|
DorianGravy posted:I do have a question, though: how'd you all end up in office work? Is this something you wanted to do in college and really thought that you'd enjoy, or just something that ended up happening? I've never worked in corporate, just retail (and you can recall from our retail thread how full of poo poo those places are). I somehow fell into it. Which is weird, because I actually studied Fashion Design and the only time I had ever been in an office was when I went into my dad's office at the bank to ask for money for poo poo when I was a teen. See, when I finished school, with my shining Fashion Design Diploma and full portfolio of fashion sketches, I moved to Toronto to find work in my field. I went on Welfare while I looked for work that wasn't tied to an industrial sewing machine doing piecework. I had this idea of getting experience, making contacts, etc, until I could start up my own line. Then enter Mike Harris and the "Common Sense Revolution". Part of which was "Let's cut welfare so that recipients can't afford anything better than white bread and baloney, and never mind affording food, rent and heat/hydro!". I had to get a job and fast. After falling for several questionable job ads (Be A Manager! Sell Perfume! After you spend weeks unpaid sitting in 'training' and giving us money!), I took a chance and drafted a resume and applied for a job as a receptionist in a software company, telling myself that learning about business from the inside would be good for my future plans in creating the next House Of Chanel. Sigh. Now I'm depressed. I coulda been somebody.
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 02:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 18, 2024 04:28 |
|
|
Robot Hobo posted:And/or what would happen if all rules regarding vacation & sick time were removed, meaning employers were not required to give any paid time off at all? 
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 02:53
|
|
|
DorianGravy posted:I do have a question, though: how'd you all end up in office work? Is this something you wanted to do in college and really thought that you'd enjoy, or just something that ended up happening? I've never worked in corporate, just retail (and you can recall from our retail thread how full of poo poo those places are). A lot of different categories of jobs involve work at a computer, indoors, for a company - aka office work - so it's not like it's always about people giving up on their dreams. It's just the environment often ends up the same no matter the industry or what you actually do. Still, I'm pretty sure what I did is what happened to a lot of others - finished college without any particular goals/money/specific skills and still wanted to make a living that didn't involve food service. An office job can be ridiculous and boring, but it's also just comfortable enough to keep you from leaving. Had I but known, I would have worked a hell of a lot harder in college and made something like medical school my goal. 
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 04:55
|
|
|
Unparagoned posted:The really sad thing is I'm not sure if that's suppose to be a joke or if it's actually serious. I guess what makes it so good is that it can easily be taken both ways, and whichever way you look at it you can get something out of it, whether it's a laugh or one of the few legitimate points it makes. Maggot Monster posted:
Should probably thumbnail those, it's utterly depressing that you should feel like you have to put all that down on an exit statement/survey/interview, but it's awesome that you managed to get it all down and it's a treat to read an employee essentially putting a company in it's place, regardless of whether or not it had any lasting effect on the company as a whole after the fact.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 06:10
|
|
|
The university I work for has just implemented a new policy concerning promotions. If you apply for promotion and are denied, you are ineligible for promotion for the next two years. I put in my application and I'm now hunting for a new job in case it gets rejected. Oh, they take seven months to review and approve/deny the applications. DorianGravy posted:After reading this thread, I'm so glad I'm heading into academia. I'm sure there will be a little bit of these administrative meetings and office politics to deal with, and the pay probably won't be as good, but no amount of money is worth dealing with the soul-deadening things talked about in this thread. Hah, things will be fine for the first year or so until you move up the food chain a bit. After that you'll find its pretty much the same. I have three meetings a week in which I give exactly the same report. These each take 2-3 hours, many of the people table also attend the other meetings. There is much more like this, but I'm busy writing papers now so my metrics look good for the promotion meetings in six months. yoloer420 fucked around with this message at 07:51 on May 2, 2010 |
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 07:33
|
|
|
That is one hell of an exit interview. I especially loved the line about achieving the goal of stagnating your career. I wonder how that'd go down as a resume objective. This story is unrelated but I just remembered it when thinking back on PTO and the chore it can be to schedule vacations. In the spring of 2006 I put in for a week off in the middle of July to visit my family. Scheduling sent me a nice refusal stating that Jason in my department had requested some of the days in that week off, and it was policy not to schedule time off for more than one person in my department at a time to ensure coverage. Okay, fair enough if you've got coverage to be concerned about, but Jason was switching departments and his move was effective July 1st. I told Scheduling as much and a few days later I got back a reply that said pretty much the same thing: Jason had requested some of the days off in that week and they could not accept two PTO requests from the same department for the same date. The following email conversation went like this:  : I am asking for time off starting July 11. Jason D will be leaving my department after June 30 to switch with Allie K. How would this be affecting coverage? Has Allie also asked for that time off? : No, Allie hasn't scheduled any PTO for July. But Jason D is currently in your department and will be until Friday, June 30. You are making a request for PTO now and we cannot enter it into the scheduler.: What does this mean? Do I have to wait until Jason is out of my department before putting in my request?: Yes. But the earliest you could do so would be Monday, July 3, and we require at least two weeks' notice when submitting a PTO request.I forwarded this response to my manager, who wasn't a bad guy at all. He'd come up from the cubicles and had been there before, so he knew what bullshit that was. He sent me one of the best replies you can hope for in this situation:  : That's insane. I'll take care of this.I got my time off in July. My manager picked a lot of fights with HR on our behalf and lasted until the end of August, when he was "moved up" to an ineffectual non-supervisory role on the corporate side. Sticking up for your employees is not something a team player does.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 12:04
|
|
|
It's 7:30AM sunday and i'm getting ready to go to work. This is completely normal for me and the only thing that makes this day different from other 5-6 I work is the lack of traffic.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 12:16
|
|
|
kalonji posted:It's 7:30AM sunday and i'm getting ready to go to work. This is completely normal for me and the only thing that makes this day different from other 5-6 I work is the lack of traffic. 'Sup weekend office buddy?  
