living in my boss’s spare bedroom, my employee lied about finishing high school, and more

by Alison Green on September 26, 2024

I’m off this week. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.

1. Should I temporarily live in my boss’s spare bedroom?

I’m in a bit of a housing bind, and dealing with some pretty serious anxiety to boot. I mentioned my anxiety issues to my boss to explain any lapses she may be seeing in my performance at work, and mentioned that my apartment search in NYC was a big contributing factor to the anxiety. She very graciously offered me her spare bedroom rent-free, where I could stay while I hunt for something that’s a better fit than the places I’m seeing now. (She was quite serious, and mentioned her offer again in a follow-up email later that day.)

Am I crazy to consider this? I definitely see the problems living with one’s boss, but I think we could handle it okay. She was my mentor for about a year before she came to work at my company and became my boss, so we have a fairly close relationship, though still professional. It would definitely be only temporary, but I’m not sure if taking my boss up on her offer would end up causing trouble?

The only way I’d do this is if you’d otherwise be homeless. It’s just too fraught with the potential for problems.

Yes, it might work out fine. But it could also cause huge problems. If she has to give you really serious critical feedback at work, do you really want to see her in the living room that evening? What if she has to tell you that your job is in jeopardy? What if she loses her job while you’re living with her and wants to complain to you every evening about your company? What if she wants to talk about work when you want to collapse in front of a movie and you feel pressured to let her? What if there’s a weird issue over money — will that really not bleed into work? What if she changes her mind and wants to kick you out early and you feel screwed over? And most importantly, what about the power dynamic? Are you going to feel comfortable telling your boss things you need to be able to tell a roommate, like “I really don’t want to spend a third hour listening to you talk about your ex?” or “Stop walking into my bedroom without knocking” or “Could you not blast Sia at 5 a.m.”? (And you can find more potential issues with it in this old letter.) Particularly if you’re dealing with anxiety issues, this all seems like an unnecessary additional source of stress.

It’s also a really bad idea for your boss herself, for all the reasons above. The fact that she’s offering says there’s a good chance she’s not super thoughtful about boundaries (again, unless you’re truly about to be homeless) and that’s a flag to be really cautious too.

– 2016

Read an update to this letter here.

2. I share a desk with the night shift and someone keeps rearranging my stuff

Recently, we had a huge increase in our workload. As a solution, my employer has hired more people and added a second shift of work at night. We do not have enough desks to accommodate the sudden influx of employees, and the night shift people share the day shift people’s desks.

I keep a few personal items in/on my desk, such as hand sanitizer, an extra bottle of water, mints, and a spare phone charger. For the past week, my entire desk has been rearranged. Being the type A I am, it drives me up the wall. Today was the last straw. I keep my phone charger plugged in oftentimes because the plug is hard to reach behind the computers. It was unplugged and thrown on the floor when I came in this morning. I am sick of people touching my stuff and not taking care of it. Am I overreacting? Is there anything I can do or say to resolve this?

When you’re sharing desks, things are going to get rearranged — there’s no real way around that. To the person working the night shift, that’s their work space — not someone else’s space that they’re borrowing, but their space. I know that’s hard to accept when it was your space first, but the reality is, now it belongs to both of you. (After all, if you were on the night shift, wouldn’t you hate feeling like you were just a guest in someone else’s space?)

If it’s going to drive you bananas to see items rearranged, I’d suggest keeping them in a drawer. It might even be worth working out an arrangement where you each get assigned a drawer, so you each have some space that’s just yours.

I agree that unplugging your phone charger and tossing it on the floor was less than polite, but just talk to the person about it — explain you like to keep it plugged in because it’s hard to reach the plug, and ask if they mind keeping it there when they’re using the desk in the evening.

Overall, just talk to the other person, acknowledge it’s tough to share space, and see what kind of system you can work out that will keep you both happy.

– 2014

3. Did I irritate this hiring manager?

I am a full-time college student graduating next month. I recently went through a phone interview with a recruiter, and she pressured me into a phone interview immediately because they liked my resume. During the phone interview, she told me I was the number one candidate, then scheduled an interview with the hiring manager. The hiring manager was giving me really good vibes and was being very nice. At the end of the interview, he told me he wanted to move forward and have a face-to-face in one week before he interviewed anyone else. Then he said that someone from his staff would contact me.

After a few days, no one had contacted me, so I contacted the hiring manager and told him that no one had contacted me. He said I should hear something this week. So, I replied with, “When should I expect to hear, and are we still planning to meet this week?” He said, “Maybe next week.” So I said, “I am looking forward to meeting with you, and I was hoping we could do it this week.” Then the manager replied, “Really – are you questioning me??” At that point, I took a step back and said, “No, I am really looking forward to the opportunity. I sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding.”

I feel like I was just trying to be assertive and show interest. Are they just giving me the run-around? What do I do now?

“Are you questioning me?” is utterly obnoxious, but his point wasn’t surprising — he told you when he was able to meet, and you kind of violated interview norms when you pushed back. The employer controls the hiring timeline. You can certainly share any constraints on your side (such as having another offer), but aside from that, you’re really at the mercy of the interviewer’s timeline.

Hiring often takes longer than people think it will. Employers often state one timeline and end up taking three times that long, or even longer. It’s frustrating, but it’s the nature of how it works. It’s good to show interest, but not to pressure them, which is what ended up happening here. At this point, I’d just be patient and wait for them to get back in touch with you. If you haven’t heard anything in two weeks, contact the recruiter (probably not the hiring manager in this case) to ask if she has an updated timeline.

– 2014

4. My great employee lied about finishing high school

I am a middle manager and we recently hired an employee, for a non-professional position, who told me after she was hired that she lied on her job application. She said she had her high school diploma, when she doesn’t, and if she had answered that question in the positive, the online application would have booted her from the application as it is required for the position.

She is a hard worker, a great team member, and really needs the job, so I am not sure if I should ever bring this up.

Ugh. Requiring a high school diploma (or a college degree) is supposed to be a proxy for “this person is likely to have certain baseline skills necessary to do the job.” This person has demonstrated pretty clearly that it’s a misplaced requirement. Plus, not finishing high school can correlate with poverty, class, abuse, and other issues that aren’t great to screen people out over.

On the other hand, obviously it’s not okay to lie on your application. But I’m having a hard time working up outrage about it. She didn’t go out of her way to lie on, say, a resume — a document that someone presumably puts a lot of thought and care into. She answered “yes” to an online application question when she should have answered “no.” It’s hardly the lie of the century.

As for what to do now … I’m sure some people will disagree, but you have a hard worker and a great team member with no high school diploma. If she’s otherwise trustworthy, I might just take it as a sign that you should drop that requirement, and then move on.

– 2016

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{ 298 comments }

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  1. Sally*

    OP4, I wonder if it would be reasonable to tell her she needs to get her GED within a fixed timeframe to continue her job? I also sympathetic but otherwise it does seem unfair to all the other people who might have wanted to apply but didn’t lie on the application.

    1. kanada*

      Lots of things aren’t fair. Making this person complete a certification that doesn’t impact their ability to do the job doesn’t really change that.

      1. Thankfully no longer a manager*

        We had a corporate trainer who liked to say fair is cotton candy and carnival rides. Treat employees as individuals and for their value.

      2. Heffalump*

        I’ve heard it phrased as, “Fair exists only in baseball.”

        There’s also, “There’s no crying in baseball,” but that’s another discussion.

      3. Princess Sparklepony*

        But as she continues on in life and other employment, having that GED will allow her to not have to lie on an application. It’s really to her benefit. Hiring people do look down on people without HS diplomas.

    2. Certaintroublemaker*

      I think it would be a kindness to help the employee find resources for taking the GED so that she doesn’t ever find herself in that position again. But not under threat of losing her current job that she is doing just fine in.

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        ^^THIS^^
        Something as simple as telling her she can use the office computer to complete homework could open up a world to her. Letting her spend X hours/week doing school work on the clock would be even more helpful.

        And it sets a precedent for changing that box to “have hs degree or are enrolled in a GED program”.

        1. Seeking Second Childhood*

          Also, the form can HAVE that box without the application being refused–tell HR/IT to make it informational. Interviewer can ask extra questions to determine skills and reliability when the answer is no.

          1. Bear Expert*

            This is the way!

            You know the job doesn’t NEED the diploma, you know it needs certain skills. those can be certified to exist with a diploma, or with other investigation.

      3. MsM*

        Agreed. I wouldn’t make it a requirement, but I would see if that was something they wanted to get and how the company could be supportive.

      4. Orv*

        Technically she still wouldn’t be able to answer yes to the question “do you have your high school diploma,” because the GED isn’t a diploma. It’s widely accepted as equivalent to one, but it’s not the same thing.

        1. rebelwithmouseyhair*

          Such subtleties have to go out the window when you’re answering robot questions that each have the power to boot you out of the application system.

          The way I see it, the candidate lied but fessed up very quickly.
          I think getting some kind of qualification would be good for her, if but to quell any imposter syndrome she might have.
          (Speaking as someone who somewhat exaggerated her qualifications in order to be hired and felt very much the imposter until she got her Master’s degree on the strength of professional experience acquired.)

    3. Ellis Bell*

      But the requirement is in itself “unfair” because people don’t have the same access to education. That’s okay if you need the requirement for the job, (as other people have said, life is unfair), but if you don’t, it’s the requirement that was unjust to those people, not the fact that one of them was able to judge from the outside that it wasn’t needed. It’s also really not a simple thing to do over your entire education if you weren’t able to access it in the first place, especially when it was never necessary.

      1. DJ Abbott*

        Requirements to have a degrees screen out people who didn’t get a good start in life, period. It’s used for discrimination.
        Employers can talk all they want about a degree indicating certain skills. Anyone with work experience knows that’s not true. How many people with college degrees have you known who couldn’t write, or think, or do much of anything?
        As a person who didn’t finish a college degree I have some strong feelings about this, so I’ll stop now.

        1. Ellis Bell*

          We’ve got a surberbly competent colleague who couldn’t read in his last year of high school. He has never stopped trying and he had our support to get his qualifications after the fourth go, (he was our student, before our colleague) but you really just can’t tell people to “just go and get x qualification”.

        2. MsM*

          I will never forget weeding out resumes with insufficiently prestigious college degrees during my summer job as a rising sophomore, when my boss turned to me and asked in a joking-not-joking tone, “Are you sure you want to go back to school?”

        3. Jackalope*

          I’ve seen the other side of it. At a job I used to have, they decided to lower the requirements to be hired from a bachelor’s degree to a high school diploma. My former coworkers have kept me up to date on the position, and it turns out that a large percentage of the people with only a high school diploma have been unable to do the job because they didn’t have the needed skills. Just like some people will be able to intuitively pick up plumbing or electrical work but you’re probably going to want someone who was actually trained, college trains you in specific skills that are important and necessary for some jobs. Does that mean that employers shouldn’t look at their requirements to see if the college degree is *actually* needed for their specific job? No, it’s definitely something to be considered, because as you point out there are times when a degree requirement is just gatekeeping. But that doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant or that college teaches you nothing and provides no life skills.

          1. Texan In Exile*

            This is a serious question – why not ask for those skills? And what exactly are those skills?

            I ask this because my mom is brilliant and organized and an excellent writer and can figure things out (when your 80 year old mom sends you photos of the doorframe she has replaced after figuring out how to use a miter saw) but dropped out after her freshman year of college because she couldn’t afford school.

            I understand using a college degree as a shortcut requirement, but I don’t think graduating from college necessarily gives someone the skills you might be seeking. A recruiter for P&G once told me that they didn’t really think an MBA added that much value to an employee, but that business schools did a good first screen and saved P&G time.

            1. Jackalope*

              In this particular case it was along the lines of: be able to research, read, & digest complex policy so that you can apply it and explain it to laypeople with little to no experience. All of which is related to the experience and training you get in college, and is something that’s really hard to rate yourself on if you don’t have experience doing it because you don’t know what you don’t know. First year college students are famously bad at knowing how to write research papers, for example, because it’s not something you’re really trained on in high school. (There were other skills that would be more identifying as to the job so I’ll leave it at this one, but hopefully that makes sense.)

              It’s important to know that there was also an “or equivalent experience” option on the application, so someone with a similar prior job would still have met the requirements even without a college degree. From my experience it did make sense to require one or the other, though.

              1. DJ Abbott*

                The equivalent experience requirement is what makes the difference between discrimination and a good employer.

              2. Texan In Exile*

                That is a great example. Thank you!

                Signed,

                English major who wrote four papers per semester per class

              3. Salsa Your Face*

                But did the “or equivalent experience” people actually make it through to someone’s desk? I noticed a huge shift in the number of automatic rejections I got after completing my college degree in my mid-30s, despite the fact that I was applying for the exact same type of jobs with the exact same resume, the only difference being what box I checked in the online applications.

                1. DJ Abbott*

                  I got a good job with an equivalent experience requirement, and was there for several years. :) Remember, I didn’t finish a bachelors.
                  I expect some employers are better than others about following through on this.

        4. Bear Expert*

          90% of the time, I agree.

          I’ve looked for people who have taken specific courses because the professor teaches specific skills I’m looking for, and otherwise I need to see evidence of familiarity with those skills in some other place.

          I think college degrees can indicate skills, specifically a skill in being able to operate a bureaucracy for several years, which can be a needed professional skill. But I hate requiring a degree in almost all cases, because the skills could come from somewhere else. Show me evidence of those skills from somewhere, anywhere, and I’m happy to take it.

          Degrees are a short cut, and not always a good one. (Years of experience can have the same problem – is it really 10 years of experience or 1 year of experience ten times?)

          1. ferrina*

            This is a really good take.

            A degree means that most people who have it will generally have most of a certain set of skills. Same with experience- it means that many people will have had the opportunity to learn and grow, but some people don’t.

