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Gin_Rummy posted:If its the one I am thinking of, who I might possibly work for, certain areas have their poo poo together while others don't. Like most jobs, it comes down to the specific program and/or boss you have. Both of mine suck. If it's 3 letters its probably the same place then. Yeah I don't know, I was going to start out installing the systems in vehicles and then move up to a radar tech and then beyond in a somewhat short timeline. They had it all laid out pre getting hired, but then I bailed on the job the Friday before I was supposed to start.
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Jun 9, 2021 15:43
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I used to work as a bookkeeper for a hotel in Albany, NY. A part of my job was taking care of the tax exempt status of any qualifying guests. During my last month at the hotel (I was moving out of state for my wife's job) ownership decided to change management companies. My new boss knew I was leaving soon and wanted a break down of what I did in a day so she could see if the company actually needed to refill my position. When we got to tax exempts I mentioned that was about an hour out of my day on average though could be much longer when session was in. She couldn't understand how something like that could ever take more than five minutes at most. It turns out that the new management company didn't have any other hotels in places that got government business and now found themselves in charge of one in a state capital. Our daily tax exempt guests were triple their other combined properties in a year. I don't understand how someone could do so little research into the client base of a business they were taking over.
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Jun 9, 2021 15:44
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My workplace (State govt agency) put pay raises and promotions on hold for over 2 years for a Pay study review, because we have had horrific turnover, and wages have fallen far short of the "90% of private sector average for experience" goal that was to be the target wage for wage band purposes. Yesterday we had the results of the pay study come out, and the results were basically that yes, the numbers that were being used to determine our pay were insultingly low, so now those are being raised towards somewhat reasonable baselines, but now our target is 60-70% of that number, which means basically nobody is gonna get a raise and this whole clusterfuck was for nothing, and actively harmful given people's promotions have been frozen for potentially years because of this. It was not that surprising to be asked if I can be a reference for two of my coworkers this morning. People are more pissed than they were before.
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Jun 9, 2021 18:58
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Deki posted:My workplace (State govt agency) put pay raises and promotions on hold for over 2 years for a Pay study review, because we have had horrific turnover, and wages have fallen far short of the "90% of private sector average for experience" goal that was to be the target wage for wage band purposes. Yikes that isn't good. I had a buddy who used to be a state park ranger and was everything the agency needed: just out of college with a biology degree, passionate about the work, competent and ethical. Except the pay was barely above entry level retail work and he had a family to support so he had to leave for a more lucrative career. I wondered how the agency could attract decent staff, then learned one of the other rangers had been fired for stealing a fridge from the breakroom (not a mini-fridge) and hoping no one would notice, so I guess they aren't.
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Jun 9, 2021 20:16
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Local Weather posted:Oh god yeah when I left my job in 2014 it was after years of the company getting more and more customer and business with us getting no raises. The owner and his wife were really upset and kind of baffled that I was leaving. The wife asked my why and I told her I was getting a $30,000 raise by leaving and she was dumbstruck and actually had the nerve to say "wait this is about money?" I had this happen when I first got into safety. I was working at an urgent care making like 12.50 an hour, without even hitting 40 so they were paying me like 25k. One of their clients poached me away for 44 an hour with hefty overtime, so it was like a 125k raise. The urgent care said if it was about money they could give me a raise! …of a dollar an hour.
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Jun 9, 2021 20:29
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Hyrax Attack! posted:I wondered how the agency could attract decent staff, then learned one of the other rangers had been fired for stealing a fridge from the breakroom (not a mini-fridge) and hoping no one would notice, so I guess they aren't. Speaking of attracting decent staff, my work has had the same issue. Even though we get paid way above industry standard, plus benefits, vacation, pension, all that stuff, we have trouble getting good people because of the way hiring is done. We have 3 different levels of staff who all do (mostly) the same job: Full Time, Part Time, and On Call. FT and PT are both guaranteed a minimum number of hours per week (40 and 24), but OC can be all over the place. Some OC will only work once or twice a month, because they have other FT jobs. Some will work multiple shifts each week, but it isn't guaranteed. OC staff aren't considered permanent employees, so they don't get vacation or benefits, they don't accrue any seniority, and they get paid less than FT/PT. So here's the lovely part. When a FT spot is available, first consideration is given to PT staff, before any other outside applicants are considered. Same goes for hiring PT staff, first crack goes to OCs. Only if there isn't any applicants from those categories will outside applicants even be looked at. So we may have excellent potential candidates who want to work FT, but they have zero chance of getting there, unless they start off as OC, and take their chances. There's no guarantee of when spots will open up, and experienced people don't want to risk applying for OC work with no solid timeline for advancement. So we mainly end up with kids fresh out of school, because they tend to be living at home still, and they won't starve on a few shifts a month.
