The Water Cooler

Q: boss slapping me due to calc error

2:13 PM

@NickC My point is there was nothing constructive asked in the question. What should I do in this situation is not constructive. What are the consequenses of doing X given my situation is a much better question. Or even something I want to take X action or I am trying to choose between X and Y What are the pros and cons etc

Jim G.

@Chad Just starred this comment because I agree 100%.

7

I was slapped in the face by my boss. Me male. She female. My Excel file had an error in the calculation. Ok, so I messed up. But to be slapped. I fixed it and saved it out to the network. If I complain I guess I will just get fired. But I don't want to work for someone like this. How should I ta...

^^^ Does anyone remember how much energy we spent on this one? And guess what? The OP withdrew his information from the account!

Q: Importance (and flexibility) in Job Title Presented in Job-offer

2:33 PM

@BenBrocka are you talking about this?

10

Situation In a job offer a job title is specified. This may be something which likely appears everywhere - whether company email address books or your email signature or on your resume. From my experience, your title can oftentimes affect how receptive and prompt other employees are to helpin...

negotiation job-offer title

I mean no offense, but I'm surprised that an owner of a consulting company would have to ask this question. — Fernando 1 hour ago

That post was made to a new user and had nothign to do to making the post better... I flagged it

@enderland No, there was some other "what title is this" or "what does this title do" question(s) that were far more specific

Q: Answers quality in hot questions

"an employee who has slept with my wife..." is top hottest at Stack Exchange for quite a while, much hotter than anything else...

3

For few recent months, I've got a habit of downvoting answers which quality doesn't look OK to me. These probably can be generally described as low effort and/or these lacking relevance to question asked. Opinionated slogans, claims that are not backed up by appropriate references or by ...

discussion answer-quality

...The way things work now helps to attract new contributors but I would appreciate if achieving this honorable, important goal **(1,

2, 3) would somehow be less damaging for good, highly visible questions.

@gnat There's a reason I always protected those and deleted the worst of the worst answers. Wish more people would downvote on them though

The big problem is most of the people arriving on those Qs can only upvote, so it's even more important that the regulars of the site downvote where appropriate

2

at Programmers we often have this kind of sex unprotected :(

2:44 PM

@BenBrocka Yeah but we dont have our beloved dictator to do that anymore :(

And unless an answer is negative we can not vote to delete... and unfortunately answers like You should send him to timbuktoo get upvotes galore.

Oh wow it's still the hottest question by almost 200 points

Too bad we cant add a tag that would keep it off the hot list

Personally I think that question is a good one for the site, and think its great that its drawing so many new users to the site :)

@Chad Only closure kicks it off there. It's not all bad, it does get some more people interested in the site. It's just always a turbulent event. Though it'd be nice to have a way to be viral that's more "read only"; hopefully a blog would be good for that

It's like having a highly-viewed youtube video. Sure the popularity is awesome but...the comments.

(Youtube comments aren't all bad by the way, but when a video gets popular it can be very tempting to disable commenting entirely. I think I've only done it once though...)

2:59 PM

@gnat we totally had this discussion yesterday. I downvote a LOT of answers on those sorts of questions

@BenBrocka This is also true. I think those of us here (in particular) need to be more willing to downvote all answers which don't meet the FAQ requirements for good answers... :)

@Chad That guy consistently acts like an @#% on here in my opinion. Meh.

Q: Why are romantic relationships with someone who works under you discouraged?

3:18 PM

Does this edit address the reason this question got closed in the first place?

-2

I run a small company and am wondering what the consequences are of starting up a romantic relationship with one of my employees, and how it will affect my business and relationship with other employees. I know romantic relationships with people who work under you are discouraged, however why ar...

work-environment relationships

3:30 PM

@Rachel Certainly a better question

@enderland That's a big part of why I wanted to get something, anything in the FAQ about answer quality. Subjective is fine, but we need some metric to measure quality against.

Q: Dress Code - Permitting Only Certain Sport Affiliation

0

My workplace is in Maryland, and for tomorrow a rule has been placed that we may dress casually, if only in purple (the color of the Baltimore Ravens, an American Football team). It is permissable for HR to enforce this requirement that affiliation must fall within a certain group to be permitted...

dress-code

what is the question here? "is it permissible" <-- yes.

Yeah I don't see the point of that one, seems more like a very calm rant (this is dumb, right?)

4:38 PM

@BenBrocka I think what it really means to ask is "Is it OK for me to make a big fuss over this dress-code rule?"

5:19 PM

@Rachel I was thinking it was more than that. But it is unclear I have asked the op to clarify. I think the problem is there is no problem to solve. If he says why it is a problem and what his problem is then it shoudl be constructive... Though I suspect he is just not a ravens fan.

As an aside I once had a boss at an ISP in the late 90's that fired a support guy for wearing Green Bay packers stuff :p

Q: We're rolling out a new "Quick Start" guide to help new users learn the basics

workplace.stackexchange.com/about-new

22

Here's the first one, on Ask Different. We've been working hard on ways to help improve the experience of new users, and one of the best ways to do that is to help teach them the basics about how our sites work before they run afoul of them. This will improve their odds of having a good first e...

feature-request status-completed new-users

holy obnoxious guide

So I'm the only one who likes it?

