Dumb shit your work does: for some reason in the Diablo font.

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Dumb shit your work does: for some reason in the Diablo font.

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Our office covid approach was to close all but one entrance/exit to jam people together and to start randomly assigning desks on arrival.

You can nuggets of sense in what they've done but definitely makes things more risky. Thankfully the staff all, more or less anyway, agreed to only go in when they need to work in the labs. You get a few of the oldies who shamble in each day to sit at a new deal and massively increase their chance of death because they can't face being at home with their spouse.

Annoyingly I have stuff on my desk that I occasionally need (we have no stores really, so it's a mess everywhere) when I'm in and it's been a bit of a struggle to convince whoever is squatting to move while I collect it

# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 16:20

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 22:50

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Sardonik posted:

Honestly, they doesn't mean much of anything when it comes down to it. Any framework or even no framework can work if your management aren't shitheads, which is where the real sticking point is.

On the note of Gantts: Has anyone on god's green earth ever seen a gantt chart that was both accurate, actionable and used to make an actual decision? I swear those things must have the absolute worst ratio of time spent maintaining them to actionable information produced.

They're useful for super rote projects where the detail matters and you need to know of your injection molding tooling is going to try and happen during new year. For development they are useful at an ultra high level to gain an estimate of "is this a three months or three years project?". For research they are pointless.

I work in R&D and my current major project has a dedicated project manager who seems amazed that nobody put her looks at the giant chart every day to know where we are and she tries to get us to replan every time something changes via half day meetings. Which is about once a week. Added to the agile stuff we're doing in parallel for some reason means I have about two and a half days of time to work each week. Thankfully I'm managing to keep the team out of those meetings so they can get work done

# ¿ Feb 28, 2021 10:43

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Bright Bart posted:

In some (or all?) EU countries it is standard to have your picture on your CV. That is not only annoying but also makes printing what will likely get thrown into the bin (or if you're lucky shredded) much more expensive as colour is expected.

It's only Germany and France that do this to my knowledge. And it's going out of fashion thankfully.

Although I'm seeing more and more grads from UK universities putting photos on. Which we have to autoreject without reading. I assume there's some reason for this but we can't even reach out and explain they need to stop it because the company is terrified of getting sued.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 10:19

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

AHH F/UGH posted:

Wait is there some kind of push of companies somewhere that there is not even have someone�s loving NAME on a CV? lmao what the gently caress

There's a push for CV review to take place without access to information that can be used to discriminate, so name, age and gender. Usually the idea is that HR redact that info when they pass it on for actual review as they need to know the name

I'd forgotten a blinder of a CV that I saw a few weeks back that had a personal statement which was a rant about the challenges of being a Christian and a Scientist and then the hobbies section was a list of churches they attended. I was astounded. I still wonder if it was some kind of discrimination case study rather than a legit application

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 10:52

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Graduate CV screening is absolute hell. You get 30-50 applications to any STEM grad job and all of the CVs are identical. They all have a 2i or First and the distinction between those grades is actually not indicative of ability (I have to wonder what happens to people with 2ii and Thirds, maybe they just leave the grade off their CV and nobody notices? ), so you're left with formatting of the CV, if they picked a combo of modules that matches the job, if their final year project sounded interesting, maybe an internship that sounds like it wasn't hanging out in your mum's office and the rest is just class and ethnic identifiers that you need to ignore.

Ideally cover letters should bridge that gap, but I've never encountered a useful cover letter

I feel terrible doing it because I can't bring in thirty kids to interview. I have to somehow pick four or five. Maybe the answer is just ten minute screening interviews where I shout physics problems and see if they can apply any of the knowledge they should have.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 12:03

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Fleta Mcgurn posted:

"Is 'culpable' even an English word, or did you spell something wrong?"

It means deserving/taking blame

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 12:04

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Greader posted:

Crazy stories about poop and piss reminded me during my apprenticeship I worked at a warehouse with office space adjacent. The system had a internal mailing and notification system and one day someone send a mail to everyone. The reason: Someone took a dump, and instead of using toilet paper or anything else, they took the towel of the nearby sink, wiped their rear end with it, and put it back where it was. The writer of the mail was the one to find it first and they in lovingly detail described what they found and how disgusted they were by it.

