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bitreaper posted:Do you have hiring power? Get yourself a whipping boy. I don't but you have to run up at least 3 or 4 levels of management before you get to true hiring power in my company. I've had to manage people before that I couldn't directly fire and I'm not eager to jump back into that clusterfuck. Also, I have a hard time delegating work when I know I can do it better. I understand that this means I'm the whipping boy. Seat Safety Switch posted:At a previous (thankfully summer) job I worked, long-running problems with a very small but essential system were intentional sabotage which went undiscovered for several years as my predecessors "programmed around it." Some letter templates used for external communication had spell check turned off on some of the parts processors could customize. This meant even if they ran spell check it would trigger on weird names in the address but not on the actual body of the letter. I'm convinced this was intentional sabotage. Very clever, extremely funny sabotage.
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Apr 26, 2010 04:36
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fosborb posted:Some letter templates used for external communication had spell check turned off on some of the parts processors could customize. This meant even if they ran spell check it would trigger on weird names in the address but not on the actual body of the letter. The fact that nobody else even realized something was wrong, leave alone tried to investigate and fix it, was really worrying to me at the time. Then I met the founder and understood that doing so had to be their own form of sabotage. I wish I had more cool sabotage stories, but unfortunately I've just worked for too many decent companies other than this one.  edit: Most of the bugs that existed are still there, since after I left, they fired pretty much everyone else and discovered they didn't know how to get into the Subversion repository (and subsequently deleted it during a hardware upgrade shortly after). They ended up just uploading code they found lying around on someone's computer from several months before I started. Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Apr 26, 2010 |
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Apr 26, 2010 04:52
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KevinCow posted:I can already feel it draining my soul away. This is really the worst part. Once its gone, the pain goes away and you just feel numb all the time.  Thankfully, for me, I got out of it and now I teach in a foreign country and couldn't be happier with the freedom I have and every day is an adventure. Its less than half the pay, but I'd never ever go back. 
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Apr 26, 2010 05:43
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Every once in a while I consider going back to IT work in the business world. This thread set me straight and I will continue trying to start my own business until I'm forced back in to it by something like a family.
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Apr 26, 2010 05:59
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I just rewatched Office Space because of this thread. My condolences to all of you.
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Apr 26, 2010 06:07
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So who hears and visualizes this 12 times per day? SME - Subject Matter Expert. Context: It's not enough to say "S" "M" "E" or even "Expert"... it's Smee. Wagoneer fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Apr 26, 2010 |
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Apr 26, 2010 06:30
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Roosevelt posted:One of these days, man, one of these days. That's probably my only real goal in life, to run my own place and get those fucks to pay me fairly. Right now I probably couldn't handle it, I don't think I'm good enough at what I do. I'll say only this, man: You will never be in a position where the finances are good and there's not other poo poo in your life going on, it's always going to be a risk and there will never be that golden opportunity that you can wait for. As for skills to pay bigger bills, you'll never learn poo poo at work, independent projects done during off-hours will be where you actually learn stuff.
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Apr 26, 2010 07:01
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I keep this twitter to report the conversations I overhear at my job: http://twitter.com/oatwork
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Apr 26, 2010 13:48
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the posted:I keep this twitter to report the conversations I overhear at my job:
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Apr 26, 2010 13:59
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Baggins posted:Thanks to corporate guidelines, forums.somethingawful.com is blocked by the web filter here. Browsing by IP negates the filter, thus beating the system. My company's filter only blocks https://www.somethingawful.com and forumimages.somethingawful.com so I'm actually able to browse and post on the forum, but I can't read the frontpage or see smilies. =/
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Apr 26, 2010 14:35
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My workplace banned flash-based storage devices after someone brought in a USB drive that had a virus on it. Everyone got bought 1TB WD Passbooks. Because viruses are specific to flash-based media.
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Apr 26, 2010 14:45
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Wagoneer posted:So who hears and visualizes this 12 times per day? I tried watching Hook yesterday and that was honestly very distracting. I keep trying to tell my managers that, while we all know that I do the job of 3 SMEs in other departments, that's not actually a good thing. I've even resorted to soul sucking corporate speak like "bench strength" and "tyranny of competence" but training anyone in the system-specific knowledge I have remains relegated to a personal side project when I have time. Degree mills should spend a solid year of credits on MS Office, including Access and VBA. My company and companies like it suck up 90% of their graduates anyway. They could at least have use beyond data entry. I don't even know what to do with MBAs that wind up in the operations side of corporate life. The degree is at best a time delay between 22 and starting work, which should correlate to a higher level of maturity but...
