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I used to work at the only good MSP I've ever heard of, it was legit a good experience for how bad of a rap they get. All of a sudden, it did a total 180 in literally a month. Let go some good workers, others quit, they announced a merger that "isn't like a typical merger, nothing will change". Knew it was bullshit, poo poo changed. We didn't get raises so we "don't have to let anyone go". They then immediately replaced all the seasoned good people with fresh IT guys who don't know poo poo and then hired 10+ brand new people, some who have lower job titles than me and get paid more than my manager. I've hopped off that wreck, got a 20K raise and 23+ days PTO and transitioned into Internal IT all in one go. I would've actually stayed otherwise.
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Feb 28, 2021 00:02
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Tetramin posted:Hot desking at any job that isn’t like, a call center is obscene. Modern loving work environment. This was all years before covid, too. The place was so wildly dysfunctional. I heard a story about a guy who would take like 2 hour bathroom breaks every day. So happy to get out of there.
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Feb 28, 2021 00:10
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Slumpy posted:I used to work at the only good MSP I've ever heard of, it was legit a good experience for how bad of a rap they get. I started my career by working in a support role for a software company and learned a ton, but after that I’ve been internal for the last few jobs. Part of me thinks I should get a gig with an MSP just to strengthen my skills, but I’m not wanting to go back to what basically amounts to customer support and dealing with grades on my work from customers. I feel like I skipped a step in my development. At the same time, I can talk the talk and am knowledgeable about poo poo so I’ll be able to get most gigs I want, but I’ll be figuring poo poo out as I go if I’m suddenly in a new environment.
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Feb 28, 2021 00:10
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ilmucche posted:I heard a story about a guy who would take like 2 hour bathroom breaks every day. That guy knew what was up
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Feb 28, 2021 01:07
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i dunno what any of this agile, gants, or scrum means... Not sure if that's good or bad for my job prospects
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Feb 28, 2021 01:59
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Thesaurus posted:i dunno what any of this agile, gants, or scrum means... Not sure if that's good or bad for my job prospects
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Feb 28, 2021 02:16
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Every company I've ever worked at offices have only been for people two titles above me, I get promoted within one, and then they switch to open office and only c-suite get offices. This isn't a joke, this is my literal entire career. Somewhere there is a person who started like 5 years before me who keeps jumping ship juuuust fast enough to keep an office their whole career. Hot desking or as they like to call it "Activity Based Workstations" makes absolutely no sense even when attempted to be spun as a positive. Every company I've ever seen do it within about two weeks every team has carved out their space they always work from and never leave and if you need to find another team you can't look up on a chart where they are you have to beg for knowledge from someone. The absolute best is I've seen it used to freeze out new hires people don't like by denying them seats with their team and forcing them to sit by themselves or get pushed out of other teams areas until they quit. The funniest part to me is they always try to sell it on "you can change who you sit with during the day as needs change!" but again, uh, accounts payable, operations, hr, etc none of them would ever need to or want to move. Even better when the department heads keep offices and for some reason their whole department is always camped out in front of their office and never budges I wonder why that is????
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Feb 28, 2021 02:55
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Thesaurus posted:i dunno what any of this agile, gants, or scrum means... Not sure if that's good or bad for my job prospects Honestly, they doesn't mean much of anything when it comes down to it. Any framework or even no framework can work if your management aren't shitheads, which is where the real sticking point is. On the note of Gantts: Has anyone on god's green earth ever seen a gantt chart that was both accurate, actionable and used to make an actual decision? I swear those things must have the absolute worst ratio of time spent maintaining them to actionable information produced.
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Feb 28, 2021 06:20
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A company was switching to activity based workstations and they were like "we're going to make all the offices meeting rooms, some just for one person phone calls" and then wanted feed back at a company wide meeting. God rest the anonymous caller who asked in front of 600 people "can we make the phone call rooms frosted glass? I'd like to have somewhere private to cry so my coworkers can't see me"
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Feb 28, 2021 07:11
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Tetramin posted:Hot desking at any job that isn’t like, a call center is obscene. My job has introduced hot desking as an incentive to get more homeoffice days. 2 instead of 1 if you opt in, after corona of course. I'm very annoyed that homeoffice is such a big deal for a company that brands itself as a "fresh, innovative player on a dusty market", hell, we've got a variation of the word punk in our name. I'm an adult, let me set my own office days ffs, I'm actually sick af of only sitting at home but the commute is 1.5 hours every day and staying at home is very good for my motivation you idiots.
