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Skeleton Ape posted:Oh, another great part of working at Blockbuster was having to sell people DirecTV I interviewed maybe two months before they shut down and the managers explained they had been told to tell their employees that this would save the company. They were hiring new clerks and telling them this.
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Jun 30, 2022 11:01
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I worked at a Kmart from like 2006 to 2011 or so. Even back then my store was bare, stained, decrepit, with cracked floor tiles and old, overpriced inventory. People would ask me daily, multiple times per day, whether we were going out of business. Somehow they hung on for like a decade after this. Shelves were emptying and we spread out thinning stock over emptying shelves, kind of like a preview of 2020. We had a rotation of managers every six months or so and with new bullshit management or sales promotion poo poo that obviously wasn't going to work and was abandoned within weeks. I barely remember any of it. There was one really nice, patient guy who really made you feel respected as a manager for like 4 months before he rocked up the lovely store manager ladder and we went back to disgusting petty tyrants. I wished he got to work for a better company. I worked in electronics, mostly trying to avoid customers who wanted to buy something because we didn't make commission and I didn't want the hassle of getting and carrying out the TV. I mentioned the overpriced inventory - nothing went on sale, ever. We still had a PS1 multi-tap, the plastic package cracked and yellowed with age, selling for full original retail right up until I left, on the shelf. Still sold VHS tapes. Those were probably our most consistently popular electronics item, that and the shelf of wrestling DVDs frequented by people looking like they walked right out of the rural deep south despite the fact that this was suburban PA (outside Philadelphia) in a pretty rich area. I quit by no call no showing when finals were coming up rather than request time off to study.
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Jun 30, 2022 12:00
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Doctor J Off posted:I worked at a Kmart from like 2006 to 2011 or so. Even back then my store was bare, stained, decrepit, with cracked floor tiles and old, overpriced inventory. People would ask me daily, multiple times per day, whether we were going out of business. Somehow they hung on for like a decade after this. Your post reminded me of the now-defuct Consumerist's collection of ancient but still over priced tech at Walmarts and K Mart - https://consumerist.com/2017/05/08/the-most-precious-treasures-of-the-raiders-of-the-lost-walmart/index.html Some other articles under the tag there but a lot of the pics are now gone.
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Jun 30, 2022 12:40
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When our KMart went under in 2002 they put everything they had in the back out for sale. None of that bullshit fake liquidation. That’s how I got several sealed NES games and brand new U-Force accessory for 20 bucks. Wonder what corner that stuff had been buried for 15 years.
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Jun 30, 2022 13:08
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Ralph Crammed In posted:Your post reminded me of the now-defuct Consumerist's collection of ancient but still over priced tech at Walmarts and K Mart - lol that link is awesome.
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Jun 30, 2022 14:49
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I worked at Dick Smith electronics from its massive expansion until its final death. Saw some poo poo man.
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Jun 30, 2022 14:49
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Extra row of tits posted:I worked at Dick Smith electronics from its massive expansion until its final death. You should tell us about it!
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Jun 30, 2022 15:42
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Meme Poker Party posted:This makes a lot of sense. IR has been a pain in the rear end for us to deal with for a while. Even buying direct from them, the price for simple stuff like compressor oil is often higher than their own stuff on Amazon lol. For a long time the local branch had one guy who was really on top of things, then he left at some point and no nobody seems to know much or care. They kind of have this weird reverse attitude almost like we're bothering them even though we're the customer. I worked in the compressor recip compressor division and without a word of a lie the compressors we make and sold were older than me. I was trying to dig up drawings to make minor mods from the 1970s that had been scanned in from microfilm (inevitably as tech support for old compressors in the field) Several times a month i would need to get the microfilm viewer out to literally check original microfilm portfolios to find what previous mods had changed since our mod note database was no existent or consisted of notes like "made hole that was 20mm 25mm instead because (defunct supplier) modified the tooling without telling us" followed by the new supplier telling us there is no 25mm cores anywhere on this casting pattern. However!!!!! Have you considered that either consolidating those drawings onto our current cad system or buying or writing a new modification database would cost more than 10 grand???? This means el presidente would need to sign off on it which his KPIs would prevent!! So good luck!!! This is the likely reasons your spares were late, coupled with compressor oil being impossible to source because we are likely on stop with both the oil company And the company that provides the bottles since we didn't pay them. Genuine buisness advice but if anyone here is dealing with Ingersoll Rand as a supplier to them I would entirely urge you to demand pro forma only and not to accept credit payment terms. You will not get paid unless you chase the payments for literally three to four months every single day after IR has your supplied parts. If IR acounts get pissy about pro forma tell them IR has a reputation for not paying. It's not even a division issue, the accounts is a global for them.
