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Sundae posted:
That PM I sent you a couple days back? Think very carefully about whether/how you want to act on it in light of this change.
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# ¿ May 22, 2015 21:44 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 15:24 |
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Hey Sundae, new plan- once you retire, let me know if you want to become a whistleblower. It's lucrative. I'm not sure of the details, but there's a similar process to what happened in the case of Ranbaxy for reporting cGMP fraud- if your company is at that level of evil.
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# ¿ May 24, 2015 23:33 |
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Sundae posted:Okay, serious question because I just don't get it: Why is our company org chart considered executive confidential? Sundae posted:It's really hard to judge without an org chart, but I'd estimate that somewhere between 60-80% of all our employees are contractors. This is a bit old, but I think you answered your own question without realizing it. The lack of an org chart may be an attempt to prevent regulators from gaining evidence of (among other things), contractor cycling. Now that I've finished powering through the archive of this thread, I have one burning question, Sundae: Why on earth would you use Minitab? I'd go anywhere and use anything to avoid it. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Jan 24, 2024 |
# ¿ May 25, 2015 08:43 |
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Sydin posted:Setting the bar low and then exceeding it is one of the fastest ways to be treated like a rock star for doing the same thing everybody else is doing. Likewise, setting the bar high and then failing to meet your commitment is one of the fastest ways to get poo poo on for busting your rear end. There's actually a simple explanation for this- the people doing the evaluation have no other way of measuring things objectively than failure or success in meeting commitments, and because commitment statements are relied upon in making other scheduling and planning decisions. For those trying to figure out a (for example) project schedule, your ability to set goals you can always meet is genuinely more important than your ability to go above and beyond- and let the people who are relying on your commitment down. Sometimes those above you do have other ways of evaluating you, but they themselves are forced to, or trained to, use the "met commitment" standard because it's the closest thing to an objective performance indicator that they have. More importantly, it's the only objective indicator your boss's boss's boss will have, because they don't personally know how things operate in your area or what reasonable versus challenging commitments are. I suspect that this last disconnect is a major source of the horribleness I've read in the thread. Even when the corporate overlords want to care about meaningful, long-term outcomes (and they're raised in a system that educates and incentivizes them not to at every step), they don't have a way of knowing what such a measure would actually look like.
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# ¿ May 26, 2015 16:06 |
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:So I applyed for a job that sounded cool but never intended to get in order to put a bit of fire under my bosses boss. The plan was im so underpaid vs market rate and so annoying/expensive to replace that they would take my request for a pay rise seriously. Congratulations, Director Botticelli! Um, could you look at my grant application, please?
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# ¿ May 26, 2015 19:55 |
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Sundae posted:I just don't care anymore. I hate this industry too much to even jump ship now. If/when I get into NIH/NSF ethics and regulatory oversight, I may ask for your contact information/CV. You have the mindset I'm looking for!
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# ¿ May 26, 2015 21:05 |
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Kim Jong Il posted:One thing that's pretty common is a lot of Lean Six Sigma programs use it, you can probably thank Motorola or GE for that. I can't think of a better reason not to use it. Hey, Sundae, you know how your Company was trying to prove that all possible calculations coming out of Minitab were correct by hand? They may have had good reason- it would not surprise me in the least if Minitab returns consistent calculation errors.
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# ¿ May 27, 2015 03:08 |
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Sydin posted:Is it common for people to actually get yelled at in most corporate settings? I've never seen anybody so much as raise their voice at another employee at my current company, and in talking with some co-workers who've been around longer than I have, it sounds like that kind of behavior is something of a major faux pas in our corporate culture. Particularly between a manager and a report. Yes, even at very high levels. Some people are never socialized not to do it, and some people are socialized to do it because it was done to them. It's never a particularly effective practice, at least under any sort of conventional circumstances. Maybe if there were literally a bomb involved, or people were dead.