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Feb 28, 2021 09:09
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Sardonik posted:On the note of Gantts: Has anyone on god's green earth ever seen a gantt chart that was both accurate, actionable and used to make an actual decision? I swear those things must have the absolute worst ratio of time spent maintaining them to actionable information produced. I'm in mechanical engineering, not software. For anything that isn't R&D they work well. This is the kind of job where you update a part to a slightly different shape in a CAD model one afternoon and it takes six months for all the follow on tasks to do with manufacture and QA to be finalised.
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Feb 28, 2021 10:30
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Sardonik posted:Honestly, they doesn't mean much of anything when it comes down to it. Any framework or even no framework can work if your management aren't shitheads, which is where the real sticking point is. They're useful for super rote projects where the detail matters and you need to know of your injection molding tooling is going to try and happen during new year. For development they are useful at an ultra high level to gain an estimate of "is this a three months or three years project?". For research they are pointless. I work in R&D and my current major project has a dedicated project manager who seems amazed that nobody put her looks at the giant chart every day to know where we are and she tries to get us to replan every time something changes via half day meetings. Which is about once a week. Added to the agile stuff we're doing in parallel for some reason means I have about two and a half days of time to work each week. Thankfully I'm managing to keep the team out of those meetings so they can get work done
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Feb 28, 2021 10:43
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Have to vent a bit in here, seems like the place so here I go: HR needs (like absolutely neeeeeeds) everyone to tell corporate what they are doing and how they are doing it — every 6 months. It amounts to a mass arse licking project where we dissect our roles and how every little thing we do makes us better. Us. Not them, because, hey they exist and if not for them we'd be living on the street. I got told that my 9 stage, 3 sections per stage form were "disappointing" after spending 2 hours on it. My boss decided that I was being under-rated in my words and talents and I was made to feel that I was letting the side down. Turns out my boss had no idea what the dicks in management wanted to hear. My boss made me rewrite what had taken me 4 hours of my out of life, to lick the owners balls Of whom (Newscorp) are crying poor. loving cunts.
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Feb 28, 2021 12:17
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I have my annual review next week, with someone I don't think I've ever actually talked to, let alone formally met. I guess he's my supervisor? Honestly couldn't tell you. Looking forward to that, I'm sure it'll be super accurate and useful.
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Feb 28, 2021 20:04
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Tetramin posted:Hot desking at any job that isn’t like, a call center is obscene. I had a job with hotdesking but we had seven stations at four people on at a time at most. Well, there was 30-60 minute crossovers between shifts (24 hour operation) but it just meant a couple people from the leaving shift would chill in the corner for a bit. But, of course, there was one lovely boomer that would get all up-in-arms if he couldn't have his favorite desk. He also made a ton of """jokes""" about how much he hated his (now third) wife. So, like, that dude was miserable. edit: Trapick posted:I have my annual review next week, with someone I don't think I've ever actually talked to, let alone formally met. I guess he's my supervisor? Honestly couldn't tell you. Looking forward to that, I'm sure it'll be super accurate and useful. My annual review was coming up and my boss said, "You can fill out your portion now or if you're too busy we can fill it out in our meeting." I was crazy busy, told him as much and he said it was fine. We then have our meeting and the first thing he does is complain that I didn't enter anything. Did it again a few times throughout the meeting. Like, what the gently caress do you want from me?! Inzombiac fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Feb 28, 2021 |
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Feb 28, 2021 20:19
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once worked with a Boomer who would try to talk about the bodies of the women here worked with the second they let the room He said he didn’t like rap because it was misogynistic
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Feb 28, 2021 20:57
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A partner at my company (who is an rear end in a top hat) personally called an entry-level job candidate to reject her for using the wrong form of "they're/their/there" in her resume.
