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Che Delilas posted:See, I don't find those types of terms inherently annoying - in theory we really should be a team, working together to accomplish goals. It's just that they're incredibly disingenuous when they come from a guy whose primary leadership tactics are intimidation and bullying, and who treats the people he manages like they're soldiers and he's the drill sergeant, for example. Yeah I actually agree (despite calling it bullshit above) but a "team" implies we work together. Any time I see it used it's in the context of "you have to do this thing for me right now why isn't it done yet THIS IS AFFECTING PRODUCTION" That one doesn't bother me as much as the "all," is, but I do occasionally get annoyed by it a little.
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Mar 8, 2015 02:56
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myron cope posted:Yeah I actually agree (despite calling it bullshit above) but a "team" implies we work together. Any time I see it used it's in the context of "you have to do this thing for me right now why isn't it done yet THIS IS AFFECTING PRODUCTION" My favorite was when someone had some issues showing up to work on time, and boss would send the entire department an email to chastise everyone and remind us how important punctuality was and how we needed to be at our desks by the time listed on our posted schedule (let's ignore the salaried, production-oriented people like developers (me) where posted schedules don't really make any sense as long as we're not missing meetings or holding up the other developers and actually getting our work done). Hey boss, has the whole TEAM been showing up late? No, everyone else has been on time in recent memory? Just the one guy with the problem then? Is there something stopping you from correcting his behavior directly, or are you going to make everyone else do push-ups while he eats a donut in front of us next, like in your bestest favorite movie?
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Mar 8, 2015 03:05
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flosofl posted:I've actually sent emails out to our team members using the term "Minions". Of course everyone knows it's tongue in cheek... at least that's what I want them to think. I use "Assests".
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Mar 8, 2015 03:45
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Che Delilas posted:My favorite was when someone had some issues showing up to work on time, and boss would send the entire department an email to chastise everyone and remind us how important punctuality was and how we needed to be at our desks by the time listed on our posted schedule (let's ignore the salaried, production-oriented people like developers (me) where posted schedules don't really make any sense as long as we're not missing meetings or holding up the other developers and actually getting our work done).
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Mar 8, 2015 03:54
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Aunt Beth posted:98% of the time "praise in public, punish in private" is the right way to go. Sounds like your boss needs to remember that. He never punished specific people in public, but if one person screwed up he used it as an excuse to remind everyone just who was in charge by telling us that "some of us" were loving up in some way and remind us all of what our responsibilities were. You know, the responsibilities the rest of the department was having no trouble fulfilling. One of the many petty little things he did chiefly to stroke his own ego at the expense of department morale.
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Mar 8, 2015 08:17
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Che Delilas posted:He never punished specific people in public, but if one person screwed up he used it as an excuse to remind everyone just who was in charge by telling us that "some of us" were loving up in some way and remind us all of what our responsibilities were. You know, the responsibilities the rest of the department was having no trouble fulfilling. One of the many petty little things he did chiefly to stroke his own ego at the expense of department morale. Well, what he did also stands up in it's own as a written warning as well. So if an employee were to violate policy he could then be immediately disciplined without having to give him another warning.
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Mar 8, 2015 08:30
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Bob Morales posted:Manager of division x: we need another IP phone and computer for a new office I'm surprised that no one has tried that on me yet, I did get the occasional "Please ensure you're getting the lowest prices bla bla" chat; getting cheaper hardware while still maintaining good specs just falls on deaf ears, I might try to make a push for upgrading laptop hard drives though "Psst... user, just get tell your boss you need an upgrade to authorise it for me). Usually I end up with multiple requests for equipment that I always have magically lying around in shelves everywhere. The big boss emailed telling me I need to have a workstation set up on the double so the new (unannounced) starter can hit the ground running, I had it ready to go the day before lo-and behold the person still hasn't shown up.
