So much this. I am absolutely disgusted Green's attitude in response. Green, apparently, never was young, or arrogant, or inexperienced in dealing with work culture, and now stands wholly as a representative of some noxious company's status quo. She tells the fired intern that she "squandered" her opportunity. No, her opportunity was squashed by impatient arseholes eager to bully Millennials. Whelp, I guess learned an important lesson about just how respected their views will be, in their future workplaces! Or something.
Added: if they fire a whole group of interns to teach the group a lesson, why the hell did they have interns? They were, apparently, of no actual value to the company? In that case, the internships were effectively BS jobs to begin with.
Added 2: there are companies that still require women to wear heels? (TIL...)
Banding together with other interns and petitioning the company to change their culture is crazy levels of naive. As an intern, you are most likely a net-negative. At best, consider yourself on a long term interview. It's not the time to ask that the company change its culture. If you happened to get picked up by the company and find yourself in a job, it's still not the time. It's not a democracy. The business was built to make money and it was determined long before you got there that the dress code would help them achieve that goal. Unless you can put some money where your dumb petition is, your best hope is some extreme eye rolling.
It doesn't matter. The company doesn't need to justify their reasons for having a particular dress code.
If the interns placed so much stock in what they were required to wear during their internship, they should have asked about it during the interview, and withdrew themselves from consideration upon learning of the dress code.
But no, they felt that the company should change its policies to suit them. Because they're that darn special.
Why would I want to take an internship where I was considered a net-negative?
If the institution of learning that is placing these interns is slotting people into internships, and they are worth than useless -- net negatives, as you say -- where is that institution's accountability here?
Why would any intern walk into that situation? Why would a company take them on under those circumstances?
Sure, I would expect an intern to be very inexperienced, to need mentoring, to need training, but the idea is that I'd get free or nearly-free labor in exchange for some of this required mentoring and training... and potentially have some partially trained future employees in the pipeline.
It would be, I think, crazy to expect that interns walk in already completely hammered into the appropriately shaped pegs to slot into jobs.
I'd fire the person who fired the interns -- I mean, how much time and effort on the part of the people who arranged those internships, did that person waste by being a dick? How does it affect the department plans to get work done with these interns?
If the answer is "not at all," why the !@#$% do they take on interns? Some kind of tax break thing?
When I was an intern [sometime mumble mumble nineteen-eighty-mumble], I spent a year earning a tiny stipend and working crazy hours because I did tedious work that my organization wanted done but no one had time or inclination to do. I learned a lot, including how to work with people in my department, but I did not learn "I'm worthless and should never question authority because I'll be immediately fired."
And, p.s., I've worked with and supervised interns before in several different workplaces.
Many internships are not like what you did. Many require a lot of supervision but even if an intern is mostly shadowing a staff member, they'll be a net negative as the staff member will either work more slowly or take the time to explain what they're doing or what they did.
Some internships are basically a form of charity, the mild negative effect on everyday work is at least partially balanced by the longer term potential of an intern becoming a good candidate for a staff position or by the positive effect on reputation of taking such interns.
In my specific area, the interns are a net-negative for the time they're with us but when they work with another group, I think they're (minimally) a net positive.
This. As someone who hires interns, it takes a lot of time and effort to train them to be effective. It takes away our resources, and we're essentially PAYING them to train them. (I have not done unpaid internships). To have a bunch of know-it-alls think they will come in and make business decisions rather that focusing on learning and becoming effective speaks volumes of those people and they need to be removed. It's not about teaching a lesson. There's just no room for that if you want to be a well-oiled ship.
I honestly want to find out what company Alison Green works for just so I can remind myself to never ever work there. Any company that fosters that kind of attitude has a broken culture.
Edit: Honestly, reading the comments, I want to find out where all these people work and cross off all their employers as places I'll never even consider applying to. No open door policy == broken culture.
Alison Green is the advice columnist. She doesn't work for the company that fired the interns.
