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Midjack posted:Is the problem your manager, or do you manage the problem manager? The former, but obviously the problem is me
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Aug 6, 2023 10:01
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Car Hater posted:With that in mind, how do you successfully tell a new manager that their relentless drive to put their mark on a hitherto functional situation is the thing killing productivity? Or does it just have to blow up in their face a few times so that they learn? Generally speaking, when I've been an IC at a place long enough to see multiple managers come and go, it's because I'm not interested in becoming involved in management there. So when trouble like this looms on the horizon I just continue to do my thing and make sure that my CV is up to date and circulating. Ultimately hours, pay, and conditions are more important to me than whether I'm IC or management. Both are interesting in their own ways, but I'm a lot more picky about taking management roles because they obviously imply accepting and promoting company policies, and I don't want to do that anywhere that's particularly terrible.
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Aug 6, 2023 11:22
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I should add that I've primarily been an IC but I did have reportees previously, most of whom were good or very good and so didn't need much in the way of actual management beyond the usual goals etc. Generally it's worked out well but I did have one who was absolutely awful but was a bit of a political hire that wasn't my choice. In that instance they were *convinced* that they were doing a superb job while churning out complete rubbish, but they were friends with someone relatively senior and went crying to them about anything approaching criticism. This became patently clear when they kicked up a huge stink about not getting a title uplift and wrote a mail directly to my manager about it (including other demands lol) who let out a massive sigh and went "of course they'll have gone straight to X about this but I know her so I'll nip that one in the bud don't worry about it. Maybe we shouldn't have promoted them to the current level but that would have been a political nightmare oh well". That was, in balance, quite a valuable experience all told. e: I have almost certainly posted this before. Powerful Two-Hander fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Aug 6, 2023 |
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Aug 6, 2023 15:02
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https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1687970474867712000?s=20 it's over
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Aug 6, 2023 16:40
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Wow. For real. What a misstep, but egos gonna ego, I guess.
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Aug 6, 2023 16:49
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Do any of you folks work in places where there are high-ranked ICs who get to stay ICs? As best I can tell, at most pharma companies, any IC rank above "barely better than peon" has built-in managerial responsibilities, and some of the lower-level ones have built-in supervisor responsibilities. Our Engineer I folks are pure IC, but by Engineer II they're also acting as floor leads, by E3 they have that plus scheduling responsibilities, E4 they have contractors reporting to them, etc. I'm E6 (Principal Engineer) and I have 5 in-house direct reports and two contractor reports, plus all my IC work, plus mentorship/supervisor for the E4 ranks. My manager is an E7 (Sr. Principal) and has IC + me + the E4s as managerial responsibilities. It seems baked in here that higher IC ranks are managers too. pmchem posted:it's over Disgustingly ironic.
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Aug 6, 2023 17:22
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Where I work the Principal/Senior Principal engineer levels can be where you top out (this might be me at SPE honestly) and then there is Tech Director but that is a lot more dealing with other groups and also having some subordinates even if you aren’t technically a manager. I don’t really think I’d like to be a manager, at SPE I am equivalent level to a senior manager in our hierarchy and sometimes have some rotating reports to split up tasks with but it’s just management lite because I don’t have to do any HR or vacation scheduling, budgets or hiring. I like it personally.
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Aug 6, 2023 17:39
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Yeah, we have high ranking ICs here. A bunch of people who are essentially high ranking ICs jumped over to management and either have small teams or jump into leading teams for a limited duration as a bit of a hired gun. This isn't a requirement, its just in Tech people get kinda nervous if they are at a certain level and don't have experience with reports. Our high level ICs are part of our leadership groups as well, even if they don't have reports.
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Aug 6, 2023 17:45
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When I was in academic publishing the endless minutiae, relationships with authors, and emphasis on avoiding embarrassing errors meant that they established separate progression tracks for commissioning IC, production IC, and management. The IC tracks ended below the top of management, but they gave enough progression to last people several years of appropriately rewarded performance. Apparently they didn't have these to start with, but got frustrated with spending most of a year training people up then losing them a year after that. The higher end stuff involved wrangling a few trainees, but extremely light on management-type duties.
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Aug 6, 2023 17:51
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My new gig is pretty senior but I won’t have any direct reports. In private firm consulting that’s not that crazy, because ultimately partners are the only ones with real decision power on staffing, but this is a public company borrowing the language of management consulting and I’m actually going to have a single boss for the first time in like 7 years, so I think it might be a bit more rare. There’s still matrix elements so I’ll still have some supervisory aspects to my role as like a project exec, they just won’t be actual management.
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Aug 6, 2023 18:18
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Yeah, Coaching and leading initiatives is something I'd expect high level ICs to do, that's just overlap with management duties.
