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Ozz81 posted:But it has the potential to be used against you later....like, say, during a performance review. Sort of a catch-22 anyhow, if you say "no", you don't look like a team player, but if you say "yes" and don't get the job done (or do it wrong), it still counts against you. That's how quite a few of my past corporate IT jobs had been, anyhow, but they were run by assholes that got canned not long after people got fed up and left. If your boss isn't prioritizing, do it for him. Make a list of all the projects, put them in what you think is a reasonable priority order, and email it to him. In the email include something like, "I have prioritized my own workload, according to X, Y and Z. I have N assignments, but I will not be able to get project 7, 8 and 9 done by their respective deadlines. Would you like to make any changes to my priorities?" Include any relevant details of why this or that project won't get done, like you needing to do extra research or testing or whatever if it's relevant. Reasonable boss would come back with priority changes, and you now have them in writing (print this poo poo out and keep it), so now you have actual direction and leadership even if you had to pull it out of him with a team of oxen. Unreasonable boss will say stupid poo poo like, "It's all top priority" in which case you very reasonably reply that in that case you will be working on things in the order you originally decided on (Print out this conversation too). You've now done your due diligence. You've said "no" in a way that's documented and honest, rather than insubordinate. Unreasonable bosses will ding you come performance review time on the fact that you didn't get all the work done. It was impossible not to get dinged. What's good for you is that you decided not to euthanize your life outside of work for the sake of unreasonable expectations by your boss, a boss who I promise and swear would have found a way to ding you on your performance review anyway.
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Oct 3, 2014 11:31
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topenga posted:Sounds like something IBM would do. Only it wouldn't be a truck, it would be the cafeteria. Probably your pick of any of the thawed-refrozen-several-times old rear end "treats" still in the inadequately chilled "freezer". At one of my last jobs, they ran a company-wide event where management could give out little cards to employees that went above and beyond for something - stuff like doing something extra for a customer, or even just picking up a piece of trash in a hall. Generally little things that most people would probably do readily if they weren't viciously underpaid and beat down and consequently ruled by apathy. Each department was part of a team, and each team had a little fundraiser-style thermometer printed up in one of the employee areas, with three tiers on it. Whenever your team collectively got enough tickets to reach one of the tiers, everyone on the team got a reward. This was a months-long program, so the required numbers to reach each tier were not trivial. The middle tier reward was a free lunch in the employee cafeteria. Approximate cash value: $2.00. Color me motivated.
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Oct 9, 2014 08:33
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Rhymenoserous posted:Believe it or not this kind of poo poo works on certain kinds of employee. Watching people go nuts where I work over a $25 target gift card is a thing to behold. Me? I find it insulting, but whatever. Oh, I know it works sometimes, on some people. It works because some people think that it's an indication that management cares enough to do a little something extra for their employees. The problem with doing something like that at that particular company was that they had really gone out of their way to systematically cut employee amenities and freeze wages. It was a depressed area and most people were over a barrel - they couldn't just quit and find something better because there was nothing better. The people working there looked dead, more often than not. Hollow eyes, trudging movement, never smiling. Trapped. To top it off, the general manager was tired of the employees not being happy, so he announced that he would be "on the hunt" for people who looked unhappy and would be issuing reprimands. A true "the beatings will continue until morale improves" message. When you start from that position, giving away a $2 lunch at your lovely cafeteria just doesn't have the same impact.
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Oct 10, 2014 12:39
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Keetron posted:He almost made me feel bad that I want to look outside the department. It's funny, the harder my boss tries to make me feel bad about advancing my career, the better I feel about it.
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Oct 14, 2014 23:41
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MightyJoe36 posted:It always makes me wonder about the psychology behind this. Like somebody read a management book about making going to the bathroom a horrible experience so the employees won't spend too much time there. I'm convinced that most features in your average office building were designed by people who sincerely believed that if you're genuinely happy at work, you aren't actually working.
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Oct 23, 2014 14:48
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Aquatic Giraffe posted:The company I'm contracting for does this, if they get enough people to donate enough dollars out of their paycheck to a particular charity they get free breakfast served one day. Those are some drat expensive pancakes. They did have a thing where every dollar pledged entered you in a raffle for some cool poo poo, but with thousands of employees the chances of winning were super low and if you pledged a lot of dollars per paycheck to increase your chances you were on the hook for that donation every paycheck for a year. The only answer I ever give to this stuff is No, incentives be damned. If anybody pushes hard or tries an emotional appeal I tell them I donate to charities of my own choosing and do not feel obligated to contribute to ones that I haven't researched and am not sure are on the level (which happens to be true). It's pretty remarkable how not pressured I feel to respond to unsolicited charity requests because of this.
