Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world"
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So one conversation we've been having is over the appropriate consequences for the following behaviors.
- Not getting to class on time, whether 1st period or during the day. Call this "being tardy".
- Not turning in graded work on time. Call this "missed deadlines."
And the question came up about what kinds of consequences are both appropriate and effective for mitigating/discouraging this behavior. It's bad behavior for two reasons (as I see it)--
- The effect on others. Being late is disruptive, and turning in work late puts extra annoyance on teachers (having to grade things twice and make it fair).
- The "bad work habits, job edition". Being late to jobs is bad; bosses don't like missed deadlines, etc. All the usual things.
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)?
To be quite honest, I'm not thrilled with my current grade penalty for late work. I think it muddles the signal about "did they know the material." But there doesn't seem to be any other signal being actually listened to by parents or kids, while they actually seem to care about grade slippage. If I put in the zero for it being missing, it magically shows up the next day (usually). But that can be seen as a very disconnected penalty.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
What consequences have you seen in the working world for coming in late
What's late? (semi-serious) Our hour hours are flexible. I get in around 8:30a. Others get in around 10a. So it really depends on the work...
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@dcon said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
What consequences have you seen in the working world for coming in late
What's late? (semi-serious) Our hour hours are flexible. I get in around 8:30a. Others get in around 10a. So it really depends on the work...
That's a good answer. So for your job (if I'm understanding you), "late" isn't a thing, but "not getting the work done" or "not putting in X hours/week" is the problem.
Part of the reason I'm asking the question is that my "real world" experience is...woefully limited. Summer jobs, basically. I've been in schools my entire life. So I'm trying to question my fundamental assumptions as potentially not applying.
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Regarding turning in work late and still wanting to measure performance: Set up a small point counter system, starting from 5 or 3 or 2 or something. Take one of these points off for each day an assignment is late without a good excuse. Withdraw them if they run out of points. Do not replenish between assignments. Grade for performance.
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@Captain said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
Regarding turning in work late and still wanting to measure performance: Set up a small point counter system, starting from 5 or 3 or 2 or something. Take one of these points off for each day an assignment is late without a good excuse. Withdraw them if they run out of points. Do not replenish between assignments. Grade for performance.
I guess I'm not understanding the bold sentence. What, exactly am I withdrawing? Do you mean "deduct that many points from their grade?"
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
So for your job (if I'm understanding you), "late" isn't a thing,
It really depends on the job. For most of us tech workers, we have flexible hours. You may need to be in the office at a certain time for a meeting, or something, but otherwise it doesn't much matter. As a contractor, I have to keep track of my arrivals and departures (or at least the intervals between them) so I can bill for (and, more importantly, get paid for) the hours my butt is in a chair at work, but the specific arrival and departure times are not particularly important.
Other employers care a lot more. Some insist that you be in the office at a certain time to facilitate collaboration with cow-orkers, and consistent tardiness may get you a 1-on-1 conference with your boss. One place I worked many years ago required salaried employees to punch a time clock. (That's one for the WTF Semiconductor thread.)
Other jobs, e.g., assembly line or retail, are very strict. If you're late to the assembly line, you hold up the entire line. If you're late to a retail job, customers aren't being served, and sales may be lost. Being late without at least calling to notify your boss or habitual tardiness can get you fired very quickly.
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@Benjamin-Hall Withdraw them from the class.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
That's a good answer. So for your job (if I'm understanding you), "late" isn't a thing, but "not getting the work done" or "not putting in X hours/week" is the problem.
Exactly. In tech companies, and I think especially companies that do unlimited vacation, getting the job done is more important than the number of hours you sit in a chair (most of us are here for around 8hrs - so we have at least a few hours overlap!). Tho as @HardwareGeek points out, it's a bit different for contractors.
edit: also, when dealing with coworkers in other time zones, 9-5 just isn't a thing.
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@Captain said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Benjamin-Hall Withdraw them from the class.
I don't think that's an action available to teachers in most US schools.
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Programmers get a freakishly large amount of leeway for when to start, as long as you show up for meetings and deliver on time.
