|
Rockman Reserve posted:my current work nightmare is that a major client has come back with a shitload of problems and issues with this one project because management absolutely refused to interface with them at all to set expectations or coordinate anything this sounds familiar
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2021 21:21
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:53 |
|
|
Since COVID my company has given everyone the option to work remotely. 70% of employees now do so. We have several buildings on our main campus that are very sparsely populated, so they are doing a "consolidation" to create "neighborhoods" to ostensibly encourage collaboration. Anyway, when I got the move spreadsheet it had me moving from a cubicle in the other building to an adjacent cubicle. I asked what was up and they just said "Oh your permanent workspace won't be ready so we're moving you to a temporary workstation first." When I say the cubicles are adjacent, it's as in, the dividers touch each other. It's so dumb. Then they put my new name placard on the first cubicle, and they spelled my first name wrong, but I'm used to that. Oh, and there are still like 20 vacant offices on the floor we're moving into and only three of us still work in cubicles. They are reserved for hoteling for when remote workers come in once or twice a year. Plus, they forgot to pay me for a bunch of extra hours I worked in October. I could go on about the move. I received the notice about a week in advance and every day they changed the move date to be a day sooner, and then on Monday when I was supposed to be packed by 5:00PM they showed up first thing in the morning and started moving furniture out of my cubicle in the middle of a meeting and started tearing down all the empty ones that surround me. I hate working from home, though. It drove me crazy being home all the time, so I put up with this.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2023 23:01
|
|
|
I'm definitely in the minority with that. They actually asked everyone who has an office who doesn't show up regularly to pack up and WFH and that wiped out a bunch of offices, but 2/3 of the people in my division didn't move out and still only come in a couple of times a month. There are days in the middle of the week when there's only maybe five people on the whole floor.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2023 23:19
|
|
|
McGavin posted:Love to sit in traffic for hours each week. It really helps me relax. That's not a problem I face!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2023 23:21
|
|
|
In grad school I spent almost all my time in the bedroom when I was at home because that's where my computer desk is. Way too much time in the bedroom. I do have a spare room, but I turned it into a weight room and there's not really enough room for a desk. When I worked from home I compromised and bought a folding table from Staples and worked in my living room, but that was crowded and tacky. It's mostly just a personal preference of wanting to get out of the house and separate work from home. It is a little silly to complain about moving to and from cubicles when I could just work from home. I actually wonder if my company doesn't give a poo poo at this point and would just prefer to pull the trigger and sell the buildings or something. Depending on what you do you do have to show up, I guess. We do a lot of different types of research and some people have an actual science lab, and then for our survey research we have an actual fulfillment and data capture center, so you have to do that onsite. That used to be in an offsite building that was a lease, but they are moving that onsite as well. Still mostly a ghost town, though, so I can't really say I'm doing it to socialize.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2023 23:44
|
|
|
Someone's manager told her she could just take an office and no one would notice and he said the same thing to me. I wouldn't get away with it. The division administrator does not like me. I'm not sure why exactly. I can't put my finger on any one incident, but every time I interact with her, she acts like she is annoyed at my mere presence. Just the other day she was walking around the new building, and I heard her and someone else talking about me "Did you hear he has to move twice?" and she's like right next to my cubicle and says "Oh, he doesn't even want to be here!" which I'm not sure why she thought that, then she turns the corner and sees I'm actually there and had the biggest "Oh poo poo" face. It might be because she ordered pizza once for everyone in the office (not out of her own pocket, though) but I missed the Teams message, so I didn't join their pizza party and was just at my desk having a sandwich, so she probably just assumed I was being a dick. Office work!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2023 01:54
|
|
|
I will give my company credit for not trying to force people back into the office when there's no point. The way they're handling employees that still want to come in is moronic, but not really in a malicious way. Just kind of dumb. No one in charge of the division really knows what's going on, either. Apparently my program director asked why I had to move twice and just over to the next cubicle the second time and they had no idea they were doing that and said that's dumb. When they tried to ask admin about it no one could explain why. It could have very well just been a typo (like misspelling my name) so now they're just rolling with it. Everyone is being real nice about it, though, kind of like just aw shucksing their way through it. They claim it's all because employees missed seeing more people in the office, which is like...what do you expect? I wonder if that was a real complaint. I imagine it's more about saving money by using less buildings.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2023 04:11
|
|
|
Spray paint his headlights black. When he drives at night, he'll get confused.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2023 05:50
|
|
|