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Apr 26, 2010 15:08
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Reading this thread brings back unpleasant memories and I feel worse just for having read it At the same time, I used to take massive liberties when possible, because if you don't, you will be a hollow shell of a human being
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Apr 26, 2010 15:13
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I have to tell you the story of Howard. I've only met Howard once, but my brother worked with him for a year while Howard was trying to get fired. When my brother started working for A Big Unnamed IT Corporation in Silicon Valley some 5 years ago, one of the colleagues that introduced himself during the first few days was a guy named Howard who asked my brother if he wanted to go see a film. "Sure, when? I'm not doing much this week," my brother replied. "Oh I mean go see a film right now," Howard said. "What, during work hours. Is that OK?" my brother asked, slightly puzzled. "Yeah, sure it's all right. Let's go!" So they went and saw not one film, but two. During working hours. And my brother didn't really feel entirely OK about it, so the next day he asked his co-workers if it was normal to skip work and go to the cinema instead. "Did you go to the cinema with Howard?" he was asked. "Yeah." "Howard is trying to get fired. Don't do anything he does or suggests." It turned out that for the past year, Howard had been working hard on some big project for the company. Doing his best and regularly working overtime. And then one day the upper management decided that the project wasn't needed after all, and it got cancelled, and no-one even told Howard anything like "Sorry. But thanks for your efforts." It was just cancelled, and that was that. So Howard decided that if the management didn't really care about his efforts, he wouldn't make any efforts on their behalf at all. So if he didn't have any work assigned for a day or two, he wouldn't really care to tell anyone. Why should that be his responsibility, he reasoned. It's management's responsibility to check that he's got enough assignments for the coming days. After a while, Howard didn't have anything to do. He just showed up at work, checked his e-mail, went to the regular staff meetings, and then just surfed the web or went to the cinema or went home early. After some months, one of the managers asked Howard: "Uh, Howard, what exactly are you working on at the moment?" "Nothing," Howard said. "I don't have anything to do right now." "Oh. Well, we got to do something about that," the manager said. Not much happened after that. Howard continued to go to work without doing any work at all. Eventually his plan was to see how long he could keep it up before getting fired. It took nearly a year before he was laid off.
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Apr 26, 2010 15:53
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 Hey can I have the latest version of the change request report? It hasn't changed over the last 2 weeks. The change that I sumitted moved.So I go into Excel and type in "Under Review" into a box... because it's easier to type an email than to click on a box and type. I am sick of making all of my loving documents idiot-proof. It's like no one has ever used Microsoft Office. How loving hard is to set your own goddamn printing options? How hard is it to type in a CELL? Is it even more difficult to ZOOM OUT when you can't see the whole sheet? gently caress you, learn Excel.
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Apr 26, 2010 16:24
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My boss asked me for a copy of my latest pay stub. This can't be good.
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Apr 26, 2010 16:48
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Wow, perfect timing on that Howard story. My little temping assignment isn't so well-monitored, either. The actual IT employees were too busy fixing some poo poo that went wrong over the weekend so one guy, Paul, walked me to a little closet office down the hallway, surfed to thepiratebay on the computer, and proceeded to download the "PHP and MySQL For Dummies" pdf. "When this gets done, just read through it and holla at me 'fore we go home." Instead I waited five minutes and then left to browse paint swatches at Wal-Mart, and now I'm hanging out at the library a few blocks down the road from the bank. I'll probably sit here and sit here and sit here until it's time for me to head back and collect my paycheck (the temping agency pays daily) before going home. No update on my first-page account of an unauthorized installation of a biological peripheral in Kathy's computer yet, but I will continue to "scan the airwaves" for any news.