Of course, this was the same toilet where eventually signs were hung on how to properly sit and poop as some people had trouble not missing with it somehow. The worst part is that amongst my fellow apprentices there were at least two who I would trust to do that kinda crap Don't think they ever found out who was responsible.

We have signs about flushing on two cubicles in the toilets next to IT because whoever is responsible always uses those two cubicles

# ¿ Mar 5, 2021 18:50

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

ArbitraryC posted:

Not to say it's not a management hellworld that results in this but I also feel like there's an unreasonably large segment of total suckups that refuse to use their sickday that contribute to this. Ironically they make everyone else get sick cause they simply won't stay home no matter how obvious it is they have something bad but their supervisors eat it up and so the cycle continues.

Nevermind the cost of not taking a sick day!

I loathe people coming to work with a cold, doing cock-all and infecting another half dozen people who then have several days of low productivity

I'm sort of hoping that covid will change this and coming to work while ill will become socially unacceptable. Although given people with covid symptoms have been pressured to come in while waiting for test results I'm not hopeful.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2021 08:38

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Every line manager had last minute mandatory training in how to explain the bonus figures to their reports. So that bodes well for the bonuses being good this year.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2021 17:15

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

TotalLossBrain posted:

I am participating in a team-based candidate interview over Teams right now. It's actually not terribly, you're doing good, guy!

Edit: Oh god, we are at the "What are you strengths/weaknesses" phase of the interview.

I'm so glad I've never had an intern that has trotted out that kind of bullshit

# ¿ Mar 10, 2021 20:03

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

aas Bandit posted:

My work is actually really good for the most part--so much so that I feel guilty even bitching after reading some of the absolute soul-destroying horror in this thread. I think once the COVID dust settles I'm going to be able to go in 2-3 days a week and continue to WFH the rest, which will be pretty much perfect because the gym is close to my office (and holy poo poo I miss it).

Dumb poo poo gripe of the day:

When you're added to an existing email thread, do you:
a) Read the thread to see exactly what's going on and what the details are?
b) Just poo poo out random questions (which have already been answered) based on reading the latest response?

c) ignore it completely

# ¿ Mar 13, 2021 10:19

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

72nd bday virgin posted:

I got in trouble once because someone saw that I had an email folder named "Unimportant" that 90% of the emails I got filtered into, because I'm on a relatively very small department of an enormous company that has a policy of keeping us in the loop on all incident reports and new releases and bugs from the primary department that everything else is build around, and none of those emails would ever be even remotely relevant to anything I will ever work on here. Apparently it is disrespectful to others to label their work unimportant, so now I filter them straight into deleted instead

They saw it when I shared my screen and they commented on the unread email count in it being over 5000

My folder for that is called "guff"

# ¿ Mar 15, 2021 10:15

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

teen witch posted:

On one hand I get why we have strict spam filtering here because I�ve seen some people do some bafflingly stupid poo poo with dodgy links, but god gently caress I�d like to actually receive email meant for myself

There was a period of two months were I couldn't receive any email from a major client. Surprisingly they didn't renew the contract with us

# ¿ Mar 17, 2021 11:36

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Inzombiac posted:

Overall the people at my work are perfectly fine but there is an undeniable "knowitall" culture (it's mostly engineers so what can you do) and it's driving me up the wall.

Our system is ancient and prone to crapping out at a moments notice so sometimes my work is delayed. People will ask me what's up, I'll describe what's happening and what I'm doing to fix it and then they will launch in to an exhaustive explanation of what I should do; essentially repeating back what I told them with a satisfied look on their face.

I know how to deal with them so I don't take it personally but a few of these dudes think that they are the smartest person on the planet because they're better at math than me, yet cannot write, speak, cook or understand technology beyond a fourth grade level.

Just hang up

# ¿ Mar 19, 2021 15:22

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Lazyfire posted:

My last company gave me a $0.25/hr raise about a week before I put in my two week notice because I think they realized I was taking random days off to go on interviews. I can't imagine what it's like to get a real salary increase offer when threatening to quit.

