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Ottoman
Apr 30, 2004

Hideki! You have so many side dishes. Can Chii be your main course?
Setting the mood: my supervisor, the department Director, is very good at his job. But he’s also a complete narcissist who is incapable of being wrong and incapable of respect for any other human being.

:downs: Where is Employee?
:j: In the clinic.
:downs: No, she wouldn’t be there. *He pokes his head in the clinic*
:j: I could be wrong!
:downs: *Patting my shoulder* “You’re wrong.”

Another supervisor – his wife – comes out of the clinic and as they walk out he asks her “Where is Employee?” “In the clinic.” This left a bad taste in my mouth because he would never in a thousand years acknowledge that a lowly Untouchable such as myself would be right when he's wrong.

A couple days before, a Random Supervisor asked me to type a memo and give it to the Director. “Please put it in his mailbox.” Sure thing, done in no time and delivered.

So back to present, shortly after he condescendingly tells me I’m wrong. I was copied on an email from Random Supervisor to the Director, 24 hours after the document was placed in his box.

:saddowns: WHERE IS MY DOCUMENT WHY ISN’T IT DONE YET
:confused: It has been completed already. Maybe you checked your mailbox before Ottoman put it there?

I knew this wasn’t going to be good. Sure enough, the Director is pissed. At me. Because HE didn’t check his own mailbox. And this is after our office manager HANDED HIM the contents of his mailbox earlier that day and he flipped through them and gave them back to her.

When we do our jobs exactly the way we’re supposed to, but he screws up and looks bad, this means that we are to blame. And then we are belittled and lied to in order to drive home how much power he has over you. He had the audacity to say, verbatim, “I was looking DESPERATELY for that memo!” No, actually, you weren’t, otherwise you would have asked a couple of people or actually gone through your loving mail for once before sending out a nastygram which means your stupidity is now in writing.

Also he has long, gross fingernails and splatters everywhere when he pees, insert small dick jokes here. (Joys of sharing a single-toilet bathroom.) Actually, it’s probably more of a Napoleon complex because he’s barely 5 feet tall and if you're an rear end in a top hat, by god, I will mock your stature. And your bushy ear hair.

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ibntumart
Mar 18, 2007

Good, bad. I'm the one with the power of Shu, Heru, Amon, Zehuti, Aton, and Mehen.
College Slice

Blorange posted:

A tip: You wouldn't have gotten poo poo for your efforts if the minimum wage wasn't raised.

That was my point, actually. I was so mad when that happened, especially since a bunch of new guys came in at the exact same rate. Made me think my hard work actually meant something for one paycheck (albeit not much, but still!) and then realize, nope, just a legally-mandated increase.

OatmealRocks
Jul 6, 2006
Burrp!

YF19pilot posted:

One thing that worries me is the "local" office I'm dealing with is based in Florida, if the interviewer's phone number is anything to go by. I'm in Ohio. Otherwise, if they pay me what I'm promised, I can probably put up with some bullshit, as long as it doesn't actively hamper my ability to work/get paid.

Current I am working for Randstad. I am happy with the rate they pay me. Other recruiters have offered me 10-15% less for the same contract. I have had to deal with many different local recruiters in Miami. Most are just horrible and short change you on the rate. Are you dealing with Broward or Miami-Dade area?

Might be able to offer some incite.

OatmealRocks fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Feb 1, 2014

Keetron
Sep 26, 2008

Check out my enormous testicles in my TFLC log!

Last week I called in sick for two days in a row, Thursday and Friday. This week I came in to find that not only did my work just piled up, I got assigned additional tasks in a meeting I was not part of as I was sick. Now people are calling me and sending email where thing xyz is as they need it today and I have no clue what they are talking about, it must be buries somewhere in this huge pile of email, half of which I do not understand what it is about, again, new tasks.

Another one is HR going ahead and not using sick leave but annual leave to book the sick days, consuming my cherished last two days I was keeping for the birth of my youngest child in a few weeks. Getting it recovered is going to need a near C-level approval, this in a company with over a 100k employees.

