Humiliation as entertainment
Posted by posted by Francis @ 3/10/2008 11:07:00 AM
This one has been brewing in my head for a while. Maybe I am too harsh. Maybe I am getting soft in my old age. But it has reached a level where it is more annoying to me than I can handle.Can you guess what one of the favorite topics of conversation is right now in the hallways where I work. Developers are laughing it up about the latest "stupid" answers that such and such recent candidate gave in a job interview.
"Can you believe that this guy claims to have extensive web experience and doesn't event know the encoding scheme of the ASP.Net viewstate object?"... or some such nonsense.
This has become so common that it slips in casual conversation. It even slipped as an example in a recent training session. People think nothing of it. They think that it is ok to make fun of some guy they don't know because he failed to answer some obscure technical question about C++ multiple inheritance and its effects on the "object-oriented-ness" of Java or something.
This is even more annoying to me because I have a hard time believing that this behavior stays behind closed doors. I am also having a hard time believing that this does not transpire into peoples attitude when they interview candidates or they meet people at job fairs or other industry events. Events where they represent my employer. Ultimately, these people represent me and my livelihood. It annoys me that they act like "know-it-all" jackasses that think they can still behave like they are in high-school.
This goes against my values and I think that this goes against the values of my company. This is not how we treat customers, employees, candidates and people in general. Period.
Sorry for the rant... I just had to vent.
Labels: work
1 Comments:
I currently work with "know-it-all" people (yup, they answered correctly to the question "what is an abstract class?"). I can tell you that they may think they know it all but they keep on breaking the builds and keep on blaming someone else and laugh at them for not being smart enough to fix the builds... This can escalate, it could go from "know-it-all" to "I am God".
In psychology, I believe this is call "levelling" when someone needs to humiliate other people so they feel superior. Maybe these other stupid-dumb-nobody-etc. were good candidates after all and they are better of not working for your company...
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