When I've handed in my notice they usual try to negotiate. And it's futile. I mentally checked out when I got the offer. If you offer me more and I stay it'll be two weeks before I'm job hunting again and I'll be on the naughty list for trying to leave so will never progress

# ¿ Mar 23, 2021 19:47

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Kullik posted:

So about a month ago we had to set our "personal goals" for the year.
This was different this year in that instead of just having a description for each one we write and a weighting for each, we have to make a powerpoint presentation from a template we're given and theres another 20 slide powerpoint explaining how to do it.
We submitted that to the system, after having my manager explain it to me because those 20 slides werent enough for me to get it.
There was some ridiculously close deadline for doing this because reasons but i managed it a few days before.

Today revision 2 just came out so i have to do it again because they didnt like how the first one came out so they want us to start over, so not only was the deadline meaningless but now i need to make basically the same thing but slightly differently.

none of this is really related to my fuckin job lol

This is how my place does annual objectives too. It's step one in a vast review process that is doing something or other six months out of the year only to eject universal slightly less than inflation pay rises and no us allocation based on booked hours.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 10:08

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Covid burnout and an acquisition means we're expecting an even larger post bonus exodus than usual this year. I can't wait for the angry Glassdoor reviews that focus on single weird issues.

SMELLY POO IN TOILET

RECEPTIONIST REFUSES TO LEARN MY NAMEDESPITE SEEING ME ONCE A FORTNIGHT ON AND OFF FOR THREE MONTHS

FISH AND CHIPS ON FRIDAYS ONLY AND NOT EVER DAY

# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 17:37

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

nonathlon posted:

I once was headhunted for a job at this biotech company. The job looked and sounded sweet, but the company had little public profile, so I went to their Glassdoor page.

Have never seen anything like it. Pages of scathing reviews, employees saying they were desperately looking for other jobs, one listing the sole 'pro' point of the job as "management is clueless and everyone hates them, so this will allow you to bond with your fellow workers fast", talk of shouting matches and bosses openly insulting employees.

On the plus side, they obviously hadn't whitewashed their Glassdoor profile.

I always enjoy when a company is going through some major clusterfuck and tries to stem the tide of negative Glassdoor reviews by throwing in some bland "Great place to work with no cons" amid the dozens of "management beat me with a bar of soap in a sock for pointing out the kitchen was out of milk"

# ¿ Mar 31, 2021 14:25

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

That sounds like the project manager who removed all the iterative design improvements following testing and proposed we just designed it right the first time.

She was promoted out of the role, of course.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2021 13:59

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Spaghett posted:

Put my two weeks in Friday.

I am so happy.

Quit and be happy with me.

(A haiku)

I did mine* on Thursday. And then took the day off. Solid.

*One month notice, but same idea

# ¿ Apr 4, 2021 17:14

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

blight rhino posted:

.

But wtf. Who wants a percentage of emails sent by a person about a subject.

We're building the case for sacking John

# ¿ Apr 5, 2021 08:51

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Bored posted:

So I�m on a 2 PIPs. 1 for productivity, because I spend the time during my calls fixing everyone else�s mistakes.
I�m about to put together my HR manifesto in response to that one, because my complaints about the same things over and over again keep getting attributed to my direct sup. It is not his fault. The same poo poo has been going on since being here.

I am trying to figure out if using the words �medical negligence� is the correct phrase, since I am fixing issues with requests for authorization for medical procedures and all of these gently caress ups in multiple departments, mostly due to poor training, mean providers are unable to provide medically necessary services.

Is there a different legal sounding phrase I should use? Because this poo poo has got to be something we can and SHOULD be sued for and I have notified absolutely every superior that I can. It�s like freaking dear in headlights anytime I explain the logical outcome from all of this though, I swear.

If you're on a PIP then you need to find another job. You'll be sacked shortly. You cannot improve the company in that time period and its not in your interests

# ¿ Apr 12, 2021 12:17

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

TotalLossBrain posted:

You know what's the best combo?
Everyone else is WFH while I need to go in a few hours a week to a completely empty lab. So nice
I really dread everyone else coming back.

It's magical

# ¿ Apr 17, 2021 08:58

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

goatface posted:

There were some "automatic male genital massagers", yes, lots of fancy overengineered fleshlights, but also simpler things like vibrators with larger controls that could be controlled by people struggling with fine motor control, some stuff like body supports and things like pillows with dildos built into them that could be rocked on in comfort.

Mostly stuff that never went past prototype or the design phase. Patent filings. That sort of thing.