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Aug 6, 2023 18:18
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Sundae posted:Do any of you folks work in places where there are high-ranked ICs who get to stay ICs? As best I can tell, at most pharma companies, any IC rank above "barely better than peon" has built-in managerial responsibilities, and some of the lower-level ones have built-in supervisor responsibilities. Our Engineer I folks are pure IC, but by Engineer II they're also acting as floor leads, by E3 they have that plus scheduling responsibilities, E4 they have contractors reporting to them, etc. I'm E6 (Principal Engineer) and I have 5 in-house direct reports and two contractor reports, plus all my IC work, plus mentorship/supervisor for the E4 ranks. My manager is an E7 (Sr. Principal) and has IC + me + the E4s as managerial responsibilities. That’s what’s been setting me off, beyond usual crankiness. I’ve directed contractors, coached and mentored, even done training and some light supervision, had department heads owe me deliverables, but because I’ve never had a direct report or held disciplinary authority it means about gently caress all it seems when it comes to breaking in to “management”. Not that I actually desire in any way to be a manager, but in traditional manufacturing, your pay only can rise so high without being a manager. Engineer level 8*++ Sr. is still just one extra base annual pay bump over level 7 (or whatever the gently caress). Have been bumping against the pay ceiling in my job search, even though I’m an SME essentially, but those roles just don’t seem to exist with decent compensation in my industry.
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Aug 7, 2023 00:01
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In clinical development we have quite senior ICs, up to senior director level currently.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:41
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Sundae posted:Do any of you folks work in places where there are high-ranked ICs who get to stay ICs? As best I can tell, at most pharma companies, any IC rank above "barely better than peon" has built-in managerial responsibilities, and some of the lower-level ones have built-in supervisor responsibilities. Our Engineer I folks are pure IC, but by Engineer II they're also acting as floor leads, by E3 they have that plus scheduling responsibilities, E4 they have contractors reporting to them, etc. I'm E6 (Principal Engineer) and I have 5 in-house direct reports and two contractor reports, plus all my IC work, plus mentorship/supervisor for the E4 ranks. My manager is an E7 (Sr. Principal) and has IC + me + the E4s as managerial responsibilities. We do, and that’s the path I am on. We do have Sr PE, Fellow, and Sr. Fellow.. the Fellow in my org is dotted lined with our VP, has no DRs, and does lots of strategic work but still technical.
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Aug 7, 2023 06:46
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I asked at my job about the IC track because I have no interest in management and the HR bullshit that comes with it, and apparently there are 4 more pay bands for ICs above my current position. Now how many people actually get to that highest IC level I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anyone with that specific title here
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Aug 7, 2023 12:47
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Deadite posted:I asked at my job about the IC track because I have no interest in management and the HR bullshit that comes with it, and apparently there are 4 more pay bands for ICs above my current position. It's nearly impossible in my org and most other I've been in and around to move from an IC5 to an IC6. It's completely impossible to move beyond, anyone who is was hired in at that level or given it because they were employee #3 who was not interested in management (the only time I've seen an IC8).
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Aug 7, 2023 14:13
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Happy Monday, thread.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:35
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Sundae posted:Do any of you folks work in places where there are high-ranked ICs who get to stay ICs? As best I can tell, at most pharma companies, any IC rank above "barely better than peon" has built-in managerial responsibilities, and some of the lower-level ones have built-in supervisor responsibilities. Our Engineer I folks are pure IC, but by Engineer II they're also acting as floor leads, by E3 they have that plus scheduling responsibilities, E4 they have contractors reporting to them, etc. I'm E6 (Principal Engineer) and I have 5 in-house direct reports and two contractor reports, plus all my IC work, plus mentorship/supervisor for the E4 ranks. My manager is an E7 (Sr. Principal) and has IC + me + the E4s as managerial responsibilities. So I work for a big financial services company, but I'm in IT. We have a very large IT org, north of 4,000 employees last I heard. A few years ago (before I joined) my org realized they didn't have a career path for senior tech talent to stay in an IC role. They created a couple more IC steps to try to keep some of that talent. We have your standard job levels for our System Engineers (III > II > I > Senior > Lead), and then they added Staff and Principal. There aren't many Staff level folks, and there are zero Principals at this time, but the job exists on paper. (It's still somewhat new, no one has been around long enough to make it to Principal). Once you hit Lead you can pretty much stay there if you want, or you can go into IT Architecture, take the Staff Engineering path, or you can go the people managing path. We do have some IC roles up to the equivalent of AVP, for Technical Fellows, but there aren't many of those either.
