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Frazzbo posted:"professional backpacker"? What does that involve, sponsored wandering about? Barudak posted:Just, she like, did that full time and got sponsorships from gear companies to do it somehow. I dunno, I don't really get "the outdoors" My brother’s fiancée, who is a nurse in her day job, is a not-famous-but-reasonably-successful influencer who takes her photogenic dogs on outdoor adventures, and she gets all sort of stuff comped just so companies can have their brand associated with pretty nature and pretty dogs. Not just limited to outdoor equipment and pet supplies either - every mattress in their home has been comped by one of those rolled-up/vacuum-packed D2C mattress companies, and all it cost her was a few pictures of those dogs on the mattress.
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Aug 10, 2021 16:40
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satanic splash-back posted:We only had to record our time spent on each task while working from home. Now that we're back in the office full time, management doesn't care what we do in our cubes, as long as we're there. "We know that there aren't forty hours of work a week. We will continue to pay you for forty hours worth of work but you will earn it by having to sit here not doing things you'd prefer to do."
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Aug 10, 2021 16:46
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Our management does the time tracking as well, to get metrics for how long tasks "should" take (and to then spin that out into "how long of a backlog do we have", "how much work are you doing", etc). I've been fudging the numbers from the start since giving honest numbers for our early work would completely throw off expectations; every project is different and takes different amounts of time. Can't just have one number fit all of it. But as they say, you get what you're measuring for, and so they're getting a sustainable pace regardless of project across all projects. Sometimes makes it difficult to argue "this is historically slower/takes longer" but it's a tradeoff I'll take for not having to work 100% all the time. Meanwhile a team member can't hit even bare minimums and keeps getting caught on their phone, with nothing happening. So I guess there's no enforcement for metrics here. Ah well, I like my policy. Just wish they'd actually hire another person instead of trying to push other teams' work onto me on top of work I already have to meet a deadline on. But that's office life.
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Aug 10, 2021 16:52
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Just learned the IT dept at my MegaCorp that had pre-pandemic had zero WFH, and now allows 2 days a week max (you know, to protect the company culture) is hemorrhaging people to competitors that are happy to allow full time WFH. I'm not super in the loop but so far five people I know of gone in a month. I wonder if we lose enough if they'll make changes but more likely they'll just plug the holes with super expensive contractors.
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Aug 10, 2021 16:53
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Darkest Auer posted:An employee gets paid the same amount every month, but - and just hear me out - if we track every minute of that employee's time we can better estimate how much we have to pay that employee every month. Efficiency! I worked in a Danish state agency who wanted this for budgeting reasons. If the time sheets weren't filled out they wouldn't get the budget needed for next year. Everyone were salaried at 37 hours per week, which I duly entered into the SAP frontend timetrack thing every week. Now you'd think if you worked more than 37 hours you were paid for and put that into the system, it could be used to track if projects needed more resources right? Wrong. If you put in more or less than 37 hours per week you would get A Talking To about not making the department look bad. Hyrax Attack! posted:Just learned the IT dept at my MegaCorp that had pre-pandemic had zero WFH, and now allows 2 days a week max (you know, to protect the company culture) is hemorrhaging people to competitors that are happy to allow full time WFH. I'm not super in the loop but so far five people I know of gone in a month. I wonder if we lose enough if they'll make changes but more likely they'll just plug the holes with super expensive contractors. IT has to be on-site all the time so the execs who never want to be home for whatever reason.
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Aug 10, 2021 17:23
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satanic splash-back posted:management doesn't care what we do in our cubes, as long as we're there. Too long for a thread title but man would it be a good one.
