If the company is really a great place to work overall, then you probably have opportunities there to move within the company; this is highly preferable to changing companies, if the company really is that great to work at (except for your boss). If you're leaving the company, it's probably not that great.
No, HR is not on your side (in the USA), their function is to handle employment paperwork, and to keep employees under the thumb of management. They are definitely not "on your side".
That sounds like a rather odd exit interview; aren't they usually conducted by your immediate supervisor? The only way your scenario would happen is if your boss's boss (or higher, or HR maybe) conducted the interview.
Exactly. If you're leaving on really good terms, then why not? You'll probably have mostly good things to say anyway, along with a few small critiques, and if you part on good terms, you'll be able to use them as a reference, which always looks good. If you're leaving on bad terms (i.e., you don't have a significantly better opportunity, just a similar one, meaning you just don't like it there), then you're not going to have anything nice to say, and it doesn't help you, because you're not going to use them as a reference anyway.
What's really weird is that in my ~15-year career, I've left 5 jobs now, and only in one did I have anything even resembling an exit interview (it was really more a quick chat with the department head because I came in late and missed the spiel about why our whole team was being let go that day). In all the other places, whether I quit or they laid me off (only one other place), I never had an exit interview. I guess they (correctly) reasoned it wouldn't be very productive. Actually, now that I think about it, in my first (highly underpaid at the time) job, which I quit, my boss did ask me why briefly and I just said I didn't want to discuss it, so he didn't ask any more. I'm pretty sure the reasons should have been fairly obvious to him.
Why should I try to help them improve their crappy company? If I liked working there, I would probably still be working there (or at least leaving on good terms for a better position or something, in which case this discussion is moot). If you're leaving on bad terms, it's because you had a bad experience there, so why would you want to help them out?
I don't see any social responsibilities here. If I hated a workplace enough to pack up and leave like that, I'd probably prefer to see them fail. I don't want them to improve, I want them to go out of business and the managers who made me miserable there to be unemployed; maybe their competitor can buy them out.
Interestingly, in a previous job, I hated it so much I got in an argument with my boss one day, and walked out on the spot. Six months later, with their new flagship product (that I was working on) waaaayyyy behind schedule, they were bought out by their next-larger competitor.
Sorry, but he's right about the cops. The cops in this country are pretty bad; their whole job is to help prosecute as many people as possible, in conjunction with the DA whose mission it is to do so, because it makes him look "tough on crime". This is all part of the prison-industrial complex. Remember, we lead the world in incarceration per capita, and the cops are a big reason behind it. This isn't like some nice, peaceful country in western Europe where the cops are only there to keep the peace.
Don't forget, we used to call cops "peace officers", and they wore blue. Not any more. They wear black now, and we call them "law enforcement officers" now; pretty soon, we'll probably just call them "enforcers". The cops are far more militarized than they used to be as well.
The cops cannot be trusted.
That said, the poster above is correct; if they're looking for information on someone else who has nothing to do with you (except that you happened to be a witness), it's probably safe to tell them everything you saw. The only people you have to fear in that case are the possible criminal and his associates, not the cops. But if they're questioning you about something you may have done, call your lawyer. They're probably looking for a way to put you in jail.
I was smiling several years ago when I (along with the rest of my team) got laid off. I had been expecting it for a while; the executives there were incompetent, and basically gave up on our whole business unit because they were too stupid to run it right. Anyway, I was smiling because I knew that I was getting a generous severance package (4 months pay IIRC!), so I'd have plenty of time to go find another job, which is exactly what I did. Little did I know that the new job, even though it paid better than the old one, was going to turn out to have an absolutely miserable working environment; I really miss the team I was in in that previous job. The executives were a bunch of morons there, but that was the best group of guys I've ever worked with.
I did have a mini exit interview with the department head. I made a few noises about my opinion about the whole lay-off, and he parroted management's official line, but interestingly, shortly after that, he quit the company and IIRC formed his own company working in that same sector, so I guess he wasn't too enamored of that place either.
That's not a "fact", it absolutely implies an opinion about the person. I'm sure any lawyer will tell you that statement can still get your firm sued for defamation.
