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Blue_monday posted:I actually kind of hate doing 'personal' things at work. Generally I'll read the news/Facebook on my phone if I'm on hold or waiting for a call to connect, or if I'm waiting for the boss. Other than that I'll book a doctors appointment or something during the day, but when I'm at work I'm there to work. It works well for what I do. My job is totally reactionary. Sometimes there's just nothing to do, yet I still have to sit there and keep an eye open just in case something happens. It prevents people from falling asleep on really slow days, or just zoning out and becoming incapable of being productive in case something does happen. The worst day at work I've ever had was last Christmas where I walked in, did about three tickets across ten hours, then went home. Without free internet access it would've been excruciating. Yet I still had to be there the entire time just to watch, just in case.
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Mar 19, 2014 00:01
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I'm a consultant so my hours are "when I'm solving a client's issues" and "when I'm working on personal things/getting a film put together". I can't imagine a place that would monitor my time usage if I was otherwise completing all job tasks. Here's my idea: Treat internet usage as another benefit. The same as a parking spot: you deliver good work in exchange for autonomy to get things done. If that doesn't work, business books. There's enough interesting material at the local library to keep you reading and learning for 100 downtime hours. (After that, you gotta go to Amazon). If THAT doesn't work, offer to start an efficiency task force. Become the schutzstaffel. Either you'll piss off a higher manager who uses the internet, or you'll keep busy keeping everyone ELSE unhappy.
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Mar 19, 2014 00:35
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So I finally got my performance evaluation, apparently coming in on weekends last summer to work on the mountain of work I had with no overtime counts as "meets expectations", gently caress this place so much.
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Mar 19, 2014 01:26
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Renegret posted:It works well for what I do. My job is totally reactionary. Sometimes there's just nothing to do, yet I still have to sit there and keep an eye open just in case something happens. It prevents people from falling asleep on really slow days, or just zoning out and becoming incapable of being productive in case something does happen. Mine is 'reactionary' as well, but I have to actually manually refresh the queue to see if anything drops in. So even if I wanted to goof off on the web, I still have to keep a work panel open constantly hitting return every so many seconds to see if something pops in. In two weeks it shouldn't matter, or so I'm told, as we should be inundated once my company's spring campaign starts. Otherwise confirmed that news and weather are acceptable uses of my time when there are no tasks in the queue. Otherwise, my work is starting some metric performance tracking that seems a little circular. Basically, they track how many tasks a person averages per hour and compares that to the team's average. This only tracks our department, no one else. The boss says we need to all be above average.
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Mar 19, 2014 02:10
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Welp, our company just hired a new C-level that oversees the division I work in who has a long history of promoting automation in tandem with layoffs. The interesting political aspect is that the division was in the hands of a SVP who has been with the company for 15 years and now she has to report to him when before she reported directly to the company president.
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Mar 19, 2014 04:12
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YF19pilot posted:Otherwise, my work is starting some metric performance tracking that seems a little circular. Basically, they track how many tasks a person averages per hour and compares that to the team's average. This only tracks our department, no one else. The boss says we need to all be above average. Uh, that's not "a little circular", that's mathematically impossible. You do know that right? Assuming you do, make sure your boss and all of your coworkers do too. The best time to stop (or at least discredit) an impossible metric is before it starts being used.
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Mar 19, 2014 08:58
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Whole team needs to be above the team average? Fuckin lol.