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Apr 26, 2010 16:48
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Part 1: Don't Let Admins Near Customers My last job was with an international corporation that had it's own internal helpdesk. I was the resident programmer for the second level, so I mostly did projects and hung out with a couple guys who administered the call logging system. Ian was a smart guy who always delivered on his projects, but for some reason never seemed to be in any meetings. One day I discovered why. Back-story: We had a third-party company contracted to handle support for Europe and it's many languages (apparently the rest of the world only hired people who spoke English). Everyone in both first and second level helpdesk loathed the European company due to general ineptitude. I was in a meeting with several managers, some higher-ups, and a few customers, starting design on a new project. Ian was there for once and his direct manager seemed to be trying to limit the amount of talking he did. One of the customers noticed we were seemingly jumping through hoops to avoid any part of the process going through the European contractor, and asked why. Ian: Because watching [European company] handle problem tickets is like watching a retard try to open a bag of chips! At this point a couple people chuckle, some look offended, and most look embarrassed. Ian then proceeds to mime the action he described and is quickly thrown out of the meeting (and all future ones with customers). Part 2: Counting Is Hard The European contractor's pricing scheme was mostly based off of how many computers we had installed in our offices over there. The numbers were coming from rough estimates made by local managers. I created a software inventory system to track things like unlicensed copies of Office, and unauthorized programs (half of South America had porn programs on their company laptops, Europe was riddled with Bonzi Buddy). A side effect of this was that we had an actual count of the number of computers we had in Europe. I compared the numbers, and it turns out that the estimates had been way too high. We were paying the third-party company roughly 5 million too much each year. When I brought this to the attention of my bosses, they decided to ignore the information, since they didn't want to "rock the boat". This was a company that had surged to the #2 position in our industry, mostly because of financial management and IT. I can't imagine how idiotic the rest of the industry was if we were the shining example of excellence.
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Apr 26, 2010 16:56
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generatrix posted:I compared the numbers, and it turns out that the estimates had been way too high. We were paying the third-party company roughly 5 million too much each year. When I brought this to the attention of my bosses, they decided to ignore the information, since they didn't want to "rock the boat". I think this is nothing short of blackmail material on your bosses.
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Apr 26, 2010 17:02
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Broken Knees Club posted:I think this is nothing short of blackmail material on your bosses. Yeah, but if the data is wrong, he's hosed. Edit: HA! Just got MeetingPlace ID # 1337... Sometimes it's the little things... 
Wagoneer fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Apr 26, 2010 |
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Apr 26, 2010 17:09
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Michael Kelso posted:"But hey, at least you still have a job!" Is the new "Case of the Mondays." I told someone that one of the perks to having a job is the ability to complain about it. ...they stole all my pens when I went to break. Thanks for giving me something to complain about. Dick.
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Apr 26, 2010 18:09
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I work in a major college library and all these stories remind me of my job with the exception that I likely get paid way less than any of you. I've been here almost three years and I've gotten to the point where I do about 2 hours of work a day at the most. Netflix, MLB TV, and Hulu are the best.
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Apr 26, 2010 18:11
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Broken Knees Club posted:I think this is nothing short of blackmail material on your bosses. My boss: Fantastic! We're going to save the company a ton of money! My boss' boss: Good work! We're going to save a ton of money if anything is done about this. My boss' boss' boss: Interesting, we'll have to see if management wants to act on it. Head of Global IT: Thanks for bringing this to me, we're not going to follow through on this because we don't want to rock the boat. CEO: *Never hears about it* Giant corporations are designed to suck any feeling of accomplishment out of anything you do.
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Apr 26, 2010 18:23
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Sebastian Flyte posted:I have to tell you the story of Howard. That's pretty funny, but Howard loses point for dragging an innocent new hire into his personal drama. In that vein, I am sick to death of jaded old-timers who think it's their duty to impart their "wisdom" (i.e. cynicism and self-absorbed bitterness) onto new hires. If this place sucks so much, why have you stayed for so long? You just told me the pay is crap so that can't be the reason.
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Apr 26, 2010 18:40
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generatrix posted:My boss: Fantastic! We're going to save the company a ton of money! Find a pennypincher, accidentally let this info slip within hearing range, stand back and watch the witch hunts. 
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Apr 26, 2010 18:50
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Winkle-Daddy posted:Does anyone work with employees from India? If so, is the phrase "please do the needful" as universally hated as it is at my office? For some odd reason someone at my current employer thought it was a good idea to outsource our software development to India. Since I've been here (I'm into my fourth week), I've struggled trying to communicate with the developers about issues our users are having or errors that are occurring in the system. Their English is pretty bad even for ESL standards and sometimes trying to explain database changes that need to occur is extremely frustrating. While outsourcing may be cheaper, the amount of time saved in dealing with a local company would certainly more than make up for it.