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Aug 7, 2023 18:08
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One of the reasons I left the military was that the IC track didn’t exist. After five years I was supervising three people and had a fourth person as a direct report. Great if you’re looking for management experience, not so much if you just want to kick it doing some lab work and nothing else
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Aug 7, 2023 19:05
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skipdogg posted:So I work for a big financial services company, but I'm in IT. We have a very large IT org, north of 4,000 employees last I heard. This is similar to what my old job was like, but instead of adding IC steps they added two more project manager tracks 
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Aug 7, 2023 19:17
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mmmm yes love to tank my professional relationships with people with 5AM "hey just a heads up" phone calls because of stupid bullshit C-Level directives. It was foolish of me to think I would avoid a lot of the political games by staying on the IC track but I guess this is just what I asked for when I relegated myself to the life of a pawn.
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Aug 8, 2023 12:16
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Renegret posted:mmmm yes love to tank my professional relationships with people with 5AM "hey just a heads up" phone calls because of stupid bullshit C-Level directives. The gently caress is a 5am "just a heads up" phone call
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Aug 8, 2023 16:36
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Volmarias posted:The gently caress is a 5am "just a heads up" phone call A good reason to keep your phone on do not disturb overnight and avoid giving out your number if possible.
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Aug 8, 2023 16:38
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I had a client for about a year that would call me at 6am to talk about absolute nonsense, or 11:30pm, etc. and stay on the phone for an hour. Absolutely insanely toxic person and me being the loving idiot that I was stuck with it because ~it will be good for your career, nobody else can stick it out with them, it's important that we keep their business~ . Pretty much my #1 cause of becoming a burnout and flipping the switch from "I will work hard and be rewarded" to "I will do the absolute minimum to continue getting a paycheck and will burn down the building on my way out". Anyway they stopped doing that when I told them on a Wednesday that I won't be back after lunch because I've hit my billing max for the month and they aren't authorizing me additional time. Absolutely flabbergasted that the time they spent talking or texting me at all hours of the night and day was billed out. edit: I did work hard. My reward was an anxiety disorder. Thankfully my current clients know very well to only call if it's a genuine emergency because the nanosecond my phone pings that's an hour billed out. Vasudus fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 17:07
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I was awakened by a call at 5:00AM on the dot this very morning, because there was an overnight power outage and poo poo was still down, VPNs, etc. I'm management, not IT. IT dropped the ball. Why are you calling me? Still counts as one (1) hour of doubletime for me. I love being hourly and doubletime on-call while also being management. Hell yes I'm making half of what I could be in a world where I work on salary with a 45 minute commute. On an hourly basis though? I do just fine.
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Aug 8, 2023 17:11
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dxt posted:A good reason to keep your phone on do not disturb overnight and avoid giving out your number if possible. Too bad we're contacting the on-call and they need to be available for like, actual problems. The correct on call engineer is regional, but the problem is we might have one personal who's on call 24/7/365 covering 3 states so we try to keep escalations to a minimum. Volmarias posted:The gently caress is a 5am "just a heads up" phone call Hey a service you own is currently down. No I don't actually need any help. It's already been taken care of. Just letting you know. Yes this happens a dozen times a day. Okay bye
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Aug 8, 2023 17:49
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Renegret posted:Too bad we're contacting the on-call and they need to be available for like, actual problems. The correct on call engineer is regional, but the problem is we might have one personal who's on call 24/7/365 covering 3 states so we try to keep escalations to a minimum. 
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Aug 8, 2023 18:00
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dxt posted:A good reason to keep your phone on do not disturb overnight and avoid giving out your number if possible. I used to try that at my last company. It resulted in an associate VP calling me with the site HR lead on the line, and informing me in no uncertain terms that I was company property and if they told me to have my phone on and give them my personal numbers, I could do it or get fired. Really enjoying the grass being greener on my side of the fence for once. Thank god.
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Aug 8, 2023 18:34
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Vasudus posted:
Pretty much sums up my experience. I played the "hero" for years. My boss even referred to me publicly as "Super Scrum" until I asked him to stop. Every ounce of extra energy I put into my work over the years has been forgotten. Every person that was a beneficiary of my additional work hours and burnout have long since left. Every accolade and kudos earned was meaningless in the end. I built up a reputation of being a work horse and it only ever earned me.. more work for the same pay.
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Aug 8, 2023 18:37
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My predecessor started work at 5am and turned things around in minutes, so people got used to sending in firedrill requests for morning meetings. Luckily it didn’t take long to correct the actions - WFH means I get up at 8:50 and am signed on by 9. If you don’t give me a heads up to adjust that schedule, I’m sleeping through your emergency.
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Aug 8, 2023 18:56
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I met a traveler from an antique land, who saidScrum posted:I played the "hero" for years. My boss even referred to me publicly as "Super Scrum" until I asked him to stop. Every ounce of extra energy I put into my work over the years has been forgotten. Every person that was a beneficiary of my additional work hours and burnout have long since left. Every accolade and kudos earned was meaningless in the end. I built up a reputation of being a work horse and it only ever earned me.. more work for the same pay.