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Feb 28, 2021 21:02
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Sardonik posted:On the note of Gantts: Has anyone on god's green earth ever seen a gantt chart that was both accurate, actionable and used to make an actual decision? I swear those things must have the absolute worst ratio of time spent maintaining them to actionable information produced. I used to work for a guy who should be banned from Gantt charts. Here's how he'd prepare one  "Engineer, how long will it take you to design this circuitboard?" "I dunno two weeks?" "Ok great I'll put 1-2 weeks""And how long will it take for our supplier (that we've used for years and years) to make the board?" "It always takes 4 weeks, maybe put 5 just in case" "Well we need to go fast so we'll talk to them about going faster. I'll put two weeks""How long will it take for you to test and verify the board (that doesn't exist yet)?" "Well if it's absolutely perfect, probably only a few days, but no circuitboard is ever perfect on the first design" "I'm putting 3 days"He'd do this with every discipline, and then blame us all in a nasty passive aggressive way for "slipping". As a result of constantly being "behind schedule" everything was done in a rush. This kept up for two and a half years, so we never had time to do any real planning (like risk assessments even though it was in a new regulatory area for us). He could not understand why I quit, told me I was lucky I even got to talk directly with the CEO as a lowly worker, and then tried to tell me it would be exactly the same at my next place. It isn't lol
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Feb 28, 2021 23:31
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Splode posted:I used to work for a guy who should be banned from Gantt charts. poo poo like this is why I am glad my program manager hears my estimates and always doubles them
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Feb 28, 2021 23:47
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Code Jockey posted:poo poo like this is why I am glad my program manager hears my estimates and always doubles them God I wish. We have actual measurable data for how long our processes take that our manager required to be measured and continues to maintain and he still shaves 30% off everything before passing it along as "our" estimates.
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Feb 28, 2021 23:53
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Just do the Star Trek thing and give estimates that are longer than you think it’ll actually take
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Mar 1, 2021 00:22
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Why, though??? Who is ever impressed by low estimates and long delays in actual production?
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Mar 1, 2021 00:28
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God I hate how people in charge slash the time estimates they get from the people doing the actual work. I work in corporate for a retail company and one of our stores is moving locations, the new store was supposed to be up and running tomorrow. I was down there to set some poo poo up 3 weeks ago and did my stuff, but they don’t even have a fuckin certificate of occupancy yet and the entire front of the building doesn’t exist, it’s just draped with tarps. Our low voltage electrician hasn’t been able to terminate his cables because there aren’t any walls. It’s basically a huge empty space. I’m on weekly calls and the general contractor is like “yup were all good! My guys are working nights and weekends!” While I know for a fact that the entire crew dips out after lunch most days. I don’t care about any of that but I’ve just been laughing every week as they say this. My coworker was supposed to head down with the store set up team this last Friday, and the contractor calls them up about 30 minutes before they’re all gonna head down there to finally fess up. Like what’s the point in just letting stuff get to the point of no return to actually admit that wait no we can’t do it. I also just found out this week that we are opening up a brand new store, and there is a hard open date of 5/1. There’s just absolutely no chance. Apparently the mall they’re putting it in has it in the contract that the store needs to be open on that day or else the other stores in the building get to renegotiate their own rental contracts or something. poo poo is not gonna happen in time and it’s a failure from day one.
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Mar 1, 2021 00:30
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poisonpill posted:Why, though??? Who is ever impressed by low estimates and long delays in actual production? You're looking at it from the wrong direction - acknowledging what a person can do and then assuming the outcome from that. These managers have an outcome in mind, and as far as they're concerned, if you set an outcome then it forces workers to keep up with it. This is the same manager, in my case, that brought me into his office for "some other questions" and quickly derailed it into making me watch some "self-help" "motivational speaker" going on about how the only way to ever be successful is if you want to succeed more than you want to eat or breathe, and some story about nearly drowning someone to make them prove they wanted to keep going. Weird loving poo poo but this dude is genuinely convinced the only thing that keeps his goals from happening is that people aren't pushed hard enough. I can do short bursts at the speeds he wants, but I'm already burnt out on this job for reasons that maybe belong more in E/N than here; I'm not loving pushing myself 8 hours a day, especially not with an employer-inflicted RSI they're loving around on doing anything about, to make 0 bonus and 0 recognition. We don't even have an "employee of the month" program any more so I won't even get the $25 gift card pittance or whatever bullshit it was before it was shut down.
