|
Escape From Noise posted:Graphic design is our passion. Oh no
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2023 15:59
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 05:04 |
|
|
So my boss (owner of the company) has gotten into the habit of wanting to hire people without giving them an actual role and then just like...finding out where they fit in the company? That might be ok I guess but he's also in his late 40s, dating a girl in her late 20s, who is a bartender in a trendy area and has bartender/server friends/roommates/etc. So he's hiring people he meets out of that pool of people. One has kind of worked out in that she's helping with HR now but had no idea what she was doing when she first came on, she worked as a waitress and then as like the receptionist at a gym. I get a call out of the blue a couple weeks ago at noon or so. "Hey, I have someone I want you to talk to about QC!" "Talk to as in like, hire?" "Yeah, I think he'll be great!" "Ok, if you want me to, but I'm not really hiring anyone at the moment?" "I'll send him over, he'll be there at 2 pm!" So I interview this guy. It's a QC role but we do a lot of electrical troubleshooting, calibrations, etc, so it's not something just anyone can walk in and do. This guy is a bartender, in his first semester of school to be an electrician (literally in a 101 class I think at the moment), a musician on the side also. So he goes to school until noon, works as a bartender in the evenings, and has side gigs in the area at local bars as a musician. His availability is like twice a week in the afternoon. He's not going to be useful to me for a very, very long time. Boss is bound and determined to hire him for *something* though, and wants me to manage him.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2023 18:51
|
|
|
YeahTubaMike posted:Is your boss season 6 Michael Scott? I haven't seen The Office but maybe, I don't know. I'm secure where I'm at, I make decent money, I'm incredibly valuable to the company and valued by my boss and everyone else, so I'm not like going anywhere or anything, it's just sometimes the owner tosses out a curveball and expects people to deal with it, and I guess it's my turn.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2023 19:24
|
|
|
Comstar posted:Trust me when I say this: EVERYONE thinks this right at the moment you get fired. If you're that valuable you would be getting paid more somewhere else. If it was a corporate thing I'd agree, and I'll never feel 100% safe or anything. But this is a mom and popish place (80 employees, single owner who started the company by himself) and the owner has gone to great lengths to keep me. If for some reason we really struggled and had to get rid of staff, myself and about 4-5 others would be the last ones off the ship, because we can all do multiple things and he can rely on them being done correctly and with the best interest of the company in mind. Obviously that could all change but for now I'm one of the most reliable people he has and he prioritizes that over most anything else. I'll see you all next when when I get fired now.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2023 15:19
|
|
|
Outrail posted:Announcing corporate buyout and merger in 3...2... Yeah, that's the main thing I could see upending everything. When I first started, the company was owned by two brothers, one who started it (engineer) and then let his other brother (business) take over the business side. Then they started to hate each other, wouldn't even be in the same room together. Business wanted to sell, the other refused to. Engineering brother bought out the other one and is now sole owner, and the company is his baby. He's hired/promoted other people to handle the business side now and the company is run by him and a small inner circle of managers, me included.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2023 15:43
|
|
|
Outrail posted:
Oh he's still a pain in the rear end, but it's more in a way where he says "yes" to every weird custom thing customers want to do, and then a few of us end up having to take a lot of time to figure out how to pull it off. He has every intention of helping and usually does, but he's also busy as hell. He wants to travel around the country actually doing the work like the dudes we pay $20/hr to, and doesn't have time for the "annoying poo poo" like doing reviews or running the day to day. So yeah he let go, but only so he can just go and do whatever job he wants to do. It's like a CEO deciding to let a board run the company while he decides to be a janitor at the building.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2023 16:08
|
|
|
bee posted:Twice. Ugh In college I did medical collections, but I always collected from insurance companies and secondary insurance, so I never minded that. In the same building was an actual collections agency that collected from individuals, so I took a job there on the weekends. I lasted one day and never went back. I was collecting for a hospital very close to me, and calling people in a VERY poor town nearby to try to collect medical debt for a heart attack from some guy in his 90s. Couldn't do it.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2023 17:06