            Both degrees and experience are predicated on getting a good start. If you had an unstable home as a child, not a lot of money, or an undiagnosed health problem (mental or physical- or heck, even a diagnosed one!), you don’t have as strong a start as someone that had a stable home, adults that nurtured them, resources to invest in them (and the peace of never wondering where your next meal is coming from), and the energy and mental focus to commit to education. With experience, you need to get into a role where your experience will lead you to you want to be. If you are trying to start your career in a bad economy, or you don’t have networking connections, or if you don’t have teh cultural capital to make the most of a job search, you are immediately at a disadvantage. If you have a manager that doesn’t advocate for you or even that actively undermines you, that makes a difference that you can’t control (and if you don’t have a lot of options and need to stay in that job due to finances, limited options and/or you need to focus your bandwidth on other parts of your life, it sucks even more).

            There was never a fair playing field. And employers are stuck trying to figure out a quick way to assess complex skills. Honestly, I think the woman in this letter is technically wrong but also right- she knew what the employer was asking for, had the skills, and communicated to the question the employer really wanted to ask (i.e., do you have these skills)

        5. carrot cake*

          “How many people with college degrees have you known who couldn’t write, or think, or do much of anything?”
          —

          A handful, but a baseline education even at the bachelor’s level imparts skills that go beyond reading and writing, like critical thinking, good communication, perseverance, and knowledge about human history, to name a few.

          Just because someone didn’t finish a degree doesn’t mean degrees are inherently wasteful. I mean, do we really want engineers, for example, with just a high school diploma? Teachers who are untrained in writing lesson plans? Etc. I know I don’t.

          1. lost academic*

            Conveniently there’s real gatekeeping for engineers. You actually do have to have gone to an accredited program and sat for exams. There are lateral pathways into being a professional engineer (or the step before, which we used to call EIT but now the exam is FE – fundamentals of engineering) but they take a LOT longer and have to be done under a licensed engineer.

            Both things, overall, are true: gatekeeping isn’t a good idea because you miss good candidates, but surrogates for skills like degrees are useful in the hiring process.

          2. DJ Abbott*

            Of course not, no one is saying people in specialized fields shouldn’t have appropriate education. That’s a straw man that was also brought out last time I mentioned this.
            But is a degree necessary for an admin? An EA? A sales person (unless it’s very specialized)? A financial counselor who has to learn everything on the job? A front desk person? A shipping clerk? An analyst? No, it’s not. What matters is the person’s skills and experience.
            Is getting a degree the only way to get the skills you mention? Of course not! I learned them more from work and life than school.
            Employers need to look at the whole person, not just the degree.

        6. amoeba*

          Eh. I mean, in instances where literally just “a college degree” is required, sure. I’ve honestly never really understood these, but then our system in Europe is quite different, anyway! Here, you typically ask for a specific qualification that’s actually needed – either a university degree or an apprenticeship, which is quite common here. (And, in my view, makes much more sense than requiring a college degree for general office work. You do an apprenticeship in an office in that case, during which you get paid at least a bit).

          But there are definitely jobs where you need the specific skills you pick up in a specific course for a specific subject. Like, I’m a scientist, we require a PhD in Chemistry for the job I do and there is absolutely *zero* way anybody could pick up the necessary skills without one. For one, for all the experimental stuff, you need access to a lab and machines and equipment! Or, say, a lawyer or an accountant – both highly specific knowledge and also a certification that’s probably quite a good idea to have for quality reasons. Etc.

          Not that I’m debating the point that there are a lot of cases where a degree is indeed irrelevant and only the skills you learn on the job count – it’s just definitely not all jobs, in my experience, and there are a lot out there where you do indeed need the specific training a specialised degree gives you.

      2. L-squared*

        I mean, let’s be real, you can say that about just about anything. Many job “requirement” aren’t exactly something that is a MUST HAVE to do the job.

        I feel like people are trying to “social justice” and “equity” their way out of the fact that this woman blatantly lied. If I see a job and say “I could do that. I know they want experience using X, and while I don’t have it, I’m sure I could do the job without it” and then I LIE and say I had it, I don’t think people would have the same sympathy

        1. Orora*

          It’s not clear that the employee didn’t have the experience needed, just that she didn’t have a high school diploma. It’s possible that she had qualifying experience, but perceived (rightly) that not having a diploma would knock her out of the running. Let’s be for real, many places won’t give the time of day to a candidate without a high school diploma, unless they are an active high school student.

        2. MigraineMonth*

          I think a lot of us have sympathy for someone who lies or steals because their other choice is to go hungry and/or homeless. This isn’t a wealthy person lying on their resume to get an unearned title boost; this is someone who never graduated from high school just trying to get past the automated submission process so she can interview for a job that she can clearly do.

          In the US right now, job prospects for people without college degrees are pretty terrible; manufacturing collapsed and there was an enormous (government-funded) push to get a large portion of the workforce college-educated. A lot of jobs that never needed a degree previously now require college degrees, and there are so many people with college degrees that they’re competing for blue-collar and service-sector jobs.

          Someone without a high school degree is going to be in pretty dire circumstances when it comes to finding a job. If I were in her shoes, I’d lie too.

      3. Emily of New Moon*

        I’m not sure where the LW is from, but in the United States, public education is accessible to all children. True, not all public schools are equal, but if it’s a job requirement, a diploma from the best performing public high school in the state is just as valid as one from the worst performing public high school.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I expect LW is from the United States, where legally everyone is supposed to be given a public school education (though court cases have ruled that it doesn’t have to be even halfway decent), but in reality it is far from universally accessible.

          1. Ellis Bell*

            Same in the UK. I went to a terrible school but I did okay because I had a good home full of books, and love with lots of peace and quiet to do my studying in, and I never went to school hungry. It’s not as easy if your home life is as rough as the school. Or you have the kids who have nice homes, but their dyslexia was never addressed by their school so they can’t read. The neurotypical kids from the same school can, though. It’s not possible to pass exams unless you’re lucky in a couple of different areas.

        2. Anon for This*

          As someone who had to figure out how to support themselves as a kid and get to/from school among the myriad of challenges posed by my situation – I can assure you that “accessible” doesn’t mean easy. I can also assure you there was little I learned from those last few years of high school that made much difference in my knowledge/skill base even though my high school was rated best in the state.

          Thankfully I was a gifted student who tested well because even though I knew a high school dropout would face many more challenges in life, if coursework hadn’t been as easy for me as it was it just might have been more than I could handle.

        3. Stuff*

          At the same time, it’s not my brother’s fault his father pulled him out of high school and didn’t homeschool him, or that someone with a learning disability really hasn’t succeeded in self studying for a GED while stuck in a state that is openly hostile to providing any sort of assistance for adult learners or people with disabilities.

        4. Nephron*

          Parents can withdraw students from school for religious, personal beliefs related to vaccines, or for basically no reason at all. At 16 almost every kid can drop out or be convinced to leave by family that needs them to work or be home.

          The public schools existing (which charter schools means they don’t exist everywhere) does not mean a kid will go to one. And charter schools in the United States that have take over entire school systems are legally allowed to reject kids that require ADA accommodations.

          1. Reluctant Mezzo*

            My husband had a student who was pulled out three weeks before she would have graduated. See, she was a girl, and her brothers didn’t graduate either.

            Some families really *are* like that.

    4. Artemesia*

      That is what I would have done — ‘You are doing great here but throughout your career not having the degree is likely to come back to bite you; getting your GED will fix that. Here is how you sign up and here is a site that provides review material to prepare for it.’

      1. Momma Bear*

        There are also high school diploma courses if she wanted to go that route, but I agree that I’d see this as something to help her fix without firing. It’s like people who claim to have a degree but are technically a few credits shy. Can they do the job? Sure. Did they lie and that might be a problem? Yeah. Sometimes what’s not a problem for that company is a problem later when they bid on a contract with greater and less flexible requirements. I take issue with computerized screening in the first place, though. I bet a lot of good applicants get lost in automation hell.

    5. Roeslein*

      Completely agree, this would be the fair way to deal with the situation. It’s likely there were other competent people in the same situation as her who were honest and so were not considered. Perhaps she can afford to take this risk and others can’t. Plenty of people who would not lie on an application because they have dependents and can’t afford to lose a new job over dishonesty! They should not be penalised.

      2. Your Former Password Resetter*

        Those people weren’t put in the same situation of getting unfairly rejected over a poorly thought out requirement though.
        Demanding that people damage their job prospects becaus the hiring company didn’t formulate their requirements isn’t exactly fair on anyone.

      3. MigraineMonth*

        I don’t think we should punish a woman who is probably struggling very hard just to be able to work, who lied once to an automated system just to get her application past the auto-screening and then felt so bad about the lie that she came clean to her boss, in order to be fair to hypothetical people who *also* were screwed by a requirement that shouldn’t be there.

        Have we considered that the woman couldn’t afford the risk of being automatically rejected once again for not being able to complete high school? Maybe she has dependents (maybe that’s why she didn’t complete high school) and cannot afford to be rejected by yet another screening system for being honest.

        Drop the HS degree requirement for this role and take a serious look at whether it’s needed for other roles as well. *That’s* how you make the system fairer for the hypothetical applicants who self-selected out, not by punishing this woman for being desperate.

      4. Kitry*

        Is it really that big of a risk though? I mean, speaking as a business owner… hiring SUCKS. Training new people SUCKS. If I found out that an employee who was doing a great job in their role had lied on an application, I would cheerfully ignore that information and move on with my life. Are people really going to go to all the hassle of firing and replacing a good employee because of something so insignificant?

    6. Richard Hershberger*

      It would be a kindness to help her with the resources to get that GED, but for the current (as of this letter) job, Alison’s point stands, that the diploma requirement is a proxy for qualities that the employee demonstrably possesses. Getting a GED would not enhance those qualities. It would be rational, if misguided, to fire her for lying on her application, but neither the fact of the lie nor her ability to do the job would be changed by her getting a GED.

    7. Hotdog not dog*

      My company switched to requiring a degree OR relevant experience when they were trying to recruit someone who had the exact niche experience they needed but hadn’t been able to finish a degree umpteen years ago. We’ve been able to hire much better employees with that approach since that went into effect.

      1. Ali + Nino*

        I think this is the answer – you’re hiring for skills, not a piece of paper. And honestly, there are many cases where people have the diploma, but not the real-world skills that will help them be successful in the job (yet – they still need the experience). It seems like holding onto this requirement without any flexibility means shooting yourself (as the company) in the foot.

      2. MsM*

        As long as the relevant experience is genuinely relevant and not so high that it’s basically just there to make it look like people without degrees are being given a fair shake when they’re really not. I’ve seen the latter far too often.

        1. I Have RBF*

          A high school diploma does not confer any skills other that being able to survive sitting in a classroom and regurgitate answers on a “standardized test”. The computerized requirement for it is a way to discriminate against certain populations, including poor folks, people with certain learning disabilities, and even people whose parents moved them around a lot as kids.

          Possibly I might want one for a starter job, but if they already have the skills you need, it’s just a stupid checkbox without real meaning.

          Yes, I graduated high school. The only skills it gave me were “meeting requirements for college.” The rest of it was a waste of years of my life.

      3. learnedthehardway*

        This is a good approach – many people have “equivalent experience” – whether that is years on the job, innate abilities, or if they have done self-directed education/training.

        There are certainly roles where you really need to have completed an accredited degree / diploma, but there are always exceptions.

        I think of my uncle, who is absolutely brilliant but never did more than high school. He has taught engineering courses to people with degrees. He’s one of those people who is highly effective as a self-directed learner.

    8. Hyaline*

      I agree in principle that offering to support her in completing her GED would be a positive thing to do, though I wouldn’t require it. However, it could be that she already has a GED! If the question was literally “Do you have a *high school diploma*” with no option for “or equivalent,” the employee would have been in a weird catch-22 of either “lying” or getting auto-rejected.

      Ultimately, it’s the *question* that’s unfair, not the people lying or “lying” to get around a crap system. Make the question informational only, have other “screeners” if that’s really all it is, or just ask for an education history without it being a prescribed set of wickets.

    9. metadata minion*

      It would be fair to see this as a heads-up that a high school diploma isn’t actually necessary and remove it, so that those people can potentially apply for the next opening.

    10. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

      At a former workplace a long time employee was required to get her GED to continue working there — but only because the federal funding that the nonprofit received required certain criteria for specific roles. The company supported her training and celebrated her when she passed the test.

    11. Venus*

      Different context but same problem:
      I have known people who can’t drive to click Yes on the online form that they have a licence when the job clearly doesn’t need any driving. They asked about driving during the interview and confirmed it was a generic question that was asked of every employee even if it would never be needed for most jobs. The question was clearly discriminating against people with disabilities, and how different is that from discriminating based on economic circumstance?

      1. Emily of New Moon*

        Interesting. I don’t drive because of a disability, and it’s always been my understanding that any job listing that says “applicant must have a driver’s license” is a job where driving is necessarily part of the job.

        1. raktajino*

          Sometimes, like many job listings, it’s just wishful thinking.

          I didn’t get my license until I was 24, and didn’t have ready access to a car until I was in my early 30s. For the kinds of jobs I was applying to back then, I saw “must have a driver’s license and reliable car” a lot. That usually just meant “must have reliable transportation.” When jobs wanted me to drive on the job, it was a company vehicle and 9 times out of 10 they were able to work around my inability to fulfill this function. (There was one memorable time 18 yo me got to sit in the driver’s seat of the stuck hay truck as everyone else pushed it out of a ditch. Mostly it just meant a trip by charter bus had two backup drivers instead of three.)

          I imagine things are different now with the gig work mentality putting all the onus on the employee.

          1. Orv*

            Often what this really means is “we want you to be able to get to work on time, and can’t fathom how anyone could do that without driving here in their own car.”

      2. MigraineMonth*

        That’s terrible! I hope someone just left it there by mistake and it wasn’t being used for any decisions, but it’s a bad message to send (and opens the company up to legal liability for ADA discrimination).

        1. Grimalkin*

          I’m pretty sure that in a lot of cases the ability to discriminate subtly against disabled candidates is a feature, not a bug.
          I applied for an office job in my hometown that had such a requirement. They said it was because they had a meeting once a year on the other end of the state. When I mentioned that Amtrak could get me there, or even Uber… crickets. That interview wasn’t my best for other reasons too, but I’ll always wonder if it was really just the lack of driver’s license that lost me that job.

