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Back end of last year my employer went from a very soft "40% in office but if you do a day every couple of weeks we won't make a fuss" to a hard "60% in office or we start disciplinary action". I discussed with my boss and said if this is how it's going to go down they're basically handing me a pay cut and I'd have to consider my options. He pretty much just shrugged. This week I've been on leave. Next week I have a second interview for a place that will let me be 99% at home and will pay me 25% more money. Thanks for the apathy boss!
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Jan 11, 2024 18:10
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Cacafuego posted:Once, I was dealing with a frustrating situation with a foreign colleague. Their requests made to a site staff member were not very well explained, likely due to the language barrier. I had to be the middleman contact trying to interpret what coworker wanted and getting site staff to complete it. The polish folks I've worked with used to reply to emails telling people they were too stupid to understand their reply so I think that lady was just kind of a jerk.
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Jan 11, 2024 21:32
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Sundae posted:I am honestly surprised how few people, even people around my age, understand anything IM-related or even basic internetty abbreviations. I set up an online meeting early last year, threw up a screen-share of a word doc that said "BRB in 5 minutes!" and then ran to the restroom, and came back to a bunch of people aasking in call-chat what BRB meant. I left my last job without telling the Data Protection team to stop calling themselves "DP specialists" on LinkedIn though, because I did not want to risk the conversation with HR that would ensue.
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Jan 11, 2024 21:37
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Lockback posted:The polish folks I've worked with used to reply to emails telling people they were too stupid to understand their reply That's actually a compliment in Poland
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Jan 11, 2024 21:54
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Lockback posted:The polish folks I've worked with used to reply to emails telling people they were too stupid to understand their reply so I think that lady was just kind of a jerk. Yeah my read is that she decided she hates OP for some unrelated reason probably to do with declining to do her job for her and went off on whatever pretext was at hand.
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Jan 11, 2024 22:06
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SpartanIvy posted:That's actually a compliment in Poland Eyyyyy is this a pollock joke or were you being serious? Now I’m just reminded no one within 100 miles of me can make a decent Packzi and I’m bummed for Fat Tuesday.
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Jan 11, 2024 22:09
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Tnuctip posted:Eyyyyy is this a pollock joke or were you being serious? I feel imitation crab meat is worthy of scorn
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Jan 11, 2024 22:15
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I used to ask someone if they could do something “real quick” for me, as in “hey could you calculate x and y in these spreadsheets real quick when you get a chance thanks”. To me and my colloquial usage when I described it as something that can be done “real quick” it’s not me saying I need it done really quick it’s me saying the task is super easy and will take no time to do. Idk maybe I’m the weird one with the weird colloquial usage but eventually I got talked to about constantly asking for stuff asap and immediately, because that’s how the person understood “real quick” to mean.
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Jan 11, 2024 22:46
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Yeah I take “real quick” to be “can you stop what you’re doing for <5 mins and do this?”
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Jan 11, 2024 22:52
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Fil5000 posted:Back end of last year my employer went from a very soft "40% in office but if you do a day every couple of weeks we won't make a fuss" to a hard "60% in office or we start disciplinary action". I discussed with my boss and said if this is how it's going to go down they're basically handing me a pay cut and I'd have to consider my options. He pretty much just shrugged.  Sometimes a little push is all you need to get out the door and find something better.
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Jan 11, 2024 23:03
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Democratic Pirate posted:Yeah I take “real quick” to be “can you stop what you’re doing for <5 mins and do this?”
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Jan 12, 2024 00:25
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Arquinsiel posted:I tend to think it means both things. You want me to stop what I'm doing and do the thing that's fast. It will, however, not be fast at all. I try to be fair to the person I'm asking that to. "Hey, quick question (and tell me if it isn't)..." Or, "Could you please take a quick sec (hopefully quick?) to..." And if I know the person well or they're part of my group, etc: "Let's pretend this thing I'm gonna ask you to do is actually quick and it's not just that I'm stupid. Any chance that you could quickly..." Otherwise yeah, even an actual, legitimately quick task is going to break someone's concentration / groove on the work they were doing. Citation: Every loving day.
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Jan 12, 2024 00:32
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I want to know how you all work in places where everyone is fully concentrated on producing deliverables or work products and can’t be distracted for 5 minutes because I don’t think in my entire career I’ve ever worked in a place that’s true. In my experience most people “work” for a dozen hours a week at best. Lots of people do less than that.
