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Proud Christian Mom posted:Large companies love to poo poo all over small vendors/suppliers because they can. If theyre your largest customer, and they know it, you really can't say no if they decide to start paying you 180 days out. That one is probably because even the worst manager understands that you never, ever under any circumstances come between a worker and coffee.
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May 25, 2017 19:55
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Proud Christian Mom posted:Large companies love to poo poo all over small vendors/suppliers because they can. If theyre your largest customer, and they know it, you really can't say no if they decide to start paying you 180 days out. Yeah, +360 isn't unheard of in my neck of the woods.
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May 25, 2017 22:27
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John Lewis of all companies have a raft of county court judgements against them for not paying invoices. And its always some ridiculously stupid amount like £500 quid.
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May 25, 2017 22:33
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Proud Christian Mom posted:Large companies love to poo poo all over small vendors/suppliers because they can. If theyre your largest customer, and they know it, you really can't say no if they decide to start paying you 180 days out. A ton of it is incompetence, not malice. With a big company no one is responsible for anything. If a bill or two doesn't get paid it isn't anyone's issue until it shows on a report a few months later. Or until someone calls and raises hell. Even then getting anything done can take weeks more because no one cares and everyone is just going through the motions.
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May 25, 2017 22:57
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Xae posted:A ton of it is incompetence, not malice. Bureaucracy too. When companies get big enough nobody's personally invested in maintaining vendor relationships or sticking to budgets, so they compensate for that by exhaustively documenting purchases in long approval chains. One link in the chain goes on vacation or gets fired and welp, gear up the approval chain for modifying the approval chain.
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May 25, 2017 23:35
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Bureaucracy too. When companies get big enough nobody's personally invested in maintaining vendor relationships or sticking to budgets, so they compensate for that by exhaustively documenting purchases in long approval chains. One link in the chain goes on vacation or gets fired and welp, gear up the approval chain for modifying the approval chain. I had a retail client that came with in about a week from failing a SOX audit because the required software upgrade wasn't approved in time. It wasn't approved because the person who approves the purchases was on vacation. When they got back and approved it the Final Approval person was on vacation. The exec in charge of purchasing didn't even have a log in to the system so approve it for us. It got resolved by an accounting VP literally whipping out his AMEX card and saying "gently caress it. I'll just read you the numbers" on a conference call with the vendor. Doesn't matter if the system almost led to a huge clusterfuck. Purchasing followed the process so they weren't at fault. ALL HAIL THE PROCESS. The Process is like a magic trick that makes accountability vanish into thin air!
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May 25, 2017 23:50
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Xae posted:I had a retail client that came with in about a week from failing a SOX audit because the required software upgrade wasn't approved in time. I worked for a place that designated roles in the approval chain by specific people's names, not their titles. So The Process wasn't "Have the VP of Purchasing sign off in step 3" but "Have Joe Smith sign off." If Joe knew he was going to be unavailable, he could enact a multi-day process to designate a delegate to do his approvals for him, but for no more than 30 days and renewing the delegate took another whole approval process. And only Joe himself could initiate the process, so if, as frequently happened, Joe got fired and marched out the door before setting up a delegate, that approval chain was a dead end. Permanently. Even if you got some advance warning, you had to continually renew the delegation settings for former employees, because once someone was built into the approval chain there was literally no way to remove them. The system was so spammy that most people had their email notifications turned off (otherwise you'd get 20 or 30 emails for every invoice, letting you know that every single other person in your approval chain had viewed an item), so to actually get something approved you had to call each person on the chain and ask them to look up your purchase by its 15-digit ID code and approve it. Which worked okay when Joe Smith was actually still working there, but frequently you'd have to suss out who the delegate of the delegate of the delegate of Joe Smith was because turnover was so high. They were two years overdue with some vendors, and they'd been blacklisted by so many that they literally had to buy their own workshop for producing an incredibly fundamental product (think like, a car assembly plant that can't source tires) because no one in the entire world with the production capacity they needed would work with them anymore.
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May 26, 2017 00:01
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Xae posted:The Process is like a magic trick that makes accountability vanish into thin air! Of course. THE PROCESS got developed (ie approved and taken credit for) by someone much higher ranking and better paid than you. Duh.