      3. Dr. Hyphem*

        Honestly, the drivers license thing is also discriminating based on economic circumstance–it costs money to get a driver’s license, if you don’t have your paperwork in order, that could also cost money, etc. Like, unless driving is in the job description, there should be no reason for that.

      4. Orv*

        I’ve also seen “must have the ability to lift 40 pounds” for jobs where I never had to lift anywhere near 40 pounds. It seems to be one of those things HR people throw in as generic boilerplate.

    12. Czech Mate*

      I don’t know that I would take this as a sign that the high school diploma/GED isn’t still a baseline requirement for the job. For example, I’ve worked in various types of schools and had coworkers who didn’t have any higher education. They were generally good at their jobs, but at the same time, they struggled to speak *in depth* with students about what it’s *actually like* to apply for and go to college. But this type of thing is a good sign that an employer should think long and hard about what is required and why.

      Totally agree that employers in this situation should quietly set up accommodations to help the person complete their GED. A lot of people don’t realize that if you basically have a high school education but not a diploma, you can get your GED in a day by just taking an exam. Folks without diplomas who need to brush up on some things can often also take night classes at their local community college. Spread the word if you encounter anyone in this situation!

    13. Elara Harper*

      Reasonable, maybe, but not really useful to the employee or employer. For an odd reason, I ended up a college graduate with a post-graduate certification, but no HS diploma. I did have want a job that required a HS diploma or GED, so I went and took the test one day (convincing them to let me take the test without taking classes was time consuming). In the end, I had a GED but it made no difference in my skill level or ability to do the job and benefited exactly no one except the test proctor who earned some extra cash.

  2. CelticGoddess1326*

    In terms of the shared desks: I worked for a company for awhile that did just this – and they designated one side of the desk for the “day folks” and the other side for the “evening folks.” Day folks and evening folks were instructed to leave the other person’s things alone – if there were problems, show your sup and they would get with the other-shift supervisor about it.

    1. Thankfully no longer a manager*

      We did that too- or at least the day person I desk shared with. Be respectful- and never leave a banana peel in the desk garbage.

        1. JustaTech*

          Why do these people exist? I had a coworker who would put his tuna sub in his desk drawer every day. There was a perfectly good fridge (clean, plenty of room) at the end of the cube farm, but no, Maurice *had* to use his desk drawer.

          At least he didn’t leave a spare one when he left.

    2. londonedit*

      Not quite the same but where I work our hybrid working patterns mean that different teams are in the office on different days of the week, so when I’m not in the office my desk is being used by someone else. As Alison suggests, we have drawers and lockers, and the general rule is that you lock away anything that’s ‘yours’ so the desk is clear for the next person. If there aren’t any drawers nearby that the OP can use, maybe they could put a small box on the desk where they could store their bits and pieces so they’re not in the way of whoever else is using the desk.

    3. Seeking Second Childhood*

      This is the situation when it’s appropriate to apply 5S procedures to an office instead of shared manufacturing workspaces.

      It includes a process for setting up a mutually agreeable layout that users commit to maintaining.

      1. JustaTech*

        Ha! Excellent callback.
        I would have a really hard time with this – I’m an “out of sight out of mind” kind of person, but I would feel obligated (rightly!) to clear the desk every night, so I’d be forever forgetting stuff.

    4. Jaid*

      The nightshift lady kept stealing the hook I kept my sweatshirt up on, because it was juuuussst over the invisible line that divided our cubicle wall. I finally wrote a “curse” on the back of one hook…cue EO, because she was a Southern Baptist and thought I was a witch. I had to explain that it was a joke and apologize to her. *shrug* I didn’t know it was her, I thought it was just some rando.

      She finally got her own cubicle after going over our manager’s head to the department manager…who was not happy to get involved in this squabble and told her manager to figure it out on her own.

      All she had to do was ask me to move the hook…

      Oh and after EO got involved, she had a statue of the Virgin Mary and a palm leaf cross and a calendar to notate the date of my “transgressions”. Like forgetting to turn off my desk fan.

      1. I Have RBF*

        So after she kept stealing from you, you tried to use a joke to get her to stop. She subsequently subjected you to religious harassment.

        If it were me, she would find her statue and cross in a drawer or covered with a rag, but I’m not nice around religious bigots who steal stuff.

  3. Orv*

    Re #2: As an IT person who frequently has to plug and unplug stuff, the solution I settled on was to always have a plugged-in power strip on TOP of my desk, where it’s easy to reach. That may not fly in every work environment, but you can find some that look pretty nice (some with built-in chargers, to boot.)

        1. Just another me*

          I work in a hospital. We use machines that use a lot of power. You can overload and start a fire. It’s a safety thing.

      2. Area Woman*

        If the company vets and provides the power strip this should not be an issue. The policy only makes sense for preventing folks from bringing their own.

      3. I Have RBF*

        IIRC, if they have a surge protector and fuse they are often approved for office environments.

        Most cubicle and desk power is essentially “permanent” extension cords daisy chained, IME.

      4. Orv*

        Most places I’ve worked we were allowed power strips, but they had to be plugged directly into the wall — we couldn’t plug a power strip into another power strip. This could be challenging in old academic office buildings that were built when two duplex outlets were considered sufficient for an entire room.

    3. PowerStrips*

      Many places I’ve worked either had power strips built into the desks or power strips on the desks by default.

    4. Bear Expert*

      I hate crawling on the floor to plug things in, so a solid power strip basically installed in a handy place is a lifesaver.

      It doesn’t stop the cleaners from unplugging it, but if the plug is annoying to reach, they may need a solution too.

  4. Not your typical admin*

    LW 2 – when you share a space, the other person is going to move and arrange things in a way that suits them. I love the idea of each of you having a separate drawer to keep your things in. I’d make part of my routine getting set up, and then packing up at the end of the day. You could perhaps even work with the other person and come of with a plan that specifies how the desk area should look when each of you leaves.

  5. New Jack Karyn*

    Oh, man, the comments on the original post for #4 were a RIDE. So much agita about ‘lying on an application’ and ‘clearly untrustworthy’.

    I just now thought of this: Wasn’t the employer also ‘lying’ when they said that a high school diploma was necessary to do the job? Does that make the employer ‘untrustworthy’?

    1. Esme*

      I agree. The comments do not surprise me. I did not complete a bachelor’s and was an outlier in my position. I definitely met people who were bothered because they felt that they had invested a lot of time and money, not to get relevant skills, but rather so that they would not have to compete with people like me for jobs.

        1. Annie*

          Another weird thing is selecting based on education level because “commitment” or other character-related reasons. I haven’t seen a convincing explanation yet that makes sense for most jobs how or why education level relates to an employee’s character as opposed to, say, work or volunteer experience.

          Exceptions that come to mind: You’re looking for someone who is unlikely to bail during a multi-phase, multi-year project; the education is the closest the candidate has to relevant work experience.

          1. metadata minion*

            And heck, I doubt I’m at all unusual for finishing my BA because a) I genuinely enjoyed college, and b) it wasn’t like there was anything else I wanted to be doing. For plenty of people it is absolutely a massive commitment and shows dedication and tenacity and all those good buzzwords. But for plenty of other people it’s just what society expects you to do and would require way more commitment and initiative *not* to do it.

            1. Zephy*

              But for plenty of other people it’s just what society expects you to do and would require way more commitment and initiative *not* to do it.

              I hadn’t considered this before but yeah, actually, you’re right. There was never a question of *if* I would go to college, of course that was the plan, the question was *which* college. If my parents had even pretended to give me a choice between College and Not College after high school, college would have been the obviously correct option. It would have been so much harder to figure my life out if I had decided to go straight into the workforce, or heaven forfend the military*, with just a HS diploma (and in 2009, to boot).

              *lmao i would last about eighteen seconds in the armed forces. i got a good heart, but this mouth?

            2. carrot cake*

              Well, those aren’t “buzzwords.” Pursuing and completing a college degree imparts a natural maturation. Also, people with degrees typically have more earning potential/power and job security, which has implications for a lot of life’s realities, including retirement.

              Besides, I think you’d find hardly find anyone earning a degree because of what “society expects.” That’s just really kind of naive.

              1. Silver Robin*

                Hi, me, I am a person who got a degree because that was what the people around me (my experience of “society”) expected. Literally was never a question and to *not* go straight to college required some kind of thought through gap year or a clear pathway to some other kind of career (like trade school or apprenticeships). Medical reasons also, but I did not know if anyone explicitly delaying college due to that. Otherwise you were a kid with your head in the clouds who would regret not going.

                I liked school and would have likely chosen to go to college anyway, but it was absolutely the default expectation. And I can promise you that it was the same for my friends and the vast majority of my classmates.

                1. I Have RBF*

                  Same here. It was not a question that I would go to college, but my parents’ divorce screwed up the money part.

              2. Annie2*

                We’re in different social milieus if you don’t think 18 year olds go to college because of societal expectations. As others have said on this thread, I don’t think it even occurred to me that I had a choice.

              3. MigraineMonth*

                I don’t know anyone in the upper-middle class or the upper class in the US who *didn’t* go to college because it’s what “society expects”. If both your parents went to college, and all your grandparents went to college, and all your classmates are going to college, you go because everyone tells you it’s the best thing to do to be successful, not because you’ve figured out for yourself whether it’s more long-term advantageous to go to college or to apprentice as a plumber.

                (That’s why there’s so many people who go to college with no idea what job they want, switch majors a bunch of times, graduate late with huge debt and no idea what job they want, and eventually end up in something entirely different than their major. Unless your parents desperately want you to be a doctor/engineer, the societally prescribed path doesn’t specify what major to take or which well-paid white-collar job to have, so people who have just been dutifully following the path start flailing.)

                Yes, college degrees–particularly prestigious ones–allow you to get better jobs and more money. (Well, usually. Other than plumbers and other people our parents warned us not to be.) That doesn’t mean we were making our own well-informed decisions; most of us were just doing what we were told was best.

                Also, I’m howling over here at “a college degree imparts a natural maturation.” Yup, I graduated college *so much* more mature and worldly than young adults my age who had been working full time, paying rent, cooking their own meals, dealing with awful apartment managers, budgeting for car maintenance…

                1. JustaTech*

                  I mean, “a college degree imparts a natural maturation” compared to the same person *before* they got their degree, but only in that getting a college degree involves the passage of time.
                  Kind of like my toddler had a “natural maturation” when he moved from the infant room to the toddler room. Like, yes he learned a lot of skills, but it wasn’t due to any specific effort on his part so much as just “growing”.

                  Now, I think that a lot of people also end up using college as a time to try out some inherently dumb ideas and get the “wildness” out – there were plenty of things I did in college that seemed like a genuinely good idea at the time where now I’m like “and why did you think building a fire tornado was a good idea?” (And I was the “sensible” one!)

                2. ReallyBadPerson*

                  Exactly this. When I was a child, I never heard “If you go to college,” it was always, “In college, you will…” There was never any question in my mind that I would go. And I did as expected.

                3. raktajino*

                  > If both your parents went to college, and all your grandparents went to college, and all your classmates are going to college, you go because everyone tells you it’s the best thing to do to be successful

                  Hell, I’m a first generation college student and I still grew up with the expectation that I was going to go to college. That’s what my parents heard was “the thing” to do. My dad was in the unionized trades and he still encouraged college because it would give me more choices than he had. (Cut rant about how unions enabled my family to give me these opportunities and how they’re largely disempowered now)

              4. metadata minion*

                College was wonderful for me. It helped me grow as a person and learn how to think and what I was passionate about. But I am completely unconvinced that I couldn’t have learned a different version of those same skills in a trade school or apprenticeship, or by taking a couple years off and working before going to college.

                I’m not arguing that a college degree isn’t useful for earning potential — it absolutely is! I just think it’s problematic to use it as a benchmark for maturity or dedication, especially since there’s a significant fraction of people who don’t go to college because they’ve been working since they were old enough to legally get a job, and possibly before that, to support their families. How on earth does that take less dedication and maturity than having my grandparents pay for college and going because it was enjoyable and what my family and community clearly expected me to do?

            3. MigraineMonth*

              Yeah, my mom threatened to kick my sister out of the house just for taking a gap year to work. (Note that we were in a high cost-of-living town and this was before Obamacare, so we were in the wonderful world of individual insurance rates, coverage gaps and pre-existing conditions.) My mom thought it was setting a boundary, but it was pretty clear college was the *only* acceptable option.

              Fortunately, one of my mom’s friends sat her down and reminded her that there was no job an 18-year-old woman with only babysitting experience could find that both paid enough to cover her living expenses and my mom would want her to be doing. My mom retracted her ultimatum and my sister eventually picked a college.

            4. I Have RBF*

              IMO, all that finishing a bachelors means is that you had money enough for food, housing, fees and books, either from your parents or crushing debt.

              Since I ran out of money to live on, I had to quit college. As it was, I couldn’t get the classes I needed to finish because the school was not tolerant of people who had to try to fit work and school together. My advisor told me to “get a loan. investigate group housing” – when I had just moved out of a roommate situation where people stole from me regularly and financially abused me as well. That was a hard “no” from me, and I tried to get other classes during the evening. I eventually ran out of money and patience with an unyielding institution.

              While some jobs require degrees and licensure, not all do. The others are just economic snobbery. There’s the old joke about engineers:
              Q: How do you identify the engineer in the electronics plant?
              A: They’re the one with the solder iron burn on their hand.

          2. Antilles*

            It’s especially weird when you realize that a lot of the companies who make “commitment” arguments aren’t even examining your transcript or asking about it – particularly once you’re more than a couple years out of school. So for all the company knows, the ‘commitment’ represented by the degree was you taking the easiest classes available, never showing up to class, and just zero-effort’ing your way to the bare minimum passing grade.

          3. Agnes*

            Haven’t the companies that have removed degree requirements found that it actually didn’t make much difference in who ends up getting hired?

          4. ferrina*

            It’s a very silly argument. I know plenty of people who got bachelors degrees because it was the only way their parents would keep paying for their lifestyle. It wasn’t about commitment- it was about comfort.

            And plenty of people who didn’t have parents financially supporting them and worked two jobs while trying to get a degree, only to have to drop out due to circumstances beyond their control.

          5. MigraineMonth*

            College taught me to really commit to long projects… that were no longer than a semester. Then it all starts over as a clean slate and new material, right?