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Jun 30, 2022 16:24
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Ralph Crammed In posted:Your post reminded me of the now-defuct Consumerist's collection of ancient but still over priced tech at Walmarts and K Mart - Lmao yeah, it was like this, except our stock often looked older and more worn than those in the pictures included. Also, some of the other electronics associates huffed the canned air on the shelf.
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Jun 30, 2022 16:33
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You may be unsurprised to learn I let them know all this in my exit interview and they were "shocked" to find out about this issues despite them being raised to top management in the last 6 quarterly town halls. None so blind as those who don't want to see, I guess.
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Jun 30, 2022 16:34
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I worked for Heinz up until they did hundreds of layoffs after they were purchased by Berkshire Hathaway in 2013. They went to this thing called Zero-Based Budgeting, where every single cost had to be approved by multiple levels of management, sometimes up to the CEO. Pens, papers, everything like that? Either fill out an expense report for them or do what most of us did, just get annoyed and bring that stuff from home. The company parking lot, which used to be free, now cost $50 a month and they got rid of the shuttle bus that took you from the lot to the office. A bunch of efficiency experts started sitting with us every day, asking what we did all day. It was supposedly to help us handle our workloads (which were insane at the time) but in hindsight it was just so they could train our replacements. The really crazy stuff was how out of touch the new CEO was. We started ramping up for Thanksgiving over the summer, building up gravy inventory since we sold more gravy between Thanksgiving and New Year's than we did for the entire rest of the year. The CEO flipped out in a meeting and asked why we were making so much gravy before even asking anyone why they might be doing that, he was just pissed that so much money was being spent. Anyway in mid-August they took all of us to a baseball game with a huge catered meal, which at the time I thought was a good sign. Then a little while later they laid entire departments off via phone call at their desk, led us down to a big meeting room, and then had security escort us out. It was a really eye opening experience for me, I used to be a dweeb who'd volunteer to work extra hours and poo poo, quickly realized none of that mattered in the grand scheme of things. I made too much money compared to what they thought I generated, so I was gone.
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Jun 30, 2022 16:41
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American companies are honestly awful to work for in that regard. I'm in Britain and that kind of culture still permeated from the American ownership and management.
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Jun 30, 2022 16:42
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Thanks, ingersoll rand guy, for explaining why the $100k screw compressor we just bought burned out the VFD in a short 18 months shoulda stuck with sullair
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Jun 30, 2022 17:03
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MrQwerty posted:Lol private equity bought the pharma company I worked for with the express intent of, "we're going to finally be the private equity firm that figures out how to run a drug manufacturing and dealing operation!" ohh man this reminds me of my time working for a camera store chain that got bought by a real estate investment firm and clearly had no idea how retail worked so they were just loving obsessed with getting as many loving SKUs on the floor as possible. I think we had like loving 900 different variations of 4x6 frames because they were all a different skew. Almost nobody bought photo frames from us lol
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Jun 30, 2022 18:18
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A Fancy Hat posted:I worked for Heinz up until they did hundreds of layoffs after they were purchased by Berkshire Hathaway in 2013. CEOs are the biggest waste of money, someone should really do something about them
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Jun 30, 2022 18:25
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A shitload about the world makes sense when you realise CEOs are pretty much basically just nobles appointed to fiefdoms.
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Jun 30, 2022 18:32
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A shitload about the world makes sense when you realise CEOs are pretty much basically just nobles appointed to fiefdoms. They're actually kind of worse if you think about it. A feudal lord couldn't plunder his own fief and then just move over to a new one once it was ruined. The lands and people they were responsible for were static over time, minus shakeups from the occasional inheritance/war/whatever. So it was in their own self-interest to keep things running reasonably well, lest they ruin the source of their power and income. But a CEO can totally destroy a company and careers, still get paid (often more), and then just move on to something else with a new company.