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Jun 9, 2021 21:14
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Wall mounted stats displays are a terrible idea, from personal experience; Newspaper company, there was a screen in each editorial department (of which there were a lot) that displayed trending searches as a word cloud thing. This could be abused, and journalists are spiteful fucks. One dude got laid off and sat down at a computer, entered his desired phrase into the search bar and started hitting f5. The phrase "Editorname is a oval office" slowly swelled on the screen over the course of an hour until eventually said editor decided to turn it off. SMS marketing company where I was interviewing, wall screen cycled through a bunch of stats, as well as test SMSes coming in and various other 'fun' things. I asked about it to seem interested, and as the interviewer was talking me through it a sample SMS of 'Don't work here it loving sucks' flashed up on the screen. Random software dev company - the actual PC was in a warehouse next to the offices and there was a wire fed through from the screen in our break room into the warehouse (which was pretty much unused - chair/desk storage and stuff). One lunchtime one of the facilities dudes was in there, noticed there was a PC running with the monitor turned off, but logged in and showing some boring poo poo on a browser window, so he decided to boot up a tab to some random porn site and crank one out to low-fi DP porn from the 2000s to the amusement of dozens of people having their lunch in the adjoining room.
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Jun 9, 2021 21:15
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cynic posted:Wall mounted stats displays are a terrible idea, from personal experience; none of those happened because of stats but lol
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Jun 9, 2021 21:19
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We had a customer decide last week that they wanted us to deliver a build in August instead of October. Problem is that we have only just started ordering long lead material and even some of that is going to arrive later than would be acceptable. Other problem: the design isn't finished. The customer's solution was the industry standard for when they give an impossible goal, I was told to expedite it. I have never, ever, seen expediting a part or order actually make a difference, but it is ALWAYS the first thing everyone goes to like it actually works. Almost everything I order is a commercial-off-the-shelf part or is built from them, so there's really not a lot I can usually do if I source things correctly. I challenged the customer on the usefulness of trying to expedite and his response was "To be honest, I've never seen it really do much good myself." So even the guy telling me to expedite stuff knows it makes no sense.
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Jun 9, 2021 21:42
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It's a pretty famous anecdote that Enron had stock price shown loving everywhere throughout all their offices and when stock was up it was like everyone was on cocaine, but when it dipped a black cloud of despair destroyed all productivity and morale. All this on a minute to minute update schedule
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Jun 9, 2021 21:43
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I had this happen when I first got into safety. I was working at an urgent care making like 12.50 an hour, without even hitting 40 so they were paying me like 25k. One of their clients poached me away for 44 an hour with hefty overtime, so it was like a 125k raise. The urgent care said if it was about money they could give me a raise! …of a dollar an hour. lmao when I was looking into transferring to the IT dept my boss was like "if I get you a dollar more an hour will you stay" binch maybe if you gave me the training and tools for my current job here I would've thought about it but no, playing president of some org on company time and having me do 80% of your job in addition to my own was more important to you god quitting that place felt SO GOOD (covid hit and there was a hiring freeze, and she refused to let me stay wfh)
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Jun 9, 2021 22:28
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About two years ago, HQ approved a "retention incentive" of an extra 20% pay because we had a hard time keeping people. It actually kinda worked and we found it easier to retain people. In 2020 when Covid hit our workload fell off a cliff. HQ comes back, decides we're staffed just fine, and takes away the 20%. We lost around 15% of our total staff in the 3 months after that announcement. Our workload since then has picked up, back to 2019 levels. With the hemorrhaging of people we've had since then HQ gave us our "retention incentive" back, though only 10%. We're so short right now that it's not going to put us back to normal for this summer, we're just hosed. (We wouldn't have been hosed if you just kept the 20%.)