            My sister used to get bored or restless every few months at a job and realized that the semester system all through high school and college had trained her to expect something new and different every 4 months.

        3. Junior Assistant Peon*

          It’s not a proxy for ability. It’s a proxy for social class and race. If they were allowed to say “we want a nice upper-middle-class white suburban kid who’s like us” you wouldn’t need a bachelor’s degree for everything under the sun.

          1. Distracted Procrastinator*

            I’ve seen entry level receptionist positions require bachelor’s degrees. Because answering the phone and taking messages takes a college level understanding of history, math, science, and the humanities?

            1. Distracted Procrastinator*

              I say this as someone who has been an entry level receptionist. I’m not disparaging the work. I’m saying the skills I learned acquiring my degree were not at all used in the job.

              1. Frankly, Mr. Shankly*

                I wish I could upvote this 100 times. I’m in my 40s, with over 20 years experience in finance. I started as the receptionist at a major investment bank and worked my way up to a very high level role. I was the only one in my department without a prestigious degree and we were all let go in the end so they could offshore. And now these online applications screen me out automatically because I don’t have a BA- I’m not applying to be a surgeon, I’m applying to the *same* job I did with success for 20 years!!
                And at that job? Our Chief of Staff didn’t know how to refill a stapler, so…. lol

              2. Zephy*

                +1 I have two bachelor’s degrees and they’re good for exactly two things:

                1. getting master’s degrees (because they’re both in disciplines that require licensure to practice, and you need a master’s to qualify for the licensing exam)

                and

                2. answering “yes” to the question “do you have a bachelor’s degree” on job applications.

                I’ve only ever used either of them for the second thing, because I finished my first one with $30k in debt and wanted to make a dent in that before taking on more to get a master’s (so I went and got a second bachelor’s with the same problems instead). Now I’ve been out of the game too long and feel like I’m not a competitive candidate for master’s programs in either discipline, because I’d like to avoid more loans, but the only real funding available for master’s programs is that or fellowships/assistantships, which are super-competitive.

              3. carrot cake*

                Well, but that’s that job. What about the potential for upward mobility? Also, knowledge on the subjects you list impart a basic understanding of consumerism, planning, voting, scientific inquiry, etc. A lack of it means we’re all robots.

                1. New Jack Karyn*

                  That doesn’t answer the question of why a 4-year college degree is required for an entry-level receptionist job.

              4. Consonance*

                And then there’s me, with two masters degrees, who every time I have to fill in as a receptionist completely fail. Can I transfer a call? Theoretically yes, practically no.

        4. Paint N Drip*

          Definitely. I muddled my way through a Bachelors, so I technically have a degree – I changed my major 4 times and skipped class and smoked weed the whole time but got the degree. You absolutely cannot tell me that someone doing who spent those years (or even half that time) working at an office wouldn’t have the same ability to do the first job I was doing after graduation.

      2. mreasy*

        Requiring a bachelor’s degree is one of the biggest hiring shams going. Yeah, I have a BA and I worked really hard for it, sure. But that was 25 years ago and I’ve worked just as hard in my career… and I can absolutely guarantee that the problem solving, compassion, and grace under pressure I developed working food service and retail are a thousand times more relevant than the lit theory and ancient languages I studied.

        1. carrot cake*

          Huh. If only more people had studied literary theory and ancient languages. Those subjects impart a level of critical examination that can’t be beat.

    2. metadata minion*

      “Wasn’t the employer also ‘lying’ when they said that a high school diploma was necessary to do the job?”

      Not necessarily — they could just have been wrong.

    3. Bear Expert*

      I love this framing.

      I hate unnecessary “requirements” I had a team for a long time that required skills that were very difficult to find, especially in combination. Hiring was a bear, and I got religion about anything that narrowed my hiring pool that wasn’t directly job relevant.

    4. Industry Behemoth*

      A bachelor’s degree is often an arbitrary requirement or excuse in hiring or promoting paralegals. I knew an experienced paralegal who returned to school for her degree, only because she’d advanced as far as she could without it.

      She put in only passing-level effort because she only wanted the piece of paper. I wondered if anyone asked to see her transcript down the road.

    5. samwise*

      And the employee let the OP know. I don’t like the lying, but as Alison noted, there are all sorts of reasons for someone to not finish high school that people with privilege don’t face. I hope the OP worked with the employee to get a GED (time off, working on ged at the office as professional development) and reviewed the job requirements to remove that requirement. Or to add: experience in XYZ may substitute for High school diploma or GED.

  6. Melissa*

    I love Alison’s answer to #2. It is so easy to think “this person is now using my desk”, forgetting that it has also become THEIR desk!

  7. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

    OP3 (pushy candidate wants to move their interview up) – yes I think it’s safe to say OP has irritated the hiring manager, who didn’t respond very professionally but expressed the same sentiment most of us would have. If I were the hiring manager in that situation I’d likely have read that, done a double take, and then expressed to someone “look at this! They were ‘hoping to meet this week’, well, you’re gonna be disappointed then bud”. I would have continued with their candidacy after blowing off steam but also been highly aware (and asked some additional questions in the interview) of any tendency they have to be impatient, pushy, demanding, unaware of social norms, etc. Some of that is trainable and some isn’t. Imagine how exhausting it would be to hire this person and then every day be full of conflict (and I am even quite conflict-seeking but even I have a limit) over low-level stuff like this. “The report needs to go to Jane by Friday” – “why does she need it on Friday? It’s for the planning committee which meets on Tuesday afternoon so she doesn’t need it until Tuesday morning” etc etc etc.

    1. Emmy Noether*

      Eh, I think we can give the LW some benefit of the doubt that it’s their first time being confronted with the horrors of job seeking.

      In most other situations in life where one is fixing a date and time for something, it’s ok to push back! Like if I try to fix an appointment with my dentist and he tells me 6 months out, I can ask if there’s really nothing sooner. He’ll tell me no, but I won’t get penalized for asking.

      Job seeking is really uniquely unbalanced in that way.

      1. Kella*

        I actually disagree that pushing back on scheduling is uniquely a no-no in job searching. The consequences for mishandling it are higher, certainly. But if a friend asks if we can hang out this week and I say “Maybe next week” and they reply “I really want to schedule it this week” I’m going to be somewhat annoyed. I’m already aware that they want to do it this week because they asked if we could, and I effectively said no. “But I want to” isn’t really a good reason to try to renegotiate what I already turned down, whereas “Oh, I’m actually going to be out of town for a while starting next week. Is there any way we can squeeze it in before I leave?” would be much more okay as a push back.

        I see a little more wiggle room in scheduling doctor appointments because you don’t necessarily know the ins and outs of their system and they do. But if I were a receptionist and I said “our earliest next appointment is unfortunately 6 months out” and the patient replied “Do you have anything sooner” I’d have to hide my frustration with them asking a question I just answered. “Is there a way to get on a cancelation list so I can have a chance of getting in sooner?” is better because it both is actually asking for *new* information, and it provides an opening for the receptionist to share if there are any other workarounds for getting an earlier appointment.

        1. Emmy Noether*

          Your examples have very specific phrasing that make them a no-no. Of course if someone just told me explicitly that the earliest time is X, or that this week won’t work, asking if there’s an earlier time is going to come across badly – not because of the push back per se, but due to the not listening.

          It’s also true that giving a reason for pushing back is of course going to make it go over better. But most situations you can push once on a “soft” proposed time (“maybe”, “how about”,…) without having to phrase it just right.

          It’s probably also a question of communication culture though (a variant of the infamous “guess” vs. “ask”).

          If I asked a friend “when can we meet?” and they replied “maybe next week” and they were annoyed if I then said “I was really hoping for this week”… they’re a very easily annoyed person. And if they ended the friendship over a single occurence of that – that would be considered one heck of an overreaction. But it’s just accepted that a job seeker may be eliminated for basically the same conversation.

          1. ecnaseener*

            Well, the very specific phrasing is mirroring LW’s phrasing, because that’s the situation we’re discussing.

            1. Emmy Noether*

              No! It’s different phrasing in a significant way: if I ask “are you free this week?” and you say “maybe next week”, that implies a “no” to this week. If the initial question is just “when are you free?”, that’s not the case!

              MY example actually mirrored the LW’s phrasing, where Kella changed it.

              1. Kella*

                There are two important distinctions that make LW’s choices different from the examples you gave.

                The first is the larger context: the hiring manager told OP she’d be contacted, indicating she should wait to hear from them. OP didn’t wait and contacted the hiring manager first. The HM then indicated again that OP should wait to hear back later and nothing was going to be decided yet. THEN OP asked, “Are we still meeting next week?” which, even when she was effectively told no, was again followed by “I was hoping we could do it this week.” So, depending on your interpretation, OP actually pushed back 3-4 times on what she heard from the HM.

                The second is, the question “Are you free next week?” that you suggested, isn’t a yes or no question, it’s an invitation to discuss a combination of schedule restrictions and preferences to discover something that works for both of you. In that context, “Maybe next week” is actually a bit rude because it’s a conversation ender, rather than entering into negotiation. “This week is a bit full, could we look at next week?” is a way to communicate the same function that continues the conversation.

                But OP said, “Are we meeting next week?” which is a plain yes or no question that places the majority of the decision-making power on the person being asked. Either they are planning to meet with you or they aren’t. The answer, “Maybe next week” can be translated to “We are not meeting this week, we might be able to meet next week but this conversation is over for now.” Following that with “I was hoping we could do it this week,” isn’t actually re-opening negotiations, it’s asserting that you don’t accept their answer and placing focus on your own desires. “Are you sure there isn’t a way we could make that happen this week instead?” asks for clarification on how negotiable things are, and keeps things collaborative, rather than just refuting their attempt to end the conversation.

                I also personally think it’s rude, especially in a very unestablished relationship, for your reason to push back on someone saying no, to be “But I want to,” because it implies your desires are more important than whatever went into their decision. In a long-standing friendship, this kind of answer would annoy me but wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. But if I was very early in a friendship with someone, repeatedly using that reason to push back on my answers would make me very unlikely to deepen the friendship.

        2. ecnaseener*

          I completely agree. The doctor’s appointment example is very different from the other situations because the patient is a client – clients can risk being a little annoying and customer service means pretending they’re not being annoying.

          That said, the hiring manager’s response was a red flag. I’d tell LW to 1) be veeeery cautious about agreeing to work for this dude, and 2) don’t do this again because it’ll also piss off the hiring managers that you actually do want to work for.

      2. londonedit*

        I think we can give the OP the benefit of the doubt, and I agree with Alison that ‘Are you questioning me?’ is really obnoxious from the recruiter. But I can definitely see why they were annoyed – they’ve said maybe next week, and the OP has come back again and said ‘I was really hoping for this week’. It’s not the end of the world, but it definitely shows a bit of inexperience on the OP’s part – they’ve been told next week, and being pushy about it isn’t going to help. If the OP had said something like ‘Thanks for letting me know – I’m excited about the opportunity and hope we can speak again soon’, fine. But pushing back when they’ve been given a timeline does just feel a tiny bit rude.

      3. doreen*

        I don’t think it’s uniquely unbalanced. I think that the dentists’ office is almost uniquely unable to penalize you and I’ve never set any sort of appointment even close to the way described in a letter. The only way they can penalize you is to fire you as a patients , and a dentist’s office would never tell you “maybe next week”. The friend situation – yeah it would be a really easily annoyed person if I was hoping for this week annoyed them and ending a relationship would be an overreaction. But two things – a prospective boss is not analogous to a friend. They’re more like someone you met last week who seems like a prospect for friendship . Getting annoyed with that person doesn’t necessarily seem overly sensitive . After all, I don’t really know them which means each piece of info means more than it would in a years-long relationship. They’re pushing back on the first occasion we’re trying to set up a time – and “maybe next week” pretty clearly means I can’t/won’t do it this week. In fact, I’m not even certain about next week. It’s also acceptable to talk about disappointments/hopes with a friend in a way it really isn’t with an interviewer – I wouldn’t necessarily see a friend who said “I was hoping to see you this week” as pushing back rather than simply expressing their desire – but a candidate telling the interviewer what they want without it being an attempt to change the timeline would be really weird.

    2. Despachito*

      While this OP perhaps was too much assertive I don’t think it was SO huge an overstep. The hiring manager gave her a specific timeframe and did not follow up on it. So far I can see it as an honest mistake, the recruitment process can be tricky.

      However, I see it pretty cavalier to the candidate’s time to tell her “maybe next week” after having avidly told her I want to meet THIS week then going radio silence without giving a bit of explanation.

      I know that the ball is in the employer’s ballpark now and that they may discard OP just because they think she was too impertinent to ask, and that from the strategic point of view it would have been better if she didn’t, but I sense in it a tinge of “how dare you, lowly peon”, and I hate that.

      1. Seashell*

        Unless a specific time was chosen for this week, the LW likely hadn’t done anything to change their schedule, so “maybe next week” should be no skin off their nose. If they’ve ever applied for a job before, as I would hope a college senior had, they should know that “hurry up and wait” is pretty standard in hiring.

        The hiring manager’s response was over the top, but I think LW’s comment was inappropriate and merited their application being tossed if there were other decent candidates.

      2. Dust Bunny*

        Eh, we don’t even know that they were cavalier with her time. Other things come up. We just had a delay on an internal hire because the supervisor of one of the departments in play had a death in their close family and hasn’t been around to do their part of the transfer. The prospective interviewee wouldn’t be owed that much information.

    3. Thomas*

      The exact wording though is a big red flag. A manager who responds aggressively to being “questioned”. There’s ways to answer LW’s question politely, there’s ways to answer it somewhat rudely but reasonably (eg “Well that ain’t happening”), but with a response like that manager gave to LW, I would no longer take the job if I had any choice. That one interaction speaks volumes about their management style.

      1. Theon, Theon, it rhymes with neon*

        Yeah, same. This manager has communicated that the act of questioning them *at all*, not of pushing back inappropriately in this specific instance, is problematic.

        My managers are going to get questioned on a regular basis, so that’s already not a good fit.