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Apr 26, 2010 18:55
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Seaniqua posted:When my current corporation implemented Six Sigma a while back, my boss then went crazy over it. I was just an intern at the time and it just seemed so completely outrageous to me, it bordered on the surreal. He started using the term "value added" more every time he went to a 6S conference or whatever. My office hired some Six Sigma consultant hucksters a few years back. They were paid a huge sum just to basically rearrange the desks and seating assignments. So instead of wasting valuable seconds carrying reports from one room to the next, most of the department was herded into one large room where the over-crowed conditions and lack of personal space turned the usual petty bickering into full-blown chaos. We went back to old way within weeks.
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Apr 26, 2010 19:00
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Murray the Hump posted:My office hired some Six Sigma consultant hucksters a few years back. They were paid a huge sum just to basically rearrange the desks and seating assignments. So instead of wasting valuable seconds carrying reports from one room to the next, most of the department was herded into one large room where the over-crowed conditions and lack of personal space turned the usual petty bickering into full-blown chaos. We went back to old way within weeks. LOL that's some genius right there. Did anyone go postal?
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Apr 26, 2010 19:04
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I'm self employed - I'm sitting here in my underwear, doing work I enjoy, earning more than you. Thats right baby I'm a phone sex operator 
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Apr 26, 2010 19:06
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I have a few stories. I once had a manager come into my office, where we had the following conversation. What makes it even better is he was using his Very Serious Boss voice, and I know he wasn't taking the piss because that would've required a sense of humor and he'd never heard of the concept. "So, I've noticed you have this...attitude." "Really? Has someone been complaining?" "No." "...okay, do you have any examples of what I've been doing?" "Hmmm, not really." "Do you have any suggestions for improving the way I'm doing things?" "Can't think of anything." Long silence as we stare at each other. "Just so I'm clear, I have some kind of attitude, but you can't give me any examples of it, have no suggestions to fix it, and nobody has complained?" "Yes." Long silence as we stare at each other. "...I'll get right on that?" "See that you do." And it never came up again. I had a job once that paid me a good amount for doing a monkey's job. I enjoyed it very much. However, my department and another department were locked in a frankly ridiculous battle that was neverending. It was like rivals in sports, and we finally lost when my boss, who'd been Best Friends Forever with our VP, resigned to go work elsewhere. Our VP was now pissed because they weren't friends anymore and was in full "a woman scorned" fury. Now we were the naughty department that needed to be punished. On my part, this involved my coworker from our rival department going over his job description with her, taking out all the bits he didn't like doing and pasting them into mine, so I would have all my work (which was easy, but plentiful), then I'd had another half-job worth of work doing all the unpleasant parts of his job. Would I get paid more, a better title, anything for doing a job and a half (and that half being all the bad parts, basically serving as his intern)? I would not. They were genuinely surprised when I gave notice. At another job, we had an insane level of bureaucracy. If I was writing something that would go out, it had to be approved by: Me, of course. My counterpart from our sister department. The head of the branch I worked for. The copywriter/editor. My boss. Her boss (the VP). The legal department, which could be two or three people depending on the issue at hand, and they had fun and arcane guidelines like "We can't use the word 'free' because that implies a lack of value, so even if you're giving away something free, you can't call it that." And finally the CEO. If it happened to involve one of our partners, it usually had to go through that corporate structure on their end, too, so it would take forever. It was actually a pretty easy job because you'd spend two weeks unable to do anything because the document you were working on was winding its way through approvals, though the downside was if you were actually TRYING to get it done to hit a deadline, you had to spend two weeks herding it from point to point. ("Waiting for approvals" was to me what "Compiling" is to programmers). If you've ever wondered why corporate copy sounds so bland, it's because anywhere from 8-20 different people (at the company I worked for, at least) have had their hands in it, changed a few things so they felt like they've contributed, and I've pushed the resulting mishmash out because Everything Is Okay So Long As I Have My Signoffs. If I managed to get an ASCII goatse out and got 20 signoffs, it would be okay because I had my signoffs. The best part was EVERYTHING had to go through the corporate chain of command. You couldn't just walk up to me and ask for something, even if it was simple. You had to request it through your chain of command, where it would go up three levels, then to my chain of command, where it would come back down three levels in completely incomprehensible form from the giant corporate game of telephone. Then I'd do it to those specs and it would work its way through approvals (detailed above) and then go back down your chain of command to you. I still remember the day we "cut all the fat out of the approval process," which meant...the CEO didn't need to see everything anymore! Hoo-ray! At that same job, my