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Machai posted:Actually the world is a vampire sent to draaaaaaaain. Compromise? The world is a gently caress'n suck'n vampire circling the drain?
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Mar 29, 2021 15:12
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Marmaduke! posted:First day back at work after nearly a month of training and holiday. So far there's been a false fire alarm and I've found out the global organisation has banned the use of date stamps. This is going to add up to hours of extra writing and terrible RSI for my team. I feel this post: That reminds me of when I was in a role reviewing human rights audit reports for a MegaCorp's overseas factories. It was mostly meaningless theater so we could claim to have a compliance program, especially as factories always got a minimum two weeks advance notice so they'd have time to update the fake payroll books and keep any workers auditors shouldn't see at home. I think the only real good we did was getting mega factories to do their annual fire drills and send photos of workers going down a staircase and milling around the parking lot. We had no impact on the installation of fire alarms, they'd just photoshop those onto a wall and as long as the same guy wasn't walking in the background in the before/after images we'd call it good.
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Mar 29, 2021 15:54
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Hyrax Attack! posted:That reminds me of when I was in a role reviewing human rights audit reports for a MegaCorp's overseas factories. It was mostly meaningless theater so we could claim to have a compliance program, especially as factories always got a minimum two weeks advance notice so they'd have time to update the fake payroll books and keep any workers auditors shouldn't see at home. Man, I'd love to hear more about this, how the lies and rubber-stamps multinational corporations use to pretend the treatment of the overseas labor they rely on is somehow compatible with the consciences of Western consumers works in reality.
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Mar 29, 2021 16:10
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A Strange Aeon posted:Man, I'd love to hear more about this, how the lies and rubber-stamps multinational corporations use to pretend the treatment of the overseas labor they rely on is somehow compatible with the consciences of Western consumers works in reality. There is no ethical consumption under 
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Mar 29, 2021 16:21
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Because of our structure, we literally cannot move faster than our slowest member. Every phase of a project must be reviewed and approved by at least one specific person and they can't seem to grok that we are all waiting on them to click a button. I've shown them numerous times, written them a workflow guide, shown them how important it is to do review right away but they will not do it unless we get on their case three times or so. This latest time they got bitchy about it saying, "Just move on to the next phase and I'll get my approvals done when I can." MOTHERFUCKER WE LITERALLY CAN'T. THE SYSTEM WON'T ALLOW IT TO GO FORWARD WITHOUT YOUR APPROVAL.
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Mar 29, 2021 16:22
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I've spent weeks showing managers how to click the "approve" button but every time they figure it out they end up leaving before they get a chance to use it regularly, and then I get a new manager babby to show the training to once again (only after months of having no approvals being legitimately signed for). And so the wheel turns.
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Mar 29, 2021 16:42
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Pope Corky the IX posted:The same company I mentioned earlier was mostly middle-aged women that printed out every single email and stored them in something like thirty filing cabinets around the office and warehouse. There used to be a huge stack of filing cabinets that blocked up a large room at my old workplace, and it had been there forever, effectively diving the room into two. When they were remodeling, they decided to open them up and all of them had been filled with the meticulously sorted and saved printouts of plans, notes, emails, and other papers this one lady who had retired a year previously had made.