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 16:14
|
|
|
qa6 posted:A lot of different categories of jobs involve work at a computer, indoors, for a company - aka office work - so it's not like it's always about people giving up on their dreams. It's just the environment often ends up the same no matter the industry or what you actually do. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was. I was just interested in how people got involved with this sort of work. And that exit interview was amazing. I'm also amazed by that company a few pages back that stopped having it's evaluation surveys anonymous. How in the hell do they expect to get honest answers if the employees have to fear "unrelated" reprimands or termination for giving "wrong" answers. But I guess they wouldn't be bad managers if they cared more about improving the company than they did about their precious egos.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 16:35
|
|
|
They don't give a hoot about honesty. They just want satisfactory feedback to give to the guys above them. Corporate life is odd. The longer a corporation has been around, the more incompetently it will be run. You see, nobody is ever promoted on their ability to work well or because they care. People like that are marginalised and belittled because a manager knows that they are capable of taking over their job. Managers only promote those who are happy to be bossed around. This way the manager can progress up the ladder and earn more money. This cycle repeats itself until you have the fabled 'middle management', which is generally a bloated mess of people who, as you move down the hierarchy, are more and more protocol-based and witless and unable to make decisions. They are not managers at all, but buffers that one guy, long ago (who has now either moved on or is in the echelon that simply doesn't get involved with day-to-day operations) placed there to protect his job. And so it rots. It took me a while to figure this out. I was only in a 'proper' corp for a year, but I've spent a decade working full-time and in every job that wasn't just me and a few other people (the best places to work), I would be promoted quickly based on my work before being shunted into a position with no future while I watched morons shoot up the ladder simply because there were insipid and unable to take responsibility. Once I decided to stop caring about the job I was in at the time it wasn't long before another position on another desk was offered - with a significant payrise. It really was Office Space made real. It was absurd. Of course I didn't take the job but at least I'm broke instead of miserable 
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 17:06
|
|
|
lohli posted:It's utterly depressing that you should feel like you have to put all that down on an exit statement/survey/interview, but it's awesome that you managed to get it all down and it's a treat to read an employee essentially putting a company in it's place, regardless of whether or not it had any lasting effect on the company as a whole after the fact. The sad thing about it is that the company won't take any notice of anything that he's said on that form, instead just seeing him as some whackjob and loose cannon. In a similar fashion to the "treating employees like retards" thing, the company I work for is under contract by the government. As it stands I am presently under my third contracted management, four if you don't count the time we were under government administration between contracts. When the contract was up for tender last year, the company at the time put out forms to all the employees to solicit feedback on what they think would be good to put in to their retender. I spent a good few hours one night writing out a long document with various ideas and thoughts. Then I deleted the file and just wrote on the form "You had 5 years to listen to what we had to say and chose not to. Why bother now?". In case you care, they didn't win the contract.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 18:20
|
|
|
I am OK posted:It was absurd. Of course I didn't take the job but at least I'm broke instead of miserable I only worked in a desk-job for a year and a half, and it was even a pretty small company, but I was loving miserable the entire time. I worked as a Research Analyst at an Economic Consulting Firm in San Francisco. Small office, maybe 25 people, the big boss was an alum from my college, and some of my coworkers were pretty cool. The rest of them, however, were horrible. The best story is about the office manager. My birthday is Halloween, and I knew they always got super fancy cakes for everyone from the local extremely expensive bakery down the street. I asked a month early if I could please have a pumpkin pie instead of a cake, since that's always been my tradition. She said sure, no problem, that sounds great! My birthday rolls around, and I am extremely excited about a fancy pants pumpkin pie. Growing up my gramma made them for me, so I was looking forward to a "professional" pumpkin pie. Out comes a carrot cake. Huh. The OM joyfully cries, "We got you a carrot cake! Isn't that what you wanted?" Slightly confused I respond, "Well, no, I asked for a pumpkin pie, but it's no big deal. I like carrot cake, too. Thanks!" She gets a confused