|
|
|
I just had a review recently and it went great. One of the things my boss built in as one of my goals for the year is to move my whole department to another spot in the building. Problem is, that spot is currently a metal shop, with a welder, drill presses, a shear, an old massive sheet metal brake, an electromagnetic brake, etc. and an absolute poo poo ton of metal. It's also in an unconditioned area of the building, and my QC lab needs to be conditioned. So not only am I responsible for getting all of that poo poo out and moved to another building or other parts of this building (where there's no room), he plans to wall that area in and heat/cool it, build another smaller room inside of it for environmental testing, and run electrical/water/air. I'm kind of at the mercy of like 3 or 4 other departments getting their poo poo out/making room, and also taking someone's office in the process. I'm supposed to get all of this done by mid October somehow, and I have a bonus hinging on it. I don't think I'm going to get that bonus dudes.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2023 19:31
|
|
|
Fanged Lawn Wormy posted:Lol no way. Maybe if the plans were set for your infrastructure already. Do you have to hire contractors for the building/ac etc? Or are you asome giagantocorp that has big internal resources for that mind of thing? (Or, alternatively, at a small hillbilly company that just does it themselves with no real knowledge of what they are doing?) We're roughly 75 employees and still operate on a very mom and pop type basis. We have no internal resources for anything, that's the fun part! Yeah we're going to have to get contractors, we don't even have an in house maintenance person at the moment, myself and a few other people handle building issues because we're "handy" but we all have our normal jobs and in my case I have like 3 different roles as is (I manage QC, but I'm also partial IT, I handle the phone system, dabble in R&D, deal with any issues regarding our cameras/alarms/solar array). I can rough in the electrical myself and just have contractors make the actual electrical connections to our panels, and I can run the water and air lines. I could in theory build the stud walls and do all of the walling it in somewhat myself I guess but again, that really isn't my job and shouldn't be on me. Our production foreman does HVAC as a side business and also handles all HVAC for the building so he'll be doing that part. Combo fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Aug 23, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2023 14:58
|
|
|
Coasterphreak posted:Depending on local laws, you can be held liable if an error in your work results in an important piece of equipment getting fried or something. Just keep that in mind. Oh I know, I'm not an electrician but I did go to school for electrical, so while I could probably do it properly and to code I would much rather just have the contractors do all of it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2023 16:50
|
|
|
Methylethylaldehyde posted:Can you do the work? Probably, it's not super complex stuff. Can you do the work to code, with all of the conduit correctly bonded and all the NEC fiddly details done correctly? Might take a 2nd inspection to pass but yeah. But you are not LICENSED, BONDED, and INSURED to do commercial electrical work. Three things that your insurance company will ask for the nanosecond there is a claim on anything, anywhere in the building. Also in a lot of areas it's straight up against local ordinances for someone to owner/builder a commercial space. Oh I'm in 100% agreement with you, and specifically I don't want to touch trying to untangle and make sense of the wiring in this building, which has been done and patched over multiples times over the years before we even got here. It's a mess. I promise you this isn't going to turn into Groverhaus: Business edition
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2023 20:05
|
|
|
Sales guy that absolutely insisted on having a Mac, and not a macbook, a mac mini, that he carries back and forth from work to home every day, is now having issues that might be partially solved if he could just be mobile and take his mac to another room for phone calls. If only he had the macbook I suggested instead of the mac mini he couldn't live without.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2023 18:05
|
|
|
Methylethylaldehyde posted:I'd figure step zero on any kind of work would would be to wave the non-contact tester on a stick at the lines to trust-but-verify the actual state of things. Agreed, for something like that there's no way I'd take their word for it. I'd test it before I started on anything and any time I walked away from it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2023 20:50
|
|
|