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Aug 10, 2021 17:25
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Outrail posted:Has anyone who had to log time in 15 minute increments ever not ballparked everything at the end of ever day/pay period? When I was a babby helpdesk tech we had to bill clients in 15 minute increments. We had one client that had hundreds of remote workers that regularly forgot their passwords/got locked out of their email, so I’d get 3-5 tickets for password resets a day. Resetting a password takes maybe 60 seconds and I’m not going to double-bill because then we get asked why we had more than 8 hours on the clock, so I basically got a free hour every day. The client also had to pay for any work over a certain number of man hours each month and they easily hit that with all of these requests. It was suggested that we could set up a pretty easy and straightforward automated system to allow the employees to reset their own password but it was rejected since they didn’t want to spend the money on a 4 hour project.
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Aug 10, 2021 17:37
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champagne posting posted:IT has to be on-site all the time so the execs who never want to be home for whatever reason. Also because if IT isn't on-site, those very same executives will go "Why do we need IT" and offshore the department in a heartbeat
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Aug 10, 2021 17:39
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Batterypowered7 posted:"We know that there aren't forty hours of work a week. We will continue to pay you for forty hours worth of work but you will earn it by having to sit here not doing things you'd prefer to do." I had a manager once justify this as 'availability is an asset' and I hate it, but it's true. It's so that when the need arrives, you're there and ready to go. My boss has been complaining about losing this access to folks and if it weren't for Delta, we'd be back in the office right now. I could wfh forever, I hate having to pretend to be busy more than anything on this earth
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Aug 10, 2021 17:42
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StrangersInTheNight posted:I had a manager once justify this as 'availability is an asset' and I hate it, but it's true. It's so that when the need arrives, you're there and ready to go. Please teach my manager this so they understand why "hiring enough people to handle the work load we get" is important. No, we don't go full tilt 100% of the time, but when we do it swamps the downsized department every single time, and every backup has been cut for cost savings. Having a second set of hands is important! It sucks to be the "spare" sometimes, but that's a separate problem to solve, once you even have the minimum.
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Aug 10, 2021 17:58
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Long rambling anecdote time! Many years ago I worked as a paperwork monkey at giant evil corporation. All of us office drones had to punch in and out, but we had to end up at exactly 40.0 hours every week. Any more than 40 was unauthorized overtime which would get you in trouble, any less than 40 and you were leaving money on the table and possibly even endangering your full-time status. Figuring out precisely when to punch out at the end of the week was annoying and error-prone, especially for some of my co-workers who stunk at math. So one night at home I got off my computer-science-major rear end and wrote a tiny little calculator app. Enter the time you punched back in after lunch on Friday, and your cumulative hours for the week showing at that time, and boom, it'll tell you to punch out at exactly 5:09pm to hit the magic 40-hour mark. Much easier than doing the base-60 arithmetic. I brought the program to work, used it myself, and also gave it to some of the people that worked at the desks around me. I was vaguely aware that it had spread out to some other people from there via email, and I was glad that more people were finding it handy. Months later, I suddenly found myself called on the carpet to explain to my boss, my boss's boss, and my boss's boss's boss just what the hell this unauthorized program was that they were finding on hundreds of company computers in offices all over the country. It seems someone in corporate IT had finally gotten wind of it, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that my little program must be hacking into the punch-clock server. (Somehow.) In hindsight, emailing around an executable like that was really not the greatest idea from an infosec point of view, so I kind of see why they freaked out. In my defense, I had only made the thing for myself and a few co-workers and wasn't expecting it to blow up the way it did. And hey, this was almost 20 years ago, when people swapped poo poo around like that all the time. That stupid Elf Bowling thing had come and gone through the office several times without a word from IT. The only difference was that this time, they had a specific person to zero in on: I had put my name in the About dialog. Anyway, even after I showed them the really simple source code and proved the program was perfectly benign, the bosses still wanted to crucify me. But the trouble was, it turned out there was no actual company policy forbidding anything I had done. So they had to let it slide, but it was clear I was now on several important people's poo poo lists. So I remade the stupid little calculator as an Excel sheet (which honestly is what it should have been from the outset) for the convenience of anyone who still wanted it, gave my notice, and a couple of months later got a much better job.