We got all fired up to do an IoT dildo (about ten years back, so before such things existed). The meeting was excruciating because our engineers couldn't stop giggling

# ¿ Apr 19, 2021 17:55

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Dr_Amazing posted:

I once had a job teaching English in Japan. It may not surprise you to learn that the vast majority of people doing this job don't really care about it and are just using it to explore a different country. Most people work for giant chain companies that contract out to schools where a low level of effort is perfectly fine.

For a year I worked at a small private company that ran things like an actual company and had actual expectations of us as employees. Every month there would be an all hands meeting where we;d go over the new curriculum and such. A lot of our clients were kindergartens so there were a bunch of songs for each topic that we had to sing with the kids. We rotated around, so each school had different teachers come in on different days. All these songs we were singing had various actions and for some reason, the people running the school were really concerned that every teacher use the exact same actions. So we would have these meetings to standardize exactly how we were to wave our hands and stomp our feet while singing children's songs. These meetings always became weirdly heated and confrontational.

No lie, I once saw two fully grown adults screaming at each other about whether it was better to point at your head with one hand or two, while singing "head, shoulders, knees and toes."

Two hands. Next question

# ¿ Apr 29, 2021 05:31

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

I worked for a place with a management consultancy wing when it was a major fad to do "agile transformation"

Agile HR

Agile marketing

Agile building surveys

Agile wastewater treatment

Agile catering services

One of the top brass gave a keynote at some dreadful "pay to speak" event about how all serious companies should now have a Chief Agile Officer who would ?????.

It was embarrassing. I've never seen agile well implemented but I can imagine the intention working okay for relatively unambitious pure software projects.

We all worry about what the next fad is as agile is on the way out now with most places having vestigal hour long standup meetings that 90% of attendees skip because they have work to do

# ¿ May 1, 2021 17:01

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

First week at my new job is good

Free lunch every day. Drinks. Intermittent snacks. Occasional breakfast. It's not impossible they're actually witches and the plan is to fatten me up and eat me.

Attempts at out of hours team building are once a month and seem well intentioned

It's made an excellent impression

I just have to figure out what I'm actually in charge of. It's a spin out that is still heavily linked with the parent in a way that seems unhealthy.

# ¿ May 8, 2021 08:17

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

CaptainSarcastic posted:

I loving hate time clocks.

I have to use one at my current job, partly because we are a non-profit and so are very careful about tracking hours and such. Almost nobody in the organization is salaried, like maybe 3 or 4 out of 200 people or so, even though it would make more sense for a lot of jobs, including mine.

I am way less productive when I have to gently caress around with a time clock. This strange tension develops where I know I need to be on the clock in order to make money but feel like I don't want to start working on something if I need to clock out in the middle of it so just put it off further. But I also feel guilty if I'm clocked in but not doing something productive. I procrastinate about clocking in, then end up wasting time. If I could just focus on tasks instead of making sure I'm clocked in then I'd be vastly more efficient.

I've worked salaried jobs in the past, and over the course of the year my weeks probably averaged out to 40 hours, since some weeks I wouldn't put in that many and some weeks I'd put in way more, because I was adjusting to what my actual work demands were. Being stuck using a timeclock means I'm forced to obsess over my hours, and my weirdly strong work ethic collides with my general anxiety to result in way lower efficiency.

That sounds awful. Even having to track my weekly hours was vaguely annoying but some kind of chess clock thing I need to deal with in real time is vastly worse

# ¿ May 12, 2021 09:47

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Outrail posted:

Who the gently caress needs business cards in tyool 2021? You want deets? What's your email address I'll send you a one word email and hey presto all my detail are in my sig and you don't have to mistype my email address if you want to get back to me.

This exact screed must have been said by a hundred thousand people over the past 10 years and yet people still think cards are important.

They started becoming obsolete around 2015 for me and the death of conferences will have wiped them or it completely now

# ¿ May 30, 2021 17:22

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

boar guy posted:

i'd probably at least try to match it in solidarity or out of boredom of having to decide what to eat every day

where in the hell has a canteen any more, anyway? do you work remote IT at the department store from are you being served?

My canteen is currently closed because of covid. Otherwise lunch options would be byo or a sandwich from the corner shop a fifteen minute walk along a busy road away. My last job had no alternative to the canteen without driving aside from a pub that changed hands every few months so couldn't be relied on to open or be serving edible food.