Personally, I think the fired interns were given a valuable life lesson, if they choose to learn something from it. If an employee wants to work for a company, it's incumbent upon them to adapt to the company's standards, not the other way around.
This, to me, is an example of the "special snowflake" mindset that colleges foster in students these days.
If you say that someone deserves to be fired because they gave management a proposal, I would not want to work for any company that would have you. Period.
Any company with a healthy culture has an open-door policy. I've never worked for a company that doesn't have an open-door policy, and I never will.
And "special snowflake" is a slur used to attack LGBT people 90% of the time.
Your sampling methodology leaves much to be desired.
Sarcastically calling people, especially young naive people, "snowflake" as a rejection of their projection of uniqueness or specialness has been around for decades. It's applied without sexual or gender connotations.
Example of alternate declarative form from Fight Club, "Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."
Okay, if you think name-calling tit for tat is the way to go. I'm not standing up for the tenets of fascism but consider "you're not a snowflake" to be one extreme to counter "every human is special" at another extreme. Both are facile.
Erm, as a queer woman, I have never seen that term used that way. In my experience, it's always used to target millenials, who actually expect the world to be more fair and less idiotic, and are going to be amazingly disappointed that life sucks a lot more than they thought once they graduate.
A proposal, which was a PETITION, made by interns, that have absolutely no capital with which to bargain, let alone demand via petition, over the company's culture. It's insane.
There is a big difference between an open-door policy and allowing a group of interns, most of which are a net-negative for the company while they are interns, to petition the company's leadership to change their culture. The intern writing the letter even stated that they had already had a conversation with their manager about it. Sounded like that convo went pretty well. "We appreciate your view, but no, the dress code is not changing". That is a good open door sounding culture.
"Special Snowflake" is pretty fitting here. You want to band together with fellow interns to make changes at the company with which you are interning? Make that company some money. That's why they are in business. That's what they will listen to. You are a "Special Snowflake" if the dress code is the sword you are going to fall on. It's nuts and these kids need to grow up.
There might very well be an open door policy in that company - apparently, all interns had talked to their managers about the issue, so managers are available.
Just because they were denied doesn't mean they weren't able to make their case.
Coming back with a piece of paper that essentially says "look how many we are, surely you're wrong and we're right" is aggravating, especially from interns who have no experience and would better spend their time trying to understand why things work a certain way rather than assume they're right.
Dismissing them is a bit harsh, but we don't really know how aggravating they were nor how much of management's time they wasted. If this whole thing turned into a 1 hour long meeting where they refused to be told no, then I might also have thought this particular bunch might be more trouble than they're worth.
When n (for n >= 2) interns are all told separately no, then gang up and demand more time and attention be devoted to their problem, a problem for which a reasonable decision has already been taken and made clear, it is aggravating.
You might have a much higher tolerance to your time being wasted than I do, and that probably does make you the better person. I can take a fair amount of rudeness, lateness and incompetence. Wasting what little time I have on matters that I have already made clear were not up for discussion though, that'll get to me.
> Who says the dress code is a reasonable decision?
I'll tell you who doesn't get to say whether it is or is not: interns (unless the dress code is illegal, but that doesn't appear to have been the case).
I call bs! The whole scenario appears to have been concocted in the mind of this columnist. Who fires a bunch of interns for a dress code petition? If this is true (and that's a big if), methinks these interns are better off not working at such a place.
The mere existence of such a strict dress code should have been already a warning sign against petitions, but yeah a greenhorn could not know this - millennial or not. It's very true that businesses should not be equated with democracies.
Now, what would I have done instead? Quit, heck, I wouldn't even have interviewed there (although I'm older so cannot compare). First of all I value input from everybody INCLUDING interns and secondly if I don't want the customer to see butt cracks there's no need to require the whole company to wear matching suits (aka, there are much milder ways).
Working for other people is a scam. The majority of 'employees' are never paid what they're worth. Employees are usually mistreated or taken advantage of, heck the entire 'internship' thing has become an exploitative form of slave labor.
I'm not surprised they were fired. The environment has become so toxic.