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Mar 19, 2014 10:13
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Well if everyone is giving 110% there shouldn't be any problems should there 
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Mar 19, 2014 10:51
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Ezekiel_980 posted:So I finally got my performance evaluation, apparently coming in on weekends last summer to work on the mountain of work I had with no overtime counts as "meets expectations", gently caress this place so much. Hey, they were expecting you to come in and finish the mountain of work so you meet the expectations. If you did not come in, had a mountain of work there and then complained about so much there remained to be done and then wrap it up in the period before appraisal, you might have been better off. Remember that in the weekend there is nobody to see you work so how can they value and judge your work? Nobody gets a raise based on weekend work, working on the weekend to keep up with demand either means your boss cannot plan or you cannot handle the tasks. So little honor to gain there. And if it is normal because you do maintenance work or something, don't expect special treatment, it is just part of your job. Peven Stan posted:Welp, our company just hired a new C-level that oversees the division I work in who has a long history of promoting automation in tandem with layoffs. The interesting political aspect is that the division was in the hands of a SVP who has been with the company for 15 years and now she has to report to him when before she reported directly to the company president. Three things I noticed about this: - Man, that lady must be pissed off to be pushed down a notch like that - Hey, maybe they do not trust here with the changes needed in the division seeing she ran it the same way for 15 years or maybe she was opposing them from the start? - Looks like a position for SVP is coming available in a few months, time to polish up your resume!
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Mar 19, 2014 11:16
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YF19pilot posted:Mine is 'reactionary' as well, but I have to actually manually refresh the queue to see if anything drops in. So even if I wanted to goof off on the web, I still have to keep a work panel open constantly hitting return every so many seconds to see if something pops in. In two weeks it shouldn't matter, or so I'm told, as we should be inundated once my company's spring campaign starts. Oh my god I will never complain our boards and stupid metrics again. I'm always complaining to management because the boards refresh once a minute which is too slow, our old system ran in real time. Yours sounds like it's begging for an auto-hotkey macro or something. They're also trying to push "metrics" on us that I've mentioned before. One thing is for alarm time to ticket creations, except the alarm times are all hosed up so it looks like everyone is 10 minutes slower than we really are. Plus when we create a ticket, it gets dumped into a queue that runs every 5 minutes, so it's quite literally impossible for us to meet our 15 minute SLA when alarms come in time stamped 10 minutes in the past and it takes 5 minutes for the system to make a ticket. If I act on an alert within one minute, I'm already one minute past SLA! There's also one supervisor who's running..."reports" on his shift to see who's doing the most work. The extent of his "report" is running a search on all tickets between a certain time frame to see who touched it. That means a person who clicks a single meaningless radio button on a tracking ticket gets the same amount of work credit as someone who's dealing with the loss of an entire remote site. Needless to say, everyone on his shift spends more time putting useless updates into useless tickets and mass modifying hundreds of tickets instead of actual meaningful work, including tasks that doesn't require tickets. This is one of those guys who seems a lot smarter than he really is and hides it under being a complete workaholic. He over complicates the simplest tasks and it impresses management that he's going above and beyond, but in reality he's usually digging holes for himself and gets everyone in trouble. I'm a huge fan of keeping simple tasks simple. (Basically, he's that guy you knew in school who's math homework was 20 pages front and back while yours was a scribble on the front of a page torn out of a spiral notebook. Meanwhile he got a lower grade because it's full of mistakes) Still not as bad as forcing everyone to be above average though. Renegret fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Mar 19, 2014 |
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Mar 19, 2014 11:50
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Keetron posted:Hey, they were expecting you to come in and finish the mountain of work so you meet the expectations. If you did not come in, had a mountain of work there and then complained about so much there remained to be done and then wrap it up in the period before appraisal, you might have been better off. Remember that in the weekend there is nobody to see you work so how can they value and judge your work? Nobody gets a raise based on weekend work, working on the weekend to keep up with demand either means your boss cannot plan or you cannot handle the tasks. So little honor to gain there. And if it is normal because you do maintenance work or something, don't expect special treatment, it is just part of your job. Considering my boss was the one who had to review my notebook and sign off of the mountain of extra work we got I find it hard to believe he wasn't aware of me coming in to do it, especially since he said thank you every Monday for me doing this. My bosses planning ability nor my ability to keep up with tasks isn't the problem, it probably has more to do with working in a small specialist group that gets more and more work but no more personnel to help with the work load. Obviously my reward for all of this was my "thank you" and I am a terrible employee for thinking that I would get anything on my eval praising me for putting in extra effort.
