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At my previous job, the country's biggest ISP and backbone provider, the entire CRM and ERP is accessed through a 320x200 green-on-black command line interface. Most of the training of new customer centre people is spent on memorising four-letter commands, and achieving proficiency takes long, hard practice on the phone with real customers, with mistakes being easily made and error codes being unintelligible. Why yes, we had a reputation for slow, error prone customer service. Must be because people are lazy, let's introduce some more KPIs linked to salary. The entire thing is coded in COBOL and there are many legends of triple-digit millions being spent on projects to replace it, only to fail miserably for unknown reasons.
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May 30, 2021 18:15
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NFX posted:I was about to say that I'd heard something similar about the biggest ISP here, so I checked your profile and it says you're in Denmark... Yeah, a bit scary that I could guess that. It can't be the only ISP in the world with an arcane setup, can it? Bingo. I'm sure there are others out there, but there can't be too many. Right...?  If you could live with the very real threat of being arbitrarily McKinzied every 3 months or so it actually wasn't a bad place to work - nice perks and very good paternity policies.
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May 30, 2021 21:26
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In my VeryLargeGlobalCorp we're constantly being reminded by IT not to click suspicious links and to immediately report and delete emails from suspicious addresses. Cue HR sending out randomly targeted wellbeing surveys with a bit.ly link from a shared mailbox without any info whatsoever attached (you can look up the address on our domain, but there is no info about ownership, organisation, names or anything else available). Literally "You've been selected at random to participate in a wellbeing survey: bit.ly/blabla" from hrsurveys@verylargeglobalcorp.com. IT also likes sending out reminders to update our iOS devices from an even more anonymous address with even less info attached, and with the "read more" link embedded in the text. Other than that, it's a really good place to work. But I'm just waiting for the news that we've paid some Russians a bunch of bitcoins.
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Jun 12, 2021 13:05
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When I suspected that no-one was reading my 4-slide monthly reports to just below C-level at a previous job, I started replacing the only link in the report (to a "key" dashboard I'd been asked to urgently!!! set up) with a Rick roll link. A year later when I switched jobs I hadn't heard a peep. For all I know my replacement is still sending it out 5 years on.
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Jun 17, 2021 12:33
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You're going to miss the drama when it becomes clear that all teams cycle through mandatory fun days along the same pattern. This thread has made me appreciate my job even more than I did before.
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Jun 30, 2021 12:59
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IT enabled the "Report Phishing" button in Outlook before the summer holidays with great fanfare. I've already reported four mails from IT and two from HR this week. No other mails have looked even remotely as suspicious.
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Aug 5, 2021 11:42
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Oh, I was reminded of a good one. Trigger warning: it's about time registration. At a previous megacorp employer we had to register hours worked on various internal digital Development projects, in 15 minute increments. If the time registered to a project didn't fit within 5% of the estimate each month, our only sane middle manager would be called in for two hours to explain the discrepancy. For each project over/under. The solution was for our PA to keep do some excel magic and email each person in a 150+ headcount department how many hours they had to register on each project on the last working day of each month. We all then registered all the hours on that day. The estimate fit the hours billed 100% and everyone was happy. Except the PA, but she soon found out how to automate the process. The aristocrats!
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Aug 10, 2021 15:42
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I still treasure the memory of the look on my previous CFO's face when I explained to him over "casual lunch with an employee" that hours registered and actual hours worked were two very different, and frequently unrelated, concepts.
Mzuri fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 19:06
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Every place I've worked that employ tests as part of the hiring process use both a comprehensive problem solving test and a DISC test to see how the applicant would fit into the team. Tests would only be administered to those applicants who went on to a second interview, and the results would be compared with the impressions from the first interview. If something scored as an outlier or a surprise, it would be a topic for the second interview. As one of my managers once put it: the problem solving test is to screen for complete idiots and the DISC test is to screen for extreme outliers, but their main functions are only as sanity checks for the CV and the impression from the interviews.
