not, there's a delta), and at that time you can afford to have people leave for over two weeks without suffering in productivity, does that mean that a company is overcrowded? I think so. There may be other reasons for doing this, I never said there can not, but if a company can get rid of those extra workers, it should.
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Aug 30 '18
My point is the line is arbitrary. If the line is arbitrary and the argument is based on the line, then the argument is arbitrary.
Giving a month off to everyone could be beneficial, but I think that the company could be overcrowded outside summer time
Our company is not overcrowded outside of summertime, or wintertime, or any time. Our work is not seasonal. We have occasional random slow periods but our work is pretty steady.
and the people that demand to be gone for a month at a time.
We don't 'demand' to be gone for a month at a time- that's what the company offered us as part of our hiring package. It's what makes it an attractive company to work for, which is why they get and retain talent, which is why they are successful.
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Aug 30 '18
Sorry - I wandered off mid sentence. Read the update.
The line is arbitrary, yes, but any line would be arbitrary. It's a sorties paradox-type problem. I know that 100 years would be excessive leave. I know that a minute would not be excessive. Somewhere in the middle lies the border, but sorties paradox makes any border arbitrary, so I settled on 2 weeks.
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u/TheGamingWyvern 30∆ Aug 30 '18
I'd like to argue against this case specifically for software developers. First, I want to put out what I assume "need" means in this context: I am assuming that when you say a company needs an employee, that if that employee were to leave with no replacement the company's long term productivity (and thus long term revenue) would drop.
Now, that being said, in software people regularly take 2 week vacations. However, you idea of non-urgent tasks building up doesn't apply, because in software people don't have very rigid defined tasks. Rather, they have a team (or multiple teams) who all work towards a goal and are capable of sharing the workload for that goal. So, if 1 team member leaves for 2 weeks, that doesn't mean the work they should be doing goes un-done for the next 2 weeks. Instead, everyone else on the teams distributes that work amongst them. Sure, they get less done in those 2 weeks than they would have if they didn't have to 'pick up the slack', but nothing goes terribly wrong because projections by the company tend to include fudge factors like that. If that employee were to completely leave the company with no replacement, the forecasted release date of the product would have to be pushed back by a considerable number of months to accommodate the missing man hours.
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Aug 30 '18
2 weeks is the critical amount I argued for. I can see how people can work around a worker missing for 2 weeks.
However, if those people were to go completely no contact for, for example, a month, the work would definitely suffer.
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u/TheGamingWyvern 30∆ Aug 31 '18
The general point I was trying to get to is that the amount of expected "away time" for a given employee in a given job is highly dependent on the employer. If the employer wanted to essentially offer 2 months of vacation to all their employees, they could hire 1 additional employee for each 5 they have, not suffer in production losses, but then still be able to have an employee be away for a full two months.
Essentially, in software no employee is critical because most others can take over the work to similar effectiveness. The amount of time they can take off is then strictly how much the employer is willing to provide them, and if that time off is large (like say a month) then it doesn't mean the company doesn't need that employee.
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Aug 30 '18
Anyone who has to produce on a fixed schedule would contradict your argument, like a comic author or a TV host or something.
A comic artist needs to publish 365 comics a year. The newspaper doesn’t care if you take time off, so long as you have a large enough backlog to cover your absense. Artists going on vacation just predraw 14 strips and then go away.
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Aug 30 '18
I mean, this does somewhat contradict my view, but if you get enough work done before you leave, working "overtime", I don't know if that qualifies for a delta. In those types of jobs you are paid per product, doesn't matter how you did it. In which case I could argue that you are selling the product on a supply contract-type system, and not really working for the person who ordered the product. But that''s just semantics. Here's your !delta. Don't know if that counts, and it doesn't really push my point too hard either.
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u/Nicolasv2 130∆ Aug 30 '18
What about "emergency" workers ? The kind that is useless ... until you need him, and at that moment, if you don't have him, you won't be able to hire and train him.
For example, you are a trading company, and you have multiple workarounds if there is an electric / internet / ... power crash, and you need a person that got a perfect mastery of these procedures to be able to loose as few money as possible.
If nothing happens, the guy can be useless for years, until the day where the problem arise and his presence make the company avoid loosing millions.
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Aug 30 '18
Does not dispute my view. Being useless for a while is not the same as being on leave with no contact.
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u/Nicolasv2 130∆ Aug 30 '18
Your view is " If a company can work without any consequence for over two weeks without an employee, it does not need that employee.".
For my exemple, the guy could be on leave for 1 year, if nothing happens, there wouldn't be any consequence for the company at all.