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Mar 19, 2014 11:54
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Ezekiel_980 posted:Considering my boss was the one who had to review my notebook and sign off of the mountain of extra work we got I find it hard to believe he wasn't aware of me coming in to do it, especially since he said thank you every Monday for me doing this. My bosses planning ability nor my ability to keep up with tasks isn't the problem, it probably has more to do with working in a small specialist group that gets more and more work but no more personnel to help with the work load. Obviously my reward for all of this was my "thank you" and I am a terrible employee for thinking that I would get anything on my eval praising me for putting in extra effort. He probably wasn't allowed by his superiors to give anyone above an average. Mine gave me a glowing review with not a single negative comment, then I had "meets expectations" down the line and he straight up told me he wasn't allowed to give anything higher. It's annoying but I can't say I'm mad because it's what I expected. I have no motivation to actually work hard and do more than the bare minimum. No matter how bad or good I am, I will get an average review, the same score as even our most useless members. I can't even use working hard as a motivation for promotion, so far every single person who has gotten promoted here was a giant pain in the rear end, and management wrote them letters of recommendation for those promotions because they didn't want to deal with them anymore. So really, if I want to get promoted, I have a better chance by being a liability and making my boss want to get rid of me. It's easier to dump your problem people on other departments here than get them fired, so that's what most managers end up doing. The best employees in my department are the ones who become too valuable to lose and they get pigeonholed for years. e: One guy almost doubled his pay by being an HR bitch. He would call HR for every little thing that happened that he didn't like weather or not he actually had a case and management was so terrified of facing the wrath of HR they did whatever he could to get rid of him. You're required to be in a position for 6 months before moving to a new department, and he's been basically getting a new job every six months for two years despite being completely average at what he does. Renegret fucked around with this message at 12:47 on Mar 19, 2014 |
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Mar 19, 2014 12:43
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Ezekiel_980 posted:Considering my boss was the one who had to review my notebook and sign off of the mountain of extra work we got I find it hard to believe he wasn't aware of me coming in to do it, especially since he said thank you every Monday for me doing this. My bosses planning ability nor my ability to keep up with tasks isn't the problem, it probably has more to do with working in a small specialist group that gets more and more work but no more personnel to help with the work load. Obviously my reward for all of this was my "thank you" and I am a terrible employee for thinking that I would get anything on my eval praising me for putting in extra effort. Yeah, that is the other option of course but it is clear there is no correlation between you actual performance and the performance appraisal given by the company you work for. This is seldom so, at least for those of us posting in this thread. But how about considering you are part of a small specialist group and there is a high demand for your skills. Maybe a competitor of your current employer is willing to give you the credits you deserve? Rereading my first comment made me see how harsh it came across, this was only partially meant to be so. Renegret posted:I have no motivation to actually work hard and do more than the bare minimum. Renegret posted:The best employees in my department are the ones who become too valuable to lose and they get pigeonholed for years. Keetron fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Mar 19, 2014 |
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Mar 19, 2014 13:33
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Renegret posted:I have no motivation to actually work hard and do more than the bare minimum. No matter how bad or good I am, I will get an average review, the same score as even our most useless members. I can't even use working hard as a motivation for promotion, so far every single person who has gotten promoted here was a giant pain in the rear end, and management wrote them letters of recommendation for those promotions because they didn't want to deal with them anymore. So really, if I want to get promoted, I have a better chance by being a liability and making my boss want to get rid of me. It's easier to dump your problem people on other departments here than get them fired, so that's what most managers end up doing.
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Mar 19, 2014 14:01
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YF19pilot posted:This only tracks our department, no one else. The boss says we need to all be above average. Do you work at Lake Wobegon or what?
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Mar 19, 2014 14:28
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Halloween Jack posted:Where I work, there's no real mechanism for promotion in your current capacity unless you can contrive for your supervisor to invent a new job, with a new job description, for which you can then apply. (And the rules require them to interview for it, so they have to waste at least two other people's time.) I don't have the data, but it appears there's a correlation between brevity of employment and current salary--you have to move from department to department in order to move up. That's one thing I like about my company. My boss has been with the company for 31 years and has never held the same job title for more than 5 years, and many people move a lot faster than that. It's such a big company that there's always room to move up in the same department, or make make a move to a different department altogether. My manager started in the call center as customer service. Honestly most of my problems I have aren't with the company itself, but rather with the management of my department. Plus this is the bitching thread so I'm bitching, but as a whole I like my job and I don't plan on moving yet.
