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My MegaCorp has a podcast. Internal only, covering what’s going on in one dept. An audience measured in the low teens. This is produced by a team of eight and growing.
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Jan 30, 2021 05:43
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frogge posted:Holy gently caress I was in an all day meeting yesterday and they pulled out the dance on camera thing, too! lol this week we had an hour long meeting with 30 people for a monthly check in. Not as many minion gifs as last time but with that many people it’s safe to switch off my camera, and after a few minutes to make sure they aren’t asking me anything audio goes too, so I can stick it to the fat cats by doing my drat job. This meeting had a new twist: 10 minutes of breathing exercises. If people want to do that on their own go right ahead, I was grateful I could ignore it without calling attention to myself.
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Jan 30, 2021 22:51
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jkk posted:My boss is not a very good manager, so he was sent to a management training class. At this class, he learned about the concept of "scrum". We are not in software development, but he decided that we could do "scrum" too. So he asked us to do daily e-mails about what we're doing/planning to do. I am also not in software development. I’m sure it is useful for some fields but we have baffling hour long sessions with our Scrum master where something that used to take one step now takes thirty (not exaggerating, from needing to add dozens of “tasks” that no one will read.) then that process is abandoned as we’re Kanban now.
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Jan 31, 2021 01:43
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Zarin posted:Ahhh, SAP. *stares wistfully and/or traumatically into the middle distance* It’s so drat bad. If a user’s password is expired, why not pop up a screen telling them to reset their password instead of a baffling error message?
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Jan 31, 2021 17:39
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Len posted:Has people come into work even if the people in their house have covid because "you don't have any symptoms it's fine" and "you don't have your results back yet so you don't have it" My MegaCorp with over 5,000 people in the office confused and nervous in March 2020 was slow to allow any WFC as who knows what the drones may do without their mandatory daily gratitude sessions. HR was so tone deaf about employees worried about how to deal with school closures or people in their household at high risk that they sent out a pointless update, then got in an internal fight because it had a typo and the subject line appeared twice. Then someone died and we all got sent home and I discovered I can do 100% of my work remotely.
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Jan 31, 2021 18:45
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Our mandatory gratitudes in our monthly standups are different in February. So we can express love and admiration for coworkers it is a secret admirer gratitude. You have been assigned a coworker you aren't fond of. You must express why you are grateful for this person. 
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Feb 25, 2021 00:49
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A VP over our dept of over a thousand people likes to send out a “shout out” video each Friday to note employees who received positive feedback. Not accompanied by any reward but ok. The email with the link to the video does not bother to list the employees, so it’s a mystery who got a shout out. And the employee or their manager likely never watch the video so don’t know they’ve been honored. I tried suggesting to the team sending the email to include names but that is somehow impossible? Minor quibble but c’mon.
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Feb 25, 2021 02:36
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Used to have job where manager refused to let us move a decade of large files from a shared Outlook folder so it took up to five awkward minutes to wait for files to open when someone asked for them on the phone. Would play exact same playlist at her desk as she did nothing each day, as faxes arrived from contractors putting liens on her house. Eventually she was promoted out.
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Feb 25, 2021 15:32
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Xaintrailles posted:We have a paid social media person. They post twice a day or so. The posts average below 1 like each, meaning they don't even like their own posts, let alone have anyone else like them. We have a podcast team. For internal consumption. For only our dept. Listenership per ep in the low teens, so sometimes they’ll play episodes during meetings to “boost numbers.” This is produced by eight salaried employees.
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Feb 25, 2021 15:37
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Barudak posted:You just reminded me a year ago one of the accounts I worked on sent out a huge email that we were going to switch to agile development and we had to brief the client and all this jazz. None of the material ever went into describing what a story was, calibrating points, and you know the other stuff that makes agile like actually function. Everyone worldwide starts panicking as nobody anywhere in this business has ever done agile before because, uh, this is an advertising company and Agile makes no loving sense whatsoever. There is no training material ever shared and every market is left to their own devices to figure out how the hell they're supposed to make it work. It's fascinating to read this thread about real software developers using Agile and it having a positive impact. I'm not in advertising but in a non-tech role and we've gone whole hog with Agile. And Scrum. And Kanban. And now we're Scrumban (someone in another thread assured me that was real.) All moving towards "Activation" that is going to change everything but I cannot find a coherent explanation of what that will be. Sure is a good excuse to give consultants millions of dollars and keep our management in meetings every minute of the day.