      2. Flax Spinner*

        I agree – “Are you questioning me?” is unncessarily aggressive, blustering and quite possibly a clue as to that manager’s overall approach to subordinates or applicants. “How DARE this little nothing of a peasant question the great and lordly ME?” isn’t the attitude you want to see in someone who’ll have professional power over you.

        1. Dust Bunny*

          Or maybe he didn’t mean it that aggressively but this is an example of how tone doesn’t come through well in emails.

          1. Gray Lady*

            I’m having a hard time understanding how “are you questioning me” is ever a reasonable way to respond, or at least a way that is constructive to whatever goals each of the correspondents might have. In what “tone” could that be said that makes it a good response? Even if LW was being legitimately inappropriate, there’s little ambiguity about “are you questioning me” being a hostile response.

    4. Nocturna*

      I think it’s important to keep in mind that the LW was originally told that the interview would be scheduled for “this week”. So while they were definitely out of touch with interview norms, I really don’t think it’s particularly unreasonable that a new-to-the-working-world candidate would express an interest in adhering to the timeline they were originally told, and they weren’t rude in how they went about it either.

    6. Orv*

      I think most of us are cynical veterans of the process and come at it thinking, “well, of COURSE the hiring manager is going to jerk you around and miss appointments, that’s just how it works!” But stuff like this is a good reminder of how disrespectful toward job seekers and their time the process actually is.

  8. nnn*

    Fanfiction: unbeknownst to either of them, #2 is in the office equivalent of a Douglas Adams cookie story with their night shift counterpart.

  9. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

    #4 Some people get hissy fits about even unimportant lies or what I call “survival lies”.
    Don’t put abstract principles ahead of pragmatism and kindness.

    This employee is doing a great job, so the high school requirement was an unnecessary roadblock that tends – and is sometimes intended – to exclude the most disadvantaged groups in society. Ditch the requirement and don’t ding the employee.
    She even told you after being hired, so she sounds a very honest person coping with the disadvantage of lacking this diploma.

    Even though she doesn’t need it for this job, I’d strongly recommend to her that she studies to get it asap, because she’ll keep running up against this in her career. Offer any resources you can, just like you’d try to develop any other great employee.

    1. Roeslein*

      That’s not the point. The point is that presumably other competent, honest candidates who couldn’t afford the risk of lying on their application weren’t considered. Either consider everyone without a high school degree, or consider no one. But considering only those who lie about it is an odd strategy. Employee should be asked to get the degree within a predefined period of time.

      1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

        We see different points.
        Just because some applicants were unfairly excluded is no justification for unfairly excluding everyone once we see an unnecessary roadblock.
        Fairness should not mean making everyone equally miserable for no business reason

        The important next step is to ditch the requirement for all future applicants and widen the future pool, not to punish a great employee for a survival lie.

        Encouraging the employee to get her diploma is to help her in her future career. She doesn’t need it for this job, so it shouldn’t be made mandatory, or as a punishment.

        1. lunchtime caller*

          I’m always mystified by people who think that one person getting a good thing when not everyone got it means that everyone should have good things taken away. It’s such a sad way to think about fairness, when they’d rather constantly have deductions rather than additions. “I’d rather we all be miserable and screwed over together than see one person happy.” And yet it’s a mindset I see in the comment section constantly.

          1. Falling Diphthong*

            The term “crab bucket” exists for a reason. (Which is not that it is an accurate depiction of crabs, any more than than the frog boiling metaphor is an accurate description of frogs. But the thing being snappily summed up sure does happen.)

            1. Generic Name*

              I thought the same thing when I read the comments as well! The capitalist oligarchs who run this country are laughing while we tear each other apart.

              1. Good Enough For Government Work*

                Also thought the same thing! The Venn Diagram of ‘crab bucket’ and ‘late-stage capitalism’ may not be a circle, but…

      2. Colette*

        I don’t understand the risk of lying on the application. By saying no, they didn’t get the job. If they lied, they might not have gotten the job. Where’s the risk?

        I mean, I don’t love the lying, but a lot of application systems have yes/no questions for situations that are more complex; no answer is necessarily correct. (For example, the candidate could have been 3 days away from completing high school when they answered this question; no, they haven’t graduated yet, but they would have by the time they started the job.)

        1. Ellis Bell*

          Yeah I grew up with a lot of people who didn’t get their high school qualifications, and I’m not saying they would be 100 pc comfortable ticking this box, but they wouldn’t see it as massively risky. It is much riskier to not even try to get past these barriers.

        2. ecnaseener*

          The risk is getting fired after it gets found out (so after you’ve left your other job to take this one).

            1. ecnaseener*

              Sure, and that factors into their risk tolerance in context. It doesn’t negate Roeslein’s overall point that it really sucks to have a system like this, where unnecessary barriers are put in place and the only people who can get past them are the ones who for whatever reason are able to risk getting fired for the lie.

      3. MCMonkeybean*

        That’s not how job applications work. The point of a hiring process isn’t to be the most fair to the most amount of people, it’s to get a person who can do the job well into the role.

    2. MagnaCarta*

      I personally don’t *like* the lying — but I think that your point that she came clean would weigh heavily with me here. She took a significant risk by sharing that. For me that’s reassurance that it was in fact a survival lie, rather than someone who happily cuts corners or cheats to get ahead.

      2. ThursdaysGeek*

        Yeah, it sounds like she didn’t really want to lie either, and came clean as soon as it was reasonably safe.

    4. Lewis*

      Yeah I’d put this into the category of stealing bread to feed your family. Sure, in the abstract, it’s wrong. But also, you need to live, and the system is against you.

      1. Orv*

        I also think that it probably matters, psychologically, that it was an automated system that required her to answer yes. The thought process probably wasn’t, “I’m lying about this,” it was more “I’m forcing this automated system to let me apply for a job I know I can do.”

  10. Emmy Noether*

    Your examples have very specific phrasing that make them a no-no. Of course if someone just told me explicitly that the earliest time is X, or that this week won’t work, asking if there’s an earlier time is going to come across badly – not because of the push back per se, but due to the not listening.

    It’s also true that giving a reason for pushing back is of course going to make it go over better. But most situations you can push once on a “soft” proposed time (“maybe”, “how about”,…) without having to phrase it just right.

    It’s probably also a question of communication culture though (a variant of the infamous “guess” vs. “ask”).

    If I asked a friend “when can we meet?” and they replied “maybe next week” and they were annoyed if I then said “I was really hoping for this week”… they’re a very easily annoyed person. And if they ended the friendship over a single occurence of that – that would be considered one heck of an overreaction. But it’s just accepted that a job seeker may be eliminated for basically the same conversation.

    2. metadata minion*

      “If I asked a friend “when can we meet?” and they replied “maybe next week” and they were annoyed if I then said “I was really hoping for this week”… they’re a very easily annoyed person.”

      I wouldn’t end the friendship over it, but I would be annoyed, because if you wanted to meet this week, why didn’t you say so? Unless there’s some other context that would make me realize the meeting needed to happen soon, if you just say “when can we meet?” I’m going to assume you don’t have any particular timetable in mind.

  11. Underhoused singleton*

    I would jump at the opportunity to live rent-free in New York. I’m increasingly of the view that the cost of housing is so prohibitive that employees should start expecting employers to meet that cost, either by providing accommodation themselves or by giving employees some sort of voucher, so this would be a great short-term benefit in OP’s case.

    1. Bilateralrope*

      The problem with the employer providing housing directly is that it gives the employer a lot of power to make the employee homeless if the job ends for any reason even if the employee can afford to pay the rent.

      As for the voucher, could you explain how that might work in a way that would involve the employer paying less money than paying employees enough to live there ?

      1. Archi-detect*

        and now if you get fired you have no health insurance AND are getting evicted! its a couple steps above working for the company store but not many

      2. Underhoused singleton*

        Don’t get me wrong: I would far rather see people paid enough to live decently. I think it should be taken for granted that anyone who works full-time should be paid enough to rent safe and comfortable accommodation by themselves while saving up enough to buy a home of their own within a few short years. However, I received an enormous amount of pushback when I suggested this recently, entailing as it would a doubling, trebling, or even quadrupling of starting salaries across the board. I don’t know how a voucher-based system would work in practice: I just know that the current system does not work—especially when it comes to single people who aren’t prepared to share their living space with strangers—and that I’m open to radical solutions.

        1. Filofaxes*

          “I think it should be taken for granted that anyone who works full-time should be paid enough to rent safe and comfortable accommodation by themselves while saving up enough to buy a home of their own within a few short years.”

          I know that this is the American Dream that’s been pushed for like 70-plus years, blah blah blah, own your own home, a man’s home is his castle, the only way to generate wealth is to own your own home and build equity in it, etc but like…not everyone wants what you’re describing? Yes, being paid enough to afford housing (especially in today’s American housing market–which is the only housing market I have experience in, FYI for non-US readers) should not be a pipe dream. But a lot of the insane housing market prices (for both renting and purchasing) are affected by factors beyond simple inflation and supply/demand. There are corporations buying up apartment complexes all over a town and then fixing the rents (to be way higher than they were even 2 years ago, let alone before COVID)–“hurray” for property management monopolies! There’s the general problem of wage stagnation since the 1980s, which affects everything in life, not just housing affordability.
          And going back to “let’s pay everyone enough to buy their own home in a few years”–again, not everyone wants that. I would be perfectly happy renting for the rest of my life for a variety of reasons–I’d just like to not have to turn over 50 percent of my monthly pay to do so. Yes I’m single and in theory, that affects my finances. But I could meet someone tomorrow, get into a relationship with them to the *point of combining finances*…and it could still negatively affect my finances if he was even poorer than me. (Because in all of your “single people are being discriminated against when job hunting!” you’re kind of assuming that coupled people always have combined assets? That coupled people *never* maintain separate finances? That’s how it comes across to me at least). Again, coupled people can be in just as precarious as a financial state as single people, if not more so.

          Also, you mentioned in your previous comments from a few weeks that you were still living “at home” so presumably with family members. That’s not really “underhoused” FYI.

          1. Colette*

            I think you’re replying to something that wasn’t said.

            Being paid enough to buy a house does not obligate anyone to buy a house. It does mean that after paying rent, you have enough money to save – for a house, for travel, to build the world’s biggest ball of twine, wheatever you want to do.

            And coupled people may have precarious financees, but theyir housing costs can be lower because they share a space.

          2. ecnaseener*

            “Not everyone wants X” is a weird answer to “everyone should be paid enough to afford X.” Not everyone wants to eat fresh food either, but everyone should be paid enough to afford groceries.

            1. MsM*

              Not to mention that the problem is still that some companies aren’t even paying enough for people to afford market rent with a reasonable number of roommates.

          3. Poorly housed singleton?*

            I think Colette and ecnaseener have addressed the substance of your post so I won’t repeat what they’e said. I didn’t mean to prescribe one way of living—I just think everyone should be paid enough to have options.

            Also, you mentioned in your previous comments from a few weeks that you were still living “at home” so presumably with family members. That’s not really “underhoused” FYI.

            Try telling that to my parents! (For what it’s worth, I take your point. I’m far more fortunate than some and I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.)

        2. Dots*

          I just don’t understand how YOU don’t understand that a couple who both work has twice the buying power that a single person has. Unless you are suggesting that only single people get doubled salaries, the only thing that would happen with the doubling of salaries is the doubling of the cost everything else, including housing. that is how inflation works. Please stop thinking that you are discriminated against. You are not.

          1. Colette*

            That’s not actually how inflation works, BTW. Doubling salaries affects costs, yes, but it’s not a 1-1 effect.

            And if anyone working a full time job is able to afford the basic costs of living (a place to live, food, etc.), that means that double income households will be able to afford more. That’s OK! But tying the ability to live to being in a relationship has serious issues for everyone.

          2. bamcheeks*

            This is true if you have a housing shortage– the prices will rise to meet whatever the wealthiest can pay, whether that means pushing out households who don’t have two salaries, or people in specific highly-paid roles or sectors pushing everyone else out the housing market. The solution is not to have a housing shortage, and that’s a political choice.

            1. doreen*

              There isn’t always a way not to have a housing shortage in a particular area – I’m all for more housing and more affordable housing but if 2 million people want to live in a town with enough housing for 1 million , they won’t all be able to. You can maybe have the government regulate rents so they are more affordable but that doesn’t increase housing – and depending on how exactly it’s done, it might keep apartments off the market because it discourages moving. (I know someone who lived in a rent controlled three bedroom apartment by himself. His parents had moved in sometime in the 60s. After his parents died, it made no sense for him to move to a 1BR because the rent would have been more

              1. Orv*

                The solution to that is to build more housing. We haven’t done enough of that for years, such that we have towns that employ far more people than the area around them can house. It’s unsustainable.

                The only other option is to restrict the creation of new jobs, and the side effects of that will be worse than the effects of a few additional high-rises.

          3. Six for the truth over solace in lies*

            Yes. At least where I live, marital status is a protected characteristic. You can’t give single people greater recompense purely because they’re single, and that would include company housing/subsidized housing/housing vouchers. So people with partners, roommates, or living with family would still have substantially more buying power since they’d now have both multiple income sources and also cheaper housing.

        3. doreen*

          “I think it should be taken for granted that anyone who works full-time should be paid enough to rent safe and comfortable accommodation by themselves while saving up enough to buy a home of their own within a few short years.” I’m not sure where you live – but I have lived my entire life in NYC and have never known a single person who grew up here and moved out of their parent’s home to a place of their own in the area shortly after finishing school. Not a friend , not a relative, not any of my kids’ friends. Every single one moved out when they got married or with an SO or with one or more housemates who aren’t necessarily strangers. It would be great if everybody could rent a place of their own, but it will never happen that a Target cashier in the most expensive cities will be able to rent an apartment by themself , not even if a Target cashier in Florida can.

        4. Midwesterner*

          If you’re open to radical solutions: maybe accept that you’re probably never going to be happy with your housing situation in the most expensive city in the country and think about moving somewhere cheaper. I live in a mid sized Midwestern city and people have been moving here in droves from the coasts for the last few years because it’s actually affordable to live here. My husband recently hired a woman who moved here from LA. She was living in her friend’s garage because she wasn’t able to afford a place of her own. She’s making a lower salary here than she was in LA because of cost of living differences but here she has her own apartment and is hoping to buy something in a few years. Living in NYC has always been ridiculously expensive and people have never been able to easily afford living on their own so this isn’t a recent development. I can see why people are confused by your insistence that this is an employer’s problem to solve when it’s really a choice you’re making, at least to some extent.