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Jan 12, 2024 00:39
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Oh great I got roped into a bunch of performance reviews as a secondary how brilliant. First input "if we're giving this person below average, the actual content should probably support that rather than sounding positive". Also I discovered today that teams has a profanity filter after I got filtered for drat of all things. Best of all, it sends the other person a message saying "the message sent to you was filtered due to profanity", leaving them guessing.
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Jan 12, 2024 00:57
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Jordan7hm posted:I want to know how you all work in places where everyone is fully concentrated on producing deliverables or work products and can’t be distracted for 5 minutes because I don’t think in my entire career I’ve ever worked in a place that’s true. In my experience most people “work” for a dozen hours a week at best. Lots of people do less than that. The reason we all work for 12 hours is because we spend the other 28 being distracted by 5 minute questions.  But seriously, I do feel that every time I sit down to review P&IDs or work on process maps, there's suddenly a line of people with quick questions outside my office. There are days where I think I have only 1-2 hours of work to really focus on (and I'm excited for a light, focused day where I'll put on some music and read/write/whatever), and that task never gets done because I spend 8 straight hours putting out fires. Edit: Not the actual one (just grabbed this off Google). I'm working on a project right now moving equipment around, and it requires revising and redrawing a whole bunch of drawings like these...  It'd take me an hour or two to redline and trace all the parts and systems, go find the other drawings if there are side references, maybe add another hour or two if some bad design practices were taken that require I redline other system drawings, etc etc. Now add "quick questions" while trying to trace what goes where and how to move it / redesign it. It's a nightmare. Sundae fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Jan 12, 2024 |
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Jan 12, 2024 00:59
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Jordan7hm posted:I want to know how you all work in places where everyone is fully concentrated on producing deliverables or work products and can’t be distracted for 5 minutes because I don’t think in my entire career I’ve ever worked in a place that’s true. In my experience most people “work” for a dozen hours a week at best. Lots of people do less than that. Workplaces vary hugely. After ~15 years working in places where people spent >80% of their hours getting stuff done I moved to a place that was as you describe. It felt... disgusting.
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Jan 12, 2024 01:04
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I usually assume "real quick" means "Can you do this quickly because it doesn't need to be an A+ thing". Like "Real quick, make me a sandwich" is going to get you a pretty lazy sandwich, even though I am capable of making a really goddamn good sandwich.
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Jan 12, 2024 01:17
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Jordan7hm posted:I want to know how you all work in places where everyone is fully concentrated on producing deliverables or work products and can’t be distracted for 5 minutes because I don’t think in my entire career I’ve ever worked in a place that’s true. In my experience most people “work” for a dozen hours a week at best. Lots of people do less than that. Business Law dictates that “real quick” questions pop up only when the recipient is finally settled into a good grove on a work problem.
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Jan 12, 2024 02:33
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I think most people I worked with at my last job put in 5-6 hours on a good day. If you could concentrate and were low enough on the pole to be the one asking questions and not answering them you could get close to 7, maybe 7.5 hours of work done. And if you were in a position where you could have some stuff being run on an automated system while you worked on some other things you'd get more work done than your manager thought possible. Sometimes none of that work mattered because the items we sent back to our end users didn't get used and a year later they'd get brought back in. The job felt so utterly pointless sometimes
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Jan 12, 2024 05:07
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come back into the office so we can ask bullshit questions with in-person urgency
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Jan 12, 2024 05:24
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With a law firm I was fairly consistently doing 10+ hours of real work each day, often more. After that, in western corporates more like the 5-7 other people mentioned. Chinese tech companies were like going back to a law firm except for less money (but more day to day autonomy)
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Jan 12, 2024 10:27
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It's called thinking time and it requires 1-3 hours a day, it's intangible so you'll just have to take my word for it. (I do actually believe this, I like to have a bunch of things in my head that are ticking away in the background)
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Jan 12, 2024 11:09
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Democratic Pirate posted:Business Law dictates that “real quick” questions pop up only when the recipient is finally settled into a good grove on a work problem.
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Jan 12, 2024 11:20
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Sundae posted:The reason we all work for 12 hours is because we spend the other 28 being distracted by 5 minute questions. Since when did you get an office?
