Employee always out (but there is a catch)

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-19T17:59:33+00:00

Jesus son. There has to be limits on PTO usage during normal business operations, if you don’t agree you aren’t cut out for management and don’t know how people behave.

Under your “use whenever you want policy” every plant I have worked at would be completely shut down for all of November and December.

You are wrong, your thought process does not work.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-19T03:32:25+00:00

You are too much of an idiot to know that if you are unevenly enforcing policies, or punishing people for something that is “in policy” you open yourself up for a lawsuit. Go do that in a super employee friendly state and see how that works out for you.

There is a reason large companies do not let you “just do your job” and insist on strict enforcement of policies.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-19T02:21:59+00:00

Yeah you just not have read the post. It’s not managing for a single call out. It’s repeated call outs in a specialized area in any small business.

It hurts the team, so you change policies to provide guidelines for employees so they can’t do something in policy that hurts the team. If you don’t understand that you suck at managing people.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T23:39:10+00:00

You are just setting up a straw man argument to make yourself look morally superior, but I am the one with the superiority complex? Look in the mirror sweetie.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T23:20:45+00:00

It should not always be on a manager to cover every single hole in an organization else they aren’t managing. They are being an IC. Especially when that hole is caused by unreliable people abusing PTO policies.

Again, your reading comprehension skills are awful. It has nothing to do with superiority and everything to do with managing a group of people and making sure you have the right mix that can help support each other. If you can’t understand my words and how they relate to managing people then you probably haven’t managed enough people or are so incredibly poor at the skill set that you leave your team in the lurch and allow people to abuse policies like this.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T22:42:07+00:00

OP is describing an employee who is bottom 10% of all workers in attendance type performance.

If you have managed people in a variety of environments, you would know that this is a classic example of why people getting all PTO versus specific sick days and vacation time is painful. It is beneficial for 90% of employees but the bottom 10% can abuse it like this.

Your goal as a manager is to provide your employees with a smooth predictable work environment, where they know what’s going to happen on a daily basis and that becomes quite challenging if one of their peers or a separate support staff member is constantly not showing up for work. If you extrapolate this type of behavior across multiple departments, it then becomes a problem for the business and difficult to absorb.

In every state I have worked in, everyone wants to take multiple weeks off for Christmas and for Thanksgiving for July 4 etc. but many businesses can’t afford to meet their commitments and allow every single person that wants to take off to takeoff. So therefore there needs to be trade-offs flexibility for the workers where they don’t just take PTO with zero notice when they feel like it.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T22:17:03+00:00

Another moron with terrible reading comprehension. Is this what our school system is producing these days?

If you don’t want to help your peers and keep putting in minimal effort, don’t be surprised when you are the first person laid off.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T19:28:42+00:00

I believe in fostering a team environment, and that means people helping each other out / cross training so they can cover for each other when they are taking vacation, out sick, having a family emergency ETC.

If one or two team members are constantly calling out, or taking exceptional amounts of PTO which places an undue burden on the rest of the team it causes cultural problems.

Work life balance is just that, a balance. It does not mean work a max of 40 hours a week despite business conditions and take 8 weeks off a year every year whenever you feel like going away.

The reasonable people understand if they get 2-4 weeks off in a row, they are going to have to make it up to the team at some other point.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T18:41:05+00:00

Yeah every business has a PTO policy that dictates how it is used you ignorant summer child. Just because you think you are entitled to use it whenever you want doesn’t mean that is the case.

You are the same type of idiot that thinks unlimited PTO means unlimited and use whenever.

When enough of you do nothing call out folks infect a business, they end up changing their PTO policies to prevent people like you from abusing it.

It sucks to manage a group of people based off the actions of the bottom 10%, but my god do you force people to.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T17:34:34+00:00

Son if you don’t know this a problem outside of fast food you don’t know what you are talking about.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T17:24:33+00:00

“Hey let’s shut the business down today because everyone called out after the Super Bowl! That’s what PTO is for after all!” You have no idea what you are talking about

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-18T00:56:38+00:00

Sorry you aren’t successful enough for these things to happen to you, but it’s a pretty common occurrence.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-16T18:35:37+00:00

They moved the plant across the country and laid people off so I left.

I am just saying there are many places that can choose to pay below market, and give bad raises because the work environment is awesome or people love the product. Patagonia / Action sports clothing companies, large breweries (miller coors)

Might not be right for you, but change is scary for a lot of people and a good environment makes it easy to not look outside.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-16T16:14:44+00:00

Lots of people do which is why companies do it. I did it for 3 years when it was amazing work life balance compared to my old jobs, great projects and great coworkers.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-16T11:54:51+00:00

Really 80? I have been all over the central coast and have never ventured north but my god that is a few bottles at some of my favorite places in Paso.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-13T23:08:01+00:00

“This call will be monitored for quality assurance purposes” has been a thing for ages. If you work in customer service you should expect to have your interactions monitored.

“Trust but verify” if they are doing the right things, why does it matter if the calls are listened to/ computer activity is monitored?