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Mar 8, 2015 12:30
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SlayVus posted:Well, what he did also stands up in it's own as a written warning as well. So if an employee were to violate policy he could then be immediately disciplined without having to give him another warning. I know nothing about employment law, but I'd be very surprised if an email to an entire department saying "hey, step up your game" would count legally as a written warning.
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Mar 8, 2015 13:42
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Thanks Ants posted:I know nothing about employment law, but I'd be very surprised if an email to an entire department saying "hey, step up your game" would count legally as a written warning. You're correct. That company had clear, documented, escalating procedures on how to discipline an employee. None of them included "vague email sent to entire department which names no names and mentions no specific incidents." There is exactly zero chance that an email like that would be considered a written warning. Even verbal warnings were documented (which makes them written warnings if you ask me since they go in your employee file but that's what they were called - "documented verbal warning" I'm not even kidding). Also, bossman had no trouble with one-on-one correction. In fact he liked it. He bragged about times he disciplined employees sometimes, to people in the same department, using names (entirely inappropriate even though the department was small enough that everyone knew what went on pretty much all the time). No, I promise you that those department emails were entirely about grinding his thumb down on everyone underneath him, reminding everyone that he was the boss and we were the peons. I wouldn't be so certain about this if he hadn't demonstrated that this was his management style through virtually his every action.
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Mar 8, 2015 14:14
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Che Delilas posted:unprofessional_manager.jpg If the mass emails to the tune of "hurr durr do better everyone my penis is small" do not fit in the escalating procedures on employee discipline... Does your office have any policies on what constitutes harassment? Particularly if the mass email ever includes names or implies them? In my workplace, public naming / shaming, even if you don't actually write someone's name down, can be pursued as harassment as it bypasses clear disciplinary protocols that strictly involve private, controlled feedback.
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Mar 8, 2015 14:59
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My favorite pathetic attempt at punishment by management was when Tony screwed up, tried to pin it on myself and the helpdesk guy and went so far as to write up a memo about it and demand that we both post it on the wall of our office so we wouldn't forget.
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Mar 8, 2015 15:38
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How about an announcement that so-and-so really needs to clean their cube after months or years of nagging, so management isn't assigning them tickets this week so they can clean up ? Thanks boss, I catch an extra ticket a day when I'm already buried so someone else can get organized. Now I'm working OT to clear my queue. The extra money is nice, but what were they expecting ? Peer pressure ?
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Mar 8, 2015 15:45
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Potato Salad posted:Does your office have any policies on what constitutes harassment? Particularly if the mass email ever includes names or implies them? In my workplace, public naming / shaming, even if you don't actually write someone's name down, can be pursued as harassment as it bypasses clear disciplinary protocols that strictly involve private, controlled feedback. This is an old job, so it's not affecting me anymore, but the short answer is that this guy was untouchable. He was hand-picked by a guy who basically had (and still has as far as I'm aware) all the decision-making power, and despite numerous official complaints about my boss, nothing was done, and it was made clear that nothing would be done. As in, a few of the more senior people went directly to the decision-maker, and were told that he wouldn't be listening to complaints about this boss. Not that he wouldn't do anything. That he wouldn't hear the complaints at all. Everyone pretty much gave up on anything getting better after that. I quit not long after and the only thing I regret about that is not doing it sooner. I understand my replacement lasted half as long as I did.
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Mar 8, 2015 17:31
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mllaneza posted:How about an announcement that so-and-so really needs to clean their cube after months or years of nagging, so management isn't assigning them tickets this week so they can clean up ? Do I dare ask how completely filthy this person's cube was that it takes an entire loving week to clean it up? 