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Mar 29, 2021 16:59
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A Strange Aeon posted:Man, I'd love to hear more about this, how the lies and rubber-stamps multinational corporations use to pretend the treatment of the overseas labor they rely on is somehow compatible with the consciences of Western consumers works in reality. Let's see, I haven't worked there in a few years but I doubt much changed. Highlights: -Labor laws in one of our major supplier countries protect workers from exploitation by setting regular work weeks to 40 hours, with only 8 hours of weekly OT permitted unless they have special permission. Almost no factories follow this as owners want big orders, buyers need quick turnaround, the workers want more hours, and the government wants a bigger economy. Of course the Western company can't "know" their items are being made in violation of labor laws, so fake books are kept at factories that show everyone is keeping to the 48 hour limit. With two weeks warning of any audits most manage to have the fake books be plausible enough and the real ones stashed. Sometimes they cut corners and realize the auditor has been reviewing the real books, at which point they are grabbed away and the auditor is handed different books. -Bribery of auditors is routine and I'm sure we never heard about 99% of the incidents (I was never on site for overseas auditors, these were all outsourced). Once when a factory had major issues they tried to offer a bribe of like $20,000 US and bafflingly the auditors didn't take it but got photos of the money. I think the factory had screwed up and threatened the auditors before the bribe offer so they were scared and wanted to get out, but that was a big outlier. -We were one of the "good" companies about audits and we only inspected the final factory in the production process. Nobody was checking on any factory further up the supply chain. Where did the raw materials come from? Are some of the final products being made somewhere else and then moved to a model factory that is considered the "real factory?" -A lot of our practices made no sense. Sure, let's take workers into a room for private interviews to see if they blow the whistle on the factory that they rely on for survival with zero protections against violent retaliation. -To prove we weren't picking on Asian countries we would audit factories in Finland and Germany. Fun way to waste time and learn chocolate workers are paid more than us and get to ride a trolley to work.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:10
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Inzombiac posted:Because of our structure, we literally cannot move faster than our slowest member. Every phase of a project must be reviewed and approved by at least one specific person and they can't seem to grok that we are all waiting on them to click a button. If it's even slightly important or time sensitive I don't even mess with these people anymore. I immediately get their management involved to compel them.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:44
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Full Metal Jackass posted:If it's even slightly important or time sensitive I don't even mess with these people anymore. I immediately get their management involved to compel them. The person in question is the second highest member of the org and the only one above them is too busy to care 
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Mar 29, 2021 17:45
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Hyrax Attack! posted:and get to ride a trolley to work. I now want to move to Europe even more.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:53
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Volmarias posted:I now want to move to Europe even more. Oh yeah, I had relatives visiting from the UK baffled that Americans get zero guaranteed vacation, while they aren't in a worker's paradise but 5.6 weeks minimum is the norm. Similar to when a Canadian friend asked why an office would have a fundraising jar for a worker's child's surgery.
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Mar 29, 2021 18:07
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Inzombiac posted:Because of our structure, we literally cannot move faster than our slowest member. Every phase of a project must be reviewed and approved by at least one specific person and they can't seem to grok that we are all waiting on them to click a button. My last job was like this, but you could bypass or circumvent some steps if you knew what you were doing. We had a need to get a set number of drawings approved by the end of each month and this led to a lot of questionable behavior. More than a few times I was not only the primary reviewer, but also the secondary reviewer. If I found any errors in my own work I would have to reject my workflow and send it back to myself. My boss would then pull the next step from the working leader and just approve both that step and his to get it to released status. I would say that it created some concerns about the validity of the data, but we were just approving anything even near close to done so it would look like we met goals at the end of the month. On the 1st or 2nd all the stuff we rushed to approve would be back because the design team wanted to make more changes and just stopped work so we could approve things.
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Mar 29, 2021 20:47
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In a way I really appreciate how strict we have to be. Were dealing with multi-million dollar civic projects and making absolutely sure everything is checked over a thousand times is a good idea. I just wish we could work on each phase independently, then do a final review before publishing. Oh well, my role is so small and insignificant that I shouldn't care too much.