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Jun 9, 2021 22:44
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Combo posted:"oh, you'll stay if we pay you more? I didn't know it was about money." Motherfucker, it's always about money. Congrats on finding what may possibly be the stupidest motherfucker who ever managed a management. Ugly In The Morning posted:I had this happen when I first got into safety. I was working at an urgent care making like 12.50 an hour, without even hitting 40 so they were paying me like 25k. One of their clients poached me away for 44 an hour with hefty overtime, so it was like a 125k raise. The urgent care said if it was about money they could give me a raise! …of a dollar an hour. Oh wait never mind. There's always more and it's always stupid. Outrail fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jun 9, 2021 |
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Jun 9, 2021 22:50
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Slotducks posted:It's a pretty famous anecdote that Enron had stock price shown loving everywhere throughout all their offices and when stock was up it was like everyone was on cocaine, but when it dipped a black cloud of despair destroyed all productivity and morale. All this on a minute to minute update schedule My MegaCorp has our live stock price on the internal intranet. It doesn't change much but for some reason it always gets discussed during monthly meetings. The leader will cheer our efforts if it is up, and there will be murmuring if it is slightly down. As we are internal support our actions have zero impact on the price but it does waste time. Dang, that reminds me of when I was on a worse team and the VP insisted on showing slideshows built for unrelated teams as he found them interesting. We'd get lectured about how the company was trying to reduce blueberry spoilage and not get to leave the meeting until we promised to do better.
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Jun 9, 2021 23:06
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Jun 9, 2021 23:31
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I had this happen when I first got into safety. I was working at an urgent care making like 12.50 an hour, without even hitting 40 so they were paying me like 25k. One of their clients poached me away for 44 an hour with hefty overtime, so it was like a 125k raise. The urgent care said if it was about money they could give me a raise! …of a dollar an hour. The best one I had was 'we can give you this payrise but noone else in your department gets a payrise because that's the entire budget'. Second best was 'As far as I'm concerned you've been doing that job for 3 years but we can't give you the pay for that position'. The latter one I saw the order sheet for the work due and I'm pretty sure by quitting I cause half a million of damage over the next few years. They immediately had to halt half a dozen projects, and a good 10 or so further projects would have been hosed. I heard my head of department quit exactly two months after I left so good news  edit: oh, the 'payrise but noone else' fuckery was half of what I asked for, and I got a job a week later that gave me what I wanted and a ton of benefits on top.
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Jun 10, 2021 00:07
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Giving my work to other people then having it to come back to me as urgent when poo poo didn't get done right.
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Jun 10, 2021 00:21
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Dariusz2k posted:Giving my work to other people then having it to come back to me as urgent when poo poo didn't get done right. Did your coworkers get trained wrong on purpose, as a joke?
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Jun 10, 2021 00:23
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Lazyfire posted:I have never, ever, seen expediting a part or order actually make a difference, but it is ALWAYS the first thing everyone goes to like it actually works. Almost everything I order is a commercial-off-the-shelf part or is built from them, so there's really not a lot I can usually do if I source things correctly. I challenged the customer on the usefulness of trying to expedite and his response was "To be honest, I've never seen it really do much good myself." So even the guy telling me to expedite stuff knows it makes no sense. Where I work everything is "expedited" as well. I am convinced the "expedite fees" suppliers charge are really just a "sucker's fee."
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Jun 10, 2021 00:25
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I got caught off-guard yesterday during a meeting. Them: "How long does it normally take you guys to finish a database build once we release the server to you? One week? Two?" Me: [internally] "The last two took me like an hour a piece. What the gently caress has the rest of my team (that I joined in January) told them before?"
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Jun 10, 2021 00:28
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Batterypowered7 posted:I got caught off-guard yesterday during a meeting. I hate that poo poo. You have to play a guessing game where being wrong one way makes you look like a moron, but being wrong the other way makes your boss look like a moron.
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Jun 10, 2021 00:35
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Blue Footed Booby posted:I hate that poo poo. You have to play a guessing game where being wrong one way makes you look like a moron, but being wrong the other way makes your boss look like a moron. I just told them I was waiting on my request for elevated privileges on the server to go through and then I'd start working on it right away. The meeting organizer hadn't even updated the spreadsheet with the two other builds I had already completed, so I got to look good when I was like, "Oh yeah, those two have already been completed and handed over to the app team."
