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Sundae posted:It used to be very normal, but most pharma companies are dropping corporate jets for regular employees and reserving them for exec levels only. Nowadays, any travel I do (seemingly regardless of how far I'm traveling) is either coach airfare or my own car, on my own time. A trip to, let's say, Hyderabad is treated as part of my commute because "occasional travel" is in my job description. They will pay airfare costs, of course, but I'm expected to travel on my own time with no other recompense / comp time. As opposed to what? I've never heard of a company reimbursing employees for travel time on work trips. Consultants can bill it, but that's about it.
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Jun 5, 2014 19:39
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Xandu posted:As opposed to what? I've never heard of a company reimbursing employees for travel time on work trips. Consultants can bill it, but that's about it. That's why you book your flights during business hours  . No one where I work expects anyone to get anything done on travel days.
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Jun 5, 2014 20:11
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Xandu posted:As opposed to what? I've never heard of a company reimbursing employees for travel time on work trips. Consultants can bill it, but that's about it. Compare these examples: #1 - Travel Sunday for a Monday morning meeting. Get a comp day for spending Sunday traveling. (This was the norm for a while at my first company, PFE. No longer true, though.) #2 - Use 1/2-day vacation time on a Tuesday so that you can leave work early to get to your 3PM flight to the Netherlands so that, after time-zones and travel time, you're there just in time for an 8AM Wednesday morning meeting. That's the difference I'm talking about. My new company and my last one as well did not consider any travel to be part of your work day if your job title said "travel may be required" somewhere. You are then required to do that on your own time as part of your commute. If travel cuts into your required work hours, you need to use your own off-time in order to get there even if the request is completely unreasonable. The situation above with the Netherlands happened to one of my co-workers for a meeting in Leiden. It also happened on a larger scale (about 1.5 days, I think?) for a contract manufacture kick-off in Hyderabad to someone else. The worst I've had is doing a nine-hour drive overnight because I was told I couldn't be late for work the next morning, even though I was traveling for work. That's the difference I'm talking about. It's not about reimbursement so much as not even acknowledging that travel for work is work. If I have to fly or drive somewhere for work during work hours on the weekday, I have to take vacation time to do it. quote:That's why you book your flights during business hours . No one where I work expects anyone to get anything done on travel days. No, that's exactly what I'm saying. Those flights are now vacation time because they're considered part of your commute and are an expectation to be performed outside working hours, even if the laws of time and space render it impossible. VVVV Preaching to the choir, buddy.  I've done quite a few overnight drives this year just so I could make it to work without being late (and therefore losing vacation hours).
Sundae fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jun 5, 2014 |
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Jun 5, 2014 20:12
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I know you have posted some insane policies before but that is outrageous.
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Jun 5, 2014 20:15
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Sundae posted:A trip to, let's say, Hyderabad is treated as part of my commute because "occasional travel" is in my job description. bbut, that makes opposite sense! If it's in your job description, it should be considered work!
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Jun 5, 2014 20:37
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What the gently caress kind of companies do you work for that travel time is not part of the work day. When I traveled for a living I got the points and time off
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Jun 5, 2014 20:54
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Yikes, I have to travel on Sundays all the time, but work travel doesn't come out of my vacation time (it's a billable hour to our clients) Xandu fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Jun 11, 2014 |
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Jun 5, 2014 20:56
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sbaldrick posted:What the gently caress kind of companies do you work for that travel time is not part of the work day. When I traveled for a living I got the points and time off Big Pharma.
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Jun 5, 2014 20:58
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Sundae posted:Compare these examples: That's absolutely insane. I frequently have to fly on Sundays and Friday nights/Saturday mornings and we don't have an official 'this cut into your time off so you'll get a comp day policy' but my managers have been pretty cool about it. If they made me take vacation days to travel to customers I would just laugh in their faces, hell I don't even get that much vacation time.
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Jun 5, 2014 21:11
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Lyon posted:That's absolutely insane. I frequently have to fly on Sundays and Friday nights/Saturday mornings and we don't have an official 'this cut into your time off so you'll get a comp day policy' but my managers have been pretty cool about it. If they made me take vacation days to travel to customers I would just laugh in their faces, hell I don't even get that much vacation time. Yeah, so what happens if the travel time happens so often during your "normal hours" that you run out of vacation time?
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Jun 5, 2014 21:15
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Solkanar512 posted:Yeah, so what happens if the travel time happens so often during your "normal hours" that you run out of vacation time? Knowing Big Pharma, you get fired for poor resource management.