entire Monday would be spent in meetings. Since I worked at a branch office, this meant that I would spend Mondays playing games on my Blackberry while sitting in on a conference call that had nothing to do with me. I didn't mind Mondays. At my last job, I and all my coworkers got laid off. In fact, everyone I know got laid off except for management. Management doesn't actually produce any of the things we do (did), so how they were planning to keep customers with no one to do the actual work is something of a mystery to me. Now they're bleeding money even faster because they have no actual product and no one producing them. Management has no clue why, so they hired a consultant. The consultant told them, basically, "You laid off all the people that actually do something, so now you don't do anything and the customers are angry." So they fired him. One of the companies I worked at had That Guy. You all have That Guy. He's the one that skates through life getting nothing done and making entire projects late, but he somehow exists in a blind spot to supervisors and managers, so even when he costs the company millions, nothing at all happens to him. It's a blessed life he leads. Anyway, That Guy blew another deadline at this particular company and they'd finally had enough, so they implemented required hours tracking so they can make sure we're all working. THis entails a little popup coming up every 15 minutes asking what you're doing. That Guy isn't stupid enough to put down "Looking at cat videos on Youtube," so naturally everyone is even less productive than before because they're interrupted every 15 minutes by this popup, but Management is still baffled by this strange productivity sink somewhere in their midst. "But everyone is working hard every minute of every day per our wonderful new software! Yet we still can't hit a deadline! How can this be!" At yet another company, we blew tremendous amounts on travel. You know how the military/other public institutions have to spend every last dime or their budget gets cut? Our departmental travel budget was the same way. If we didn't burn our whole meal allowance, Finance would cut the hell out of our budget, so even if you were happy eating at Subway or whatever, you had to keep a running tab, and if you wound up well below your meal budget, it was time to start ordering bottles of wine! I was in a meeting once where I suggested changing our product because we lost a lot of users at one particular step. I mentioned I myself quit using it when I hit said step. The CEO remarked thoughtfully that surveys showed that's where they lost most of their users and maybe they should do something about it sometime. Nothing was ever done. I worked at a company where we had a big meeting every few months announcing our wonderful new bonus structure. After a full day of wonderful powerpoints and slides, they assured us they were still working out some kinks, which is why we couldn't get it in writing. Guess how many bonuses we got? I once had a meeting where our CEO asked me very politely what my actual job description was because he didn't know and nobody could tell him. I'd worked there for 3 years and at some point they'd reorganized me completely out of the corporate structure and titles. I was, it turned out, accountable to no one for nothing for most of my employment there, at least according to the org chart. I worked at a company where my boss "doesn't like typing," so he'd call me every time I sent over a document and launch into monologues on my document while I tried desperately to keep up with where he was based on hints I could glean about the text. Didn't matter where I was, what I was doing, or that I had no way to see this document or even know what he was talking about. I worked at a company where we had an expensive, cutting-edge videoconference system that could network all our offices together, which we never used because management liked "to see people's faces," so not only did we have a massive travel budget, we had a massive budget for keeping the videoconference system we never used maintained. I worked for a web design shop for a while. The boss hired his girlfriend to be our new web designer. She also got veto rights on all our proposals. Since she didn't want to do any work, she vetoed all our proposals. our boss was happy because he got to spend more time playing Counterstrike. I got bitched at for not making us money through the projects I'd find, then we'd not do because she didn't want to work and he wanted to play Counterstrike. I left to go work elsewhere and found out later that his girlfriend went back to her homeland (somewhere in Europe) and he got in a ton of trouble when he spent every dime the company had chasing her to Europe so he could convince her to come back and marry him, even though they never seemed to like each other very much, like his ego just couldn't take the notion that she'd broken up with him. Regarding the thermostat wars, I worked at a company where there was a big, open floor on one end then a bunch of offices in the back. Most of the people and equipment were on the big open floor (imagine a ton of computers belching out heat all day every day), but the boss sat in an office in the back and controlled the thermostat and wanted it cold, so the people up front would be sweating and dying and the people in back would be wearing coats and the boss would be complaining because "the goddamn thermostat doesn't work!" Related, I worked for a company based in New Orleans. Our office thermostat was controlled by the home office in Minnesota (and matched theirs). Let me tell you about the months we'd go with it 90 degrees outside and the heat roaring out full blast because it was below freezing in Minnesota. We regularly had to take employees to the emergency room when they passed out from the heat. I worked at a company where I got a friend of mine/coworker written up twice. He had no control over what I was doing, but I'd gone out of town so they couldn't write me up. So they wrote him up. And never mentioned it to