The exact amount of leeway vary a lot between different places, some do not give the slightest hoot if you even show up at the office, as long as you are available for questions and meetings via phone/chat and actually deliver, while others demand you be at the office between specific hours, and work exactly 40 hours every week. My current gig is somewhere in the middle, requiring us to be in the office, unless otherwise asked for permission to work from home. We are expected to show up at 9:30 for the standup, and stick around until the last meeting in the day. Me being an early riser and overachiever, I leave at 15 every day more or less, and the rest seem perfectly happy not to book any meetings with me that goes on after that.As far as punishments, I've only ever seen stern talkings to, with threats of ending employment. But I do know of people that was fired for tardiness, while not programmers but factory workers where you got docked 30 minutes pay for being late even one second to the clock to check in.
As far as tardiness in school goes, I had a lecturer that would just freeze, mid word and stop moving entirely when someone entered after the start of the lecture, and stand perfectly still until they had seated themselves when he'd keep going from exactly where he stopped as if nothing had happened. He never started over any lectures for tardy people, and he always started the lecture on the second it was supposed to start, even if there was only a single person in the hall. He was the single lecturer in university that got my entire class to show up on time for most lectures.
The first time he did it, it felt rather surreal, but it did work.A college teacher I had way back used to hold back grades for late turn in assignments, and give extra assignments to "unlock" the withheld grades. A lot of complaining, but it seemed to work as well.
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@dcon said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
Tho as @HardwareGeek points out, it's a bit different for contractors.
As a contractor, in theory, the client can tell me what to do but not when, where or how to do it. Practically, the client can demand whatever they want from my employer (consulting company), who can then tell me exactly what, when, where and how. In reality, it's simpler to skip the middleman and follow the client's requests.
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@Captain said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Benjamin-Hall Withdraw them from the class.
Yeah, that's not an option.
Part of the whole problem is that discipline (other than grades) has turned into a bit of a mess--specifically, it feels like we either have meaningless punishments (DH, talking to them, etc) or the nuclear options of suspension/expulsion. There aren't any intermediate signals that seem to matter.
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@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.
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Tardiness: I was served a written warning, years ago, for regularly turning up late. I organised it so that I didn't turn up quite so late thereafter.
Missing deadlines: https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/18477 (
Lounge) is the only major case I've personally experienced, and that took just shy of 12 months to eventually get rid of him.
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@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.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
So one conversation we've been having is over the appropriate consequences for the following behaviors.
- Not getting to class on time, whether 1st period or during the day. Call this "being tardy".
- Not turning in graded work on time. Call this "missed deadlines."
And the question came up about what kinds of consequences are both appropriate and effective for mitigating/discouraging this behavior. It's bad behavior for two reasons (as I see it)--
- The effect on others. Being late is disruptive, and turning in work late puts extra annoyance on teachers (having to grade things twice and make it fair).
- The "bad work habits, job edition". Being late to jobs is bad; bosses don't like missed deadlines, etc. All the usual things.
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)?
To be quite honest, I'm not thrilled with my current grade penalty for late work. I think it muddles the signal about "did they know the material." But there doesn't seem to be any other signal being actually listened to by parents or kids, while they actually seem to care about grade slippage. If I put in the zero for it being missing, it magically shows up the next day (usually). But that can be seen as a very disconnected penalty.
Before I give you straight answers, I'd like to address a difference between work deadlines and school deadlines. Work deadlines are, by and large, especially for programmers, institutionalized stupidity. The people who are in a position to give the best estimates, the people actually doing the work, suck at giving estimates. This is because programming time is fundamentally unpredictable. 99% of the time spent on a programming task is dealing with problems, and these problems are by their very nature unforeseen. It is also because they get pressure from above, which causes them to low-ball their estimates.
But the people they report to are usually the ones giving the estimates. And they are even further removed from how long it will take. They make an estimate based on how long they think it would take them, and this itself is subject to the above error. But in addition, they tend to underestimate the amount of knowledge that they have acquired that is unique to that particular code base, and that is necessary to learn for completing the task.