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Mar 1, 2021 00:44
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SkyeAuroline posted:You're looking at it from the wrong direction - acknowledging what a person can do and then assuming the outcome from that. New job time. You don’t owe them loving poo poo. Quit.
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Mar 1, 2021 00:48
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Tetramin posted:New job time. You don’t owe them loving poo poo. Quit. Semi-rural red states. Not even once. Lot of resentment for my parents moving back here from the coast (Navy family) before I was born. Lot of opportunities that don't exist without the money to get out and the connections to land somewhere safely.
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Mar 1, 2021 00:57
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poisonpill posted:Why, though??? Who is ever impressed by low estimates and long delays in actual production? So in this case, this is because: - the company bills clients per hour (time and materials) - my boss was criminally unethical and believed his own bullshit So we estimate really low, win the project, then go 300% over budget. This just means the company makes more money, as there are no penalties for exceeding our budget estimates. Funnily enough this place doesn't get a lot of return customers! My new place mostly does a lot of fix cost contracts, so I double my estimate, then my boss doubles my estimate, then his boss adds contingency. Then we win the project anyway, I finish in half my estimated time (because I'm not being hassled and stressing out) everybody wins!
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Mar 1, 2021 01:00
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Sardonik posted:On the note of Gantts: Has anyone on god's green earth ever seen a gantt chart that was both accurate, actionable and used to make an actual decision? I swear those things must have the absolute worst ratio of time spent maintaining them to actionable information produced. Specifically, this was manufacturing in Chinese factories, so there was a lot of face to lose by admitting milestones were slipping. If you didn't have concrete step-by-step evidence to which you could hold them showing they'd miss it, then they'd just arm-wave away the problem until it became too late. They'd invariably claim they'd catch it up by doing some other stage faster, but you could then push them on the productivity x number of shifts calculation and eventually they'd throw on additional afternoon/night shifts, or move workers from a non-critical path to the critical one (another use of the Gantt to see where we could slow production and reallocate staff to catch up on the critical path), which helped a lot to minimise any delays. He was an awesome PM, and we poached him back to the engineering side and now he's my boss and it rocks. Code Jockey posted:poo poo like this is why I am glad my program manager hears my estimates and always doubles them  I have almost always had really good PMs and they save my arse so much trouble. Nam Taf fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Mar 1, 2021 |
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Mar 1, 2021 01:30
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Ziv Zulander posted:Just do the Star Trek thing and give estimates that are longer than you think it’ll actually take I've done that. The immediate reaction is "can we pay to expedite?" The answer is always no, the parts always show up on time. They are always not needed for another two months anyways.
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Mar 1, 2021 01:31
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Nam Taf posted:
If my PM leaves (not to retire, but for another job), it's gonna take quite a salary bump to keep me from following her. She's been one of the few people in my career I can honestly call a mentor. Just amazing at her job, and we've become personal friends as well. A really incredible human being. A few weeks ago, my job pulled me off of the two gigantic, holy-poo poo scale projects I was juggling to have me focus on a much smaller but much more time sensitive one. Reading the story of the not-ready store above made me remember this. The delivery dates for one of those giant projects are hilarious. The business keeps shifting requirements, we haven't decided on a bunch of key technology yet (let alone purchasing and installing and testing it, and integrating it with our in house software), and just every drat day it was something new. I'm still talking to a PM buddy who is on that team, and... it isn't getting any better, and time's a ticking! Meanwhile my smaller scope project is entirely defined by my dates (we have a hard must-have date that's near the end of the year but we'll easily make it) and I'm running it with someone I really like working with, and I'm getting paid the same, so I'll take it.
