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Aquatic Giraffe posted:I had a super micromanaging project manager who'd try to do everyone's jobs for them (design and engineering) and royally hosed poo poo up. He'd go on trips to check on subcontractors and not take us with him "because the budget wouldn't allow more than 1 person to go" and gently caress around with stuff and we wouldn't find out about it till it was in production and then when the customer was like "hey wtf this isn't what I approved" he'd blame the actual designers and engineers who had no idea he dicked around with our design till it was too late. Outside of my scrum meetings with our engineers, I will generally let engineers run with what they need to do. They're all responsible adults who have a stake in what we're building because, poo poo, that's just the mentality we have on our team. My specific situation was regarding interactions I had with a director of Product Management - I was supposed to be sure she had a plan to distribute work to her team, and then double check on her. I told my boss I trusted that she had already made a commitment to me to get this work done. That's when I was told "yeah, you trust people way too much." I've also been told "I don't think you understand what a project manager is supposed to do", I got yelled at for not making numbers for a white elephant gift exchange until we got to the restaurant for our holiday luncheon, and for not turning on my vacation leave message until right after I left for vacation (this I admit is something I should be more responsible about anyway).
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Jan 22, 2015 19:09
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I recently started my first "office job," and after being a loyal reader of this thread I feel like I'm either in some sort of alternative universe, or blissfully ignorant of some unforeseen yet impending reality check. Well, I'm not sure if it really counts as "corporate"-- we're a public company with about ~700 employees world wide through 4+ locations and a couple subsidiaries, but it still has a small business/start-up type of feel. IT hooks me up with whatever software/hardware I need, there's professionally prepared food for lunch, I can show up anytime between 7 and 9 and put in my 8 hours, we all knock off early on Fridays for drinks + pub food, and I've been initiated into a clandestine Whisky club. There's ping pong and foosball, I'm getting some continuing education courses paid for, and will likely get to do all sorts of travel, which I'm excited about. Obviously there's a lot of work, times where things need to be done yesterday, and your typical "wow how did X person manage to gently caress this up?," but I figure that's all par for the course... This is my first 'real' job after spending my entire life in university + grad school, and it's pretty cool. Whenever there's downtime I just work on my cont ed, learn some Excel stuff, do semi-related research, post on SA... Did I luck out? Should I hold on for grim death? Grouco fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 19:30
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Grouco posted:I recently started my first "office job," and after being a loyal reader of this thread I feel like I'm either in some sort of alternative universe, or blissfully ignorant of some unforeseen yet impending reality check. If it's public then you're at the mercy of the C-level's need to think in terms of short-term quarterly profits. It sounds like you work for some tech startup that is trying to attract talent and pressure employees into staying on campus all day by having loads of "cool stuff". When the tech bubble bursts you'll all be screwed. (Citation: see Palo Alto, 2000)
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Jan 22, 2015 19:34
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Xandu posted:I'm not a sales guy, but sometimes I help out with business development and proposal work and I feel like it's the worst of both worlds. I have to deal with all the pressure of putting together the proposal and everything, but unlike the sales guy, I don't get any commission if that 7 figure contract comes through. This is my field, and as a proposal manager, I was an overhead, non-billable resource with 100% accountability for the success (or lack thereof) of a submitted bid and 0% direct authority over proposal resources. And likewise, I get no commission for the successful ones. So glad I'm out of that line of work now. 
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Jan 22, 2015 19:43
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HiroProtagonist posted:This is my field, and as a proposal manager, I was an overhead, non-billable resource with 100% accountability for the success (or lack thereof) of a submitted bid and 0% direct authority over proposal resources. And likewise, I get no commission for the successful ones. This is me now. It sucks.
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Jan 22, 2015 20:15
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So I pretty much give up. After last year consisted of a long fight of asking for more responsibility and being promoted I finally got promoted last week. Come in today and see an email that the manager is taking a personal day, usually asking everyone how's their workload and reassigning stuff goes to the senior people, so as someone recently promoted that could be me right? Nope its the girl the manager is best friends with and was hired six months after me. I don't even know what to do here, this girl is being given increasingly senior poo poo like training and projects while I get jack poo poo. There isn't a lot of opportunities to move up in this place and little poo poo like that is giving this girl the edge for no real reason.