And there is something related to the Dunning-Kruger effect. The confidence in a person or a manager's estimates is inversely proportional to the accuracy of the estimates.
Whereas in school, the teacher gives the same work to the whole class, year after year. So the teacher has an actual field of comparison for how long something should take.
Back to your actual questions:
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)?
It depends on the work environment. Some environments, such as some public safety positions, union jobs and mass transportation, have formal consequences for arriving even a minute late. Programming, not so much. There are a lot of behaviors that get added together, and not usually in what a student would consider to be a fair way. A "heavy-hitter" or a boss's buddy may be able to get away with tardiness on a regular basis, whereas a newcomer may not. I can say that I haven't seen actual, clear, specific consequences for tardiness in the programming world.
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)?
I don't know that I've ever actually seen this. There are consequences for missing deadlines, even if it's because the work is more time-consuming than allocated. As far as I know, I've never actually met a programmer who doesn't work when they have work to do. Slackers tend to go into easier professions.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@dcon said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
What consequences have you seen in the working world for coming in late
What's late? (semi-serious) Our hour hours are flexible. I get in around 8:30a. Others get in around 10a. So it really depends on the work...
That's a good answer. So for your job (if I'm understanding you), "late" isn't a thing, but "not getting the work done" or "not putting in X hours/week" is the problem.
To be fair, in my current job, neither is really a problem. Though we all try to at least keep the appearances.
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As many others have noted in my experience start time doesn't mean much as long as the meetings are attended and the work gets done. That being said, those that abuse the policy see it being removed for them and they were not allowed that freedom.
Punishments I have seen have been first conversations, second was being informed that you were past over for promotion/raise because of your failures and finally in one case they were let go.
As for school, my HS had the concept of "Incomplete" for a class, which simply meant it was not finished and had to be finished. It didn't go on your transcript until it was finished. This
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@Dragoon said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
As many others have noted in my experience start time doesn't mean much as long as the meetings are attended and the work gets done. That being said, those that abuse the policy see it being removed for them and they were not allowed that freedom.
Punishments I have seen have been first conversations, second was being informed that you were past over for promotion/raise because of your failures and finally in one case they were let go.
As for school, my HS had the concept of "Incomplete" for a class, which simply meant it was not finished and had to be finished. It didn't go on your transcript until it was finished. This
We only give incompletes when the student missed so much (usually meaning the final exam) that it wasn't fair to give them a grade for it.
Those that are chronically absent (our threshold is 20 days, which is a separate WTF) get put on pass/fail (so it doesn't contribute to their GPA either way.
But I'm mainly talking about turning in papers late. I say "have this done by tomorrow and they give it to me 3 days later". Letting people take their time without penalty doesn't seem right because it's not fair to the people who actually put in the time now to finish it (basically giving some people more time than others). My current policy is that for homework they have 1 school day after it's due, during which it's worth 50% credit. 0% after that. For labs and other big stuff I do -10% per school day late, up to 5 days (which is the overall school policy). But I'm not sure I like this policy.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
that it wasn't fair to give them a grade for it.
I thought that was sort of the point of your request. And part of why I recommended "W" (though I works just as well).
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@Captain W is for things like the time my son tried going off his ADD meds (you're "supposed to" outgrow the need for them; wrong!) and blew off the whole semester. And that wasn't a decision by the individual teachers; it was from the administration — whatever office deals with special needs students.
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@HardwareGeek said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Captain W is for things like the time my son tried going off his ADD meds (you're "supposed to" outgrow the need for them; wrong!) and blew off the whole semester. And that wasn't a decision by the individual teachers; it was from the administration — whatever office deals with special needs students.