look on her face. "You didn't want carrot cake? Then who likes carrot cake? OH, RIGHT! ME! I like carrot cake!" I know this isn't near as bad as the vast majority of things people are talking about on here, and mostly I find this story funny because she was such an idiot, but it kinda captures how that place was run. I also had a "manager" who was just someone technically at my level who had been there a few years longer who tried to guilt trip me into coming in on the Sunday that one of my friends from childhood was graduating from Stanford. It was also Father's Day, and he tried to give my cube-mate trouble for wanting to spend it with his FATHER, saying the big boss will be upset if he spends the day with his family instead of at the office. Keep in mind this was after three weeks solid of no days off because of a short-turn-around deadline that was dropped into our laps AND I had come into that deadline from having surgery and never got any real time off to recover. I still refer to that guy as Tool Bag Luke. I quoted the above because I left that place and started teaching. Talk about a pay-cut! And I work at a year-round private school, am paid hourly, have no benefits or vacation or sick days or retirement, but goddamn I'd rather do what I do now and be broke and happy. I have plenty more complaints about being a "permalancer", but it's still a thousand times better than working at that goddamned office.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 18:56
|
|
|
Just curious to see how many bosses everyone has. I have 5.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 18:58
|
|
|
Depends... what day of the week is it? More specifically: The reporting structure from my department has been rearranged five times since I started here... which was only a bit over 2 years ago. I have kept my primary boss, which is nice. I keep growing more and more dotted lines, though. I currently have my primary supervisor, my project supervisors (two of them), and my initative supervisor. So, 4 bosses at present.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 19:32
|
|
|
I had 3 -- my manager, the VP and the CEO Because I was the computer guy, that basically made me the CEO's computer bitch. For the VP & CEO I have set up: 4 iPhones, 4 iPods, 3 laptops(for her kids, purchased on the company card) and 2 video cameras. None of this stuff was ever used for company purposes except for 1 laptop because her kid didn't like it so the company uses it, and I guess you can count 3 of the iphones due to company email. funfact: the picture in my avatar and many others were taken at work! You can see my binders of now unimportant poo poo behind me.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 19:56
|
|
|
DorianGravy posted:I do have a question, though: how'd you all end up in office work? Is this something you wanted to do in college and really thought that you'd enjoy, or just something that ended up happening? I don't think anyone in the hard sciences/engineering really *planned* on doing office work. I have to imagine if you major in business (w/ no real concentration) or don't have a college degree, you have some idea that you'll be generic office drone #453. Having a degree for computer science, and being hired for a software development position, I assumed at least the majority of my time would be spent developing software. This, however, is not the case. Most of my time is spent politicin', responding to emails, and meetings (phone/webex or live). It's so bad that when I purposefully carve out 20% of my week for the s/w development that I am technically responsible/get paid for, people get upset that I'm missing meetings and not responding to emails quickly. I've come to grips with the fact that I'm committing big-company political suicide, but dammit, I want to work on what I enjoy and can use to land another gig. I don't think anyone will be impressed when I list on my resume how many emails I can parse, summarize, and respond to in a given day.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 20:31
|
|
|
I'm not really sure anymore. (I had a long list of on-paper, de-facto, and plain insane-o management types listed here but decided it was a bit too specific and personally identifiable to post in GBS. Sorry. In summary, I could answer anywhere from "1" to "4", and sadly the one with the most direct org chart line to me is a braying jackass who has zero personal empathy or leadership skills. This puffed-up fop was just promoted another level higher, with no named replacement yet, so there's more chaos than usual to boot.) It's kind of sad because the actual work of my job I love (when I can do it and not fight political nonsense), and I feel reasonably fairly compensated, and I even believe in the (stated) goals and mission of our company. By every measurement except direct (mis)management, it'd be a perfect job. Hell, I even posted in a few job threads in the relevant sub-forums when we had openings because I knew the positions were not reporting to {my hosed up management chain/group/herd} and thus would probably be pretty fun gigs for an otherwise good group. (Edited to add:) B-Nasty posted:being hired for a software development position, I assumed at least the majority of my time would be spent developing software. This, however, is not the case. 