Finally, all initiatives I come up with that are bringing in business got shot down because for reasons. In many cases I understand the reasoning behind it but then at the same time can you see the market share dwindling, losing to more decisive competition.

I am so done with this place, but love the client I am working for and the money too.

cyberia
Jun 24, 2011

Do not call me that!
Snuffles was my slave name.
You shall now call me Snowball; because my fur is pretty and white.
All I want in life is to work in an office where:

(a) the people who sit near me don't eat at their desks all day
(b) the people who sit near me don't loving gossip with each other all day and not actually do any work
(c) at least some of the people in the office were born in the same decade as me
(d) I never have to hear about anyone's weekend trip to goddamned, motherfucking Costco ever again as long as I live

Is that so much to ask from the world?

martyrdumb
Nov 24, 2009

pants are overrated

cyberia posted:

All I want in life is to work in an office where:

(a) the people who sit near me don't eat at their desks all day
(b) the people who sit near me don't loving gossip with each other all day and not actually do any work
(c) at least some of the people in the office were born in the same decade as me
(d) I never have to hear about anyone's weekend trip to goddamned, motherfucking Costco ever again as long as I live

Is that so much to ask from the world?

Can you wear headphones? I can't, so I feel your pain. We don't even get cubicle walls, and we take phone calls all day long. It's a nightmare.

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

cyberia posted:

(d) I never have to hear about anyone's weekend trip to goddamned, motherfucking Costco ever again as long as I live

Is that so much to ask from the world?

BUT THE DEALS! THINK OF THE DEALS!


One of the few high points of my job is that I have an office with a door. Hell yes.

Tony Montana
Aug 6, 2005

by FactsAreUseless
One of the most important things, if you want to get ahead, in any corporate enviroment is to be liked. I know that rankles many of you just from the introverted nature of someone that posts on an Internet forum in the first place, it bothered me too.

It's the truth. When you get up near the pointy end of your profession and the pay gets really good and the conditions are great and you're working on interesting clients or the best projects happening in your space.. for the biggest players (hence corporates).. the competition is such that the people forming the teams can simply pick who they want to work with. At that level we've all got the qualifications, experience, sheer ability to do the job.. it then is just a question of who you'd prefer to have sitting next to you for 40 hours a week.

It's a revelation particularly to technically focused roles. Many firms have the technically best engineer sitting in a corner on 50k because he's just a pain in the rear end, while the technically less competent more junior guy shoots through because people are just more willing to approach him.

Does that mean you need to be a statesman and kiss babies and listen to endless Costco stories? No, but it means learning how to dance and appear to give a poo poo about your coworkers even if you don't.

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

Tony Montana posted:

One of the most important things, if you want to get ahead, in any corporate enviroment is to be liked. I know that rankles many of you just from the introverted nature of someone that posts on an Internet forum in the first place, it bothered me too.

It's the truth. When you get up near the pointy end of your profession and the pay gets really good and the conditions are great and you're working on interesting clients or the best projects happening in your space.. for the biggest players (hence corporates).. the competition is such that the people forming the teams can simply pick who they want to work with. At that level we've all got the qualifications, experience, sheer ability to do the job.. it then is just a question of who you'd prefer to have sitting next to you for 40 hours a week.

Yep. Completely agreed here. Being social is super, super important. Hell, that (plus an unhealthy dose of corporate desperation by my employer) is how I'm in my job in the first place. It's not a good job by any means, but I have people with 25+ years of experience reporting to me now while I've only been in the industry for six years, and it's all down to personality and language skills. The best tech guy on earth is useless if he can't get his point across clearly without starting a fight.

peter banana
Sep 2, 2008

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

cyberia posted:

All I want in life is to work in an office where:

(a) the people who sit near me don't eat at their desks all day
(b) the people who sit near me don't loving gossip with each other all day and not actually do any work
(c) at least some of the people in the office were born in the same decade as me
(d) I never have to hear about anyone's weekend trip to goddamned, motherfucking Costco ever again as long as I live

Is that so much to ask from the world?