The whole thing is a bad idea. Why do you want to make an ex-employee miserable and unable to get another job? What's in it for you? You might get sued, or you might have him show up one day with an assault rifle and tear gas. Why not let him go on down the road, and maybe you'll get lucky and your competitor will hire him on.
Yep, it probably depends on the company. Big companies tend to have very strict policies about this, because they have a LOT to lose in a defamation lawsuit. Plus, big companies tend to be smarter about many things IME, in a ruthless kind of way. How does it help the company to tell the truth about some employee who quit (or was terminated)? What exactly do they have to gain from it? Nothing at all, but they have everything to lose: defamation lawsuit, going postal and coming to the old employer with an assault rifle, tear gas, and a gas mask, etc. It's much safer for them to just let the bad (in their opinion) employee go on about his life without any interference from them, and maybe they'll even get lucky and one of their competitors will hire him.
In smaller companies, it's easy to see how some egocentric person would want to make an ex-employee's life miserable, and as smaller companies haven't created policies about every single thing to cover their asses from lawsuits, they get away with it.
It's worse than that; each package is usually a superset of the preceding package. And channels like Discovery tend to be in the basic package, so you don't get a choice to have it or not, unless you don't subscribe to cable at all.
What I'd like to know is how they determine ratings these days. In the old days, the "Nielsen families" had extra boxes monitoring what they watched. These days, with cable boxes, they can have them report back to the cableco what people are watching, so I imagine they do that, but that doesn't cover people who only subscribe to basic and don't have an extra cable box. They probably just ignore those people.
Yep, why bother showing educational programs about astronomy when you can instead show a puerile drama about a couple of retards building shitty motorcycles and constantly arguing with each other?
"You liberals"? Sorry, but I go to a protestant church. I just don't care much for RC (especially after growing up in it, and finding out later that most of the priests I knew are now in jail for molestation).
Islam has its faults (and some pretty severe ones at that), but it also has no proscriptions against contraception that I know of. Muslims have lots of babies because they want to, not because their imams are telling them that condoms are evil. It's the same way in much of Africa; they don't have kids because of religion, but because of local culture. Poor latino Catholics may also be having kids because of local culture, but you can't deny that their churches are also telling them to; it's hard to say exactly what would happen if one of the two factors changed (being poor, or being Catholic).
It also doesn't help when governments give all kinds of financial incentives to poor people to have more kids, in a perpetual cycle. The poor people are ecstatic if they have 8 kids and one of them manages to go to college on a scholarship or something and get into the middle class, but in the meantime, there's 7 other kids that are still dirt-poor, several of them in and out of prison, and all having 8 kids of their own, each. The whole thing isn't sustainable.
As for Sharia Law, you sound paranoid here. Maybe the Europeans need to worry about that, as they do have a lot of immigration from nations where that is practiced and revered, but over here in North America it's not a big concern. There's a few muslims here and there, but not even close to enough to make a difference in the polls, and their kids tend to be assimilated into western culture anyway because, again, of their low concentration.
Exactly. A lot of people scream about statistics that 1 in 6 US children are born into poverty, and there's a reason for this: it's the poor people that have all the kids. The rich(er) people are too busy with their careers to have more than 1 or 2, if any. A lot of people even put it off because of their careers, only to find out they missed their window.
I don't see how you can avoid tangling with the pesky religious issues. Certain religions (names Roman Catholicism) forbid you from using contraception, no ifs and or buts. If people live longer in Catholic countries, the population will skyrocket (and it already is), because they'll still have 6-10 kids per family but they'll live longer, and modern medicine will mean more of them will live to adulthood and have more kids of their own. The only way around this is for those people to abandon Catholicism, or to practice it the way Americans do (which is to ignore the pope and priests when they talk about contraception). The latter doesn't really work though; what I've seen is that Catholics have become more extremist in America, and the moderates who ignore the stuff about contraception have all abandoned the Church (largely in the wake of the pedophilia scandals) and switched to other churches such as Episcopalianism.
There is some hope, though; I've read that in Latin American countries, a lot of people are switching to evangelical churches, so maybe those people will use more contraception and also push others to switch (since evangelicals are really big on converting people). Of course, now we'll wind up with a huge population of Rush Limbaugh fans.
