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The marketing people have been rotating our product names so frequently and enforcing it with snotty cc all call outs, that it isn’t uncommon to have three teams meet and all be speaking about the same thing but using different words and confusing each other. None of this affects the clients. They also called me up to personally rat out one of the people I supervise for only getting a six out of eleven answers correct on the “just for fun” corporate values quiz we all took at the end of some zoom event last month. Then they called my boss about it
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Apr 30, 2021 12:26
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There is nothing more fun than correct corporate citizenship. That person had insufficient fun and so must be burned
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Apr 30, 2021 12:31
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PIZZA.BAT posted:For what it’s worth the guy who invented the concept of ‘points’ has publicly apologized and said it was one of the worst things he’s introduced to the world thats not nearly enough
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Apr 30, 2021 12:35
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lol gently caress, this is why I read this thread. It reminds me that I don't want to go look for a higher paying job at a big corp because it's not worth it. I like seeing the president of my company every day and chatting with him and he's just a regular guy who doesn't demand I eat, sleep, and breath corporate values
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Apr 30, 2021 12:44
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Imagine how awkward the conversation with my boss was where I had to tactfully say I didn’t care how much or little this person knew about corporate values because they were doing their job well; and trying not to say that I also didn’t care about these quizzes either
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Apr 30, 2021 12:44
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poisonpill posted:The marketing people have been rotating our product names so frequently and enforcing it with snotty cc all call outs, that it isn’t uncommon to have three teams meet and all be speaking about the same thing but using different words and confusing each other. None of this affects the clients. Speaking as someone who was in-house marketing, this sort of garbage is largely leadership driven. "How can we infuse our company core values into our work?" and you sit there knowing the answer is "please pay your people more and stop overworking them, gently caress". Doesn't stop some marketing people from either buying into it, or buying into it enough to get a paycheck. And mercy on the entire company if leadership has a business coach or get hooked on some book by a business 'guru', because now you have to be some sort of dipshit alchemist and merge company values and whatever garbage they're really excited about. Then you have to turn around and give all of this info to the rest of the company who do not give a poo poo in the slightest.
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Apr 30, 2021 13:58
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Motivation idea: During annual evaluations workers can gift their CEO with a brick. When there's enough bricks to build a little wall the CEO has a quiet cigarette and the company starts looking for a replacement. Thoughts?
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Apr 30, 2021 14:02
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The cask of agile development
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Apr 30, 2021 14:03
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Received a 40ish cent raise in exchange for shutting up about our tech debt when trying to solve problems. lol cheaper than an IT guy I guess.
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Apr 30, 2021 15:40
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Creature posted:Our marketing people have been giving us what seems to be hourly updates on the last day for some guy who's retiring. They seem to think that everyone in the company is totally invested in events such as his last lunch with the team, his farewell, his last drive out of the carpark, and how much he looks forward to playing golf in his retirement. Lol we get those too. If the team the person works with wants to hold a small event sure go ahead. We don't need dept wide emails or a celebration video. Fortunately with WFH I don't have to sign a going away card for a total stranger. On another topic, does anyone else's MegaCorp have a extremely high amount of contractors as they can't attract full time staff for in-demand technical roles? I'm not directly involved with budgeting but from context clues every year our leadership mentions wanting to get contractor headcount down to zero (and grumbling about how expensive they are) but whenever there is an update on that goal it's in red with a note that another 200 have been added to the total. I assume any MegaCorp always has some contractors, but here it seems to have become a de facto permanent solution.
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Apr 30, 2021 15:40
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Gotta vent for a sec. I had my annual performance review the other day and for the most part it was complimentary. However, my boss kept bringing up issues that happened at the beginning of the pandemic (issues with our vendors) that I had no control over but still fixed them anyway. He kept calling them "your little glitches" in a tone that was probably more condescending than he meant but whatever. He didn't acknowledge my efforts to resolve the problems, he only cared that they happened at all. So the rest of the review goes well, no major critiques or complaints. I get my score and it is "passing". Basically the lowest grade you can get without going on a PIP. Normally I wouldn't care because I can't get a raise or a bonus anyway but this is the lowest I've ever been rated and it's getting under my skin. I asked how I could improve in the future and he said, "Well... the ball is in your court!" I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
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Apr 30, 2021 16:03
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Is your resume up to date?
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Apr 30, 2021 16:05
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ultrafilter posted:Is your resume up to date?
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Apr 30, 2021 16:07
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ultrafilter posted:Is your resume up to date?
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Apr 30, 2021 16:09
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Inzombiac posted:Gotta vent for a sec. Yikes that is not good.
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Apr 30, 2021 16:10
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You've all been updating the hours worked/hours remaining on your tasks so the burndown chart looks good as we near the end of the sprint, RIGHT?
