August 20, 2009 at 11:44 am
Steve Jones - Editor (8/20/2009)
I tend to agree with Jason here. What you do on your time off, really isn't the business of your employer, provided you are not representing them. You shouldn't volunteer in a company shirt and bad mouth your company, but you ought to be able to explore other opportunities.
I used to work for a company where the manager wanted to know what I was going to be doing on my "personal" day so she could decide whether the company's needs were getter than mine for that day.
I refused and told her it was PERSONAL. This resulted in her taking it up with her manager my bad attitude.
August 20, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Jason and Steve, here in Australia it is often written into employment contracts/is a condition of employment, that you do not take any other paid employment at the same time without getting your present employer's OK. I guess many people just wouldn't tell them and hope it was never found out. Most employers though are pretty good if you discuss it with them. You may be using skills that your employer has paid for you to develop and they probably feel that they should benefit from that not others. I have taken on other paid employment occasionally and it hasn't been a problem. Different labour laws give rise to different attitudes and conditions of employment I guess. I certainly don't believe that anyone should have to discuss personal aspects of their life with their employer unless they choose to do so. But I wasn't talking about that, only about taking a second job. Hope that's a little clearer.
PS This has nothing to do with volunteering, companies here encourage that.
Nicole Bowman
Nothing is forever.
August 20, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Nicole Bowman (8/20/2009)
Jason and Steve, here in Australia it is often written into employment contracts/is a condition of employment, that you do not take any other paid employment at the same time without getting your present employer's OK. I guess many people just wouldn't tell them and hope it was never found out. Most employers though are pretty good if you discuss it with them. You may be using skills that your employer has paid for you to develop and they probably feel that they should benefit from that not others. I have taken on other paid employment occasionally and it hasn't been a problem. Different labour laws give rise to different attitudes and conditions of employment I guess. I certainly don't believe that anyone should have to discuss personal aspects of their life with their employer unless they choose to do so. But I wasn't talking about that, only about taking a second job. Hope that's a little clearer.PS This has nothing to do with volunteering, companies here encourage that.
Flip the coin. You could also learn and develop skills on the second job that the primary employer benefits from as well. My take is that as long as you don't work for a competitor it shouldn't be a problem.
August 20, 2009 at 8:10 pm
The purpose of the probationary period is to see if the employee is a good match. It also gives the employee a period where he/she can evaluate the company. Having this 2-day tryout is fashionable for some types of jobs where the skills can't be easily evaluated or the job position is not set and they just want to see which of candidates they have might not work out. But for DBA positions, if the resume, the interview, and the probationary period are not sufficient then no 2-day tryout will.
August 21, 2009 at 7:37 am
First all I love my job and hope to retire here. On that note, I would not trust an employer that wanted me to work for a week as a contractor to determine if they are happy with me. I have had a problem where I was not honest in an interview and I would expect that from an employer as well. Why would anyone give up a job without another great opportunity to go to. We all have families to feed and that is just too risky.
Trust your decision and work with a new employee if you see a problem. Do your homework before you hire and its a safe bet you will get a good employee.
August 21, 2009 at 9:00 am
I have a problem with the two days.
If you have a task that can be picked and meaningful work accomplished in only two days, you REALLY should be outsourcing that work. If the work is too sensitive to be outsourced, you really shouldn't hand it to a new/temp hire either.
October 28, 2009 at 1:41 pm
bob_silenzi (8/21/2009)
Do your homework before you hire and its a safe bet you will get a good employee.
Sounds like some sort of strange magic to me. I can't imagine how to do the right homework. I can get it right most of the time (have done nearly all the time - but not quite all the time; and my bosses and I might differ as to which times I got it wrong [once they though I was right and I know I was wrong; once they thought I was wrong and I think I was right]).
When you are hiring experienced people, you can probably get some idea of what they have done (but, at least in the UK, references from a previous employer are generally meaningless - and references from current employer are even worse) and if any of their former colleagues are in your personal network you may even be able to get some idea of their attitudes to work, how they get on with other prople and so on; but you can't know they'll fit your team until you've had them for a while, and you can't really know if they are genuinely competent to the standards that you require until you see some of their work.
Hiring juniors/trainees is even harder: the guy has got a degree from a good school, it's a good degree - first class honours (summa cum laude if it was an American school), good reference from his tutors/supervisors at the University, good school record, was class preseident in his final year, interviews well, so you hire him; and then perhaps you discover that he thinks his degree entitles him to a good salary for which he needn't bother to work, that he already knows it all so doesn't need to learn anything new, and that he regards the other employees as boring old men (even the ones only a year older than him) except for the female ones, whom he assumes are office bicycles. Pass him around several different departments to see if any of your team leaders/managers can get him to understand that he needs to improve, or get him excited bythe intellectual challenge of the job; and end up conducting a termination interview before the end of his probation period.
From the other sie of the fence - well, a trial period or a probationary period wouldn't bother me - I might even consider it a good thing. Most jobs in Europe have a probationary period anyway. My various employers mostly haven't been concerend about other employment, so taking a couple of days off for a trial period wouldn't be an issue. But I consider job hunting a horrible bore, so usually I've just let my friends know I'm free and waited for someone to call or email - much more restful, and has led to some really fun jobs with lots of responsibilities, lots of opportunities to learn new things, and even sometimes total freedom to run things the way I want to. Right now I'm not working, and haven't made my mind up whether I'll work again just to keep my hand in and carry on learning new things or retire - going to take a rest until next May anyway (actually spend three months of that on an intensive course in Spanish, plus I'll do a few other not very restful things) and see what I feel like then. ANd of course play on my toy computer (which will knock anyything I've ever had on my desk at work into a cocked hat, so no problem running MS SQL and VS and ....).
Tom
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