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Aug 10, 2021 18:04
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champagne posting posted:Sounds like he is coping with what sounds like your insane workplace with doing as little as possible, which makes him my personal hero. This group runs completely differently from the rest of the company and some people get here and stay for decades and never look for anything else while others run screaming almost immediately. Completely locking up at the mention of a multistep solution to whatever problem needs to be fixed is just not something I've seen as a coping mechanism here before. I've been with the company for three years and don't intend to leave, but I'm probably getting out of this group soon. If I don't I'll be here for 20+ years and it'll be the only area of the company I'm qualified to work in because it requires such a specific skillset.
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Aug 10, 2021 18:26
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sitting in meeting about how much money we're losing and then i hear: OMG I'VE NEVER BUILT AN INSTAGRAM FROM SCRATCH 
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Aug 10, 2021 18:32
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Powered Descent posted:Long rambling anecdote time! Hahahaha dang. I thought the twist would have been dozens of locations thinking you're the wizard of Payroll and calling you at all hours with FMLA questions.
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Aug 10, 2021 19:10
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A hundred years ago when I was working for a sole operator consultant we had a really annoying client who'd keep calling to ask the most inane questions. The boss got red up with his bullshit and said 'Outrail, every time that ***t calls you for anything I want you to bill them an hour'. Didn't matter if it was a 30-second conversation or 30 minutes, an hour it went. Sometimes I was billing 12 hour days and working 8.
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Aug 10, 2021 19:38
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We used to do that for a company that had money out of the wazoo but would call us about the most idiotic things, only in 15 minute increments. Mark, you are calling me to ask me about something you wrote in and email to us. And it cost you 20 bux. What is going on at your company.
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Aug 10, 2021 19:42
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Son of Rodney posted:We used to do that for a company that had money out of the wazoo but would call us about the most idiotic things, only in 15 minute increments. Sounds like someone having to justify their position, probably had a manager that thinks if you are not on the phone, you are not working.
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Aug 10, 2021 19:44
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So we have been using our in house CS tool for years now, so much so its mostly muscle memory. Out of the blue a few months ago we got 'Great news we have made it easier to do certain things! We call them workflows. Get a ticket about this, use the workflow." The workflows do save time, but muscle memory makes them on par with some of the workflows. Then they ordered us to use workflows only from now on for these. One particular one, is the purchase one. A good 90%+ when we use it is for three or four items usally. But we have dozens upon dozens of items. And when a new one item is added, its added to the START of the list that we see, not the end. So by this time, the workflow takes several more clicks than it does if we use it manually, due to the ones we use the most now 10 pages deep into the list. We have asked them to change it, sort it so the most used items are at the start. But no, can't afford to waste 10 minutes to save the accumulated hours wasted a week.
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Aug 10, 2021 19:45
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SkyeAuroline posted:Please teach my manager this so they understand why "hiring enough people to handle the work load we get" is important. No, we don't go full tilt 100% of the time, but when we do it swamps the downsized department every single time, and every backup has been cut for cost savings. Having a second set of hands is important! It sucks to be the "spare" sometimes, but that's a separate problem to solve, once you even have the minimum. Sounds like you should be working “lean” You have the perfect number of people for exactly the minimum amount of work you ever get: maximum efficiency! Someone goes on holiday, you’re hosed Someone is off sick, you’re hosed There’s a global pandemic, you’re hosed and can’t hire anyone to take up the extra work Added bonus if it takes six weeks to train anyone, so by the time you’ve noticed there’s a problem, its already too late
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Aug 10, 2021 20:15
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Minium staffing is a great way to vastly over inflate the cost of pay roll as you are intentionally making your turnover spike. It's the very definition of penny wise but pound foolish. Endlessly mincing of miniscule savings for monstrous losses of money. We recently had a dude blow a tire and sail into a tree, costing the company a truck, the disposal cost, insurance costs, and the medical insurance plus workman's comp cost because his boss wouldn't loving shell out for the tires. 300ish bucks saved, easily 30k (definitely more) spent on myopic nonsense.