Slave labour? I assume you're talking about internship in the US, how does that work?
In France, I personally pay my interns (no great credit to me though, it's a legal obligation), give them a bonus (usually one month's wages) at the end of the internship unless their performance / attitude has been abysmal, and make sure I devote some of my time to training them (although to be faire it probably averages under 1h a day). It's probably not the best deal in the world, but I certainly wouldn't call slave labour...
It depends on the value the intern provides vs. the value the intern receives. In general, I think it's better for interns to receive some pay but money is not the only thing of value an internship can (or should) provide.
While I agree with you now, I recall being on the edge of tears when my very first internship concluded and my manager told me I'd already gotten paid in knowledge and should not expect cash on top of that. For the longest of times, I assumed the knowledge he was talking about was "managers are assholes".
You started an internship without knowing whether is was paid or not?!
"Managers are assholes" is not very valuable information, you can pick that up from sitcoms and Dilbert. But you can learn a lot from bad jobs and the mistakes of others, including managers.
Yeah, it was an internship with some friend of my parents. I don't believe there was a formal contract or that I read it if there was (but I was 16 and very naive).
The "managers are assholes" bit was meant as a joke, and I learned loads from that internship. It's just that when you're that young and self centered, you tend to see what you didn't get rather than what you did.
There might not be such a distinction in France. It was a summer job with some level of mentoring, which we just call "internship". It's entirely possible that this is what Americans would call an apprenticeship, my vocabulary is not wide enough to know for sure.
…and illegal in many countries, including the US unless “the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern” what I can hardly imagine it can realistically happen. http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.pdf
The 'intangible' things of value that internships supposedly provide are the exact same things that "entry level jobs" used to provide.
I've only been alive a few decades and I've seen the corporations convert "entry level jobs" into "internships" in that timespan. So it is exploitative and it is a form of slave labor.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 98.4 ms ] threadYes, a petition is really aggressive/s
Added: if they fire a whole group of interns to teach the group a lesson, why the hell did they have interns? They were, apparently, of no actual value to the company? In that case, the internships were effectively BS jobs to begin with.
Added 2: there are companies that still require women to wear heels? (TIL...)
Added 3: something something ACLU wrongful termination lawsuit something...
That's a big assumption to make. I doubt the company ever tested whether their business made more or less money without dress code.
If the interns placed so much stock in what they were required to wear during their internship, they should have asked about it during the interview, and withdrew themselves from consideration upon learning of the dress code.
But no, they felt that the company should change its policies to suit them. Because they're that darn special.
I'm confused by this.
Why would I want to take an internship where I was considered a net-negative?
If the institution of learning that is placing these interns is slotting people into internships, and they are worth than useless -- net negatives, as you say -- where is that institution's accountability here?
Why would any intern walk into that situation? Why would a company take them on under those circumstances?
Sure, I would expect an intern to be very inexperienced, to need mentoring, to need training, but the idea is that I'd get free or nearly-free labor in exchange for some of this required mentoring and training... and potentially have some partially trained future employees in the pipeline.
It would be, I think, crazy to expect that interns walk in already completely hammered into the appropriately shaped pegs to slot into jobs.
I'd fire the person who fired the interns -- I mean, how much time and effort on the part of the people who arranged those internships, did that person waste by being a dick? How does it affect the department plans to get work done with these interns?
If the answer is "not at all," why the !@#$% do they take on interns? Some kind of tax break thing?
When I was an intern [sometime mumble mumble nineteen-eighty-mumble], I spent a year earning a tiny stipend and working crazy hours because I did tedious work that my organization wanted done but no one had time or inclination to do. I learned a lot, including how to work with people in my department, but I did not learn "I'm worthless and should never question authority because I'll be immediately fired."
And, p.s., I've worked with and supervised interns before in several different workplaces.
Some internships are basically a form of charity, the mild negative effect on everyday work is at least partially balanced by the longer term potential of an intern becoming a good candidate for a staff position or by the positive effect on reputation of taking such interns.