volkadav fucked around with this message at 20:47 on May 2, 2010 |
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 20:45
|
|
|
Valdara posted:The best story is about the office manager. My birthday is Halloween, and I knew they always got super fancy cakes for everyone from the local extremely expensive bakery down the street. I asked a month early if I could please have a pumpkin pie instead of a cake, since that's always been my tradition. She said sure, no problem, that sounds great! This reminds me of an internship I had. To make a long story short, it was tradition it seemed that every intern on their last day would have a party with cake or whatever the intern wanted (someone got a cookie cake from Mrs. Fields, somebody else got an ice cream sunday bar, another got cupcakes from this special bakery, etc.). Well 2 months into my 3 month unpaid internship I had an interview for an actual job! I wanted to work at my internship's company, but I made it known that I had an interview (I actually wore a suit that day). I also made it known when they started checking my references, I made it known when they said they were ready to make me an offer, I made it known that they had made me and offer and when they needed to know by! I then told them I'll be ending my internship a week early to start this other job. They then scrambled to make me an offer to keep me there, at 25% less pay, which I declined. They then tried to convince me because it was better than other people's starting pay and that my other job sounded kind of lovely. Then surprise surprise, on my last day the internship coordinator didn't have a party for me or do anything special on my last day. They didn't even announce it, nobody knew I was leaving and it was a surprise when I was saying goodbyes to people. That kind of stuff sticks with you and you don't forget it...
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 21:28
|
|
|
DorianGravy posted:I do have a question, though: how'd you all end up in office work? Is this something you wanted to do in college and really thought that you'd enjoy, or just something that ended up happening? I've never worked in corporate, just retail (and you can recall from our retail thread how full of poo poo those places are). Sometimes it just happens. I used to work for a game studio that had everything going for it -- informal atmosphere, flat structure, etc etc. Except our project was delivered late and was a barely controlled disaster. So the studio prez hired a bunch of project management types to ensure it never happened again. These people were ex-EA, and by God, everything EA did was evil and terrible and gross. Yet when given basically free reign over their own studio, they made everything run just like it did at EA. Larry Craig would be proud. At some point, a culture of "email it to anyone who could even be tertially involved just to cover your rear end" took hold. I easily spent a couple of hours a day on email, and I wasn't even management. I remember some meetings where we'd argue over the schedule. I'd say "I can't break this down into smaller tasks yet, because this is a research task and I have no idea what will be involved in solving it" only to get a lumbergh-esque response of "yeah .. just go ahead and break that down into smaller tasks, one or two days at most, mmkay?" Anyway, that project was delivered late and was a barely controlled disaster. I work for a new studio now. 
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 22:30
|
|
|
Ikona posted:I remember some meetings where we'd argue over the schedule. I'd say "I can't break this down into smaller tasks yet, because this is a research task and I have no idea what will be involved in solving it" only to get a lumbergh-esque response of "yeah .. just go ahead and break that down into smaller tasks, one or two days at most, mmkay?" I used to deal with this by just creating generic sub-tasks. So, if I had a few weeks of research/prototyping planned, I'd just break it down like: Begin research task 1 (2d) Continue research task 1 (2d) Finish research task 1 (1d) And so on. Then I'd spend the time doing whatever needed to be done and report % complete each week showing that I was on schedule. The project manager knew it was all bullshit but she didn't care since it allowed her to meet the scheduling requirements handed down from above. One thing I don't think I've seen in this thread yet is "brainstorming" meetings. Basically someone calls a meeting to discuss some topic with the assumption that great thoughts will be had by all. It inevitably turns into an argument about some minuscule semi-related detail and at the end of the meeting the only thing accomplished is a few hours of lost productivity for all involved.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2010 23:36
|
|
|
I started a contract where I was supposed to be taking over support for a customer support database system for a large utility company. The previous guy had been there for years and knew the entire system inside out. My first two weeks were spent following him round the building watching him solve problems and somehow attempting to acquire all of his knowledge and experience. After the two weeks were up, he left and I was now the main contact for support. I knew absolutely nothing about anything. Almost immediately people would come to me with complex issues, assuming that I knew everything that the previous support guy did. A batch job had failed, or one of the regression tests was flagging an error, or there was a referential integrity problem with a couple of database tables. For the first three months I pretty much answered every query with "I don't know, I'll get back to you", before I finally managed to get a handle on how the whole mess fitted together. When my contract came up for renewal (another six months) I was out of there soooo fast.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 01:21
|
|
|
