Video Games Before Work

[Sourdough]

Was talking today with a friend, who is the owner of a boat shop in Fairbanks.  He also sells and maintains four wheelers, and snow machines.  Right now is the crossover time when boats are having to be winterized, and put into storage.  Snow Machines are being uncrated and assembled.  He hired four new people just to help out during the rush.  He had to fire all of them their first week, due to them being one to two hours late everyday. 

Back during the summer he had a great mechanic, this guy was a whiz with boats.  Because the guy was so good, and the amount of work he put out, my friend put up with the tardiness for a couple of months.  One day my friend decided "No I can not put up with this any more, this guy has to start coming to work on time".  My friend pulled the mechanic into the office and questioned him about why he could not come to work on time.  The guys response was "I'm just not a morning person, I stay up late playing video games, and just can not get up that early".  When my friend told him he was fired, his response was, "Why am I being fired, It's not my fault you have to open your shop so early".

All five of these young men had the same problem.  They could not get out of bed in the mornings, due to staying up late playing video games.  Is this our young people today?  More interested in video games than a job. 

[teamnelson]

Our service men and women are the same way. I know some that don't sleep between duties - they just play. I remember hanging out in the squad bay with a deck of cards and some beer. Now they're all in their private rooms with a flat screen and an xbox. Have had a few that "forgot" which world was real, this one, or the online one.

[Redtail1949]

Maturity is the problem..not being able to take care of business when it was time. That is in the case of the Workers..the soldiers I think are just trying to occupy their minds without having to dwell on the business they will have to take care of. In my day we used booze and some used dope. In my uncles day they used Booze.

[Redtail1949]

Sourdough;

Am I nuts when i say that i have seen only a handfull of young kids and young men ( that does not include soldiers or those that have served) that have any sense of responsibility. They do not want to work they want to lay around and do nothing. they seem to have that chip on their shoulder  about how people have it in for them and the world owes them something. I think that crap started in the 60's I was lucky enough not to have been raised that way but many around me felt that way. It seems that it has gotten slowly worse since those days and all they think about is how to get something for nothing.

[LONGTOM]

I blame the kids but I also blame the parents for not teaching them the correct values in life.
Of course you also have to consider that some of those same parents have no values either.
You can bet their parents and grandparents had them and knew what they meant!!!


LONGTOM

[MGMorden]

Eh, I see two sides to this argument.  DISCLAIMER: I'm 28, play a TON of video games, and also occasionally have a little trouble getting to work on time (though it's usually not directly due to gaming, and I'm more like 10-15 minutes work to late tops ).  On the flip side thoug, I also have little qualms about staying late to get things done though.  When things got busy a few months back I was regularly staying 2, sometimes 3 hours late.  One night I even stayed at work till 1:30am (and still made it to work at 9 - or rather 9-ish, the next morning ).  2-3 hours of donated time after work to finish a project (I'm salaried so no overtime) makes up for a hell of a lot of 15 minutes late to work in the mornings.

A lot of younger people tend to see job performance with a different set of metrics than the previous generation.  Namely, many see their performance value as the amount of work they get done in a day.  Set schedules are kind of arbitrary.  IE, lets say worker A typically comes in a bit late everyday, takes slightly longer lunch breaks, etc.  Worker B on the other hand comes in 15 minutes early every day, well dressed, always by the book.  HOWEVER, if they're say, fixing boats like in the example, lets say that despite this, Worker A is fixing 10 boats per day while Worker B is only fixing 6.  In that case, Worker A is still more valuable to the company.  Getting strict on the schedule will often come off as a manager or boss just wanting to flex authority for the sake of doing it.

Or to sum it up, many people in today's environment feel they're being paid to do a job.  To get a task done.  As long as the task gets done and the work itself is on schedule, then all is fine.

I think the workplace is shifting to fit this though.  Salaried workers are becoming much more common than hourly.  A lot of places are allowing employees to work from home in the computer industry (where there certainly is no schedule - you just get your work done during the day and all is good).  I'm noticing a ton of places adopt a "flex time" system.  Essentially, they go by a system where the company is generally open during daylight hours.  Often 7am to 7pm.  Each worker is free to come and go as they please as long as they put in their 8 hours daily.  Doesn't matter if you go 7 to 3 on one day and 11 to 7 the next, so long as you get in your time.