me. He said it was like something out of Catch-22. "Well, I got this writeup form out of my desk and I can't just put it back in there, and he's not here, so..." I worked at a company where we had an "open office" to "facilitate communication" yet nobody talked to each other because all the departments were locked in a World War II of interoffice politics and warfare, so we had to rearrange desks constantly to "facilitate communication," which didn't help much since very few people were actually on speaking terms. I once got a talking-to because I complained I needed some kind of quiet space for taking important calls. This was another open plan office, which meant it was 30 people in one room with no barriers between them. I'd occasionally have important calls with our partners, who had poor opinions of us when you could hear the IT guy screaming about FUCKWADS and SHITDRAGONS in his wow guild or the office funnyguy telling a loud and dirty joke. I told my boss, basically, "Hey, I'm talking to our partners, and we don't really look professional when he hears soandso yelling gently caress and poo poo in the background and I'm sick of hissing 'Quiet down' like a librarian." That's "thinking I'm better than everyone else and my conversations are more important than theirs." I worked at a company where we couldn't get a reliable internet connection (it was down for hours daily) despite having multiple, spread-out offices that relied on things like Wikis and Skype to stay in touch with each other. No, I could not go home and use my (reliable) home connection to VPN in. Sit and wait until it's fixed. This is how I got paid several days a week to dick around on the internet via iPhone. I worked at a company where they had trouble selling ad space. They hired the best salesperson in the industry, then dicked her around over her comission. Naturally, she left. They hired the next best salesperson in the industry, then dicked him around over his comission. Naturally, he left. They've since been busily working through salespeople, since they insist on dicking around over their comission. Likewise, they hire the best contractors in the industry, then dick them around and try to not pay them, then wonder why nobody will work with them anymore. I worked at a company where my boss decided, on a whim, we should get our (software) client to a bunch of journalists and to make it really easy for them, we should put it on DVD so all they have to do is put the disk in and install and, oh, if all those DVDs could go out by the end of the week, it'd be great. Actually, what if they don't have DVD drives? We should just use CDs. Which meant our client/installer stretched over something like 10 CDs each rather than one DVD. Guess who got to burn all those CDs, then put together the envelopes making sure each journalist got all 10 CDs (and that all of them worked), then had to overnight it all because it takes forever to burn, test, collate, and pack 600 CDs? And he seemed genuinely surprised that they got this massive pile of CDs and decided to just download it from our site anyway. At one job, I coordinated with our PR agency, letting them know what was going on and planning releases and such. The problem was everyone in the company liked to decide/bitch about things on a moment's notice, so I'd get a press release at 4pm PST on Friday and they'd want it going out immediately, no matter how much the agency pointed out that we'd get 0 pickup at 4pm PST on Friday but we'd get the JUST DO IT DO IT NOW 24-style treatment, so we'd send it out and it'd get no pickup because everything was closed and everyone that was open wasn't doing a drat thing at 4pm on a Friday. Then I'd get yelled at for not getting more out of our PR agency. I got laid off eventually and bumped into our rep a few months later. She wondered why I hadn't been answering her emails, since we were pretty friendly. Apparently, they never told our agency I'd been laid off. Curious, I logged into my old email account and found piles and piles of PR stuff "TO GO OUT IMMEDIATELY!!" then a lot of demands wondering why they hadn't seen a release go out. From the same people who laid me off. Evidently, it was too much work to walk over to my (now empty) desk to talk to me (which you couldn't have because I didn't work there anymore). I worked for a startup where we got the mandatory 10-12 hour days, the whole "we're all a team", gotta all pitch in, let's work together to build something great. And naturally the CEO laid everyone off after a few months of working us ragged to bring in some friends and relatives that didn't actually know our industry, but they "knew how to work with him." Naturally the company went under a few months later. I was a copywriter at a place obsessed with metrics. All that mattered were your metrics. They were baffled when it came to me, because all my work depended on the whims of the company. If something needed written, I'd write it, but if nothing needed written, I didn't have anything to do. Finally, they hit upon a metric. Words per day. My target was 500 words per day. And it didn't matter what I did, so long as I hit it. Even if it wasn't work related. Working on a novel, playing a MUD, writing a forum post, it all counted towards my daily target. And because this was a "typing=productive" office, so long as I was typing or had a big word document open, I was golden. They were sad when I left because I always killed my metrics and always seemed very productive. I once got written up for "going home early when most other people don't." I pointed out that was because they took 3-4 hour lunches, so naturally they had to stay until 9 or 10 to get any kind of work done, whereas I took the requisite hour lunch, so left when I did. Didn't matter. Can't be seen leaving before everyone else. They also suggested it was a problem that I wasn't in on the weekend like some of my coworkers. "They're not doing anything. They're just playing World of Warcraft on the company internet." Oh, we know. Doesn't matter. Shows commitment to the company.