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# ¿ May 28, 2015 21:49 |
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ItalicSquirrels posted:Just found out our Director got a promotion to... Executive Director. Not like he moved up to a different post, his position got renamed to include "Executive". So now we have Associate Directors, Assistant Directors, and an Executive Director. I think this is going back a couple pages, but this is my new least-favorite corpspeak thing. Tacking "Executive" onto things to make them sound more important. I guess whatever he needs to do to justify his salary increase while the rest of us get our COLA rescinded so the budget will break even. It's actually perfectly sensible- it's meant to reflect a role equivalent to a parallel structure in other companies (particularly larger ones) where there are both Directors and an Executive Director- it smooths over normal role confusions. If you're the executive director, and you're dealing with executive director things, do you expect to talk to the director of your partner company, or to another executive director? It's not like the company org chart is public. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jun 2, 2015 |
# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 20:01 |
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ItalicSquirrels posted:We're a state agency with an extremely public org chart. We mainly deal with similar organizations. It's not like you pass around the org chart at executive meetings, though. These name changes are a routine practice to let everyone in the room know the responsibility and authority levels of the people they are talking to. For state orgs, the different titles also often correspond to pay grades that are established at a higher level, or which may be shifted as a part of mandated seniority or employment-period based shifts. I can still remember my father's move from assistant to associate dean, with no other changes, because he'd been employed for three years. The same sort of policies may exist in the private sector.
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# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 21:04 |
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The procedure on evals sounds like a misapplication (probably intentional) of the central limit theorem.
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# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 17:44 |
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Lowly posted:My boss went from Director to Executive Director to VP. Her actual job has never changed and they haven't created any new positions. Every time she gets a promotion the title she used to be just disappears. She's the worst boss I've ever had, but she sure is great at getting promotions. I think she has one for every year of working. Promotions are super rare at my company, so I'm not sure exactly what sorcery she's doing, but whatever it is, I guess she's spending all her time on that instead of her actual job. We already talked about why this was the case. Read the rest of the thread- it has nothing to do with her on the job quality and a lot to do with being able to interact with people from other parts of the company/other companies.
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# ¿ Jun 4, 2015 13:58 |
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Sundae posted:Speaking of performance reviews, I have to fill in my mid-year evaluations for some of my underlings. These are samples of the questions I've been asked for each person this year... CONNECT SHAPE what are some of the others?
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# ¿ Jun 4, 2015 14:11 |
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Taliesyn posted:Those review questions make me think of the old Dilbert strip where a frustrated Dilbert points out (I believe to a Purchasing Troll) that not everything adds value, using office chairs as an example. The next panel has either Wally or Alice bitching him out because the company got rid of all the cubicle workers' chairs. As well they should- chairs are an indirect value add.
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# ¿ Jun 5, 2015 01:43 |
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Radio Talmudist posted:In the four years after graduate I spent job hunting, the vast majority of jobs I got came from temping. I think once or twice I was hired off cragislist, but most of the time applying for jobs consisted of me spending several months sending dozens if not hundreds of resumes without getting any response. Which creates a kind of generational divide because our parents had it considerably easier in terms of finding employment, at least that's my perception. Part of the generational divide is actually a continuous sampling error. If your parents were able to have kids, they were more likely to have a stable job or jobs.
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# ¿ Jun 5, 2015 14:17 |
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Radbot posted:This would be accurate if people with lower socioeconomic status had fewer kids, which they don't. In fact, the precise opposite is true. socioeconomic status isn't a proxy for job stability, and you're turning children into a continuous. We've also got a selection bias in the population on the forum.
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# ¿ Jun 5, 2015 18:50 |
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Radbot posted:Yeah I'm just gonna call bullshit on your whole idea until you've got data to prove otherwise. Feel free. Also maybe reread my initial idea and notice what you missed in your initial eagerness to attack it. vvvvv Congrats! Also share in the lawthread- they will be happy for you/you remind them that family law exists, which will depress them. Bonus Points! Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Jun 6, 2015 |
# ¿ Jun 6, 2015 02:39 |
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The point of the game is to incentivize that sort of thing- it's not particularly meaningful.