The rest of my floor is moving to the new building today. This guy who I will share a wall with apparently took it upon himself to move a bunch of poo poo and put together his own furniture, despite us being explicitly told not to. I think he assumed no one was around, because he's whistling and talking to himself and causing a ruckus while doing so. Using his own power tools. At first I thought he was a mover. Later some other guy shows up and I hear them talking as clear as if they're right next to me. He's got this annoying redneck accent. "YEAH gently caress THOSE MOVERS I DON'T TRUST THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS WITH MY poo poo. I HAD TO GET IN AT 8 .I WAS PISSED. Told my wife I might get arrested. Blah blah blah, gently caress this, gently caress that. poo poo, gently caress, etc. I want my desk facing the window! They wouldn't move my personal furniture, waaaah!" I'm like, who is this rear end in a top hat? Apparently he's pretty high up in our division. He better watch it because there's also two others on the same wall and he's already built a case against himself for like three separate HR violations.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2023 21:48
|
|
|
RocketMermaid posted:Sounds like executive material to me! Promote this man! We're ostensibly a relatively liberal research institute so he'd be in trouble for sure. He didn't say anything I would complain over - nothing prejudiced, although, if he's always that loud there will be trouble. The EVP is right next to him, so he'll probably behave. Besides, he's another one of these guys who has to have a beautifully decorated office with custom furniture but only comes in like once a week.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2023 22:14
|
|
|
I'm working as a data collection task lead under an inexperienced project manager who doesn't understand any of the processes that run our projects. We do surveys, so it's not really rocket science. I'm about to lead testing of the web and telephone survey programs and I discovered a testing scenarios file that she just pulled from the same survey project two years ago and renamed with a 2024 in it. We have a fraction of the budget that they did then when they used it, but she thinks it will be fine. I open the file and apart from it having none of the new variables, it's missing the entire front end of the CATI program and the entire back end of both the CATI and web programs, which is the most complicated part to program and test. There were already a dozen scenarios that go through the whole main questionnaire. We could only afford two testers with 6 hours for the first round of testing. That's like, the bare minimum. I asked if she thought she was sure we had time for this and she was like "Yes." So I'm like gently caress it, it's not my budget, and spent a bunch of project hours adding all the extra stuff after pointing out it's not in there. I made sure to ask, "You sure you want me to?" I estimate it will take five times longer than what I had initially planned. Some times they just have to learn the hard way. I've tried explaining in the past but learned it's pointless. Mulaney Power Move fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Dec 1, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2023 05:43
|
|
|
At least he wasn't jacking it
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2023 22:43
|
|
|
There's really no monitoring in my company. You just get the work done or you don't and no one cares when you do it or where you're doing it so long as it's done when it needs to be. Senior staff DO gently caress off and charge to project hours, though. My manager was directing a project that basically ran itself, so I have no idea what she did all day when she wasn't in a meeting. Her Teams status would be yellow for hours on end. I get e-mails and teams messages out of nowhere all day with questions or things that have to be done immediately, so I could never get away with that. There are others, though, who I've needed to get on something ASAP because it's on fire and it'll be like 3:00 in the afternoon and their status will say "away for 45 minutes." My ex works for the same company and she'd just take naps or run errands when she didn't have meetings.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2023 22:23
|
|
|
If someone said I wasn't a team player for not going for drinks I'd go straight to HR.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2023 18:33
|
|
|
If a performance coach poked me I'd go straight to HR
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2023 03:36
|
|
|
My company tries to make a selling point of its equity and diversity initiatives but legal got wind of the notion that our competitors with similar initiatives and government contracts are being sued and fined because white dudes are complaining about being discriminated against. So now legal is saying nothing that is written or recorded can reference people of color or gay/trans or say anything about a specific group. Every DEI now breaks some kind of rule. There was a President's forum the other day and he talked about it as a language change and he tried to pitch it as "the mission has changed, but we're all in the same ship steering the same course" blah blah blah. His voice was shaking like he was scared shitless. We're a pretty liberal organization so this is going to stir up a poo poo storm. Can't wait to watch him just try to "aw shucks" his way through it. When he was made CEO he said his goal was to foster diversity and inclusivity and that too many white people were in charge, but now legal is saying "Nope, you're going to get sued." I only know the full story because I'm close friends with someone on the equity committee. She wouldn't even tell me in text, insisted on calling.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2023 03:55
|
|
|
Now that the "workplace consolidation" is complete, I share a wall with some people who are higher up and I did overhear them discussing an equity issue yesterday. A white dude with a masters and two years experience applied and a black woman with a bachelor's and I guess little or no experience applied and they were going to start at the same level, but the guy was saying no, that is an equity issue, let's hire the white guy at a higher salary grade. Which makes sense, but I wonder why it would be a discussion in the first place. What I always heard was that they were very stringent on how they determined the starting salary grade. Like, if you apply for a lower level job and your degree is too high or you have too much experience, they won't even call you back after the HR screener. Mulaney Power Move fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Dec 8, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2023 12:38
|
|
|
I'm hearing a lot of interesting things, actually. They also had a conversation about the use of extended time. That's just normal pay for salaried employees who work more than 10 extra hours every month. It's only done if it's approved for a certain project that you bill too. The gist of is was, center directors didn't like that project directors were approving it without giving them a chance to say "No, gently caress you."
