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I work for a major internet company doing some engineering work on bugs that get created by our "Tier 3 support" group. Now, by some magic of the all mighty org, I report to the same manager as the Tier 3 folks. So, my small team of engineers gets abused to gently caress by these employees because they're all like "OH HAY, I'LL ASK AN ENGINEER!" I can deal with this, however, my manager I cannot. I had a conversation with my manager that went something like this: Hi Winkle-Daddy, can you please come to the conference room so we can discuss your bonus plan? Yes, I will take myself away from my current project that I'm working on now so I can listen to some wacky bonus structure you've come up with this week. So, the rest of my team's bonus is mostly based on how many escalations they work through and the customer satisfaction surveys they get back. You don't talk to customers, so you don't get surveys, and you don't have a constant stream of tickets, so that wont work either. You also work on other various projects that involve rewriting some of our code base. I've decided that your bonus should be based on how well you help the rest of the team meet their goals. So...you are going to hold my large quarterly bonus hostage at the hands of other people on the team? Well, if we're going to have you on this team, we need to make sure you're helping people. And how will you determine how much I help them? Based on their stats improving. Okay, so...it is the job of the Manager to hold each individual on his or her team accountable to their individual goals. If the manager is good, and the team meets those goals, then the manager gets a good bonus. I am not a manager and I need individual goals that I have 100% control over. That's kind of the difference between being an employee like me, and a manager like you. Oh! I see what you're saying and that makes perfect sense. I don't know how I thought my way was fair. So, you need goals specific to you. Yes, do you have any ideas around that? Sure, your individual goal is to improve the team's stats! I wish I was joking. My job is mostly awesome, but sometimes I just want to 
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Apr 21, 2010 17:22
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Just had another conversation with a manager two levels above me... Hey Winkle-Daddy, can you upgrade the server we host internal tools on? Upgrade what, exactly? Is something not working? Well, you said a few months ago that you're running FreeBSD and the newest servers are running RHEL5. Yes, but not all of our internal packages that I'm using will work on RHEL yet. Well, we should upgrade anyway, we don't want to fall behind. We're not falling behind, this is the standard set up. If everything works, and all security updates are installed, we're okay. So...are you going to upgrade or not?Some time passes, and he comes by my desk So, did you upgrade that server we were talking about? No, I explained why we shouldn't right now. We really need to, though. Okay, I'll look into it and get back to you.At this point, I realize he's just re-using things he's heard elsewhere and he has no idea how to even SSH into the server to check. I decide to just tell him I upgraded everything. He hasn't bothered me since.
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Apr 21, 2010 19:29
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Does anyone work with employees from India? If so, is the phrase "please do the needful" as universally hated as it is at my office? I occasionally look up random support tickets our India tech support people e-mail out to our customers. When I want to be a dick, I now use a phrase I saw in one of those e-mails: "I have satisfied you to your satisfaction." Nothing against people from India, our engineers over there are way smarter then I am and I really enjoy learning from them...but their support people suck equally as much as their American phone jockey counter parts.
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Apr 22, 2010 03:28
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Baddog posted:its crazy how so many of those guys say that. Someone in some english class over there must have decided to have some fun with them and they all picked it up. We wanted to see if we could introduce some interesting verbal combinations into their lexicon of words that they used by using them ourselves in bugs we assign back or e-mails to them when they ask for information. Some of our ideas: prespect - the act of preventing an expected problem. e.g. "The launch included a prespected bug fix around user registration." prepose - When you re-use an already approved proposal that was previously used. e.g. "The change request form was similar enough we were able to use a preposed plan." There were some other good ones, but I can't remember them now. But if goons give me some good ones, maybe in a few yours you'll hear it the next time you call tech support.
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Apr 22, 2010 03:43
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