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sticksy posted:[Zappos Model +] since they could never figure out who they were supposed to go to for certain problems or to escalate things. I only discovered this thread a few days ago, and boy did I do it at the right time so I could reply to this. I work at one of the big US vertically integrated oil and gas companies (which I won't name but with enough effort you could figure out), and last year as part of a massive reorg tried to implement a chapter model which I thought I remember was related to the Zappos holacracy or at the very least Zappos was called out. The traditional reporting structure was nuked and you had a chapter head which was supposed to focus solely on managing your development and performance metrics (i.e. all the traditional "boss" components) and then product managers who would handle your technical capabilities and actual work product. Needless to say it's been a complete disaster, and the mandate from on high is "well this wasn't going to be effective right away and we knew it would be 1-2 years before we were operating optimally with this new model". This totally aligns with sticksy's comment of nobody knowing who to talk to about anything. You used to be able to look up a simple org chart or check someone's supervisor in Outlook, now the person who technically is someone's manager has even less clue about their day to day activities than they used to. It loving sucks, and it's insane to think that as much as most people hate it we still have another few years of attempting to make it work before we reverse course. Someone's use of the phrase "tiger team" above also induced the same tunnel vision it did in other posters. Maybe next month when things settle down I'll post a tale of my current promotion saga, which in the past would have been "we're making you an architect, this is a relatively easy move" but is now "well because A is moving to another job and B takes A's job and two of the overall moves are from chapter reporting to direct reporting we have to post the jobs internally and it will take 3x as long and we let you know you'd be moving a month in advance but you can't tell anyone so enjoy being in limbo and not knowing what you're supposed to actually be doing for 2 months".
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Dec 27, 2021 01:40
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Just want to thank this thread for being a wellspring of content for me. A few months back work decided to push MS Defender to all corporate mobile devices (I refuse to have two phones) and one of the sites they chose to content block is Imgur. This killed my ability to browse a ton of forum threads without seeing giant white spaces I had to find ones to waste time reading that didn’t involve embedded pics. For actual content, I have been sitting in as an observer/grader for an externally posted job in a bunch of sessions this week and it’s wild how different the processes is from what I was expecting. My wife works for an Australia software company and they have a VERY locked down process: only able to ask preapproved questions and there’s an HR person sitting in on the interview. I work at one of the large US oil companies (in IT) and our interviews had some starter questions but it was largely a free wheeling jumping around stream of consciousness affair with 5 people in it all chiming in.
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Apr 5, 2023 23:34
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HiroProtagonist posted:why on earth do you refuse to have two phones if it means using corporate apps and content controls on your personal one instead?? unless you mean "because they won't pay for it" in which case, like fair, but i'd also tell them to gently caress off if they wanted me to subject my personal phone to that poo poo because they were too cheap to get me a phone for work at all. I could have loving sworn I included this in my post but I guess I did not, pretend I said "corporate owned mobile devices". Around 10 years ago because I had on-call responsibilities (and because the oil price was high) they were all too happy to just put people on the corporate plan. So in exchange for my phone number becoming part of the company plan, I've gone over a decade without having to pay for a phone plan and every 2 years I get a new latest minus 1 generation iPhone for free. So yeah, I effectively don't have a personal phone and if I ever left the company it would probably be a nightmare to deal with but . . . until that content blocking stuff it's never really bubbled up to a big issue in my mind.
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Apr 10, 2023 22:55
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Years ago on a shared email list for support, a user who frequently is highly demanding and insufferable went unnecessarily aggro against one of our guys who genuinely was trying to help. We have a system that can submit supposed anonymous OC feedback against people and I used it, effectively saying “if there are problems we can work together but this tone of voice against our admin staff is not professional and not in line with our values”. I am paraphrasing but hand to god I worded it in a legitimate business context vs gently caress YOU BUDDY. After I do this, the guy replies to his own message to the DL and effectively throws a very public temper tantrum calling “me” out saying how this is stupid and not respectful and blah blah blah and trashes the fact he got feedback at all. I find out years later that my boss’s boss at the time was SUPER mad at “me” and was trying to find out who submitted the feedback but never did. It still makes me smile to this day. I have no illusions that now especially with more tight Oauth style identity there’s much less chance for anonymity and I don’t trust the overlords, but that ONE time the system worked.
