> I'd take a reduced salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human being for once.
Right, that's the thrust of my question. A person with a mental illness may not simply be capable of providing the value to their company of say a $150k/yr job, but firing them sort of implies to me that they have no value to the company. If the employee is able to show that they can provide value to the company, just at a lower position I'm thinking that would be a good alternative to outright firing.
Not talking about your case specifically, I can say this, from an employees perspective, having a peer that is not pulling their weight for whatever reason is infuriating as the slack ultimately ends up on the other employees.
From personal experience, I've had several peers who couldn't fulfill their full-time job assignments (for a wide variety of reasons), and I and my other team mates were already pulling 40-50 hour weeks. Having to add another 5-10 hours per week to our loads to make up for one of our peers was really simply unfair to us as well.
I provided value to the company, I migrated legacy code to modern programming languages, I debugged the code from other programmers that couldn't figure out why their programs didn't work right, I was one of the few that actually wrote documentation, used a standard naming convention for variables, used comments in code to explain to other programmers what it did, I converted from MS-Access databases to MS-SQL Server because nobody else knew how. I wouldn't say I was the best, but I did valuable work.
I mean the original article in this thread is a man with schizophrenia who was a success at college, how is he less valuable to the college because he is schizophrenic? John Forbes Nash Jr. is schizophrenic and he won an award for economics in the Nobel Prize, should he be given a lower salary and lower position because he is mentally ill?
The other workers could not finish their tasks because they were too busy trying to bully and harass me, so management reassigned many of their tasks to me to finish. I even took work home and worked at home for no extra pay to meet deadlines.
But because of the constant stress from the bullying and harassment I would keep becoming sicker and sicker, yet I was able to still get work done. Eventually I suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress and had a panic attack at work, and then was fired on that very same day. That experience had broken me, and my doctors put me on disability being too sick to work. Being put on disability also broke me, it made me develop a mental block and writer's block which I am only now overcoming.
But had I not been bullied and harassed, I would still be doing valuable work and earning even more money.
I admit there are those out there smarter and better than me, but I am not an idiot because I am mentally ill despite people thinking that.
Right, that's the thrust of my question. A person with a mental illness may not simply be capable of providing the value to their company of say a $150k/yr job, but firing them sort of implies to me that they have no value to the company. If the employee is able to show that they can provide value to the company, just at a lower position I'm thinking that would be a good alternative to outright firing.
Not talking about your case specifically, I can say this, from an employees perspective, having a peer that is not pulling their weight for whatever reason is infuriating as the slack ultimately ends up on the other employees.
From personal experience, I've had several peers who couldn't fulfill their full-time job assignments (for a wide variety of reasons), and I and my other team mates were already pulling 40-50 hour weeks. Having to add another 5-10 hours per week to our loads to make up for one of our peers was really simply unfair to us as well.