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May 26, 2017 00:30
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:Of course. THE PROCESS got developed (ie approved and taken credit for) by someone much higher ranking and better paid than you. Duh. Really bad consulting joke: You know the difference between accountability and a Unicorn? I've never seen either, but at least heard someone describe a Unicorn. Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I worked for a place that designated roles in the approval chain by specific people's names, not their titles. So The Process wasn't "Have the VP of Purchasing sign off in step 3" but "Have Joe Smith sign off." If Joe knew he was going to be unavailable, he could enact a multi-day process to designate a delegate to do his approvals for him, but for no more than 30 days and renewing the delegate took another whole approval process. And only Joe himself could initiate the process, so if, as frequently happened, Joe got fired and marched out the door before setting up a delegate, that approval chain was a dead end. Permanently. Even if you got some advance warning, you had to continually renew the delegation settings for former employees, because once someone was built into the approval chain there was literally no way to remove them. The worst process I've ever seen was at a huge global conglomerate. Like 85 business units all over the globe huge. We were working a Master Data Management process. They wanted to make sure that the "4cm reverse threaded hex bolt" was the same all through out the company. Now the code we wrote generated the full and official name. But they wanted a way to change the name if needed. The process for this change would require the "Data Manager" at all business units to approve any change in 48 hours. 84 approvals, 48 hours. Why? Because the company was "collaborative" and "agile". So you couldn't just assume that someone was OK with a change. Oh no, they had to collaborate and sign off on it! And since they were agile the approval window had to be short. They insisted on the process even when we pointed out it was going to be impossible. Eventually the executive who thought of the "Collaborative and Agile" process had to get approvals on his own poo poo and Came to Jesus. Thankfully we were able to charge them 3 times for the deal. Once to try and talk them out of it, once to do it wrong and once to fix it. Xae fucked around with this message at 00:42 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 00:33
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blowfish posted:Of course. THE PROCESS got developed (ie approved and taken credit for) by someone much higher ranking and better paid than you. Duh. Ironclad PROCESSES that you can never, ever violate mostly just create a lose/lose scenario for employees often. If you violate THE PROCESS then you defied a DIRECT ORDER from your superiors. You are insubordinate and you are fired. If you anger a customer while following THE PROCESS then you angered a customer and are a lovely employee because you're supposed to make the customers happy. You lost the company money and are fired. It isn't a matter of IF you violate company policy but WHEN. Granted I also worked at Walmart for too many years. You'd constantly get conflicting instructions between your immediate managers, their managers, and written company policy. Meanwhile you weren't payed enough to care. No matter what you did you were wrong so you just picked whichever option was easiest at the moment and accepted that you'd eventually get written up for some totally unrelated, bullshit reason anyway just coincidentally near review time when you got your raise. It was literally impossible to be a good enough employee to get the biggest raise which was like 50 cents an hour.
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May 26, 2017 00:35
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Target's website is so needlessly bad that it should be used as a case study in schools in how not to put together retail site for a large retailer.
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May 26, 2017 01:13
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Space Poodle posted:Target's website is so needlessly bad that it should be used as a case study in schools in how not to put together retail site for a large retailer. Which is amusing because they're the reason websites have to be ada compatible.
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May 26, 2017 01:49
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duz posted:Which is amusing because they're the reason websites have to be ada compatible. What's the story there?
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May 26, 2017 01:50
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:What's the story there? They got sued by the National Federation of the Blind because their site sucked.
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May 26, 2017 01:53
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I thought I had it bad when our main customer decided to give themselves a 2% discount for paying net 10 after unilaterally imposing a 15% cut in payments because they can
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May 26, 2017 02:18
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I worked for a place that designated roles in the approval chain by specific people's names, not their titles. So The Process wasn't "Have the VP of Purchasing sign off in step 3" but "Have Joe Smith sign off." If Joe knew he was going to be unavailable, he could enact a multi-day process to designate a delegate to do his approvals for him, but for no more than 30 days and renewing the delegate took another whole approval process. And only Joe himself could initiate the process, so if, as frequently happened, Joe got fired and marched out the door before setting up a delegate, that approval chain was a dead end. Permanently. Even if you got some advance warning, you had to continually renew the delegation settings for former employees, because once someone was built into the approval chain there was literally no way to remove them. That place sounds like a nightmare to work at. Did no one try to fix or replace the system or approval chain?