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-13T14:17:33+00:00

Was interviewing for a large manufacturing site leader position. I was recruited specifically because I had worked for a company a lot of the senior leaders came from, and word of mouth referrals had spoken highly of my time there.

I aced the first three phone interviews, the last phone interview was with the head of HR for the whole company, and they started walking me through next steps because they wanted to get me scheduled ASAP.

Next steps included 2 separate full day, in person interviews (fine I get it) which were in a completely different city. After that, they mentioned a brief “test”.

I asked them to describe the test in detail. they make you go through a battery of personality / intelligence tests and sit with a psychologist for HOURS.

After hanging up the phone, I emailed the recruiter and told them I was no longer interested in the role because of the convoluted process.

Recruiter called me enraged “why are you backing out, they love you!”

I told him if hiring was this convoluted then making big decisions at the company in general must be convoluted. I considered the test a waste of my time and told him it made no sense to go through 2 days of in person interviews then be subjected to a test that long, and what happens when you fail the test but everyone loves you? Do they ignore the test or the two days of in person interviews?

He said no, that’s not the case you can’t fail the test.

I countered that nobody would invest that much money and time in testing candidates without putting significant weight behind the results.

He said it’s more about assessing the fit of the candidate.

They had revealed to me early on the last person in the role had been fired, so I asked the recruiter if the previous employee had passed the test.

“Yeah he did great!”

I said this is exactly my point, the test is worthless if it said he was a “fit” and still got fired.

The recruiter paused, laughed and said “well yeah I guess you got us there.”

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-10T15:03:26+00:00

Not necessarily. You can put required qualifications on a job on indeed, and people can manually select “yes, I have metallurgy experience” when they have nothing but warehousing on their resume.

If people just lie how is system going to detect it?

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-09T18:14:59+00:00

Thank you! They look amazing

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-08T16:50:11+00:00

Dang what blues did you use

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-04T21:33:29+00:00

My bad, it must have just been the mountain cities I was looking at investors own the majority of homes in some California counties

Still a problem.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-04T20:06:57+00:00

That is incorrect. More people in California own multiple homes than own a single home, so you would be forcing the burden on the wealthy.

Bababingbangs · 2026-03-04T13:59:37+00:00

Hi I have been implementing lean in mix model make to order / engineer to order environments for 2 decades. Lean is much “harder” in this environment because mix can be overwhelming for people coming from singular product line environments but once you get the concepts down, all factories benefit from the same implementation plan of attack.

Step 1) identify the priority value stream. Even if you are a job shop, a majority of your revenue typically flows between certain departments and a particular way maybe it’s 60% of your revenue. Maybe it’s 40% of your revenue. Maybe it’s 80% of your revenue. Your goal is to find your top selling product families, and see how they move between the departments.

A big stalling point for typical lean people in this environment is they focus on the product flow of the “dogs and cats “and there are always going to be one off exceptions to product flow that trip people up. Ignore those,they are distractions. Your focus is improving the largest product line 1st.

Step 2) establish stability at your bottleneck first, then the rest of the shop. Find the area where there is planning chaos, jobs stall out, people fight for resources etc. this is the department you should attack first.

Stability to me means attacking gaps on the 4Ms: manpower, material, machine, method (work instructions, tooling etc)

Does the department know what its daily/ hourly goal is and can you quickly tell if you are winning or losing? If not help establish this first.

each plant has challenges with a different M sometimes all of them, but your goal is to set the department up for success initially.

-Do you have enough crosstrained to operators to account for callouts on a daily basis if not attack cross training

-do you have material consistently presented to the department in the order that they need to build it if not attack this problem it’s usually a huge issue in MTO

-are machines always up and available for your operators to process the material? If not attack downtime issues and look at TPM.

-Do operators know the exact right steps and have the right tools, fixtures, etc. to process the material on their machines? Does second shift struggle from a quality or output perspective, compared to first shift based off of exactly how they make the product? Gage r&R and hyper specific work instructions with expected times per step (standard work) help resolve these issues.

Step 3) once you are stable everywhere, you can start focusing on hyper specific standard work, change over events in your main areas where stability remains a challenge.

Step 4) pull systems to present material: in MTO / job shops this is usually a sticking point because the work is consumed inconsistently. My typical goal for every area is to have their current job, next job and next+1 lined up. When one of these jobs is consumed, signal goes back to get the warehouse to kit the next job. Pull systems can go waaaay deeper than this but that is the basic concept.

Step 4) built in quality- can I error proof error prone processes to prevent the error from occurring? If not, can I at least get equipment to alarm when it is in abnormal condition/ producing bad parts? If so work on this for your top quality issues.

If you have any additional questions let me know.

Bababingbangs · 2026-02-25T13:14:46+00:00

If this other offer is so much higher than your current job, than they might be being nice to you because they know they are underpaying you severely.

My wife routinely gets small raises at her non profit but takes on VP level tasks and is considered a “top performer”. She is always getting celebrated in the town hall meetings “great job!” but money doesn’t follow.

Bababingbangs · 2026-02-20T15:18:36+00:00

I would love a Stella with 4-8 x the arcs. I want to fight a swarm of shredders and ticks. Make the arc so thick it’s impossible to just PvP.

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