It makes me so sad when my firends say they're coming out but bringing their "work friends" along. I wish I had work friends :smith:

Tony Montana
Aug 6, 2005

by FactsAreUseless

Sundae posted:

Yep. Completely agreed here. Being social is super, super important. Hell, that (plus an unhealthy dose of corporate desperation by my employer) is how I'm in my job in the first place. It's not a good job by any means, but I have people with 25+ years of experience reporting to me now while I've only been in the industry for six years, and it's all down to personality and language skills. The best tech guy on earth is useless if he can't get his point across clearly without starting a fight.

The corporation simply doesn't have to put up with it. The pool of talent to pick from for promotion is so broad and their global name and resources so appealing that the competition for the juicy corporate roles is unparalleled.

How good technically you are can't be your only draw card. Globalization ensures that there is someone, somewhere better than you and probably willing to work for less. You've gotta be the combo of knowing your poo poo but also the guy people want to talk to, which a lot comes from how you handle social interactions.

HipGnosis posted:

It makes me so sad when my firends say they're coming out but bringing their "work friends" along. I wish I had work friends :smith:

You can't have some if you lowered your standards and sometimes tuned out while they talked about poo poo that irritated you? That's the sort of 'social capital' I'm talking about, eventually that is more important to getting that top role than almost anything else.

Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Feb 4, 2014

peter banana
Sep 2, 2008

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
Oh I don't mean "people at work I'm friendly with." I know lots of people like that, that doesn't bother me. I mean "people I work with who'd be up for going out to a bar or watching rugby or whatever." That's much more difficult when your department is staffed with middle-aged people. That's not their fault, obviously. But having people you can relate to is nice in a place you sped most of your waking hours.

ladyweapon
Nov 6, 2010

It reads all over his face,
like he's an Italian.

Tony Montana posted:

One of the most important things, if you want to get ahead, in any corporate enviroment is to be liked.
TPS Reports and Coversheets: Be liked, not exceptional.


It's 100% the truth too, especially in admin. No one cares if you're good at your job if they don't want to deal with you.

I found a way to mostly automate a big part of my job so that it goes from taking most of a day to about 2 hours. I've learned enough that I know to tell exactly no one about it :j:

Tony Montana
Aug 6, 2005

by FactsAreUseless

HipGnosis posted:

Oh I don't mean "people at work I'm friendly with." I know lots of people like that, that doesn't bother me. I mean "people I work with who'd be up for going out to a bar or watching rugby or whatever." That's much more difficult when your department is staffed with middle-aged people. That's not their fault, obviously. But having people you can relate to is nice in a place you sped most of your waking hours.

But, it's the same for me. At HP in my office I was the youngest by an average of 10 years. You just work towards finding things you do have in common, watching Star Trek at one of my previous consultancies was something that brought me and a coworker 10 years older than me together. He'd tell me all this stuff about when Trek was on TV and I'd enjoy the perspective from something other than my age group.

Sounds like hard work? Yeah, it is. But corporate is usually the big leagues, you're playing hardball. You don't have to do these things if you don't want, but you'll underperform a coworker that does in things like salary and progression. If you're early twenties and this is one of your first jobs then you probably don't give a poo poo, fine, but when you approach mid-thirties like me and you're about to start with yet another corporation you start thinking in terms of how to maximize your return on your effort there.

It's just nice being friends with everyone, as well. Lowers the stress that is the hallmark of corporate offices.

ladyweapon posted:

I found a way to mostly automate a big part of my job so that it goes from taking most of a day to about 2 hours. I've learned enough that I know to tell exactly no one about it :j:

Sucks you can't ride that initiative to better things. When I got to HP I was given a reporting task as a technology lead on a technology our client used. It was being done manually, once a month some poor engineer would disappear for a week into Excel and create this horrid loving report. It took me six months and I had to learn two new languages to do it, but when I was done this script would pull the data out of the client's systems, put it all into Excel beautifully formatted and mail it to the people that wanted it. I had it running as a timed job on a server, I literally didn't touch it and just included myself in the mailing list so I could see the report and make sure the computers weren't making GBS threads themselves. After a few months I stopped looking at the reports, they were solid.