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May 26, 2017 03:35
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Pharohman777 posted:That place sounds like a nightmare to work at. Unfortunately the guy who had to sign off on approval process changes left the company, and no one could get approval anymore. 
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May 26, 2017 03:47
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Wow that's all pretty impressively bad. Where are the people with systems background in these companies?
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May 26, 2017 05:29
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BrandorKP posted:Wow that's all pretty impressively bad. Where are the people with systems background in these companies? I... I don't think most of these people know what systems are. Even as a low level minion a decade ago I knew more about not tying yourself into a PROCESS knot, because the mentality of these places is MBAs are the only college degree of value to them. Not the good kind of MBA either. The "I am a midlevel manager of people who have lost the will to live" study track.
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May 26, 2017 05:41
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BrandorKP posted:Wow that's all pretty impressively bad. Where are the people with systems background in these companies? They're being ignored. There is no consequences for failure and the lay employees don't give a gently caress if they succeed. Even if SystemsGuy on my team is right why should I go out of my way to fix poo poo when I get paid either way?
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May 26, 2017 05:43
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Pharohman777 posted:That place sounds like a nightmare to work at. The company was a multinational with headquarters in a country that likes to think of itself as providing lifelong careers, so you aren't supposed to need to designate by title instead of name because employees stay forever because we value loyalty here. Also by questioning The Process you've proven you're insubordinate so you're fired.
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May 26, 2017 07:40
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So what happens when someone gets demoted using that system? Is it possible for the janitor or such to be the person who signs off on purchases because they were shuffled around in the company from their old position?
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May 26, 2017 12:25
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Xae posted:"Collaborative and Agile"
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May 26, 2017 13:16
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Best Buy keeps posting solid profits and their stock has jumped up again. I don't get it because they seem like a total dinosaur to me, and since I stopped working there in 2003 I've probably been into one a handful of times.
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May 26, 2017 14:25
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Pharohman777 posted:So what happens when someone gets demoted using that system? Is it possible for the janitor or such to be the person who signs off on purchases because they were shuffled around in the company from their old position? that would be more of a Japanese thing, in the US either you're using a union for your facilities operations or contracting it out.
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May 26, 2017 14:32
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Pharohman777 posted:So what happens when someone gets demoted using that system? Is it possible for the janitor or such to be the person who signs off on purchases because they were shuffled around in the company from their old position? I've literally never heard of someone getting demoted in the US, they're just fired. Do union employees get demoted?
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May 26, 2017 14:52
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I've heard of someone getting demoted in Goodwill of all places
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May 26, 2017 15:16
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FistEnergy posted:Best Buy keeps posting solid profits and their stock has jumped up again. Well, isn't that likely to be because they're about the only fully national store in their category left? They've also shaved off about 100 normal locations and 200 of those "Best Buy Mobile" branch locations since their height for store counts, rather than continuing with massive growth. And in their Canadian operations, where they used to have both Best Buy and Future Shop branded stores in the country, often locating a store from one very close to the other, they instead shut down the Future Shop brand and permanently closed any locations that were already close to an operating Best Buy, which surely saves money without much affecting revenue. You combine that with the fact that their Geek Squad service has developed a reputation with the average shopper as being a reliable place to get things fixed (regardless of the fact that various local repair places would probably charge less), which keeps people coming to the stores more often than they would otherwise do, and both is a revenue source in itself as well as a chance to tempt people into thinking "hmm maybe I could use some new gadget while I'm here". I'd say adding all these things together is why they've been able to get into a pattern of solid profitability after a few rough years adjusting to online shopping and stuff.
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May 26, 2017 15:29
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call to action posted:I've literally never heard of someone getting demoted in the US, they're just fired. Do union employees get demoted? All my experience with people getting demoted is to leave a black mark on their resume.
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May 26, 2017 15:49
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FistEnergy posted:Best Buy keeps posting solid profits and their stock has jumped up again. warranties. they print money
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May 26, 2017 15:55
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:warranties. they print money Best buy double dips on them. The warranty you buy is an insurance policy on the item through AIG. BBY gets a commission for selling the policy and gets to bill the repair against it.
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May 26, 2017 15:57
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duz posted:All my experience with people getting demoted is to leave a black mark on their resume. I voluntarily took a demotion once after having a nervous breakdown at the normal stress level for my position at the time. It worked out great, though, because I ended up really loving my new position and excelling in it so I made more money.