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May 4, 2023 00:01
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Motronic posted:That exists and it's not yammer. My company uses it: Workplace(TM) by Meta. The perfect place to give facebook access to sensitive corporate information and your employee list. We’ve had Workplace for years and it has exactly two types of people posting on it: +managers wanting to look important +people replying to those managers in hopes of also seeming important It’s nothing more than a massive self congratulatory circle jerk, and anytime someone mentions it to the actual people doing real work it gets eyerolls / laugher.
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May 10, 2023 17:16
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I have been in a class this week for “Better Leaders in IT” and while there are plenty of good things about it which I hope to actually put into practice, so much of it is so massively tone deaf and disconnected from reality. “Scientific studies have shows that paying people bonuses for better results delivery does not work. Don’t do that. We see that if you actually scale up normal pay to a correct level everyone will be more engaged and then innovate” “Oh so we’re going to pay people more?” “LOL no. Moving on …” “Our employee survey results year after year reflect low pay and massive overloading of work / stress” “Yes that’s true. *immediate topic change*” One instructor bringing up a book called “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” def made me want to jump out the 30th story window.
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May 18, 2023 00:22
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Trabant posted:Serious question re: Mentoring Also a gigacorp employee who has dealt with similar stuff in the past and feels your frustration. We’re really bad for new hires because even in the context of giving them a formal mentor that person typically is in the same team and so it becomes a catch all for all manner of disparate questions from “how do I get access to this room” to “how do I build a VM” to “how do I work well with my boss” and it makes it hard to get focused. I agree with what people have already said and would add +You can have a technical mentor or a business/behavioral mentor. Technical side is easier, just focus on actual hard results and how to do stuff / what to learn. Business is a lot more unfocused but really a lot more valuable. Discuss career paths, what helped them in the past, etc. It's up to you to define what you want to talk about (I know that's not necessarily helpful . . . ) +Distinguish between mentoring and coaching (which is a big new push here). Mentoring relies a lot on the mentor’s personal experience, if you’re a mentor you’re giving direct advice and guidance and sharing what you went through. Coaching is about longer term goals and open ended questions, where as the coach you’re not supposed to give the answer but are making the coached person think critically about the situation The 1-2 mentors I had formally assigned were pretty bad, and I get the sense that’s what a lot of people experience. But if you actually can FIND a mentor on your own who you have a rapport with and you can have an open and honest discussion about work and what you want to get our of having a mentor, that can actually help you out even if it’s just someone who you can vent to (obvious caveat you have to trust this person).
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May 24, 2023 17:26
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Ugh, my wife works for a software company and they just announced that all front-line managers (like 500 people) are going to be reassigned to either be an IC or an upper manager with like 15+ people under them. The decision was made for them by their management, and she found out today she either has to be an IC (a "lateral" move but of course that really means demotion) or else get a severance package in a few months. She feels lovely and isn't sure exactly what she wants but will probably start job hunting soon. She likes it there but the past 9 months has been eternal tech reorg hell.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:04
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CancerCakes posted:Someone at work celebrated their 50th recently About 10 years ago we had someone who hit 50 years and retired pretty much immediately after. Dude started in the mailroom probably as a teenager and worked in IT the entire time so he'd been through the mainframe days to deskside support and then back to datacenter. I have zero clue what he did the last few years besides just get paid to make older users feel better and hold their hands on certain things.
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Jul 5, 2023 12:57
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I swear, this past week has been me getting increasingly pissed of at people who have the inability to just stand up and make any kind of decision. Set a timeline / have an actual opinion / ANYTHING, and not what springs to mind here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyocQT4Vn2g
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Jul 20, 2023 00:25
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I learned in like my second year on the job that audits are meaningless after having this conversation Auditor: What are your tape backup procedures? Me: We don't do tape backups, our data mirrors to another site automatically onto similar hardware [and I described the process a little bit] Auditor: OK, where are your tapes stored? Me: I . . . I just told you we don't do tape backups Auditor: Ok, what's the time length you retain tapes for? Me: I SAID WE DON'T DO TAPE BACKUPS, WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE I was for sure annoyed and taking it personally at the time, and now I know that most auditors are just reading a literal script and don't know a single thing about what they're auditing and as others have said just give short but accurate answers and smile and nod.
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Jul 23, 2023 18:26
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I work across two separate larger orgs at my job, one IT and one actual oil finding people. The later did a “remodel” of their reporting structure like 3 months ago where the messed around with product lines and now my actual team in IT is participating in a “realignment”. They are doing their damndest not to call anything a reorg … I swear the chapter model they adopted like 4 years ago (Spotify uses it! Why shouldn’t we!) is the DUMBEST structure I’ve seen in all my career.