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Oct 25, 2014 04:17
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MightyJoe36 posted:Conversation at work yesterday: "Yeah, well that's the day I get to wear a bathrobe."
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Oct 28, 2014 17:30
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ladyweapon posted:Keurig coffee isn't fantastic (the sumatra I get is passable), but you cant mess up "put Kcup in, push button to dispense coffee." Please no one ruin this for me, I don't want it to be possible to screw up a keurig. Challenge accepted. (Not really, I don't coffee)
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Oct 29, 2014 19:03
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1500quidporsche posted:I got lectured that I'm not a team player because I declined to go bowling to catch up on work once. An old boss of mine decided to host a team-building session-thing for the deaprtment. Nothing creative, just trust falls and who-gets-to-go-in-the-submarine-during-apocalypse poo poo and anything that you could find in a So You Want To Be A Manager book. This boss also loved to talk and beat the corporate drum, so I expected at least one long-winded speech about vision and the future and other cringe-worthy nonsense. Starting at 5:00 PM. In a department where about half the employees were salaried. Mandatory. I was the only one with the gall to coincidentally need to call in sick on that very day.
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Nov 1, 2014 22:10
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Sydin posted:As much as I miss being able to decline off-hours meetings by pulling the overtime card, I enjoy not having to worry about time sheet shenanigans more. I was a software developer for a place that made all their salaried employees punch a clock. I was also written up (as in, written reprimand, goes into my employee file, too many of those and you're fired automatically) for punching in at exactly 8:00 one day. Because that meant I was at my desk at 8:01, and my  posted schedule (again, salaried, production-oriented position here, not some customer-facing desk or phone that needs to be manned 100% of the time) had me down for 8:00.What I'm saying is, salaried/exempt means nothing if you work for a sociopath who doesn't know how or care to evaluate someone's actual work. Count your blessings.
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Nov 3, 2014 21:49
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Phuzzy posted:Except there have been numerous cases that have before the Labor Board that have slapped employers for this idea. You clock in, you get paid. You clock in early because of policies, you get paid for the whole time. Even if you're salaried. What? I didn't say I didn't get paid, I said I got written up. I got paid my exact agreed-upon salary. Similarly, on the days I did come in early or leave late or take a shorter lunch, I got paid the exact same.
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Nov 3, 2014 22:26
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1500quidporsche posted:One of the very very few benefits of being salaried is that you aren't treated like a 5 year old child when it comes to getting work done and putting in the hours. One of the theoretical benefits. Not only being salaried, but being salaried in a position that has nothing to do with the time of day you enter/leave the building and everything to do with a finished product being done correctly and under deadline. He was indeed a giant back of dicks, for this and many, many other reasons. One of my co-workers, a man in his fifties who had worked in IT in various capacities for the last three decades, said that he had "never met a more vile human being in his life." enraged_camel posted:"stealing from the company." If someone was found to be taking a little too much time for lunch breaks, or coming in a bit too late in the mornings, they would receive a verbal reprimand from their manager (who was in turn reprimanded by the CEO by not keeping people on a tight leash). A phrase my boss used on more than one occasion. I once pointed out that I had come in on a couple weekends to get a project in under a deadline, and that sometimes I took 20 minutes for lunch because I just wanted to get calories into me so I could go back to a problem I was seriously engaged with. His response? "That doesn't matter." Okay then. quote:Said CEO passed away from cancer a few weeks ago. I sometimes picture her on her deathbed examining a stack of time-sheets, protecting every penny of her wealth from thieves like a true captain of industry would. One of the reasons I quit that job was that I found myself picturing my life if my boss were to die in a high-speed collision on the commute to or from the office. Sounds like I'm being a drama queen but this guy was a terror and being around him (more precisely, in his power) was doing things to my personality and my thoughts that alarmed the poo poo out of me.
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Nov 4, 2014 05:21
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enraged_camel posted:It doesn't matter. Even if the guy's boss says "you are paid for 40 hours a week," salaried people aren't paid hourly and there's no upper limit on how much they are expected to work. The smart ones aren't that direct anyway. My boss was fond of using phrases like, "go above and beyond" and, "do more than the bare minimum." That "pieces of flair" scene from the movie Office Space is a work of non-fiction, is what I'm saying.
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Nov 4, 2014 09:07
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Sydin posted:Now he's thrown out a truckload of meetings on every free slot any of us have from now until next Tuesday for "prep work", and my calendar looks like the Berlin Wall. That moment when you realize that you are working for a child. 