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Jun 30, 2022 18:38
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The gentry also at least espoused the concept of Noblesse Oblige. Of course that was probably all bullshit but at least they didn't try to define an entire moral framework around "gently caress you, got mine".
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Jun 30, 2022 18:44
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DickParasite posted:The gentry also at least espoused the concept of Noblesse Oblige. Of course that was probably all bullshit but at least they didn't try to define an entire moral framework around "gently caress you, got mine". Corporate moral framework is the worst loving thing on the entire planet. If I hear a guy start talking about how we’re a team here or growth mindset I want to jump out the nearest window
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Jun 30, 2022 18:55
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Meme Poker Party posted:This is the hallmark of a failing large company imo. Total lack of care or concern among the line staff. Anyone below Store/General Manager or maaaybe some assistant managers just doesn't give a poo poo anymore. This is how it was when I worked at Radioshack and that was like ten years before they finally collapsed. I can only imagine what it was like in the homestretch. When I go to Best Buy this is how it feels. All the displays are hosed up and I can’t even get basic information about the products. Like sure let me just get whatever dash cam is in this box without seeing it or reading the specs. Plus it took longer to get an associate to unlock the cabinet than it would take me to pull out my phone and order off Amazon.
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Jun 30, 2022 18:59
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BAGS FLY AT NOON posted:CEOs are the biggest waste
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Jun 30, 2022 19:00
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Did anyone work at Fry’s Electronics? That place always had a weird sketchy vibe, like a mix of spirit Halloween and K-Mart.
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Jun 30, 2022 19:15
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Internet Old One posted:When I go to Best Buy this is how it feels. All the displays are hosed up and I can’t even get basic information about the products. Like sure let me just get whatever dash cam is in this box without seeing it or reading the specs. Plus it took longer to get an associate to unlock the cabinet than it would take me to pull out my phone and order off Amazon. Last time i went to best buy i told the dude i needed coax cable and he tried to sell me patch cable 
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Jun 30, 2022 19:26
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I worked for Clear Channel Communications (you may know them as iHeartMedia) in the mid 2000’s. At the time, Clear Channel was getting out of television broadcasting, and sold its TV stations — including the one where I worked — to a group of investors. These investors had no clue about what they were going to do with us. I left the company shortly thereafter. Within weeks, the new owners put a hiring freeze into effect, forced unpaid furloughs on employees, and cancelled bonuses. That's a dodged bullet.
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Jun 30, 2022 19:37
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I worked for Focus DIY in the UK from the mid 2000s until it went under in 2011. The company had been milked dry by successive private equity groups, and had been on life-support for years. When you're looking down the barrel of an average of 3 potential catastrophic collapses a year, you tend to stop paying attention until one finally sticks. We found out that the company had gone into administration from BBC news. They had told us to stop taking reservation orders earlier that morning, but it was 'just for administrative reasons'. Our manager was relatively new to the business (our previous manager had been fired for rampant fraud amongst other things), and had recently been through the same thing at Woolworths. He gave us carte-blanche to do whatever we could get away with. We hid pretty much everything of any value so that we could buy it in the final 90% sale. The liquidators used to send people round to lift up the ceiling tiles and shelf bases, but after working there for so many years we knew hiding places they could never dream of. They even tried to guilt-trip us into revealing where our stashes were. Towards the end, we sold off pretty much any of the shop fittings that weren't bolted down for cash. I'm pretty handy with an angle grinder, so a lot of the things that were bolted down got sold off too. We used the money for a massive drunken party on the last day. I still miss working there, but gently caress head office. Soylent Yellow fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 20:14
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shame on an IGA posted:Thanks, ingersoll rand guy, for explaining why the $100k screw compressor we just bought burned out the VFD in a short 18 months I am surprised the VFD failed since (lol) that's almost certainly outsourced, but what kinda duty were you putting it under?