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Mar 29, 2021 21:42
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Pope Corky the IX posted:The same company I mentioned earlier was mostly middle-aged women that printed out every single email and stored them in something like thirty filing cabinets around the office and warehouse. The company I contract for has a document retention policy and anything in your inbox gets automatically deleted after 90 days. I have worked on projects with timespans of 2-3 years. When it was implemented, I asked what I'm supposed to do when I need to keep proof of decisions made via email. They told me to print it out. Thankfully IT never really locks programs enough to limit workarounds. In Lotus notes (which we used up until like 2015) it would automatically send things to the trash, but you could set the trash empty policy yourself. So I set it to 10 years. In outlook I don't have that option, but any folder you create can have any retention policy you want. So I just set up a bunch of inbox rules to file important poo poo away in folders with a "Never delete" policy. Lazyfire posted:My last job was like this, but you could bypass or circumvent some steps if you knew what you were doing. We had a need to get a set number of drawings approved by the end of each month and this led to a lot of questionable behavior. More than a few times I was not only the primary reviewer, but also the secondary reviewer. If I found any errors in my own work I would have to reject my workflow and send it back to myself. My boss would then pull the next step from the working leader and just approve both that step and his to get it to released status. I would say that it created some concerns about the validity of the data, but we were just approving anything even near close to done so it would look like we met goals at the end of the month. On the 1st or 2nd all the stuff we rushed to approve would be back because the design team wanted to make more changes and just stopped work so we could approve things. We recently switched over to a new drawing management system (Teamcenter, the worst loving product I have ever used) and at first they refused to give me internal level access despite the fact I work from a factory office. So any designs I did required me to submit them for "review" to internal people. Who would not even look at what I did, they would just load the workflows and click approve. There was one time I realized after submitting I forgot something, so I got the reviewer to actually reject the workflow. Which then put the drawing into a loving limbo that required intervention from an administrator. Turns out in this global implementation no one actually tested the reject workflow process. I feel like I could write a book on bad engineering software decisions I've had to deal with.
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Mar 29, 2021 22:13
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Crustashio posted:The company I contract for has a document retention policy and anything in your inbox gets automatically deleted after 90 days. I have worked on projects with timespans of 2-3 years. When it was implemented, I asked what I'm supposed to do when I need to keep proof of decisions made via email. They told me to print it out. Can't you save an e-mail/e-mail chain as a .msg file and just store it locally?
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Mar 29, 2021 22:38
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That would be manual, while their current solution is automatic. Unrelated: feels bad to have to work at 50% speed all day and take mini breaks where I can't actually do anything, just to not gently caress up target metrics and make my job harder. Perverse incentives & negative reinforcement, management, have you heard of either one?
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Mar 29, 2021 22:51
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Six months in, still can't understand 'sign into zoom app' means sign into the zoom app. I don't get it. Double click icon, sign in. There's two steps. It's driving me crazy. Don't click the link. Sign into the app. Not the browser. Do not use the browser. Open the application and sign in. No, not the link. Stop clicking the link. Open the....Okay we'll use the link again this time. Again... You're not in the room. Which link did you click? No, that's not it. This is why we need to use the app. Okay, I'll send you an invite. Again. Yes I agree this is a clumsy way to do meetings. That's why we moved to using the app. You just want to use the phone? Okay fine I'll call you. Oh you want to see it? Well I'll need to share screen with you, so (oh God kill me) I'm sending you a an invite link. Click the link. No, your email. Okay. Yes I'm muted, because there'll be feedback and... Yeah okay might as well hang up the phone now. Yes, that was a waste of time. If you use the app you can just call me directly. Yes, we should give that a try. My entire workday is just filled with things almost going right and then something or someone refusing to do something or understand something for incomprehensible reasons. My treasurer has delayed or rescheduled a meeting for three consecutive weeks now, every time requesting a time that doesn't work after I carefully found a time that people can work with. It's like herding cats with a cattle prod.
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Mar 30, 2021 05:14
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Normally I can muster long ones. Not today. Not now that I've had the reveal. Why do we have a fully manual system that takes months of time to input what should process in under an hour? (Which, incidentally, is the only reason I have a job?) Nobody ever asked if the automated import function worked before me. How the gently caress has no one ever asked this.
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Mar 30, 2021 05:25
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In Germany we have a word for this: "betriebsblindheit" or workplace blindness. There's a one week period at any new job where you look at things and wonder whether you could improve them, after which you stop thinking about it and just keep doing it as you've always done. Still, I feel for you as a former intern who had to do data entry stuff often which could have been automated very easily by someone with some coding skill.