Most big manufacturing sites also have canteens. They're pretty common

# ¿ Jun 3, 2021 07:38

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

AHH F/UGH posted:

Is a canteen the same thing as a break room? We�ve got one of those with some vending machines and some kitchen stuff. Or is it more like an actual staffed kitchen that serves food?

Staffed kitchen that serves food

# ¿ Jun 3, 2021 08:23

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Scientastic posted:

There was a rumour a while ago that IT were going to take admin rights away from the sales team, and the thing that stopped it was the overwhelming negative feedback that people said they would consider going to a competitor if they did it.

I can�t imagine not having admin rights to my work laptop, it would genuinely make my working day unbearable.

At many jobs most people just can't be trusted with them

# ¿ Jul 13, 2021 09:04

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Barudak posted:

I may have told this story but it came back into my head.

I had a boss once who was considered a rising star in the company. Out of tens of thousands of employees globally, she was selected to be one of 10 to fly out to Cannes, spend a week there, attend the events, and take seminar training courses with CEOs and other rich corpos and basically be tee'd up for more senior leadership.

The seminars in between the fun events for the industry were your usual plattitude bullshits like "envision your passion" "do what you love!" Etc. You know, usual corporate time waster self-fellation. Well after a week of that she must have actually taken that to heart because the first thing she did on returning to the states was put in her two weeks notice because "I realized I don't like my job and don't want to do it for the rest of my life"

An old CEO once have an "inspiring" speech about how we didn't do this job for the money, after all we were smart people, if we wanted money we'd go and work for a hedge fund

Within three months we lost 50% of our applied maths group. All of them joined hedge funds and cited the vast salaries in their exit interviews

# ¿ Aug 9, 2021 06:47

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

Pekinduck posted:

For grad students, any professor along the way pretty much has the ability to permanently end their academic career. This gives professors the impression they can treat students however they want, because they can, and the toxicity often extends to how they treat staff.

Even by the standards of where I work this was pretty egregious though. Everyone fully admitted the incident took place (hard to hide when the employee comes out of your office with a bruised face) This also wasn't their first rodeo with staff complaints though their first physical assault AFAIK. Thankfully they finally retired recently.

Oh I forgot about this lmao, as part of the "communication improvement" plan HR came up with, my boss was required to have a monthly "coffee break" with all their staff to get to know them better. Because a professor having to talk to staff is considered punishment.
.

It's also the support staff who are in a precarious situation.

It's recently come to light that the high admin staff turnover from a very prestigious research group where I got my PhD was because the professor, who was swimming in funding grants, sexually assaulted so many of them and the university HR investigations ended in sacking the admin staff and getting them to sign some kind of nda in the process

# ¿ Aug 29, 2021 19:46

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

nonathlon posted:

That's extraordinary, even for a university. How did they get them to sign an NDA? Once you're fired, what hold do they have over you - or was there some cash involved?

I sort of hope so, otherwise all I can think is that it was just bullying. Academics being monsters was old news but what passes for HR being complicit was a real shock to everybody.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2021 20:06

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

(you're sacked)

# ¿ Oct 13, 2021 07:34

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 22:50

Mojo Jojo: Sep 21, 2005

I remember once going to help out a company that was struggling with a new product. The figure of merit was too low (it was a gene sequencing platform so this was basically a combo of longest bit of DNA it could read in a standard shift). My problem was really easy to solve (the wash cycle was throwing away 99% of the sample) but the real issue was that we had two sets of instruments and about ten people needing constant access as part of finishing the rest of development. So it was a scheduling catastrophe with people twiddling their thumbs for 3-4 days a week and then working as many hours as they could see straight on the days they had access.

I had a desk away from the rest of the team due to space constraints in the technical bit so I was with middle management. One day somebody slid open a door I'd not noticed just off my bit of the office and I had a momentary glimpse of rows and rows of instruments sitting completely idle.

Turns out that every time the team using the original two instruments complained about lack of access the request resulted in another alpha instrument being assembled (in another country), shipped over and then installed in a lab nobody knew about, with no communication back to the team.

That place was the only time I've felt like it needed some management consultants to come in and clear house

# ¿ Oct 24, 2021 12:18

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Dumb shit your work does: for some reason in the Diablo font.