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Jul 26, 2023 23:13
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Baddog posted:I had to look chapter up, had never heard of it before. Back when I was actually in the chapter before becoming an architect, it amounts in reality to having two bosses: your actual solid line from an HR perspective boss who is supposed to only really handle your OC / employee development, and then you’re also on a product team with a dotted line boss of a product owner who actually gives you actual tasks to do and understands what you work on day to day. So yeah imagine your annual reviews being completed by someone you have NO meetings with (except for maybe a bi weekly check in) who does nothing for you / cannot directly impact decision / is completely ineffectual, whereas your product owner has zero official say in how you’re graded even though you talk to them every single day and totally control your schedule. Now also imagine this is implemented inconsistently across the whole enterprise. Dumbest. Design. Ever. Motronic posted:It's a bunch of bored highly compensated employees and VC-funded tech execs that that are too special to simply "build and operate the product you said you'd build and operate". I’d agree with you if we weren’t an oil company 
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Jul 27, 2023 00:02
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Past three-ish years: “man this new simplified billing is great, the cloud is basically free!” Now: “HOLY poo poo WHY IS OUR INFRASTRUCTURE SO EXPENSIVE *multiple projects and efforts IN THE SAME ORG start spinning up to understand costs and make their own dashboards all of which are a top priority.*” Love it when marching orders make groups stand up redundant efforts all on the same thing because they want to be the people to solve the “problem”.
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Aug 17, 2023 21:16
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Quoting myself from earlier in the yearCael posted:Ugh, my wife works for a software company and they just announced that all front-line managers (like 500 people) are going to be reassigned to either be an IC or an upper manager with like 15+ people under them. The decision was made for them by their management, and she found out today she either has to be an IC (a "lateral" move but of course that really means demotion) or else get a severance package in a few months. She feels lovely and isn't sure exactly what she wants but will probably start job hunting soon. She likes it there but the past 9 months has been eternal tech reorg hell. Seeing that whole interview process from the sidelines reinforces my decision to just be a lifer where I am now . . .
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Aug 22, 2023 11:38
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Democratic Pirate posted:There’s gotta be a corporate law that states The less effort expended on something, the higher the chance it circulates upwards. Our company has a pretty good rewards program where you can send $50 gift cards to people for good work they did and there’s little to no oversight. They also have higher tiers that go through a lot more oversight and are mainly for big projects, highest being a few thousand dollars and its called the President’s Award. I got one maybe 8 years ago for being part of a team decommissioning a data center. An INSANE amount of work and stress and anxiety but it got done. I just learned someone got one about 2 years ago for writing some kind of MS Office plugin that helped people do something or other during the heights of Covid and they probably did it on a whim and they also got multiple direct mentioned in internal newsletters.
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Sep 2, 2023 17:03
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I loved last week that after pushing for a long time how full remote is never an option and to accept the 3 day hybrid (which legitimately I think they’re going to stay with long term because of space issues), in a big town hall when someone called out how IT was being ignored and deprioritized the CEO said “look IT had done a lot of the past year, the video conferencing work has allowed us to collaborate extremely effectively”. Peak cognitive dissonance on display.
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Sep 3, 2023 15:31
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On the niche topic, my dad is a decent example there. He turns 70 this month and continues to be an expert in some specific area of electrical control systems in his company that few others do / have the overall experience for. He doesn’t have any direct reports (and hasn’t for years, he hates being a manager) but is important enough for the company to accept his suggestion of “hey I want to switch to half time in January so I can still keep getting healthcare”. He’s not under any illusions that he’s irreplaceable, but they just as easily could have said no to him / hired someone younger for cheaper. He’s happy to keep milking the role as long as he can until he genuinely doesn’t feel like doing the work.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:31
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Metaverse and block chain are the two examples of “mega marketing push but there’s nothing behind it”. Completely laughable. GenAI right now is largely marketing as people want to get on the bandwagon and make bank but it’ll eventually settle and there’s a solid foundation there. I think of it like 5-10 years ago when the fad was “big data” / data science. Something that had legit implications in the tech space of you knew how to apply it, but the initial wave was all just trying to get people to spend money without knowing what problems they wanted to actually solve. Also just wait another 10 years when “quantum computing” starts to actually catch on beyond just research / at scale …
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Sep 12, 2023 14:19
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I blame this thread, I had never noticed double-click in the wild until like a month ago and it was after someone mentioned it here. Nails on chalkboard.