Maybe at this school. I took a W for missing a couple of homework assignments once, in college. Basically because it was unfair to grade me and they didn't want my GPA to take a hit.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
But I'm mainly talking about turning in papers late. I say "have this done by tomorrow and they give it to me 3 days later". Letting people take their time without penalty doesn't seem right because it's not fair to the people who actually put in the time now to finish it (basically giving some people more time than others). My current policy is that for homework they have 1 school day after it's due, during which it's worth 50% credit. 0% after that. For labs and other big stuff I do -10% per school day late, up to 5 days (which is the overall school policy). But I'm not sure I like this policy
For individual work, most of the classes that I can recall had little to zero tolerance for late work. If it wasn't turned in on time it was a zero. Obviously, there are the usual caveats, but that was the general rule for most of the classes that I can recall.
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@Captain said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@HardwareGeek said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Captain W is for things like the time my son tried going off his ADD meds (you're "supposed to" outgrow the need for them; wrong!) and blew off the whole semester. And that wasn't a decision by the individual teachers; it was from the administration — whatever office deals with special needs students.
Maybe at this school. I took a W for missing a couple of homework assignments once, in college. Basically because it was unfair to grade me and they didn't want my GPA to take a hit.
How many homework assignments did you have total?
Right now I"m about 2 weeks from the mid-semester point. My chemistry class has ~7 assignments in the grade-book, for a total of about 70 of 400 points. We'll have ~1200 total points by the end of the semester, plus an exam worth 15% of the final grade. Each homework is only worth about 10 points, so maybe a total of 10-12% of the final non-exam grade will come from homework. So missing one is minimal (less than 1% of the final non-exam grade).
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@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.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
less than 1% of the final non-exam grade
If they're of that little value, I don't think I'd accept late work at all, at least without a valid excuse like illness. But if you want to accept it, 100%/50%/0% seems like a reasonable penalty.
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@pie_flavor Comparing college withdrawal policy to high school gets iffy. For us, we have to make sure they have the right number of classes per semester, so withdrawing from one means finding them another and slotting them in. Which if you're half-way through the semester is iffy at best. And not all classes are taught (or have room) every period, so a schedule change usually causes most/all your classes to shift around (which is obnoxious for everyone involved).
It happens, but it's rare. Our add-drop policy goes like:
- You have 12 class meetings to transfer or switch classes, no penalty. Your grade does not follow you if you switch to a lower level of the same basic course (from Advanced Chemistry to Chemistry, for example).
- After that, the only course changes that can be made without a withdrawal (which goes on the record) are level changes (e.g. dropping an AP for the regular version of that class). You have 1 week (I think?) to do this, but your grade follows you (so if you drop with a D, you have a D going into the new class).
- After that period, withdrawing from a class involves a big process that leaves either a
WP(withdraw, passing) orWF(withdraw, failing) on your transcript. Having any of those on your transcript is a big huge red flag for the college process, especially aWF. They'll treat it exactly like anFunless you can really explain yourself.
This window re-opens at semester, for year-long classes.
We do allow kids to retake a class to replace a D or F. Freshman Biology is a common one for that to happen in. But then you have the poor grade on your transcript until you do so successfully, and it means doubling up another year (cutting down electives).
It used to be that they could level change up to 1 week after mid-term grades (so about the last week of October) without the grade following them. This was...awful. Since the classes aren't in any kind of sync, that meant that they'd have 1/2 or less of the grades in the book by the end and could strategically maneuver things to avoid work.
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My situation is pretty similar to what most have already mentioned, but I'll drop in my 0.02€ of experience anyway.
I don't have a fixed schedule, but there's a certain window during the day (less than the total hours) where you're supposed to be there to enable useful collaboration. That window starts at 9am. Since I constantly stay up way too late, this means I usually leave the house shortly after 9 and arrive around 9:10. I guess this qualifies for what you called tardiness.
Obviously, this doesn't apply for planned meetings. When there's a phone call to Asia set up at 7am, I absolutely need to be there at 6:45. Failing that, there would be consequences. I don't know which and I'm not going to find out.
Also, I often stay pretty late, too, sometimes 8pm, even without there being an urgent deadline that would require it. So my boss knows better than to tell me off for a few minutes in the morning.Regarding deadlines: if it's a project deadline slipping, you usually see it coming some time earlier, and you can already discuss that in advance in the meetings. Since that usually involves unforeseen problems and you've got co-workers working with you on the project, it's not the result of your personal slacking off.
