The rise of regulations that HR depts enfroce has strangled the ability to criticize anything in a workplace. Bosses are afraid to criticize ees, ees are scared to say anything critical up the chain, and in meetings no one wants to offend or verbally joust with their peers. It chokes off creativity and innovation.
Watch every second of this fight between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski. It's everything people like you and Davis Aurini have been talking about. CNN was doing this same exact "story." Worthless excuses for journalists.
I remember the last time HR set up a round-table. It started with the usual pablum, of what was said in this room stayed in this room, and how there were no wrong answers, ect.
I succeeded in breaking that inside the first fifteen minutes by calling a conference-call-commando on her BS.
I want trying to be a jerk. I just was not in the mood to put up with her derailing the meeting by tales of how great she was.
"the years of the mid-70s to the mid-80s were where the major damage was done. Boomers starting to enter positions of power"
The "worthless degree" situation is less a product of feminists, more a product of Boomers.
Boomers were the original credentialists. Boomers were the ones who flooded colleges in droves thanks to parents who were much better off after riding the economic upturn in America post WW-II. The children of the Boomers and Gen-Xers were the ones told to get degrees in droves because it worked out well for their parents.
The value of those pieces of paper have now dramatically depreciated due to the way the market (read: colleges) adjusted (lowered standards) to accommodate the influx of people and make as much money / get as large as possible.
This accommodation created a glut of degrees in areas that did not formerly have as many people trying to move into the workforce. Hence a job shortage and a depreciation in the value of credentials in those over-supplied fields.
*BUT EVERYONE WITH TWO EFFING BRAIN CELLS KNOWS WHAT THE PROBLEM IS*
The solution is going to be dynamic to an individual's situation and circumstance. In the most general sense, the jobless generalist must learn to specialize, and the jobless specialist must learn to generalize. As much as this sounds like some platitude Sun-Tzu would say, it is directly applicable in this situation.
Oshii wrote through the original Ghost in the Shell movie: "Overspecialization breeds in weakness." If your specialty is generalization and that's not getting you a job, it may be time to think of something different.
Alternatively, you can find a path that requires less credentials, or is more willing to accept the merit of the ones you have. This may require additional work and time to build a rapport at a job like that; and yes you were shafted. No one is arguing that. The point is simply to move forward instead of dying in a ditch somewhere and banking on some over-romanticized notion of a ".38 caliber retirement plan"
I worked for a mid-sized newspaper chain based in a progressive community. For years, people of all races, genders, and ages not only worked side by side, but lived side by side. So the elderly black woman in paste-up, for example, had a grandkid on the same bowling team as several of the white reporter's kids. Many of us went to the same high schools.
Enter the HR director after the company was bought by a conglomerate. She had us in meetings "learning" about how to treat people of other races. People found this beyond patronizing. Why should some outer office in a big city be telling US of all people how to behave? Then we had to go through the usual sexual harassment training. Ugh.
This had the effect of alienating people from one another and killing morale. People had previously behaved well because we all had to live together. For example, you weren't going to harass the hot girl in advertising because odds were she went to the same Chamber of Commerce meeting as your mother.
By this point, though, resentments had started to build between factions of people because HR was stirring up problems with these constant "training" seminars. One time a guy put his hand on a woman's shoulder and was almost fired. In the old days, she would have not even noticed, but they'd redefined that as "harassment," so she went batsh*t insane. Morale fell further.
Then HR started sitting in on meetings. People froze up, terrified that whatever they said would be written down by the HR director, who jotted down notes on her little pad. The HR director was nothing but an advocate for whatever idiotic management idea came down the pike. At these meetings she's shout "remarkable!" at management's lame initiatives and scowl at the employees who said anything, then write notes in her little pad.
That's about when I started working from home. It got too insane. Every day it was something else. Conclusion: HR people drum up problems because if there's no problems, they're out of a job.
