G Martin 87 said:
Burdizzo said:
Victimhood is an excuse for failure. It goes back to that mantra of racism and low expectations. Of you can blame someone else for your own lack of success, it gets you off the hook for exerting effort.
I work in a STEM field where the laws of science, math, and physics are the foundation for work products that impacts public safety. If you screw up in my field someone might die. The cultural expectation is that you know your fundamentals well enough for people not to die. When I would write performance reviews on poor performing employees, you could always count on about 2/3 of them disputing their bad reviews and blaming it on some sort of discrimination or cultural bias. We would then show them where their mistakes put people at risk.
When you work in a liberal arts science where there is no risk to human life, you can pretty much get away with saying anything you want, and someone will buy your bovine scat.
My BIL was an air traffic controller, and a damn good one. He was supervising a shift and heard one of the less experienced ATCs give directions to a flight that could have caused a mid-air collision on approach. He took over, corrected the mistake, and then pushed for the young ATC to be removed from duty. He had enough seniority to make it stick, but it led to retirement. You can guess the rest of the story. Protecting employees on the basis of minority class over competency can have life and death consequences. Next time, my BIL won't be around to intervene.
Wow, this is crazy and scary. A few years ago, One incident that took place at my work was an IT guy was asked to reboot some servers or something of that nature. He ended up screwing up and ended up shutting down and deleting a good portion of work emails.
I never got the full story of how that happened but the shocking thing was that he never took responsibility for it. As his other colleagues were working furiously to try and remedy the situation. They were putting in long hours to get the email server back up and running. This joker never put in the work to fix his mistake. In fact, he left early. Needless to say, he was fired pretty quickly. It wasnt because he made the mistake, but because he wouldn't take ownership.
Scary to think that if that happened today, what he would have gotten away with. My hope is that our company would still do the right thing.