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Jan 12, 2024 13:37
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Last year, I moved into middle management to a team of 6 reports (no former peers or anything like that - brand new team for me). I had my end of year review with my boss yesterday, and managers are rated on two scales - what you do and how you manage. I got the highest score possible on the "how you manage" side of things. Apparently, because I care about my team and their career growth, that makes me outstanding. One of my reports said that I show an "uncommon and positive interest" in their growth which they have never seen from any other manager. I'd think what I do as a manager would be par for the course, but I guess a lot of managers here suck. I'm feeling pretty good about the high review considering I was hesitant on managing people. Also, the high rating will bump my bonus up by about 5%.
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Jan 12, 2024 16:45
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SerthVarnee posted:Since when did you get an office? Since I stole one again!  I'm in flux mode again, sitting in a storage cubicle currently because the 'hotel' office I stole has an actual, honest-to-god legitimate visitor using it for the next few weeks. I ran the non-numbers and it's more convenient for me to be a floater than it is to ask everyone to get their poo poo out of the storage cubicle, so I'm just sort of perching my laptop on top of boxes. On a positive, I have my pick of three different (broken) chairs in the cube!
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Jan 12, 2024 17:05
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Our team is densifying a row of 3 cubes to 5 sit/stand desks with partitions between, and others will have to hot desk as they’re in only 1-2 days a week. It’s ironic we need to show facilities that we need to expand the office space as things are getting really tight even with a lot of hybrid work (our site is growing like mad)
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Jan 12, 2024 17:08
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priznat posted:Our team is densifying a row of 3 cubes to 5 sit/stand desks with partitions between, and others will have to hot desk as they’re in only 1-2 days a week. It’s ironic we need to show facilities that we need to expand the office space as things are getting really tight even with a lot of hybrid work (our site is growing like mad) Our new 60% return to office mandate came complete with a senior manager telling us all on a call that we may have to start booking desks weeks in advance in order to be sure of meeting the mandate. Uh, no, you want me in the office you make sure there's a loving desk for me, this is 100% a you problem.
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Jan 12, 2024 17:17
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Fil5000 posted:Our new 60% return to office mandate came complete with a senior manager telling us all on a call that we may have to start booking desks weeks in advance in order to be sure of meeting the mandate. Uh, no, you want me in the office you make sure there's a loving desk for me, this is 100% a you problem. Yeah they better expand our office space because we’re already pretty full as far as people who come in to the office (a lot of people don’t at this site and only come by for occasional meetings) Thankfully as one of the leads I get my own cube, benefits of being an old fogey.
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Jan 12, 2024 17:19
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Good-Natured Filth posted:One of my reports said that I show an "uncommon and positive interest" in their growth which they have never seen from any other manager. Yep, so much about managing is just having empathy and listening and then even the bare minimum of opening doors. A lot of people thing managing is building power point slides and getting a pat on the head from a VP, but if you actually do your job its amazing the results you can get.
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Jan 12, 2024 18:13
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I'll never forget telling a manager that I needed to take some time because my mom just died and he said "I knew it!" like he got a winning trivia question. I honestly completely checked out after that.
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Jan 12, 2024 18:47
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priznat posted:I'll never forget telling a manager that I needed to take some time because my mom just died and he said "I knew it!" like he got a winning trivia question. I honestly completely checked out after that. What the actual gently caress
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Jan 12, 2024 19:00
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I am in a bit of a pickle. I can't give very many details at all, but broadly speaking... 1 - Hired a new contract employee. 2 - Had the old-guard guy train her on equipment / basic lab stuff while I was going out for a month on vacation (bad timing, but there were supposed to be two people covering me) 3 - Both of those covers (one of which was my boss) go out on vacation & medical leave while I'm out. 4 - New contract employee puts in a harassment complaint against old-guard guy while I'm out. I come back to it from vacation. So, I separate them and they never are going to work together alone. They're at opposite ends of the facility now. He is on instructions not to talk to her about anything whatsoever until the HR investigation ends. The HR investigation has taken two loving months and it's still ongoing, but in the course of it, Old Guy has shown that he's literally just a loving dumbass and not malicious. Both HR and I are in agreement on that aspect - he's a loving idiot, but didn't mean harm. (He thinks he's giving everyone meaningful life advice, etc etc. He thinks this to the point that he literally gave HR references to other people he'd helped as a means of exonerating himself, which just created Pattern Of Behavior for them.) Fast-forward to the new year: New hire doesn't want to work