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May 26, 2017 16:51
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call to action posted:I've literally never heard of someone getting demoted in the US, they're just fired. Do union employees get demoted? Here there are plenty of cases where someone stops being a first line manager, picks up their toolbox and becomes a mechanic again. I certainly wouldn't look down on someone who realized that a bunch of management jobs were going to be axed or they decided they sucked at management.
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May 26, 2017 17:12
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Pharohman777 posted:So what happens when someone gets demoted using that system? Is it possible for the janitor or such to be the person who signs off on purchases because they were shuffled around in the company from their old position? I never heard of a demotion happening - they'd usually just fire people. But the company had a lot of sub-companies within it and I worked for one and then transferred to another. Completely legally and financially distinct entities, and yet for over a year post-transfer I would get approval requests for my old division and frantic calls from people I'd never met asking me to please approve their keyboard replacement so they could type sometime within the next month. That's right, not only were IT requests subject to the approval system, the approval chains weren't organized by expertise or stake-holders, but by dollar amount. So I, a lowly creative worker, wielded my mighty $1-499.99 approval ranking to decide if people all over the company could have phone chargers and k-cups. Another thing with this system was the higher the dollar amount, the more approvers you needed. Since they were so badly behind with most vendors, invoices would pile up and pile up until the totals were so high you needed the CFO to sign off on them. The CFO who lived in another country and didn't speak English, and was completely unreachable during American office hours. This company makes such colossally bad products that it gets thinkpieces written all "How???" But I know how. I know. Unrelated story did you know that in a dysfunctional company you can completely not do your job, like literally not do it at all, for roughly four months before anybody notices?
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May 26, 2017 17:40
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I voluntarily took a demotion once after having a nervous breakdown at the normal stress level for my position at the time. It worked out great, though, because I ended up really loving my new position and excelling in it so I made more money. Yeah, I was referring more to involuntary demotions. Those are a bit harder to explain away in an interview. Nothing wrong with a short stint as management/etc and realizing it's not for you. Potential issues if someone has a decade of management and then suddenly doesn't at their previous company.
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May 26, 2017 18:08
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One of the things I like about my job is that I have sufficient lack of oversight that I can just do something and solve a problem rather than figuring out what the drat process is. Because god knows if I follow the process I'll be here till next year waiting for resolution. Entertainingly this works because the store manager can blame any errors on me and I can blame the store for making the extra work necessary, and the process for chasing up either of those is sufficiently convoluted that it never gets back to either of us
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:13 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 18:10
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I never heard of a demotion happening - they'd usually just fire people. But the company had a lot of sub-companies within it and I worked for one and then transferred to another. Completely legally and financially distinct entities, and yet for over a year post-transfer I would get approval requests for my old division and frantic calls from people I'd never met asking me to please approve their keyboard replacement so they could type sometime within the next month. TB, I feel like the place you worked at is the place from that famous SA (at least I think it was here) story where a guy got re-assigned to a division that didn't really exist and no one noticed so he continued to get a paycheck despite not doing anything. poo poo does anyone have a link to that, it was hilarious. edit: here it is https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ axeil fucked around with this message at 18:24 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 18:21
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axeil posted:TB, I feel like the place you worked at is the place from that famous SA (at least I think it was here) story where a guy got re-assigned to a division that didn't really exist and no one noticed so he continued to get a paycheck despite not doing anything. This sounds like every organization that eventually gets large enough though.
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May 26, 2017 18:23
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:
I did this once. I was hired as a contract developer early in the process. So early in fact that they were not ready for development. But they were going to start developing any day! For the next 6 months I showed up attended all the meetings asked all the right questions and was exceedingly polite to everyone. But I did nothing. I went to read.amazon.com and plowed through novels. Eventually the project got cancelled because it was a cluster. But they liked me so much they hired me full time. All the other contractors, even the ones who were busy got let go. I consider it cashing out karma for some of my 80-100 hour sleeping under my desk projects. Moral of the story: following the dress code and having a minimal amount of social skills puts you a leg up on most people in IT.
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May 26, 2017 18:30
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Xae posted:I did this once. This puts you a leg up on a ton of people in a ton of industries. Showing up on time, or slightly early, and staying slightly late while being generally polite to everyone makes you hard to fire in a lot of places, even if you aren't particularly good at your job.
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May 26, 2017 18:46
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