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Apr 26, 2010 19:17
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ObsidianConspiracy posted:LOL that's some genius right there. Did anyone go postal? One guy did get fired for getting in a physical altercation (just a couple of shoves from what I heard). He seemed like a pretty mild mannered guy until he was ripped from his cubicle and forced to sit with a bunch of gossiping old biddies.
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Apr 26, 2010 19:25
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Colonel Penguin posted:At my last job, I and all my coworkers got laid off. In fact, everyone I know got laid off except for management. Management doesn't actually produce any of the things we do (did), so how they were planning to keep customers with no one to do the actual work is something of a mystery to me. Now they're bleeding money even faster because they have no actual product and no one producing them. Management has no clue why, so they hired a consultant. The consultant told them, basically, "You laid off all the people that actually do something, so now you don't do anything and the customers are angry." So they fired him. How much does it suck to live in a front page caricature of corporate life?
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Apr 26, 2010 19:44
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Colonel Penguin posted:I have a few stories. Christ... How have you not killed yourself yet?
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Apr 26, 2010 19:46
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I got hired on as an IT guy at a small mortgage debt collections company. They wanted some brand new guy they could train up and would be there for a very long time, who had lots of good base experience with IT and systems administration and could pay them $31,000/yr out of college. They ended up with me, the former A/V tech with a political science degree. I actually was higher paid than most of my other classmates who got degrees in their field, but that's besides the point. They gave me like 2 weeks to read up on SQL and become "a DBA by the end of the month." They put me in a cube next to my friend who got me hired there for some reason, which was kind of cool. Also there was no talking allowed between people in the little cube farm I was in. You had to send emails or use the Lotus Notes chat system. Like I couldn't ask the person right next to me in the half-height cubes if they wanted to go to lunch, or HER boss would send my boss and email asking why I was disturbing his workers. But if I sent her an email that said "lunch?" that was cool. Anyways, they had the lotus notes chat system, and some new employees (all fresh college grad girls) that knew each other before would chat all day on there with each other since everything else was blocked. They'd talk about all kinds of things, and occasionally ask me about random things like shoes or how much I hated working there, and I'd just not have time to respond, so I'd give some one word answers or not respond at all. I don't think I initiated a single conversation on the chat system. If I needed to talk to my boss or the IT guys, I would stand up and walk over there. They appreciated this a lot. One day, I come in to work and notice all the girls in my cube-section crying a little bit but still working. My boss pulls me into his office and goes "hey, you probably know what this is about..." I say I don't and he is surprised and goes "Well, a lot of people here were abusing the chat system and we went through the logs, and saw that even though you never chatted much at all, in fact you use the system the least of anyone in the company, I have to write you up for using the chat system for non-work purposes." I asked for an example of this, and he goes "well, there aren't any good ones, but here's one that the HR lady gave me:" phonegirl: Man I hate Phil, he's so dumb. blah blah blah, shoes, blah blah, drinks after work? dunkman: busy. phonegirl: Aww come on, what's going on down there? dunkman: signs off at 5:15pm He even said that he felt bad about writing me up for it, since I obviously didn't do anything wrong, and that I didn't have to do anything differently in the future, but I still had to be written up. When I put in my notice like a month later (on the same day as the only other SQL person, unintentionally), he thought it was a joke, and then took me out for a beer and apologized for the writeup, but said it had come down from above that "anyone using the chat system was to be written up."