If a deadline slipping would solely be my personal fault and I could have reasonably made it but messed up, I will definitely put in extra hours as the deadline approaches. Depends on how "important" the deadline is, of course, but as a working adult I'm better suited to judge that than school kids who don't want to do homework.About school homework: we didn't have graded assignments nearly as often as the daily homework. Most teachers' rule there was: if you don't have your homework you get a minus point. Three of those earns you an extra F grade. Depending on how many grades you get for that class in total, that could carry more or less weight. This gives you a bit of leeway even for unexcused missed homework, but gets harsh after that.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
meaningless punishments (DH
Why does this not work, at least as an intermediate measure? Do they not care if they have to stay longer at school instead of going home and doing what they like?
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@topspin said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
meaningless punishments (DH
Why does this not work, at least as an intermediate measure? Do they not care if they have to stay longer at school instead of going home and doing what they like?
Half the time their parents aren't picking them up till nearly 5 anyway (which is a separate
). They treat it as the cost of doing business.
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@Benjamin-Hall Is it possible to keep them until after their parents would normally pick them up? Don't release them until the parents get out of their cars, walk into wherever they're being detained, listen to an explanation of why their
bratswonderful offspring are being detained, wait a half-hour or so until the detention period is done, and sign them out. Inconvenience the parents, not so much that they get mad at you, but enough to lean on their kids so that it doesn't happen again.
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@HardwareGeek said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Benjamin-Hall Is it possible to keep them until after their parents would normally pick them up? Don't release them until the parents get out of their cars, walk into wherever they're being detained, listen to an explanation of why their
bratswonderful offspring are being detained, wait a half-hour or so until the detention period is done, and sign them out. Inconvenience the parents, not so much that they get mad at you, but enough to lean on their kids so that it doesn't happen again.I wish. But probably not. Inconveniencing the parents really is the way to solve most private-school discipline cases, but...
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@HardwareGeek
Apparently you live on Earth-99 or something. Because there aren’t two sets of parents in the entire US (whose kids are still in public school) that wouldn’t completely blame the teacher for inconveniencing them and harming the well being of their wonderful offspring.
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@izzion said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@HardwareGeek
Apparently you live on Earth-99 or something. Because there aren’t two sets of parents in the entire US (whose kids are still in public school) that wouldn’t completely blame the teacher for inconveniencing them and harming the well being of their wonderful offspring.I've met some...but those were toxic cases already, where the kid was blamed for everything, whether or not it was their fault.
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@Benjamin-Hall Oh for a world in which parents are able to make a sober assessment of their children, neither thinking that they are perfect angels who are capable of doing no wrong (or snowflakes whose self-esteem must be protected at all costs), nor blaming them for all that is wrong.
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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...
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@izzion said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@HardwareGeek
Apparently you live on Earth-99 or something. Because there aren’t two sets of parents in the entire US (whose kids are still in public school) that wouldn’t completely blame the teacher for inconveniencing them and harming the well being of their wonderful offspring.I've met some...but those were toxic cases already, where the kid was blamed for everything, whether or not it was their fault.
My mother’s response to a call from the school was: “Which kid did what?”.
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@M_Adams When my son was in middle school, a call from the school invariably (and, unfortunately, somewhat routinely) meant we forgot to give him his ADD meds before school, and I had to go to the school and give them to him. (Heaven forbid he should be able to take them to school with him. Drugs On Campus!!!1!!1! Nor, of course, would the school take responsibility for them.) Fortunately, we lived literally across the street from the school, so it just a matter of walking across the street, around to the front of the building, and into the office, and waiting while they called him from class to the office.
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@HardwareGeek said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
Nor, of course, would the school take responsibility for them.
That's probably because they're not allowed to, legally. I recently had to take a refresher course in first aid and one of the topics was medications.
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.