Back in 2020, one of our sales people insisted that he needed a mac rather than his windows laptop, because his windows laptop was slow. I spec'd him out a new windows laptop, he sent back a link for a mac mini. I told him at the time that we didn't have support in place for macs really (I know next to nothing about them, and we had an IT company at the time but they were awful and understaffed and nobody there knew anything about them either). He insisted, his manager agreed, I'm not the gatekeeper for all things tech here, but I told him he was on his own. He purchased his mac mini (hint: not a laptop) which at the time was fine because he wasn't coming into the office, so he kept it at home for a bit. These days he's coming into the office and he brings his mac mini with him every day. Whatever, he picked it. He got an assistant earlier this year which is a whole other bit of nonsense, but he insisted on a mac for that guy too. That guy got a macbook, and I've since fired the old IT company and hired a new, competent company that can actually help with them, so all good. Mac douche is now jealous that his assistant has a macbook (which he could have gotten himself in the first place 3 years ago). A couple weeks ago he starts sending me emails with his manager copied with some black friday deal at microcenter for a macbook. I've already been down this road before with him and manager, I tell him to do whatever he wants, as long as manager approves, I don't get to say yes or no even if I think it's a stupid idea. He offers to sell his mac mini to give the proceeds to the company to offset the cost. He gets his new toy and to my knowledge he's all set up now. Today he sends me an email asking how to factory reset his old windows laptop. Why? So he can sell it and put it towards the cost of his stupid macbook. Like I'm his father and I bought him a new gaming system on the contingency that he would sell his old one.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2023 21:50
|
|
|
Update: Mac douche has now decided that his brand new macbook that he just got like a week ago, is too slow. Why? The one he sent me the link for has 8 gigs of ram. I cautioned him about the low amount of ram and found the next step up from that, which is 18 gigs of ram (shared with the gpu i guess). He opted for the 8 gig cheaper version and now it's slow and zomg it's an emergency because the other one is still on sale but it might end today because of cyber monday! I hate this dude.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2023 22:44
|
|
|
RocketMermaid posted:Type "Your poor understanding of technical issues and decision making does not constitute an emergency." into an email. Unfortunately, I just went and spoke to his manager, who's second in command of the company, and she agrees that he "needs" the other macbook, so I get to work with the IT company to factory reset it, return it to microcenter, and buy the more expensive version, and then get the IT company to set it up. Did I mention this guy is in sales? Nothing he does is fast paced. These are contracts for a year out or more before anything gets done. If he was in some job where breakneck computer speed mattered, I would get it, but dude is just using PDFs/Sage/MS365 stuff. An extra 10 seconds for a pdf to open is not some deal breaker. Combo fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Nov 27, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2023 23:00
|
|
|
Lazyfire posted:I've never worked for a company that would let me select, purchase and use a laptop, so this is all really weird. Pretty much every large company is going to have their IT firm provide the computers and software builds that would work with the OS. This whole thing is extremely weird. I have a Windows 10 PC with like six gigs of RAM and can run TeamCenter and SAP and multiple Chrome instances along with several Excel files without any real issues. This sounds like he's doing something incredibly dumb if his laptop is not running well already. We aren't some big corporation, we're around 100 employees (not all of those people have laptops or emails or anything, a lot of our people are traveling construction/service workers) now but still run very mom and pop. We have never had it in place (with the old IT company or the new one) to have a batch of company laptops that get imaged with the current setup. Everyone has their niche uses so laptop specs differ a bit (someone running CAD software vs just a general office person, etc). StrangersInTheNight posted:I mean, gently caress macbook guy sure, but if it's not your money and your boss says just give it to him, why do you care? I don't care necessarily about spending the money, it's just that I end up having to deal with it because I do the purchasing for most general PC stuff. Once I actually get the machine I can pass him off to our IT company and let them set him up.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2023 23:38
|
|
|