with him under any circumstances, including group conditions. She expressed concern about being in the same room as him even for team meetings. (The witness to all of it thinks she's overreacting, but that's not her call. In harassment things, one of the dangers is to assign your own level of comfort to someone else's feelings. For all I know, she's had a bad past experience and this is traumatizing. I don't get to assume she's overreacting because feelings aren't rational.) We have 7 operators (including contractors) running two manufacturing facilities (one dev, one GMP). Old Guy runs the dev facility mostly single-handedly at this point, so the rest of the team can handle the GMP side. Old guy has 15-20 years of experience, runs an entire lab of ours, and is (this is important) a full-time employee. We are on a Full Time Employee hiring freeze. If I fire him, I don't get to replace him. Not even with a contractor, because those headcounts are separate. If I fire him, he's just plain gone and more work for my other operators. If I terminate Old Guy, I will have an operator mutiny on my hands because everyone likes him, and because it's a small team. It'll instantly come out why he was terminated, new girl will be a pariah, and everyone else will be pissed because their workload drastically went up (because of the hiring freeze aspect). If I terminate the contractor's contract or send her back to the agency for replacement, LAFFO LOL  HAHAHAHAHA I deserve everything that will happen to me in response. It should be clear why this isn't a viable option.However, there is zero way I can keep a team of 7 operators all working separately forever and not have team meetings or group work. One of our pieces of equipment takes 6 operators to run, as an example. One person out of the office during that (or more than one task to do in the lab) and I need to put them together. Plus she's the newcomer, so she's not trained for solo-work activities yet and won't be for almost a year with our company's training requirements. HR is meeting with me next week, but currently says they plan to "not give a formal recommendation, just my options," which I think is probably codephrase for "glhf you're on your own, whatever you do is your problem not ours." So yeah, those bullshit two-hour-long trainings on harassment we have to take every year? I think I've found their target audience.  This is making my life VERY HARD.
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Jan 12, 2024 19:11
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One of my team leads was insulting our recruiter and now sent a salty email complaint to me and my boss because we haven't hired anyone for his team. Just go quit already so I don't have to fire you.
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Jan 12, 2024 19:13
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I'm now imagining priznat's office looking like this
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Jan 12, 2024 19:15
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Baddog posted:I'm now imagining priznat's office looking like this lol no there will be partitions! Also kneeling is optional but chairs are for closers
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Jan 12, 2024 19:21
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Sundae posted:I am in a bit of a pickle. Remember that if there was no malice/no violation of policy accommodations for things like this have to be reassonable. I would suggest her preferred remedy is not and you should be ready to discuss this topic with your HR.
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Jan 12, 2024 19:22
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Yeah I’m not an HR expert or anything but from my many many training, just send the contractor packing. Someone being offended unreasonably isn’t harassment, again I say only as having sat through the training videos and not giving advice
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Jan 12, 2024 19:26
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Sundae posted:So yeah, those bullshit two-hour-long trainings on harassment we have to take every year? I think I've found their target audience. So basically HR is either not doing their one job, or they've done it and judged that the person either doesn't have a strong case for a harassment/hostile workplace lawsuit (or that they can't financially sustain a lawsuit for such). As lovely as I'd expect from a corp that size. How set in stone is the hiring freeze? Can you make a case to get an exception to replace the old guard due to the risk of lawsuit (that you can make despite HR not stepping up)? Edit: I'm assuming here that the harassment complaint is reasonable, given the understandable lack of detail that you can provide.
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Jan 12, 2024 19:31
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Sundae posted:I am in a bit of a pickle. I can't give very many details at all, but broadly speaking... Oof. This suuuuuuuucks. I see no reasonable alternative but to concur with Motronic: explain to her that you will keep them apart wherever possible, and you will never allow him and her to be alone again, but her job requires her to sometimes work with him and that isn't fixable. You will need to clear this with HR before you do it. Even if they shrug and refuse to touch it with a barge pole, you at least need to cover your rear end so far as you can document HR didn't stop you. You also need to clear it with your boss, of course. But I have no great hope of a good outcome here to be honest. Most likely she will continue to lodge complaints and will force the issue: fire him, or have her quit and sue. HR's entire job is to understand the risks here and only allow you to not fire the guy if they're confident she can't sustain a lawsuit and will at worst accept a small payoff. e: You also need to sit down with Old Timer and very specifically explain to him what he must never say or do ever again. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jan 12, 2024 |
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Jan 12, 2024 19:38
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