manpurse posted:

Hi Manpurse,

As a team lead (I am not a team lead. I dont get paid to be a team lead, I dont have the title of team lead, I have just been here the longest) you need bring the team together, not drive them apart. Many of us have been working from home for over a year now and are doing so successfully in a challenging time. While we have seen many benefits to new ways of working, the Where We Work project team found that company culture and our ability to work together on complex initiatives can be negatively impacted when people are not regularly connecting with one another in person. That being said, we are looking at letting employees work from home part time after successfully applying to the program and with a satisfactory performance review (our company gives between 1-5 on your rating. It has no impact on your pay, bonus, career development. Corporate mandates we have a certain number of 1,2,3,4,5, so 95% of people get 3s). In the future please do not bring up your personal grievances during team meetings.


There has been such backlash that management is avoiding the question issue altogether, telling us to reach out to senior management, or the union. Or CEO recorded a video message yesterday, a key message being "vaccination is a personal choice and, as an employer, we respect that."

September is gonna be hilarious.

SubnormalityStairs posted:

*Shortly after COVID started, anybody who could WFH started WFH. This was great, but they got rid of the cafeteria staff and replaced all the coffee with a single coffee machine. This coffee machine can serve up a single cup of coffee in about a minute. It's good coffee, and this is fine with 1/10th of our workforce in the office, but now they're talking about bringing everybody back. This is not going to work with 400 people in the building.
*They're not bringing back any of the cafeteria staff. Instead, they installed a lovely self-serve system with junk food and truck-stop sandwiches. Which are overpriced. And not enough for our 400 people. There are no other food options within walking distance as we're in an industrial park.

Hyrax Attack! posted:

That's interesting I hadn't heard that term before. Knew someone in college who's dad had been a creator of Oregon Trail and they were baffled how it had achieved near total cultural saturation in our generation.

manpurse posted:

zedprime posted:

The Buddha called together his directors for a root cause analysis on the recently cancelled software project.
"It's the developers' fault because they left." shouted the director of North American Sales.
"It's the architects' fault because they chose impossible technical groundworks." shouted the director of North American Implementation
"It's the sales people's fault because they promised impossible features to the customers." shouted the director of North American Technical Architecture.

The Buddha nodded and spake: "why did you guys hire the Buddha to run a capitalist enterprise anyway, this is so not my speed." And took a giant rip from his bong before walking out of the conference.

Thusly the directors returned to their petty fiefs trapped in the samsara of software development for only a few weeks longer before the company dissolved.

Volmarias posted:

Are you already on your way out the door? If you are I hope you ask them whether they actually believe any of that.

Zarin posted:

I really wonder how long it'll take me to be competent/good at this job, considering that:
• The training has been garbage
• The documentation is incomplete/confusing/wrong (sometimes more than one)
• I'm being pulled in different directions constantly
• Every time I feel like I'm beginning to master a process, I discover missing/undocumented process steps that have not been performed in X (where X can range from a couple months to three years)

AHH F/UGH posted:

...
And in the end, remember the situation you were in at your last job and how lovely that was and just thank god you're not there still

SubnormalityStairs posted:

We're doing our best, but there's only so much we can do, and we can't fix the actual problems.

This has been a low-cost area for a long drat time, and so it's also been a low-salary area, relative to the rest of North America. And our office in particular pays less than even the rest of the places around here. However, we've always been able to retain talent because of benefits not present at many other places. The work/life balance has been great (almost no overtime, ever), we had a great cafeteria with low-cost great food (like a complete butter chicken meal for $7 CDN). We had dedicated kitchen staff who kept the free coffee flowing all dang day. We had a merit-based cash award system that had a per-person max per year that was not amazing but still a nice perk. Managers could evaluate team members based on performance, period. Raises and promotions were two separate processes, done in two rounds per year: one for lvl 1-3, and one for lvl 4+ - this meant we could promote based on merit when people were ready, and the bucket for raises were large enough that everybody got at least cost-of-living every year and those who performed well got more. We have a STIP for lvl 4+ that used to be based on personal MBOs. People have tended to stay with the company for a long time, like my senior guys are both 18 years with the company.

Some of this started backsliding over the past few years, but it's been a slow decline.

• Open evaluations became curve-based, which is loving stupid and I hate it.
  
• Raises and promotions got mashed into a single round of both for everybody. Now if I want to promote somebody, I literally have to take away from everybody else's raises. Hardly anybody is even getting cost-of-living anymore. It sucks, and I hate it.
  
• Our per-person cash reward system has become a per-team budget points-for-products system which has a dollar value average of less than 1/4 what it was before. It's awesome, I love it! Wait no I hate it.
  
• Our STIP has gone from mainly personal MBOs to mainly org MBOs which are almost never met so our bonuses have been cut in half or worse. Not sure how I feel about this one. Wait no I know exactly how I feel - I hate it.
  