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Mar 8, 2015 18:25
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SlayVus posted:Well, what he did also stands up in it's own as a written warning as well. So if an employee were to violate policy he could then be immediately disciplined without having to give him another warning. I have never worked anywhere where that counted as a written warning. Hell, it won't even pass a verbal warning. According to HR documentation, verbal requires a 1 on 1 meeting with an acknowledgement from the employee the meeting happened (not what was specifically discussed). A written warning is another 1 on 1 with the employee signing a meeting summary acknowledging they have received a written warning. Even then you can't fire someone related to job performance until the employee is placed on 90-day probation (which is another kind of written warning). If they gently caress up then, you can terminate employment. The "Team, remember that..." bullshit that a manager afraid of confrontation will send out won't stand as any kind of disciplinary action that's considered part of the lengthy progression to terminate someone. In fact the only thing that will get someone booted immediately where I'm at is gross incompetence or gross insubordination. And even then, HR might ask for probation instead.
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Mar 9, 2015 02:33
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A project involving rewiring the office network has a hard deadline of the last of March. We have known about this project and its deadline for at least a year. The project had no prior dependencies other than a manager OKing the cost. There was even a good reason to start early last year to get the cost onto that year's budget. Part of the project involves purchasing new network equipment, so we could run parallell networks and not have to move all the drops at once. I explicitly told everyone involved early last year that we should get started as early as possible to have plenty of time to fix issues that will come up, because I know how these things go. We got an OK mid february. I got the equipment delivered last week. The cable guys started working on setting up new patch bays and routing new cables today.  Now all the tricky work of moving the drops has to be made in one tightly scheduled weekend that has basically no margin for error. This is why I drink.
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Mar 9, 2015 16:41
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Man what the gently caress, I've been chipping away at this bloody Xerox printer practically the whole day and I'm two steps worse off from where I started; All I wanted to do was setup a way to get faxes out  Not only did I end up removing the bizarro connection configuration as I was getting DNS errors from Scan to Email, but putting in the proper DNS details cause the Fiery controller to drop off the face of the earth so I can't connect to it anymore... at least it still prints I guess. And now I get home to figure out why my Ubuntu HTPC boots to a black login screen... 
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Mar 9, 2015 20:04
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Hey Cisco, gently caress off with your mandatory log in for public downloads.
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Mar 10, 2015 14:50
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So I'm the chump working 12-day weeks. Recently, I got interrogated over 15 minutes that management thought I didn't need to spend on processing a call that I got at 5AM while on-call. Then they decided that field techs should have to put the first and last half hour of travel time on their own time, rather than being on the clock for it. Because even though we all work from home, use our own printers and other office supplies, we should have commute time. And now we've got expected time to task on some of our calls, and if we go over that time, we have to justify it. Yesterday I replaced a cache card and capacitor on a server in <10 minutes, but spent nearly two hours waiting for access to the server, waiting for the remote server team to power the server down, and waiting for them to verify functionality after it powered up. Since they expected me to have it done in an hour and a half, I'm probably going to get poo poo about that too. I've got an interview tomorrow, and if I get the job, I'm going to be out of here so fast I leave skid marks. Still going to put in two weeks as a courtesy, but screw this place. Our new CEO 10 months ago negotiated a contract terribly, we lost the contract because of things that were the client's fault but were negotiated to be our responsibility, and now since the company is in trouble, the rank and file techs are getting nickel and dimed.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:16
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If you're in the US, most of that poo poo is tax deductible for you, at least.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:29
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22 Eargesplitten posted:So I'm the chump working 12-day weeks. Recently, I got interrogated over 15 minutes that management thought I didn't need to spend on processing a call that I got at 5AM while on-call. Then they decided that field techs should have to put the first and last half hour of travel time on their own time, rather than being on the clock for it. Because even though we all work from home, use our own printers and other office supplies, we should have commute time. And now we've got expected time to task on some of our calls, and if we go over that time, we have to justify it. Yesterday I replaced a cache card and capacitor on a server in <10 minutes, but spent nearly two hours waiting for access to the server, waiting for the remote server team to power the server down, and waiting for them to verify functionality after it powered up. Since they expected me to have it done in an hour and a half, I'm probably going to get poo poo about that too. Don't budge on that sort of thing, ever. They want on call but don't want to pay for on call, that is their own problem. Don't let them use your personal time to make money.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:31
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Sickening posted:Don't budge on that sort of thing, ever. They want on call but don't want to pay for on call, that is their own problem. Don't let them use your personal time to make money. This; stop being a doormat dude.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:35
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Also   Not only do I get to keep my vacation cruise I have been planning for over a year, but I also was able to negotiate just under 6 figures + 10% bonus at the end of the year (up to 15% depending on performance), full benefits, and 7.5k relocation to San Diego! Hooray!