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Feb 26, 2021 17:15
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ClothHat posted:Imagine 70 people simultaneously singing happy birthday over Zoom. A coworker thinks they are a mindfulness instructor now, as they took a four hour course and got a certificate, so during yesterday's mandatory meeting there was ten minutes of 40 coworkers on video with eyes closed breathing intensely. As my video/sound were off I just glanced every few minutes to confirm they were still at it and kept doing work.
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Feb 26, 2021 18:03
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poisonpill posted:Anyone else here have some boomer bosses that whip themselves up into a frenzy about WFH andhow we need to get back into the office every few weeks? So far no, surprisingly. Some of our MegaCorp depts do need to be in the office to look at product samples but they got them spaced out enough that they've been back in for a while and I think that was a sort of pressure release valve as upper management sees people there rather than empty spaces. A VP made an offhand comment taking into account where an employee had moved to in proximity to the office, and while I don't want to read too much into it, it sounded like they may been at least considering more WFH in the future. I'd be fine with 100% WFH, our office is a dump without enough parking and located in an upscale unaffordable suburb so nearly everyone has a long commute. I get more done from home and don't mind working an extra hour some days to finish up work, while I almost never did that in office as I needed to leave on time to beat traffic.
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Feb 26, 2021 18:43
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We switched from Outlook to Gmail about 8 years ago, bless whoever pushed that through. Self-updating browsers so no more multiple versions of IE, access from mobile devices, and easy to find resources. Plus they enabled two-step verification by default which despite boomer complaints about needing to carry their phone to meetings if they are setting up a presentation has definitely saved the company millions by making it harder to prevent bad actors from having a field day with accounts. That changeover was an interesting learning experience, some longtimers had real questions about changes from Outlook to Gmail and once assisted retained the info. Others would point at an Excel document and complain "the Gmail" had broken it.
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Feb 26, 2021 19:18
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We had a meeting to decide which shared network drive we would use to store files for an upcoming project, as a director thought using the P:Drive was low status as P is far back in the alphabet. So I needed to explain why the A:Drive was not an option. Then why the B:Drive wouldn't work... then the C:Drive...
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Feb 26, 2021 21:05
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On the subject of estimates had a request last week that wanted a cost/time estimate ASAP, as their management needed to know. It was a new type of request that would probably take 2 weeks if a vendor went at maximum speed and I had nothing else to do, but I declined to provide a guess until I at least confirm the vendor is still in business. Last time I had to deal with a team (HR) that loved arbitrarily timelines they liked the idea of releasing something on January 1st. That is a holiday and no one is here, it could go out Monday the 4th and I am made that clear and they agreed to it months in advance, fast forward to them yelling at my boss about me dropping the ball on our promised New Years release. Next project they have will be handed off to one of the team do-nothings and HR can enjoy hearing about their untested broken content they just provided to thousands of employees.
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Mar 1, 2021 04:32
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Bright Bart posted:In some (or all?) EU countries it is standard to have your picture on your CV. That is not only annoying but also makes printing what will likely get thrown into the bin (or if you're lucky shredded) much more expensive as colour is expected. Huh I didn't know that, that's interesting. In my limited non-management role looking at applicants I don't think any have included a photo. My MegaCorp has many meeting rooms but it can be tough to get a room on short notice. Once in the cafeteria I was on break when a manager sat down with an employee at the next table and began a disciplinary meeting for a fairly serious violation. It was bizarre as you'd think he could have waited to get a room with a door, as I don't think public humiliation is a part of the process. After a minute when I realized what was happening I got up and moved.
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Mar 1, 2021 17:03
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Had a coworker who got caught playing games on his work computer, not hard to detect with an open office plan. Instead of giving him a formal warning not to do that, his manager moved his desk so he had to sit in her cubicle like he was a first grader who wouldn't stop talking during storytime. Both people involved were four decades out of grade school. Whenever I needed to talk to that manager at their desk they'd be constantly interrupting to refresh their home security multi-camera footage from their McMansion in an ultra safe neighborhood. They weren't expecting trouble, or a package, or checking on a pet.