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Aug 13, 2021 18:04
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zedprime posted:How do you fail a DISC test? Too much D. No such thing, baby  E: I did once get told that my low S was a potential problem for a project manager position, as they wanted someone "less adventurous". I withdrew my application. Mzuri fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Aug 14, 2021 |
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Aug 14, 2021 08:08
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Barudak posted:Your director of sales is laying on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. "The opportunity cost of turning you over erodes the overall business case of helping you. I'm sure you understand."
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Aug 14, 2021 13:25
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My very first boss at my very first megacorp set me straight about HR: "They're not a people department, they are a process compliance department and 99% of the time only care about protecting the company. Never forget." I have met a couple of good HR people but they inevitably get tired of tilting at organisational windmills and leave.
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Aug 24, 2021 17:47
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champagne posting posted:But that costs money. One is CAPEX, one is OPEX, what is so hard to understand?????????
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Aug 25, 2021 11:27
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My megacorp wants us to do time registration in SAP. I used to be responsible for training and troubleshooting, but wasn't actually given any user rights to fix issues with user data, of which we had plenty. So I just forwarded said issues to the project management department until a chief PM realised they could just as well cut me out of the loop. And that's how I got out of dealing with other people's SAP problems.
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Sep 8, 2021 17:16
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champagne posting posted:Did no one at any point ask why they wanted time registration? All the time. I've been trying to kill it for two years and my boss and his boss agree, but the project management office ~~needs to track if interdepartmental actual costs match projected costs~~ and has the ear of the CTO. It's pretty much kabuki as this point because everyone knows that what goes on to SAP bears little resemblance to reality, but the Excel sheets have to show green at the monthly management review! Our external consultants also have to register time in our SAP system. Yes, they also register time in their own companies' systems, and send us detailed invoices. Yes, they billl us extra for the time they spend registering time in SAP. As annoyances go, it's not a huge one, but still...
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Sep 8, 2021 17:51
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At a place I used to work, HR demanded that managers place employees in a Cartesian system with four quadrants, Performance on the Y axis and Potential on the X axis. This was based on scores from 1-10 on both axes. Here's the kicker: A) you could not give the same score on any axis to two or more employees and (hold on) B) there must be an equal number of people in each quadrant. If there was a number of people on the team not divisible by 4, the quadrants must be filled from the lowest score up. Only raises for those in the high-high quadrant, of course, which was the point of the whole exercise. And yes, everyone could see who was rated what.
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Nov 25, 2021 14:08
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Haha, holy poo poo 
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Nov 27, 2021 10:24
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At my previous job, one of the two biggest retail conglomerates in the country, the standard terms of payment was 120 days. I was gobsmacked when I found out, but that was before I realised that the company did everything in the most assholeish way possible. I once had an essential vendor on a big project dig in his heels and demand 30 days. Getting that approved took 6 days and sign off by the CFO himself. gently caress "cash is king!" types and their lovely financial practices.
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Dec 8, 2021 22:26
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goatface posted:Culture leak. Goons get everywhere and we scatter our memetic baggage as we go. Better that than the genetic kind 
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Jan 28, 2022 17:40
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SubnormalityStairs posted:I'm an ansoc What is that - Anarchist Socialist? Or a sex thing? (Not kink shaming)
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Mar 11, 2022 20:24
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Rockman Reserve posted:it's really really cool hearing how strong the job market is for employees right now as I limp into my third month of fruitless job-searching Every company I know employing people in STEM fields are hurting for qualified employees, and they are *really* hurting for those elusive diversity hires.* Maybe have a professional advise you on your pitch? Sounds like it could myabe use some improvement. I'm sure it'll happen soon  *My job and network is in Europe, but my US colleagues in our STEM megacorp are making the same noises.