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Jan 22, 2015 20:50
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just save it for the exit interview (which will be cancelled at the last minute)
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Jan 22, 2015 22:17
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Xandu posted:I'm not a sales guy, but sometimes I help out with business development and proposal work and I feel like it's the worst of both worlds. I have to deal with all the pressure of putting together the proposal and everything, but unlike the sales guy, I don't get any commission if that 7 figure contract comes through. I hear you. I basically have to do all of the paperwork for certain sales reps that don't want to (seriously, that's their justification) do it themselves. As a result, it's shunted on to me, and I get to see how much money they're getting paid to have me do their job for them  One rep is a real piece of work. Not only does she have me do her work for her, but she lies to our clients' faces and says that she personally creates and fulfills the products that my department does, and that my department just takes the completed work from her and sends it to the client. And of course, nobody cares because she puts numbers on the board. TwoSheds fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 22:24
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1500quidporsche posted:So I pretty much give up. After last year consisted of a long fight of asking for more responsibility and being promoted I finally got promoted last week. This exact same thing happened to me. The only thing I could do is what you've already done - fight for a promotion so that at least on paper it shows that I am advancing. I wish I had some helpful advice or a story with a happy ending to pass on to you, but in my case what felt inevitable did come to pass. I did receive the promotion I fought so hard for, but the boss's favored employee was promoted over me. Honestly, I was just happy that I had been proactive and gone after a promotion for myself, because it became very clear to me that my boss had no intention of promoting anyone but her golden boy, except that she actually was instructed by higher-ups to allow me to make a case for a promotion. My "case" was a memo that was also read by the higher-ups so in order to deny my promotion she would have had to justify the denial to them based on the content of my memo. It also forced her favorite dude to have to go through the same process instead of just being handed a promotion, so that gave me some kind of petty, pointless satisfaction, anyway. What's really awesome is how my new manager is always coming to me privately to ask questions about how to do things. That's really fun. So now, I'm just trying to stay on the good side of the people above my boss and make myself visible to them in positive ways. I also asked for and got permission to work part time in another department with another manager, so that I have someone else reporting on my performance, and have skills and knowledge that people in each of my departments don't have so I can take on tasks that other people can't do by themselves. This has already been noticed and commented on by the CEO, so yay for that. This year I'm also moving offices to a situation where I am physically away from my boss and working with a smaller group of people from different departments, so that even if my boss sucks, I won't have to stress about her during my normal day-today work. I don't know if any of this will actually help me to advance in the company, but it makes me feel better to be responding to the situation proactively and improving myself (and therefore my future job prospects) in the meantime. It's also helped me to back away from the stressful parts of my job that were affecting me too much emotionally. I was trying way to hard to "prove myself" and it was only leading to disappointment and frustration and huge blows to my self-confidence on top that. Being able to let it go and just focus on doing my job well without caring what my boss thinks about it has really improved my state of mind and stress level.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:11
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We got an 1800-word company-wide email yesterday. It's a corporate-speak work of art: there will be reorgs throughout several groups, so and so promoted, so and so retiring after 16 years of service, new groups in Asia, blah blah blah...the last paragraph snuck in at the bottom after most people have been skimming or tuned out completely: “oh PS we’ll be reducing headcount on Friday” Tomorrow should be very interesting. I wasn't around the last time this happened in 2008, so I guess we'll know how bad it is in the AM if there are stacks of empty boxes in the hallways.