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Aug 8, 2023 19:18
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Scrum posted:Pretty much sums up my experience. I played the "hero" for years. My boss even referred to me publicly as "Super Scrum" until I asked him to stop. Every ounce of extra energy I put into my work over the years has been forgotten. Every person that was a beneficiary of my additional work hours and burnout have long since left. Every accolade and kudos earned was meaningless in the end. I built up a reputation of being a work horse and it only ever earned me.. more work for the same pay. Because I was a complete idiot, I believed the company line that I was on track for the higher tiers of management. I worked extra on proposals, I hosted lunch and learns, I did mentoring (I still do that, but ho ho ho is the tone different) and so on on top of handling the extremely difficult clients that people bailed on. I believed all of this because I grew up blue collar, was the first person to go to college and grad school, and believed the meritocracy line hook, line, and sinker. In reality the game was rigged from the start and I'll never get the reward, but thanks for all the hard work.
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Aug 8, 2023 19:26
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If you can't figure out how to keep your service alive then maybe getting called about it at 5am will help you prioritize it.
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Aug 8, 2023 19:26
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Lockback posted:If you can't figure out how to keep your service alive then maybe getting called about it at 5am will help you prioritize it. That sounds good and all, right up until you're responsible for a device or service that is unreliable and after repeated attempts to get funding/headcount/whatever to fix it you get nothing other than grief when it very predictably keeps failing. I've been in this position a few times and used exceptionally slow response time/MTTR as a forcing mechanism.
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Aug 8, 2023 19:31
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Motronic posted:That sounds good and all, right up until you're responsible for a device or service that is unreliable and after repeated attempts to get funding/headcount/whatever to fix it you get nothing other than grief when it very predictably keeps failing. I've been in this position a few times and used exceptionally slow response time/MTTR as a forcing mechanism. Yeah, this is the thing. You might absolutely know how ot make it reliable and just can't, for reasons outside your control. My facilities crew gets 2:30AM alarm calls far too frequently (once every two months, maybe twice a month in the summer) because of PG&E loving poo poo up and our facility briefly losing power. The generators kick on, but that brief power flicker triggers the model of smoke detectors we're required to use. The smoke detectors then turn off the air handlers, we lose differential pressure throughout the area, and then our cleaning crew has a bad week ahead of them. They can't stop PG&E from loving up California, of course. They can't change the smoke detector because it's a mandated thing from EHS, which was validated as part of a system kit from Fire-lite/Honeywell for building automation, which was signed off by the fire marshal / county offices. They can't even put those smoke detectors on a UPS without bureaucracy making GBS threads on them, let alone change the model.] They can keep pushing to fix it, but until someone who makes decisions has to get up at 2:30AM and deal with it, nothing's going to change. Now, the elevator technician who decided to flip-flop our power breaker a few times per second for like a minute while he "tested the elevator" ? That's an easy fix; I'm gonna throw him down an elevator shaft. E: Inclusion is important in a workplace. That's why we... um... sent you e-mails in a language you can read. Yeah. That's it. 
Sundae fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 19:39
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Lockback posted:If you can't figure out how to keep your service alive then maybe getting called about it at 5am will help you prioritize it. Not when it's outside their control. I work for a Mega ISP so we're talking along the lines of waking up the highest levels of engineering at 3AM because a tree fell and took out some fiber. Doesn't matter that redundancy is in place and is working as designed. It's not even useful for troubleshooting purposes because investigating the cause is a NOC function and we're far better at it than they are. It's nothing more than some C level saying "well shouldn't they be aware just in case??????" for something that happens a dozen times a day. If we need engineering's help then we'll ask for engineering's help. Otherwise they get an e-mail just like everybody else while we handle it from beginning to end.
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Aug 8, 2023 19:53
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URGENT (THIRD MESSAGE): YOU HAVE ALL FAILED LOCKBACK"S TROLLING TEST, PLEASE COMPLETE YOUR MANDATORY TRAINING
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Aug 8, 2023 20:04
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The solution to that is to have a voice mail that sounds like someone who just got woken up at 3am and follows a specific script of sounding like he is receiving such an update.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:11
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My boss wants to be kept in the loop anytime anything happens even if it's outside of our control. I guess the need to be able to tell your bosses whats going on outweighs being woken up at 3am.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:12
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SerthVarnee posted:The solution to that is to have a voice mail that sounds like someone who just got woken up at 3am and follows a specific script of sounding like he is receiving such an update. Finally chatgpt and deepfake audio’s true calling.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:14
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