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Jun 30, 2022 21:15
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I am an ESL teacher, and I worked for what was, (at the time), one of the biggest companies in Japan. NOVA at the time of it's death. It was my first ESL job, and at first it was awesome. I did my training at a big branch in Yokohama, and then was moved to the branch I worked at. A tiny little school in a shopping centre way in the outer suburbs. From the day I arrived there were rumours of how badly the company was being run, and how soon it would collapse etc. But I was a fresh faced newbie straight off the boat, and the grizzled expat veterans, (you know the type. Arseholes all of them.), told me that the rumours saying the company would collapse immediately had been around for years. So I shouldn't worry. And I, knowing no better, believed them. Well it turned out that due to a combination of embezzlement, insane billing practices, over expansion, and corporate fuckery NOVA died 9 months into my 12 month contract. They owe me 2 months pay that I will never see, and they owe my immediate Japanese supervisor/boss at least 3. Also due to the upper management having their heads in the sand, (in the end days there were at least 4 company wide memos saying "everything is OK. Do not believe what you see on the TV news."), they were still recruiting from overseas when they had no money to do so. A girl was recruited to my branch who arrived about 6 weeks before the end that never got paid at all. Ultimately I was unharmed by it all, (apart from 2 months of non payment). There were a lot of people who just stopped going in to work the second they didn't get paid, and others who jumped off the sinking ship to other ESL jobs in Japan. I stayed because 1) I had originally only planned to be there 12 months, and so had a return ticket booked. So it didn't cost me much to get it rescheduled 2) I am a good boy and had been saving, so again was not too hurt by the 2 months of no pay, and 3) the branch I worked was tiny. It was only me, 1 other foreigner and 1 Japanese supervisor/receptionist. I knew all my students by name and felt a responsibility to them. I was young, naieve and didn't want to let them down. Also I had really enjoyed my time in Yokohama. It was my first time living and working overseas, my first time as an ESL teacher, (something I eventually took up as a career),, and generally I felt it would be an arsehole move to just cut and run on my students, (many of whom lost a bunch of money when NOVA collapsed due to unusable lesson tickets), when I wasn't hurting. It is a matter of no small personal pride that I taught the last lesson at NOVA Honmoku SATY. And even though the old management was put in prison for embezzlement, now, (15 years later), the NOVA brand rides again in Japan. But not as widespread, and I hope with less predatory billing plans.
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Jul 1, 2022 04:34
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BrigadierSensible posted:I am an ESL teacher, and I worked for what was, (at the time), one of the biggest companies in Japan. NOVA at the time of it's death. I worked for NOVA from 2014 to the end of 2018. It was the best ESL job I had in my ~10 years of teaching in Asia. All adult teaching too, thank loving god. I was at a franchise location so after a year of doing the standard Tues-Sat 1PM-9PM shifts, I was getting burnt out and tried to find a new job doing gig work all around Tokyo. Thankfully I was a good teacher/performer/person-who-gave-a-poo poo that everyone liked I had ingratiated myself with the students so much that many threatened to leave if I quit. I was able to leverage that into the owner of the location to let me do 4-9PM, Wed-Sat for the same pay. Eventually I got married and quit but and when I did, the place started to go downhill like you'd expect. Luckily the people who owned it also had a bunch of other business holdings so the NOVA branch was basically a pet hobby for the owner. They were really nice people, too. They took us out for Kobe beef teppanyaki during new years and worked with out vacation schedules, a bunch of other stuff they didn't have to do, but still did. I never felt bad about strongarming them into giving me full time money for a part time job, but it kept the place afloat. My coworkers there were also all really cool and I keep in touch with a good number of them. The main problem was that NOVA tried to tell students that their points would expire even though the contract the students signed they wouldn't. That amounted to embezzlement and the start of the lawsuit. Many students at NOVA still had like thousands of points amounting to years and years worth of classes that they paid for which the original NOVA tried to screw them out of. The new NOVA still sometimes gets a bit of hate but I think our branch most absolved that with our students because 1. Totally new owners and management and 2. We did such a good job. Actually technically the "best" ESL job I had was the one where I was working 5-9PM, Wed-Fri in Seoul, but that place closed down because the company was burning money. Sad times, I loved basically not working but still making money. I partied a lot in Korea. I mean, a LOT. AHH F/UGH fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Jul 1, 2022 |
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Jul 1, 2022 05:36
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Dirty Beluga posted:You should tell us about it! It would be a novel, basically it was a well run company staffed by professionals that all liked each other, genuinely watched out for each other and trusted staff (including fully backing them up in disputes) to know what they were doing which was sold to people that assumed they could change enormous parts of the system with no negative effects and would point blank tell someone they were wrong when even to an outsider it was obvious they were right.