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Jan 23, 2015 03:06
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I think my Dad is becoming that way too trusting/good middle manager unicorn is his company. After doing corporate and global accounts he was reassigned to be an on-site manager to handle business with another company whose office is super chill. So for the last year and a half it's helped him be more calm because he deals with his client which is a laid back company more than his own company which is super cutthroat and very cliquish. In general my Dad has actually been pretty good for being an older guy who could easily fall into complacency: he laughed at both his and his client's company for offering laughably low salaries for new hires: "bachelors with a master's preferred in NYC for 28k starting? Do you want these kids to hate us or have you not changed the pay scales after you hired me?" Anyway, he has a counterpart at his client company, and they have different contracts for different parts of the business. My Dad noticed some big issues with another contract he isn't responsible for and his counterpart is like "that's their problem not yours" and now 6 months later that contractor's gone to poo poo and the new VP of the client has taken a disliking to my Dad because he "doesn't have our backs because he didn't point this out." My Dad, nice guy that he is won't throw his counterpart under the bus for ignoring his observation but he is increasingly feeling like his job is on the line for other people's fault. One office from another city gave him bad data he forwarded directly to this VP and it turned out they lied, and when my Dad corrected the data he was chastised for not "protecting your own and taking responsibility" by his client's VP. Then, a work stoppage/slowdown disrupted ALL logistics poo poo on the West coast and he's getting blamed for not having "pull" to get things ahead of other people with their poo poo sitting on the docks or in warehouses. It's a classic no-win situation and he's holding off on taking anyone else down but I'm starting to worry an idiot might think they can replace him with a cheaper, ill-informed yes-man and he'll not ever get as nice a job again.
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Jan 23, 2015 03:41
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That sinking feeling when you suspect the 88-year old company director is forcing you to stop all existing work to dedicate time to a project for a client who does not, in fact, exist outside his imagination.
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Jan 23, 2015 03:50
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Uh, wow. What tipped you off that client/project doesn't actually exist?
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Jan 23, 2015 04:58
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Solkanar512 posted:Uh, wow. What tipped you off that client/project doesn't actually exist? It's an exaggeration, but not much of one. We're doing work that was never signed off on, never quoted, and probably never requested because the man saw an email from the client in question and extrapolated that as a request for a two-week project that's eating into everyone's time - the fact that it never went through the proper channels also means that the client's under no obligation to pay if they decided to be a dick. You ever have a senile grandparent who'd sometimes wander around the house knocking things over or shouting at nothing just to let everyone know they still existed? It's basically that, but with the guy who signs my paychecks. There's only one other person in this company who can make him or his attention-deficit son (they run the place jointly) shut up and go away for ten minutes and she's been out all week, so they've been terrorizing everybody ever since. This place has months to live at best, I need to get the hell out of here.
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Jan 23, 2015 05:19
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Anyone ever had a consultant refuse to work with them? I haven't yet but I think this might be the one. My managers are having me email him relentlessly asking him for quotes that we need exact answers for but cannot provide any specifications to. So I send something like "How much would it cost for a commercial?" and I'm unable to even provide the length of the commercial we want, yet my managers want some kind of "ballpark" answer. He writes back with some huge range of numbers and then I have to go back and ask exactly what is covered between the lowest figure and the highest figure in the quote. Rinse and repeat with ever more intricate questions into his ridiculously unspecific original answer. I also had to send him these questions while he was at a funeral, so that's probably not helping either.
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Jan 23, 2015 05:32
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SpartanIV posted:Anyone ever had a consultant refuse to work with them? I haven't yet but I think this might be the one. My managers are having me email him relentlessly asking him for quotes that we need exact answers for but cannot provide any specifications to. My last boss for a responsible-level gig had me go back to our network consultants three times for tweaks on a quote for a whopping seven hours of work. I'm still surprised I got an answer the last time. By the time I got laid off I was already looking anyway.
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Jan 23, 2015 05:53
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Is it like that storyline in Hornblower where the captain goes crazy but everyone still has to obey his increasingly dangerous orders?
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Jan 23, 2015 07:10
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Swink posted:Is it like that storyline in Hornblower where the captain goes crazy but everyone still has to obey his increasingly dangerous orders? I don't think I hated it THAT much.
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Jan 23, 2015 07:27
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SpartanIV posted:Anyone ever had a consultant refuse to work with them? I haven't yet but I think this might be the one. My managers are having me email him relentlessly asking him for quotes that we need exact answers for but cannot provide any specifications to. I mean, I'm a consultant and if you couldn't provide me with a clear description of what you wanted up front, the answer for a quote would be "$5000-$500,000, depending on the scope of the project, please provide more detail." And then if you asked what $5000 covered and what $500k covered, I'd probably roll my eyes and go work on something else.
