The Workplace Stack Exchange
The Workplace Stack Exchange

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1500 questions
181
votes
19 answers

How to communicate with a manager who forbids me to write emails and denies that I told him things

I have a typical office job in a Western culture. My colleagues and I spend 99% of our work time with our laptops. My manager forbids me to write emails. I'm used to writing emails if I want to have things in writing, e.g. for documenting purposes…
BigMadAndy
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180
votes
13 answers

Given an ultimatum, threatened with dismissal

I work for a Mobile GIS company in South Africa with roughly 40 or so employees. This is my first job after finishing university. On Wednesday, after working here for about 8 months (and to my immense surprise), I was called into a meeting by the…
Jnthndjgr
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180
votes
23 answers

How, in practice, can I hire more diversely?

Let's say that I've attended all the talks, I've read all the research, and I've concluded that what's best for my team and my company is to increase the amount of diversity in my software engineering team. So, I already want to hire more people of…
Elliot Nelson
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179
votes
12 answers

How to negotiate salary with an extremely unprofessional in-house recruiter?

I'm interviewing at a certain programming job. I've passed everything, the people doing the interview say they really like my skills and want me to join the team, everything's looking great, the manager even said directly that he was going to have…
detcader
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179
votes
12 answers

Co-worker works way more than he should

I work in a research facility in Germany. I have lots of co-workers that are from other countries, mostly part of some international collaborative research projects. There's one guy from China who's in his office almost every day including the…
supersoft
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179
votes
12 answers

New manager penalising my team for 'tiredness' - how to shield them?

Background I'm an infrastructure support night team leader for a very large IT services company in the UK. Due to the requirement for 24/7 support that most of our clients have, the support teams are on 12 hour shift patterns, 4 days on, 4 days off…
user83477
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178
votes
11 answers

How do we evaluate a candidate who would not speak to any women during the interview process?

In our small company with a few employees, everyone's input is important. We call each candidate in for two interviews, one with the owners and another with the Head Developer and a team member who volunteers. Something curious happened during the…
Trickylastname
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178
votes
5 answers

New employer wants me to pay for ISO 9001 accreditation before employment begins - is this a scam?

I recently went for an interview for a new job, the interview took place in the restaurant of a hotel in Euston, UK. They called 2 days later to inform me I got the job of a customer service advisor with salary £20k+ and would like me to sign a…
J Aluede Esirorie
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177
votes
13 answers

Should I charge my client the agreed amount for the difficult tasks that I have solved by accident within few minutes?

It was fixed-price contract to develop Python scraper to scrape 2 websites. I always charge ~$200 per website. We agreed $200 per website. I agreed $200 blindly without analyzing those websites because I was busy in other things. Usually it takes a…
Umair Ayub
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177
votes
16 answers

How can I dissuade a coworker who is disturbing my work from giving me help I don't feel I need?

When I am focused on a task that is assigned to me, my coworker will frequently shout out "Liz, come here." I go to his desk and find he has been working on my task and he explains to me how to solve it. I will for example be on Step 5 of solving a…
Liz at work
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175
votes
9 answers

How to find a job with as little social interaction with coworkers as possible?

I worked in a startup as a web developer and it was really unsuitable for me. I don't like making friends at work, going out to eat with the team, having to go get drinks, team lunches, "team outings", meetups, open offices, or having to fit in with…
R. Que
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175
votes
14 answers

Staying focused during automatic processes, "It's compiling"

I recently ran into quite an ironic situation. After changing a small part in some code and telling my computer to start compiling, I switched to a website and ran into this: [xkcd comic 303 by Randall Munroe] At my company they choose to work with…
Daniël van den Berg
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174
votes
14 answers

My boss gave me an end date for my job- but he wants a very complex project done before then

I've been working as a software engineer contractor for the last year and a half, at a company that has been promising to onboard me as a full employee for over seven months. However, I was recently told that our whole team is being eliminated, and…
Gman
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173
votes
11 answers

How to handle interview technical tests that are absurd (e.g. an unreasonably large task with a short time limit)?

If an interview includes a technical test involving an unreasonably large task and short time limit, does it make sense for a candidate to turn in work that does not meet the candidate's quality standards to finish by the deadline? And if the…
NibblyPig
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173
votes
5 answers

How do I coordinate the process of pursuing multiple job opportunities at the same time?

In the hot field of software engineering, a competent programmer wanting to switch jobs will be able to apply and interview easily for at least a half dozen jobs. However, coordinating the speed at which the interview and eventually offer process…
atconway
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