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Jul 1, 2022 06:41
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About a decade ago I worked at an A&W that was at a Mall Food Court, and I was the most recent hire with Black Friday coming up. Instead of just not scheduling me on that day, my boss called me in on my day off to quickly fire me under the hasty excuse that "everyone needs to be there on Black Friday and you haven't been trained fast enough". Now I'm gonna say again this was a decade ago and at a Mall Food Court, so you can guess how that A&W was doing when malls began to die and the real reason my boss fired me. By the apologetic look on her face I'm gonna assume she was told to lay off the most recent employee and find an excuse because I'd only worked there like a few months. And then the rest of the stalls in the food court closed one by one, indeed, along with the A&W. And then the rest of the A&W's in my town slowly disappeared over the next few months including the one that was also a Long John Silver's and actually produced good food unlike the one I worked at! Ironically, A&W seems to have recovered! Just not the concept of Malls! CJacobs fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Jul 1, 2022 |
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Jul 1, 2022 07:06
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The Bloop posted:I've talked plenty on the forums before about riding RadioShack down (nearly) till the end. It was definitely a weird atmosphere and starting about a year before it all went to hell it was obvious to those of us on the front lines who were paying attention that very bad decisions were being made by corporate management. There was really no reason it should have failed, it was just hubris and idiocy and it was incredibly frustrating to watch. Reminds me of one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in my life, Jon Bois’s RadioShack memoir https://www.sbnation.com/platform/amp/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-stories
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Jul 1, 2022 08:03
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Did anyone work at Fry’s Electronics? That place always had a weird sketchy vibe, like a mix of spirit Halloween and K-Mart. Store was an absolute mess and our loss prevention guy himself was responsible for 90% of missing inventory. Actually took management 4 years to start asking why tons of games went missing every week and he never seemed to catch anyone. tetsuo fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Jul 1, 2022 |
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Jul 1, 2022 09:54
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From 2012 to 2014 I worked for Alstom Power as it was starting to shed assets and raise revenues before General Electric bid on the company. In hindsight, the sale was in the works for a while, but while we were cutting entire departments and closing facilities it looked like the Chief Change Officer Alstom hired had severe MBA-Brain and was trying to apply business school ideas in the real world. Shortly after he started enacting his new policies people started trickling out of the company, but it became a scramble for the exits once the buyout was announced. We had so many people quit that they moved my team from the third floor to the second just so they would have at least someone on the second floor. One day after the move I walked all the way around the floor and found one other team was still there clear across the building from us. It was kind of nice because the lack of people meant my extremely loud coworker was given an office to herself. By that point two of the other product line managers had left the team to "safe" jobs in the company, so I was alone in our four person cube. I was so slammed with work that we simply stopped servicing their product lines once they left. We had been told quietly that the company was going to move the product line management roles for our team to Tennessee before the merger was complete and we needed to find other jobs. My boss was so focused on the job search that she just didn't care about two product lines just not having sales anymore. The rest of the company was sliding into anarchy. Our delivery assurance team went without a manager for over a year because that manager's manager had already quit and not been replaced. People stole phones off of empty desks. I saw a guy I knew walk out on his last day with a box of half-face respirators with company logos on them. People started bringing in multiple Yeti jugs and filling them with coffee in addition to their usual cup or two so they would have iced coffee for the ride in the next day (I also ended up doing this). We had an executive move his entire family to the US from France thinking he would keep his job when GE took over only to be fired a couple weeks later because apparently he didn't tell anyone he was going to move. The person responsible for paying utilities for one of our locations left and the power got shut off because no one was assigned that job. Somebody stole all the fancy coasters out of the executive conference room and passed them out to his friends at the company because the pass code thing broke so the door was just propped open. When I eventually quit my boss changed my last day to January 1st instead of December 28th or whatever it actually was in order to not have to pay me out for the PTO I had remaining on the year. That was petty but I can laugh about it now. She was apparently not liked at any level of the company and wasn't even offered an interviews for other jobs despite being told they would find placement for management level people who were being cut. My wife had an MBA class that specifically reviewed GE's purchase of Alstom and labeled it the worst decision ever made by a major corporation, if you were wondering how well everything ended.