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Jan 23, 2015 14:53
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SpartanIV posted:Anyone ever had a consultant refuse to work with them? I haven't yet but I think this might be the one. My managers are having me email him relentlessly asking him for quotes that we need exact answers for but cannot provide any specifications to. Mostly. Back when I worked at Samsung, our Korean overlords didn't really understand the concepts of "boundaries" or "hired contractors aren't your salaried employees so they're not at your beck and call" and so I was on some uncomfortable meetings where our contractor basically told us that if we continued to call his employees at their home numbers on weekends over trivial bullshit they were going to just end the contact and go away. The worst part of that is that those contractors were ENTIRELY UNNECESSARY, and in the end our own implementation of what they did (which worked better and would have been done sooner if we didn't have to babysit them) ended up getting used.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:03
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Good morning, TPS thread. Have you considered how you could be a better, more collaborative participant in your next meeting? Perhaps you should take a few lessons from Moosie the Moose. Image Removed. Please contact your HR department to see how many CE credits you get for reading that poster. There is a Moosie the Moose plushie in every conference room just to remind you of his words of wisdom. (You all know where I work, but I figured I'd black out the company name just to be safe.  )Edit: This is round 2 of the poster, by the way. They originally spelled it "concensus" and had to go reprint all the posters. Sundae fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Apr 5, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 15:42
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Grouco posted:I recently started my first "office job," and after being a loyal reader of this thread I feel like I'm either in some sort of alternative universe, or blissfully ignorant of some unforeseen yet impending reality check. This is what's known as the 'honeymoon period' and can last anywhere between 2 to 6 months. See how you feel after the glow wears off.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:45
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Sundae posted:Good morning, TPS thread. Have you considered how you could be a better, more collaborative participant in your next meeting? Perhaps you should take a few lessons from Moosie the Moose. You know on the one hand I'd be incredibly insulted that HR views me with the same mental capacity of a 4th grader but on the other hand there are actually people who not only be told these things but constantly reminded
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Jan 23, 2015 15:51
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Sundae posted:Good morning, TPS thread. Have you considered how you could be a better, more collaborative participant in your next meeting? Perhaps you should take a few lessons from Moosie the Moose. That picture is a bit fuzzy, so I initially read the first disruptive action as 'snuggling'. And why is it "The Moose is on the table"? They totally should have gone with "The Moose is on the loose!" That would have been much more trite and nonsensical.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:54
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Sorry about the picture quality. My cell phone's camera is awful. Apparently it's our company's version of addressing the "elephant in the room." Open, honest communication puts the moose on the table and doesn't hide it. Yeah.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:56
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My mom used to work in the offices of a school district that also shared the building with the special needs students (mentally handicapped). On the wall on their side of the building was a poster that read like We are adults, and adults: 1. Wash their hands 2. Clean up after themselves 3. Don't scream 4. etc. I want to find copies of that poster and put them up in every workplace.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:56
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Necc0 posted:You know on the one hand I'd be incredibly insulted that HR views me with the same mental capacity of a 4th grader but on the other hand there are actually people who not only be told these things but constantly reminded Given that HR policies are almost always reactive, there is always a story behind any specific policy - usually an amusing/horrifying one. Especially ones that use the phrase 'inappropriate behaviour'
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Jan 23, 2015 16:07
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Necc0 posted:You know on the one hand I'd be incredibly insulted that HR views me with the same mental capacity of a 4th grader but on the other hand there are actually people who not only be told these things but constantly reminded Yeah, I'm willing to roll my eyes and put up with some of this silliness if it gets someone to not be an irredeemable rear end in a top hat when they otherwise would have been. SpartanIV posted:My mom used to work in the offices of a school district that also shared the building with the special needs students (mentally handicapped). On the wall on their side of the building was a poster that read like This is where I tell everyone again about my old boss, who used to shriek "WOO HOO!" at the top of his lungs in the hall, outside offices that had people like me in them who need to concentrate for long periods of time for a living. There wasn't anything to celebrate, no local football teams had won a game, we hadn't just met some huge milestone. He just wanted attention, to remind everyone that he existed, no exaggeration. Sometimes he would "rev up." Like, "woo woo wOo WOO WOOO WOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" Every goddamn day.