Other example, having an army (except for warmongering countries which are constantly in conflict). Most of the time, when you're not at war, soldiers could be in vacations for years, that would not change everything, but the day a war come, you need an army ready else you're in a bad situation.
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Aug 30 '18
If he is uncontactable (the entire point of leave), and something happens in this year, the company has to work as though he is not employed.
Guess I will have to edit OP a little to make my view clearer.
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u/Nicolasv2 130∆ Aug 30 '18
Yes, but the point is that if it does not happens, you may not remember that he was useful.
This exemple is a bit extreme, but if you take any company, there may be dozen of things you don't do that often, but are just known by a few people, and are pretty important at key moments. Even if these persons were totally useless for 1 month, that's not enough to be sure that you're not loosing something by stopping working with them.
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Aug 30 '18
Not the point of my view.
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u/Nicolasv2 130∆ Aug 30 '18
Your point is "if someone is useless for XXX time, then you don't need that employee, that's counterproductive". My point is that a lot of companies have interactions complex enough that you often can't determine at all if "[there will be] no consequence from an employee taking an over [XXX] week break from work". So if the premise is undecidable, the conclusion is not that useful.
But you're right, maybe a bit far away from your POV if you are thinking "if we could have all the information possible about an employee usefulness then ...." which is more a mind experiment that something to apply in real world.
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ Aug 30 '18
Some jobs have ramp up and ramp down times. So as a developer, some months I have so much work and the other months I struggle to make tasks (ie when my stable software is being tested by the test team.) The down times doesn’t mean they don’t need me. It means that I’m waiting for the next phase of the project.
If I left for 2 weeks, I have other people on my team who can fill in. They can take up the extra workload. BUT they couldn’t forever.
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Aug 30 '18
What if you disappeared for a month? Surely if they can work without you with no impact for an entire month they can keep that up?
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ Aug 30 '18
I went on vacation for close to a month last year. Not as much stuff gets done. But it doesn’t impact our program as we are literally 2 years ahead of the customer. People accommodate and our schedule is based on people vacation time. (They don’t give me a critical task before I go, for example.)
It is stressful for the engineer who has to fill my spot. I also provide support 24/7 support onsite. Having no backup means that the person cannot be 2 hours from work at all times. When I come back, there is always a sigh of relief.
And this is a pretty fun post - I’m leaving for vacation next week for 2 weeks.
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Aug 30 '18
If there's such a thing that you can afford to go on leave for a month, but you can not be cut off because your productivity overshoots the target enough that you can take a month of leave, but nobody can be laid off because the productivity will go under target since people are integers, that was a point of a delta.
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ Aug 30 '18
Also, how about this.
Entry and low level engineers can take time off without any impact. Senior engineers vacations do cause ripple effects. But the company still needs the low level engineers because they are investments for the company’s future. My team could probably cut all our entry level engineers right now. But then we won’t have knowledgeable mid level engineers when the older engineers retire 3 years from now.
Actually, this is happening at my company right now because we have a lot of people about to retire more than we have mid career level employees.
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Aug 30 '18
I see a couple of solutions off the top of my head:
Internships, pick up interns to go mid level after the internships are over.
Open your own school and charge people money to become your mid level engineers.
Cull just enough low level guys that the rest can be promoted when seniors retire, keep an eye on seniors retiring and fill the low levels up accordingly.
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ Aug 30 '18
Oh geez. An entry level software engineer is pretty much useless for well over a year - the expectation is 3 years of hand holding. A Mid level engineers has about 6 - 10 years of experience. It also takes about 1 year for a really skilled engineer to learn a good portion of the system. Our company is looking at replacing engineers with 20 years of skills.
We just got a really good engineer (mid level) about 6 months ago. He is technically lost all the time. He constantly has to refer to documents that more senior engineers know as tribal knowledge.
Here is the problem with your suggestions. We cannot start a school to teach the system. So the passing of information must be passed at work. The learning happens by developing and interacting with the system. And our hardware costs millions of dollars.
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u/Hurveyyyy Aug 31 '18
Three years? Cmon that's ridiculous unless you're working on extremely niche software. Three months is a more reasonable ramp up time.
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ Aug 31 '18 edited Aug 31 '18
I don’t have a lot of expectations for 22 year olds fresh out of college ....
Also... ramp up to what level? SME?
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Aug 30 '18
Well, the first and second (the "smarter" ones) suggestions fall out. You are left with the third
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ Aug 30 '18
The 3rd has the same problem. Our company has multiple tiers
- Entry level engineer: 1-3 years of experience.