The arctic, or the antarctic? In the arctic, you have to ancient spirits called "Wendigo" killing you. In the antarctic, however, that's not a problem, but instead you have to worry about shape-shifting aliensattacking you and using your body to attack your coworkers and friends.
Actually, I disagree about the "training" aspect. Training is worthless when the person trained never uses it, or dies before it's used. Sure, it'd be cool if a bunch of people figured out how to live in Antarctica, but if they don't do it, what good is it? It's not like they're going to somehow pass that knowledge on to the next generation. We learned that with the space program; some of the basic designs were preserved, but a LOT of stuff simply wasn't, and this happens every time some industry goes under or moves offshore. Not everything is written down somewhere, and doing something large and complex creates a huge number of "learned lessons" and specific domain knowledge that usually just dies when the people doing it die off. Even if there were a much larger effort to record knowledge, putting it into some form where it can then be looked at by following generations isn't so easy. Just look at all the problems large organizations have with organizing data, frequently leading them to using the shitty "Sharepoint" tool from MS which just makes it worse.
That's probably a factor too. If the troll just took over the public-domain bridge, or if the troll prevented others from building competing bridges, either way is just as bad IMO. There's nothing wrong with just being a landlord; someone has to own rental property after all, and not everyone wants to or is able to purchase their own real estate (it generally doesn't make any sense unless you're going to stay there for 5+ years). It's when you use nefarious tactics to block competition that it's bad.
I don't know how that term could be confusing. They're not seeking to pay rent, they're seeking to collect rent. That should be obvious. It's like a troll under a bridge (which he didn't even build himself), wanting to collect a toll from everyone that passes.
Maybe at the local levels, but that's probably about it. Above that, it's very hard for a non-psychopath to compete. At best, they might get on the national ballot as a third-party candidate, but then everyone says "you'll waste your vote if you vote for him" so he doesn't get elected.
What are you, some dumbass IT director or something? They don't produce anything of value, just stupid reports that lead firms to buy into crap products and services.
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If the company is really a great place to work overall, then you probably have opportunities there to move within the company; this is highly preferable to changing companies, if the company really is that great to work at (except for your boss). If you're leaving the company, it's probably not that great.
No, HR is not on your side (in the USA), their function is to handle employment paperwork, and to keep employees under the thumb of management. They are definitely not "on your side".
That sounds like a rather odd exit interview; aren't they usually conducted by your immediate supervisor? The only way your scenario would happen is if your boss's boss (or higher, or HR maybe) conducted the interview.
Exactly. If you're leaving on really good terms, then why not? You'll probably have mostly good things to say anyway, along with a few small critiques, and if you part on good terms, you'll be able to use them as a reference, which always looks good. If you're leaving on bad terms (i.e., you don't have a significantly better opportunity, just a similar one, meaning you just don't like it there), then you're not going to have anything nice to say, and it doesn't help you, because you're not going to use them as a reference anyway.
What's really weird is that in my ~15-year career, I've left 5 jobs now, and only in one did I have anything even resembling an exit interview (it was really more a quick chat with the department head because I came in late and missed the spiel about why our whole team was being let go that day). In all the other places, whether I quit or they laid me off (only one other place), I never had an exit interview. I guess they (correctly) reasoned it wouldn't be very productive. Actually, now that I think about it, in my first (highly underpaid at the time) job, which I quit, my boss did ask me why briefly and I just said I didn't want to discuss it, so he didn't ask any more. I'm pretty sure the reasons should have been fairly obvious to him.
Why should I try to help them improve their crappy company? If I liked working there, I would probably still be working there (or at least leaving on good terms for a better position or something, in which case this discussion is moot). If you're leaving on bad terms, it's because you had a bad experience there, so why would you want to help them out?
I don't see any social responsibilities here. If I hated a workplace enough to pack up and leave like that, I'd probably prefer to see them fail. I don't want them to improve, I want them to go out of business and the managers who made me miserable there to be unemployed; maybe their competitor can buy them out.
Interestingly, in a previous job, I hated it so much I got in an argument with my boss one day, and walked out on the spot. Six months later, with their new flagship product (that I was working on) waaaayyyy behind schedule, they were bought out by their next-larger competitor.
Or you could tell them your opinions are proprietary information and if they want access to it, they'll have to pay a hefty fee.
You're quitting for a reason. Why help them any more than you have to?