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Aug 10, 2021 20:27
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Sometimes people on my team will mutter about a contractor not always having something major to do, like they'll have a solid 4 hours work in a day then 3 hours of whatever mundane tasks we can come up with. But only once or twice a week, max. The moaners would prefer we redid their whole contract as part time and just don't understand that we need this person for those weeks where we're all flat out all the time, it's a fair price (£15 an hour) to pay for the assurance that we're not going to collapse if one person goes off sick.
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Aug 10, 2021 21:01
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Scientastic posted:Sounds like you should be working “lean” We get in poo poo if we don't meet deadlines, so we work OT to reach those deadlines. Then we get in poo poo for charging OT to reach deadlines.
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Aug 10, 2021 21:05
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I was in an IT team that was all in the same US time zone but expected to support things across the globe and on call 24/7. We were getting destroyed and other teams would do poo poo like put in an "EMERGENCY" ticket at 5pm and then leave for the day expecting us to figure out what the problem actually was and fix it with no input from them. Went to our VP and told him how bad things were, and his response was, "So you're all working over 60 hours per week? Because I have to be able to justify more employees". That was my "noping the gently caress out" on that job. They had multiple other people leave shortly after me, and one of the remaining guys leveraged that fact for a 50% pay raise before he bounced 6 months later. Crackbone fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Aug 10, 2021 |
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Aug 10, 2021 21:17
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A Festivus Miracle posted:Minium staffing is a great way to vastly over inflate the cost of pay roll as you are intentionally making your turnover spike. It's the very definition of penny wise but pound foolish. Often this is the result of the 300 bucks coming out of my budget, but the 30k coming out of Tim's budget. Like the probably apocryphal story about the base commander who needed carpets in his building on base, but installing carpets came from one budget and replacing them came from another, so he had his men scavenge some carpet from a dumpster, dropped it in his building, and then complained about it being worn out.
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Aug 11, 2021 04:51
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Outrail posted:Has anyone who had to log time in 15 minute increments ever not ballparked everything at the end of ever day/pay period? When you do tangible stuff for tangible people and a client is directly billed in a manner that matches your timecard. Work as a contractor where you spent 3.75 hours fixing a thing, bill the client 3.75hrs + travel + whatever flat rates you/the company you work for have for the service/equipment/parts required. This falls apart when 80% of your day is spent staring out of a window or talking to adjacent people in your office but when there's easily measurable products and or services you produce with your time it's not that nonsensical.
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Aug 11, 2021 05:09
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Oh I've found a wrinkle in my new job. One of the teams I'm attached to/supporting is a small 3 man team that we bought out a few years ago. They work on a very specific bit of software to basically do video encoding/decoding. They currently have no QA so that's my area to look out. However, they get through 3 work items a month, and release every two months. Their currently backlog is about 97 items and it is increasing at double their 3/month output. The current plan has them clearing the backlog in mid-2023. Apparently there is no appetite from upper management to hire new staff into this team to give them a hand so everyone's just kinda shrugging their shoulders and watching the list grow and grow and grow.
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Aug 11, 2021 09:26
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20 Blunts posted:sitting in meeting about how much money we're losing and then i hear: Please spare a shred of pity for people who are responsible for building social media presences from scratch for faceless corporates. Probably one of the most psychically draining jobs imaginable. It's almost the archetypal modern capitalist dystopia gig and it's no surprise that it is like a maw that devours an infinite treadmill of young grads.
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Aug 11, 2021 10:46
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I've been tasked with politely putting a pillow over the face of our social media account and pushing down until it dreams forever
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Aug 11, 2021 10:49
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Barudak posted:I've been tasked with politely putting a pillow over the face of our social media account and pushing down until it dreams forever This isn't the smart poo poo your work does thread.