          1. atalanta0jess*

            Only to an extent though – there are plenty of places where the cost of living has changed *dramatically* in recent years. Folks want to be where they have roots, AND they want to be able to afford a place to live. That’s not super off the wall or rigid of them. It’s hard to accept that the only solution is to move when you’ve seen the market shift dramatically right under your feet.

            1. Jackalope*

              Yeah, I know not everyone is in this situation but I’ve lived where I live for decades now. I have family and close friends here, I know and love the area, I know and love the climate. Housing is important, and if I truly had no other options I’d do what I had to do to find a place to stay, but living in a friend’s garage is significantly more palatable than spending several years desperately lonely as I try to find a new support system, in a climate I dislike (I’ve been to the Midwest on the regular), far away from my loved ones. Not to say it’s never an option for people; obviously you (Midwesterner) know several people who have done so and are glad! But for me, burning my whole life to the ground would be an absolute last step. That’s a choice on my part but it’s a well-reasoned choice based on past life experiences (I don’t move easily or well). And I know plenty of other people in my shoes.

          2. Orv*

            There can be cultural issues. The Venn diagram of places where it’s safe to be an out LGBTQ person and places where rent is cheap has no overlap.

      3. Cat Tree*

        Yeah, it’s fraught. I currently use on-site daycare through work. Even though I still pay 100% of the cost with no subsidy or discount, I still love it because it’s so convenient. But I am very aware that if I get laid off or quit, it would be really hard to find new full-time childcare on short notice. I actually have quite a good amount of money in savings so the cost isn’t the biggest issue. Many daycares have long wait lists so I don’t know what I would do. Fortunately I like my employer and am planning to stay-long term anyway, plus childcare is a temporary need. But I just have to hope for stability in my job for a few years.

    2. Archi-detect*

      how would that work exactly? most people in a reasonable economy pay 30% of their income for housing- does that just get deducted from your salary? the whole idea of salary being different in New York versus Idaho is the cost of living is different and 300k a year may get you a mansion in one and roommates in the other.

      1. Try50Percent*

        30%? That’s a nice dream if you live in one of the higher cost of living cities. I can’t afford to live in Boston proper and I pay 50% of my take home pay from my six figure salary on rent in the suburbs. Granted, Boston is consistently one of the three most expensive places to live in the US (along with San Francisco and New York), but 30% sounds like an unreachable dream.

        1. Insert Pun Here*

          Housing affordability is calculated as a % (usually somewhere between 28 and 36) of your gross income, not your net (take-home) income.

          (I, personally, find the higher end of that to be uncomfortably high, budget-wise—but that’s how the banks and the landlords and the government measures it.)

          1. GrossVsNet*

            Not according to the banks here. Their baseline mortgage approval level is 30% net which is why I’m still a renter. You couldn’t buy a closet here for 30% net. Last time I checked the maximum mortgage payment I’d be allowed by a bank was about $800/month less than my then current rent.

            1. londonedit*

              It’s probably a bit different here, because it works on the amount you can borrow rather than the amount you can afford to pay each month, but I have a similar problem. The standard amount that mortgage providers will lend is around 4-4.5 times your gross salary, and they’ll expect you to contribute at least a 10% deposit on the purchase price (many expect a higher deposit amount than that, especially for first-time buyers). My salary would allow me to take out a mortgage of about £150,000, which still leaves me about £160,000-£175,000 short on the purchase price of even the most basic studio or one-bed flat where I live. Seeing as I have to pay rent and bills and buy food, I don’t really have a way to save up £160,000 to make up the shortfall. And so I carry on renting.

              1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

                There’s a finite amount that lenders can do; the 4-4½x and 28-36% are (via baked-in assumptions) predicting the borrower’s ability to repay the loan. Loosening those standards further would also increase defaults and foreclosures, and home prices would rise again in response.

                Demand is going nowhere but up (everyone needs a place to live).

                This problem needs attacked on the supply side. More homes being built and for sale should put downward pressure on prices as buyers have more options to choose between and sellers have to compete on price to make the sale.

                1. londonedit*

                  Oh absolutely, I don’t have a problem with mortgages being regulated and restricted to those who can afford them. We definitely need more decent housing to be available at genuinely reasonable prices, but it’s supply and demand, isn’t it.

                2. GrossVsNet*

                  Except I’ve demonstrably shown I can and will pay a higher monthly amount on time and have done so for years – nay, decades. If I demonstrate I can pay $3500/month in rent, you should let me qualify for a mortgage with approximately the same amount, or at least something close to that.

        2. Crest*

          Yeah they really need to either update that 30 percent to be more in like with what people are actually paying or accept that housing and rental costs *are* out of control and fix that somehow. I’m pretty sure that 30-40 per event recommendation is based on outdated/wildly skewed data that was true for maybe 5 minutes in 1945.

          1. Ashley*

            The mortgage is only one part of the home ownership factor though. Typically after buying the house, the taxes are going to go up from the higher appraised value / sales price. And then you have the huge problems with insurance rates currently which can cause your monthly payment to change annually by hundreds of dollars lately. And then the true joys of home ownership kick in with having enough to be able to constantly fix and repair things.
            The housing crash was in part because people were getting approved for houses they couldn’t afford. It isn’t a great system, and 30% isn’t practical in many many markets, but the theory does have some barring. I will say I have seen where 40%-45% is used if it is your total debt to income ratio though (so adding car, school, and credit debit into the calculation).
            All this to say is housing is expensive, but having your housing tied directly to your job seems worse then just how our insurance is already tied to so many jobs.

          2. Pescadero*

            Some places are really bad.

            …but largely – for most of the country – the 30% number is pretty reasonable.

            I work in the most expensive housing city in Michigan.

            Yet there are currently 85 houses listed within a 15 minute drive, listed at prices below 30% of the state median income – and that is including budgeting for escrow (taxes/insurance).

        3. doreen*

          I don’t know – is it a dream if you live in one of those cities or is it only a dream if you want to live in certain parts of one of those cities ? I live in NYC – Queens to be exact. My neighborhood is not a bad area- but it isn’t trendy and the closet thing we have to a coffee shop is Dunkin Donuts. A one bedroom will run about $2000 a month while the trendier areas in Brooklyn and Queens start at around $3K for a one BR and can go much higher. ( like I’ve seen $7K and up for a 1BR)

            1. GrossVsNet*

              I live near Boston and $2000/month would make me think someone made a typo on the lease. I was paying $2000/month 20 years ago, and again that’s self-selecting out of Boston/Cambridge/other most expensive locations.

    3. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      I don’t know how much a voucher would betaxed, but it might be a very inefficient way of helping. Simpler & better just to raise salaries.

      What could be very helpful is to have an internal site where employees can post to find roomies and where vetted external providers could post vacancies too.

      re employer-provided housing:
      There are significant disadvantages in having your home, education or child’s education tied to your employment. If you are let go suddenly then you have to scramble to find somewhere to live etc simultaneously to job hunting. It could also be “golden handcuffs” holding you back in your career.
      It would be difficult to guarantee such benefits could continue for a few months, mingling with other employees, after firing for cause.

      For me, it would also impose a higher threshhold for reporting an employee or coworker, if it’ll automatically make them homeless as well and their kid losing their school place – especially if I’m dubious about how fairly or thoroughly allegations are investigated. I know these problems would arise soon for some coworkers anyway after being fired, but it’s not usually so automatic and abrupt.

      1. Lady Lessa*

        About employer supplied housing. One of the blogs that I used to follow (now out of business) was set up by a teacher at a residential school in a poor isolated area. they provided the housing, but he became terminally ill and had to stop teaching. The only reason that he wasn’t homeless is that his wife also taught there.

        I was/am heartily ashamed of my loose connection with the supporting organization

        1. WS*

          Yes, it is harsh, but (speaking in general terms about rural professionals) the poor isolated areas are also the ones struggling to provide housing in the first place, so now they would be down a house with no teacher. My local hospital had this issue with providing housing to a GP, who then needed maternity leave, but then there was no house for a locum GP to live in. Fortunately a local family had a house they could temporarily let the hospital use (their grandmother had just passed away) but the employer supplied housing issue is always contentious!

    4. Filofaxes*

      HBO’s “Chernobyl” was a dramatized retelling of a real event so grains of salt and all that. But during the key “meltdown scene,” Dyatlov tells Akimov and Toptunov to proceed with the test despite their attempts to shut things down and find out what was going wrong. He also threatens to fire Akimov and blackball him from any other nuclear-related job in the Soviet Union. It’s the Soviet Union so Akimov’s job *is* tied to his housing at the time.
      So on the one hand:
      1) potential nuclear meltdown (but no one necessarily realized that was potential outcome, just that the test wasn’t going as predicted so let’s turn things off, wait the required 24 hours, then try again and hope things are fine)
      2) your boss is threatening your career *and* your ability to not be homeless in an environment where yeah, it’s not an idle threat (and again, you don’t necessarily KNOW that listening to him will trigger a *nuclear meltdown* that will fundamentally change parts of Eastern Europe topography, health, and the political climate for like the next 1000 years. Rarely do people wake up one morning and *decide* to enact a major catastrophe).

      So yeah, this is one example of why tying one’s housing to one’s employment is maybe not a great idea. And that’s without getting into real life examples of company towns (Henry Ford, man–imagine if Elon Musk was given free reign to literally force Tesla and X employees to live in shoddily-built houses as a condition of their employment while also having full say over how they spent their non-work hours. And the government refused to do anything about it, even more so than now); rural towns needing to provide housing to attract doctors, teachers, etc; schools and churches providing housing for pastors and custodians (but never paying enough money for proper upkeep); etc.

    5. Magpie*

      This seems like it would be worse for employees and wouldn’t fix many people’s housing problems. If employers were giving a housing voucher, they would make up for it by reducing salaries. So employees would basically be receiving less cash and then have a certain amount of money that can only be used for housing. For people who are living with family or have housing covered in some other way, that would result in them making a lot less money because they have a housing voucher they have no use for.

    6. Generic Name*

      Sure, then companies could also pay employees in company scrip which can only be redeemed at the company store…..

    8. Dust Bunny*

      Or employers could just, like, pay people and then let them find their own housing.

      I am not in favor of instituting a lot of extra vouchers/perks/etc. for things that should be covered by a paycheck. It feels like the old company store system. Just f-ing pay people. If they can’t afford to pay them then they can’t afford to house them, either. Don’t give employers incentive to be overly involved in their employees’ decisions.

      2. Orv*

        Pay people, and build more housing. It’s really that simple. We just make it complicated because everyone wants their city preserved in amber the way it was when they moved in.

    9. Bella Ridley*

      Okay. I have direct experience with this, having lived in employer-provided housing. And let me tell you, it is not the panacea you think it may be. For starters, it is wildly expensive. The cost of acquiring housing (either by purchase or building), administering housing (essentially the company is now in the business of landlord-ing and must deal with applications, move-ins and move-out admin, dealing with contractors, etc), and maintenance/upkeep is going to be so astronomical that most companies will flat-out not be able to manage it.

      On top of that…most people don’t actually like it. Yes, it’s less expensive than renting on the economy, but there are a ton of downsides. Do you like all your coworkers? Do you want to live next door to them? Do you want your boss to see that you’re bad at keeping up your lawn and the house is a mess? Do you want your least-favourite coworker to see you taking out the trash in your grubby clothes? Do you want the office busybody curtain-twitcher seeing that you have a different person over every night of the week?

      There are sensibility costs as well. What do you do if someone lives in company housing and is being fired? Now they’ve lost their job and they’re out on the streets. What do you do if someone is a truly horrific neighbour but a rockstar employee? In my work there are avenues for that, but do you really want your boss putting you on a PIP because you have too many noisy parties?

      There’s a reason employer-provided housing is rare these days.

    10. Glomarization, Esq.*

      Suggest you read up on Pullman, Illinois, or any number of mining towns. There’s a significant history around company towns in the U.S. and any introductory volume on American labor history would help inform as to why employer-provided housing isn’t generally favorable to the employees.

    11. Coyote River*

      Well if you want free housing you could always consider the military. Accommodation, meals, uniforms, a steady pay check, and college after you finish, it was how I was able to save so much money as a young man.

  12. Joelle*

    My BFF – who has a PhD in a SCIENCE – has lied about having a high-school degree (they don’t have one – they dropped out of highschool and started doing college-level stuff at like 15) on job applications because otherwise they are auto-rejected by the system. They were upfront about it once contacted, and no one actually cared because they have a Bachelors and the PhD. Most of the academic jobs they applied to in their last search did not actually have the highschool question.

    1. Nonsense*

      Same with my dad, funnily enough. Got accepted to Caltech at 16 so he technically dropped out of high school to go and ended up with a PhD in Physics. The couple times an application asked about a HS diploma, he lied because he knew the PhD was what they were really after.

      I mentor college students now, and it sounds like maybe half of online applications for entry level roles have moved away from asking about diplomas. Fast food and retail seem to be the most consistent about asking, while grey and white collar type jobs aren’t. It’s interesting.

      1. kiki*

        I think fast food and retail are more consistent about asking about high school diplomas because it’s more likely to be the highest degree of education received than for a white collar job. A lot of professional job applications are looking for undergraduate education and above, so the high school stuff becomes irrelevant in the scheme of things.

      2. slightly more anon*

        I was in a fairly prestigious technical PhD program. Someone a few years ahead of me got into college without technically graduating from high school, then got into the PhD program without technically graduating from college.

        Then they almost failed their quals, which would have made them instantly go from PhD candidate to high-school dropout…

        (Not sure if they ever got their PhD, but they definitely got their we-need-to-give-you-this-so-you-can-teach Masters, so everything was fine in the end)

    2. Emmy Noether*

      Most forms I’m familiar with just ask for highest degree of education, which would solve this particular problem.