I like it except the sliding and the choice of questions so far

I don't like UI stuff moving on me as I scroll

but maybe that's my HCI backbround...

5:28 PM

movement-on-scroll seems pretty popular with conversational home pages these days

geocities was once popular too ;-)

2

Yeah, I get the point of it, it just seems really over-eager

@enderland Yeah, I'm not saying that's proof that it is effective, but there does seem to be a correlation between quality design (in other senses) and the technique

I like the idea of the page, but I find it very confusing with all the things sliding around and dragging my attention all over the page

It's definitely not browsable, it's designed to be linear, but it's still a web page and does'nt force linearreading

5:55 PM

On the plus side Workplace's auto-picked question for about-new (it's selected by the computer) isn't nearly as bad as most sites'

Q: Why are romantic relationships with someone who works under you discouraged?

6:26 PM

0

I run a small company and am wondering what the consequences are of starting up a romantic relationship with one of my employees, and how it will affect my business and relationship with other employees. I know romantic relationships with people who work under you are discouraged, however why ar...

work-environment relationships

I wish i could vote to close again

you can't?

no

6:54 PM

@Chad is it a time limit? BTW feel free to comment again. I cleaned up the comments that pertained to an earlier version.

It is a list question now

@NickC Because I voted to close it once already

woohoo we have a its actually no bad answer in the list...

@Chad It was a list question before

@BenBrocka YEs there is no real difference in the question other than the words

7:30 PM

@Chad I don't think asking why something happens is a list question. Sure the answer might consist of multiple parts, however I would not consider that a "list question"

7:41 PM

@Rachel why-part feels OK by as far as I can Chad refers to: "what the consequences are of starting up a romantic relationship with one of my employees, and how it will affect" - this might probably read as list request

I wouldn't worry about it until it starts on its 2nd page of answers :) Most of the current answers seem good, and we can always slap a "protected" notice on it to prevent any of the "I have something minor to add" answers

have to admit, improvements you made to question title and its last paragraph made it hard to me to notice that list-part

while it's low-traffic, there is a good chance that other readers will also tend to overlook list-part and keep focused on why-part

Q: I crashed a rental car on a company trip

0

I was sent to another state for 2 weeks where I was told to rent a car using my own credit card and decline insurance. (Our corporate credit cards had expired the week before so I needed to use my own). I ended up getting into an accident (my fault) and totaled the car. It turns out, my company...

employer-relations human-resources

any reason this question should remain open?

@Rachel It'd be nice if we had the ability to auto-put "protected" on any question with "sex" "affair" or a similar list of words in the question or title...

man, I hate it when bad questions pick up bad answers before they are closed...

8:05 PM

@Rachel You are nto asking why something is happening you are asking for a list of reason why something is bad.

If the list was definite then I would have less of a problem but it is not definate and based on at least one answer its not even definitive that it is bad at all.

@gnat No they think hey i have a reason not on your list and i need to post an answer too.

And then someone says hey if that question is acceptable so is mine then whines in meta when it gets closed and points to that broken window question

8:57 PM

The question is now a give me a list of reasons why i shouldnt date someone who works for me. That is no better than what are the problems with it. — Chad 2 hours ago

So... an answer of "because I'm heterosexual and only have same-gender reports" would not be a good answer?

@Chad I think I understand, it's like getting a "list of reasons". Well, that's a slippery thing but I would not immediately render it bad. It may be bad mind you, I just am not sure. In cases like that I'd rather wait and see how it goes (as opposed to you I still can down- and close-vote it, I just don't hurry)...

having more than one (even more than five, or even ten) relevant answers somehow doesn't necessarily scare me. I tend to believe that in some cases...

...some good questions could be presented so that their wording does "guide" the various answers coming from different perspectives, helping them converge into useful body of knowledge instead of diverging into garbage bits of unrelated advice

that kind of "converging list" doesn't scare me

For the sake of precision I haven't seen this happen often; more typical case is either there's one right answer or wildly wrong uncontrolled list

in that sense that's a risky affair, yes

9:16 PM

one thing I like about answers giving reasons is these give me a way to request author to make an effort. I feel this is why "why-questions" feel relatively safe to me. I mean,...

...say, lazy poster answers with a one-liner "this is bad because of blah-blah". Without any substantial effort on my side I post a comment "Why do you think blah-blah is bad?"... and, in most cases, downvote. This puts the author in a position when...

...they have either give an explanation (which is 80% of a good answer, recall the FAQ answers that explain why - here's both explain and why), or live with my downvote, which due to easy understandable comment leaves an answer less chances to get upvote plus has a good chance to get doubled / tripled etc by other readers

that works in the direction I want, with little effort on my side, what can be better? List questions are risky, true, but list-of-reasons are less so

Q: How can I professionally resolve this disagreement about insurance liability with my company?

@enderland I took a shot at editing it, but I'm still not too sure if it qualifies for reopening. What do you think?

-1

My company sent me to another state for 2 weeks where I was told to rent a car while I was there. Since our corporate credit cards had expired the week before, they told me to use my own credit card, and decline insurance since it was covered under their corporate agreement. I ended up getting ...

employer-relations human-resources

I wanted to try and focus more on how to act professionally in such a large-scale disagreement that may result in parting ways with the company