Is it okay for an hourly employee to work 30 hrs/week (instead of 40) for 3 weeks due to illness without taking intermittent FMLA? Their manager is cool with it and the employee doesn't want to take PTO.

One month your paycheck covers 9 workdays. The next month, it covers 12. You get paid the same each time. If you leave in the middle of your next pay period, how is your pay prorated?

She couldn’t control the mayhem upstream, but somehow she was the one apologizing.  “Have you ever heard of a ‘blameless post-mortem’?” I asked. It’s a concept that I learned from software companies. When a bug causes a major incident, the review isn’t about a bad line of code but the whole causal chain.

Being the only nontechnical person at a tech company always felt like being the office dog - I understood more than people thought, but didn't have the language or typing skills to do anything about it.

This story still makes me laugh... and haunts me to this day. Is a boundary still a boundary if only one person asserts it? Or is it rebellion?

He was quite confident that people always know when their paycheck is wrong. I wish that were always true. Payroll is complex, and you don’t know what you don’t know. I see a ton of these kinds of silent errors with 401(k)s. 

What started as a step back became a growth hack. When it came time to brand my service, I knew exactly what I was good at, where there was a gap, and what people would pay for. 

There is something that payroll administrators can do to mitigate the Big Check Suckerpunch. It’s not shady and doesn’t expose the departing employee to risk.

We’ve all been there. You dust off the old resume and break out in a cold sweat. You write what you think you’re supposed to. Two days or minutes later, the rejection comes. Or your boss tells you you haven’t demonstrated the skills yet. Not because you’re underqualified. Because you’re too specific and you’re expecting people to see the same depth behind the words as you do.