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Mar 19, 2014 14:33
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Renegret posted:Oh my god I will never complain our boards and stupid metrics again. This happened at one of my old jobs as well. As soon as everyone on the team found out what metric-of-the-week was being looked at, we'd all alter our workflow to make that metric look good. For a while it was "how many tickets you've touched that day", so we'd mass edit->save tickets to make it look like our last update was today, so it would show as a much higher number.
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Mar 19, 2014 16:51
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Keetron posted:Yeah, that is the other option of course but it is clear there is no correlation between you actual performance and the performance appraisal given by the company you work for. This is seldom so, at least for those of us posting in this thread. I've been applying to other organizations since the year started but these things move at a glacial pace. Probably doesn't help the technique I work in demands PhDs nowadays and I don't have one.
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Mar 19, 2014 17:22
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ObsidianBeast posted:This happened at one of my old jobs as well. As soon as everyone on the team found out what metric-of-the-week was being looked at, we'd all alter our workflow to make that metric look good. For a while it was "how many tickets you've touched that day", so we'd mass edit->save tickets to make it look like our last update was today, so it would show as a much higher number. I found out someone did a mass edit -> Save last week and us and is going to get written up for it. I joke about doing that but holy poo poo I wouldn't have the balls to actually do it. The guy's a loving dick though and I'm glad whenever something bad happens to him. The best part is that the supervisors didn't even catch it. Another co-worker ratted him out to management. Shows just how much supervising the supervisors do around here.
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Mar 19, 2014 17:26
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People, I work on about 10 projects at any one time. Sending me email with subjects like "Updated the PRS" and content saying "Hey guys just wanted to let you know I updated the specifications for the project, please review!" with no link to the document and no other information is not going to make me like you.
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Mar 19, 2014 17:38
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Renegret posted:I found out someone did a mass edit -> Save last week and us and is going to get written up for it. That is the problem, metrics are used in place of supervision, instead to augment supervision. I cynically say that I am a ticketing system engineer instead of a support engineer, because my job function has changed from fixing issues and satisfying customers to clicking on the right things at the right time in the ticketing system.
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Mar 19, 2014 18:04
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This is a problem in pharma as well. Our deviation investigation group is held to specific timeliness metrics for the closure of investigations that are enforced (and punished) regardless of the complexity or severity of the deviation. The result is a weird sort of culture of fear where people will do bullshit work and half-rear end major investigations rather than risk being fired for going over 30 days on an investigation. Their managers literally show up in my office yelling at me when I reject an investigation report over shoddy science or non-existent statistics. I'm not putting my name on a load of poo poo, and that's all they have time to produce due to the way the workflow is structured.
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Mar 19, 2014 19:23
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Not sure if I mentioned this one, but we are held to 90% billable in order to rise over the "Meets expectations" thing. Then when you are not innovating enough, you cannot rise over the "Meets expectations" thing. Also, get a publication in a book or respected blog. Please ensure that you make your training targets. ... There is no guidance in how to achieve this, no hint at all. Nothing. Being half the globe away from the training centers does not help. No, you cannot have your travel request approved. Oh, the above points are all needed to get an above average appraisal. Yesterday I was a year in this place but three weeks back my youngest was born, I now have four kids to feed. My father drank beer and genever at the dinner table, I am starting to understand why. He was in no way an ugly drunk but he never liked working, the drinking mostly stopped now he is retired. But hell, does that starting to feel like a good idea.
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Mar 19, 2014 20:37
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Up until the year I was hired this company handled online address changes manually. If a client filled out an address change form the info got pushed into a email that was mailed to my department. Someone would come in at 5 and print off whatever new emails came in and then stuff them in filing cabinets sorted by date. Before the process was automated somewhat by an excel macro a team of 14 people was employed just to manually enter these into an IBM 5250 terminal emulator running a mainframe program last updated in the 1980s. It could take up to 3 days for an address change to go through and customers used to live updating would mash furiously, generating more emails and clogging the pipe even more.