      Also, I’d argue that morally, though maybe not formally, any higher degree that requires a lower degree, but waived that requirement for this person, includes the lower degree on completion. So it’s only technically a lie, not morally.

    3. HighSchoolDropout*

      I, too, dropped out of high school to go to college and have degrees in physics from Chicago and Penn. I haven’t been asked about a high school diploma in an online form ever (I was infrequently asked about it on paper applications back in the day, but I could just skip it).

      Most people who do this are automatically granted a high school diploma after completing a year of college – this was pretty much expected by at least the 80s. My parents moved during that year so my school district decided they were no longer legally obligated to grant the diploma, but otherwise they would have had a legal obligation (would have been after the 88-89 school year in my case).

      I did encounter one employer who asked for info about when I graduated from college at some point after I was hired and were flummoxed when I said I didn’t have one. It caused quite a kerfuffle because their systems didn’t envision the possibility of having a graduate degree without having a high school diploma but they eventually figured out how to check whatever box they needed to check out.

      I’ve mostly been asked about my terminal education level which itself can be interesting because I did a year of non-degree graduate education after my last degree which I eventually decided us irrelevant to the question since it doesn’t change my highest degree.

    4. Ellis Bell*

      A lot of those automated forms have to be filled in according to the spirit of the law, rather than the letter of the law. So, if they are asking for a very specific type of degree or professional accreditations, they probably really, really need you to have those for compliance. If they’re asking about your teenage exams – they probably only want to know if you can bring a comparable level of diligence to the work. Anywhere that’s ever truly needed the qualifications they are asking for is usually going to ask for those certificates, do the checks, call up the awarding body etc. If you aren’t willing to do that in hiring, I think it is worth asking yourself how important it is to you. I am in an job where they definitely need my exam certificates from when I was 16, but they ask you to bring those to interview.

    5. kiki*

      I think your boyfriend’s situation is a bit different from the one described in the letter and your boyfriend didn’t really lie— the question was poorly written/didn’t account for edge cases. What people making the form probably meant was, “Do you at least have a high school level of education or its equivalent?”

      Knowing that a form is likely going to auto-reject you over a poorly written question and filling out the form addressing the intention of the question doesn’t seem like lying to me. It’s working around technological limitations. In a real conversation with a person if somebody asked your boyfriend if he had his high school degree, he would probably say “no, but I do have an undergraduate degree and PhD.” The form won’t let him clarify, but the clarification is super important in this context.

      It seems a bit pedantic to and out of sync with the realities of online applications to consider what your boyfriend did a lie, imo.

    6. AnReAr*

      I technically am and am not a high school drop out, and only now finally finishing my Associate’s a good 15 years later (hooray for adult diagnosed learning disabilities! I literally had everything required and then some but math for the past ten years and only just got accommodations this summer). I’m not a true dropout because I did take my GED as soon as I was legally able to at 16, and was even able to take the SAT and get very good scores a couple months later.

      Despite all that, since I wasn’t a STEM major there were no early college or university opportunities for me. My parents couldn’t afford college for me beyond two classes a semester (and that was only because they worked at said college) and there was no financial aid available to me until my high school class graduated.

      Being a ‘dropout’ and unable to really move forward with my life for so long really messed up my mental health, so I really commiserate with anyone else who also fell out of mainstream education pathways. It greatly affects the trajectory of your life, but there’s almost always no better option in the moment. It’s very tough to be any kind of divergent.

  13. anonymous person*

    I have pulled a private background check on a supervisor who I had no say in hiring and had some bad vibes about. I did it for my own peace of mind, and was deciding if I should stay or go. I would NEVER mention it though!!! Technically, those sites all have disclaimers about how they can be used, too.

    Spoiler: Background check came back clean and they were still an awful supervisor! I should have trusted my gut and quit sooner. I was younger and hadn’t learned that yet, sigh.

  14. CorporateDrone*

    Does anyone else feel like the desk sharing letter is quaintly outdated? I’m sure lots of people still have desks where they can leave stuff, but it’s my impression that post pandemic it’s much more common to book a desk for your in office days. Certainly the workplaces I go to one would not dream of leaving anything personal at the office, and although I typically work at the same desk that’s because my office is at 2% capacity. Some of my colleagues are lucky to get a desk at all and might not even be on the same floor within a given month.

    1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      Yeah, I feel like unless you have your own office (which around here where space is expensive requires a pretty high-up position) you’re hot-desking most places these days. Could be a local phenomenon, I suppose.

    2. Accommodations*

      I have been 100% remote since well before the pandemic, but this is depressing to me as someone who is disabled and could not manage carrying very much in/out of an office regularly. At a minimum, I’ve stocked up on food at every office that didn’t supply significant free food because otherwise I’d have trouble eating.

      It seems like the modern working world just packs on more and more things some folks might need accommodations for instead of slowly reducing them as one might logically expect.

      1. this-is-fine.jpeg*

        From my understanding, many organizations with hot desking have lockers or some other system to keep items at work that you use regularly.

        My office (and most of my local friends offices) all have designated desks if you request one / come in semi-regularly (once a week or twice per month in our cases though I know this can vary wildly!).

    3. 1-800-BrownCow*

      I’m curious where these “most places” and “common to book a desk for your in office days” are located because it’s not my experience t all. Maybe due to what field one works in. In my workplace and with customers and vendors I visit, its still the standard office layout where people have a permanent office/cubicle/shared desk.

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        Agreed, and places that I know tried hotdesking for awhile have started moving away from it. It’s similar to how when you go to a college class, you pick a seat and sit there for the whole term even if there’s no assigned seating. People like having their own space, there’s a psychological safety to it. Talking to a lot of job seekers, some will tolerate hot desking but a lot will reject a job the second it comes up.

      2. Paint N Drip*

        I certainly don’t work in a hot industry or a metropolitan center, and my experience is the same as you’re describing. A few of the bigger companies who use hybrid work do hotdesk but it’s a specific situation rather than the norm.
        (As much as I’d like to engage in hybrid or remote work, I do very much like to have my stuff at my desk like references, good pens, snacks, extra meds, etc.)

    5. ecnaseener*

      Hotdesking is certainly more common for hybrid workers now (like you said, “for your in office days”), but I would guess that most fully-in-office workers still have assigned desks.

      1. MsM*

        Yeah, at least half my office is 50-90% remote, and there’s still always a fun little game of “where can we put the new person?” when we hire someone.

    6. londonedit*

      We have assigned desks, but they’re shared, so on my office days I sit at ‘my’ desk, and on the days when I’m not in, someone else sits there.

      We have lockable drawers, and lockers, where we can put things when we’re not in the office. There’s definitely no expectation that you’ll lug your stuff around with you (laptop notwithstanding). If you want to have a mug or a hand cream or whatever, you just tidy it away in your drawer or your locker when you leave the office.

  15. Desk woes*

    phone charger: if the other person needs (or prefers) a different charger they may feel similarly upset that the day shift employee keeps leaving their charger plugged into the only outlet like they own the place when clearly they must know it is a shared space. Night shift employee may have gotten fed up setting a good example by removing his or her charger every morning and took it a step further, or maybe the charger simply fell off the desk at some point and was forgotten about, but at the end of the day, it must not be that difficult to get to the outlet if the night shift person can handle it every night…I have a coworker who for a while choose to eat lunch at my desk (we have a break area with table/chairs, private conference room that is only used once or twice a year for its intended purpose, dining room, empty desks) and even leaving my things spread across it didn’t deter her. I’d run to the restroom and come back to someone at my desk and she’d act so put out I’d end up taking a laptop to an open desk. A few times I even tried wadding up tissues and leaving them on the desk and keyboard and it still didn’t stop the problem, so even if the charger on the floor was intentional I get where that person is coming from…(the only thing that solved my problem was when I was almost done with something at the point it happened and stood next to my desk finishing that task up…somehow that finally sent the message.

    1. Jezebel*

      But why would you not just say you need your desk and she has to go eat elsewhere? Who cares if she’s put out! I would be put out by someone taking over my desk.

      Totally agree about the charger, though. From the night person’s point of you’re being a jerk by hogging the outlet and not putting your things away when you know someone else is coming to use the space.

    2. LeaveItAlone*

      I’m disabled and have to ask someone for help every time I plug in a cord in an office that doesn’t have outlets on top of the desks. If someone kept removing my plugs I’d be pretty upset. I’m 100% remote, but last time I semi-regular worked in an office and was assigned a desk I left a laptop charger plugged in all the time because otherwise it was disruptive to other employees.

      I’ve never shared ownership of a space as described here, but you better believe I’d be crying foul if I came back into an office and found my chair adjusted (I can’t easily readjust them, and when I do it with difficulty it’s extremely painful) or my plugs unplugged or my monitor changed or other things that would make the space either difficult or impossible for me to use.

      What a recipe for disaster.

      1. Abigail*

        I think if Coworker A has a designated space and moves things around in Coworker B’s space for no reason that is a problem.

        If Coworker A and Coworker B share space there cannot be the expectation that nothing changes.

      2. Dust Bunny*

        Okay, but in your case you could, I hope, ask for the accommodation of a designated workspace so you wouldn’t have to deal with that. The LW, as far as we know, is not disabled and literally a shared workspace means that any one person doesn’t get to demand a specific permanent setup. Because it’s shared. And other people have to be able to use it to their own better advantage. So if they need a different kind of charger or if they’re six inches taller than I am and need to change the chair height, they bloody well get to do that, because it is their workspace as much as it is mine.

      3. Jezebel*

        That’s the problem with this type of arrangement. The other person has just as much ownership of the space as you do, so if your settings don’t work for that person, why should they not have the right to adjust the chair, etc, for their needs? Yes, it would be a problem for you, but it could be an equal problem for them to leave things as you want them. That’s why everyone should have their own dedicated space!

        1. doreen*

          Maybe – I worked in a similar situation once. The night shift was all part-timers , different ones working each night but we weren’t assigned desks and we really didn’t have any ownership of the space. It was very much the “night shift uses the day shift’s desks” – same as if I have a desk at one location and I’m covering for someone who is on vacation in a different location. It’s their desk, I’m just using it temporarily.

          1. Cmdrshprd*

            “same as if I have a desk at one location and I’m covering for someone who is on vacation in a different location. It’s their desk, I’m just using it temporarily.”

            Even in that situation where it is employee As desk, if a temp/part timer/fill in has to use that desk even for a night/shift they have every right to adjust things to how they like/need it. It is bad health wise to not adjust the desk to fit your body needs, same way when driving a car first thing you should do is adjust the seat/mirrors to fit you.

      4. Cmdrshprd*

        “I’ve never shared ownership of a space as described here,”

        I think the key distinction is in a “private” some assigned desk, versus a shared desk.

        if you had a shared desk it would be unreasonable to cry foul to the other person sharing the desk. just as you need the chair/desk adjusted to certain setting so do they, it is also their desk and fair for them to adjust it.
        it would be reasonable/understandable to ask for ADA accomodations of having your own desk due to your situation or your own chair, but that would be something to take up with management/company, not other employees.

        yes OP used to have a private desk, but they don’t anymore, they have to get used to sharing.

    3. Still*

      I’m sorry, somebody kept sitting at your desk to eat lunch while you were in the bathroom?? And you didn’t tell them to stop??? I must be missing something here, this sounds ridiculous.

      2. Non confrontational*

        many people (myself included) struggle with confrontation. If there is a solution that doesn’t require a difficult conversation it is very normal for people to choose that path…especially if in the past standing up for one self has led to issues

    4. Jackalope*

      This is fan fic here. The letter says nothing about the Night Shift employer unplugging the phone every night; as far as we know it only happened the one time. There is also no indication that the OP was using the only (or the only accessible) outlet; for all we know they were plugging their phone charger into a strip of 8 available outlets. Your past negative experience with someone else using your desk for lunch definitely shows a jerk move on your coworker’s part, but it doesn’t provide a reason to make up a story about the OP which puts them in the worst possible light without cause.

  16. kiki*

    Lying about having a high school diploma in order to get a job where the education is truly not necessary strikes me as an act of desperation more than something that would make me question her character. It sounds like this isn’t as if somebody had lied about attending nursing school but still got a job as a nurse where there would be real dangers in that. It also says something to me about this employee’s character that after getting the job, she has come clean about it to her manager. I also think not having a GED or high school diploma is a hard trap to get out of— getting a GED required money and time. Now that this employee has money from their job they are in a much better place to get that GED… but they only got there by lying about having their GED.

    1. this-is-fine.jpeg*

      at a certain point though, it may not make sense to go back and get your GED.

      My partner has 2 master’s degrees despite dropping out of high school, why should they go back to school to get a GED?
      Also my ex was a lawyer with a JD — went straight to college without ever finishing high school on some non-traditional program and never got a GED (damn why have I dated 2 different people without GEDs or high school diplomas? weird pattern!) — it would be so annoying to need to get it to check a box on an application.
      I have a friend / former coworker who dropped out of college so never got a degree after high school — he still puts it on his resume (doesn’t say he completed but it’s worded vaguely) and applies to jobs that say “Bachelor’s degree required”. He was a great coworker and it would be silly to penalize him for not finishing his degree 10 years ago when he has no desire to go back to school or get more formal training in his career.

      Obviously this isn’t the case for everyone, but questioning the ‘why’ of the ‘does someone actually need a high school diploma or equivalent?’ is more important here than questioning their character about something that’s not necessary to do the job.

      1. kiki*

        I think your partner’s situation and your ex’s situation are a bit different than what I believed the letter is about. This might be assuming facts out of the letter, but I assume the employee is somebody who has no high school equivalent and also did not pursue any additional higher education. I agree that it wouldn’t make sense to go back to get a GED once you have a bachelors or higher. I think most job applications care about the highest degree of education received— once you complete college, nobody really cares about high school, etc. But writing good questions that consider edge cases (somebody with a JD who didn’t attend high school) is harder and a lot of applications and screening systems fall down in that regard, so I’d advise anyone to answer in the spirit of the question rather than being pedantic.

        I think the question of character here is relevant in the case I described above (no hs diploma or equivalent or higher education) because the employee’s answer to the question would be straight up false. Some people would view that as a lie and would wonder what else this person is willing to lie about. I personally disagree with that mindset for my reasons stated above. I also think getting a GED, if it’s feasible, would be a good move for somebody in this situation (no hs, no equivalent, no higher education) so they don’t run into this situation again.

