In which a bunch of privileged males cast judgement from their perches on someone who's clearly had to make some unpleasant choices, some of which may even have been poor ones.
Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
121–130 of 171 posts
Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
When my father died last year, I was immediately offered (without me even asking for) up to two weeks payed leave. And they didn't call me the next day to give me an ultimatum. Of course the company didn't care that my father died. No one outside of my team even knew. But my immediate supervisor did. And he did everything he could to help me get through. Because he's a human, not a corporate drone. However deep or sh…
> When my father died last year I'm sorry. :( > I was immediately offered (without me even asking for) up to two weeks payed leave. That was really good of them. My hope is that the author (and everyone) will choose to work for a company that would be as good to her as yours was to you. But a job is just an offer. The employer can't ensure that the offer makes sense for any individual's situation. I personally think…
> I look for whether or not they were deceptive or failed to hold up their end of the deal.
Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we made a list of every large company that violated a reasonable code of human morality.. the wheel was spun and today's public outrage is at Yelp. This stuff happens all the time. Sure we get outraged at the random story we come across every now and then, but largely we are numb to it. I just think the most valuable thing we can do to prevent these situations is have deeper discussions on the macro level instead…
I'm British and living in the UK, so under law I can't be fired for taking time off for an emergency with any of my dependents, and I'm entitled to "parental leave" for things like appointments[1]. This is the absolute minimum I would expect a country to afford its citizens. This is how this problem should be dealt with at the macro level. I find it saddening to see the micro-level impact of not having these sorts of…
But how a company handles it's legal obligations is also interesting. When my father died the company that employed me at the time said, essentially, "Go away and come back when you feel ready". This despite the fact that the only other member of my direct team was the other side of the world and there was no one with domain expertise was available so it would have been infuriating for them to cover support. There was certainly no mention of statutory pay or anything.
They also let me leave on multiple occasions at short notice in the preceeding years when he was ill.
Their being incredibly generous with compassionate leave allowed me to deal with the personal stuff without worrying about money/job stuff. It also meant that I worked remotely, covered support, and generally made sure that everything ran as smoothly as possible.
These choices make business sense, as well as being the decent thing to do.
Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is possible that she has a long history of staying absent from work. She did. She'd only been working there from December, used up all her sick-days while still in training, and missed even more days in the following months. One time she missed work because she couldn't find her car keys. It sounds like her manager got fed up and that was the end of it. Being a single parent is hard.
> One time she missed work because she couldn't find her car keys. You mean she was late because her 3 yr old child hid her keys in the hopes of spending more time with his mother. Completely unacceptable indeed.
>Completely unacceptable indeed.
Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#125Is "single mother" some kind of minority status she keeps repeating at every sentence?
It does smack a bit of "my problems are more important than yours" attitude. The same kind of judgmental tone can be seen in other parts too:
>I am the single mother who closed two deals with a fever during winter “break” while my co-workers took their days off for fun. I worked through and paced my time off into half days bc I knew I needed to save up my time off.
Why does she care what her coworkers use their time off for? Everyone gets the same amount of vacation and they can use it for whatever they damn well please, that's none of her business.
Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it...
Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well Yelp didn't vote for her to be a single mom, or for her BF to go on a risky outdoor activity to get injured, or for her to take a loan @ 300% interest (lol wat?). For some reason people seem to think they deserve special treatment for the choices that they made that didn't turn out so well. Yelp is a company. Its relation with her is that of business, service in exchange for currency on agreed upon work conditio…
Exactly my thoughts. Also I don't understand the "single mom" part. Society does not owe any special treatment to a single mom, not more than any other mom. Single mother is a choice of an independent woman and if she cant afford it she should probably not make it. Instead of being thankful for an employer to have given an opportunity in first place she is ranting against her employer, this is going to make it diffic…
I prey that in your hour of need, that the person able to help does not think like you.
Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
And of course the fundamental fact that she chose to work here and that a slave did not have a choice, except to not obey his master and be beaten or murdered.
A slave could have chosen not to work and would have been beaten. She could have chosen not to work and wouldn't have been able to feed herself and her children. To me this looks like a situation which is at least related. Not exactly the same, but not completely different.
A slave can't chose to work somewhere else though. She could chose to work somewhere else with cheaper conditions.
Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#128Not to distract from the content of the piece, but she took a 300% loan? THREE HUNDRED PERCENT? Could she have gotten a better loan? I'm under the impression that most banks offer loans at more reasonable rates. Also, how is Yelp able to retain salespeople in the Bay Area if they pay only $2k/month? The salary is clearly under the cost of living. On topic: please don't let all the particularities of this case distrac…
Maybe it's $2k basic before commission (as sales salaries are often largely composed of commission), and that fact wasn't disclosed in this post?
So, she was selling $19k worth of stuff, and claimed she was doing a good job (let's assume she's correct). Her income was $2k.
So that means ~10% of Yelp's revenue is going to salespeople. Is that normal? Do salespeople normally take 10% of every sale?
Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#129> I am the single mother who closed 17K in month one and 19K in month two. This needs more context. Is this amount of sales considered incredible, very good, average, below average or significantly below average in Yelp world? It's one thing if the author was a top-notch performer terminated for family circumstances beyond her control, it would be a different story if she was under-performing, perhaps on internal pro…
If she was a top-notch performer Yelp would have bent over backwards to keep her around. The fact that they didn't would imply that the trouble of keeping her is less than the cost of firing her, which says a lot about the performance of an employee.
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Re: Yelp Fired a Single Mother Today: Me
#130> I am the single mother who closed 17K in month one and 19K in month two. I am the single mother who gets to see her son for a few hours a night, pays $2500 in rent (I make 2k a month so YES, my family has to help and I am so sorry to burden them), pays $1200 a month in daycare (#yelpcares — no subsidy there) I'm not experienced in sales...but how is this a good deal for the author, nevermind tenable? This, plus the…
Ada Lovelace was upper-class.