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Nov 17, 2014 23:37
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ladyweapon posted:Oh sweet Mary I think my head would explode. This seems like it'd make it even harder to keep track of emails since you'd have a flood of people responding to the same thing, but not necessarily taking care of anything. My general reaction to policies like this that I will follow them to the extent that they make sense. In this case, I would interpret "every single email" as "every email asking a question of me or containing an issue on which I need or wish to comment." I tend to respond quickly to such things in any case, and if it is going to require research or otherwise a long time, I respond and let them know that that's the case. Good managers will let you go around or ignore bad or overly broad policies when they don't make sense, and those that don't will find themselves losing their best people on a regular basis. As for answering emails on weekends, I'll make any company a deal on this. Hire me to produce a thing or keep a system working on a perpetual basis, and I'll get it done for you. If that requires me to come in on a weekend to meet a deployment deadline, or resuscitate a dying server or something, I'll do it. And then maybe you won't see me the following Monday and Tuesday. Maybe I'll go home on a Friday at 2:00 to take my dog to the park because it's really nice that day. I'll have a doctor's appointment sometimes, and I expect to not need to burn a PTO day to go. That's the deal. If you want me to be dynamic and react quickly to situations, allow me freedom and flexibility with my schedule. If you want me in the office from 8-5 every single weekday without fail, keep your loving hands off my free time. Pick one.
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Nov 18, 2014 23:34
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SpartanIV posted:Our CEO is asking/forcing us sign an addendum to our original non-compete agreement that sounds like it could be used to keep us from entering entire industries if he wanted it to. Basically it sounds like "You're not allowed to work for a year after your employment ceases at any business that operates in an industry that your CEO has an idea about", and our CEO has ideas all the time. So we're all a bit scared that a year or more down the line there won't be any industry we're not competing with. Right now our non-compete only covers the industry our company currently does business in. Chances are any court worth its salt would find such a broad agreement unenforceable, but it's still something you might have to go to court to fight if you sign it, which may not be something you can afford. This is something I'd be inclined to outright refuse and call his bluff, but I'm confident that I can find a new job in my industry pretty quick. Not sure if you are in the same boat. It's bullshit anyway; ideas are worth exactly nothing. Edit: I might be inclined to demand a guaranteed year's worth of full severance and benefits in exchange for being asked to essentially be unemployable for a year. That's a fair exchange, if he's that terrified of someone competing with his precious ideas. But again, I can afford to be that demanding. Che Delilas fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 13:24
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Necc0 posted:It may vary by state but I'm pretty sure non-competes have to be extremely specific and operate under very strict rules. They're very rarely enforced because they rarely can stand up in court. It's a bluff talk to a lawyer Non-competes are handled at a state level, yes. In California for example they're just automatically void except for a very specific set of exceptions (I'm reading a wiki, not a lawyer, etc. etc.)
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Nov 19, 2014 18:37
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rolleyes posted:Of course, that's so much hot air since no organisation in the history of time has ever implemented Agile properly. Most of the time they apply the buzzwords and then expect magic to happen. It's like Agile is supposed to be a different way of organizing and managing development, while management thinks Agile is a way to avoid having to organize and manage development.
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Nov 22, 2014 04:22
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:That said, depending on what process you current follow, Agile is pretty good. You know if you get somewhere close to what it should be. My favorite example of it being done wrong is the daily stand-up meeting. Manager sees "daily... meeting" and latches onto it because that's something he (thinks he) can understand and loves meetings, but then turns it into a 15-minute managerial wank-fest, which balloons into 30 minutes or longer, every single day. So instead of every developer getting a quick picture of the immediately important poo poo and having a precise direction for that day, everyone begins the day annoyed and already drained of energy.
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Nov 22, 2014 15:26
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Aquatic Giraffe posted:This is EXACTLY what happened at my old job. We had daily meetings that were supposed to be a quick update on whether or not items on our action item list were completed, literally just a yes/no. In reality it turned into at least an hour of discussion. These meetings were at 9 every day, usually followed by a meeting with subcontractors at 10 so the whole team was tied up in meetings from at least 9-11:30 and sometimes later every day then the management was bewildered at why productivity was dropping. I mean, it doesn't have to just be a yes/no, someone can alert the group to a roadblock or problem they're having and the lead can suggest someone specific to put eyes on it, but you should never be discussing the problem or solutions at those meetings.