        1. BS and MS with no HS*

          While the situation may not 100% align with the original LW’s situation, a lot of the concerns that others have raised about “character” and “integrity” when someone is less than forthcoming about their HS education status are equally applicable. And the “once you have a bachelors or higher no one cares about high school” isn’t always true.

          As someone who also has multiple advanced degrees but no HS degree and a GED that’s in an indeterminate state (long story), stories like this one make me terrified of filling out job applications. When the application asks me to state your highest level of education, I can honestly state that I have a completed Master’s degree. However, the applications will then assume that you have all the degrees leading up to it and ask you where you got them from, leading to the awkward position of having to tell a white lie/lie by omission to actually finish the application. I would certainly elaborate if there were places to do so, but today’s automated application systems are very rigid and don’t always include places for clarifying text.

          Does that really make me a liar with bad character?

          1. kiki*

            I don’t think anyone would consider you a liar in this case, especially if you clarify once you’re in the interview or next stage talking to a real person. Maybe I’m wrong and other people feel differently, but I cannot fathom a person being upset when the issue was actually their bad application/form.

            Very few forms are designed perfectly so from time to time everyone has to fill out a form with less than accurate details because the form doesn’t present the right options. I am biracial and a lot of forms today still make you choose just a single race and don’t offer a multi-racial or “other” option. I don’t think anyone would consider me a liar for selecting just one of my races.

            My friend has a last name with just two letters. A lot of forms require at least three characters— to get through the initial application, she’ll often add an extra letter at the end then follow up in the interview with a correction.

            All that to say, for a regular job application (not a job with clearance or something special like that), I do not think anyone would question your character if you’ve fully earned a masters degree via legitimate means but have to add a filler high school because it’s a required field. Especially if you proactively address it in the phone screen, interview, etc.

    2. Dahlia*

      “getting a GED required money and time”

      Yes this! People act like it’s simple, and sometimes it might be, but there can be huge barriers to access. Where I live, you’d have to drive at least 50 miles to get to the nearest testing center and it’s a pretty long process.

  17. Hyaline*

    Without more information, I’d also keep in mind that there are a lot of reasons someone might not have a formally issued high school diploma—including leaving high school early to start college, pursuing an athletic or dance career and dropping out of school for training, homeschooling, attending school in another country—and plenty of possibilities essentially check the box of “yes I completed basic fundamentals of education.” The problem is the question on the application, not the person’s answer which might not fit yes or no neatly.

    1. Ellis Bell*

      My examples of when people haven’t completed education have been more in the vein of dyslexia, truly awful and barely-competent high schools, homelessness, domestic violence, bereavement, illness or needing to work to support siblings. So I really like your examples much better than mine.

    2. Rebekah*

      Exactly! I don’t have a government issued high school diploma because I was homeschooled. However I completed the high school level work required of me by my parents so I will check the diploma box without any guilt about lying whatsoever. There are some fields where it is an actual requirement to have the piece of paper but I’m not in one. If companies are just using it as a stand in for basic intelligence/education then I think my higher education record speaks for itself, including my SAT score in the 99th percentile. However a binary yes/no box on the website can’t take that into account and I save the nuance for the interview.

    3. Not your typical admin*

      I agree. I just “graduated” my homeschooling son son last year. He would have no official (not issued by me) document to prove that, other than the fact he’s now in college.

  18. AskFirst*

    The problem as I see it is when a company says lying on the application is a firing offense and fires other people for lies. You can’t arbitrarily enforce something like that without opening yourself up to liability.

    I have been in a situation where I couldn’t accurately fill out online paperwork because they weren’t designed to handle the situation I needed to document (most memorably on background check forms). I called my contact and explained and they told me to lie about it. I confirmed with them exactly how they wanted me to fill it out then sent them email documenting what they told me to do. I hated signing the “you verify everything supplied is complete and accurate” line, but at least this way I had something in writing showing I was instructed to complete it that way.

    I would do something similar if there was a way to ask (there’s usually an email on the company’s website if nothing else). I would not arbitrarily apply with the incorrect information.

    I say this as someone who dropped out of high school to go to college (although that’s not what has tripped me up on forms in the past).

    1. ecnaseener*

      But what would the employee have asked in this situation? LW doesn’t mention any sort of technicality that would mean she couldn’t answer accurately, so it would just be “I don’t have a diploma, can I check yes anyway?” Of course the answer would be no. Maybe if she was very lucky, the answer would be “oh actually the hiring manager says that shouldn’t be a hard requirement, go ahead and check no but you’ll still be considered.”

    2. L-squared*

      I think this is a great take.

      If you’d fire someone for lying about other things on their application, I don’t know how you could keep this person on.

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        You keep them on by considering the circumstances. Lying about a felony that’s relevant to the role? Fired. Lying about a ‘requirement’ that isn’t actually necessary in order to succeed in the role? Not fired.

  19. It’s A Butternut Squash*

    OP wants to keep the person because they’ve proved to be a great employee so far, and they came clean about a small lie. Weighing someone’s performance against any issues they have is how you decide whether to fire someone. It’s not arbitrary and it doesn’t open the company to liability any more than any other hiring/firing.

  20. Apex Mountain*

    I agree with the advice for #4 – I’d also feel the same way about someone who lied about a college degree. If they can do the job and have proven to be a great employee I’d give them a pass

  21. ASD always*

    (After all, if you were on the night shift, wouldn’t you hate feeling like you were just a guest in someone else’s space?)

    This is funny to me as that’s how I’ve always treated my desks at work, even though I’ve always had an assigned desk. It took actual years before I removed the extraneous keyboard, wired mouse, and cables for the two monitors that are standard issue at my current desk (I prefer to use just my laptop and a wireless mouse).

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      Same. My office is comfy, and I have personal items, equipment I prefer, I’m nested and everything. But if someone went through my desk to get a mint or a charger, or took a call from my desk, it wouldn’t bother me (except that I handle sensitive information but that’s a different issue). I want a place that is mine in the sense I can plan where I’ll be and keep my convenience items there, but I know it belongs to my employer.

  22. MCMonkeybean*

    I think a huge piece of the high school diploma letter is that it sounds like she told her manager the truth pretty much right away after she was hired presumably knowing they might fire her over it. I think that indicates she didn’t really intend to lie to her employer, but just didn’t want to get blocked from an opportunity by an automated rejection.

    I think the only reason to be concerned about this lie is if you feel like you can’t trust her going forward, but that seems to show that you probably can!

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      I agree. Automated forms can be overwhelming when you know your situation has nuance. The fact she came clean and is excelling in the job would make it a nonissue for me.

      When we’re navigating bureaucracy and automation, the human element is often taken out in exchange for efficiency. That fact isn’t going anywhere, and a lot of us have needed to circumvent a form that didn’t have the right options or a standard that applies to 95% of people no problem but we fall into the 5%. When you remove humanity and consideration, it’s hard to justify requiring it in return. She got past the robots and then talked to her manager like a person. Seems fine.

  23. Melody Powers*

    #1 was startling for me to see because I actually did stay in my boss’s spare room for a while and it was terrible. My apartment burned down and she offered me a place to stay and I wasn’t in a position to refuse the offer. She kept assuring me that I could take as long as I needed to find somewhere else to go but as I had trouble finding somewhere else I could afford it became clear that she hated having me there, and I had the impression that she didn’t believe I was really trying to find somewhere to rent. Finally she texted me one morning saying that she needed the room back and I had to leave. So I packed up what few things I had and drove to my parents’ house in another state. I tried filing for unemployment since I couldn’t commute from my parents’ place and needed to find a new job but I think she contested it.

    I’m glad this LW avoided this kind of mess.

    1. londonedit*

      That’s really horrible, I’m sorry. I also think that even if it isn’t quite as horrible as your situation, it’s still incredibly likely to end badly. The boss may say ‘take as much time as you need’, but how much time is that, really? How long before the boss starts to get annoyed by the fact that the OP is still there? She might think it’d be absolutely fine, until she’s actually living the reality of having someone from work living in her spare room 24/7. I’ve been in a similar situation – a housemate asked if I’d mind if her boyfriend stayed with us for a while, until he found a new job. I didn’t want to be a horrible person so I said yes, but I quickly got sick of the whole arrangement – I was working from home and he was there all the time, he’d be in the shower whenever I wanted to use it, and the two of them would commandeer the TV every evening to cosy up and watch a film, so I had to go and sit in my room (or be a gooseberry). And of course the promised ‘bit of money to help with the bills’ never materialised. In the end it was the impetus for me to find somewhere else to live, because it didn’t seem like he was going to go anywhere. And that’s without the added weird dynamic of a boss and an employee!

      1. Hush42*

        So my house has become a bit of a rotating door place since I bought it and I love being able to help out my family and friends when they need it. Most of it has been brought on by life need- My grandparents stayed for 3 weeks while their house was being finished, my other grandmother and my uncle stayed on and off for 4 months one year because my aunt had cancer and they live 2 hours away from the hospital she was in whereas I live 10 minutes from that hospital, my brother and his whole family stayed with my for 8 months while they were transitioning out of the military. All of those were varying levels of stress for me but I would 100% say yes to all of them again… the one that I would say no to is the summer I let the 19 year old daughter of one of my friends stay with me. She is the only one who paid rent but I also found her very stressful to live with because it made me feel awkward in my own home. The major difference was my comfort level with the people everyone else was family. She was an acquaintance who I had known since she was 12 but wasn’t someone I naturally spent a lot of time with. That being said I don’t think I could live with my boss or any of my employees without it making me miserable from having them in my space all the time because I think it would feel very similar. I have had a few of my employees stay in my guest bedroom for 1 night at a time due to their long commutes and severe weather we were having (they’re allowed to work from home if the weather is bad but have, in a few cases, made the wrong call and come in anyway). But 1 night is very different than an undefined amount of time.

      2. Melody Powers*

        Yup, we both would have benefitted from her being more upfront about how much time she was really comfortable offering me. I do still appreciate the initial help though, even though things soured later.

  24. Dust Bunny*

    Shared desk: It sounds like it’s only a few things and none of them are super personal (no trinkets or photographs) so just keep them in a designated work tote and either put them away or take them home/take them away from work and leave them in your car. It’s not just your desk any more–it’s a shared workspace. If that other person was leaving things, you’d probably move them to suit your work style, too.

  26. HonorBox*

    In regards to letter 4, someone upthread suggested that changing the HS diploma question could be changed to informational versus one that was qualifying / disqualifying of candidates. I think the LW has a perfect example of why that change would be helpful. While I would caution against using the employee as the example directly – you don’t want to put them or you in peril – if the position is one that doesn’t absolutely need specific training, then why disqualify someone who doesn’t have a diploma?

  27. ParseThePotatoes*

    Thinking about letter #1 –
    This is one of those cases where ‘being a good human’ and ‘being a good manager’ clash, and like most of those cases, the more specific scenario takes priority.
    You’d offer a spare room to a friend (or slightly-closer-than-casual acquaintance), if you know they’re in a housing bind and need the breathing room to not rush and make mistakes. However, as described above, the same things that make it good to do for a friend are the same things that make it problematic for a supervisor.
    Generally speaking, there’s nothing wrong with offering – because most people don’t think about all the possible downsides, they just see somebody who needs help that they can provide. But, as the letter writer and Allison (and, per the follow-up, their boss) said, it’s better to decline if you can.

    1. Csethiro Ceredin*

      “The more specific situation takes priority” is a great way of thinking about it – that never occurred to me before.

  28. Mad Scientist*

    Re: LW1, funny enough, many years ago, my partner’s boss lived in our spare room for a couple months. It went surprisingly much better than you might expect, but I’m sure our experience was more the exception than the rule for this sort of thing.

  29. Alicent*

    Oof, yeah, sharing a desk can be fraught. I worked for a very small business and had to share a desk with a very part time long term employee because there wasn’t enough space for everyone. He was there maybe once a week, sometimes he didn’t even come in for a couple of weeks and he would be livid if I was at his desk. I can’t say I can blame him considering it had been his for decades (he worked for the owner’s dad when it was his business) and he was being pushed out and sidelined. He was also struggling with some significant disabilities and ended up fully retiring when we moved into a construction trailer that had steep stairs he couldn’t navigate (may or may not have been legal, but we had less than 15 employees). No one handled the situation well, least of all our boss.

  30. Csethiro Ceredin*

    Q4 was interesting to see because we have a very good administrative employee who, we learned a year in, had never attended ANY school. Her parents just… never sent her or taught her themselves – she was entirely self-taught. We’d never specifically asked about her schooling, though the ad she applied to said high school grad was required.

    She’s prodigiously intelligent and loves learning, so I was furious with her parents when I learned it, but it doesn’t seem to have impacted her work at all apart from the occasional odd thing she won’t know and a (waning) tendency to assume she has to solve every issue herself rather than asking.

    I removed the high school thing from the ad because apparently it is NOT required.

  31. Semi-retired admin*

    Re: #4 I’m curious as to why the employee even brought it up after being hired. Unless they were asking for the diploma, it seems like it was better just left alone. I’ve never had anyone ask to see my HS diploma.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      There’s a bunch of people here saying that it counts in her favor that she brought it up. She didn’t wait for it to be uncovered. To me, it seems like she really didn’t want to lie but she needed a job. She knew she could do good work in that role, so she clicked the box. But because she wanted to be honest, she came clean after she’d gotten hired and established that she *could* succeed.

  32. HR disaster*

    LW1: Reminded me of when I first started dating my husband a very long time ago. He had recently been divorced and needed a roommate to keep his house. At one point, one of his employees was his roommate. And I worked with both of them, that is where I met my husband, though not in the same department. Looking back, I see what a disaster that could have been, but luckily everything worked out. Once I moved in with him and we got married, there was no longer a need for a roommate. Though my sister was in and out many times during the early years of our marriage.

  33. jojo*

    Tell her to get her GED she never has to tell that lie again. And that she is doing a great job so far. Plus she will need it to use the company education benefits so she can get a promotion. This is not on you. It is on your company background check people.

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