Is it harder to be fired at a big company?

My coworker work for Lockheed Martin and she is under performing. She knows the very bare minimum and always make mistakes. So is it harder for big company to fire their employees in fear that the employee would sue them? What piss me off is that she's at a higher level than I am and I do the twice the work that she does.

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Comments

Devilry

I think in some ways its easier, because you are just a number to them.

But then again easier to fire at a small company for underperformance.

kingslayer

I would say the more 'generic' the technologies you work with, the more replaceable you are.

If your job involves imaging PCs and configuring Windows server, anyone can do that.

But if your company makes its own applications and you support those then your knowledge is very valuable to the company.

Psoasman

There are several factors involved here. It depends, among other things, on the union agreements, what kind of work is being done and do those mistakes cost the company money. Does this person "know someone high up"?
There are a lot of qualified people out of work now, so it pays to increase your skills, education, and work hard.

SteveLord

What does a lawsuit have to do with someone underpeforming? I am sure Lockheed Martin's legal team wouldn't break a sweat.

Everyone

If it is a government contract you're working on, and a security clearance is involved... that is one way people get away with stuff like that when working for a large company (I worked for Lockheed for a few years myself). Her skills may be easy to replace, but finding someone with the same skills that also happens to have a security clearance is much harder.

dave330i

SteveLord wrote: »

What does a lawsuit have to do with someone underpeforming? I am sure Lockheed Martin's legal team wouldn't break a sweat.

If this person has some sort of disability, then she becomes almost impossible to fire. Doesn't matter how great the legal team is.

hiddenknight821

dave330i wrote: »

If this person has some sort of disability, then she becomes almost impossible to fire. Doesn't matter how great the legal team is.

Okay, now I feel obliged to ask. If that claim is true, then how does this person gets away with it? I would love to hear what you have to say, because I'm hard of hearing, and I don't quite get it.

xenodamus

I've worked in some larger environments where canning somebody was all about documentation. If they aren't doing anything huge to bring attention to themselves, you have to regularly document when they fail to perform and you have a coaching/counseling session with them. You just have to be able to prove you had legitimate reason.

Tackle

passcert23 wrote: »

My coworker work for Lockheed Martin and she is under performing. She knows the very bare minimum and always make mistakes. So is it harder for big company to fire their employees in fear that the employee would sue them? What piss me off is that she's at a higher level than I am and I do the twice the work that she does.

I would say that it is harder for a big company to fire someone. I'm in a small business right now (60 people total). Only myself and my boss as far as IT goes. He supports most of our proprietary software, I handle the servers and workstations. If I screw up, everyone knows who to blame. In a bigger company, if you are part of a team it'd be harder to point a finger at just a single person for failing.

I know it'd be very easy to replace me, but I try my best to go above and beyond what is expected of me. Try to gain some soft of job security.

MrRyte

The size of the company should be irrelevant.

The immediate supervisor should be aware of the employee's performance. If the employee isn't meeting performance standards or is doing something detrimental to the bottom line then the action(s) should be documented.
The more documentation you have regarding the employee's performance the more secure your foundation for termination IF and when the time comes.

WafflesAndRootbeer

hiddenknight821 wrote: »

Okay, now I feel obliged to ask. If that claim is true, then how does this person gets away with it? I would love to hear what you have to say, because I'm hard of hearing, and I don't quite get it.

It's really a case-by-case basis. You're hard of hearing, so that more or less means that communication is going to be an issue if nobody understands that you have a disability. So long as your employer makes reasonable accommodations to help you do your job with an acceptable and comparative level of performance to your co-workers, the onus is on you to keep yourself employed. Of course that is something that obviously involves discussion and sharing of thoughts between you and your employer, so you need to be sure that everyone is on the same page. Just my two cents from someone who has been there.

hiddenknight821

WafflesAndRootbeer wrote: »

It's really a case-by-case basis. You're hard of hearing, so that more or less means that communication is going to be an issue if nobody understands that you have a disability. So long as your employer makes reasonable accommodations to help you do your job with an acceptable and comparative level of performance to your co-workers, the onus is on you to keep yourself employed. Of course that is something that obviously involves discussion and sharing of thoughts between you and your employer, so you need to be sure that everyone is on the same page. Just my two cents from someone who has been there.

Right, but I don't get dave330i's point. He suggested that even if a disable person who was already given reasonable accommodation at work would be harder to fire. I disagree with that statement since I believe I would be treated as equally as the other non-disable employees. They wouldn't pity me and let me go on facebook all day and then fire the other guy who has no disability but work his butt off. If he is saying that the company had to downside and save budget, so they decided to lay off disable employees who may have caused some undue burden on their budget. That would be wrong for them, and it would definitely be an easy case to win. Most businesses need to make sure they have a balance of diversity in the workplace to avoid lawsuits.

whatthehell

I think the larger the organization, the harder it is to get fired. It also means that supervisor's most likely aren't monitoring individual performance well, unfortunately.

I definitely agree that if you have specific valuable knowledge about specialized software/hardware, then it would give you some sense of job security.

Being an IT Generalist is great, in the sense that you learn many different aspects of IT. But without a specialty, and some area of focus, it makes you a lot easier to replace (which is why I am trying to go for some kind of specialty! lol)

Devilsbane

I would guess the opposite. With so many people your individualness becomes less important. If they don't like you they can **** you and then each person's workload increases by 1/50th of a person (each person would have to do 10 extra minutes of work a day to make up for your 8 hour shift) for the next couple weeks while they replace you. Many large companies have a very high turnover because you are worthless to them.

NetworkingStudent

passcert23 wrote: »

My coworker work for Lockheed Martin and she is under performing. She knows the very bare minimum and always make mistakes. So is it harder for big company to fire their employees in fear that the employee would sue them? What piss me off is that she's at a higher level than I am and I do the twice the work that she does.

I have a NON IT job at the moment..

Everyone is replaceable

I think it’s harder to get replaced in a larger company, because you have less direct contact with your manager.

However, it does depend on the company and how they handle under performance. I know several people at my company that became operators and then got demoted to a lower position, when they couldn’t make their numbers. Also, I have never seen my company outright fire someone. Usually there had to be document performance issues, such as being late, not getting the assigned work done ect…. I know once we had one guy that keep showing up late, and my work had to let him go, but one of my managers tried to call him back in again to show up to work , and he still showed up late. She tried to give him one last chance. He had been there 10 years and she didn’t want to see him go and she felt bad for him.

One thing you gotta remember is that employment is at will this goes both for employer and employee.