Like Lord of the Flies in shiny suits.
She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets (obviously wrong.) She is very much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got fired.
Recruitment companies will literally push their employees to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or they break you and fire you.
Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common and frequent.
Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)
This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....
Hourly rates:
$30 $60 if you watch $120 if you help
A good project manager will be confident in their position and in doing whatever they can to help the project and won't mind. But that type of person wouldn't be looking over your shoulder unless invited.
This is an example of what universal basic income is intended to prevent.
Basic income has many of the same upsides, but the downsides are mostly about the dollar cost.
It's not unreasonable that some people prefer to pay (eg) higher taxes than suffer various forms of corruption.
I will take UBI or negative income tax every day of the week over unions.
In fact, if they were championed by - shall we call them economic liberals? - then they might be a damned sight harder to subvert and be a whole lot more effective and palatable. I know Sweden has strong unions and workers on boards (something I learnt from the very readable though still arguable book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism[1]), with restricted power (the employees can never become a majority in any vote on the board) and it seems to me to be an obviously good idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Things_They_Don%27t_Tell_Yo...
But what have they done to deserve the truth?
More or less this is how we get thinga like Chernobyl, when the entire chain is lying because the cost of tellong the truth is too high and there is no incentive to do so.
Still, after the accident some of the engineers went for a literal suicide mission to open some ventil to make it all less catastrophic. And unlike the poor construction workers, who died, too, they knew what they were doing.
I doubt they did it just for the postmortal fame. Some people have actually moral standards and can stand by it, even if it means disadvantages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Entries like "received fatal dose of radiation during attempt to manually lower the control rods as he looked directly to the open reactor core."
— Mark Twain in Eruption
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHrVlyU3suk&t=132s
Edit: Everyone at the time probably thought that they were being sent to their deaths so they were staggeringly brave - but that's not how things turned out.
I am talking about actual voluntary suicide missions in chernobyl, like Lelechenko, Aleksandr Grigoryevich:
"in order to spare his younger colleagues from radiation exposure, he went through radioactive water and debris three times to switch off the electrolyzers and the feed of hydrogen to the generators, then tried to supply voltage to the feedwater pumps. "
And he and others did pretty much die right away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Some organisations are just run like that.
Sales is especially harsh in some environments.
I knew someone who ran the business side of a small company. They thought they were really good at sales. But they were really just handling client service, billing, etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through their own relationships. They ended up going on to do "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't pretty.
It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when you first start so you can "get better" every year and get a bigger bonus.
What made it worse was that each year, they would "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went down while expectations on sales went up.
I've been playing with Duolingo. The main incentive is seeing your "streak" increase (the number of days in a row you complete a lesson). You are allowed to make five mistakes total every day on the free version. If you struggle with a lesson, you might use up all five of them, in which case your streak will die. Duolingo allows you to spend points to buy a new thing of five "hearts" (the traditional video game lives). So you have a fairly strong incentive to make sure you always have a cache of points.
Once you blow through some easy incentives in the first few weeks, there aren't that many ways to get points (besides completing more lessons, which you can't do if you run out of hearts). One of the main ways to get points is to do well in the bracketed competition system, where you are compared to 49 other users you are grouped with every week.
Unless you're in the top 3 (hard, because there are a handful of people who treat Duolingo like a full time job), you don't earn any points from your bracket placement. You only earn points from going up a bracket at the end of a week (top 10). Once you reach the top bracket, you don't get any more points. So the system is actually incentivizing you to repeatedly drop down one bracket so that you can climb it again.
(Interestingly, there's a very easy time-zone based trick to get yourself much easier competition because their matchmaking algorithm is unintelligent. All weekly competitions start at midnight UTC on Monday morning, which is what allows the trick to work. I managed to get top three finishes in a pretty high bracket without much work. Been meaning to write this up...)
At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.
I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!
It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for more senior hires. The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher pay
No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a repeat customer their incentives are to get decent candidates quickly into a role without causing any issues.
Not really. Like realters, "Real estate agents do not generally represent the buyer," says Florida real-estate attorney Barry Ansbacher. "But buyers think they do."
On a global scale? Sadly no.
I rather suspect the tech sector is a very safe space, in that regard. Because of demand and supply. But overall life is cheap on this planet.