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May 10, 2022 08:35
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My current MegaCorp has also taken away our bins and replaced them with central located ones in the name of sustainability. I don't get it, you're just wasting people's time by making them walk to the kitchen and back. In the interest of reviving forklift chat, I once worked at s supermarket where our 16-year-old helper decided that he couldn't wait for someone with a license to get him that pallet of bottled Carlsberg from the far end of the outside yard. So he fired up the gas-powered forklift and actually did quite well picking up the pallet. This is where I entered the back room and saw what he was doing, so I yelled that he should stop and come in - I got a smile and a wave, while he accelerated. He approached the loading bay at pretty high speed. As he got closer he lifted the pallet to above the height of the bay, about chest high. Then he decided to adjust course and turned the steering wheel slightly, still at speed. Amazingly, he wasn't fired, but I will never forget the look on his face as he stood next to the atomized remains of over a thousand bottles of beer and the overturned forklift while our usually phlegmatic store manager SCREAMED himself hoarse. At least no one was hurt and the kid never did anything dumb again while I worked there. He went on to law school and did alright, so there's that 
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May 17, 2022 13:06
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Randy Travesty posted:With that last post said: I feel, pretty constantly, like I have no idea what the gently caress I'm doing at work. Are you me?! I realised a while ago that most people don't have a clue, but that just made me feel more anxious that someone will recognize it from themselves in me. I am very open about it. Got my third promotion in as many years in July, and now I am just saving as much as I can for when they find me out.
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Sep 1, 2023 12:57
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I just completed an online class in behavioural design. The final module was about habits and changing bad ones to good ones. At the end, it struck me like a bolt of lightning that my relationship to my work has every single hallmark of a bad habit and it made me really  to finally figure out why I have been to inexplicably sad and tired these past four months. Getting my biannual health check-up next week, pretty sure I'll need to do some acting to not get sent on to a pshrink. I need the money.
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Sep 26, 2023 17:43
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When Corona lockdowns hit for real in 2020 and lots of small businesses started feeling the pinch, my former piece of poo poo place of work did something incredible. They are the biggest retail corporation in the country with a pretty healthy operation and the shittiest workplace culture you can imagine. They are in a position to dictate their terms of payment to their suppliers so they just default it to 120 days because CASH IS KING and gently caress you, everyone is our bank. Anyway, the CEO goes on LinkedIn one day and announces they in these exceptional and trying times, they are being a good corporate citizen who have graciously decided to pay their suppliers with outstanding invoices as soon as possible this one time. I was gleefully looking forward to people going "Hang on, why are you waiting 4 months to pay your bills?". Instead, it was one long dick-sucking contest, both on LinkedIn and in the media. That POS CEO is now heading up a Canadian retail giant, so good luck to the hockey people.
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Oct 7, 2023 11:16
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Son of Rodney posted:It gets mentioned every time the topic pops up but you US people need to rise up and demand a humane amount of time off. This plus of one of my kids are sick, I can take their sick days off (within reason).
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Oct 10, 2023 11:04
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I wonder how it was handled by HR. I hope they came down on him like a ton of bricks. Back when I managed people (lol, never again), I had an employee who did what your co-worker did, but mentally - he would basically pitch a poo poo fit every time something didn't go his way (at least once every working day) and start harassing people left and right, to the point of directly causing four stress-related leaves of absence in four different colleagues over a year. When he didn't get what he wanted, he sat down and cried pitiful tears at his desk. He was 47 at this time. I have never, ever seen such a long history of talks and meetings with so many managers at all levels and HR reps, ever, with nothing to show for it. Ever. loving nightmare. Why he wasn't fired, warned or otherwise sanctioned, you ask? He was the tame union rep that was instrumental in OK'ing the closing down and outsourcing of our (huge) call centres, so management protected him while that was going on and rewarded him with job security and an iPad afterwards. Even his own union colleagues could not stand him. Eventually, the last of his protectors left and he was "downsized" the next day by his then-manager (I'd moved on). It was close to two years of sheer hell for me and my colleagues, and it has given me near-zero tolerance for drama in the workplace. gently caress that guy.