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Nov 22, 2014 19:11
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Poop Cupcake posted:How does Agile handle the situation where the customer is Well, part of the responsibility is on the development team to analyze and draw out the correct information from the customer. But Agile handles that by being itself. What I mean is, Agile exists because requirements change, people change their minds, people can't communicate, and people don't know what they want. You're supposed to do "sprints," i.e. very short term (couple weeks) development cycles on specific features, present the result, get feedback, and iterate. If the worst case happens and you've gotten it completely wrong, you've lost a couple weeks and nobody panics. Contrast this to Waterfall, where everything is designed up front and the whole product is delivered a year down the road. Customer tells you half the poo poo is wrong, now you have all these design specs carved into stone that you have to shatter and re-carve and it adds months. Disclaimer: I'm by no means an Agile expert, and I may be misunderstanding parts of it. It's as subject to poor/incorrect implementation as any other process, which can gently caress up your development hard just fine, which I believe is what started this whole conversation
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Nov 24, 2014 20:31
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and doesn't effectively communicate what they want and/or actually has no idea what they want?
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:The thing about waterfall is that it's a strawman. It's just the opposite extreme. At one of my old jobs we had a waterfall-like process. Boss insisted on big formalized requirements documents that were signed off on by the "clients" (internal dev, so other department heads). If there was a change after that, I had to generate a bunch of extra formalized documentation and get signatures again. Once I delivered, no more iteration. I can describe that by using the word "Waterfall" so I'm going to do so.
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Nov 25, 2014 00:56
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ladyweapon posted:There's a bunch of things that could make our processes so much more efficient, but this right here is why I keep my mouth shut. If anything at any point goes wrong, regardless of reason, it will somehow be because of that change. I'm sure there are corporations out there where you can focus on making things better rather than on avoiding blame. But I haven't found one yet.
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Nov 27, 2014 02:30
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a shameful boehner posted:I'm stuck in a spot where I'm paid pretty well for what I feel my qualifications and skills are in my role, but have gotten so burnt out due to this sort of poo poo I just really don't give a flying gently caress anymore. I've been looking but not truly seriously. So frustrating. You didn't ask for advice, but I'm going to give it anyway. Ramp up your job hunt and make active plans to leave. You might be surprised at the way your overall mood improves just by making effort to change your situation, even if that situation isn't actually changing right away.
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Dec 4, 2014 00:01
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ninjahedgehog posted:NOT EVERYTHING ON THIS GODDAMN EARTH HAS TO BE ABOUT YOU. It doesn't have to be, but it is. Didn't you know that? She knows that. She KNOWS that.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:15
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Pleads posted:That's gotta violate something or other about health and privacy. Like, what if she has an abortion or a miscarriage and didn't plan to tell anyone. If the boss got access to her medical records somehow and found out about it that way, and then spread it around, then maybe there would be repercussions. If she just told the boss, probably not.
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Dec 6, 2014 00:15
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Solkanar512 posted:Non exempt is what you're looking for here. "Hourly" is not a term that confuses anybody, so I'm not sure why you're sperging about it. Aquatic Giraffe posted:My current company is doing a lunch, onsite, mandatory, during the work day, unpaid. At least the food is free? My boss held a "team-building" meeting, after work hours, mandatory. It was only unpaid for the salaried employees, of which I was one (because yes it would be completely illegal otherwise). Dinner was provided, from the company's extremely mediocre buffet (so essentially it was no cost to the boss), and it was scheduled to be at least 3 hours. I was the only one with the balls to call in sick that day. Three hours of my own time in the evening and all I get in return is $10 worth of buffet food? I'll pass.
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Dec 9, 2014 07:42
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Sundae posted:My contract is up in July 2015. I'm out the door pretty much the day it ends. Does he regularly tell his people that they owe him sit-ups or push-ups?
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Dec 11, 2014 23:46
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Kim Jong Il posted:I'm a masochist because I feel like I'm not accomplishing anything by my standards, although I am a lot in what everyone else cares about. Why the gently caress does it matter what everyone else's standards are? If you're not satisfied, you're not satisfied.
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Dec 13, 2014 01:40
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rolleyes posted:Motherfucker, the spaces in my calendar are where I do my actual work! Some people think meetings are where work gets done.
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Dec 13, 2014 09:56
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Shear Modulus posted:Haha an intern has been gone for like two days and this one rear end in a top hat manager is already talking poo poo about his work. There are a lot of unprofessional things managers can do, but insulting the people they're responsible for, past or present, has got to be near the top of the list.