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2023 12:51
|
|
|
fresh_cheese posted:Unless the hiring policy has a chiseled in stone formula set or rubric for computing the starting job level and salary based on education and experience it will always be a somewhat fuzzy negotiation process with HR It's not as chiseled as I thought, but they weight degrees higher than a lot of other companies. In general, a person with a higher degree almost always starts at a higher pay rate than someone with more experience and a lesser degree. A bachelor's degree with like ten years experience is the eqivalent of a PhD with little or no work experience. PhDs get the best deal because their PhD work seems to count a lot more. And to give an example, they'll hire entry level bachelor's with little or no experience and a PhD with little actual work experience but I've never seen an opening that didn't say a person with a master's needed at least three years experience. It's basically fair from the perspective that this is a research job and a person with a PhD should be more experienced with that just based on what they did in school. It's worth adding though that more openings are usually bachelor's with 5 years or master's with 3. Then entry level. Don't see a lot of come straight in with a PhD positions. Mulaney Power Move fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Dec 8, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2023 13:31
|
|
|
Hire George Santos on cameo to do the interview and test how good the algorithm works
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2023 21:54
|
|
|
Lazyfire posted:My wife's site's Business Development guy is incredibly good at his job, to the point where they had to keep him from issuing more proposals for a few months this year because they're already working at capacity and he was making them fall further and further behind on every delivery due to the amount of new work he was bringing in, often quoting the standard lead time from five to ten years ago when they were less busy. This is sort of like the program I've been in for four years. Except we keep winning midsized projects with shoestring budgets and absurd development timelines so we keep going through these periods of being extremely busy with tight deadlines but without the budget to support the labor that's really necessary. I used to manage three of the worst ones. They are three year deals with three separate budgets for each year of work which goes on simultaneously - finishing deliverables for the previous year, fielding the current one, and development for the next. We don't really need them - our program director has said so - and they have grown hideously complex over ten years total. There's no budget to do the work to streamline anything and all the technical staff either get off of it or treat it as their lowest priority. I moved on and now the new PM messages me daily talking about how much she resents the projects. She's about to go on maternity leave so a new mark awaits. I refused when my manager floated the notion of taking them over again.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2023 04:12
|
|
|
It probably goes without saying, but if an employee's productivity can't be measured without monitoring keystrokes or whatever then that means they need to reevaluate what is actually productive. You should be able to tell whether or not someone is productive without that. So like, do they have employees who otherwise could just do nothing and no one would notice?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2023 01:43
|
|
|
It was kind of a rhetorical question, I guess. In my company it's the "directors." I have no idea what most of these fools do all day other than e-mail us with a sentence or two of " directions." the managers do actual managing.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2023 03:02
|
|
|
"The mouse stays. YOU GO."
