3w ago

The audacity

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It might be that the business had some delivery date for some product and really needed to manpower to do it. Once that manpower failed they renegotiated a new delivery date at a loss, and could make do with less employees until they hire more, so the employee's presence was not so urgent anymore, and, since they didn't deliver when necessary, were fired.
I see no hypocrisy here. The owner might be a scumbag for reaching that conclusion but they are no hypocrite for firing them.
Edit: Y'all seem quite pissed with my conditional read of the post, but sure as hell agreed with the other side since the most upvoted comment is calling the boss a hypocrite. Idk man, if you are going to entertain one interpretation of the story but refuse the other one, you are kind of a hypocrite.
- They are no hypocrite for firing them assuming your fantasy scenario is reality
  
  Fantasy scenario? have you even worked in consulting and project deadlines? It's my everyday life.
  In any case, let it be clear that the boss is a piece of shit and that although consequences should be in place, firing is way overboard. I'm just being a tad pedantic and saying that no, they are not a hypocrite necessarily.
  
  And I’m being a tad more pedantic pointing out that “they are no hypocrite” and “they are not a hypocrite necessarily” are not the same statement, that one of them is baseless, and that you lead with the baseless one.
  
  Okay, agreed. I don't see the same argument being made in the other 99% comments of this post calling the boss a hypocrite, though.
  
  Because they’re likely hypocritical. Most workplaces are not on the brink of collapse one week due to one person calling out and yet capable of handling their absence for the next few months.
  
  this happens in most consultant works and most workplaces that depend on project deadlines. Also IT and/or security world. There might have been an extra lack of workforce for a week and even if that was bad planning, when that workforce returns that employee isn't as required as it was in the week they were off, this applies to most factory work where they also have deadlines and production peaks. There are tons of cases in which your statement is just not true. Also, no one said that the workplace was at the brink of collapse, what I said is that if deadlines are not met, the company might suffer a loss and that should reflect on some kind of consequence on the worker that didn't show up to work.
  Your statement is just as conditional as mine, yet more widely accepted because if the boss did something excessive (firing them) everything around it must be bad.
  
  Firing someone after they notify you of an inability to be present is bad, and there are many cases where it’s illegal, such as in the U.S. when FMLA paperwork exists. We’re not discussing that, nor are we discussing how a real manager reassigns mission critical work and doesn’t blog about hirings and firings. No—we’re discussing whether it’s hypocritical. I disagree with your usage of the word “most”. I truly do not believe that most workplaces are one person away from missing an important deadline. Most workplaces I’ve experienced get over it extremely quickly, but that is just as anecdotal as your workplace experience.
  If we assume most workplaces are exactly like your hypothetical workplace, which is to say, happy to let someone go despite how long hiring someone new will take, then these workplaces are still usually not up against the wall when it comes to someone taking time off; they instead spend most time in a state of not caring whether or not they have full staffing, which means taking time off shouldn’t be an issue for most of the year. So again, in a world where every workplace is understaffed and hyper focused on deadlines, the mathematical odds are that this action was still hypocritical.
  But those are just odds! I could be wrong. This person who publicly posts about workplace drama and fronting may also also be a very fair and judicious person. Maybe they just care so much about their clients.
- And Occam's Razor pretty easily lets us throw out this line of reasoning, absent any further information.
  The facts we know are:
  Employee put in a PTO request
  Employer denies it
  Employee takes PTO day anyway
  Employer fires employee
  Employer makes post referenced in OP.
  Occam's Razor states that, when two or more scenarios are equally likely, the one that makes fewer assumptions is the more likely one. It certainly seems like the gymnastics required to reach the scenario you presented requires a lot more assumptions (active project, able to move deadline, proper communication was given to the employee) than the scenario most people here have gone with - assuming the boss is a bad boss, and fired the employee out of retribution.
  So yeah, I think most people are gonna land on "the boss is the asshole" barring motivated reasoning, like enjoying boot leather.
- It might be that the employee was a dishwasher.

205 comments