We managed to obtain approval for one teacher to be allowed to administer a drug for treating acute epileptic seizures - but that needed documentation by the doctor, approval by the parents, the district and the principal. All in all, a huge hassle.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
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)?
While the importance of timeliness of arriving at work varies a lot (it depends on your role and corporate culture) the importance of delivering results in a reasonable fashion is pretty high, as failure to deliver can block other people or cause difficulties with handling money in a whole bunch of ways. Which isn't to say that the deadlines imposed are always possible or sensible — bad bosses are well known at
for their impact in this area — but there's no point in hiding from their importance. “The dog ate my homeworkdeliverable” earns you no life credit at all.
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@dkf said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
“The dog ate my
homeworkdeliverable” earns you no life credit at all.My personal experience differs on this front too. Shit happens all the time, and higher-ups are usually very forgiving if shit happens for reasons outside your control (and even for reasons in your control, provided it doesn't happen too often).
Maybe I should mention I've only ever worked for multibillion megacorporations.
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@Gąska said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@dkf said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
“The dog ate my
homeworkdeliverable” earns you no life credit at all.My personal experience differs on this front too. Shit happens all the time, and higher-ups are usually very forgiving if shit happens for reasons outside your control (and even for reasons in your control, provided it doesn't happen too often).
Maybe I should mention I've only ever worked for multibillion megacorporations.
Does it matter if you willingly fess up or not (for the cases where it is your fault)? Are they more lenient if you give a good explanation (not excuse)?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Gąska said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@dkf said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
“The dog ate my
homeworkdeliverable” earns you no life credit at all.My personal experience differs on this front too. Shit happens all the time, and higher-ups are usually very forgiving if shit happens for reasons outside your control (and even for reasons in your control, provided it doesn't happen too often).
Maybe I should mention I've only ever worked for multibillion megacorporations.
Does it matter if you willingly fess up or not (for the cases where it is your fault)? Are they more lenient if you give a good explanation (not excuse)?
In my experience, always being honest helps you in the long run, since everyone around you (and above you) knows that when you say something, it's probably at the very least how you interpret the events and pretty close to the truth.
I've worked for everything between the worlds at the time largest software producer to 7 people in the company in total. (I think it was) and the smaller, the better the truth works. The bigger the organisation, the more you just kinda float along with the rest, unless you are exceptionally bad at your job.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@Gąska said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@dkf said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
“The dog ate my
homeworkdeliverable” earns you no life credit at all.My personal experience differs on this front too. Shit happens all the time, and higher-ups are usually very forgiving if shit happens for reasons outside your control (and even for reasons in your control, provided it doesn't happen too often).
Maybe I should mention I've only ever worked for multibillion megacorporations.
Does it matter if you willingly fess up or not (for the cases where it is your fault)? Are they more lenient if you give a good explanation (not excuse)?
I was never really into corporate politics, so maybe it's different up the food chain, but among people who actually do the work, it's very rare for people to hide their fault, as it only makes everyone's work harder (and it's usually very easy to track it down to you anyway). The only exception is when there is a numerical metric of how "faulty" each project/department is, that's calculated with The Algorithm™, and that metric directly impacts performance review scores - then, people will naturally start doing everything to shift the blame away. It's very annoying, but we don't get mad at each other because we're all aware why everyone's doing it.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
Does it matter if you willingly fess up or not (for the cases where it is your fault)? Are they more lenient if you give a good explanation (not excuse)?
With sane management? Yes.
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I see that I'm late to this thread... (not really, but I couldn't pass the opportunity of a bad joke)
Anyway, not much to add about my actual work environment. It's software development so a lot of leeway etc. I also have no experience of a co-worker pushing the limits of what's acceptable (both in late at the office and in not meeting deadlines), which might be that by the time people get to the kind of work I do, they've all be trained to not be late etc.
A comment though on the school thing: up to the end of high school (which, I think, is where you're teaching?), teachers would close the door after entering the classroom (or after having let students in), and after that second (OK, depending on teachers there might be a tiny window of tolerance, but not much), being late would mean sent to the, uh, what's its name, "the guy who keeps a modicum of order in break rooms etc.". This in turn would mean having to fill in a form and get it signed by your parents. Quite an effective deterrent in practice, people were rarely late without a good(-ish) reason.