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Jun 5, 2014 21:28
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So my company won a jd power and associates award and to reward us upper management gave us free lunch yesterday. Allegedly some people in my department bitched about the free lunch selection so this morning we got chewed out by the AVP in charge and told to look up "gratitude" and "thankfulness" in the dictionary. I found it amusing because our employee badges don't say what dept. we're from and yet somehow the people in the cafeteria (she said the café workers reported it directly to the CEO) figured out not only who was complaining but also what department to accuse.
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Jun 5, 2014 22:38
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Peven Stan posted:So my company Fixed
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Jun 5, 2014 23:47
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Peven Stan posted:management gave us free lunch yesterday. Allegedly some people in my department bitched about the free lunch selection. Well, what was the lunch? Was it a legitimate gripe or were people just being lovely?
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Jun 6, 2014 00:24
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Well, what was the lunch? Was it a legitimate gripe or were people just being lovely? You had your choice of spaghetti, lasagna, a cheeseburger with bbq sauce and fried frenchs onions on top (which was p good), chicken breast sandwich, pepperoni, and sausage pizzas. Looking at the menu now and there was apparently some kind of turkey club ciabatta too that I forgot to include. Or the "vegetarian" option of a salad. All choices came with a choice of side which ended up being in-house fried potato chips or a side salad. I personally didn't have a problem with the selection but we're talking about an office here where the café fried up chicken fingers for the kids on bring your kid to work day for them to eat and initially told adults it was only for the kids. The adults threw a shitfit and ended up screaming so the cafe relented and let them order the entire supply of them before the kids could eat. CAPS LOCK BROKEN fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 00:29
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Your colleagues are horrible.
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Jun 6, 2014 03:47
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Your colleagues are horrible. Agreed, it sounds like the real children actually got the chicken fingers in that story. What a bunch of man/woman-babies.
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Jun 6, 2014 06:30
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Xandu posted:As opposed to what? I've never heard of a company reimbursing employees for travel time on work trips. Consultants can bill it, but that's about it. I do; I'm paid quasi-hourly (legally salaried, but I get my hourly rate + a premium for any hours over 40, and a bit more on sundays). This is the most common pay arrangement for heavy industrial engineering staff; almost every company I've seen in this field pays for travel time (and overtime on the job site, if you're not in sales).
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Jun 6, 2014 13:20
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ehhh...I'm a vegan and it does kind of suck that the "vegetarian" option is usually a Caesar salad, loaded with parmesean and bacon. It's not hard to grill veggies and throw em in a tortilla. No, literally that's the vegetarian option for our onboarding lunches.
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Jun 6, 2014 14:45
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peter banana posted:ehhh...I'm a vegan and it does kind of suck that the "vegetarian" option is usually a Caesar salad, loaded with parmesean and bacon. It's not hard to grill veggies and throw em in a tortilla. I work for a company where our chief of security thinks UN peacekeepers are on the verge of being deployed here at Obama's request. Trust me in saying that anyone with remotely hippeish leanings probably won't work here or is busy trying to get out. I don't drink soda and I get mocked for that from time to time. Keep in mind the same people who drink coke out of gallon jugs are the same ones who complain that our company's self insured employee health insurance seems to go up every year
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Jun 6, 2014 15:54
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I know, I get gentle mocking as well for being weird and self-righteous. It's okay, it's just the price you pay for not buying into a reprehensible industry of torture and murder.  But yeah, it's funny that that what we offer on the first day of onboarding and there's no time for any people with other dietary concerns to go out and grab something themselves. I did say something (as the corporate trainer and it's changing). Our "culture" here (heavily influenced by the "you must like sports or else" sales team) is what our recruiters use to woo new candidates. Welcome to the company! You're already excluded socially!
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Jun 6, 2014 16:11
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peter banana posted:
I've never worked in a corporate culture that could be remotely called "politically correct", but being made fun of because you didn't drink soda would fly. I work in a place where some offices still have porn on the walls yet no one would give a crap about diet issues.