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2023 12:18
|
|
|
Do managers have it in their programming to always assign a new task that can easily wait on an afternoon before a holiday weekend? Yes I will scramble to get this thing done immediately that no one will look at or need for a week.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2023 19:59
|
|
|
Ever since WFH became an option for everyone 70% of all staff do it. They consolidated and moved people from different buildings closer together to create "neighborhoods" and the only result from my point of view is my cubicle is right next to the EVP office and two other high level people so I can hear all their conversations through the wall we share. Getting some good gossip but I also hear this one goober talking to himself, whistling, and humming all day. I think the real reason they did it was to save money, but someone told me they can't lease the empty buildings because of security concerns. I'm not sure if that's true because security just sent a reminder to not let the wrong person into buildings because of "new tenants." Not sure if that means we will actually be leasing or if they mean contract staff who used to work at an offsite place they are no longer leasing. I used to work there, and it was common to get your lunch stolen and people would be fighting in the parking lot so it will be interesting to see how that works out on the big fancy main campus. That place was a completely different environment. I suspect the biggest challenge will be that you could smoke in the parking lot there and main campus is 100% no smoking.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2023 15:28
|
|
|
I helped write a proposal that I was bid on as a task lead and when we won the project this "senior adviser" came in and completely restaffed it and replaced me as well as the project manager and project director who actually led the proposal with no explanation whatsoever lol It was like, great work, this is a big win - now go gently caress off and find something else to do.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2024 04:59
|
|
|
A project manager refused to implement a process the way I recommended it because she thought it was too time consuming (she obviously had no idea how it worked because it wasn't time consuming at all) and after trying to argue the point in two separate meetings I gave in. So, we did it the way she wanted which was vaguely defined and even more time consuming and prone to more errors, and of course we just had an error which could have been easily prevented. The error only cost us a fraction of a percent of the total budget, but apparently, it's a big deal and now the project director is like "What went wrong and how could this have been prevented?!" And I was the one who discovered the problem, so guess whose fault it is. Had I not reported it no one would have known lol
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2024 18:14
|
|
|
We've been encouraged to do something with "AI" and make it an "upskilling" goal but I'm too busy learning R as an upskill because they won't pay for my SAS license anymore 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2024 19:41
|
|
|
I've been working from home a lot more lately. Everyone got the option to telework full time during COVID and my company has stuck to that since, so most people cleared out of the office. A ton of people still had office space and weren't coming in, so they made up a rule that you need to come in three days a week to keep your office. Most people just moved out permanently. Then they had a big annoying "consolidation" effort now that they had all these empty buildings. They moved people around into fewer buildings with the idea of creating "neighborhoods" to "encourage collaboration." I think like three people in total from my division still come in regularly. Every time I go in it's still a ghost town. It turns out they aren't actually tracking people who come in, so there are people who kept their offices and still never come in. Like many here, almost all of my meetings are still on Zoom or Teams so I usually go in just to meet with people virtually and maybe bump into the two or three people who come in regularly. The whole move was a huge pain in the rear end. They kept changing dates and one day while I was in the middle of the meeting movers came in and just started taking out my furniture. Then I had to move to one office temporarily just to move again to the adjacent office a few weeks later. The place I previously moved to is still vacant. The only thing that I got out of the move was that they put me next to these two really loud program directors. One is always humming, snapping his fingers, and talking to himself, and the other is always talking poo poo on other people on speakerphone. I'm glad I'm not in his program because he sounds like a real dick. At one point I heard him say something like "If people on this team don't want to come in to collaborate then gently caress them."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2024 14:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:53 |
|
|
My company just put out this new thing for helping them staff projects where employees have to fill out a "skills database" that is essentially a resume where you list your education and certifications, clients you have worked with, and hundreds and hundreds of skills where you rate yourself at "basic" to "advanced." After going through it all I could think is how many people are bullshitting their way through this so they get priority to work on projects vs. answering honestly so you can actually best meet a project's needs. The jury is out on whether or not this is dumb yet, but it is always demoralizing when you have to apply to work within your existing job. This all coincides with an effort to increase everyone's Direct Project Rate (DPR) because despite us being "fiscally healthy" our practice area is 1.8% below our direct project billing rate, so now we're getting orders like "don't have staff meetings" unless you can charge it specifically to a project rather than overhead. We had all these initiatives like "upskilling" and "inclusivity and belongingness" that are now on hold because you can't charge any of that to a client. Any time you see poo poo like this you gotta figure they're going to start firing people who aren't billing everything to projects.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2024 17:39
|
|