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Mar 10, 2015 17:37
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ratbert90 posted:This; stop being a doormat dude. I'm not being a doormat. I told them that it took me 30 minutes to get information on the call, check road conditions because we were in the middle of a snowstorm, and get more information on the call from the critical team person who called me. They said "Well, did it really take 30 minutes? You're not supposed to round off," and I said that it actually took me 33 minutes, so if they really cared that much they could adjust it. It was ridiculous and petty, but obviously I didn't tell them that outright. They ended up saying that they were escalating it to my management, who would make the decision. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to ask my manager what the decision was on that. I just need to walk the line between being a doormat and being fired. Thankfully, I can probably get away with more right now than I could if we weren't drastically understaffed already. But I don't want to push it, we have third parties that can be called in that take some of our workload.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:47
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I'm pretty sure they also can' t just say "hey your first 30 and last 30 minutes of travel time don't count" either, but I am not a lawyer.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:51
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That sounds kind of illegal. I know a manager made a policy at a big tech call center that everyone had to been signed in on their phones exactly at the start of their shift. If you were scheduled at 9AM you must be signed in at 9AM or prior but anytime prior the start wouldn't count on your timecard. A bunch of employees got a lawyer and the decision was reversed.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:05
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Eargesplitten, who in God's name do you work for? Is it just me or is every hardware servicer scammy as hell?
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Mar 10, 2015 18:06
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Well, they can say my first 15 miles of travel don't count (and another place I interviewed for was even worse), so I wouldn't be surprised if they can. fake edit: Well, googling around, since every day I do work before I travel and I'm carrying necessary tools, they might have to pay for it. I could always ask the legal counsel I'm paying $6 a pay period for. edit: We had a similar thing to that call center thing at the call center I worked for, except we had a few minutes flex either way. I'm not going to say who I work for yet out of paranoia, but as soon as I get an offer I'll say. I mean, if my boss read these forums, she could probably tell who I am, but I'm more worried about someone googling my company's name, seeing me talk poo poo, and then trying to find out who I am. Or am I being too paranoid? 22 Eargesplitten fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 18:07
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Are you based in the United States? Depending on your financial situation I would bounce(quit), get a new job or drag your feet and once you've got a new job - bounce.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:19
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I'm not going to say who I work for yet out of paranoia, but as soon as I get an offer I'll say. I mean, if my boss read these forums, she could probably tell who I am, but I'm more worried about someone googling my company's name, seeing me talk poo poo, and then trying to find out who I am. Or am I being too paranoid? Nope, goons can and have hosed other goons in the past about petty poo poo. The SAclopedia has an example someplace of the drama that resulted from a confession thread where a dude said he liked to sniff his sister's panties. Goons immediately found who he was, found his sister's name, found where he worked, and proceeded to leave like 50 voicemails and faxes proclaiming him a horrible weirdo. He may have subsequently killed himself. So no, not telling people where you work isn't too paranoid.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:23
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I don't have much saved up, I've been spending most of my money on paying down my credit card. I had a month off work late last year after having surgery, since I couldn't lift my toolbag for a month, and that elminiated most of what I had managed to save. Like I said, I have an interview tomorrow. It's for a lovely T1 helpdesk job, but it's 8-5, rather than 8-surprise, it will at least not be a pay cut, and it will give me some experience with remote support and administrating tickets rather than just responding to them. And I won't have to work out of my hatchback anymore. I'm also moving in less than a month, so I need to save money for move-in expenses. I'm in Colorado, but not in Boulder or Denver, so work is harder to find. I'd move to Boulder, but I've got things tying me here for now. Maybe in a couple years I can move to the promised land of 100-200 jobs being advertised for every day, but for now I've got to deal with more limited prospects.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:26
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Well, they can say my first 15 miles of travel don't count (and another place I interviewed for was even worse), so I wouldn't be surprised if they can. If you have $6 coming out of your paycheck for a company sponsored legal council that's a pretty gross conflict of interest on his part if you have to ask anything against the company...