duffmensch posted:This is pretty much how Sales works when companies don't have strict limits on what type of device they're allowed to purchase (or have to provide a business justification for going outside the norm). They don't need the performance but god help them if they don't have the latest trendy thing to show off in meetings or conferences. Pretty much. I posted way earlier in this thread about said mac guy complaining that his email wasn't working, it turned out he was using the apple mail app for his o365 work account rather than just installing outlook. When he complained to me about it, I told him to install outlook, he didn't want to, he HAD to use the apple mail app, because it was better, so i told him to email apple support then. Whatever issue he was having they weren't able to solve either so he grudgingly installed outlook and what a surprise I haven't heard a thing from him since.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2023 00:01
|
|
|
Reoxygenation posted:Wait I'm sorry you're how many people and you don't have dedicated IT resources?? We have ~55 users with laptops. Previously we had an IT company for about 10 years, I guess in the beginning they were pretty solid (way before my time) but over the years maybe they didn't pay well or whatever and people just left it in droves. We were also on a quarterly plan for x amount of contract hours. Before I came along the head engineer, who also handles R&D, electrical drawings, etc was the guy doing some of the day to day IT stuff to keep us under the quarterly hours. Like, adding a printer for someone, etc. If the job got to be too big he would pass it off, or if it had anything to do with the server. Around 7 years ago, they found out that I used to be in IT back in my 20s and I still keep up with it for personal use. Head engineer was going on vacation and they wanted someone available in case things blew up, so I became that person. When head engineer came back he happily just allowed me to keep doing it. I'm more personable than he is and much more approachable, so people started coming to me for everything. I worked shoulder to shoulder with the IT company, and part of my duty was just to keep us under "x" hours so we didn't have to pay their lovely overages. Over time I could see they were crumbling. The last straw was we purchased a new server from them as our old one was out of date and lovely, and they dragged their feet and botched it heavily, to the point where we lost some data (minor but could have been way worse). In those 7 years I became one of the inner circle managers that runs the place, there's about 6 of us total that work closely with the owner. When the IT company hosed up our server (about a year ago) I finally got the go ahead to start shopping for a new company. Myself and the head engineer interviewed a bunch of companies and finally found one, pitched it to the owner, and got the go ahead to hire them. They started in March and things have been MUCH better and I push as much off to them as I can. One of the things I haven't pushed off yet is purchasing new equipment through them, only because usually when people need a new laptop they need it fairly quickly and the IT company takes at least a week or two. Combo fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Nov 28, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2023 01:05
|
|
|
We've also just hired a flurry of people in the last few weeks and they've all had needs which I've been fulfilling. Also keep in mind none of this is part of my job title, I run the QC department. It's just if you show yourself as being capable of taking on more, they will pile more on you. Let this be a lesson to all young people in the workforce. Never try.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2023 01:20
|
|
|
Sapozhnik posted:Sales people understand that customers aren't going to give you business if you roll up to a client meeting with the computer equivalent of a beat-to-poo poo Nissan Altima, it's not "trendy" any more than a decent quality suit is trendy. I can respect that, appearance matters in sales. In the case I'm talking about, zero of the sales are done in person. They're via email and zoom/teams/whatever, so they'll never see his super sweet macbook in person.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2023 08:39
|
|
|
We have hit all of our projections for the year already which is nice, so hopefully the profit sharing is solid and sounds like it should be. Won't know until the end of December though.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2023 20:26
|
|
|
Barudak posted:Company hired someone who first day stated "I do not wish to work" and just hasnt for the last two weeks. They still clock in and out but they refuse all tasks. We hired someone a while back to clean/take out trash/do general maintenance. Once he got hired on he was instructed to take out everyone's trash. "Oh I don't take out trash." He still somehow lasted like 2 months before they got rid of him.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2024 03:05
|
|
|