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Mar 19, 2014 20:47
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Keetron posted:
My job gave an easy answer to all this. I got an Outstanding rating this year, the best I have ever gotten for any job and I can honestly say I earned it. I worked my butt off making sure hour largest customer (~30% of total revenue out of 100s of customers) was happy. My reward? 2.5% raise and an atta boy. So basically that brass ring ain't worth chasing.
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Mar 19, 2014 21:01
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The firm I've been temping at extended me a full time offer today. Benefits and everything! In exchange for a pay cut from my temp wages. 
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Mar 20, 2014 03:20
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I have a customer-facing email address which looks like 'department.type@company.com', today I got a call from a client who wanted to know why an email sent to this inbox a week ago hadn't been actioned. I checked all my folders in Outlook and it looked like I'd never received the email so asked them to forward it to my personal email address. When I got the email I saw that they had originally tried to send it to 'depratmnet.typ@compyn.com'. How do you completely gently caress up typing a three-word email address like that? Not only that but when I checked their adjustments every single reference number they had written down was incorrect and did not match the line items they were asking me to amend  From this I can only assume that either this person is intensely dyslexic or drunk on the job or they are actually a dog wearing a tie that has managed to infiltrate a hospital's AP department and is now trying to learn how to type with their paws.
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Mar 20, 2014 05:23
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cyberia posted:From this I can only assume that either this person is intensely dyslexic or drunk on the job or they are actually a dog wearing a tie that has managed to infiltrate a hospital's AP department and is now trying to learn how to type with their paws. If it was a dog, he would have been apologetic and asking you what to do to make you stop ignoring him. He is obviously a cat, he shat next to the litter box and now you have to clean up his mess all while he looks at you sternly for not being happy with his piece of art. The poo poo meant to be like that.
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Mar 20, 2014 08:31
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SubjectVerbObject posted:My reward? 2.5% raise and an atta boy. At a previous company, they had a bonus plan for managers and senior staff. The bonus was based on a manager approved personal objective for the quarter and sales meeting its CEO-defined goals. Personal objectives were expected to be quarter-long efforts (like a new product) on your own time for what amounted to less than a week's pay.
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Mar 20, 2014 13:13
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I just got an email regarding scheduling, assuring me that a research partner doesn't have too many "immovable appointments" on their end. I asked what happens if she schedules an immovable appointment back-to-back with an unstoppable appointment (assume spherical appointments).
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Mar 20, 2014 15:14
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The new email template for corporate emails includes a shiny new banner/header. It's so tall that it fills the entire conversation preview window on most monitors. It's also a 500kb image. Did I mention most people here really struggle with pretty low email quotas? No doubt the intention is to increase employee engagement or something, but the real outcome will be people filtering them straight into the deleted items folder. *sigh*
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Mar 21, 2014 15:52
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If you're still dealing with email quotas in 2014, you have bigger problems. You can buy 1 TB hard drives for less than $100, so either your IT department is either incredibly incompetent or so powerless that they can't make minor purchases.
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Mar 21, 2014 17:15
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Konstantin posted:If you're still dealing with email quotas in 2014, you have bigger problems. You can buy 1 TB hard drives for less than $100, so either your IT department is either incredibly incompetent or so powerless that they can't make minor purchases. Actually, enterprise storage is incredibly expensive compared to consumer harddrives - especially when you're talking about hosting and syncing an Exchange system spread across multiple continents - so that's not a useful comparison. Our headcount is north of 12,000 so it's not simply a case of slapping another drive in the RAID 5 array. It's just the waste of (both visual and storage) space which is annoying me. edit: Some back of the envelope maths assuming everyone in the company has the same quota limit (which I'm sure the CEO etc. does not) suggests that we'd require somewhere in the region of 8TB of storage were all of our email hosted on a single Exchange server. However, since we operate and have offices in North America, South America, Europe, India, Japan, China and Australia you can assume at least one exchange server per location listed there so we're now up to a minimum of 56TB before you consider room for growth. That needs to be backed up somewhere and so on, I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the servers have redundant hot spares and, as previously mentioned, consumer prices are not even close to being indicative of enterprise storage costs for high availability systems. Basically, what I'm saying is I understand why we have quotas and I wish the person who came up with that banner did too. rolleyes fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 17:19
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Konstantin posted:If you're still dealing with email quotas in 2014, you have bigger problems. You can buy 1 TB hard drives for less than $100, so either your IT department is either incredibly incompetent or so powerless that they can't make minor purchases. I'm the consumer drives in production storage devices.
