My sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and basically described the same. They set targets for everyone that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and more hours.
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.
Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech.
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.)
At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.
In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem.
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....
I wasn't entirely serious and short of surgically grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)
Great advice. Another variation on that is just getting them to look something up for you that is at least tangentially related to your work. Anything where they are now helping you changes the power dynamic and will make them super uncomfortable.
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.
As someone of a more libertarian bent myself, I find the opposition to unions slightly puzzling. It's clear the disdain is driven by opposition to socialism, as so many unions are subverted by socialists and their influence, but as a general idea they are perfectly acceptable if not ideal and should be championed - free association, individuals coming together to use their bargaining power to provide corrective balance to a part of the market suffering from power and information asymmetry… there's so many good things about 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.
"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 "
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.
Absolutely, but the events are not comparable. Sacrafice at Chernobyl might save thousands, sacrafice at %xcorp% saves a fat bonus for the guy responsible for the whole mess in the first place!
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. "
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.