Hah, I've been planning on chiming in for a while. I probably shouldn't say this stuff but frankly I don't give much of a gently caress. I used to work for a small company that was responsible for monitoring DRM for various large clients. What we purportedly did was fairly advanced and sophisticated as an end result. How we got those results was archaic and absolutely laughable. The head honcho was an old-school hacker and douchebag who had lucked out during the tech boom and managed to get out while the going was good, and a few years later he decided to start this company. He frequently harassed employees if they made any comments regarding the work that weren't absolutely positive and would practically pick fights with people. One day he bet the employees $100 if they would put on a dog collar and bark loud enough for it to zap them. Nobody did, but I have to give him props for that because it would have been hilarious. The company promotional videos and newspaper articles made us out to be some powerhouse of intelligence and cutting edge technology. I remember one line in particular that said "If you pirate something, we will find you". These were not unusual claims. You know what our "secret" was? We had several dozen people scouring Youtube and related sites for copyright infringements...entering data manually into Excel. At first the work was awesome because "hey getting paid to browse the web rocks," but after a year and a half I prayed for sweet death. I watched movies and made up work for myself because frankly, there just wasn't poo poo to do. When I first started, I had made a ton of suggestions for how to improve efficiency, since the company was small enough to listen to its employees. I would ask for new assignments. By the end I was still getting paid the same to do the same job I got hired for, a process which was "sort of" automated by the time I left. Things were "looked into" of course, and some of the things got implemented... 20 months in. I had a coworker that I suspect was a 4channer as he constantly put up stupid memes like "Ceiling Cat is watching you" in the ceiling. He had an entire folder dedicated to loli pictures on the network drive that I'm drat sure were NOT appropriate. He would laugh and laugh... all the time. It was like nails on a chalkboard. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xEfUh6dSpk I just searched annoying laugh but this isn't far off, interspersed with "Oh my god, this is so f'ing funny" or something to that effect. He ALWAYS had a "clever" quip for anything you said. A few times I caught him on his bullshit and would usually have some quiet last word in just because. As far as I know he is still the manager and has trained a friend of mine to become the manager, a friend that was hired three months before I left and was already almost promoted. :| My supervisor's favorite phrase was "going forward". I probably heard it three times a day, either in person or in a meeting or an email. About two months before the end they crammed everyone into a different building, literally thirty feet away. Previously we'd had several separate departments. Now all of them were in the same room with a big glass window looking out to the freeway, with no walls between me and the departments we hadn't interacted with at all. It was uncomfortable to say the least and by this time they had already slowly neutered most of our privileges so any sort of break or anything was not tolerated. When I was finally released after almost 2 years, I was let go with maybe two days of notice. My exit interview, if you could call it that, was where I got a few hundred in severance and the supervisor had the gall to tell me "This has nothing to do with your performance, oh and you're welcome to reapply in the future!!!!" The reason 30% of the company (the least productive, naturally) got canned was that the new building we moved to was contingent on a loan the boss never got, so the money had to come out of somewhere. Why did he move us to the next building? So he could store his race cars. Not as bad as some of the stories, but I don't envy office work at all. Good news is after I left and the sun came up I've been "going forward" ever since! Snyderman fucked around with this message at 02:47 on May 3, 2010 |
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 02:30
|
|
|
This is such an awesome/depressing thread. I haven't put up with nearly as much poop as most of the posters, but I feel venting is always nice. Right out of college I was hired as a 3rd party on-site Logistics Administrative Assistant temp. That means that through Temp Agency A I worked for Logistics Corporation B that was hired by Manufacturing Company C to help with parts shipments. The work was for 9 months 40 hours a week at $15.00/hour. I worked directly under the only other on-site employee. While my on-site supervisor scheduled the majority of truckloads, I was given all the miscellaneous stuff like overnighting nuts & bolts or expediting bigger/more expensive poo poo. For a few months all was right in the world. Then Company C got a new boss for the department we worked on-site at. Suddenly, all the shipments had to be here yesterday. Any and all delays were our fault. One actual exchange between my supervisor and manufacturing Company C's new department boss.  