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Oct 30, 2023 12:42
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We recently started a sourcing round to find a provider for our pay / salary management system. This is a workplace with more than 15000 employees, so an attractive customer, one would think. One of the competitors has already dropped out due to not being able to handle more than five digits in the "employee number" field. They suggested we change our policy as it was a "hard limit" for them. You read that right 
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Nov 4, 2023 21:41
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Machai posted:Is 15000 not a 5-digit number? We've been in business for over 80 years and don't reuse numbers. And contractors are given temporary 6-digit IDs. Also a good point about them having a niche. It just seems like such an odd hill to die on.
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Nov 4, 2023 23:57
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Is it this guy? https://youtu.be/5Bmk-WrYJKc?si=VaNfxYl_ZbAIck5H
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Nov 5, 2023 09:23
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TheBlackVegetable posted:It's possible they had one developer build the system 20 years ago who's now retired and they're too afraid to make any kind of changes to it / they've lost the source code (guess how I know this sort of thing can happen) Oh I am sure that is it. When I stopped working for the country's largest Telco in 2016 their entire customer database was still run in a 320x200 green-on-black COBOL-based system that only responded to arcane four-letter text prompts. God help you of you forgot a comma when looking up a customer's info. Legend had it that all attempts to migrate to something more modern had failed because they just kept discovering new dependencies. I had a girlfriend at the time whose dad was one of the 12 senior COBOL programmers keeping the thing running. Dude made bank.
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Nov 5, 2023 09:29
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The solution is obviously to migrate the forums codebase to Excel. In other words, make the macros codebearing 
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Nov 6, 2023 13:12
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Only the top 200 managers in my megacorp have their own offices, which suits the rest of us just fine - that way we know where they are. When they leave the office, they post on Yammer. Very handy. The rest of us have hotel desks, except managers have the same corner hotel desks every day.
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Nov 8, 2023 23:11
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Godspeed, Shoehead. Seldom have I been more invested in a stranger's travails at work!
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Nov 10, 2023 12:22
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McGavin posted:Love to sit in traffic for hours each week. It really helps me relax. I just want to point out that not everyone is American, and some of us can *gasp* walk or bike to work. Or drive 10-15 minutes. I'm sorry you have it the way you have it.
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Nov 20, 2023 12:46
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freddiestarfish posted:My commute takes about 2 weeks and 9000 miles each way, so some people are luckier than others. Ok, Frodo.
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Nov 20, 2023 14:17
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Last year my team of 8 scored lowest (worst) in the Stress category in our department of 250+ people. HR mandated that our manager held weekly 2-hour meetings with us (without an HR rep) to discuss why - he didn't see why and neither did we, as the stressors were well known and systemic and therefore way out of our circles of control. But the meetings had to be held because we were in "HR Hypercare". Without HR. After the first two meetings of sitting around and doing some awkward small talk, we agreed to just not show up and get some work done instead. Eventually, after 4 months our HR Partner showed up - and so did we - and listened to our complaints for two hours, looking very serious. At the very end, when we asked him what he would do, he just looked a little confused and said - and I am quoting this directly: "well...Have you tried mindfulness?" He is still alive, and got a promotion a couple of months later. The system works.
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Nov 23, 2023 07:47
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Monday around noon a news item appears on our intranet, essentially saying "We are going to lay off a bunch of people in these areas tomorrow, Tuesday. If you are affected, you will be informed directly tomorrow, Tuesday. Have a good day!" I could almost physically hear all work grind to a halt.
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Nov 30, 2023 08:19
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Enterprise Ratfuck Promotion
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Nov 30, 2023 17:20
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Atopian posted:Steal all the stationery. I dodged a firing. Now my next life goal is to make it to Christmas without being asked to make another one-pager on an impossibly complex project. I have a very small chance of making it. Very small. Plus, I once worked seven years in a company that was brought by a capital fund and cut the workforce by 3% every quarter for five of those years. I was fired four times and once went through eight direct managers in one year. So I already have enough stolen stationary from previous jobs to last two lifetimes 
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Nov 30, 2023 17:34
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