In my specific area, the interns are a net-negative for the time they're with us but when they work with another group, I think they're (minimally) a net positive.
Edit: Honestly, reading the comments, I want to find out where all these people work and cross off all their employers as places I'll never even consider applying to. No open door policy == broken culture.
Personally, I think the fired interns were given a valuable life lesson, if they choose to learn something from it. If an employee wants to work for a company, it's incumbent upon them to adapt to the company's standards, not the other way around.
This, to me, is an example of the "special snowflake" mindset that colleges foster in students these days.
Any company with a healthy culture has an open-door policy. I've never worked for a company that doesn't have an open-door policy, and I never will.
And "special snowflake" is a slur used to attack LGBT people 90% of the time.
And haphazardly laying claim to a perjorative in order to impugn someone? Get over yourself.
Got a reference for that?
Sarcastically calling people, especially young naive people, "snowflake" as a rejection of their projection of uniqueness or specialness has been around for decades. It's applied without sexual or gender connotations.
Example of alternate declarative form from Fight Club, "Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes?item=qt0479117
So it's mainly uttered by fascists? (Tyler Durden is a textbook fascist) Sounds about right.
Proof by assertion?
There is a big difference between an open-door policy and allowing a group of interns, most of which are a net-negative for the company while they are interns, to petition the company's leadership to change their culture. The intern writing the letter even stated that they had already had a conversation with their manager about it. Sounded like that convo went pretty well. "We appreciate your view, but no, the dress code is not changing". That is a good open door sounding culture.
"Special Snowflake" is pretty fitting here. You want to band together with fellow interns to make changes at the company with which you are interning? Make that company some money. That's why they are in business. That's what they will listen to. You are a "Special Snowflake" if the dress code is the sword you are going to fall on. It's nuts and these kids need to grow up.
Just because they were denied doesn't mean they weren't able to make their case.
Coming back with a piece of paper that essentially says "look how many we are, surely you're wrong and we're right" is aggravating, especially from interns who have no experience and would better spend their time trying to understand why things work a certain way rather than assume they're right.
Dismissing them is a bit harsh, but we don't really know how aggravating they were nor how much of management's time they wasted. If this whole thing turned into a 1 hour long meeting where they refused to be told no, then I might also have thought this particular bunch might be more trouble than they're worth.
You might have a much higher tolerance to your time being wasted than I do, and that probably does make you the better person. I can take a fair amount of rudeness, lateness and incompetence. Wasting what little time I have on matters that I have already made clear were not up for discussion though, that'll get to me.
So aggressive and aggravating!/s
>a reasonable decision
Who says the dress code is a reasonable decision?
I'll tell you who doesn't get to say whether it is or is not: interns (unless the dress code is illegal, but that doesn't appear to have been the case).
Now, what would I have done instead? Quit, heck, I wouldn't even have interviewed there (although I'm older so cannot compare). First of all I value input from everybody INCLUDING interns and secondly if I don't want the customer to see butt cracks there's no need to require the whole company to wear matching suits (aka, there are much milder ways).
I'm not surprised they were fired. The environment has become so toxic.
In France, I personally pay my interns (no great credit to me though, it's a legal obligation), give them a bonus (usually one month's wages) at the end of the internship unless their performance / attitude has been abysmal, and make sure I devote some of my time to training them (although to be faire it probably averages under 1h a day). It's probably not the best deal in the world, but I certainly wouldn't call slave labour...
Unpaid internship. Aka exploitation.
"Managers are assholes" is not very valuable information, you can pick that up from sitcoms and Dilbert. But you can learn a lot from bad jobs and the mistakes of others, including managers.
The "managers are assholes" bit was meant as a joke, and I learned loads from that internship. It's just that when you're that young and self centered, you tend to see what you didn't get rather than what you did.
Of course not. But unpaid internship is always exploitation.
I've only been alive a few decades and I've seen the corporations convert "entry level jobs" into "internships" in that timespan. So it is exploitative and it is a form of slave labor.