Where is that truckload of gobbeldeegoos? You mean the truckload that we always schedule to deliver on Friday? The driver is stopped for the moment. There's a blizzard in Kansas. They'll still deliver Friday morning though. That's unacceptable. The plant just called and said they will run out by the end of the day. Set up an expedite to pick up from that truck and deliver that stuff here by 6am tomorrow. These parts are huge. It would take a 53' truck to carry this stuff. Taking all the stuff off the truck and loading it on an expedite truck would take longer than letting the driver ride out the blizzard and delivering it normally Friday morning. That's unacceptable. Put the parts on a plane right now. There's a blizzard. Airports are closed. Parts wouldn't fit on a plane anyway. How is truck going to get to an airport during a blizzard? Unacceptable! I want those parts here by midnight tonight. There's a blizzard...Things came to a head when My supervisor took a planned vacation day that she had scheduled months in advance. All trucks were set up to pick up/deliver and any expedites I couldn't handle, I could pass on to the Corporation's 24 hour expedite team. Everything was worked out with our real boss. comes over to my cube at 10 am and asks where's the supervisor. I say she's on vacation. turns red and goes on a huge tirade about that being unacceptable. She storms off to her office and spends an hour on the phone with our boss from the Logistics Corp. comes back to me later smiling saying my supervisor will no longer be working there and to clean off her desk.After leaves, I call my boss and ask him what's up. He says not to touch stuff, my supervisor will just take a couple days off, let things cool down.At the end of the day, asks me why I haven't cleaned off desk and tells me if there's anything on it in the morning, it's going in the trash. So I clean out her desk and put her stuff in my trunk. Next morning boss calls me and tells me they let my supervisor go.Now I'm in charge of everything. gently caress. Cue me trying to keep our trucks coming in for the next month, being on call 24/7 expediting poo poo we don't need but gotta have now, and the plant getting shut down at least one day a week because I don't know magic. Just because didn't like my supervisor. drat, I was so glad when my 9 months was almost up. Put in my two weeks and smiled every day cause I didn't give a gently caress if the parts arrived or not. I then went to work as a substitute teaching making $45 a day before taxes and loving every single minute of it. I've since learned that every one of the eleven employees under was terminated within 6 months of me leaving. They've since moved to another department.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 04:22
|
|
|
Wagoneer posted:Just curious to see how many bosses everyone has. I could probably say 5 at least as well but I couldn't count 3 of those as my boss's since they generally treat me as more of an equal 
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 05:39
|
|
|
I did environmental consulting as my first job out of college, then got randomly fired when the work ran out and they never bothered to train me or mentor me on anything. Then I was unemployed for six months and got a job as night shift at a hotel. I worked flawlessly with no complaints despite being tired and headachey all the time from never sleeping at night. I got one noise complaint and the woman said I didn't do enough or something. Then the managers accused me of not wanting to be there ( of course I dont you loving twats paying me 20k/yr for a poo poo job even though I'm doing it perfectly) and they kept wanting me to come in during the middle of the loving day WHEN I WORK NIGHT SHIFT for meetings. Finally, the general manager said I had to come in or lose my job. I told them to go gently caress themselves. Now I'm unemployed again and I'm just going to volunteer my technical background in some IT and geology instead. Because honestly, gently caress America, gently caress capitalism, gently caress managers, and gently caress any business that isn't entirely owned by the employees.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 05:50
|
|
|
Sylink posted:I did environmental consulting as my first job out of college, then got randomly fired when the work ran out and they never bothered to train me or mentor me on anything. Wanna start that Marxist revolution. 
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 05:55
|
|
|
After watching how all the front desk staff were white and all the maintenance/housekeeping were Mexicans who got paid half as much with no future I pretty much don't understand how there isn't an armed uprising against private business.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 05:58
|
|
|
Sylink posted:After watching how all the front desk staff were white and all the maintenance/housekeeping were Mexicans who got paid half as much with no future I pretty much don't understand how there isn't an armed uprising against private business. Check LF for the latest installment of Prison Nation and wonder no more!
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 05:59
|
|
|
Unparagoned posted:The really sad thing is I'm not sure if that's suppose to be a joke or if it's actually serious. A friend and I spent most of Friday last week debating whether it was sincere or such a perfect parody neither of us could tell the difference from the real thing, and thus a work of art. RitualConfuser posted:One thing I don't think I've seen in this thread yet is "brainstorming" meetings. Basically someone calls a meeting to discuss some topic with the assumption that great thoughts will be had by all. It inevitably turns into an argument about some minuscule semi-related detail and at the end of the meeting the only thing accomplished is a few hours of lost productivity for all involved. Oh god, at one job, we'd have four hour meetings where my team would have conversations like this. I once had a conversation about how my text should be friendly, like your best friend is talking to you, but salesy, and really push the hard sell on our stuff. And "edgy." I pointed out that my best friend wouldn't use the hard sell, only to be shouted down and told to figure it out. So I used smaller words and dressed it up with '90s EXXTREME WHOA DUDE adjectives and they loved it. The artists had it worst, though. "We want something that's warm and approachable, inviting but not too inviting, you know, still professional. And edgy. It should be very edgy." And once upon a time, I did have a great job interview where the manager felt comfortable enough to laugh when I asked about the company's plans for the future and say, "Well, we're