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Apr 30, 2021 16:22
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Inzombiac posted:Gotta vent for a sec. Where I last worked we could appeal our reviews, triggering some sort of meeting with HR. Can you do this? Is it even worth it?
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Apr 30, 2021 16:25
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titty_baby_ posted:Where I last worked we could appeal our reviews, triggering some sort of meeting with HR. Can you do this? Is it even worth it? lol no how could this ever be worth it inzombiac you have a bad boss. i've had a boss that pulled that poo poo on me before. the only fix is to get out. you won't regret it
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Apr 30, 2021 17:09
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Inzombiac posted:. I asked how I could improve in the future and he said, "Well... the ball is in your court!" drat you got negged by your boss
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Apr 30, 2021 17:16
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Inzombiac posted:Gotta vent for a sec. Yeah aside from knocking you for some poo poo that sounds like wasn’t your fault, and you worked to make the best of the situation, the answer to your question of how you can improve screams poo poo scum manager. I have been lucky enough to have pretty caring managers for most of my career who want you to succeed, and none of them would ever answer a question like that. Does the boss have some kind of vendetta against you/did you piss them off somehow?
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Apr 30, 2021 17:21
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Thanks everyone for affirming that I'm not going insane. No, he doesn't have a vendetta against me, he's the Big Boss but doesn't know what my day-to-day is like and has said that he doesn't really care to learn. I give him slack because he's responsible for a lot of high-level science/engineering work that is very stressful. I just don't understand why he's my direct supervisor. This place is doing good, important work and I feel lucky to work for them but if you're not a scientist or engineer, there aren't any good resources for advancement.
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Apr 30, 2021 17:27
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Creature posted:loving golf. Why are all these old men so obsessed with golf. Playing golf is not a personality you boring grey office fucks. Img- The Old Grey Whistle Test theme and logo but it's "The Boring Grey Office Fucks"
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Apr 30, 2021 17:28
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At a previous job I was basically on my way out (had another offer I hadn’t yet accepted) but I had my annual review and wanted to bring it up and allow them to counter offer. My review went perfect with the exception of some very minor things (“sometimes at meetings people feel like they don’t have your full attention”. Yes, that is correct when it’s not my department being discussed). At the end my boss says “normally this would be where we discuss pay raises, but because of the pandemic we cannot do that”. I said “that’s fine. I’m actually going to leave”. I later learned that, despite being unable to offer me even a modest raise they had hired a new person to do podcasts (???) for our company. So, I made the right choice.
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Apr 30, 2021 17:42
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Yeah. "Ball's in your court" to me sounds like the answer a clueless manager gives when someone else is mad at you for something and they don't really understand the problem.
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Apr 30, 2021 17:45
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Well podcasts pay for themselves. It’s basically radio on the internet, what a loving genius idea! You can’t afford not to!
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Apr 30, 2021 17:50
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I got dinged in a review for "lacking initiative" the year after I volunteered to spend 14 months rebuilding 700+ items that would have stopped working because of a pending software change. Oddly when we get similar requests nowadays I nod and agree that they certainly look complicated, as why bother stepping up?
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Apr 30, 2021 17:52
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HR usually makes you put your reviews on a bell curve so if your boss ever seems like they're fishing for dings against you in a review it's because they like you less than your coworkers and they need fodder for the mid range or low performer tail.
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Apr 30, 2021 18:07
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I love the way this insane idea permeated business. All teams perform equally well, and every team is made up of a bell curve of performers. Therefore, it makes sense to view the ratings of the HR team compared to the UX developer people compared to the accounting team. Get rid of the worst 10%! Doesn't matter what team you're talking about, or anything like that. It's absolutely crazy, and that's before you start factoring in people gaming the system or something like that.
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Apr 30, 2021 18:17
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Problem: people recognize and understandably hate bell curve performance review systems Solution: the performance review has a generic set of ratings with clear easily attainable metrics so everybody feels like they're making it. Then have a 9 box shadow system that only people managers and HR have access to where they put their real rating
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Apr 30, 2021 18:37
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Yeah, they've forced this bell curve bullshit on us at my company too. I loving hate it because I've got a team full of great devs and I refuse to lie to them. So I told them straight up that I was going to game the system to be as beneficial for the team as possible and that they should ignore the numbers because they're now effectively meaningless. I realize this means I could be shitcanned but the industry is absolutely crying for SDMs (oddly enough) so they can suck my poo poo. edit: oh, I forgot to mention the latest dumb poo poo my work does that brought me here in the first place We don't get to promote our guys when they're ready for a promotion. We get a bag of money generally once a year that we can divvy up for promotions and raises as we see fit. It's a pretty small bag so if I promote somebody, that means the rest are barely getting a cost-of-living increase. It sucks but it's been... workable. We also had a policy that anybody moving from one team to another had to make a completely lateral move with no promotion for at least six months after the move, to prevent poaching. Yeah well apparently they're relaxing that policy, so now somebody who wants a promotion and is ready for it can apply for that level on another team while I'm stuck being able to do jack poo poo for them. I really hope everybody's ready for the inevitable late projects as key devs switch teams! Tinestram fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Apr 30, 2021 |
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Apr 30, 2021 19:20
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99.9% of my job is just making sure the ball is in someone else’s court, mostly by emails that say “No” or “You need to call the support line”.
