“There’s the door.”

In a former job of mine I attended an IT All Hands meeting where they announced starting at the beginning of the new year the whole department will be on an on-call rotation. Immediately hands went up with a myriad of questions. Will be trained on the products we’ll be supporting? No. Will we be compensated for our time after hours? No. Will we get a company phone to use for on-call? No. Where does it say in our job descriptions that we have to be on-call? Right here (pointing at a vague one sentence in all our job descriptions.) After all our questions were NOT answered the manager presenting this new burden to our jobs ended with this, “If you don’t like it? There’s the door.” In the weeks to come we lost 25% of the personnel in our department.

There was a time where “There’s the door” was a threat. During that era workers were limited in their options and I they chose the door they could wind up unemployed indefinitely. But now a days this is an idle threat by a boss who doesn’t realize if the employee chooses the door it opens to the entire world. Remote work has opened an enormous number of opportunities for workers. These doors are not just open to digital workers either. Manual labor, service industry etc. all have positions to fill and are more than willing to take on more help. No longer do workers have to stay in a job with long hours, horrible bosses, lousy work environments and poor wages. They can pretty much go wherever they want, and its high time bosses get on board with that notion!

Recently our team hired a couple of VERY junior developers right out of school. These kids have no job experience at all, and chances are never had to deal with real world consequences for not getting your work done. Being GREEN developers, they were still ramping up and completed minimal work in their first sprint. I can only imagine being new at the job they didn’t want to screw up or tell anyone they didn’t know something. Especially our lead developer who just assumes anyone is stupid right out of the gate then treats them as such or our boss who has all the warmth of a frozen fish stick. Needless to say, our retrospective didn’t go well where our boss put up a general warning, “If you’d rather not participate on the team, we can have a conversation about that.” Which was basically a watered-down version of “…there’s the door.”  One of our junior developers quit that afternoon and the other was on the edge of leaving. I understood where my boss was coming from, work wasn’t getting done and he would have to explain to his boss the two people HE HIRED weren’t up for the challenge yet. But he also shouldn’t have been surprised when one of his junior developers whom he hired quit after his little ultimatum. It’s time for management to realize it’s a whole new world out there. Your intimidation and measly threats of forcing people into the office, monitoring their laptops to see how productive they are or telling people, “If you don’t like it…” You’ll be left in an empty office with no one to push around anymore. It gets lonely in the high tower.