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Jun 10, 2021 00:39
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Blue Footed Booby posted:I hate that poo poo. You have to play a guessing game where being wrong one way makes you look like a moron, but being wrong the other way makes your boss look like a moron. 'That can depend on a number of factors including our current workload, and I don't want to give you a poor estimate. Can you send me some basic specs and I'll check with the team on our capacity to work on new projects in the next month?'
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Jun 10, 2021 00:40
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I hate giving estimates on when something will be done because the easy part is controlling my portion. The difficulty is trying to compel everyone else to do their part to finish the project. So I'm always so wishy washy on that. I'm always reassured that "don't worry this just so I have a ballpark; it's not a hard deadline." It always ends up becoming a hard deadline that I failed to meet lol Edit: to clarify this is for internal teams or organizations. I don't work with outside customers.
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Jun 10, 2021 00:43
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Full Metal Jackass posted:I hate giving estimates on when something will be done because the easy part is controlling my portion. The difficulty is trying to compel everyone else to do their part to finish the project. So I'm always so wishy washy on that. I'm always reassured that "don't worry this just so I have a ballpark; it's not a hard deadline." It always ends up becoming a hard deadline that I failed to meet lol Narrator: It was a hard deadline
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Jun 10, 2021 00:43
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The last build actually took two hours instead of one, but that's because I missed a "/" in a file and it took an hour to figure out why backup jobs were failing.
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Jun 10, 2021 00:46
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no go on Quiznos posted:About two years ago, HQ approved a "retention incentive" of an extra 20% pay because we had a hard time keeping people. It actually kinda worked and we found it easier to retain people. Am I right in guessing the reduction didn't hit anyone above a certain pay grade?
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Jun 10, 2021 13:51
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Gin_Rummy posted:Where I work everything is "expedited" as well. I am convinced the "expedite fees" suppliers charge are really just a "sucker's fee." My first job out of college was on a program where literally every part was expedited because there were only a couple approved suppliers for any component type. By the time I started "expediting" just meant getting the part within what would be normal lead time. When I left four years later it had gotten so bad that some companies had stopped accepting expedited orders just so they could catch up with everything else and not piss off other customers anymore than they already had.
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Jun 10, 2021 16:21
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WonkyBob posted:Am I right in guessing the reduction didn't hit anyone above a certain pay grade? I'm sure everyone in the company was very happy to see the recent emails about how incredibly profitable the company has been recently! Spatial fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jun 10, 2021 |
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Jun 10, 2021 17:25
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As somebody who's worked in manufacturing for the last 20+ years, I'd say a lot of the lead time issues stem from the poor application of Lean or Just-in-time manufacturing concepts. Most of the time upper management gets a book about it, picks out the parts they like and them implement the parts that need the other parts to work correctly. For example JiT does not work when: 1. You don't plan ahead and purchase from suppliers ahead of time to match your lead time to their lead times. 2. When you expect a supplier to provide a part at X$ per unit for 2 pcs when the parts used to be manufactured in batches of 20 or 30. Then the supplier has to quote higher with longer per-unit lead times. Then your project that you've quoted already has to eat that difference. 3. When you do manufacturing internally and don't invest in systems to allow rapid switchover of jobs so internal lead times are skewed and can never be fully quantified. 4. When supply chains are too long and there is no redundancy you wind up eating poo poo sometimes for months. I know nothing about Agile or waterfall or whatever but I know that when a system is poorly implemented it just fucks everything and is often worse than whatever leaderless system came before it. Also, these kinds of things open themselves up to never ending bureaucratic busywork that starts to make a company top-heavy with meaningless data shuffling and people defending their little patch of turf.
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Jun 10, 2021 17:28
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Tarkus posted:As somebody who's worked in manufacturing for the last 20+ years, I'd say a lot of the lead time issues stem from the poor application of Lean or Just-in-time manufacturing concepts. Most of the time upper management gets a book about it, picks out the parts they like and them implement the parts that need the other parts to work correctly. For example JiT does not work when: Part of our issue now is that we use a ton of commercial electronics equipment, so when someone tells me to expedite parts my only option would be to call Intel and demand they make a CPU faster or something. I've never not been impressed by how bad program managers are at planning for ANY sort of lead time. Every few months the same designs that use obsolete or discontinued parts come up, I remind them how long it takes to get one part or another and its already too late because they promised delivery in eight weeks instead of the 28 it would take to get the parts and put them into the assembly.