As a result of this I became so specialized that all I did was consult to other accounts how to write middleware for their clients and I just bounced around talking to people about poo poo I found interesting. I reported to noone, my boss just keep getting reports of 'Tony came and helped us with this thing and it's awesome now' so he left me alone. Annual reviews were a joke because I'd say 'so you have no idea what I do' and he'd say 'no, but we hear it's good'.

It sucks you're not in a place where you can be appreciated for and ride your capability into the clouds. Think about that next time you're thinking of changing jobs.

Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Feb 4, 2014

ladyweapon
Nov 6, 2010

It reads all over his face,
like he's an Italian.

Tony Montana posted:

It sucks you're not in a place where you can be appreciated for and ride your capability into the clouds. Think about that next time you're thinking of changing jobs.
I'm a little jaded from past office work, and in general giant corporations, its a decent idea to keep your methods obscured so not anyone can walk in and do your job. Or, at least, not do it as well. My current employer appreciates everything I do 100% of the time and continually tells me what an amazing job I do. I'm looking at a minimum of a 7% raise in June("more if [boss] wants to give you more"), work an average of 32 hours per week (time spent in office, I'm paid for 43 per week salaried) because my boss hates people being at work till 5 on Fridays, and I'm getting 1.5 days off with pay this week because of the Chinese New Year. I'd have to have an offer of at least 2.5x my current salary plus an impressive benefits package (which I am wholly unqualified to recieve) to even consider bailing on this job. But this isn't the "lets talk about awesome aspects of our jobs" thread. I'm just bitching about corporate crap, including being jaded enough to screw anyone who tries to take over your admin position.

I'm also quasi-friends with both my coworkers and we talk about costco ~once a week :laugh:

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
Anyone working in regulated fields: Do your SOPs force you to get your Excel spreadsheets verified?

Starting on Feb 1, I'm now required to print all spreadsheets (Excel, Minitab, etc) first with data, then with all formulas shown, and deliver them to the Computer Systems Validation group for review regardless of whether they're GMP documents or not. These printed sheets have to be second-person verified, all calculations replicated for accuracy, and then signed off by the CSV department approvers before I'm allowed to show them to anyone. The sheet can only be used once and then must be archived and deleted from my computer. No spreadsheet may be reused without complete validation (which involves third party approvals and testing per our SOPs).

Even plotting a line graph with like twenty data points takes two weeks once you include the approval times, and heaven help you if you'd planned on using that spreadsheet for multiple projects.

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

Sundae posted:

Anyone working in regulated fields: Do your SOPs force you to get your Excel spreadsheets verified?

Starting on Feb 1, I'm now required to print all spreadsheets (Excel, Minitab, etc) first with data, then with all formulas shown, and deliver them to the Computer Systems Validation group for review regardless of whether they're GMP documents or not. These printed sheets have to be second-person verified, all calculations replicated for accuracy, and then signed off by the CSV department approvers before I'm allowed to show them to anyone. The sheet can only be used once and then must be archived and deleted from my computer. No spreadsheet may be reused without complete validation (which involves third party approvals and testing per our SOPs).

Even plotting a line graph with like twenty data points takes two weeks once you include the approval times, and heaven help you if you'd planned on using that spreadsheet for multiple projects.

Wait, your consent degree is so strict that you have to verify that Excel is calculating everything correctly every time you use a function? It's one thing to make sure a report is calculating things correctly, but once the report itself is verified then we can go hog wild.

docbeard
Jul 19, 2011

Sundae posted:

The sheet can only be used once and then must be archived and deleted from my computer. No spreadsheet may be reused without complete validation (which involves third party approvals and testing per our SOPs).

I cannot possibly be understanding this correctly. You seriously have to create every Excel document from scratch every time? Wouldn't that make problems more likely, rather than less likely, to happen?

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

docbeard posted:

I cannot possibly be understanding this correctly. You seriously have to create every Excel document from scratch every time? Wouldn't that make problems more likely, rather than less likely, to happen?

