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Not sure if relevant to you, but I came to tech from manual labor in the midwest, so my work ethic was probably skewed. I found my team incredibly whiny and rather lazy. I fired the laziest one after catching him sleeping for the however many'th time.

Not long after, I realized I was setting expectations way too high and had the 'time to lean time to clean' mindset too fresh in my head. I regret being such a brainwashed hardass, and firing that guy, and hope he landed on his feet elsewhere.




What do you mean by "sleeping"?


Physically fall asleep in his chair, usually on quiet mornings.

It might sound bad on paper, but all the crap I've seen since WFH and forced COVID WFH since makes that look and feel extremely benign.


Not to make you feel worse, but falling asleep at work can be caused by a health issue, for example sleep apnea. In the future I would recommend approaching this with your employee as a health issue first rather than as a laziness issue.

Manual labor is usually paid hourly with bonuses for overtime. Unless you're keeping a close eye on the workload to make sure not only the entire team but also each team member is treated fairly, you can expect people to do things that resemble slacking off, to manage their own workload. If you randomly require the whole team to work weekends, the person who put in a solid 40 hours during the week loses out compared to the person who left early when they could. If the whole team is sometimes required to stay until 6 or later to fix some crisis, the person who shows up at 9 sharp every day loses out compared to the person who drifts in around 9:30 or 10.


IDK man, straight-up sleeping at work sounds pretty wild lol, unless, as the other poster mentioned, it was the symptom of a real health issue.


My Dad is straight up the biggest work-a-holic I've ever met. Constantly works 12-16 hour days, weekends, etc. Says he loves it. Came out of retirement to work more. I don't understand it but he's happy.

I got some of my friends jobs at work through him and it got brought up to me that he fell asleep at work quite a lot. Was hard to hide because he snored really loud. Was pretty embarrassing to me. Either way, long story short, he had exactly what the other poster was talking about sleep apnea. Got diagnosed, got a c-pap(?) device and guess what, no more falling asleep at work. Probably saved his life as well, as he's already had a heart surgery.

Either way, I pretty sure he's the most non-lazy person I've ever been around. :)




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