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Jun 6, 2014 16:37
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Armchair Eclectic posted:I can wear pretty much whatever I want on most days without meetings, I show up to work late and leave late and nobody cares, the corporate bullshit and bureaucracy is at a minimum, my boss is cool and easily the most hard working person in the building and is completely unpretentious.  (a small (< 15 people) financial software company)At my last job (large corporate) I once needed FTP access to a Unix box so I could write the archival scripts for this project. We put in the request and heard nothing for three days. So my boss asked the admin (a portly gentleman with an unshaven neck) if he could take care of our access request. He responded with an email saying the "regulations" very clearly allowed him two weeks to grant an access request. He then waited an extra third week before granting us access, for the hell of it. When I got to the new job I asked our network admin how long it takes to give out FTP access, he said "under 5 minutes, 10 tops." FieryBalrog fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 22:04
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Peven Stan posted:You had your choice of spaghetti, lasagna, a cheeseburger with bbq sauce and fried frenchs onions on top (which was p good), chicken breast sandwich, pepperoni, and sausage pizzas. Looking at the menu now and there was apparently some kind of turkey club ciabatta too that I forgot to include. Or the "vegetarian" option of a salad. All choices came with a choice of side which ended up being in-house fried potato chips or a side salad. I personally didn't have a problem with the selection but we're talking about an office here where the café fried up chicken fingers for the kids on bring your kid to work day for them to eat and initially told adults it was only for the kids. The adults threw a shitfit and ended up screaming so the cafe relented and let them order the entire supply of them before the kids could eat. God drat when we get a free lunch its usually hotdogs and the veg options are non existent. Though the thanksgiving free lunch is an amazing spread that even the paid cafeteria never comes close to equaling, so it balances out I guess.
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Jun 7, 2014 04:27
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My company's cafeteria is Avenue C from the third-party vendor, Canteen. Self-service fridges and a price-scanner/card-swiper. Not shown in sample picture: Fridge full of Lean Cuisine and White Castle 4-packs, everything thrown in a giant pile in the fridge and left for you to sort through to find what you like, wraps that somehow have 830 calories. Present in sample picture but not in real life: Chairs, tables, vague sense of order inside the fridge. I will gladly take that cafeteria people complained about.
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Jun 7, 2014 14:47
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Our work cafeteria is pretty nice. They had to quit making hot cooked meals a while back because of some code bullshit (not enough ventilation or something silly), but they have hot and cold sandwiches with Boar's Head meats and bread from a good local bakery, homemade soup and chili, and a huge selection of cold deli-type salads that they make themselves, including plenty of veggie-friendly options if that's your thing.
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Jun 7, 2014 17:19
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Peven Stan posted:So my company won a jd power and associates award and to reward us upper management gave us free lunch yesterday. Allegedly some people in my department bitched about the free lunch selection so this morning we got chewed out by the AVP in charge and told to look up "gratitude" and "thankfulness" in the dictionary. I found it amusing because our employee badges don't say what dept. we're from and yet somehow the people in the cafeteria (she said the café workers reported it directly to the CEO) figured out not only who was complaining but also what department to accuse. Myself and the other staff pharmacist used to buy our technicians Chinese food every payday until one of our techs complained to management that they didn't like Chinese food and that we were being unfair.
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Jun 8, 2014 00:18
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My company always catered BBQ or sandwiches with no vegetarian option. Our on site cafeteria regularly served undercooked (or completely raw) chicken. But it's not my problem anymore since I'm officially out of there!
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Jun 8, 2014 01:17
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keiran_helcyan posted:Myself and the other staff pharmacist used to buy our technicians Chinese food every payday until one of our techs complained to management that they didn't like Chinese food and that we were being unfair. To be fair, it is sort of a little bit of a "gently caress you" to someone if you keep buying a particular kind of food for "all" the techs when you know one of them doesn't like it, rather than switching up the type of food every week or something. I can see why the guy might have felt a bit slighted. Whining about it to management (and ruining it for everyone else) is still petty and stupid, though.
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Jun 8, 2014 02:45
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dennyk posted:To be fair, it is sort of a little bit of a "gently caress you" to someone if you keep buying a particular kind of food for "all" the techs when you know one of them doesn't like it, rather than switching up the type of food every week or something. I can see why the guy might have felt a bit slighted. Whining about it to management (and ruining it for everyone else) is still petty and stupid, though. Of course, if you don't know they don't like it, then it is entirely on them for being unable to say "Hey keiran, I appreciate the gesture, but I wonder if we could hit up a different place next week? I'm not the biggest fan of Chinese food but I'm happy to have it if we can change things up now and then," and running straight to management to whine about it.
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Jun 8, 2014 02:50
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We used to have a guy who didn't like cheese. Not allergic or religious, just didn't like it. He was Greek. We alternated between Chinese and Indian take out. The one time someone screwed up and didn't know about it and got pizza he just left for the day. The food was feeding like 20 other people. 