Unless you get it validated, at which point you can then have it stored in the secure spreadsheet repository and get it issued to you by Document Control every time you want to use it.

Otherwise yes, you have to recreate it from scratch every time and redo the formula verification.


quote:

Wait, your consent degree is so strict that you have to verify that Excel is calculating everything correctly every time you use a function? It's one thing to make sure a report is calculating things correctly, but once the report itself is verified then we can go hog wild.

That's the thing... I don't think this is mandated by the Consent Decree but rather is just a ridiculous overreaction by the CD mitigation group to create compliance.

ItalicSquirrels
Feb 15, 2007

What?

Sundae posted:

Unless you get it validated, at which point you can then have it stored in the secure spreadsheet repository and get it issued to you by Document Control every time you want to use it.

Otherwise yes, you have to recreate it from scratch every time and redo the formula verification.


That's the thing... I don't think this is mandated by the Consent Decree but rather is just a ridiculous overreaction by the CD mitigation group to create compliance.

Sundae, it sounds more and more to me like you're posting from inside a game of Paranoia.

Hypha
Sep 13, 2008

:commissar:

Sundae posted:

Unless you get it validated, at which point you can then have it stored in the secure spreadsheet repository and get it issued to you by Document Control every time you want to use it.

Otherwise yes, you have to recreate it from scratch every time and redo the formula verification.


That's the thing... I don't think this is mandated by the Consent Decree but rather is just a ridiculous overreaction by the CD mitigation group to create compliance.

Every time you post, it just gets worse. :magical:

llamaperl2
Dec 6, 2008

Sundae posted:

Anyone working in regulated fields: Do your SOPs force you to get your Excel spreadsheets verified?

Starting on Feb 1, I'm now required to print all spreadsheets (Excel, Minitab, etc) first with data, then with all formulas shown, and deliver them to the Computer Systems Validation group for review regardless of whether they're GMP documents or not. These printed sheets have to be second-person verified, all calculations replicated for accuracy, and then signed off by the CSV department approvers before I'm allowed to show them to anyone. The sheet can only be used once and then must be archived and deleted from my computer. No spreadsheet may be reused without complete validation (which involves third party approvals and testing per our SOPs).

Even plotting a line graph with like twenty data points takes two weeks once you include the approval times, and heaven help you if you'd planned on using that spreadsheet for multiple projects.

You're just trolling us now....right?

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

llamaperl2 posted:

You're just trolling us now....right?

No. :( I really wish I was. Apparently this was the company's idea of a suitable response to the FDA observation [paraphrased] "Hey, you guys make a lot of data errors in your reports. How are you going to fix this?"

We'll fix data errors by making it impossible to generate any data. Perfect.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

Every time Sundae posts it makes me really grateful for the following things:

- My mom no longer works in the pharmaceutical industry.
- I am not currently dependent on any sort of prescription medication.
- My job on its worst day isn't half as bad as working for that godawful mess of a company.

You must be counting the days until they can't fine the poo poo out of you for quitting. What a loving terrible practice, you're basically an indentured servant thanks to that relocation "benefit."

Knot My President!
Jan 10, 2005

I work as an intern doing market research. Work can be sporadic because the company is pretty tribal and mismanaged. I don't really have a boss because mine-- the COO-- is out of the office and doing his own thing a bunch, so I find projects to do. These projects include organizing surveys, creating excel spreadsheets with pivot charts and tables that nobody else at the office can do, and creating a full library of relevant demographic data for our prospective clients. Anway, things are going great. Every department loves me and people have flat-out told me that I'm a huge boon to the company in any way I help.

Come a few weeks ago, HR pulls me into the office and tells me that I have to stop making projects for myself. "If you find work for yourself to do, it makes me think that you don't actually have work to do."

This was followed by informing me that she's gonna be micromanaging me from now on, but is, as a person, completely incompetent and can't even use Dayforce, Excel, or math in general. Anything I try to explain to her falls flat because she hasn't taken past high school algebra and I'm guessing has never taken a statistics class.

