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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

(oldvcr.blogspot.com)
511 points goldenskye | 3 comments | 01 Apr 25 07:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.607s | source
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glimshe ◴[01 Apr 25 12:11 UTC] No.43545801[source]▶
Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's time.

It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset to have wasted time doing something boring and useless.

Additionally, the scale of social media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN.

Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

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fkyoureadthedoc ◴[01 Apr 25 12:27 UTC] No.43545936[source]▶
All jobs I have ever worked have collectively wasted more man hours through incompetence and the usual corporate BS than I could ever hope to with any conceivable April fools joke.
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roenxi ◴[01 Apr 25 12:37 UTC] No.43546051[source]▶
The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour.

There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.

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circlefavshape ◴[01 Apr 25 14:04 UTC] No.43546933[source]▶
> There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad

Bollocks, and bollocks to the parent hot take. Any moral framework that forbids fun, whether it's because it offends God or "causes people (a tiny bit of) stress", is repugnant to me

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wat10000 ◴[01 Apr 25 15:08 UTC] No.43547703[source]▶
It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money. Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes. Now apply that to all the time spent by random people calling the main office, and by the main office fielding all those calls. It's one thing to cost your employer thousands of dollars because you made a mistake (I'm sure we've all been there), and quite another to cost your employer thousands of dollars with a prank.

You can't even make the (quite bad) defense that people should have known better and it's their own fault for falling for it. The message was 100% plausible.

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freehorse ◴[01 Apr 25 16:07 UTC] No.43548451[source]▶
> timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes

Not the best way to measure time imo.

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wat10000 ◴[01 Apr 25 16:59 UTC] No.43549046[source]▶
The whole point is to measure what really matters to the business, instead of measuring time.
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1. freehorse ◴[01 Apr 25 18:40 UTC] No.43550094[source]▶
Not every second of working time has the same level of productivity/value. Having a clock that measures time in dollars makes no sense because it assumes some linear relationship between them.
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2. krisoft ◴[01 Apr 25 19:14 UTC] No.43550379[source]▶
There is a very linear relationship between time and money for the one who pays the employees though.

Nobody says “you know boss, that two hour meeting today was a total waste of time, please deduct two hours worth of my salary from my paycheck”. So the company quite literally pays for everyone’s time who was at the meeting. And that is a function of who is present and how long the meeting goes. It is very much not a function of productivity/value.

And the point of having a, more often rethorical than real, taximeter showing the cost of the meeting puts this into perspective. The more people you invite the more the meeting costs. The longer it goes the more it costs. The goal is not to abolish all meetings, but to make people think if the bang to buck ratio of the meeting is right. To instill a culture where people prepare for meetings, they have concrete questions or decision outcomes they are looking for, and to criticaly think about the length of the meeting and right-size the invite list.

3. wat10000 ◴[01 Apr 25 19:24 UTC] No.43550456[source]▶
No, it assumes some linear relationship between pay and time. Which is a little iffy for salaried workers, but only a little.

My employer gets about 40 hours/week of "work" from me, whatever that might consist of. I cost them $X every two weeks in pay and benefits. It's pretty reasonable to say my attendance in a one-hour meeting has a $X/80 cost to my employer.

You don't need to overcomplicate this. The employment relationship is pretty simple at its foundation: the employer buys the time of its employees.