Are you "expected" to make mistakes when you start a new job?

[DonIago]

Hell, I've been at my job 5 years and I still occasionally wonder, when mistakes are found, where the hammer might land and how hard.

It really sucks when you realize you can have performance reviews that go very well but don't necessarily mean anything in terms of job security.

 

[MacLeod]

I agree. It depends on the mistake. I work at a grocery store as a cashier, and the slightest mistake with someone's money is a big problem. Now we have these signs up that advertise "Faster checkout." The only problem with that is the mistakes get made more often because we don't have enough checkers and we have to get faster to accommodate the larger lines that form.

It is true that one is expected to make a mistake at a new job, but there is a deadline by when the mistakes are supposed to stop happening. We have one checker who has been there for a month and he still makes stupid mistakes that could cost him his job if he doesn't start paying attention to what he's doing.

Being in retail myself, I train Cashier's and the general rule is that you should serve the customer in front of you as effecively as possible and that it's not a competetion to see how fast you can serve customers.

If Cashier A can serve 3 customers in the time it takes Cashier B to serve 2 so be it. So long as they are not making mistakes. Trying to be fast generally leads to more mistakes therefore inconveniancing the customer when they pick up on the mistake.

You should be concentrating more on the customer you are serving than the queue. By all means be aware of the queue but don't let it's size distract you from dealing with the customer dircetly in front of you. If you have all checkouts open you can't do much more than that. Just apologise to the people who have had to wait when they finally reach a cashier.

 

[RAMA]

People are too afraid to ask questions these days, I think its important to ask questions when you start a job and for as long as you need to, no one ever stops learning completely. Having said that, there is a point when I'd expect a new employee to start being more independent and make fewer mistakes, and gaining speed at tasks, usually around the 2 month mark or so.

 

[MacLeod]

There is no such thing as a stupid question.

I've trained thousands of people in the course of my career, and I'm more than happy to go through how to perform a task as many times as they need. Though it could be challenging at times given the timescales that I had when I was a trainer as little as 2.5days to cover a lot. Before I had to move onto the next location.

But I did put in the hours (way over my contract hours) to get the job done, 12+ hr days weren't uncommon.

 

[137th Gebirg]

There is no such thing as a stupid question.

You've obviously never been asked why the computer's cup holder is broken!

Sadly, there are extreme situations when you work for a very large company with unnecessarily byzantine rules about how to let someone go and when (for fear of being sued). I've seen a situation where a coworker crashed an enterprise-wide production web server while trying to install a patch (without first testing it in development). Nothing happened to him because the paperwork to cite him for the screw-up and eventual dismissal was more trouble that it was worth. The managers pretty much closed their eyes, crossed their fingers and hoped it would never happen again. The worst that happened to the guy was that he didn't get a raise that year - and he actually complained about that. Yeah - dumb as a bag of fucking hammers, this one. I wound up spending an inordinate amount of time making sure his FUBAR's didn't splash back on me.

You won't find that level of apathy in smaller companies, though. If mistakes are rampant, especially if the company is in a right-to-work state (non-union), expect to be booted. If you keep on top of your manager's assessments of you, however, and learn from your mistakes, I think you will find a great amount of flexibility with most employers.

 

[Amasov]

I haven't made any critical mistakes. I work as Web Designer/Developer and Multimedia Designer, but lately my focus has been mostly on the web side. I sometimes can tell one of the people I work with -- the one I'll usually go to if I need some help with a specific coding issue -- gets impatient with me. A few times, I've heard a sigh behind my back when I'm trying to do something. He's difficult to understand sometimes. It's moments like that which make me very uneasy fearing the axe is going to come down.

 

[Balrog]

If at first you don't succeed...

...skydiving is not for you.