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Mar 30, 2021 05:29
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SkyeAuroline posted:Normally I can muster long ones. Not today. Not now that I've had the reveal. Step one: automate the process Step two: do not tell anyone you automated the process Step three: enjoy your free time and status as data entry wizard Step four: see step two, idiot. Step five: no seriously, don't tell anyone or you'll lose your job E: Son of Rodney posted:In Germany we have a word for this: "betriebsblindheit" or workplace blindness. You guys seem to have a hyper specific word for everything. It seems really efficient but how do you memorise a word for every possible scenario? That seems really inefficient. Outrail fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 05:35
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Outrail posted:Step one: automate the process My attempts at doing that have been documented here, and I got cut off by IT every time before I was really able to do anything meaningful (nature of our software fucks with it). Existence of said attempt is already known. This time around it's a built in feature that's already in the software and bypasses the layers of bullshit I have to work through for my option... but it's being guarded like a dragon hoard by the old IT greybeard who refuses to lift a single finger unless it's by his choice. (We've had "this will break our inventory system entirely the second someone tries to pull this, here is all of the rewritten update info, run this through ASAP" sitting on his backburner for close to a week because he won't let anyone else touch the update tool.) Son of Rodney posted:In Germany we have a word for this: "betriebsblindheit" or workplace blindness. There's a one week period at any new job where you look at things and wonder whether you could improve them, after which you stop thinking about it and just keep doing it as you've always done. Still, I feel for you as a former intern who had to do data entry stuff often which could have been automated very easily by someone with some coding skill. It's not really even a one week thing, I'm well into this and still seeing places every single day the process could be made more effective if anyone over in IT were willing to work with me for the parts I can't directly access. Literally hundreds to thousands of man hours saved a year, which is kind of a big deal when your biggest team is 3 people. But no. I just get to continue being a typing bot loving up my hands worse (despite working well below 50% speed because extra progress is onlu punished), because they're too lazy to give enough of a poo poo to even look, and they're all working from home so I can't even force a response through physical presence. I still wish I could find something better that would pay. This place trashes my mental health worse than I usually have it. But stuck on account of how poo poo the pay everywhere else is. Not even survival pittance.
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Mar 30, 2021 05:43
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Oh, then constructively give up. You probably already know this but just stop giving a poo poo. Seriously just stop giving a poo poo about anything at work aside from doing minimal effort on your hours and going home. The place sounds broken and it doesn't deserve anything beyond the time they pay you for. Focus on getting out of there.
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Mar 30, 2021 05:53
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SkyeAuroline posted:...the old IT greybeard who refuses to lift a single finger...because he won't let anyone else touch the update tool It doesn't matter what language that update tool is written in, 100% chance it has "immutable" variables that have been added at the top over the last 3-10 years. E: Someone started a rewrite 2/3rds ago and so some of the IMMUTABLE_VARIABLES are derived from other IMMUTABLE_VARIABLES.
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Mar 30, 2021 06:08
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Outrail posted:Oh, then constructively give up. You probably already know this but just stop giving a poo poo. Seriously just stop giving a poo poo about anything at work aside from doing minimal effort on your hours and going home. The place sounds broken and it doesn't deserve anything beyond the time they pay you for. Focus on getting out of there. That's where I'm at and have been at, yeah.
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Mar 30, 2021 06:14
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SkyeAuroline posted:That's where I'm at and have been at, yeah. honestly you don't sound like much of a team player and they will probably be better off without you asking so many questions all the time and making everyone feel stupid. i hope you can find another office that's up to your "standards" or whatever ben shapino fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 06:36
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ben shapiro posted:honestly you don't sound like much of a team player and they will probably be better off without you asking so many questions all the time and making everyone feel stupid. i hope you can find another office that's up to your "standards" or whatever
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Mar 30, 2021 06:41
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As I mentioned before, time to spend effort on making some scripts that will do this for you, since apparently they don't give a poo poo about how long this takes, so you have time.
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Mar 30, 2021 06:46
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Outrail posted:E: The beauty is that we combine words that we already use so it's easy to do and normally kind of intuitive. German animal names are hilarious for this reason. Hm, it has a face like a toad, and it's back looks like a shield?? Let's call it a Schildkröte! An animal that's very stinky? Stinktier! An animal that's very lazy? Faultier! This animal looks a bit like it's wearing many belts! Well guess what we're gonna call it, Gürteltier! This mouse is running a lot, guess we'll call it a rennmaus and be done with it. Like 50 percent of our animal names are just "attribute + tier" or "attribute + animal it kind of looks like".