The kicker is hearing this person tell me "I just want to make sure our company gets the most bang for the buck for having you here." I make minimum wage, about 50% less than a normal paid intern in this exact position, in the bottom 2.5th percentile of paid market research analysts in the entire country let alone this area. Let's not even mention that I switched us from two bad programs to a single good one and saved us double what I make every month in wages, making me more than debt-neutral.

Meanwhile, she makes 85k a year doing absolutely nothing, or in her words: "I may not know much about each department, but I like to think my HR experience and communications degree allows me to offer my own insight when people in each department need help communicating." I get it! You're the homeschooled kid who had no clique in high school because you had nothing to offer. Thanks for making over four times as much as I make.

Contract is up in a month* and I'm loving out.






*I have a surgery that puts me out of work for two or three weeks. HR cheerfully told me that it sounds like a great time to end my employment if this is the case. Convinced at this point that HR stands for Huge Retard :sigh:

ladyweapon
Nov 6, 2010

It reads all over his face,
like he's an Italian.

Xovaan posted:

in her words: "I may not know much about each department, but I like to think my HR experience and communications degree allows me to offer my own insight when people in each department need help communicating." I get it! You're the homeschooled kid who had no clique in high school because you had nothing to offer. Thanks for making over four times as much as I make.
It sounds like you made a personal enemy of the HR person. That is generally not a very good idea as HR isn't on your side to start with.

Knot My President!
Jan 10, 2005

That's the thing, though. She brought that up randomly. It was me nodding my head to her explaining everything that she had to say and that got lumped into it, probably because she didn't believe her own bullshit.

They hired this QA guy from Qualcomm who is looking to put in ISO processes since we have none. I mentioned to her that this guy has a lot of great ideas and I can't wait to help him with quality analyses. Flat-out says, "Oh, XXX. We know how much he likes his 'processes'.", rolling her eyes, just completely blowing off what this guy was hired for and what he wants to accomplish.

Having talked to employees about what happened, they all let me in on the huge known secret that she's a horrible subhuman being and does this to everybody.

I'm very nice and quite socially affluent and it's very apparent this person is not. Hard to make my case because it's the Internet though. :goleft:

mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

by Fluffdaddy
How does she even have anything to do with you? If I reported to the COO, I'd just tell her to go gently caress herself. "[The] company is pretty tribal and mismanaged", well, poo poo. I was going to suggest talking to the boss about it, but really I don't see why you'd want to stay in that place anyway.

Knot My President!
Jan 10, 2005

I'm a recent graduate and this was a three month contract turned into six months due to how helpful I've been. I really am trying to get more experience before I become unemployed again. Job hunting has proven unfruitful but I'm gonna really buckle down and start that after my surgery.

Tony Montana
Aug 6, 2005

by FactsAreUseless
Dead weight is as much the corporate game as being friends with people you wouldn't ordinarily pick for your friends. Make her trust you, make her consider you one of the 'good guys'. It may be too late now, sounds like relationship is hosed.. but remember this next time. It doesn't matter that she is trash, she has power over you and you need to work with that.

If she is really trashy and everyone hates her, it makes it easier for you to slide in because she is expecting hate from all sides. The minute you're out of her control, with her blessings, you never look back but neither burn the bridge.

Politics. You can always go and work for someone smaller if you don't like it.

Knot My President!
Jan 10, 2005

I wish I could claim I was even granted an opportunity to get on her bad side, but she was determined to not like me from the start.


During this meeting she also told me I couldn't talk to the front desk administrator anymore since "people were complaining about it", meaning she didn't like it. I would say hi every morning and hi for a minute while my food heated on lunch. A week later she fired her for making a simple mistake on a document that was outside of her job description since they were swamped for the holidays. No warning, no insight, nothing. And because she is hired through a recruiter, they don't have to pay her unemployment since she's still technically hired by the recruiting agency.

She tried to get me to interpret a survey I helped her deploy as a test to 20 people to see if the system simply worked. I had to explain to her that I couldn't interpret it since people were giving white noise answers back for the specific purpose of testing the system. She paused followed by a blank stare and a drawn out "...oh".