More of a generational divide I guess .

[Questor]

Sourdough:

That is amazing. When I was in my late 20s I realized that since I was in the computing trade I should be at least somewhat familiar with the video games. I played a couple to completion and that was the end of it. I wrote it off as a waste of time. My son now plays video games as a diversion He really likes it, but he doesn't spend a lot of time on it.

When he wants a new game we go to a place called Game Stop, which sells used video games. Most of the people who shop there, and work there, are in that 20 to 30 year old range.

When my son began playing the games he sometimes would spend too much time on them and I'd tell him to go do something real for a while. He has always had to buy his own game machines and games. I have never bought one for him. He has earned the money to buy them. He buys the machines used for about $50 to $75 from a friend who upgraded, then buys the used machines at Game Stop.

[Sourdough]

MGMorden:  I disagree, the shop opens at 7:30 everyone needs to be there at 7:30.  If you start letting people come in an hour or two late every day, what happens on the day you open and no one shows up for the first two hours.  You have an emergency vehicle that is needed right now, and there are no mechanics to work on it.  That will cost you business/money maybe even a law suite.  Your job is to be there at 7:30 ready to work, or go find another job.  A business man can not allow his employees to rule, he's the Boss, he rules.  If the employee can't deal with that, good luck finding a job somewhere else.

When I was still working during the late 90s, I had to fire several guys for not coming in to work on time or poor job performance.  A week or so later I started getting phone calls from prospective employers, where these young men were seeking employment.  The application required they list their last five jobs and supervisors.  So when these employers called me I told them the truth, that the guy was not able to make it to work on time, or perform the job requirements, so I fired him.  That one statement pretty much guaranteed that the young man did not get the job. 

One day I was visiting one of the plumbing shops we contracted work to occasionally.  I was standing at the counter talking to the owner, when I noticed a young man working in the warehouse area that I had fired about five or six weeks earlier.  I asked how he was working out, hoping the young man had learned his lesson and straightened out.  The owner said he was getting tired of chewing his butt everyday.  The guy could not follow instructions well, he screwed up almost everything he touched.  I laughed and said I knew what he was talking about.  He could not follow the first instruction I had given him, that was to be at work by 7:30.  I was lucky to see him by 9, that's why I fired him.  The owner looked surprised, and said "He never told me he worked for you, he did not list you on his application.  And I can understand why".  He called the young man over, confronted him on the spot about not listing his last job on his application.  The owner fired him on the spot for lying to him about his previous employment.  He then told the young man he needed to move out of Fairbanks.  He would see to it that all the other plumbing shops in town knew about him. 

Fairbanks is a small city, I have not seen that young man since.  So apparently he moved to Anchorage or left the state.

[teamnelson]

I've been an operations manager for a large DHS/CBP contractor, and directed project management and IT departments, so I've hired and fired blue collar to white collar. In the technical white collar jobs, there seems to be a movement to much of what MGM described. But that is only one market niche. I can appreciate the marathon coding or compiling projects - normal business hours don't impact success necessarily; unless your hardware support staff work 9-5 and your testbed server crashes. But that leaves alot of markets where business hours are essential to success, and a lot of those are blue collar and customer service. I don't think you can call it generational other than there are more technical white collar jobs for this generation than ones prior.

SD's point is valid in any market though; that's why its called "right to work." You have a right to a job only as long as you meet your employer's expectations.

[MGMorden]

TeamNelson: It could be perspective as you say.  I do indeed work in IT - my official title is IT Project Manager but in reality I'm project manager/programmer/database admin/email admin/report writer.  Any incoming projects (generally changes in reports or modifications to program code) come in on a work order queue (and aside from that my tasks are patching my servers and keeping them up and running), so as long as I keep up with my queue and stuff gets done, nobody seems to care too much what time I'm getting to work.  Indeed I've been at my current job for 5 years come the end of this month, being at least a tad bit late 4 days out of 5, and I've managed to increase my salary by 74% in that timeframe .  It matters more that I can usually do in 15 minutes what it takes my coworkers an hour to do, than what time I'm getting there .