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Nov 12, 2023 16:48
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So most of the year, we were firmly in "we are on track to make our goals, some statuses are yellow but we're working them". All kind of normal stuff. Week ago we get a email from the CFO (who is known to be leaving the company next year) saying "Let's check in on our year to date performance: <X> is not on target, <Y> is not on target, <Z> is not on target" and proceeds to lay into the entire company about how we need to focus on delivering results to our shareholders. All of this as we still earn oh several billion per quarter. The response from rank and file has been savage and in a few town halls since then for various orgs there's been ton of "I've been here for 30 years and that was the most negative email I've ever seen and there was no admission of why we weren't succeeding" and a ton of "why is the entire company being held up as failing when there's zero accountability at leadership". CEO has been completely silent during all this. Very excited for next year when after all the soul searching on how to remediate the situation, they just pull the big "LAYOFF + RE-ORG" level again.
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Dec 11, 2023 22:33
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Eric the Mauve posted:People who have been there for 30 years should certainly know by now that it is the world's most obvious signal shot that layoffs are coming. Oh to be clear: I've been there 16 and I also know it means layoffs are coming. That's a fact of any big corporation, but usually there's a more of a delay between rounds or a PERCEIVED effort to solve the problem instead of just resorting to the easy way out.
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Dec 12, 2023 00:17
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This week is an effective en masse return to work for most of our company since in oil the majority people will hit Thanksgiving and then just take six straight weeks off and everything slows to a crawl. In addition to the usual dread of just having things ramp up, I'm also in a lovely situation since the other architect on our team besides me passed away over the Christmas break. (Obvious preface so I don't sound like a sociopath: my "situation" pales in comparison--and in reality there IS no comparison--to that of his family and friends. I worked with the guy for over a decade and he was my boss at one time before I moved up and we became peers. Dude was probably only late 40s too, it's an awful thing to have happen to any family.) He'd had medical issues off and on for years and I've never had a problem picking up the slack for him before, and was glad to do it to ease the burden. But I'm now facing the situation where my workload stands to double instantly. Has anyone been in a situation like this and have any advice on how to navigate it without seeming insensitive? I'm obviously not going to do this day one, but I absolutely need to have the conversation with my boss to say "you need to backfill that position NOW. Don't say that because of future budget cuts we're just going to let it sit open / eliminate it". The longer it goes as an open spot with me doing double duty, the more my sanity will start to fray . . .
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Jan 8, 2024 00:43
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Our main IT department (several hundred people) had a meeting yesterday to talk about business context. It was Mardi Gras themed. They gave out beads and at one point the manager of IT--who reports directly to the CIO--was in front of everyone wearing a domino mask and beads presenting about our priorities for the year. Nothing infuriates me more than people trying to make meetings "fun". Just say your poo poo and let us get back to work.
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Jan 24, 2024 14:01
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"In April, all US staff will have their time writing / leave / payroll shift from SAP to Workday" I'm sure this will go well and have no issues.
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Feb 2, 2024 21:39
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As a college professor of mine would frequently say, “good enough for government work!”
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Feb 10, 2024 15:26
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IT has been back in the office one day a week for like a year and two days a week for maybe 6 months (with my group having done both of those 6 months before everyone else because our manager is a suck up). Around December, they communicated that management now had tracking dashboards and they were monitoring all product lines to see who was actually meeting the requirements. Fast forward to this week and the word is there’s like 50 people who haven’t showed up a single day in the office since 2023. They’re going to be having “formal conversations” with those people soon. Countdown to seeing a bunch of account go disabled in the system …
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Mar 14, 2024 16:04
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Also lol at him thinking “oh just turn the camera on, so simple” as if people don’t have multiple barriers physically blocking the actual lens. On the rare times when I actually do get on camera (usually in a small meeting when everyone else is) first thing I do when joining is flip up the plastic flap and first thing I do when I disconnect is flip it down.
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Mar 22, 2024 15:43
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A Tale of Two Companies Company my wife is joining: onboarding portal for things like background check and policy training, she picked her preferred laptop a few weeks back in it, when she got a shipping email it was accompanied by instructions to not turn it on when received and to wait for a Zoom call to ensure all IT prerequisites were done, came with a company backpack Company my wife is leaving: she gave two weeks notice but apparently her boss didn’t actually flag she was leaving to HR until a week later. She asked about returning her laptop and they said she would probably get something about it. It’s been just over two weeks since her last day and she still has the laptop and has gotten no return information.
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Apr 25, 2024 21:16
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