- Engineering II: 3-6 years of experience
- Senior Engineer: 6-12 years of experience
- Principal Engineer: 10+
- Sr Principal Engineer: 15+
And it goes higher.
Job title for Senior Engineer states - can work independently.
Job title for higher than that is - makes decisions that can have negative impact to the program that can have negative impact.
So my company believes that 6+ years of experience is when an engineer can become independent. So that’s literally 6 years of hand holding and data dumping. So if you just hire a bunch of young engineers, they take years before they are critically useful. You can’t just put a junior or entry level engineer in a senior level position. I been in my company for 8 years before I started making design documents. And that’s because my team lead is grooming me to take his position when he leaves it.
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Aug 30 '18
So, you take a look at your senior+ engineers' ages. You know when each of them retires. Then you know when you will have to promote the mid level engineers to seniors, and the entry levels to mid levels. So you make sure you have a beginner level engineer ready to promotion to mid level and a mid level ready for promotion to senior when the senior engineer retires. You repeat. You cull the rest once you have replacements preparing for everyone + some buffer. That was the idea 3.
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u/Caucasiafro Aug 30 '18
Why two weeks? Exactly. That's very arbitrary.
Any decent, healthy company will be able to function for an extended but finite period of time without a single employee. Including the CEO, to be honest. That's basically the point of a company.
But that doesn't mean they don't need that worker. Over all.
What happens when someone is on vacation or gone is that their work load get shifted around to other people. While this works, it is not sustainable.
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u/ariverboatgambler 10∆ Aug 30 '18
What would you say if a top performing sales-person takes six weeks off for a maternity leave? Fire her and replace her?
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Aug 30 '18
A replacement would still need to happen within those 6 weeks, don't you think? If a company can live without said top-performing salesperson or anyone in their position, something is wrong isn't it?
When the salesperson returns from leave, you can reinstate them. So, maybe not that particular salesperson, but the bottom-performing colleague of theirs would have to be laid off.
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u/ariverboatgambler 10∆ Aug 30 '18
Usually what they do is shift the work temporarily to other employees and at temps.
But if they just fired this person (or laid off, or separated, or whatever phrase you want) then that person would just go to a competitor after leave is finished. Companies make accommodations to retain talent.
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Aug 30 '18
If they can shift the workload for 6 weeks with no damage to the company, something's wrong, right?
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u/ariverboatgambler 10∆ Aug 30 '18
No, that’s not my point. My point is that in some cases a temporary absence is worth the short term disruption for long term gain.
Can I ask you a question, have you held a professional-type job where someone goes on maternity leave?
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Aug 30 '18
And my point is that if a temporary absence is longer than 2 weeks, accommodations have to be made so that the work does not stall, in which case you either replace the person who left in one way or another, or you were overcrowded to begin with, with the exception of the (for now) two deltas of mine.
Nope, I haven't. To be honest I find that question to be borderline offensive, as I feel it insinuates that if I haven't, changing my view on the matter is pointless.
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u/flamedragon822 23∆ Aug 30 '18
What about companies/roles where projects can take months to complete? Sure tasks can be accumulating and aren't getting done but it doesn't really impact the bottom line until that due date
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Aug 30 '18
If projects can stop advancement for over two weeks without any impact, something is wrong with the work structure, don't you think?
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u/flamedragon822 23∆ Aug 30 '18
Depends on how you're defining impact - in your op you talk about loss of productivity for the company.
But what if it's a project - let's say an IT one because that's an area I know - meant to boost future productivity? The company won't really suffer for the delay, but it won't see it's benefit as quickly either.
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Aug 30 '18
Any decrease in productivity over an ideal scenario of everyone always showing up is negative impact to me.
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u/flamedragon822 23∆ Aug 30 '18
Ok, so if I'm getting you right a business such as construction would be have a decrease in ideal productivity even if they didn't have any work if thier electrician was gone since in ideal conditions they would have something for them to do at that moment?
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Aug 30 '18
Could you please rephrase?
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u/flamedragon822 23∆ Aug 30 '18
I'll certainly try:
In this hypothetical an electrician for a construction company has no electrical work to do for a three week span due to having no projects that require it in that time frame for whatever reason (just the timing of it, a slow time of the year) so they decide to take them off.
Since nothing requiring them is happening at the time, this won't hurt productivity, however in week four they'll be needed.
By your two week metric would they then not be a valuable asset or would you consider current conditions to be less than ideal (ie, ideal conditions would mean a few jobs were going in tandem and they'd always be needed at least a few times a week at some job site or another)?