just hoping the FDA doesn't shut down our little loophole, heh heh heh." And the PTO chat reminded me of our delightful PTO policy at one of the companies I worked at after we added the hotshot new CEO. Suddenly, you had to give two weeks notice to use your PTO. Everyone found this out when one of the guys in our department got dragged back into work during the vacation he'd planned for months because he hadn't put in a vacation request form. These didn't actually exist, and the new CEO had never communicated this policy in writing or verbally, he just sort of decided it one day and didn't tell anybody, then went ballistic when someone tried to take vacation time without having a form in. A form that didn't actually exist, mind you, because he hadn't told anyone about the policy, just thought it up, decided on it, and marched on. Giving some kind of notice may not be completely unreasonable, but you had to use PTO for anything you might leave work for, and we had 5 days per year. Leaving work an hour early for any reason? That's half a day's PTO. Doctor's appointment (just a checkup, nothing unreasonable)? Half a day's PTO if you're leaving early, even if you come back. And you better come back. The policy even applied to emergencies. One of the guys I worked with got written up for not giving notice for his PTO use because he had the gall (the gall!) to be in the hospital for anaphylactic shock and was a few hours late for work. The two weeks notice requirement applied to everything, even medical emergencies. And the PTO use applied to everything. Want to go downstairs (literally downstairs) or across the street (literally across the street) for a cup of coffee or to grab a drink from the convenience store? Better have time off! In advance! And no, if you DO go out to Starbuck's, you can't just leave for the rest of the day. Just because you're using your PTO to do it doesn't mean you can just leave for the day. Actual words, actually said.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 06:04
|
|
|
Colonel Penguin posted:Oh god, at one job, we'd have four hour meetings where my team would have conversations like this. I once had a conversation about how my text should be friendly, like your best friend is talking to you, but salesy, and really push the hard sell on our stuff. And "edgy." I pointed out that my best friend wouldn't use the hard sell, only to be shouted down and told to figure it out. So I used smaller words and dressed it up with '90s EXXTREME WHOA DUDE adjectives and they loved it. The artists had it worst, though. "We want something that's warm and approachable, inviting but not too inviting, you know, still professional. And edgy. It should be very edgy." This reminds me of an e-mail I saw to one of our writers that said "Lets add about 30% more cynicism to attract the 20 something crowd". Ugh... Colonel Penguin posted:Giving some kind of notice may not be completely unreasonable, but you had to use PTO for anything you might leave work for, and we had 5 days per year. Leaving work an hour early for any reason? That's half a day's PTO. Doctor's appointment (just a checkup, nothing unreasonable)? Half a day's PTO if you're leaving early, even if you come back. And you better come back. The policy even applied to emergencies. One of the guys I worked with got written up for not giving notice for his PTO use because he had the gall (the gall!) to be in the hospital for anaphylactic shock and was a few hours late for work. The two weeks notice requirement applied to everything, even medical emergencies. And the PTO use applied to everything. Want to go downstairs (literally downstairs) or across the street (literally across the street) for a cup of coffee or to grab a drink from the convenience store? Better have time off! In advance! And no, if you DO go out to Starbuck's, you can't just leave for the rest of the day. Just because you're using your PTO to do it doesn't mean you can just leave for the day. Actual words, actually said. That sucks. You can probably blame some rear end in a top hat for abusing the PTO policy for why it was the way it was. For example, at my girfriend's school she is a parapro where she assists teachers in the classroom and gets paid additional if she substitutes as long as it's a half day or full day. Well it was quite common for at least one teacher every other day or so to want to take off early and have her cover for them. And it was especially problematic when multiple teachers on the same day came up with reasons for needing to leave early and needing someone to fill in for them! Except that the teacher didn't want to claim it as part of their PTO because "it's just 30 minutes!"... except it's 30 minutes of time wasted that my girlfriend is expected to just come up with something for them to do because no plans are left, because if lesson plans are left it would then seem like this excuse to leave early was thought out and could have been given in advance. Well it then turned into the teachers leaving 15 minutes after lunch so it didn't technically count as a half day so they didn't have to use PTO, meanwhile my girlfriend would get screwed because since she didn't technically sub for a half day she wouldn't get paid the additional sub rate! It eventually got switched to the policy of if you have to leave early for any reason it counts as a half day of PTO, which encourages the teacher to just take a half day leave and actually make lesson plans Of course, they have something insane like 15 week of vacation every year with summer and holidays, another 15 sick days every year that rolls over, and then another 5 days or so of "personal days". I think they didn't like using PTO/Sick Days because there is a perk where if you save up a full school years worth of rolled over sick days over the years working there, you can actually cash them in for a years worth of pay. I think because that's budgeted money they have which would have gone to a substitute if you used them...