I really just wanna become a mountain man and grow pot for a living. This corporate stuff is worse than high school.

Tony Montana
Aug 6, 2005

by FactsAreUseless
Is it beyond your abilities to make her like you? That's the only option you have, you'll never challenge her professionally.

You don't have to be a mountain man, just go and be a tradesman or teacher or one of a billion other roles. Anytime you become successful at pretty much anything you'll start noticing these themes coming back..

Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Feb 5, 2014

CovfefeCatCafe
Apr 11, 2006

A fresh attitude
brewed daily!

OatmealRocks posted:

Current I am working for Randstad. I am happy with the rate they pay me. Other recruiters have offered me 10-15% less for the same contract. I have had to deal with many different local recruiters in Miami. Most are just horrible and short change you on the rate. Are you dealing with Broward or Miami-Dade area?

Might be able to offer some incite.

It's the Ft. Laud office. Just had a phone interview with the company today, and they've extended an offer! I will be leaving the world of retail behind in two weeks. Not the main job I was hoping for, but it's basically the position under it. It will be an office position at a bank, and pays the same as last time I worked at a bank, except this time I'm only doing one job, not every job. So far it checks all the right boxes, but we'll see how it goes from here.

Knot My President!
Jan 10, 2005

Tony Montana posted:

Is it beyond your abilities to make her like you? That's the only option you have, you'll never challenge her professionally.

You don't have to be a mountain man, just go and be a tradesman or teacher or one of a billion other roles. Anytime you become successful at pretty much anything you'll start noticing these themes coming back..

It's not beyond my abilities; this is simply the situation as it stands now. No relationship is unsalvageable from my own experience.

Last week she was introducing a new employee and sent her to every cubicle, purposely skipping mine. Later, I was having a meeting with the director of marketing and she brings her into the office we're both in to introduce the new hire to the director, completely skipping and ignoring me. I explained what she did to the director and she effectively called her a lot of names that I didn't expect from my boss, hah.


Tony Montana posted:

Dead weight is as much the corporate game as being friends with people you wouldn't ordinarily pick for your friends. Make her trust you, make her consider you one of the 'good guys'. It may be too late now, sounds like relationship is hosed.. but remember this next time. It doesn't matter that she is trash, she has power over you and you need to work with that.

If she is really trashy and everyone hates her, it makes it easier for you to slide in because she is expecting hate from all sides. The minute you're out of her control, with her blessings, you never look back but neither burn the bridge.

Politics. You can always go and work for someone smaller if you don't like it.

I agree. This internship has taught me a lot about keeping my tail covered; maintaining a balance of obscurity, pretentiousness, procrastination, and deadline dilation. Office politics are strong, and while I typically use SA to muse, I am aware of the situation I'm in. I've learned a lot of positive aspects of corporate as well. Many people here support what I do, with several offering to write me letters of recommendation for the work I've done thus far.

I'm just hoping I can fall into something soon after my surgery so I can get my next motorcycle. :coolfish:

Pleads
Jun 9, 2005

pew pew pew


Xovaan posted:

I'm just hoping I can fall into something soon after my surgery so I can get my next motorcycle. :coolfish:
What area are you in? I'm in MR in the middle of the freezing rear end prairies of Canada but I have a bunch of contacts in the US that might need slave laboura young go-getter.

Higgy
Jul 6, 2005



Grimey Drawer

Sundae posted:

Anyone working in regulated fields: Do your SOPs force you to get your Excel spreadsheets verified?

Starting on Feb 1, I'm now required to print all spreadsheets (Excel, Minitab, etc) first with data, then with all formulas shown, and deliver them to the Computer Systems Validation group for review regardless of whether they're GMP documents or not. These printed sheets have to be second-person verified, all calculations replicated for accuracy, and then signed off by the CSV department approvers before I'm allowed to show them to anyone. The sheet can only be used once and then must be archived and deleted from my computer. No spreadsheet may be reused without complete validation (which involves third party approvals and testing per our SOPs).

Even plotting a line graph with like twenty data points takes two weeks once you include the approval times, and heaven help you if you'd planned on using that spreadsheet for multiple projects.

