Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world"

boomzilla

My current work arrangements are very flexible, however I've worked in other situations where it wasn't. Any time you are expected to interact with the public you probably have a more rigid schedule.

I've worked retail (grocery and book stores). Those were hourly jobs, so you clocked in, and being late means you get paid less.

I also worked in sales where part of my job was to field phone calls from customers, which meant that I needed to be there during certain hours, especially when I was scheduled to be the only one around. I don't remember there ever being a problem with anyone being late but I'm sure it would have started with supervisor warnings and ultimately you'd get fired if you couldn't be there reliably.

Zenith

My career breakdown thus far goes 80/20 government/private and 70/30 employee/contractor so keep that in mind when factoring cynicism.

I don't believe that I've ever seen any direct consequences for missing deadlines. When I say direct, I mean "Derpy misses deadline, Derpy gets punished." I have, however, seen lots of scapegoating, where Derpy has missed many deadlines and Brian is lured in, deliberately handicapped, and punished (fired) for missed deadlines.

Showing up late (or at all), that depends on A) if your boss is an asshole or B) if you're management or labor. I've had three bosses that weren't worried about my schedule because they knew I accomplished more in an hour than some developers do in a day, week, or month and I usually made up the time anyway. I've had several others that were fixated on me being in this exact seat at this exact time for this exact number of hours to the exclusion of all else, like there's a monster in the basement that psychically feeds on misery and they're its keeper.

How does missing attendance/deadlines affect work? I spend alot of time waiting for everything. I rarely feel like the wait is legitimate, like the task being too big or unforeseen detours. It's almost always somebody grossly unqualified being disinterested or spinning their wheels and not willing to ask for help. It's not so much the waiting, it's the poor time management. In properly managed shops, I could go work on something else or work around what I was waiting for. Otherwise, it was army-style hurry up and wait followed by barking about deadlines.

This is, in my opinion, a consequence of assembly line development. Say you have 10 applications and 10 developers. You can have each of them "own" a program or you can have everybody monkey patch everything. In the ownership model, a bad developer's damage is limited. They mess up and slow down one program and it's pretty easy to see it's their doing. In the "swarm of bees" model, they have their fingers into everything and there's not only a ripple effect but responsibility is obscured. If Brian is working on feature A, which has hooks into feature B, on program C, Derpy dragging his feet on or introducing bugs to feature B increases Brian's risk of missing the deadline and/or delivering a broken product due to factors completely out of Brian's control.

Bad project management that doesn't know anything about programming only exacerbates his situation. Not only are they scheduling with no idea how long work they've never done should take, they're ignorant of how this sort of cross-pollution can further warp that schedule. Too many organizations double down on more project managers when they should be looking at their process and what sort of people they're hiring. They all have to look busy so they create what Peter described in Office Space about eight different bosses hassling him while he tries to squeeze in 15 minutes of work each week.

It really comes down to hiring smarter and managing effectively. I don't know that I can even draw a parallel to school work. The bus got me there on time, I had half my homework done in study hall, and it's really hard to "fire" students. When I went to college, I actually wanted to be in those computer science courses and I was largely graded on my work and my work alone. That's very different from what I experienced roughly half of my working years. Sorry.

jinpa

@pie_flavor said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Captain said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Benjamin-Hall I mean, you can't put a W on their transcript and make them take the class again, without hurting their GPA for messing up the first time? Because that seems like the intermediate option.

Nope. Withdrawing from a class is a big deal and leaves permanent red marks. It only happens in extreme cases. WAY beyond just not turning things in on time.

Wow, I wouldn't like to go where you work. Here withdrawal is perfectly fine and just means you weren't a good fit for the class - the thing that hits you worse than an F is an unauthorized withdrawal, which is for 'de facto withdrawals' like not showing up for several classes including the final.