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# ¿ Jun 7, 2015 02:24 |
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Miss-Bomarc posted:"removing a side effect" sounds good until it turns out that the side effect is, like, "occasional nausea, vomiting, chills and fever" (which is pharma-label code for "psychosomatic bullshit but people reported it so the FDA forced us to put it on the label so that they can feel like they're doing something, which, these people have bachelor's degrees in English and their boss has an MBA and they're dictating terms to people with PhD's in biochemistry who've brought entire new classes of molecules to market, but the law says that whoever sits in the FDA seat is in charge so whatevs" Look, I'm sure you have Opinions about the FDA, but this is some monumentally incorrect and ignorant posting here. You're wrong in so many ways I can't keep track of them all-the facts, the reasoning, the implicit causal and ethical claims, the bizarre sense of moral confidence that I'm used to seeing from people under scrutiny because they just killed a roomful of immunosuppressed kids. Please find somewhere else to express these ideas, preferably the Leper's Colony. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Jun 8, 2015 |
# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 07:05 |
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Weatherman posted:what 1. Removing side effects is generally good absent externalities. "occasional nausea, vomiting, chills and fever," aren't always psychosomatic, and there isn't a clear evidentiary standard for their inclusion. 2. The legal basis for listing reported effects is effectively hardcoded into the laws the FDA enforces. They don't do things "to feel like they're doing something". 3. If the FDA doesn't enforce the law in that way, it creates an opening for a suit (probably from WLF and friends) that will make it hard to list any side effects, or make it even more impossibly expensive for FDA to regulate labeling and approvals. That would be the best case scenario. They probably already have several generations of filings and amici lined up in case the opportunity arises. I have interacted with WLF. They are the stereotype of satanic lawyers made flesh. 4. Few people in policymaking at FDA have MBAs, and none that I've worked with have just had english degrees-aside from the couple who do the equivalent of copyediting. Some of the lower level heavy hitters had bachelor's degrees in sciences, but most of that generation is retired. Anyways, they still knew the relevant science better than industry. Using degrees as a substitute for field knowledge is a dodge from the main issue, which is that industry can't meaningfully regulate their own science. 5. Industry believing they categorically know the field (and the science) better than regulators is a symptom of conflict of interest, and is usually a prelude to people dying. These people are often immunosuppressed, because that's a particularly vulnerable population for a number of FDA regulated areas. 6. I spent a summer working with an FDA compliance consulting firm. One of the categories of company we would have to work with were people under investigation after regulatory noncompliance or adverse events. Many of these people, confronted with their own responsibility and incompetence, doubled down on the "I know better than FDA" line of thought. It rarely ended well for them- but sympathies are better directed at the innocent people such actors have harmed. They also parroted many of the antiregulatory non-truths that Miss-Bomarc did, especially the bullshit pointless English degrees one. It's a stupid, dangerous line of reasoning, built on nothing but ignorance and self-delusion. As someone who has worked in that area, it's not a set of statements I have much patience for. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Jun 8, 2015 |
# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 07:49 |
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MrKatharsis posted:the FDA was mean to my mommy Haha, wow, I didn't notice that post- it was from right before I speedread the thread and started reading regularly. Can I call 'em or what?
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# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 15:55 |
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Right, that's the takeaway. Not "kid in his twenties with a BA in English telling a woman with two PhDs that genetic engineering is still an unproven technology and that's why we can't cure cancer this year". No, it's all about mean to my mommy. You are proving our point. Do you understand why you are proving our point?
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# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 07:15 |
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Fil5000 posted:Vox, how would the Death Vox version of the FDA operate? Whether for serious or not, that's probably too far off-topic. Assuming total control, I would change the mandate of the tobacco division so that it harmonizes with the rest of FDA's mission, though. I have to be careful here- FDA is one of the places I hope to work.
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# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 14:43 |
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SubjectVerbObject posted:Given that your company seems to be all about appeasing authority rather than scientific discovery, it would be the perfect place for one. ?????
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# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 21:18 |
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SubjectVerbObject posted:I am just thinking that a creationist scientist would work very well in a place where you are expected to follow orders, not think for yourself and not question authority. I see- I couldn't tell who you were referring to as authority.
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# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 00:46 |
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Grabpot Thundergust posted:Ask them to recite the contents of your employee handbook from memory. It's...I...do they not know what that is?! How could..I mean, even an expert attorney in your area doesn't have rote knowledge of the relevant CFRs- it's like expecting you to know the machine code of all the software you use!