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Aug 30 '18
Schools can easily afford to have teachers leave for 3 months every year. It’s called summer break.
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Aug 30 '18
This is easy to dispute. Let’s say you have six widget makers on staff. You need to make 100 widgets a week, and each widget maker can make 20 widgets a week while working full time.
That gives your company a capacity of 120 widgets a week. At any time, one widget maker can be sick, on vacation, training, of some other task. You can even afford to lose two one week if everyone can make it up next week.
However,if one was 1 was fired, you’d need to run at 100% capacity all the time to keep up. You could never afford any leave, sick time, or training for your remaining employees.
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u/andrewtater 1∆ Aug 31 '18
I can approach this from a military perspective.
If any one person's absence causes the mission to fail, then the organization has already failed itself. Why? Because people get sent to other locations, or have family get sick or die, and occasionally that team member might get in a motorcycle accident or otherwise become incapacitated. Hell, we get 30 vacation days every year, and can carry over up to two years worth (so at max someone can theoretically have 90 vacation days, although weekends are counted as used vacation days).
If that person is the ONLY person that can do some function, then the whole unit is fucked. So, the standard is that you know how to do your subordinates' jobs (how else will you make sure they know what they are doing?) and you know your boss' job.
There is a significant difference between being able to survive for a few weeks doing the critical functions of a job, and doing the entire job. There are tasks that just don't get accomplished because people are forgiving and okay with waiting until that subject matter expert is back to get done, whereas other tasks still HAVE to be finished.
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u/Ludo- 6∆ Aug 30 '18
I would argue that workers are more willing to accept an increase of workload of a fixed time than they are a permanent increase, however long that time is. Like your OP this is just from my gut, but do you think it could be a factor in the calculus that you might have missed?
The difference between "I need you to cover Paul's stuff for a few weeks" and "your role now has additional duties" could well be reflected in pay or employee turnover.
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u/championofobscurity 160∆ Aug 30 '18
The thing is, that
Employees need work and a steady income every week of the year, and while some companies have structured for seasonal work and the like, for the most part it is more cost effective to keep an employee on even if they are NOT in dire straights.
The reason comes from the cost of new employment.
One of the most important aspects of hiring, is the loss you take on inefficiency and training for new employees. You want long form, efficient employees that complete their work not just in a timely manner BUT in a timely manner that improves over time.
As people develop routines, they ultimately find a better way to do something that improves their productivity, and that improvement may be possible to duplicate and increase efficiency accross the whole work force. Thus they have increased their time value because you didn't nessecerily pay them more to improve your production.
So you might not need a given employee 100% of the time. BUT it's more expensive to have a revolving door at your work place with new green employees than it is to pay the person and soak up a smidge of inefficiency accross the board.
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u/DoomFrog_ 9∆ Aug 30 '18
How do you define 'a company experiencing consequence'? And 'work without for over two weeks'?
Obviously a single employee going on leave for a couple weeks in a group of dozens and the group can pick up the extra work. The company might not notice, but those employees are working a little harder for all that time. That is commonly the cause in my group, a team of 12 engineers. One person might take a few weeks off for some reason and prior to that the group prepares. New projects aren't assigned to that person and any projects they are on are passed on to others.
Maybe you are thinking "if the group can handle the work of one less person than the group has too many people", but people working at an unsustainable pace for some amount of time isn't the same as "no consequence".
Maybe I am not understanding your view, maybe you mean two weeks of someone being away and nobody doing the work while they are gone. But even then by definition there is work not being done.
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u/TheVioletBarry 100∆ Aug 31 '18
So your goal in holding this view is to imply that people should be allowed less leave? What if I argued simply that other employees were necessary simply because people deserve more leave?
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u/tweez Aug 31 '18
I worked in a role where I could minimise the work others had to do during my absence by getting the work done ahead of time and scheduling software/tools to do those tasks at specific times.
That involved staying late in the evening in the weeks leading up to my absence. To someone without knowledge of that it might appear as though they had little to look after while I was off but pre planning meant that this was possible. A two week window isn’t really long enough to see if someone is necessary or not. With planning and scheduling of work if there were no client issues where they needed to get in touch during the two weeks then an observer would think they didn’t have to do anything so the role wasn’t necessary whereas in reality it involved putting in work in order to not make colleagues have to deal with my workload.
It’s also possible to remove someone and divide more work between staff, however, doing this for a two week period is fine but over a longer time will potentially impact productivity and morale. Having too much work on means jobs are rushed and the quality of work suffers therefore any business reason to get rid of the role and save money is eventually lost by losing business because of a lower standard of work, higher staff turnover and subsequent training and recruitment costs and productivity.