I got pulled into a meeting last week to let me know I was being switched from hourly to salary. They've recently hired someone from a much more corporate environment, and she has decided that none of the managers can be hourly. They framed it as a bit of a pay bump even, as appreciation for what I do for the company. Turns out if you punch my hourly x 40 x 52 it's actually $30 less (over the course of the year, but still) than what I currently make, and obviously I wouldn't get paid overtime for doing anything off hours anymore. This comes on the heels of me and the head engineer coming in on a Sunday and physically moving the server rack to another part of the building (per their request), which took about 5 hours because we had to run new network cables and cleaned up old ones. I'm annoyed but this will also apparently help me a substantial amount when it comes to profit sharing. I guess salary employees get a much bigger chunk. Suppose we'll see.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 15:54
|
|
|
There's pretty much never a time where I'm not busy. If I'm not doing my own day to day work, I'm working on SOPs and processes to streamline things. Then I do like 4 other things on top of that. I'd love some work down time 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 16:15
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Well, sounds like you punch in for 8 hours and don't work beyond that then. That's what I told them when I was approached about it. Said I was way less likely to come in and do the extra stuff if I wasn't going to be compensated.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 16:42
|
|
|
Spoke to the owner about the salary thing today, he told me it was meant to be a bump up. I showed him what I made hourly and showed him the numbers as salary and he said "oh that's absolutely not right, it was supposed to be a raise for you, you're one of the most valuable people here". So if I do get moved to salary I'll at least get a minor raise out of the whole thing it sounds like. Good to have a solid relationship with the owner of the company.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 17:52
|
|
|
blatman posted:im salary and get paid ot at 1.5x for hours above 40/wk See if I could get arrangement I would be happy to move to salary!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 20:58
|
|
|
Well in an hour I get to go in and explain to two adults that make more than me how switching me to salary is actually costing me money when they presented it to me as a pay bump last week. I told my wife this morning that it's either going to go quick and they'll realize their mistake or its going to be slooooow and a lot of arguing basic math.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2024 17:25
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Just bring in your W2 from last year and point out what your total compensation was for that year. That's probably the simplest way to illustrate the issue, without getting into how much OT you do and doing math. I think what they did was look at my hourly pay in January and calculated it from there. What they didn't take into account was I got a $4/hr raise in July. I have a spreadsheet that has my gross pay from the end of July when I got my raise until current. Next column is the calculated amount I'll get paid under their proposed salary number. Then a column with the difference, then a column with the difference taking all overtime earned out of the equation (which is literally still lower). I do have faith that it was a misunderstanding, I am super valued here and one of the two I'm meeting with is the person really pushing to move me to salary and bump me to make sure I'm happy and I stay here, or at least that's how she presented it to the owner. I talked to the owner earlier this week about the whole situation, he's got my back and meant for it to be a pay bump too, so even if they decide today that their number is right, he's going to get involved after that and make sure I'm taken care of. They've all basically said if I leave they would need to hire 4 people.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2024 17:34
|
|
|
Salami Surgeon posted:Leave and let them hire 4 people I feel like it would be a lot less stress sometimes. This place does have it's benefits though, can't complain too much really.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2024 17:52
|
|
|
Super Waffle posted:Tell them to triple your salary; they'd still come out on top. Well they moved the meeting to Monday for whatever reason, so maybe I will now.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2024 18:27
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Bring your W2. It's all online in ADP including my W2 so no problem there.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2024 18:51
|
|
|
Even $100 is on the low end. At my last job where i fixed lab equipment it was $175 for me to just walk in the door.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2024 02:05
|
|
|
Zero One posted:
Teams did? Or maybe just by default? We record our managers meetings every week.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2024 16:11
|
|
|