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Apr 26, 2010 19:46
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I worked in a place one time with a policy that said if you clocked in late - even by one second, you'd be docked half a day's pay. I pulled my supervisor aside and told him that if I saw I was ever going to clock in at 7:00:01, I was going to turn around and go back home and show back up after lunch when I would get paid. There's no way in hell I was going to work for free for half a day. My dad worked in a place that actually made their people clock in and out of the bathroom. HR would review the bathroom logs every month, too, and let you know if you spent too much company time in the crapper. I used to love these exchanges, too: HR: Your start time is at 8:00AM Me: Cool HR: We'd like you to be here by 7:45, though. Me: Oh, so I start at 7:45 then? HR: No, you start at 8:00, you just need to be here, clocked in, and at your desk working by 7:45 Me: But if I start at 8:00, why do I need to be here working by 7:45. That would mean I start at 7:45. HR: No you start at 8:00, just be here by 7:45. Me: Let's just say I'm at my desk working by 7:55. HR: Oh, no. You'd get written up for that. Me: For what? If I start at 8:00, I should be here by 8:00. If I start at 7:45, then I should be here by 7:45, right? HR: You're not understanding. You start at 8:00, we just expect you to be here, clocked in, and working by 7:45. Me: So I really start at 7:45 then. HR: No, you start at 8:00 Me: *sigh*
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Apr 26, 2010 20:57
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My manager is a lazy bitch. Terrible management seems to be a pretty popular problem in this thread. Anyway, over the past three years I've worked in this office my manager is almost never in the office to do her drat job. She shows up five days per month, if we're lucky. Her job is not a telecommute position because she is required to be here to supervise her underlings. She's always had a spotty attendance record but no one calls her on it because the last guy who tried was discreetly "laid off" by the company president after the company went through some "financial difficulties" due to the recession. The president is always flirting with her and it's nauseating to watch. She never knows what's going on. She has no clue how to do her job and ends up handing off her duties to someone else whenever she is in the office. Most of her time is spent gossiping and complaining about her underlings doing things she isn't aware of (maybe she'd have a better idea if she actually showed up to work). I've watched her just sit at her desk reading a trashy book from 8-12 then take off for lunch and not come back. She's told several of us to find work elsewhere because she refuses to promote us. And when lunch time rolls around, it is a miraculous day if she comes back in the afternoon. We're all hoping she gets hit by a bus since it's obvious she's sleeping with the president of the company and isn't going anywhere any time soon. Pretty much everyone who has to work under her has been trying to find different jobs. It breaks my heart seeing someone new being brought in and watch as their hopes and enthusiasm are crushed when they realize they're in corporate hell. I'm stuck until I find something else myself.
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Apr 26, 2010 21:27
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Tip for those who are new to corporate: Don't turn projects around quickly. Sit on it. Don't submit it until you absolutely have to. We know you're good at Excel - you're probably the best ever. You don't have to prove that, though, because no one else knows how to use it. Small projects suddenly become larger! In fact, right now I'm "working on" some spreadsheets. It won't land on my boss's desk until 5PM. Oh yes, it's finished - if he asks where it is I'll say I just sent it to him (that's when you send it). You then work your way over to his/her desk for some feedback. Always good to get some face time.
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Apr 26, 2010 21:39
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I'm an (unemployed) recent graduate, so I have limited experience in the corporate world. I've spent a summer interning in a small firm, which had very few of the issues I've read. I did have to learn how to not step on toes with "MY PARKING SPOT" and the coffee machine, though. Also, I'd catch a glimpse of corporate hell while dealing with outside companies on projects. Inflated egos and power were annoying, but they employed us... Thanks for the entertaining thread
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Apr 26, 2010 22:02
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Lets talk about consulting jobs....for the government! If anything in this life will make you more disillusioned with the way that the government handles its day to day tasks, its doing work for them as an outside contractor. How a contract for the government comes to fruition is that, for example, a job will be created that will state, "Well we need an outside contractor to do a job for us that will take around a year with a budget of $5 million." Cue a long line of consulting firms yelling, "We'll do it in 6 months for $3 million!" "We'll do it in 3 months for $2 million!" And so on and so on until you are left with a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Case in point, I was 24 and in a well known consulting firm doing a project for the Pentagon that entailed looking through their massive amounts of congressional acts and making recommendations as to what I thought should be eliminated to save them money. I had no experience doing this whatsoever and neither did anyone else working with me in my team of 3. There were literally 10s of thousands of these things and we had to read through all this in like 3 months. Every recommendation we made was shot down, so really we did nothing at all. Just money flushed down the drain. People in certain government jobs will arrive to work at 10 in the morning, leave for a two hour lunch at 12, then leave work at 3. I remember working 14 hour days while I watched all these government workers happily skip off to have a 24 year old, in essence, make decisions that could ultimately effect certain branches of government. It was the first job I had ever quit even though it paid unbelievably well. So glad I quit that field.
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Apr 26, 2010 22:06
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Gullous posted:I did have to learn how to not step on toes with "MY PARKING SPOT" Jokes on them as later tons of higher-ups lost their jobs under charges of embezzlement and kiddy porn in the offices and such.
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Apr 26, 2010 22:11
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