"TPS Report and coversheets - Sundae's Personal Hell"

Holy poo poo, this is the worst thing I've heard in the entire thread. I had to gin up a forecast model in excel using federal budget forecasts and a fairly complex algorithm with multiple variables to determine the performance targets for the next 5 years. This is to be used for program planning on a ~$400M/year program. Nobody questioned a damned thing and now just refer to it as "Higgy's Model". I would not get any work done if I had to get spreadsheets reviewed like that because I would literally just stop making them to answer people's questions.

On the topic of "Higgy's Model", someone at some point said "this will determine all of our planning" and now everyone just assumes it does despite the long list of assumptions and caveats I've tried to make clear since it's inception.

Convincing people that, yes, you DO have to still actually have detailed plans for how to exceed the performance target and how to spend the money allotted to you with your project teams has been harder that actually building the damned thing to begin with.

Drink and Fight
Feb 2, 2003

Sundae's job sounds like the exact opposite of my job in every way. My company might not even exist in six months but I couldn't be happier at work. Yeesh.

defectivemonkey
Jun 5, 2012

Drink and Fight posted:

Sundae's job sounds like the exact opposite of my job in every way. My company might not even exist in six months but I couldn't be happier at work. Yeesh.

To be fair, I think that may not be far from Sundae's company...

Knot My President!
Jan 10, 2005

Pleads posted:

What area are you in? I'm in MR in the middle of the freezing rear end prairies of Canada but I have a bunch of contacts in the US that might need slave laboura young go-getter.

I'm north of San Diego in Southern California. Clothed or unclothed cabana boy?

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Tony Montana
Aug 6, 2005

by FactsAreUseless

Sundae posted:

Anyone working in regulated fields: Do your SOPs force you to get your Excel spreadsheets verified?

I guess by 'regulated field' you're referring to legislation around reporting because you're in pharma, Sundae?

IT isn't really regulated, or the industry the client or whoever owns the infrastructure might be (like finance, holding credit card info for instance) and you have to comply with that but the methods you use to get there are your call. It's a lot of the appeal of the industry for me, you come to me as the business with your requirements and commitments and I as the technology priest will converse with the technology on your behalf and tell you what the technology says. The technology is displeased today, you must buy new servers or you will be smitten down.

Anyways, that report I described above that I automated, one of the outputs of that report was active users (a list of all the active users on the network, when they last logged in and some other stuff about them). There was over 10k for my account, while HP itself has something like 300k. We bill based on active users, the monthly bill HP gave to the client for services rendered, the entire managed services contract. So the number my report gave as active users is mutipled by what we charge per user and that handed to the client monthly as the bill. It was over 300k a month.

I could not get anyone to sit with me and go through the way I queried the clients Active Directory database to yank out the users. That's a bit of technobabble, but I basically write a query using standard query language which says GET USERS WHERE (THEY LOGGED IN LESS THAN 2 MONTHS AGO)(ARE NOT DISABLED)(ARE FULLTIME), etc. So obviously the formation of this query, what I decide to stick in there effects the users returned dramatically and by putting in or taking out a part of it you can effect the user count by thousands. My own boss wasn't interested because I was so far out of his control by now he had enough of his own poo poo, the finance and billing dept said 'just give us a number, I have no idea about your techy stuff'. Eventually a senior woman was hired in billing to oversee billing to this client (they'd questioned some of the reports as I was totally winging it month to month initially) and she was just a MBA grad with a stack of admin-style experience. She simply couldn't understand what I was doing and all I could do was break it down into very simply plain English directives and ask her to ask the client if they're cool with that.

It was crazy man, if I had this much trouble wanting to automate it and actually solidify what we need to do, imagine the dude every month doing it manually. No two reports would have had the same criteria and government departments and various super-corps in Australia (all the biggest, coolest networks HP managed) just paid the bill because it's coming from HP and they don't make mistakes.

So my story is basically the complete opposite to yours, Sundae, except we just play with vast stacks of money and hence if we get it a bit wrong it's ok.

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