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Jul 1, 2022 18:14
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Internet Old One posted:When I go to Best Buy this is how it feels. All the displays are hosed up and I can’t even get basic information about the products. Like sure let me just get whatever dash cam is in this box without seeing it or reading the specs. Plus it took longer to get an associate to unlock the cabinet than it would take me to pull out my phone and order off Amazon. I bought an open box TV from them recently and the store was so dead that no less than ten employees came over to check out what was happening. They gave me some free poo poo, too, so they clearly don't care anymore.
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Jul 1, 2022 18:19
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deep dish peat moss posted:Well over a decade ago I worked for a company that was a conglomerate of web hosting companies. Basically, this rich kid from India went to business school and then came up with a brilliant business strategy and used his connections to meet with investors at major investment firms. They gave him a lot of money. Like, a lot. This was back in the 2000s and I don't think any of the investors understood the internet, but man did this kid sell them on it. Holy poo poo you and I have quite a bit in common! I did webhosting from 1999-2008 and learn so much during that time. You are right about how in the 90s nearly everyone was running a web server off some tower in their closet. Remember that webpages back then were just text, images, and maybe a CGI script for a guestbook, so it was easy if you knew Unix. Domain names where pretty expensive though, maybe $150USD? Nearly all of my stories mirror yours. We started out really small and then began to buy up other hosting companies that were not surviving after 9/11. One company we bought was in Alabama and our executives wanted to physically move their data center into ours. This was 2001 so we couldn't just transfer the data at high speed or automate the migration in AWS. They rented 5 or 6 uHauls and had the tech support and NOC staff drive from Indianapolis down to the Deep South. These poor bastards had to leave on a Friday morning, drive non-stop in teams to the data center, unrack and load up all the servers, cables, monitors, chairs, switches, everything, drive back non-stop, rack up ALL the servers and power them up in time for Monday morning. L O L Yeah we were hosed on Monday morning. See one mistake that was made was our owner was the never considered or discussed any transition period. He just told the staff at the other company, "You are gone as of next month. We will take over all equipment so please make sure all documentation is up to date. " So yeah, we had all these hard-coded IPs in customer websites and we could never figure out the sendmail or whatever it was in some old rear end version of Unix. Meanwhile, most of the customers are from the a region of the US that like to bully staff and don't say nice things to women and minorities. After that we paid a little more attention. We still bought up smaller companies here and there, moved out of co-lo into our own data center. There was some big merger and we doubled in size so we moved into a real call center and that's when I left. Its been bought and sold about 3 or 4 times since then. There is one sales guy that I worked closely with and he's still there. I see him post on LinkedIn all the time .
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Jul 1, 2022 18:55
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tetsuo posted:Similar vibe existed at CompUSA (#497 Lenox represent) in the early 2000s right as it was starting to succumb to other big box retail. worked in the tech shop so I got to take the brunt of people's frustrations that their "warranty replacement program" was only going to give them a laptop half as fast as their previous model because that one was no longer available. don't think i ever worked with retail people who were just so completely comfortable with brutally lying to people for a $2 spiv. Man I miss being young and dumb and browsing the CompUSA game section trying to figure out what would run on the family iMac and sometimes hitting a home run. Hmm... haven't heard of Myth: Total Codex before but this is a slick game box and it might be worth a try.
