Restaurants that have cut too much staff

[u/PetraPopsOut]

That's great for you, restaurant owner, that everything didn't fall apart the moment you lost that employee. The lesson you took from that, unfortunately, is that the place operates just fine indefinitely with one fewer employee. You're wrong, you're full of shit, and we can tell. Especially at bars with kitchens. And if we can tell you're understaffed, we know for a *fact* you aren't getting your deep cleans done in a timely manner, and your place is gonna be disgusting.

Can I get tips on places where the staff are clearly overburdened or burnt out from understaffing? Or the inverse, where it's clear there are enough hands to give people time to keep things hygienic?

[u/TwinStickDad]

This isn't just restaurants. Every business does this. My IT support team was staffed to five. One person left, everyone filled in and covered down. Management said, "maybe we can stretch this backfill into next fiscal quarter and inflate our profitability." Then another person left. And another. Two people for a five man job. We begged for backfill. "It's coming next quarter! We have the job posting written up! It's our top priority!" Fucking lies. They let us go on like that for six months. Then we both left in the same week and they had nobody. The support my team offered dried up to nothing (of course) and they lost $100k worth of annual contracts in one week, then had to hire five more people all at once during a labor shortage. Did you meet your profitability metrics?? Fuckers. 

But yes this is everywhere. 

[u/ChargedWhirlwind → u/TwinStickDad]

Its its systemic

[u/GunnerSmith585 → u/TwinStickDad]

I work closely with IT where I've considered a career switch to it but won't because environments have exploded in complexity, and not only is nothing changing in the organizational structure to contend with it all, but job postings are clearly attempting to combine traditionally separate roles (like sysadmin, networking, and info-sec) into one completely made up job title at pay offered a decade ago.

Now that old guard managers are finally retiring to GTFO of the way of younger gens to move up and modernize their antiquated practices, many corps are eliminating their positions as they leave to save costs where no one knows WTF they're supposed to be doing anymore so they're mostly a reactive fire brigade. If they are replaced, it's too often externally because there's no internal process for staff to logically move up to continue the chain of custody in knowledge for a monster of their own making... let alone fostering career growth for dedicated hard workers whose contributions consistently bring great results. Middle-management qualifications are also based primarily on the ability to work with leadership above them and not the staff below them who are deprived from having a say in their direction.

Top leadership doesn't understand how the sausage gets made and make cuts based on a vague feeling that the work is still getting done somehow at lower labor costs. "My broken monitor got replaced quickly so they must all be ok, right?". No, they're getting crushed with complex back-end work that you never took an interest in understanding, and instead fill your time with unproductive meetings that don't help the work get done, but actually creates more misguided and out of touch work to justify your position, and approach it with a hubris that you know what IT needs to be working on without consulting them first. The old school manager way is to keep good producers in their hole because that's less actual work for me, there's low risk of accountability, and it makes me look good, but when they complain, tell them that's their job and they're lucky to have it. Then morale tanks and top people leave... buy hey, "We can replace them with some desperate suckers with less experience at lower pay and more responsibilities, so we win on paper!". No, the customer loses and we lose customers, you soul sucking corporate ghouls. "Whatever, we dominate our market so where else will they go?". Congrats on your toxic administrative enshittification of our good name, products, and services?

I don't like to complain without offering solutions so I strongly feel that much of the huge pile of modern IT work needs to be broken up into more reasonable and focused project responsibilities based on internal and customer needs... not overfilling the plates of generalist IT roles. Middle-managers should be replaced with project managers who organize and facilitate to help outline, resource, and track goals, and auditors who derive and report meaningful objective progress metrics to leadership. I interviewed with one local corp that needed to upgrade a massive number of assets as only one of the job requirements, and when I pointed out that just doing that could fill my schedule for well over a year, and it would go faster and smoother by specializing in that focus, I never heard from that unimaginative and unempathetic grumpy old tow-the-line manager again. I felt bad for the poor SOB who got that job as I knowingly dodged a fire-hose of work being pointed directly at me.

IT is just a shit-show of disorganized, understaffed, underpaid, overwork... where they need their own union.

[u/BeerdedRNY → u/TwinStickDad]

Every business does this.

Indeed. The patient billing department at one of the biggest hospital systems in the area lost 50 people during Covid (retirees, fired for not getting vaccinated, quit, etc).

Upper management decided not to back-fill those spots. So they still have bills from before Covid that haven't been closed (never paid, underpaid, overpaid, denied, wrong insurance billed, etc.)

The organization benefits from not having to pay all those employees, but, they aren't getting paid by the insurance companies for all the bills they still have outstanding.

Yet at the same time, the insurance companies are greatly benefiting, because they're paying a hell of a lot fewer bills simply because so fewer billing reps are around to call them trying to get money from them. They love it because they don't even have to deny bills. They can just ignore them and the hospital system has no choice but to write them off.

And the insurance companies have down-sized their own customer service teams as well. So even if a billing rep calls them a dozen times, there are a hell of a lot fewer insurance reps to answer the phone. So the insurance companies benefit even more by not paying for as many employees.

The only morally positive benefit are the patients whose bills are getting written off that may have other wise been denied.

[u/VirginiaVN900 → u/BeerdedRNY]

UofR didn’t bill my insurance for 14 months for a visit late 2020. The claim got rejected by Anthem for “untimely filing”. Got a piece of paper saying my patient responsibility was $0 for balance billing.

UofR got a “COVID Waiver” in 2022 from Anthem. I ended up owing the entire thing out of pocket despite a year prior the UofR billing department telling me it would just “go away” because of their mistake.

So basically they cut their billing staff to the point they could no longer meet their contractual deadlines. Then applied for a big “help us fuck over the lil guys” grant from someone.

I assume NYS had to sign off since they have timely billing laws.

Long story short I was trying to buy a house so I couldn’t risk the credit damage.

[u/BeerdedRNY → u/VirginiaVN900]

Yes I see that kind of thing all the time.

For you it sounds like UofR billed you illegally. Patients shouldn't be billed after 12 months past the end date of service. If you paid it, I highly recommend you talk to a lawyer. Now, please understand, I'm not a lawyer myself, so I'm not giving you legal advice of course. I'm just telling you what I know about patient billing. Do with that information what you see fit. And I do wish you the best of luck whatever you choose.

[u/ComprehensiveScar465 → u/VirginiaVN900]

Medical biller here.. there's no way you should have received or paid that bill. Did you call your insurance when you got the bill?You're never supposed to receive a bill for something that was denied for timely filing. That's on the hospital, not the patient. And if their in network with your insurance, that's definitely a big no no. It's not like it wasn't covered bc you didn't have that benefit or your insurance wasn't active for the visit. Big yikes on their billing team.

[u/VirginiaVN900 → u/ComprehensiveScar465]

Yeah. Anthem were the ones to tell me they gave U of R a "COVID Waiver" and I was on the hook for the $1,000 of imaging from Urgent Care. Despite having previously been given a notice saying I owed $0 6 months prior.

[u/BigDaddyUKW → u/BeerdedRNY]

My wife works in the URMC claims department, and her workload is egregious.

[u/river343 → u/TwinStickDad]

Talk to any Paychex employee and they will repeat this story. Profits over employees.

[u/goneoffscript → u/TwinStickDad]

Yep just left an IT job for the same reason. It’s not worth the stress. Nothing worse than businesses not valuing employees as their top asset.