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Jun 10, 2021 18:04
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Actively loving things up can be very profitable for the middle manager on a mission to move up. The consequences come far later than the rewards.
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Jun 10, 2021 18:05
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Spatial posted:Actively loving things up can be very profitable for the middle manager on a mission to move up. The consequences come far later than the rewards. Someone I used to work with: "If you can't be part of the solution, then there's money to be made in prolonging the problem" this was in the cleanup industry for legacy nuclear waste lol
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Jun 10, 2021 18:12
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Here's something messed up: I know people in my company who haven't had their work reach the real world in literally years because management keeps cancelling projects so they can start new projects with higher profitability. Which are then cancelled again, in a loop. For one team this cycle has continued for four years straight. One time the project was cancelled two days before the release date! Imagine the impact this has on morale lol. Why even bother doing anything right? It'll never see the light of day anyway.
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Jun 10, 2021 18:34
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Spatial posted:Here's something messed up: I know people in my company who haven't had their work reach the real world in literally years because management keeps cancelling projects so they can start new projects with higher profitability. Which are then cancelled again, in a loop. For one team this cycle has continued for four years straight. One time the project was cancelled two days before the release date! What's it like to work for Google? Oh wait, that's "Release half-assed product then cancel it prematurely."
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Jun 10, 2021 18:42
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I recently did some training about why it's good to do quality work, why it's worth having the attitude that high quality output is good work even if it takes longer, that it more than pays for itself in the long run, etc. There's a questionnaire at the end to confirm you were paying attention. You know, the usual stupidly easy questions with a bunch of obviously wrong joke answers. Only one thing: the joke wrong answers were all exact descriptions of what my team actually does and says. Normally I wouldn't give two shits about corporate training stuff but this hit so close to home it was actually depressing. Just a laser accurate gut punch.
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Jun 10, 2021 18:42
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Thinking of evaluations after training reminds me of something that happened to me a few years ago. I applied for a new job internally, and when it came time to interview it was before an entire panel, led by a person called, let's say, "Bailey". One part of the interview involved having me get up and run through some problems in Excel on a smartboard in front of the interview panel. Now, I'm not an Excel wizard or anything, but between Google and stackoverflow and hunting around I've never run into anything I couldn't get done as well as anybody else, but I totally flopped hard trying to do it with everyone watching. Got all flustered and then I couldn't think straight. Needless to say, I didn't get the job. A few months later I run into "Bailey" in the elevator, and they ask me if I'm still in my previous department. "No," I say, "I got a job in [other department]." They say, "Well... I'm glad you found something... appropriate... to your skills," with what I interpreted as a mocking look on their face. A few years later "Bailey" gets moved to the in-house training department, and I end up in one of their classes. Can you guess what I put on the anonymous evaluation form they passed out at the end of class? "I'm glad you found something appropriate to your skills."
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Jun 10, 2021 18:56
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Boss's boss is now demanding we be in the office 5 days a week. It should be pointed out that boss's boss is fulltime remote while being as far from an office as some of us are from this office. So now my boss's official policy is "you have to be here five days a week... But if you have something up, I can let you work from home one day a week. And if that happens once a week... Oh well." With a lot of winking, nudging, and 'hey don't tell anyone outside of this team'. He's a good guy.
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Jun 10, 2021 19:11
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Having a good manager rules. At the end of a big project my last manager gave the entire team a week off and told us not to tell anyone, just leave the computers on and logged in. Five extra vacation days baby, now that's a bonus. When I first started he took me aside and gave me this spiel about how the company doesn't care about people, so gently caress the company and I should bleed them for everything I can get. He helped me get plenty of that blood too. What a star lol
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Jun 10, 2021 19:24
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Imagined posted:A few months later I run into "Bailey" in the elevator, and they ask me if I'm still in my previous department. "No," I say, "I got a job in [other department]." They say, "Well... I'm glad you found something... appropriate... to your skills," with what I interpreted as a mocking look on their face. Why do people, like Bailey, think it's appropriate to speak this way in the office? (you did the right thing getting him back, not trying to cast stones at you)
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Jun 10, 2021 19:26
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