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Mar 1, 2021 17:50
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Thanks for effort post on Turkey. That is fascinating.Outrail posted:I'm a big fan of reverse printing. Scan and save and throw that poo poo out. We have about 15 years of files saved on one shared folder. As it would take years to recreate them if lost I suggested allocating $140 to put copies on an external hard drive (I know there's probably a cheaper way to do this but better than nothing.) Got mixed response of blank stares and suggestions that someone heard a rumor the shared folder is backed up, maybe, so why bother?
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Mar 2, 2021 00:42
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At our MegaCorp HQ a dept VP was Very Serious but had very little to do. During meetings he'd go through slide decks intended for our retail locations, and do stuff like identify cashiers were not scanning items in the bottom of shopping carts at an acceptable rate, and although we had zero contact with cashiers or responsibility for that task, we were expected to nod and agree this was something that must be fixed immediately. Never mind that nearly all of those in the meeting would keel over if sent to work an 8 hour shift hauling shopping carts instead of playing fruit ninja at their desk for triple the pay.
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Mar 2, 2021 16:17
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Outrail posted:False. HR exists to make everyone angry with each other and HR instead of focusing on the company itself. The Office undersold irritation with HR, as Toby didn't do anything to deserve it. This week had to request an HR Director tell senior management to send in request forms the same way every other user does, and to stop having them email our team directly expecting preferential treatment. The director got annoyed that we would dare expect a VP to click a link.
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Mar 2, 2021 20:21
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Marmaduke! posted:I've been on a management course this week and they basically kicked it off by showing a Ted talk of some guy who loves Apple almost as much as huffing his own farts. Did you know everyone loves Apple and buys all their stuff because of their amazing values? Also imagine I'm doing William Shatner style pauses before every key word for the full effect. If I had to include Ted Talk videos in a management presentation might be fun to have the all-star line up of Elizabeth Holmes, Glenn Greenwald, and David Cameron.
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Mar 3, 2021 18:53
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poisonpill posted:
Lol that's awful. I got taken aside my a manager after I appeared distracted during a morning meeting and got antsy during the 10 minutes of mandatory gratitudes and wasn't paying attention to what coworkers love about their gym or television. I explained I had been pulled away from fixing a critical issue where an important item wasn't working that was causing tickets to flood in. The manager (who ostensibly is responsible for this type of issue, but it's not a TED talk so nah) agreed I should indeed consider fixing that right away.
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Mar 3, 2021 20:02
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Plucky Brit posted:Fixed that for you. My MegaCorp dept tried to embrace Agile a few years ago. Ok for software teams, but for other depts like my own it was useless. So breaking tasks into pieces or any improvement were discarded, but the daily standups remained as those give management something to do. In addition to sharing what I am working on that day (my immediate team already knows, adjacent teams that have nothing to do with our work but are in our meetings don't care), I'm supposed to express what I am grateful for that day. Can't politely say "I'd prefer not to share this info and have work to do," gotta think of something. I usually say something about what I ate for dinner.
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Mar 3, 2021 21:17
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At the start of covid the thousands of people at my MegaCorp's office were anxious as we had received no guidance or info about transitioning to WFH. We did learn the office coffee would now be free, reminding us they had been charging. Also after a vague update email was sent by HR, HR management's primary concern was this had gone out with a typo in the subject line. Then someone in the call center died and it made the news so we were sent home and I haven't set foot in the office in a year.
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Mar 4, 2021 17:16
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Pekinduck posted:Could you get away with doing it while keeping your old job? $$$ Lol wow. I had a friend whose wife's last name was Muhammad. She got randomly chosen for heightened airport security checks every time. She's a Boeing engineer with a masters, if you built the plane maybe someone should get a pass.
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Mar 4, 2021 18:32
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A friend who works at Google took me on a tour of their office. Free cafeteria with a top tier menu was impressive. It was a weekend so no one was cooking but they had a lot of premium snack items out, and he confirmed it was fine for me to grab a few and no one blinked an eye. Seemed nice. Meanwhile at my MegaCorp an adjacent team controls the steps for pushing out updates my dept creates. As most of their team doesn't want to do this, it falls on their nicest employee who works late each day and weekend, as their role used to be done by two but after the other person left it was easier for their manager to do nothing rather than try to justify a dreaded "headcount." As this person once mentioned taking zero days off the last two years, I've been trying to stress to my manager we need to less their workload by taking tasks or get them backup, as I have no clue why they haven't already left for double the pay at Amazon or burned out. My not-great teammates have gone the other direction, and despite being aware this person is swamped have begun implying in meetings that their updates are being delayed because this person is playing favorites or not working hard enough. 
