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Hello, thread. This is a little weird, because I've been reading this thread from the start, so I feel like I know many of the thread regulars, but obviously you know nothing about me. Anyway, I'm past page 1100 now, but not up to the present day, and just wanted to say: Way back in the archives, posts began to appear from "The Sean", each one mysteriously edited to say "gently caress this thread." What could this be? What could have caused this? Quotes of the posts revealed nothing special - fragmentary glimpses into a moderately interesting set of stories, but nothing that could explain how things ended up. Then I noticed that all of the posts shared an edit date: 20th of April 2020. As I ploughed through the archive, drawing ever closer, to this magical date I speculated on what might have caused his situation. Had someone ratted him out to his lecherous ladyboss? Dark betrayal from within the thread? Possibilities abounded. Then I just found out it was a scuffle about names on forms what the gently caress. 2/10, would not theorise again. Anyway, I still have a lot of archive to get through, so uh yeah.
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Oct 19, 2021 07:03
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priznat posted:Our lab in the HQ has this goofy turnstile thing with glass panels where you gotta badge in and out and it went on the fritz and wouldn't let us out, but you could badge in, lol. The opposite of work from home.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:41
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Discendo Vox posted:Regrettably too long for a thread title. The Terrible Secret Of Excel
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Jun 27, 2023 09:25
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Vasudus posted:My company does capacity hires - we basically take you off the market and put you in our pocket until we need you. You're essentially hired out of pure spite. It rules if you're lucky enough to be one. Having been one of those, it can suck. I got hired then spent about half a year heavily underutilised until I figured out some things to do myself. If they'd pay me to sit at home, that'd be great, but if I'm chained to a desk I want to do *something* with my time.
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Jun 28, 2023 01:14
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Baddog posted:Only takes one time getting caught with your poo poo unboxed. A former co-worker once got caught at an Important Meeting with his phone in his desk. I had to bring it out to the front of the building. Super classy place.
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Jun 29, 2023 06:09
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skipdogg posted:I've been through several acquisitions in my career, and this is bullshit. No one can promise you this unless they're willing to provide a signed employment agreement with very favorable terms in it. It's rare to see those outside of the c-suite. The person telling you this could get fired tomorrow, and the person replacing him wants his own people and you're out on your rear end. Yeah. Tales of being directly lied to about this are rare in my experience, but tales of being reassured then fired along with the person who reassured you are common.
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Jun 30, 2023 00:54
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Out of interest, what is the reason that companies hate that idea so much? One place clearly couldn't offer the pay needed to keep me, but clearly did need to keep me. I suggested negotiating for fewer hours at the same pay, they wouldn't go for it even though they then spent almost 2 years trying and failing to replace me for an important role. As in, I got constantly updated on the ongoing carnage by former co-workers. So... what's up with that? Seems counterproductive.
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Jul 1, 2023 18:17
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Volmarias posted:What an aggressively stupid way to do this. Your department is doing amazing things for everyone in the company! Have a budget cut! Actually wait that *is* how things usually work even without this system.
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Jul 5, 2023 02:32
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ThePopeOfFun posted:A multiple choice question with the following options: "Yes."
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Jul 17, 2023 14:58
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I once had a manager who insisted on moderating performance review stats into averages across the board. I never said anything about it because I knew I was moving on soon enough, but one person on a parallel team became the subject of gossip for changing jobs in a hurry, and when asked about notice period, said "I'm just a completely average employee like everyone else, you should have no trouble replacing me!" I suspect that the manager didn't get the memo about talking the employee up while kicking the stats down.
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Jul 24, 2023 11:29
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knox_harrington posted:Just an Event Horizon type portal, nothing for you to worry about. We won't need KPIs where we're going.
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Jul 30, 2023 12:20
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:I've probably topped out at 50% of actual work the last week because 1) I'm just about a month into this job 2) everybody else is on another continent and 3) the reporting structure is a bit strange because the people that report to me don't report to me and have been basically unmanaged for like 3 years. Speaking as someone who has usually been an IC, if they've been fine without management for that long, don't mess things up by overmanaging now. Go in, fix problems that need to be fixed - even if that includes people and how they do things - but leave the other stuff alone, at least for a while. I've had two good teams broken up by people coming in and feeling that they needed to make changes in order to be seen to be doing something.
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Aug 5, 2023 21:21
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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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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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Lockback posted:Don't let loved ones go to Florida. Yeah. As someone who is generally quite pessimistic about covid stuff, young children really do tend to get less severe effects. This has been generalised to "all school-age people", which lol, but it should apply to 3-year-olds.
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Aug 11, 2023 15:06
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Shrieking Muppet posted:I get this is to please the ego of the new Senior VP but for fucks sake no one below VP cares. This would be better as "the new Senior VP *of* for fucks sake no one below VP cares".
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Aug 30, 2023 11:20
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evil_bunnY posted:Just ditch the phone? Yeah. In the past when my employer has gotten weird/complicated about any device, phone or laptop, I've just taken a step back and said "you provide/manage it then". Sometimes they did, more often they decided I didn't really need to have one. Either way it fixed my problem.
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Aug 30, 2023 12:12
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tokenbrownguy posted:oh you're the ceo? didn't realize that dude texts like a drunk tumblrite posts I mean, for many companies...
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Aug 31, 2023 05:35
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Whenever I start to question whether management ever does anything useful, I think of situations like that and remain thankful that they're not my problem.
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Sep 8, 2023 10:31
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Jordan7hm posted:I’d rather have one mediocre tool than 10 slightly better mediocre tools. Not a fan of matrix management, eh?