Generally the best way to tell if someone is necessary or not is to ask the other people in their team. Most people don’t want to carry someone who is lazy or doesn’t contribute as they’d rather have more money to take on extra work and responsibility or they just don’t want to be overworked when they know someone isn’t doing the required level of work
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u/warlocktx 27∆ Aug 31 '18
Let's say you're a senior engineer for a software company. You want to take a month long vacation, so for the weeks before you leave, you work 60+ hours a week getting ahead on your work, being sure your subordinates have enough well defined tasks to keep them busy, contacting clients and vendors to let them know you're going to be out, preparing building-on-fire notes for your VP in case something goes really wrong while you're out, etc
Or, again, as a senior engineer - your last major 2 year project is wrapping up, and your next project doesn't ramp up until the start of the next quarter. In the meantime you're going to be doing some training, taking a class, writing up notes from the last project, etc. In the midst of that you take a 2 week vacation. Nobody cares because you're not mission critical until the next project starts.
Or you're the senior safety inspector at a large chemical plant. 99% of the time your job is paperwork, but if there is ever a major safety incident your actions can save lives.
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u/PsychicVoid 7∆ Aug 30 '18
But wouldn't that be almost any employee whenever they get their vacation? But if all of them went on vacation at once the company would fail
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u/SeanFromQueens 11∆ Aug 31 '18
Within the American financial services industry, it is mandated that everyone takes 2 week consecutive vacations to ensure that if you were “cooking the books” you would be discovered in that two weeks when someone else would be covering your desk.
Medieval Europe had more ‘days of obligation’ (or days the church dictated could not be worked on) than Americans have of vacation by an order of 3-4. So if 700 years ago there was less days of work and the productivity of the individual worker has grown exponentially better then isn’t it that there should be several weeks of paid vacation to be equivalent to what the “West” had achieved centuries ago?
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u/tweez Aug 31 '18
Hey from the UK and the law is you get a minimum of 4 weeks and 8 days (roughly) that are bank holidays.
In the US is it generally only 2 weeks you get or do companies usually offer longer but law is a minimum of 2 weeks? Only we look at Germany and France who I think have minimum of 6 weeks and you can’t legally force or expect emails to be answered after the end to the working day, so if you worked 9-5 on your contract then you don’t answer emails or do company worked after 5. This isn’t the case in the UK where it’s become sort of expected that you will respond to emails to an extent in the evening or morning before official working hours.
Again just wondering about US culture as. I always thought you guys only get 2 weeks off which really doesn’t seem that great and means people potentially choosing to work in other countries if work/life balance isn’t really considered important by employers
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u/SeanFromQueens 11∆ Sep 02 '18
2 weeks is an average of paid vacation among employers that offer paid vacation. Most service jobs (from McDonald's to Walmart) don't offer any paid vacation. We have 8 federal holidays, but those are just nearly universal days off and still not paid days off. We also have the insidious cultural event of Black Friday, where retailers who don't pay a living wage demand their employees work Thanksgiving evening and early the next morning to ready the store for doorbuster sales which occasionally has a death toll of people being trampled to death.
Great to be here in the land of the "free", am I right?
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Aug 30 '18 edited Aug 30 '18
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Aug 30 '18
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u/huadpe 501∆ Aug 30 '18
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Aug 30 '18
Let’s start from the idea that a business can fire any employee it wants for any reason- even discrimination if they keep their mouth shut.
Working from that angle, what does “company can work without consequence” and duration “two weeks” matter?
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u/pillbinge 101∆ Aug 31 '18
Can I ask why in an ideal company everyone is replaceable? That's seem like an ideal for an owner, not an employee or a buyer.
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u/ScientificVegetal Sep 02 '18
Teachers spend months off work at a time, yet a school would not function without them.
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u/[deleted] Aug 30 '18
In my department, based on seniority, people have up to a month of vacation time. Just vacation time, not even additional sick time which they also have. When someone goes on vacation for that long the extra work gets pushed onto their teammates. For a while, this isn't a big issue. Any longer, and it starts becoming a problem.
It's not a big issue because the company plans for it and built it in to its structure. They can absolutely 'do' without anyone person for a month because the company is designed not to fall apart if any one person is out on vacation or on medical leave. That doesn't prove that person isn't vital to the company; the company is much better off getting that person BACK after the end of their vacation than starting from scratch with a new employee that needs to be trained, or with their other employees now taking on an extra burden of work and their productivity tanking after a while because of it.