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Jan 23, 2015 16:48
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SubjectVerbObject posted:And why is it "The Moose is on the table"? They totally should have gone with "The Moose is on the loose!" That would have been much more trite and nonsensical.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:18
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Che Delilas posted:Yeah, I'm willing to roll my eyes and put up with some of this silliness if it gets someone to not be an irredeemable rear end in a top hat when they otherwise would have been. What in the actual gently caress?  Seriously, how do some people stay employed?
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Jan 23, 2015 17:22
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HiroProtagonist posted:What in the actual gently caress? In this case, by being shamelessly self-promoting and having the ear of the one person who had the final say on everything. I quit that job largely because of my boss, and I've learned since that people who have been at that company for years and years have quit within months of being placed under him, I'm sure not coincidentally. The person they hired to replace me walked out after half as long as I lasted, with no notice, because she literally could not take being around him for one more day. He is quite truthfully costing the company their best people, and they do not care.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:34
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Sundae posted:Good morning, TPS thread. Have you considered how you could be a better, more collaborative participant in your next meeting? Perhaps you should take a few lessons from Moosie the Moose. My favorite part is on the Do's side, where one bullet point says you should agree to disagree rather than feeling obligated to come to consensus, but then the point immediately after says that for decision making purposes everybody should ultimately align. 
Sydin fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 18:23
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Sydin posted:My favorite part is on the Do's side, where one bullet point says you should agree to disagree rather than feeling obligated to come to consensus, but then the point immediately after says that for decision making purposes everybody should ultimately align. Thats not necessarily a bad thing. I can agree to disagree with something my boss wants done, or the direction that a certain project is going, but when it comes time to actually do the work, you can't have someone second guessing or deliberately tanking the project because thats not what they wanted or how they wanted it done. Being in training, I don't agree with every single policy or best practice that corporate comes up with, but when I'm out there working with end users, I certainly can't tell them "here's this policy that you have to follow that I'm going to train you on but FWIW its loving retarded P.S. corporate goons are dummies" and expect to keep my job very much longer.
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Jan 23, 2015 18:33
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Did the moose move my cheese?
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Jan 23, 2015 18:56
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Not sure about the cheese, but it was certainly an owner of our business.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:06
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Volmarias posted:Mostly. Back when I worked at Samsung, our Korean overlords didn't really understand the concepts of "boundaries" or "hired contractors aren't your salaried employees so they're not at your beck and call" and so I was on some uncomfortable meetings where our contractor basically told us that if we continued to call his employees at their home numbers on weekends over trivial bullshit they were going to just end the contact and go away. I have an intense dislike for Korean engineering contractors and I make a point of never giving them anything but my office number because of poo poo like that. Although sometimes I also ignore the office phone if it rings with a Korean extension because they have a habit of giving you an impossible deadline for something at the last minute then calling every hour for updates and wondering why you haven't made much progress.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:39
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Sundae posted:Good morning, TPS thread. Have you considered how you could be a better, more collaborative participant in your next meeting? Perhaps you should take a few lessons from Moosie the Moose. Meh, Moosie the Moose sounds more fun then Fish! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish!_Philosophy
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Jan 23, 2015 19:42
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Ugh gently caress fish! They showed us the video during onboard at my last customer service job, then spent four hours enumerating everything we weren't allowed to do anywhere near a customer. Someone pointed out that by policy, the guys in fish should have been fired (throwing things, shouting, giving customers nicknames) and the trainer got really pissed off, it was amazing.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:45
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Pfizer used to use Fish. They called it their "Pfish!" program, and it broke every aspect of the program and turned it into even bigger bullshit than it already was.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:52
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Blindeye posted:I think my Dad is becoming that way too trusting/good middle manager unicorn is his company. After doing corporate and global accounts he was reassigned to be an on-site manager to handle business with another company whose office is super chill. So for the last year and a half it's helped him be more calm because he deals with his client which is a laid back company more than his own company which is super cutthroat and very cliquish. In general my Dad has actually been pretty good for being an older guy who could easily fall into complacency: he laughed at both his and his client's company for offering laughably low salaries for new hires: "bachelors with a master's preferred in NYC for 28k starting? Do you want these kids to hate us or have you not changed the pay scales after you hired me?" It honestly sounds like lost a power struggle in the middle but he's still to important to fire. The VP of the client more then likely doesn't have the pull to do anything to your Dad so don't worry about it.
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