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Mar 5, 2021 19:08
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Trapick posted:There's a post on our intranet about employee appreciation day. Really makes me feel needed. Could have offered an additional day off or something, but this is great. For sure. Or make do with one less contractor and use the $100k for quality of life improvements.
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Mar 6, 2021 00:18
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Dang I know I’ve griped about my job but they’ve never hassled me about sick days and are good about communicating it’s fine to take them as personal days for emergency issues. When I needed to take a few days for helping with hospitalization of relative it was no problem.
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Mar 8, 2021 01:42
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Splode posted:drat America is an awful country. Yup. Was talking to some relatives from the UK and they were baffled Americans get no guaranteed paid leave. They get five weeks minimum. I’m sure there’s more to it but yeah. Same with Canadians not understanding why someone would be trying to raise money for a coworker’s kid’s medical bills.
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Mar 8, 2021 06:44
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VileLL posted:got to tell you folks, as someone from the uk who had to take a texas-based remote job after getting fired for having covid (or similar), lol, lmao, etc Lol yeah my company's corporate office starts people at zero paid vacation for the first year, and we're not breaking the bank with our pay. Sometimes they'll generously give a new hire a week's vacation to start like it's coming out of the manager's pocket. Somehow our management has never figured out that it is more costly to constantly be restaffing positions and hiring expensive contractors for critical roles than to simply pay industry standard wages/benefits.
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Mar 9, 2021 00:54
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SniperWoreConverse posted:my dad tried pulling this bullshit and got instantly shut down by my mom. he also would wake up, turn the tv on, and then leave and get pissed if it wasn't on when he got back. because turning it off and on would just make it more likely to break. Lol wow. We had a Mr. Dink neighbor who was vaguely an artist (inherited multiple apt buildings in Seattle) and totally indifferent to wasting money. They’d run their hot tub 24/7/365 just in case someone wanted to use it, even if they were away for weeks at their beach house. Also the only person I know who hired a “dog whisperer” (it didn’t work.)
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Mar 11, 2021 16:29
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Inzombiac posted:An old coworker of mine was an alcoholic and maybe a pill-popper. Yikes. We had someone in an adjacent dept get arrested for a warrant in the parking lot. He was released soon after and simply never came back despite still having a job, with zero outreach to anyone. After a month they shrugged and terminated him. He was a good worker, and could have requested time off to get things in order and they would have assisted. Instead now he has no income/insurance on top of whatever else is going on.
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Mar 11, 2021 22:18
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Whoa Target is closing their main HQ and shifting to smaller offices and more permanent WFH. Hope this gets taken up by more companies.
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Mar 12, 2021 17:25
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Batterypowered7 posted:Dumb poo poo my work does: Yeah I don't understand anyone wanting to be back if they don't have to. I haven't set foot in my office in more than a year, zero issues. I understand some roles really do need to be there but when I see articles "won't someone think of the commercial real estate tycoons?!" I do acknowledge it's a bummer for other businesses that support MegaCorp offices like neighboring restaurants.
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Mar 12, 2021 17:48
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My Lovely Horse posted:If you're not friends with at least some of your coworkers your job loving sucks and I can understand why you'd arbitrarily dedicate a portion of your own personal space that you pay good money for to a company that already saps your very lifetime, just to not have to actually go there, which in isolation strikes me as a perfectly mad thing to do. My coworkers range from pleasant to toxic but I'm not really friends with them, to the extent I'd hang out outside of work. A Strange Aeon posted:I think it's going to be hard for there not to be inequity between people who go to the office and get tons of face time and conversations with their bosses and those who work from home and get none of that. That's true for some jobs where the manager should be in their role. My manager is nice but was shuffled into the position from another team and has zero clue about what we do, to the extent I have to explain basic tasks. Which owns in some ways as I have near zero supervision and can get my work done, but makes planning larger projects hard as no one above me knows what I'm talking about. Inzombiac posted:Working from home loving rules because sometimes a job has downtime and not having to pretend to be busy has saved my mental health. For sure I like being able to run laundry, spoil the cat, or do dinner prep, and when I'm doing mindless work can have movies on. I'm getting my 40 work widgets done a week without needing to be in an office, everyone should be fine with that.