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Mar 10, 2015 18:26
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I don't have much saved up, I've been spending most of my money on paying down my credit card. I had a month off work late last year after having surgery, since I couldn't lift my toolbag for a month, and that elminiated most of what I had managed to save. Like I said, I have an interview tomorrow. It's for a lovely T1 helpdesk job, but it's 8-5, rather than 8-surprise, it will at least not be a pay cut, and it will give me some experience with remote support and administrating tickets rather than just responding to them. And I won't have to work out of my hatchback anymore. Yeah the conditions you're outlining sound pretty shady/illegal, not sure about specific Colorado state law though. Lots of employers will try to gently caress you over with travel related expenses like that and they aren't worth even bothering with, imo.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:46
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Wouldn't those expenses be tax-deductible?
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Mar 10, 2015 19:00
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Trying to deploy a new HP Envy 15-k118nr (with Beats Audio  ) with our standard Windows 8.1 image. I get that this is obviously supposed to be a consumer laptop and was not aimed at business use (and I have no idea why it was purchased) but holy poo poo, is it that hard to put drivers in a pack for IT people? They already do it for a lot of their models here... and then the individual drivers that they have download as executables that install themselves instead of just giving me package that I can extract the .inf files from. 
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Mar 10, 2015 19:12
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It's like hardware vendors don't understand that no matter what they do to their business line, some jackwagon exec somewhere is gonna want a consumer laptop.
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Mar 10, 2015 19:23
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Trying to deploy a new HP Envy 15-k118nr (with Beats Audio lmao
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Mar 10, 2015 19:23
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I hate the poo poo for brains webdev company we use. CFO is buddies with owner. It's hilarious how much payments to these guys, and another vendor have gone down since I came on board. They were spending $2-5,000 a month with each one. Then after I got hired they are barely invoicing us, because we can do the work internally now or we just won't pay for their craziness. Anyway, they have done 3 websites for us. One is in /var/www, one is in /var/www-additional, and one is /home/foobar There are old copies of the websites scattered around as well. Last week the marketing assistant couldn't figure out why something wasn't working, turns out he was uploading his changes to /home/sitename that wasn't actually in an apache config files. dur. So I ask webdev numbnuts inc. to do the following: Move all the loving sites to one folder. /var/www/sitename.com Change all your cron jobs and poo poo to match the new path Change the site config files to match the new path I could do this in 10 minutes but they have their own lovely source control and deployment stuff setup that we can't use. They quoted us 3 loving hours @ 80 bucks an hour. I want to tell them to get hosed but I'd rather just have them doing it. We're going to be done with them pretty soon anyhow. "Pay us to do something, then pay extra us to do it right"
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Mar 10, 2015 19:31
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Trying to deploy a new HP Envy 15-k118nr (with Beats Audio Their corporate models aren't a great deal better - our guys still haven't been able to get the drivers for the hotkeys or 3G card for the current models into our standard 7 image
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Mar 10, 2015 19:39
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Tab8715 posted:Wouldn't those expenses be tax-deductible? I get paid mileage, but only part of the federal standard. I can claim the rest on my taxes. Which will only amount to about 200 this year, but at least 800, if not 1000 next year.
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Mar 10, 2015 19:52
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