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 06:36
|
|
|
I sit next to a guy named Scott. Since we work in the aerospace industry, Scott thinks that I, and everyone else here, should and does have some form of interest in aircraft. I don't and neither do most of the people I work with. Scott is a pilot, which he makes a point to mention several times a day. He knows that I am not a pilot, but uses conversation starters like the following: "Do you know what ... is like when you're flying?" The answer is always 'no' because I've never flown a plane. Queue up 15 minutes of him explaining how "..." is different when flying an airplane. Besides his aviation hobby, Scott has a lot of opinions and likes to talk about them. Although we tend to agree politically, work is not the place I like to vent my frustrations. For instance he was talking to another colleague of mine about the Catholic church a couple weeks ago when I was on the phone. I had to place my hand over the mouthpiece no less than 3 times because Scott was yelling "loving LITTLE BOYS" at almost the top of his lungs.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 13:55
|
|
|
Sock The Great posted:"Do you know what ... is like when you're flying?" One response guaranteed to get him to leave you the hell alone is to smile, say "yes," then flap your arms and crow like a Lost Boy.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 14:06
|
|
|
Colonel Penguin posted:Giving some kind of notice may not be completely unreasonable, but you had to use PTO for anything you might leave work for, and we had 5 days per year. Leaving work an hour early for any reason? That's half a day's PTO. Doctor's appointment (just a checkup, nothing unreasonable)? Half a day's PTO if you're leaving early, even if you come back. And you better come back. The policy even applied to emergencies. One of the guys I worked with got written up for not giving notice for his PTO use because he had the gall (the gall!) to be in the hospital for anaphylactic shock and was a few hours late for work. The two weeks notice requirement applied to everything, even medical emergencies. And the PTO use applied to everything. Want to go downstairs (literally downstairs) or across the street (literally across the street) for a cup of coffee or to grab a drink from the convenience store? Better have time off! In advance! And no, if you DO go out to Starbuck's, you can't just leave for the rest of the day. Just because you're using your PTO to do it doesn't mean you can just leave for the day. Actual words, actually said. Was this before the Family Medical Leave Act?
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 14:23
|
|
|
Solkanar512 posted:Was this before the Family Medical Leave Act? Federal law? What's that? 
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 14:24
|
|
|
Sylink posted:
Start looking for work at smaller municipalities. Having worked for several private/public companies and hating life, I now work at a municipal job and it is the best job ever. I will never make as much money, but I get more vacation, sick time, better retirement, and actually get treated like a human being. There's dumb office politics and stuff you have to deal with (always is), but it's a small price to pay for a much more sane working environment. I will never go back to work for any business that needs to worry about turning a profit again.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 16:02
|
|
|
DorianGravy posted:I do have a question, though: how'd you all end up in office work? Is this something you wanted to do in college and really thought that you'd enjoy, or just something that ended up happening? I've never worked in corporate, just retail (and you can recall from our retail thread how full of poo poo those places are). My advise to college grads is to study what you have a passion for, and then find work in what you studied. Plain and simple. If you are in it for any other reason (money, fame, bitches) then quit now and switch majors. Your happiness and fulfillment is worth the change now to avoid career regret later. I didn't jump into corporate, we fell into each other. It was convenient (IT), and made sense at the time since I've always been into computers and it paid pretty good. Now I'm regretting not going the earth sciences route. I would be paid less but it would be a kind of 'ignorance is bliss' deal since I probably wouldn't have gone into corporate.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 18:13
|
|
|
I'd add a clarification, though, that some fields may result in you never managing to get out of debt due to the cost of your education. Look into the costs and rewards of your field ahead of time. My girlfriend absolutely loves her job - illustration - but art school is not cheap, and illustrators are not well paid. She's sitting on $65K in loan debt, and she makes $15.00 an hour with no benefits. The job's great, but she's going to be in debt until the day she dies. Edit: Or until I end up marrying her and taking on almost double my own student loan debt as a result. 
Sundae fucked around with this message at 18:21 on May 3, 2010 |
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 18:15
|
|
|
Wagoneer posted:Just curious to see how many bosses everyone has. Actual boss bosses or are we talking up the chain of command here? Chain of command: 5 Actual bosses: 1 but I have taken orders from as many as 3, where 1 and 2 were direct reports of 2 and 3 respectively. I hope that explains it but if not then refer to the Zybourne Clockian description of time.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 18:41
|
|
|
Orgasmo posted:My advise to college grads is to study what you have a passion for, and then find work in what you studied. Plain and simple. If you are in it for any other reason (money, fame, bitches) then quit now and switch majors. Your happiness and fulfillment is worth the change now to avoid career regret later. Isn't that a great way to set someone up for unemployment and debt? I think study is a means to an end, people need to figure out what they want in a career, what kind of lifestyle/income they'd like and study accordingly.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 19:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 18, 2024 04:28 |
|
|
sanchez posted:Isn't that a great way to set someone up for unemployment and debt? I think Orgasmo has it mostly right, but I would advise for a little bit of practically as well. For instance, if your passion is to write novels, you should be able to pursue that, but also know that very few people can make a living doing so. In such a case, maybe you should have a backup plan, or maybe study a second interest that has more career possibilities and pursue your first interest as a hobby. But I agree that the first question you should answer is "do I like doing this?" not "how much money will I make?"
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2010 19:18
|
|