Similarly for homework, not turning it in the day it was due would usually be a zero, no discussion possible (well, yes, of course, there are always exceptions i.e. you've been sick or whatever, but you would have to plead your case pretty well and not wait the last minute). Again, that was so ingrained in everyone that in practice, no one ever turned in homework late. But it's also worth noting that in our school system there is little homework given back to the teacher to be graded, most homework is of the variety "application exercise on yesterday's lesson, reviewed collectively in class the next day" (but even those one would get you a zero very quickly if not done, especially in primary school).
So I guess what I mean is, tolerance zero?
(things get more lenient at university)
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@remi said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
Similarly for homework, not turning it in the day it was due would usually be a zero
Maybe for fairness, the teacher should have a deadline for grading after which they have to give it a max grade.
This happened to me once: the assistant didn't grade the project for several months (way after the official end of semester) and then in the middle of the holidays he gave everyone good grades even though the solutions weren't perfect - I guess he wanted to finally get rid of it.By the way, when you are tempted to be so harsh on the students, remember they have different tasks/courses/theses, which may be more important than your course.
And also, the point of the work is to learn something, so even doing it later can achieve that goal? Unlike at a real job, no customers or coworkers need the output of some exercise.
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@Rhywden said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@HardwareGeek said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
Nor, of course, would the school take responsibility for them.
That's probably because they're not allowed to, legally. I recently had to take a refresher course in first aid and one of the topics was medications.
In my kids' school district it's legal but you have to make arrangements with the school nurse, which includes a doctor's note for prescription drugs. States have different laws and then localities no doubt operate differently within each of those frameworks.
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@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?
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@Adynathos said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
@remi said in Tardiness, missed deadlines, and consequences in the "real world":
Similarly for homework, not turning it in the day it was due would usually be a zero
Maybe for fairness, the teacher should have a deadline for grading after which they have to give it a max grade.
That's a different thing, indeed teachers taking ages to grade is very frustrating. But unfortunately I feel that any constraint added on the teacher directly is unlikely to really work, there would be too much opposition to it (at least around here -- university teachers who have some kind of feedback system on their own course are seen by their colleagues as weird or even crazy, and there is no chance any secondary/primary school teacher would ever do that).
Also there is the thing that "fairness" isn't really a thing in learning or in real life. You've done your part of the job, good for you, but you can't artificially expect the quality of your work to increase because someone else didn't do theirs. But that's not really the point here and anyway, I don't feel that it has ever been a significant-enough problem to require a specific solution.
By the way, when you are tempted to be so harsh on the students, remember they have different tasks/courses/theses, which may be more important than your course.
It depends at which level, and this is why I explicitly said it's different at uni. At primary/middle (and arguably even high) school level, the teacher probably has (or should have) a good knowledge of the overall workload of students, and students aren't really expected to be working for themselves (and not because they're told to). I mean, all teachers say that this is what students should do, but let's face it, it's not and will probably never be the case.
So I don't really see that as an issue.
(as always, there'll always be bad teachers etc. but that's edge cases, not the rule)
And also, the point of the work is to learn something, so even doing it later can achieve that goal? Unlike at a real job, no customers or coworkers need the output of some exercise.
True, but the point of school is also to learn how to behave in society more generally, and respecting deadlines is part of that. I mean, you could make the same argument for whether to take off points for bad spelling/grammar in e.g. maths homework: there are many graduations but for example it doesn't strike me as bad to take off points for a primary school student who just puts the number instead of writing a sentence (e.g. "the number of candies left is ..."), if they were very clearly told and shown how to do the latter. It's part of learning to express themselves in a structured manner, respect guidelines and whole lot of other things. They might have gotten the number right, but it's not the only thing in the grade. The same goes for turning work on time.
But again, I expect university to have a different policy (although in practice and since students have learnt before not to be late, it's not a huge problem in university either).