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Sep 20, 2023 02:19
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Re: the recent thread bullet dodge, I've often wondered about the thought process behind the "just one quick (disruptive) question" person right as a fraught meeting is drawing to a close after unexpectedly righting itself. Obviously I can't ask such people what the gently caress is up in meetings, but I can here. So, uh?
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Sep 22, 2023 01:51
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:You need to up your game here: stealth into the meeting and right at the end ask a question that upends the entire thing. Only if I can expense the subsequent smokebomb.
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Sep 22, 2023 10:13
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One out of two is a meeting organiser. The one who isn't, follows him! When the organiser gets killed, the one who is following picks it up and presents!
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Sep 23, 2023 03:40
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Jenkl posted:Sundaes gonna be working Sundays if this keeps up. Just another manic Sundae
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Sep 29, 2023 14:03
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:So the out of control Control saga continues, yesterday hit the classic from another team who were showing us how they're doing it of "yeah we use X right now, but X is being deprecated in favour of Y, and Y doesn't have feature Z, so I wouldn't suggest trying to do that" followed by my absolute favourite: "well yes this is being done at the design phase, but we're about to lose our designer and we won't get a replacement so we can't do that anymore" the Control response was "well you need to escalate that to your management to get that resource back". Lol, lmao even. Hope you're getting the essentials in writing for the inevitable denouement.
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Oct 5, 2023 12:16
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Volmarias posted:Honestly, do this. It's not like anyone else is going to look anyway. Over the years Sundae's employers have not been known for acting reasonably with respect to logic, fairness, and material reality.
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Oct 12, 2023 01:26
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:This just reminded me that I need to do a year end self review by the end of the week except I've only been here three months and my manager didn't set me any goals. Goals: don't achieve my goals.
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Oct 12, 2023 14:56
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No-one can give you any minutes of your life back.
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Oct 13, 2023 14:58
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Jordan7hm posted:Real interesting to see global companies navigate their responses to world politics right now. My company has set up a pretty good donation match that includes both Israeli and Palestinian charities. I’m pleasantly surprised. Weirdly wise. Expect them to do something terrible soon to make up for it.
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Oct 14, 2023 11:47
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Sundae posted:
People hate counterintuitive risk assessment results. Aside from all the usual corporate stories, there was a government scientific advisor in Britain who got forced out after accurately determining that ecstasy (the illegal drug) was overall less dangerous than horseback riding.
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Oct 18, 2023 00:25
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tactlessbastard posted:Our local HR department has become nearly exclusively a party planning committee. Maybe it's just my location, but when I hear "Party planning committee", I think of something different than what was probably intended.
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Oct 19, 2023 01:15
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Sundae posted:I started writing a pharma story but it spans five years and might end up being a full loving book chapter. Do I You're not going to use up all the infinite canvas of the internet. Just post.
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Oct 19, 2023 09:30
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or is that too long for people's interests? Office politics in hiring, racism, accusations of sexual involvement with a direct report, and a series of well-meaning decisions by managers resulting in kind of lovely outcomes for the direct report.
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Re: decisions, I'm sure it isn't news to anyone here but so it's stated: there are a lot of organisations where making decisions is career poison, and the optimal (individual) outcome is to trick or persuade or frustrate someone else into publicly deciding what everyone already knows needs to be done. Unfortunately, if a particular decision can only be made by one of a small number of people, and they're all aware of the situation...
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Oct 20, 2023 08:19
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Lockback posted:One of the advantages of working at a small company is being able to work around stupid bureaucracy, but them saying "Sorry, you don't have the minimum required time to take PTO" is just the worst of all worlds instead. Emptyquoting
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Oct 21, 2023 16:21
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Before you go, set your voicemail to the sound of you confusedly answering the phone and asking how you can help.
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Oct 24, 2023 06:43
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ThePopeOfFun posted:Let's all take a second to press and hold on that thought. Going to right click - view element - delete on this part of the meeting.
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Oct 25, 2023 01:56
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From your description it sounds fairly obvious: The facilities head has a lot to do and not much time to do it in, your boss has a known pattern of slowing things down to no benefit, and established procedures would not be compatible with the scale of the necessary task in the available time, so facilities is going around your boss and the procedures as much as possible and presenting things as a fait accompli each time. And... it doesn't sound like facilities person is wrong to be doing that? If this is accurate, then your job is to get out from under your deadweight boss before she drags you down as she sinks beneath the weight of her own ineffectiveness. Is there any chance of you getting onto the team that's getting stuff done?
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Oct 25, 2023 08:01
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Midjack posted:Do it and see if they're dumb enough to legally retaliate a load bearing employee out of the job, watch the whole thing fall over from a safe distance afterwards. I don't usually post on this side of the argument, but the premise of the "Corporate Megathread", does imply that yes, they very much would be willing to do extremely unproductive things if it means fulfilling bureaucratic directives. It's the key factor that keeps the business world in flux by slowly killing the largest corporations while their lean small competitors attack them with an efficiency that mere economies of scale and regulatory capture cannot defend against. In short, don't bet against corporate bureaucracy when your career is on the line.
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Oct 28, 2023 17:02
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Midjack posted:Fair enough; I've done the right thing at high personal cost more than once so I'm willing to launch resumes and burn the motherfucker down. Oh sure, I agree, that's why I left the corporate world behind and I'm a teacher now, but I don't give advice that might lead to that in this thread! In the end I was too committed to Getting Stuff Done.
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Oct 28, 2023 17:14
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Tnuctip posted:I’m certainly not knocking technicians, but how many techs has that lab promoted out and up over those 26 years? Yep, the curse of productivity. At a lot of places, you only get promoted out of individual contributor roles if your networking and people skills are better than your productivity, because then it's a net gain for the company. So...
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Oct 30, 2023 23:40
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