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Dec 16, 2014 21:42
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Armacham posted:Every one got sick at my wife's Christmas party except for me because I didn't eat the vegetables! I have real trouble partaking of all the goodies (especially homemade) that the nicer people in the office bring in on a regular basis, and this kind of thing is why. People don't know how to wash their loving hands.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:25
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Swink posted:"Nobody wants that benefit" Gotta love when executives double down on employee goodwill after being cheapskates by then insulting everyone's intelligence.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:11
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Xibanya posted:Today the head director of the company called all of IT into a meeting wherein she berated us repeatedly for loving up the payroll, repeating again and again that we hosed up and that if we can't run payroll then we're all hosed. She was really mad and semi-incoherent. "it's all our responsibility to make sure payroll runs and yet not one of you thought to check that it actually had run" and how IT is careless and not fully aware of the company's purpose. Hate this poo poo. My old boss used to send passive-aggressive emails to the entire department after someone (one person) came in late, saying things like punctuality is important and we all have a responsibility to blah blah blah blah. I would ask him why he sent the letter to me, and if I had hosed up, and of course I hadn't, he just wanted to wave his Alpha Penis around and remind everyone who was in charge. He couldn't say that, so he'd just be vague and generic and say things like "everybody on the same page" and other manager-speak. Nice way to lose the respect of your best people.
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Dec 31, 2014 16:47
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rolleyes posted:In my experience this tends to happen because the person doesn't like confronting individuals rather than because they want to project their awesome powers. I don't know your old boss though, so maybe he was both confrontational and passive-aggressive - bonus! I don't think that was the case with this guy; he's chewed out people directly before (I know this because he bragged about it to some of us: "I really handed Tom's rear end to him yesterday!"). Very professional. And he wasn't otherwise passive-aggressive, only those letters were, because you can justify sending "We all have a responsibility to blah blah blah" to the whole department, but doing the same with "Joseph was late, Joseph don't be late again it's not good" is really inappropriate. No, I think for him it was all about taking another opportunity to flex his managerial muscle and remind everyone that he was in charge. He was an egomaniac through and through, and this was just another way of stroking his ego.
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Dec 31, 2014 19:00
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Cheesus posted:Sundae is called into his boss's boss's office and the conversation begins, "Even with these replacements, we're missing our established deadlines..." A situation like this would make it easy for me to stop giving any kind of a poo poo. I mean, what are you going to do, suddenly take up the slack of 13 other people all by yourself? It ironically takes all the pressure off, because everything is entirely, utterly out of your control; projects will fail and there's nothing you can do about it. So I'd just be doing the work I can do and not worry about deadlines or put in any unpaid overtime or anything. If they want to fire me for that, they're doing me a favor.
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Jan 4, 2015 01:33
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Grouco posted:"No, I'm out of town this weekend." This, but don't tell them ahead of time. Just don't answer your phone on the weekend and if someone bitches at you the following monday, tell them oh sorry, I was out of town.
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Jan 9, 2015 04:21
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ladyweapon posted:It would take longer to train someone to assist with anything useful than its worth. My other coworker is pulling half the weight. I'm not trying to do everything by myself with no support. Yeah, its not acceptable, that's why I'm complaining about it. I'm not going to look for a new job because I'm working a lot during a temporary period (a lengthy temporary period, granted) & my boss is OK with having a couple ounces of champagne on lunch on a day where I'm not in contact with customers or vendors. Of course it's acceptable. You've proven to them beyond any doubt that it's acceptable by acquiescing to everything they've dumped on you. If it weren't acceptable you wouldn't loving accept it.
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Jan 10, 2015 23:19
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Weatherman posted:The beatings will continue until morale improves! A place I used to work cut down on wages and benefits and friendly little perks around the time the recession hit, and just never got around to giving any of it back once the economy (and yes, this included the income of this business) recovered. This was a place where it was very important to make the customers feel like they were loved, and therefore required employees to be real bubbly and accommodating and overall look friendly and happy. Naturally, cutting all the benefits and never returning them when they could have caused a large number of employees there to get pretty apathetic and the bubbly happiness was pretty much non-existent when I was there. The GM figured out that people weren't happy, and his solution was to send a company-wide email to browbeat everyone into being happy goddammit. He told us that he would be "on the hunt" and that disciplinary action would be taken against employees who weren't smiling or being enthusiastic enough. Shockingly, that didn't seem to work very well.
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Jan 11, 2015 22:13
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It's nice that you went out of your way to make it as pleasant as possible, but the fact of the matter is that being forced to hear music that you have no control over sucks. It sucks bad, and it's worse if you have to concentrate to do your job; I can't tell you how many times a loving saxophone from across the room shattered my focus at my last job, and it wasn't even loud, it just penetrates. Anything with lyrics, heavy bass, just any song you don't like, and being unable to turn it off or skip it? Forget about it. Let people bring in headphones if they want music, for gently caress's sake. Your CEO's idea was terrible.
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Jan 13, 2015 03:55
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