This was all bad enough, but it was spread out over enough time that people got used to each individual lovely thing. Over the past year, however, poo poo has REALLY accelerated.

• Shortly after COVID started, anybody who could WFH started WFH. This was great, but they got rid of the cafeteria staff and replaced all the coffee with a single coffee machine. This coffee machine can serve up a single cup of coffee in about a minute. It's good coffee, and this is fine with 1/10th of our workforce in the office, but now they're talking about bringing everybody back. This is not going to work with 400 people in the building.
  
• They're not bringing back any of the cafeteria staff. Instead, they installed a lovely self-serve system with junk food and truck-stop sandwiches. Which are overpriced. And not enough for our 400 people. There are no other food options within walking distance as we're in an industrial park.
  
• Our lovely little city has absolutely exploded, our cost of living has exploded, housing prices have exploded, and our already-small salaries now feel much smaller.
  
• Actually smart businesses have realized that they can have remote workers and still get poo poo done. Our devs are able to get good salaries and not move.

And we're talking about returning to the office, which is absolutely the stupidest thing they could do at this point.

I can do nothing about most of this poo poo. I can be as fair as possible with the raises and promotions, but I can't force finance to give me a bigger bucket to work with. The curve, the rewards, the in-office work is all pushed down to us. I can't fund the cafeteria.

So I go into our system, and flag every single person on my team as a High Retention Risk. HR is already aware that we're losing people. I don't give my guys poo poo about vacation time or personal time or any other time for anything, ever. I do my best to unblock people, and abstract as much bullshit away from them as possible. Not that it was happening often before, but I now absolutely refuse to ask anybody to do overtime. I honestly don't know what else I can do.

SubnormalityStairs posted:

I honestly don't know what else I can do.

Lascivious Sloth posted:

I mean, you should just leave, if you can, or whenever you can.

fresh_cheese posted:

You are good people, giving your peeps the cover you can and enabling their success as best you can.

Ultimately, once the accountants and MBAs are in charge and start optimizing out expense, thats all thats left to a leader who actually cares about their team.

Joke answer: lead them to the competitors office for raises and keg fridays.

AHH F/UGH posted:

I immediately sent off applications to like 6 different companies on indeed and already have three interviews scheduled

AHH F/UGH posted:

In retrospect I should probably ask for $30 an hour.

TotalLossBrain posted:

ask for $40

Volmarias posted:

But also let THEM make the first offer.

AHH F/UGH posted:

The "Exciting Announcement that you're all going to love" from last week? A training and onboarding site, or something. Some poo poo that no one will ever loving use. I would have preferred the free bananas in the break room over this. (Blue marks are mine, duh)

AHH F/UGH posted:

My boss today mentioned that the Governor is removing COVID restrictions soon so we might be going back to the office at some point.

I immediately sent off applications to like 6 different companies on indeed and already have three interviews scheduled with the express point of working remote permanently. gently caress going back into an office.

Armauk posted:

You're doing exactly what's being mentioned in this story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/remote-work-is-the-new-signing-bonus-11624680029. An interesting coincidence.

SubnormalityStairs posted:

I know this is the right answer. My successor is already picked out and I know he'd be awesome for the team (as long as HE holds on anyway...), so I'm honestly not sure why I'm still hanging on other than interviews loving suck. Every job I've ever worked in the IT industry has been a result of somebody seeing me being good at my current job and pulling me into my next position. I know that's a positive thing but my scumbag brain takeaway is that I just suck at interviews.

Inertia's a bitch, yo.

Thanks. I appreciate hearing that.

I've always told my team that loyalty to a company is misplaced and that if any virtue is worth striving for, it's integrity. Of the four guys who have left my team over the past four years, three of them have been for advancement opportunities (one Senior became a CTO!) and one went back to school for an art diploma because that's what he REALLY wanted to be doing. I consider all of these to be successes.

I look forward to poaching the poo poo outta my team when I leave.

Son of Rodney posted:

just have to figure out what I'm going to ask for.

AHH F/UGH posted:

That's the benefit of being underpaid, overworked and having lovely working conditions (i.e. going into an office when there's literally no point other than Panopticon-style surveillance and making managers feel like big tough boys)

Armauk posted:

Even if one were to work from home, aren't there draconian monitoring services these big, tough boys would have no problem spending money on to make their remote workforce isn't "wasting time?"

Lascivious Sloth posted:

I recently left the company I work for and then was reached out to for a different position which I was interested in by them. Then they told me there needs to be an official HR process and I have to interview, but they're already conducting handovers, meetings and asking me to work despite no contract and I won't be paid for this time. Simply because their HR process is so slow, and technically I don't have the position yet, so if anything changes I could have wasted all this time. I also had an opportunity to freelance for a different department of them but was told to turn it down by this new department, as they want me in this role and wanted me "fresh" for when I start. So every week I'm losing a massive consultancy fee as they take their time to officialize my new contract. So pissed off.