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Apr 30, 2021 19:43
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AHH F/UGH posted:99.9% of my job is just making sure the ball is in someone else’s court, mostly by emails that say “No” or “You need to call the support line”. Sounds like a dream.
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Apr 30, 2021 19:44
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Biffmotron posted:I have to scream about this. Sorry not sorry for the nerd poo poo. I'm a programmer that maintains and develops some pretty simple automated processes that once a day connect to the company's internal data system and produce a bunch of reports. My overall job has been migrating this automation from the old codebase, which was a box of angry possums that would escape and bite people at least once a week, to a systematic framework that isn't full of weird corner cases, can be extended, and doesn't break all the time. Usual computer toucher stuff Hi. I'm an agile coach. I'm going to counter vent just a little but not at you  What you described is not Agile. At all. And this is why my job is so hard sometimes. Because people do a bunch of dumb poo poo and call it Agile, then people who don't know better assume that all the dumb poo poo is representative of agility and all agile frameworks everywhere and then abandon it without trying to do it right or even incrementally improve it at all. Then "agile" gets a bad rep whereas if it was implemented well with someone like me helping it would probably have worked much better. I'm not saying agility is perfect or works well everywhere but most types of work can be improved with some kind of agile framework if introduced and implemented properly. Basically everyone who hates agility and complains about how much it sucks is working for a company that's doing it wrong. Which is most companies. But I guess that's why I'm still employable.
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Apr 30, 2021 20:21
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Hyrax Attack! posted:On another topic, does anyone else's MegaCorp have a extremely high amount of contractors as they can't attract full time staff for in-demand technical roles? I'm not directly involved with budgeting but from context clues every year our leadership mentions wanting to get contractor headcount down to zero (and grumbling about how expensive they are) but whenever there is an update on that goal it's in red with a note that another 200 have been added to the total. I assume any MegaCorp always has some contractors, but here it seems to have become a de facto permanent solution. My first job was at a contracting firm and at that time (2008) companies like the one I was an "outsourcing asset" for were setting quotas for how many contractors they needed to have because they had reduced headcount as much as possible but hadn't lost any of the engineering work they needed done, so contractors were really attractive because they were cheaper and you could scale how many of them you had pretty easily. The expensive ones are usually specialists in some software or are actually companies providing services and the contract stipulates how many people they'll have working the account. The firm that I worked for went from 40 employees when I joined to a little over 300 when I left, but had cycled through almost 1000 people in four years, I was something like the eighth longest tenured employee. My current company uses outsourcing all over the place as well and it's impossible to see us reducing the numbers for a few more years at least. Our company policy is that if you switch jobs you have to stay in the role for a year or more before moving on, and we're at skeleton crew levels for the time being. I had a co-worker die a few months ago and the hiring freeze the company has in place means we can't bring in a replacement or use the opening to fill a different need, so we just have a contractor taking on some of his tasks and are looking for another to do programing for a while.
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Apr 30, 2021 20:25
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Elephant Ambush posted:What you described is not Agile. Is a 500 line Excel sheet with cells filled with paragraphs of UAT criteria agile? Because it really sucks.
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Apr 30, 2021 20:26
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Scientastic posted:Is a 500 line Excel sheet with cells filled with paragraphs of UAT criteria agile? Because it really sucks. No because there’s literally an agile principle about working software over comprehensive documentation
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Apr 30, 2021 20:29
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vyst posted:No because there’s literally an agile principle about working software over comprehensive documentation Agile documentation is 500 sticky notes on a corkboard.
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Apr 30, 2021 20:33
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Elephant Ambush posted:Basically everyone who hates agility and complains about how much it sucks is working for a company that's doing it wrong. Which is most companies. But I guess that's why I'm still employable. If most companies get it wrong, is it really a good framework?
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Apr 30, 2021 20:35
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Scientastic posted:Is a 500 line Excel sheet with cells filled with paragraphs of UAT criteria agile? Because it really sucks. Agility isn't about the tools you use it's about mindset and behaviors. If an Excel spreadsheet is the only tool you have access to for something like this then my suggestion would be to find a better tool. That sounds like a nightmare.
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Apr 30, 2021 20:36
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90% of agile development is explaining how you're doing agile development wrong. The other 10% is writing stories and scoring points.
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Apr 30, 2021 20:37
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