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Mar 1, 2021 01:38
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SkyeAuroline posted:That's easy to say from the outside. I've been actively searching since well before I took my position back. Turns out that "paying over twice minimum w/ reasonable hours" isn't duplicated elsewhere without masters' degrees I don't have (yeah, job market is that hosed), and relocating far enough to get a new job market takes money I don't have and will continue to not have as long as I'm in the middle of ongoing medical hell. The positions that will take me and pay enough to make rent (in a low-end apartment complex that I can't cut rent any further from without ending up in a cockroach den) & live my fairly spartan life... don't exist here. Moving to where those positions do exist would require me to manage something like an 80% pay increase to continue to cover, again, low-end-without-literal-slum rent. At least for now I'm getting paid enough to survive while I keep looking, and while they're not actively helping me, my manager is at least willing to work the schedule with me to make access to medical appointments possible in a manner that no previous employer has been willing to do. Good ol' American "tie healthcare and the money to afford it to employment, then put people in precarious situations where they need it". Of course, it is easy to say that from the outside indeed. I’ve dealt with awful work environments before and it’s hard as hell to just jump ship. I just hope you can find a way to not let it weigh on you. It sounds like you’re putting up with some awful people and hopefully the situation can change soon.
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Mar 1, 2021 01:39
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Tetramin posted:Of course, it is easy to say that from the outside indeed. I’ve dealt with awful work environments before and it’s hard as hell to just jump ship. I just hope you can find a way to not let it weigh on you. It sounds like you’re putting up with some awful people and hopefully the situation can change soon. I stayed in helljob entirely too long for a lot of reasons which were due to how predatory that job was. They knew they could underpay "green" people, keep them just under competitive rates, but tell them the right things to make them afraid to jump ship. This meshed perfectly with the lifelong anxiety I've had about my finances and economic stability. gently caress you, helljob. You knew exactly what you were doing to people.
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Mar 1, 2021 01:46
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Tetramin posted:Of course, it is easy to say that from the outside indeed. I’ve dealt with awful work environments before and it’s hard as hell to just jump ship. I just hope you can find a way to not let it weigh on you. It sounds like you’re putting up with some awful people and hopefully the situation can change soon. Doing my best over here. The way things are arranged right now I only have to deal with a couple people, it's pretty "fixed" work & expectations (so, boring, but unlikely to run into any giant issues & fairly easy to predict what's going on in the future), and I'm making significant progress on my own goal of automating the busy work to focus on the stuff that needs human hands. Dealing with these ancient garbage systems and with the people that run them is a mess, but win some, lose some. I was supposed to be running a separate team without having to deal with this manager, so if we ever get the funding for more people, then maybe that'll get me out from under the thumb. Don't like management but at least I've worked with the systems being managed. In the meantime, continuing to track down leads.
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Mar 1, 2021 01:47
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I've seen Gantt charts on the walls of construction site offices often enough, I don't know if they have accurate timings or anything, but if nothing else they'd be a useful reference to make sure you haven't forgotten a major step on a complex project.
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Mar 1, 2021 01:50
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There's nothing inherently wrong with gantt charts, but they don't handle tasks that take a variable amount of time well*, and like every other management tool, they can he abused by dickheads and used to dress up wishful thinking and idiocy so it LOOKS like intelligent planning has been done.
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Mar 1, 2021 02:14
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Gantt charts work very well for projects where you know what you need to do up front, you know which parts depend on each other, and you know roughly how long each part is going to take. Any attempts to apply them in situations where you don't have those conditions is going to end badly.
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Mar 1, 2021 03:02
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A good gantt chart: This part takes 5 weeks to design, 3 to test, two for extraneous approvals and feedback so next piece dependency can start blah blah blah A bad gantt chart: This loving rear end in a top hat with the data usually takes a week to get back to me but gently caress me if he doesn't just sometimes dissappear into a magical back alley for weeks at a time and uh now that I squint this request has nothing to do with what the client asked for in the first place, why is this attached on the same chain?
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Mar 1, 2021 03:14
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Splode posted:So in this case, this is because: Literaly? Because tipping the police/authorities off about shithead employers is objectively a good thing for workers and society.
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Mar 1, 2021 03:51
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Outrail posted:Literaly? Because tipping the police/authorities off about shithead employers is objectively a good thing for workers and society. Not literally criminal but he did get taken to court by pissed off clients reasonably regularly. When he tried to get us to bend safety regulations the answer was either no or the design failed certification testing, so the system works I guess!
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Mar 1, 2021 04:03
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Our company wont publish an org chart because 'it might hurt peoples feelings to be on the bottom of the chart' in reality, it lets the 10 complete shitheads in the business continue to be shitheads because literally nobody knows who they report to. They're also not grunts but regional/dept managers.
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Mar 1, 2021 04:19
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