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# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 20:12 |
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FizFashizzle posted:Girl at Huge Corporate Entity who I'm friendly with has recently been promoted to a new position. SHe's now in charge of the entire national wellness program for the entire nation through all their big facilities. Her main job is basically telling the employees exactly how many wellness options they have, and getting them to partake. All companies receive free health screenings (cholesterol, triglycerides, etc) because healthy employees lower insurance premiums across the company. Before you lean in, make a list ( I mean a literal list) of all involved parties who might try to screw you on this, and any way in which your program would have liabilities or problems in an upward scaling.
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# ¿ Jun 13, 2015 01:54 |
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Ashcans posted:Just start inserting excerpts from your books into your work and see how long it takes anyone to notice. Set one of your books in your workplace. Describe the company and location in detail. Include details on the security system. Make concealing FDA noncompliance a plot point. Include this fact in the blurb. Let me give you some people to send promotional copies to. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jun 18, 2015 |
# ¿ Jun 18, 2015 01:38 |
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Epic Doctor Fetus posted:If Sundae were to do this, it could potentially open him up to libel charges. The setting should be the completely fictitious pharmaceutical company "Jackson & Jackson." Only if the published statements were false- and weren't considered parody!
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# ¿ Jun 18, 2015 07:02 |
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Sundae posted:I've been invited to an award presentation with the company president next week. I look forward to reading about your promotion to president of the company in a couple week's time.
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# ¿ Jun 26, 2015 02:23 |
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Sundae posted:Double-post, but it's worth it. I don't understand- Susan does not appear to be a friendly animal of the savannah.
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 19:23 |
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Sundae posted:If they try, I'll be declining it. Though, I do suspect that my boss is on the way out... That's because they're giving you your boss's job.
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# ¿ Jun 30, 2015 01:54 |
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FizFashizzle posted:They're going to send me another, new offer letter. From there I guess I'll counter, quit, or put my head down and just start counting down the days until I die. Why not all three? More seriously, if they spent time discussing how to present your case to other stakeholders, it sounds like you have their buy-in.
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# ¿ Jun 30, 2015 17:22 |
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I would guess that in this context, "executive presence" is actually another way of saying initiative-taking and stick-toitiveness, meaning:Initio posted:He also wants me to show up earlier, work on more than my current set of tasks, and not bill any additional hours.
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# ¿ Jul 3, 2015 03:21 |
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Sundae posted:Edit: But on a positive note, my indenture clause terminates at 11:59:59 PM EST tonight! Congratulations! I sorta want you to stick around so I can see how high up the ladder you can be dragged.
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# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 16:43 |
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CitizenKain posted:The next thing is the company puts up a health flier in the bathrooms, which usually ends up on the wall in front of the urinals, providing reading material. These are usually tips like "Veggies are good!" or stories about health screening. Banal but harmless. Last week someone must have got rushed, and pulled one from a weirdo health blog, as it recommended drinking water because you get energy from water, and it helps with the bodies magnetism. Then had a bunch about flushing toxins from your system. I'm a little worried homeopathy is going to show up on there next. Ask, and if this is the case, escalate. It may seem dumb, but even things like this can be a vector for this sort of nuttery.
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# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 06:01 |
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BigDave posted:I thought a lot of big corporations love to push homeopathic b.s. because it's cheaper to have sick people take sugar pills then actually using their health insurance. ...I would be surprised if this is the case, since that would cause the employee to incur more serious costs. And almost certainly be illegal.
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# ¿ Jul 12, 2015 06:06 |
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For the thread's amusement, I found a story about Sundae's latest promotion. This is also a good opportunity to understand how the business is seen from the other side. Read the whole article once wears off- there are multiple layers of irony if you've been reading Sundae's posts.
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# ¿ Jul 12, 2015 16:55 |
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Right, but as the article says, she did so much to improve the workplace culture and atmosphere! That was her strong suit! (notice that Sundae did not deny being Alex Gorsky)
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 01:07 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 15:24 |
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Kim Jong Il posted:That sounds strange. I'd figure they'd be scared of liability to recommend anything. Sundae was discussing terrible culture interventions coming down from above during a period that matches Weldon's tenure over his division. Sundae also has a history of being promoted despite being a seething, apparently well-concealed fount of white-hot loathing directed at his employer.
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 04:46 |