The rise of regulations that HR depts enfroce has strangled the ability to criticize anything in a workplace. Bosses are afraid to criticize ees, ees are scared to say anything critical up the chain, and in meetings no one wants to offend or verbally joust with their peers. It chokes off creativity and innovation.
ReplyDeleteWhy you can't reason with radical feminists.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdp8v3kcjZw
Watch every second of this fight between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski. It's everything people like you and Davis Aurini have been talking about. CNN was doing this same exact "story." Worthless excuses for journalists.
I remember the last time HR set up a round-table. It started with the usual pablum, of what was said in this room stayed in this room, and how there were no wrong answers, ect.
ReplyDeleteI succeeded in breaking that inside the first fifteen minutes by calling a conference-call-commando on her BS.
I want trying to be a jerk. I just was not in the mood to put up with her derailing the meeting by tales of how great she was.
Of course, this resulted in a visit from HR....
"the years of the mid-70s to the mid-80s were where the major damage was done. Boomers starting to enter positions of power"
ReplyDeleteThe "worthless degree" situation is less a product of feminists, more a product of Boomers.
Boomers were the original credentialists. Boomers were the ones who flooded colleges in droves thanks to parents who were much better off after riding the economic upturn in America post WW-II. The children of the Boomers and Gen-Xers were the ones told to get degrees in droves because it worked out well for their parents.
The value of those pieces of paper have now dramatically depreciated due to the way the market (read: colleges) adjusted (lowered standards) to accommodate the influx of people and make as much money / get as large as possible.
This accommodation created a glut of degrees in areas that did not formerly have as many people trying to move into the workforce. Hence a job shortage and a depreciation in the value of credentials in those over-supplied fields.
*BUT EVERYONE WITH TWO EFFING BRAIN CELLS KNOWS WHAT THE PROBLEM IS*
The solution is going to be dynamic to an individual's situation and circumstance. In the most general sense, the jobless generalist must learn to specialize, and the jobless specialist must learn to generalize. As much as this sounds like some platitude Sun-Tzu would say, it is directly applicable in this situation.
Oshii wrote through the original Ghost in the Shell movie: "Overspecialization breeds in weakness." If your specialty is generalization and that's not getting you a job, it may be time to think of something different.
Alternatively, you can find a path that requires less credentials, or is more willing to accept the merit of the ones you have. This may require additional work and time to build a rapport at a job like that; and yes you were shafted. No one is arguing that. The point is simply to move forward instead of dying in a ditch somewhere and banking on some over-romanticized notion of a ".38 caliber retirement plan"
I worked for a mid-sized newspaper chain based in a progressive community. For years, people of all races, genders, and ages not only worked side by side, but lived side by side. So the elderly black woman in paste-up, for example, had a grandkid on the same bowling team as several of the white reporter's kids. Many of us went to the same high schools.
ReplyDeleteEnter the HR director after the company was bought by a conglomerate. She had us in meetings "learning" about how to treat people of other races. People found this beyond patronizing. Why should some outer office in a big city be telling US of all people how to behave? Then we had to go through the usual sexual harassment training. Ugh.
This had the effect of alienating people from one another and killing morale. People had previously behaved well because we all had to live together. For example, you weren't going to harass the hot girl in advertising because odds were she went to the same Chamber of Commerce meeting as your mother.
By this point, though, resentments had started to build between factions of people because HR was stirring up problems with these constant "training" seminars. One time a guy put his hand on a woman's shoulder and was almost fired. In the old days, she would have not even noticed, but they'd redefined that as "harassment," so she went batsh*t insane. Morale fell further.
Then HR started sitting in on meetings. People froze up, terrified that whatever they said would be written down by the HR director, who jotted down notes on her little pad. The HR director was nothing but an advocate for whatever idiotic management idea came down the pike. At these meetings she's shout "remarkable!" at management's lame initiatives and scowl at the employees who said anything, then write notes in her little pad.
That's about when I started working from home. It got too insane. Every day it was something else. Conclusion: HR people drum up problems because if there's no problems, they're out of a job.