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Mar 12, 2021 19:50
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SkyeAuroline posted:For once something not systems related, but people related instead: We had a long timer in another dept when a newer person asked them for a spreadsheet, took out a ruler and a blank piece of paper and began drawing lines.
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Mar 12, 2021 22:34
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A Fancy Hat posted:We used to do a monthly district level meeting which comprised about 15 of us. It was stupid, but it was an excuse to get the company to pay for lunch, and a couple of the old guys in our group loved it because it was a big happy socializing event for them. Dang that's no good. I've never understood coworkers so bored that meetings are a social highlight of the week. We had one odd guy who kept butter at his desk, would constantly be looking at a spreadsheet of retirement planning (I wasn't trying to snoop, he'd pull it up in a conference room projector screen), and put a for-sale sign on a motorcycle in front of the building, which was fun as this is a corporate campus and that was way out of place but none of our management wanted to tell him to knock it off. After retiring and moving with his wife to their second house two hours away, he'd still periodically show up to wander the halls and confuse coworkers who wondered why he was there. He has unlimited free time, good chunk of income, access to every book/tv show/movie ever made, and couldn't think of anything else to do?
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Mar 15, 2021 19:15
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Gin_Rummy posted:He still sounds better than this one guy I worked with who would routinely have dating/adult websites on his desktop and who on occasion would loudly say his SSN into the phone in an open-office setting. Lol that's pretty bad. We have shared printers and if I need to print out something like baseball tickets (before those were moved to an app) I'd be hovering over the printer to grab them. Contrast with coworkers leaving personal tax documents there all day. One guy had printed I think an immigration form packed with bank/address/other items and it was sitting in the print tray face up for hours before I mentioned to a manager that someone should tell the guy (I didn't know where he sat). Code Jockey posted:I wonder if he didn't experience what prisoners experience, where after a while the world inside the office is all that he really knows and he doesn't feel comfortable outside of it I think that was a big part of it. I could understand if it were a university and he wanted to go to games or the library or if we were a tech company with a free gourmet cafeteria and gym, but this is closer to hanging out in a dentist's reception area or chilling in the DMV parking lot on a Friday night.
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Mar 15, 2021 20:14
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AHH F/UGH posted:I mentioned this a while ago but I got an email from the guy who has the passive aggressive chud-ly "nuke the trees" thing in his email signature so I can share this Dang that's oddly specific. The only coworker I know who printed emails called the help desk for a "your computer isn't broken, turn on your monitor" issue and would leave 5 minute voicemails that got automatically cut off before they reached the point of the call.
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Mar 15, 2021 23:19
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smellmycheese posted:One thing I’ve noticed about WFH is how little so many people have done to make their life easier. I’ve been working freelance for the last 6 months for one of the UKs biggest media companies which, hilariously, still runs on creaking tech a decade out of date - Windows 7, Outlook 2010, no collaboration software whatsoever and tiny lovely wheezing HP company laptops. The company intranet is also total garbage but all the important functions can be accessed on any computer using 2FA. It amazes me the number of people who just accept that this is the limit of what they need to work and sit hunched squinting at a tiny screen all day in a business where you need to watch, analyse, transcribe and edit video. It's odd how common that is. I'm no computer genius but was able to get my WFH set up on dual monitors with no trouble, and coworkers who didn't already have the equipment could get it ordered from the company without much hassle. Several months into WFH some not-great coworkers were complaining about tiny Chromebook screens being hard to navigate. As some of these coworkers are toxic I wasn't able to try to become their tech support, so good luck with that. ilmucche posted:Someone sent a scan of their passport to the wrong printer in our office once. It got printed by the printer made for spitting out big drawings, so a passport sized image bang in the middle of like a 2m wide sheet of paper Oh yeah I would walk past the marketing dept that had one of those giant printers and sometimes could see two inches of an email on a giant sheet. Would usually sit there for a few days. A CRAB IRL posted:My engineering director said we should use our "design champion", a principal engineer (very senior, non leadership track engineering people who float around different teams), to ensure that we're not missing stuff when building new systems. Upon expressing puzzlement that we had such a thing, I decided to investigate. Whoa, that owns. Just being on call for years and nobody asks you anything? Dang that's the dream.
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Mar 16, 2021 15:27
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