[TRENCHES] Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - Democracy
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Democracy
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/democracy
Full-Time Monster
AnonymousI worked for a major publisher as a contracted QA Tester. The pay was minimum wage, benefits were next to none, and we were treated as sweatshop labor, constantly cycling in new fresh-eyed college kids to
replace the dozen fired the week before. Everyday the Full Time employees and managers would come in, take a look at everyone’s numbers for the week, and decide who to fire.Over a year period I watched as managers fired dozens of friends I made there simply for not reaching an arbitrary bug number the manager made each week regardless of the state of the project. I watched as we were only allowed two smoke breaks a day and the worst schedules to be at work while Full Time Employees came in and left at their leisure, and took smoke breaks upwards of 10 times a day.
Then one day, I applied for an open management spot, and I got it. I became a Full Time Employee.
And I never looked back. My hourly pay was doubled, I had insurance, I went out drinking with my manager and his manager. I fired people who didn’t meet arbitrary bug numbers, I took 10-12 smoke breaks a day because I could. I made up my weekly schedule based on what I wanted to work, coming in late or leaving early. Suddenly all the excuses I heard from people who got fired no longer mattered to me, I had numbers to meet and my raises depended on them.
I became the very thing I hated.
I have no regrets.
Posts
I'm assuming being treated like shit to them is just "paying your dues".
Well gosh, I suppose I might as well settle in for a nice cuppa ...... this is gonna be good!
This is the unwritten rule of the fuckbags.
Man, I hate smokers at work. Every time I need someone's input/feedback/approval on something time sensitive, they're always outside Goddamn smoking!
So,,,much...wrong...with...story. *gak*
Is it legal to just say "no smokers" and be done with it? I'm sure someone sued someone at some point over this, but did they win, or did the non-smoking judge laugh them out of court?
PSN: astronautcowboy 3DS: 5343-8146-1833
I have Sega, Nintendo and Xbox games and systems for sale. Please help me buy diapers.
It's very very true. If your boss smokes and you want to get promoted... start smoking. You'll get more breaks and he'll (she'll?) like you more. You'll die earlier, smell terrible, and all that other stuff but hey.
You heartless monster.
Edit: and on the "if your boss smokes and you smoke, you get 10 breaks a day" mention, its absolutely true in every retail level job I have seen. I tried to take a break once in retail as a non smoker to just get some air and walk around ,and I was written up. "you stand around all day not doing anything anyways!" customer walks in "uhg, im going to go smoke". I quit pretty soon after that.
Some companies are trying this out right now. It's currently banging around in the courts and will be a mish mash of state decisions until a federal court picks it up.
As for the strip, "maintenance." Next time my son is griping about something or my wife wants me to take some crap out the garage, I'm gonna be down for "maintenance."
I also love how "maintenance" is in quotes.
I'll hate the players because they make the game.
At the point he was in a position where he could change it, he thought "nah fuck it" why should anyone else be treated better than I was.
Its wonderful.
Uh, anyways, with every strip Cora just gets more and more annoying to me. It's just a rollback that everyone even the player base knew was coming (even if they didn't know exactly WHEN it was coming.) I mean, geez.
It is one thing when the company was lying to the players to cover their ass because of a faulty game and inadequate Q&A. One could sympathize with Cora's trying to tell the players the truth. However, now the rollback is probably necessary to save the game and her crusade just looks like a temper tantrum. She is making Isaac look like a reasonable person.
The story reflects a view that crappy work conditions in game testing area a 'self-inflicted misery'. The testers are willing to put up with the abuse when most could probably get decent jobs in another field, so the industry does not see a need to change. The author got out and has no sympathy for those who are not willing to do so.
Course, instead of a roll back, I'd have demanded to be put in charge of a giant gold eating stargod boss who literally hunted every player down and shook the money out of them like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. But that's me.
However, my wife's experience in the health care sector is where people paid by the hour get two fifteen minute breaks, one half-hour unpaid lunch, and ten five minute smoke breaks if you are a smoker.
You wouldn't happen to be posting from work, would ya?
Taking a lil internet break on company time.
Yeah I love the smoker fallacy. How many people who bitch about smokers, spend a good hour or more a day dicking around on random websites while on company time.
One begets the other. Smokers get a few breaks a day and the non-smokers get jealous and decide they are going to waste company time too. I watch it happen at every office job ive ever worked.
2 smoke breaks and a lunch is enough. If multiple people are taking 5+ smoke breaks a day, thats bad management.
//Smokes
///works construction so i can smoke whenever i want until sheet rock gets installed in the bld, then i have to go outside on break time like everyone else
Posted while smoking
Ha, like smokers only use the internet for company purposes. The thing of it is, smokers do every waste of time thing the 'normals' do (extra coffee run, water cooler chat, idle web browsing) but throw in going outside and having no potential to do work multiple times a day.
...Also I don't smoke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil
...and I just Godwin'd the thread. I don't think I've ever managed to do that before.
So it comes down to being jealous then. I can respect that.
I grew up in a smoking household. I'm the only one who never took it up, never got addicted.
At forty, I've already lost both of my parents to smoking-related causes. (Okay, my father had a history of strokes on that side of the family, but I doubt the cigs helped, or that he kept smoking right up to the end. My mother's cancer? No question.)
If anything, I feel sorry for you.
Not that I'm not after caffeine most days, but it's really not the same thing.
I do smoke, no, not ten times a day and when I was in a temp position, I was smoking with my boss. (It didn't get me full time, I got it at another studio)
What bothers me the most is that QA is such a fickle beast when it comes to the stability of the job and instead of pointing out flaws in how the system works and trying to change it, this person became what testers hate the most.
You. Are. That. Guy. I hope you die in a fire.
Dont.
Years later the BBC picks up on it and thinks "This would be a great experiment to disprove on national TV!". Thus commenced what Wikipedia calls "The BBC Prison Study" or "The Experiment", which was the name of the show. The whole thing went down real well, the guards started showing compassion for the prisoners, the show allowed some of the prisoners to become guards, and eventually the 'prisoners' accepted their position....only to try to overthrow the guards. Then the guards, including former prisoners, cracked down on the prisoners and were about to instil a harsher rule than even the original experiment which forced the group running the "study" to stop.
The moral of the story is. People are dicks. It's not power that gets to people's heads it's the idea that now that you're one of "us" and not one of "them" you're better than "them" and there's no reason to think about "them". In the military it's also known as "Rank has it's privileges".
It really doesn't matter if you're a good person or a bad one, whether you're male or female, or whether you're compassionate or stoic. If the guy "above" you says that the guys "below" you don't matter, you have to exert a large amount of willpower to overcome that concept just to notice that it's wrong.
And considering how the often reproduced Milgram experiment goes, you have even less chance of making an actual attempt* to change things.
*Something beyond just saying something about how it's wrong.