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Jul 1, 2022 23:11
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Lazyfire posted:From 2012 to 2014 I worked for Alstom Power as it was starting to shed assets and raise revenues before General Electric bid on the company. In hindsight, the sale was in the works for a while, but while we were cutting entire departments and closing facilities it looked like the Chief Change Officer Alstom hired had severe MBA-Brain and was trying to apply business school ideas in the real world. Shortly after he started enacting his new policies people started trickling out of the company, but it became a scramble for the exits once the buyout was announced. We had so many people quit that they moved my team from the third floor to the second just so they would have at least someone on the second floor. One day after the move I walked all the way around the floor and found one other team was still there clear across the building from us. It was kind of nice because the lack of people meant my extremely loud coworker was given an office to herself. By that point two of the other product line managers had left the team to "safe" jobs in the company, so I was alone in our four person cube. I was so slammed with work that we simply stopped servicing their product lines once they left. We had been told quietly that the company was going to move the product line management roles for our team to Tennessee before the merger was complete and we needed to find other jobs. My boss was so focused on the job search that she just didn't care about two product lines just not having sales anymore. I was working for a bolting supplier to Alstom power on their hydro projects and it was really depressing to see. In the space of about 6 months Alstom went from having good engineers who understood the projects they were working on to having random non-engineers trying to organise things because theyd had a team putting together a power house in Tanzania or wherever and apparantly they'd had staff sitting there for 4 months being paid to do nothing because no one in the remaining, hollowed out engineering team was assigned to work on the job to project manage it and nothing had been ordered or built for the job, and could we deliver bolting tools for this *checks notes* 2 months ago? Really sad to see them sliding so fast so quickly. I'm honestly seeing a pattern with American companies buying working companies Ans just... Absolutely ruining them. Drone_Fragger fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Jul 4, 2022 |
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Jul 4, 2022 08:27
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Drone_Fragger posted:I am surprised the VFD failed since (lol) that's almost certainly outsourced, but what kinda duty were you putting it under? We have to wait about a month for a specific Honeywell actuator for one of our chillers and I want to know how long is the wait for a VFD. All kinds of way important you-need-that-for-heavy-equipment-to-function poo poo are impossible to find now.
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Jul 4, 2022 20:12
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i worked at a place that had been bought just before the gfc by a major investment firm and the essentially left to rot after the crash. it was a large broadcast services company, and i was hired as a programmer. on my first day i turned up and there was no computer for me. i had to dig around in a pile of old IT junk to hack together a xeon to use. the standard windows image was locked down to bullshit, so i couldn’t use it at all for my job. i ended up installing ubuntu which worked fine after some guy told me to add some static routes. I was building itunes api integrations and couldn’t get by the firewall to call the APIs at all so i created an ssh tunnel to route things via a seedbox i rented off some goon. after a while i realised no one gave even an ounce of a poo poo so i farted about in irc all day and downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of trash from my seedbox (this was 2010 so having a big pipe was some good stuff) so basically the nerd version of taking as much poo poo as you wanted
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Jul 5, 2022 10:15
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Drone_Fragger posted:I was working for a bolting supplier to Alstom power on their hydro projects and it was really depressing to see. In the space of about 6 months Alstom went from having good engineers who understood the projects they were working on to having random non-engineers trying to organise things because theyd had a team putting together a power house in Tanzania or wherever and apparantly they'd had staff sitting there for 4 months being paid to do nothing because no one in the remaining, hollowed out engineering team was assigned to work on the job to project manage it and nothing had been ordered or built for the job, and could we deliver bolting tools for this *checks notes* 2 months ago? Really sad to see them sliding so fast so quickly. I was in the thermal power division, so I don't have much insight into the Hydro or Nuclear part of the business. Alstom was a weird company because it had been hacked together from pieces of other businesses with the different divisions having almost no interaction between them, we didn't even share business development people for the same sites within Thermal Power. I'm not overly surprised the quality drop off was universal, though. We were bleeding people because GE had made it clear that the only thing they were interested in on the Thermal Power side of things was our Turbine business. People who had connections were requesting transfers to that business unit and our warehouses and service centers that remained after the purge were tilted to Turbine production and provisioning. Meanwhile, one of the sites we shuttered was the tube stockhouse/tube shaping location, which was integral to the Boiler business. As it turned out a lot of the Boiler exodus was because of this as losing them made it much more difficult to price and sell replacement tubing as we had almost no bending/forming vendors with the kind of equipment or experience needed to get approved as viable replacements for any of our pars.
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Jul 5, 2022 13:38
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