So I posted a couple months back about being approached about moving me from hourly to salary, but when given my new salary rate, it was absolute base salary with no overtime included. One of the reasons I'm valued here is I will come in on off hours/weekends to get things lined up so that we hit shipping deadlines, which of course I would get OT for but it wasn't a thing that needed to be done all the time and at least I was being compensated. I scheduled a follow-up meeting where I showed them a spreadsheet I had made up that showed the difference in money overall in a 6 month time frame and pointed out that the salary value they offered was a pay cut. They kept trying to convince me otherwise, even though it was right there in black and white. Ultimately, they said I could move to salary at the given rate or I could stay hourly and I would be knocked down from manager to "lead" or some other bullshit they would come up with. Nothing would change in my role, I would still be running my department. I stuck with salary with the intention of going straight to the owner with the issue and bypassing this other person that was forcing it on me. Person forcing it on me has been coming to work drunk for the past few weeks and finally got caught by someone that matters (a consultant that my boss hired) and they've indefinitely suspended her. I brought up my pay issue with the consultant, as he's kind of in the stead/along side of the owner for the next few weeks. I explained the situation and showed him the numbers I had run. He immediately says "well that's absolute bullshit, I'm going to bring this up to <owner> later this afternoon." That was yesterday. Today he came back and told me that I'm getting a $5k raise. That plus that bitch being suspended (and likely never coming back) has made it a pretty solid week.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 18:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 05:04 |
|
|
Outrail posted:A rare win there. I will say I was very skeptical when they brought these dudes in last year, but they got the owner's ear and kind of talked him into backing off and let the people he hired to run things actually run things. That was all going great until October when he hired the woman who just got suspended. Despite being at 80+ employees we are VERY mom and pop run still. He hired this woman, who used to be an executive at an $80 billion dollar company, to come in and kind of shape things up a little bit I guess, I'm honestly not sure what his intention was. Anyway, she was a toxic loving bully. She immediately started grabbing up power/departments and putting them under her under the guise of minimizing the amount of people that directly reported to the owner. Which in and of itself is reasonable, however there was already a clear #2 person directly in line after the owner. This bitch put herself as another #2, immediately, and starting doing whatever she wanted to do. She took over HR and two other departments, and immediately wanted access to employee's pay and a bunch of other crap. Last year around this time I fired our old IT company and hired a new one after a long vetting process. We have an arrangement where they send a guy once a month, always the same guy, and he gets face time with people so they can all put a face to the company and have an idea of who they're calling when they call for tech support, etc. Plus he can work on stuff in house if needed instead of remotely, and I can throw any task at him if I need something done in that realm. Within 2 weeks of her being at the company, she had pulled him aside and told him she was "the new IT coordinator". We don't have an IT coordinator but I suppose if it was going to be anyone it would be me. IT guy immediately came to me and questioned it, I told to hear her out but anything she tells him to do passes through me first. Later on that day I pulled her aside and questioned her on it. "Hey, did you tell IT guy that you're the new IT coordinator?" "Oh, yeah, well I just found out how much we pay them monthly and I think we can get more out of them" "Well first of all you haven't been here and dealt with it at all, so you don't even know what we currently get out of them. If you want we can sit down and talk about it, but for now everything he does goes through me." "Oh...well yeah that's fair, ok" Since then (and other than the salary thing) she's treated me decently, if not pushy and overbearing at times but that's her entire personality. Other people she bullied and nagged the hell out of. When the consultant first got here a few weeks ago he met with all of the leaders individually, me included. When he brought me in, his first question was "Combo, what the gently caress is going on around here? When I left last year you guys were heading in a great direction and now there's this lady here and everyone is tense and stressed." I just laughed and told him I honestly wasn't sure. Later in the conversation she actually peeked her head in during his and I's conversation, and he told her that we weren't done and he'd come get her when he was ready. "Oh no no, nobody comes and gets me." They had a little standoff/back and forth in front of me for a few minutes before she finally left. After she closed the door again he said "Why doesn't anyone just tell her to gently caress off?". This is a normally very buttoned up, professional guy, he was just gobsmacked by her. It's also why I felt comfortable discussing the salary thing with him.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 19:09
|
|