Maybe, but does Canada have a giant prison-industrial complex like the USA, with the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world?
Sorry, but he's right about the cops. The cops in this country are pretty bad; their whole job is to help prosecute as many people as possible, in conjunction with the DA whose mission it is to do so, because it makes him look "tough on crime". This is all part of the prison-industrial complex. Remember, we lead the world in incarceration per capita, and the cops are a big reason behind it. This isn't like some nice, peaceful country in western Europe where the cops are only there to keep the peace.
Don't forget, we used to call cops "peace officers", and they wore blue. Not any more. They wear black now, and we call them "law enforcement officers" now; pretty soon, we'll probably just call them "enforcers". The cops are far more militarized than they used to be as well.
The cops cannot be trusted.
That said, the poster above is correct; if they're looking for information on someone else who has nothing to do with you (except that you happened to be a witness), it's probably safe to tell them everything you saw. The only people you have to fear in that case are the possible criminal and his associates, not the cops. But if they're questioning you about something you may have done, call your lawyer. They're probably looking for a way to put you in jail.
I was smiling several years ago when I (along with the rest of my team) got laid off. I had been expecting it for a while; the executives there were incompetent, and basically gave up on our whole business unit because they were too stupid to run it right. Anyway, I was smiling because I knew that I was getting a generous severance package (4 months pay IIRC!), so I'd have plenty of time to go find another job, which is exactly what I did. Little did I know that the new job, even though it paid better than the old one, was going to turn out to have an absolutely miserable working environment; I really miss the team I was in in that previous job. The executives were a bunch of morons there, but that was the best group of guys I've ever worked with.
I did have a mini exit interview with the department head. I made a few noises about my opinion about the whole lay-off, and he parroted management's official line, but interestingly, shortly after that, he quit the company and IIRC formed his own company working in that same sector, so I guess he wasn't too enamored of that place either.
That's not a "fact", it absolutely implies an opinion about the person. I'm sure any lawyer will tell you that statement can still get your firm sued for defamation.
The whole thing is a bad idea. Why do you want to make an ex-employee miserable and unable to get another job? What's in it for you? You might get sued, or you might have him show up one day with an assault rifle and tear gas. Why not let him go on down the road, and maybe you'll get lucky and your competitor will hire him on.
Yep, it probably depends on the company. Big companies tend to have very strict policies about this, because they have a LOT to lose in a defamation lawsuit. Plus, big companies tend to be smarter about many things IME, in a ruthless kind of way. How does it help the company to tell the truth about some employee who quit (or was terminated)? What exactly do they have to gain from it? Nothing at all, but they have everything to lose: defamation lawsuit, going postal and coming to the old employer with an assault rifle, tear gas, and a gas mask, etc. It's much safer for them to just let the bad (in their opinion) employee go on about his life without any interference from them, and maybe they'll even get lucky and one of their competitors will hire him.
In smaller companies, it's easy to see how some egocentric person would want to make an ex-employee's life miserable, and as smaller companies haven't created policies about every single thing to cover their asses from lawsuits, they get away with it.
It's worse than that; each package is usually a superset of the preceding package. And channels like Discovery tend to be in the basic package, so you don't get a choice to have it or not, unless you don't subscribe to cable at all.
What I'd like to know is how they determine ratings these days. In the old days, the "Nielsen families" had extra boxes monitoring what they watched. These days, with cable boxes, they can have them report back to the cableco what people are watching, so I imagine they do that, but that doesn't cover people who only subscribe to basic and don't have an extra cable box. They probably just ignore those people.
Yep, why bother showing educational programs about astronomy when you can instead show a puerile drama about a couple of retards building shitty motorcycles and constantly arguing with each other?
"You liberals"? Sorry, but I go to a protestant church. I just don't care much for RC (especially after growing up in it, and finding out later that most of the priests I knew are now in jail for molestation).
Islam has its faults (and some pretty severe ones at that), but it also has no proscriptions against contraception that I know of. Muslims have lots of babies because they want to, not because their imams are telling them that condoms are evil. It's the same way in much of Africa; they don't have kids because of religion, but because of local culture. Poor latino Catholics may also be having kids because of local culture, but you can't deny that their churches are also telling them to; it's hard to say exactly what would happen if one of the two factors changed (being poor, or being Catholic).