A thing I've seen a professor do is in order for a paper to be accepted late at all, you have to write an email to them describing precisely why you're unable to turn it in on time, and the email is held to the standards of the paper in terms of writing quality and it has to be at least a third of the word count of the actual assignment. This filters out a lot of the 'my printer broke' bullshit.

My college had two dates - one before which withdrawal was allowed without penalty, but after which left a W on your transcript, and a second date past which withdrawal was not possible.

jinpa

@coderpatsy said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

My sister's boyfriend had problems with being on time until he got a job at a fast food place with a coworker who also had a bad habit of being late. It's hard to get off your shift and go home if your replacement is taking their sweet time getting in.

Not sure how to translate that lesson to school though...

I would have thought that most fast food joints would have time clocks, and that the manager would be on top of punctuality issues. :naive

izzion

@jinpa
There's being on top of time issues, and then there's being on top of time issues.

If you're late as a weekend shift opener, or if you're late for a 9am breakfast rush shift and happen to pick the day that sales are +50% over average, tough shit, you no longer have a job.

If you're 20 minutes late as a closer coming in for the post-dinner shift, your predecessor gets to suffer in glorious silence, and you'll probably get little more than a warning.

(Also, sleeping in the break room instead of setting up the grill area for lunch transition like you're supposed to be as said weekend shift opener is also a great way to get slipped).

HardwareGeek

@dkf said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

sane management

HardwareGeek

@Adynathos said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

they have different tasks/courses/theses, which may be more important than your course.

At university, that's certainly true. More than once I simply blew off an elective class. I remember telling my piano teacher, "I'm trying to finish my Senior Project and graduate. I don't have time to practice, so I'm not even going to take the final."

Benjamin Hall

@HardwareGeek I should have dropped my Human Anatomy class after I decided I wasn't going to med school. But instead I kept going to lectures but didn't put in any significant time in the cadaver lab. Lowest grade I've ever gotten, held up only by the fact that the lecture part of the class was graded multiple guess, which are always easy for me.

HardwareGeek

@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

cadaver lab

Nope! thread is .

Benjamin Hall

@HardwareGeek said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

cadaver lab

Nope! thread is .

It stank. Literally. Plus filleted penii. And they wanted 20 hours/week outside of the 2 hrs lecture and 1 hr lab section. Nope.

Ended with a B- overall. D (maybe C-) on the lab section, A on the multiple choice.

dcon

@izzion said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Adynathos said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

Maybe for fairness

Isn't the point of school to teach kids that life isn't fair?

Careful - there's SJWs out there...

Polygeekery

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

There's a shitload of legal problems around those and usually you're not even allowed to administer life-saving drugs (like using an epi-pen in case of anaphylactic shock) to someone else.

Huh??

Rhywden

@Polygeekery said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

There's a shitload of legal problems around those and usually you're not even allowed to administer life-saving drugs (like using an epi-pen in case of anaphylactic shock) to someone else.

Huh??

Yes, that was about our reaction too. You're only allowed to hand the person his or her epi-pen. They then have to administer it themselves.

Polygeekery

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Polygeekery said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

There's a shitload of legal problems around those and usually you're not even allowed to administer life-saving drugs (like using an epi-pen in case of anaphylactic shock) to someone else.

Huh??

Yes, that was about our reaction too. You're only allowed to hand the person his or her epi-pen. They then have to administer it themselves.

So...just let them die?

Do you not have a good samaritan...clause...statute...law...whatever they are?

Rhywden

@Polygeekery said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Polygeekery said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

There's a shitload of legal problems around those and usually you're not even allowed to administer life-saving drugs (like using an epi-pen in case of anaphylactic shock) to someone else.

Huh??

Yes, that was about our reaction too. You're only allowed to hand the person his or her epi-pen. They then have to administer it themselves.

So...just let them die?

Do you not have a good samaritan...clause...statute...law...whatever they are?

