IT Employment

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Honor and honesty

0 helpful
5 replies

by dylan teo 1 view

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

Recent discussion has been targetting on the employee loyalty, contractors honoring promises and general character of the employees.

The character of your employees has been put under the spot light. But has it occurred to the hiring manager thatthe person has a problem with the methods of hire employed.

Most employers will hang a carrot to entice a willing person. But once the person has joint the organisation, the carrot vanishes like a mirage.

Many felt cheated, some organisation entice people by promising greater responsibility and role to the person but when he/she is in, the job scope went through a funnel.

The recent discussion about a contractor not promising to fulfill his promise of 2 weeks. Let me put the question to the hiring manager, did he delivered what he promised the contractor.

Honor is like 2 way NT domain trust feature. It cannot be a single direction. With honor comes honesty, then your staff will open up to you. Show more care and welfare to yourstaffs.

The action of management goes a long way in bringing the peace and harmony of the organisation. If honor and honesty are values that does not have a place in our society then why was it taught in our education system. And why when peopleleft school they never practice these time tested qualities.

I hope the new technological advances has not brought about a regression in human qualities. I believe there is still plenty of room that many management personnel need to improve on.

5 replies

by ebob

...on Dilbert.com there was a discussion about "how do you justify giving short notice when you quit to go somewhere else".

A recurring theme was: "they" don't find it required to give "me" any notice when "they" fire "me", so "I" will give "them" the same respect.

The discussion spread out and basically covered your thoughts here: that what the employer wants out of the employee has to balanced with what the employee wants to get out of this relationship. As well as "wants", the relationship also has to cover "needs" and the ability of both parties to commit and to deliver.

by doug22

This bring to mind a situation I faced--what do you do when you are given a project with supposedly a hard and fast timeline and find out later that resources were going to be pulled anyway with no recourse of replacement? They are many other situations, too, that management fall through on. How do you handle management's support?

by dylan teo

I don't know the employment market is like in US.
It is my understanding in Asia, employers expect employees to be slaves of the company.

It was to my surprise that I went to a recent interview at Citibank in Singapore where the manager in the engineering department was so adamantly biased against Singaporean.

I found out the reason being that he is verbally abusive and only foreign employees will take the dishing out from him due to contract obligations.

He basically invalidate any past experience, or cv. He told me that a job would take Asian 1 day to perform will require 3 days from American, 4 days for Europeans. Basically,it is a given. Asians are more subjugated. It blows my mind that a big corporation would hire such a racist and biased person in their organisation.

The basic drive now in the employment market is just cheap labour. Experience and skillset be damned. In Asia especially, certification is what employers look for. Pioneers like me are deemed unsuitable now because with experience and without certification we are viewed as no value to the organisation.

The employers forgotten that without pioneers like us, there would not be a market. Maybe I am ranting but executives, management and employers have to rethink what have become of their organisation. Outsourcing, certified in experience IT staff. What is your perfromance level and is the organisation delivering the required SLA.

As for management, due to the command now falls on the employer. I had a recent encounter with a British executive, AP Director for a European IT company. I asked a question regarding employment and opportunities for contractors. His reply was " Contractors, we hire we fire. No thinking needed."

Imagine, the kind of mentality and characters that have infiltrated into the executive level these days. Hardly people that working level people would put in 110% for the organisation.

Employers and interviewers got to think also that the person you are interviewing could be your customer like me, a customer of Citibank service. While you are being interviewed, the interviewee is also observing you, your character and the corporate value and culture through your presentation and body language.

by the admiral

I generally start managing the system down to closure. I don't keep trying to make it look like the project is going to succeed. I start winding down everything so that the plug can be pulled.

by the admiral

I think that you are addressing two issues in your note. First one is the honesty of the contractor, and the second one is the loyalty of the contractor to your company.

First, honesty and honor are two seperate items. Honesty to their employer is all they are required to perform, not the client to which they are contracted to. That is a major problem that HR has in that contractors need to show loyalty to the client and be honest with the client, when in fact the people who cut the check is the only people they need to be loyal, honest, and honorable to. If this is a problem for the HR, then perhaps they need to hire a employee to perform the job than trust contractors. When I walk into a client, I am responsible for getting a job done, NOT HONEST to them at all, I am required to be HONEST to MY COMPANY and not theirs.

Second, Loyalty is not an issue in a contractor/client relationship. If I had to be honest to only one company, then I would have only one client. So the loyalty is only to the one who cuts the checks, and that is called into question if they cut your pay, or do other stupid things that casts their loyalty to their employees into doubt.

This discussion is closed to new replies.