It also doesn't help when governments give all kinds of financial incentives to poor people to have more kids, in a perpetual cycle. The poor people are ecstatic if they have 8 kids and one of them manages to go to college on a scholarship or something and get into the middle class, but in the meantime, there's 7 other kids that are still dirt-poor, several of them in and out of prison, and all having 8 kids of their own, each. The whole thing isn't sustainable.
As for Sharia Law, you sound paranoid here. Maybe the Europeans need to worry about that, as they do have a lot of immigration from nations where that is practiced and revered, but over here in North America it's not a big concern. There's a few muslims here and there, but not even close to enough to make a difference in the polls, and their kids tend to be assimilated into western culture anyway because, again, of their low concentration.
Good point. Maybe I should have said they'd become Donald Trump or Kock Brothers fans or something like that.
Exactly. A lot of people scream about statistics that 1 in 6 US children are born into poverty, and there's a reason for this: it's the poor people that have all the kids. The rich(er) people are too busy with their careers to have more than 1 or 2, if any. A lot of people even put it off because of their careers, only to find out they missed their window.
I don't see how you can avoid tangling with the pesky religious issues. Certain religions (names Roman Catholicism) forbid you from using contraception, no ifs and or buts. If people live longer in Catholic countries, the population will skyrocket (and it already is), because they'll still have 6-10 kids per family but they'll live longer, and modern medicine will mean more of them will live to adulthood and have more kids of their own. The only way around this is for those people to abandon Catholicism, or to practice it the way Americans do (which is to ignore the pope and priests when they talk about contraception). The latter doesn't really work though; what I've seen is that Catholics have become more extremist in America, and the moderates who ignore the stuff about contraception have all abandoned the Church (largely in the wake of the pedophilia scandals) and switched to other churches such as Episcopalianism.
There is some hope, though; I've read that in Latin American countries, a lot of people are switching to evangelical churches, so maybe those people will use more contraception and also push others to switch (since evangelicals are really big on converting people). Of course, now we'll wind up with a huge population of Rush Limbaugh fans.
The arctic, or the antarctic? In the arctic, you have to ancient spirits called "Wendigo" killing you. In the antarctic, however, that's not a problem, but instead you have to worry about shape-shifting aliensattacking you and using your body to attack your coworkers and friends.
Actually, I disagree about the "training" aspect. Training is worthless when the person trained never uses it, or dies before it's used. Sure, it'd be cool if a bunch of people figured out how to live in Antarctica, but if they don't do it, what good is it? It's not like they're going to somehow pass that knowledge on to the next generation. We learned that with the space program; some of the basic designs were preserved, but a LOT of stuff simply wasn't, and this happens every time some industry goes under or moves offshore. Not everything is written down somewhere, and doing something large and complex creates a huge number of "learned lessons" and specific domain knowledge that usually just dies when the people doing it die off. Even if there were a much larger effort to record knowledge, putting it into some form where it can then be looked at by following generations isn't so easy. Just look at all the problems large organizations have with organizing data, frequently leading them to using the shitty "Sharepoint" tool from MS which just makes it worse.
That's probably a factor too. If the troll just took over the public-domain bridge, or if the troll prevented others from building competing bridges, either way is just as bad IMO. There's nothing wrong with just being a landlord; someone has to own rental property after all, and not everyone wants to or is able to purchase their own real estate (it generally doesn't make any sense unless you're going to stay there for 5+ years). It's when you use nefarious tactics to block competition that it's bad.
I don't know how that term could be confusing. They're not seeking to pay rent, they're seeking to collect rent. That should be obvious. It's like a troll under a bridge (which he didn't even build himself), wanting to collect a toll from everyone that passes.
Maybe at the local levels, but that's probably about it. Above that, it's very hard for a non-psychopath to compete. At best, they might get on the national ballot as a third-party candidate, but then everyone says "you'll waste your vote if you vote for him" so he doesn't get elected.
What are you, some dumbass IT director or something? They don't produce anything of value, just stupid reports that lead firms to buy into crap products and services.
Hmm, that is a possibility. You're right, long guns are a lot easier to shoot accurately than handguns, even for people with relatively little skill.