Yes, but it might actually go either way when it comes to administering drugs. It falls under the same legal rules as to what kind of procedures EMTs are allowed to do - some states allow them quite a lot (up to deciding on their own what kind of drug in which dose they may give the patient), other states reduce their EMTs to ambulance drivers who may not do anything unless an emergency doctor is present as well.

It's a bit of a clusterfuck.

Polygeekery

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

It's a bit of a clusterfuck.

Yeah, it sounds like it. But I am not going to pollute @Benjamin-Hall's thread with this tangent.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

coderpatsy

@jinpa said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@coderpatsy said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

My sister's boyfriend had problems with being on time until he got a job at a fast food place with a coworker who also had a bad habit of being late. It's hard to get off your shift and go home if your replacement is taking their sweet time getting in.

Not sure how to translate that lesson to school though...

I would have thought that most fast food joints would have time clocks, and that the manager would be on top of punctuality issues. :naive

Even the first time or two stuck on the clock because your replacement's nowhere to be found can be a valuable lesson that you do it to others too. Though I don't remember how long it took sis's bf to realize.

Also let's just say there were a lot of other problems at that restaurant.

Benjamin Hall

@coderpatsy I've been told that a lot of the reason people end up stuck at minimum wage fast food jobs is that they can't learn to show up reliably, on time, and not wasted. The last may contribute to the first two.

pie_flavor

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Polygeekery said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

There's a shitload of legal problems around those and usually you're not even allowed to administer life-saving drugs (like using an epi-pen in case of anaphylactic shock) to someone else.

Huh??

Yes, that was about our reaction too. You're only allowed to hand the person his or her epi-pen. They then have to administer it themselves.

What the fuck is the point of an epi pen then. They exist, and are so perfectly idiot proof, because they frequently need to be applied by someone else.

izzion

@pie_flavor said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

What the fuck is the point of an epi pen then. They exist, and are so perfectly idiot proof,

They are most certainly not idiot proof. My cousin is in-the-same-room-as-peanut-butter-is-life-threatening allergic to peanuts, during her college days, she went to an event in a gymnasium where they had Gordon's Food Service sized tubs of peanut butter open (she didn't realize they would), and started having a reaction, determined she had left her epi pen in her dorm room. Called her parents for advice, they were like "send your roommate for the pen, and call 911, use whichever gets there first."

Ambulance gets there first, but by policy isn't allowed to let her use the pen to inject herself, the EMT has to do it. So he opens it up, lines it up to inject it... and jams the trigger button into my cousin, thus sticking himself with the business end of the epi pen. Ambulance carries two epi pens in case of oopses, so my cousin forcibly took the second pen from the EMT and stuck herself instead.

Filed under: Building a better idiot

sockpuppet7

@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

So I want to as a question of this cynical bunch. What consequences have you seen in the working world for coming in late (and how soon do they kick in, and are they actually enforced)? What about for just being late getting your assigned work done (ie letting deadlines slip, not because it's not working but because you didn't do your work in a timely manner)?

Being honest, I never seen anyone get negative consequences for being late or missing deadlines at work. Other than the boss complain a bit about that.

Being late usually means you won't get paid for that time.

I've seen people get fire when there was no evidence of them being able to do the job, like people that lied about their skills on the interview.

coderpatsy

@Benjamin-Hall There are lots of reasons people work minimum wage jobs, and a good chunk of the time it's not exclusively because the employee is (ab)using substances or too lazy to find/make better opportunities. There's a lot to be said on the topic, but this is most definitely the wrong thread for that.

But while I'm here, I can't resist leaving this tweet screencap.

dcon

@izzion said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

and jams the trigger button into my cousin

Sounds like she got the ambulance driver, not an EMT...

Zenith

@coderpatsy said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":

but this is most definitely the wrong thread for that.

Oh I don't know, the "GitHub hates UTF" thread spiraled into an existential discussion on the meaning of "is" so why not.

Then again, maybe I just want to dump on people whose businesses can't survive without slave labor (full disclosure: I operate a sole proprietorship so I know all about bad business models).