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Jun 8, 2014 03:10
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We had a guy who'd refuse any bird meat and pork and wouldn't eat salad. If there wasn't a beef option he wouldn't eat. Yes he makes his wife cook him a special meal on Thanksgiving.
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Jun 8, 2014 04:36
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Uncle Jam posted:We used to have a guy who didn't like cheese. Not allergic or religious, just didn't like it. He was Greek. He brings shame upon my people. We approve of cheese. If he was still around I would send a tub of feta to his desk.
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Jun 8, 2014 04:52
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Going outside the office isn't really an option because we're really remote. The onsite cafeteria is huge. The hot food is hit or miss, sometimes good sometimes not, but all the healthy options are just insanely good. The prices are market rate too, not the typical cafeteria ripoffs. I've had better food (a previous gig had insanely good but overpriced stuff), but it's usually edible.
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Jun 8, 2014 05:45
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dennyk posted:To be fair, it is sort of a little bit of a "gently caress you" to someone if you keep buying a particular kind of food for "all" the techs when you know one of them doesn't like it, rather than switching up the type of food every week or something. I can see why the guy might have felt a bit slighted. Whining about it to management (and ruining it for everyone else) is still petty and stupid, though. Then just don't eat it? This wasn't out of some employee morale fund, me and my buddy were just buying 15 odd co-workers dinner every other week as a thank you. It would be like complaining about the birthday cake that someone brought in to share with everyone being the wrong favor. Weren't most of us taught around the age of 6 that if someone offers you a free thing and you don't like it just say "no thank you", not whine about how the free thing wasn't up to your standards?
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Jun 8, 2014 05:53
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I totally get that you should be thankful and not complain when a free thing isn't what you want. The thing is that these things are often a team-building event. If people are being consistently left out, it's bad for the team. It'd be rude to complain about a birthday cake, but if you're getting left out on a regular basis then it's a problem, even if it's free.
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Jun 8, 2014 08:02
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Aquatic Giraffe posted:We had a guy who'd refuse any bird meat and pork and wouldn't eat salad. If there wasn't a beef option he wouldn't eat. I really don't get how people like that don't die of malnutrition. To contribute to the cafeteria chat, I haven't worked anywhere large enough to have one in years, but the last time I did, it was pretty decent. They usually had four or five really well-done entrees to choose from (think grilled salmon with asparagus), one of which was a vegetarian option, as well as a grill and some standard things like pizza, salad, and soup. Of course, this was the headquarters of one of the company's three global divisions (and just a few miles from the company headquarters), so a bunch of executives ate there regularly. With that kind of scrutiny, even Sodexho (prison caterers extraordinaire) can manage to be good.
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Jun 8, 2014 10:43
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keiran_helcyan posted:Then just don't eat it? This wasn't out of some employee morale fund, me and my buddy were just buying 15 odd co-workers dinner every other week as a thank you. It would be like complaining about the birthday cake that someone brought in to share with everyone being the wrong favor. Your story made me angry. It's stuff life this that you pass off as urban legend of corporate culture gone bad and yet it actually happens. I hope you made a big fuss about it.
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Jun 8, 2014 12:18
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My third day at my new job, the grill station was serving The Swanson, which is a whole turkey leg wrapped in bacon. When it was handed to you, the chef at the grill station stared you dead in the eyes and admonished "No sharing!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34qmCycbK-U My workplace is amazing 
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Jun 8, 2014 13:14
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Some motherfuckers just want to ruin everybody's good time. I worked in a law firm a few years back, and set up an occasional lotto pool. Usually once a month or so, I'd send an email round asking people who were interested to let me know, and that when they paid their $5 that was them considered in the pool for that week. Usually I'd give people a working week's notice. One of the usual participants complained to my boss when she was left out of the pool when she was on vacation. Not only did she not tell us she'd be away, but she didn't ask anyone to put her name down or put $5 in for her. The crazy thing is, like usual, we didn't win anything, so if anything she was up on the rest of us. Lawyers gotta lawyer, I suppose. One of the partners told me that if we had won the jackpot while she was away, that she'd have grounds to sue. Moreover he said that even people who didn't tell me they wanted to join may have an actionable position if we won and they missed out, so the money might be held up while we racked up legal fees. So in order to avoid that I just had to put a stop to it. But I made sure to tell everyone who asked exactly whose fault it was. modeski fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jun 8, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2014 21:49
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