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Mar 21, 2014 17:19
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rolleyes posted:Actually, enterprise storage is incredibly expensive compared to consumer harddrives - especially when you're talking about hosting and syncing an Exchange system spread across multiple continents - so that's not a useful comparison. Our headcount is north of 12,000 so it's not simply a case of slapping another drive in the RAID 5 array. So are there techniques out there for obnoxious picture signatures and other redundant data to be centrally located in a single place rather than taking up insane amounts of space every time someone hits "Reply All?" Also, I work somewhere that has published pay bands for every job. How sweet would it be if just before sending out an email, your local copy of Outlook matched up your recipients with their median wage, figured out based on the complexity and length of your email how long it would take to read through it and popped up a message that said, "This email will cost approximately $XXX, do you wish to send it out?" I'll bet it would stop reply all responses rather quickly. Hell, it would work the same way for scheduling meetings too.
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Mar 21, 2014 17:51
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Solkanar512 posted:So are there techniques out there for obnoxious picture signatures and other redundant data to be centrally located in a single place rather than taking up insane amounts of space every time someone hits "Reply All?" There used to be prior to Exchange 2010. There's a technology called de-duplication which recognises exact copies of information and replaces subsequent copies with a link to the original copy. However, Microsoft removed this in Exchange 2010 - something to do with it needing extra databases which then reduced the efficiency to the point where it wasn't actually very useful. Basically it works great for file stores, turns out it doesn't work very well for email. Anyway, this is the TPS thread so I'll stop with the techy stuff an just say "screw obnoxious email headers/footers/signatures".
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Mar 21, 2014 18:00
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"In order to manage costs, we will be backfilling positions at lower levels. We are also freezing promotions. We are doing this in order to re-stock our teams with young talent." I can't think of a way to NOT keep existing young talent worse than this. It screams short-sighted cost savings at the expense of employee recognition and advancement.
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Mar 21, 2014 19:44
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Omne posted:"In order to manage costs, we will be backfilling positions at lower levels. We are also freezing promotions. We are doing this in order to re-stock our teams with young talent." They don't want existing young talent, they want new young talent who are
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Mar 21, 2014 20:29
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nah it's cool, because your organization has an awesome employee development program right?
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Mar 21, 2014 21:34
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rolleyes posted:There used to be prior to Exchange 2010. There's a technology called de-duplication which recognises exact copies of information and replaces subsequent copies with a link to the original copy. However, Microsoft removed this in Exchange 2010 - something to do with it needing extra databases which then reduced the efficiency to the point where it wasn't actually very useful. Basically it works great for file stores, turns out it doesn't work very well for email. I'll bring it back slightly to exchange as I've got an infuriating TPS report. Essentially there's a medium sized company that my MSP supports. One of the users there has a 20GB PST (Exchange 2003) - For anyone not aware, .pst files are archaic and don't work that well if they're over a couple of GB. The guy's the head of HR and point blank refuses to let anyone touch it as allegedly there's years of info on there. He won't let us archive it off either, he doesn't trust us. The CEO backs him up. So, what this means for the user is that his calendar is constantly corrupting, missing entries etc. Outlook crashes constantly and he screams at us to resolve it for him. Without touching the PST file in *some* way, compacting it, splitting it up into smaller ones, we can't help him. DrAlexanderTobacco fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 22:31
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