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Mar 30, 2021 06:52
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Hedgehogs are Spike Pigs 
Volmarias fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 07:01
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Well yea but they're Hedge Hogs in english too.
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Mar 30, 2021 07:57
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And Puercoespín in Spanish (Puerco = pig, and Espina = thorn, needle).
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Mar 30, 2021 08:14
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Shellception posted:And Puercoespín in Spanish (Puerco = pig, and Espina = thorn, needle). Puercoespín is porcupine, not hedgehog E: Which still fits the whole porcine + spine thing.
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Mar 30, 2021 09:17
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ben shapino posted:honestly you don't sound like much of a team player and they will probably be better off without you asking so many questions all the time and making everyone feel stupid. i hope you can find another office that's up to your "standards" or whatever  Wow.
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Mar 30, 2021 10:48
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It's a pretty good (and depressingly accurate) imitation of "this is what managers actually believe"
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Mar 30, 2021 16:08
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Son of Rodney posted:It's a pretty good (and depressingly accurate) imitation of "this is what managers actually believe" I had a supervisor once suggest to me that I should probably consider leaving the company and finding a place where my work "would be appreciated". I think he actually meant it, though, since he was kinda fed up with stuff and was considering leaving at the time as well. Still . . . I wonder sometimes.
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Mar 30, 2021 17:07
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So I had mentioned we started doing this activity log things when we started working from home, and that i had had a large backlog of them because I stopped giving a poo poo. It got brought up in a meeting Saturday by my annoying coworker and I told her I honestly hadn't been doing them and asked why we were even doing them. My boss said it was because the allocation of our time was all screwed up from the start of the year, which doesn't make sense because we started a new time card program that let's you allocate your time specifically, which we had all been doing. Their was an issue where some of the allocations were going to the wrong place but we had a conference call with finance and got it sorted by doing our old allocation sheets for this time period (theyre not specific like the new activity logs, theyre just "x hours on this grant, y hours on this"). I asked if I could just do the logs then since it's faster and the answer was sort of waved away. My annoying coworker thought maybe I didn't understand how to do them (I do. Ive done them for months prior), described how she does them, and now this week she emailed me asking me to set up a meeting with her and another coworker who's slacking on the logs (she couldve scheduled the meeting in the time it took to delegate the task). Said annoying coworker is the only employee working from home now, because she refuses to get the covid vaccine. She's even gotten an ergonomic chair and standing desk built and delivered from my other coworker recently. I assume she wants us to do the logs to try to keep check on us, because she's being groomed by the director to replace him, and hes basically checked out and has been "working from home" (watching his kids while his wife is in jail for something)
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Mar 30, 2021 17:18
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titty_baby_ posted:So I had mentioned we started doing this activity log things when we started working from home, and that i had had a large backlog of them because I stopped giving a poo poo. It got brought up in a meeting Saturday by my annoying coworker and I told her I honestly hadn't been doing them and asked why we were even doing them. sounds like she's trying pretty hard to justify her job
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Mar 30, 2021 17:19
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boar guy posted:sounds like she's trying pretty hard to justify her job One would think, but said coworker is also "really busy" all the time. She is in charge of at least two large projects that have brought in funding, one of which requires a lot of coordination with other agencies and has weekly meetings. I assume that would be enough. We used to be chill and basically spent the first 4 months of my employment loving around taking buzzfeed quizzes all day, but when the old director got sacked and she became intermin director she did a 180 and decided to do all she could to get upwards momentum. I know she's done some management training, which I assume is the motivation for this micromanagement bullshit titty_baby_ fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 17:38
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zedprime posted:You're in good company of honest to God critical business programs written in VB for excel that run off an Access db back end. We had an entire ERP system built that way. It had been first cobbled together for a 5 person company 20+ years ago, then bloated/rewritten as the company grew, the company was purchased and absorbed into another one which switched over to the homebrewed system for a lot of project and operations stuff. It was almost completely unusable over VPN due to speed and frequent crashing and was still in use when Covid started.
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Mar 30, 2021 18:22
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