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Aug 11, 2021 10:59
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Barudak posted:I've been tasked with politely putting a pillow over the face of our social media account and pushing down until it dreams forever "Shout out to the 83 corporate accounts, senior employees and bots that follow us. We're slipping...it's so dark...I'm scared #notearsonlydreams #b2bmarketing #manicmonday"
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Aug 11, 2021 11:01
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a couple months back some manager set up a daily check in call where the idea was he would join and tell us shift workers what the dayshift guys were up to and field any questions or whatever and it was an ok idea, he usually had some insight we could use for certain things and it was great for the first 2 meetings where he actually bothered to show up. Since then we've had this daily meeting every single day we're in on dayshift and its been really fuckin awkward to wait for like 15 minutes in a voice call with my team and talk about like what we're having for breakfast then we get a message saying he's too busy every single day without fail.
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Aug 11, 2021 11:09
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"Barudak, what happens if customers no longer have awareness of our products?"
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Aug 11, 2021 11:39
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Freedom, blessed freedom. Alternatively, they're all dead.
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Aug 11, 2021 11:50
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EvilHawk posted:However, they get through 3 work items a month, and release every two months. Their currently backlog is about 97 items and it is increasing at double their 3/month output. The current plan has them clearing the backlog in mid-2023. (Like mine does  )
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Aug 11, 2021 12:22
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Jeza posted:Please spare a shred of pity for people who are responsible for building social media presences from scratch for faceless corporates. Probably one of the most psychically draining jobs imaginable. It's almost the archetypal modern capitalist dystopia gig and it's no surprise that it is like a maw that devours an infinite treadmill of young grads. Barudak posted:I've been tasked with politely putting a pillow over the face of our social media account and pushing down until it dreams forever Lol, I just hired a guy to basically do CPR on our dying social media accounts. He seems keen and we have actual metrics to aim for. It's gonna be great!
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Aug 11, 2021 14:04
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It's great when there's revenue targets attached to your social media accounts when your product is $100,000 generators or whatever that are only useful to maybe two companies on the planet. Management is thinking random people are going to drop $100,000 on something just because they saw a post about it on Twitter.
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Aug 11, 2021 14:22
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Kullik posted:a couple months back some manager set up a daily check in call where the idea was he would join and tell us shift workers what the dayshift guys were up to and field any questions or whatever and it was an ok idea, he usually had some insight we could use for certain things and it was great for the first 2 meetings where he actually bothered to show up. Suggest setting up a recurring event in Outlook that everyone can add to their calendars that he can cancel and then he’ll do it like every day on his own the day before the meeting
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Aug 11, 2021 14:48
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For years my company has been trying to do Social Media and it always fails. It's always pitched by the sales guys as "we need a social media presence!". They try to get me to do it because I'm IT and know website / computer stuff. They never listen when I tell them I don't even have a social media presence myself, I don't know how it works after like 2015. Then when we get the new "hungry and disrupting high school grad" we pay minimum wage to do it and it inevitably fails because people are not on social media to buy our expensive niche products. We can spend a week of time developing an ad in some of those bullshit online ad creator websites when we have an Adobe license! We spend hundreds of dollars to get a couple of clicks on an ad and no leads. Luckily this has slowed down as of late since I took that ad budget and just threw it at AdWords and have seen actually sales generated from it.
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Aug 11, 2021 17:20
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Social media for like, 90% of businesses is a waste of goddamn time and the whole company would be better off posting erotic business goal fan fic because someone then might actually read it
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Aug 11, 2021 17:25
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EvilHawk posted:Oh I've found a wrinkle in my new job. One of the teams I'm attached to/supporting is a small 3 man team that we bought out a few years ago. They work on a very specific bit of software to basically do video encoding/decoding. They currently have no QA so that's my area to look out. However, they get through 3 work items a month, and release every two months. Their currently backlog is about 97 items and it is increasing at double their 3/month output. The current plan has them clearing the backlog in mid-2023. The silver lining here is that 80% of those tickets are probably worthless poo poo that customers never asked for so they'll never get implemented and that's ok Nobody ever has a clear backlog and that's a good thing for many reasons
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