Octopus Overlords

Interesting job is nice.

So today I did a zoom meeting with the girl from Tek Systems. It went just fine, after the meeting she said she would send relevant opportunities right after. But as I suspected, the job were she was pimping was one I applied for last week with ATI. I told her I did, and got no follow-up response.

Her email did include salary information, which would be a 25% pay cut. This place is fairly conveniently located (30 minutes away on no-traffic roads), spitting distance to the logistics facility I used to spend a day a week at while at my last job. Maybe I didn't hear back from them because of my salary (it's always negotiable, but the application engines always insist you enter some dollar value and I typically enter what I was making at my last job, unless it's really far away in which case I list more, partly because a consulting firm told me I was underpaid at my last job).

While I don't have a good history with this company (Tek Systems), she seemed to like that I'm a power user in Service Now, an ITIL-based system that she said is in pretty high demand. I lived in that system for about 8 years.

How did you take a bath?

dbt1949 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 08, 2021 8:30 pm How did you take a bath?

Pfft, the nanobots eat up all the taint.

I mean, do you really want to end up where this goes?

If it means getting to hang out with The Shat, then yes.

Unfortunately, your hanging out will be ghost-performed by Ron Goulart.

So today I had another interview with someone who approached me off LinkedIn. He sent a job description, of which I was about 80% competent. I replied point by point where my skillset was in each of those areas, and decided to leave it to him whether to pursue it further. He scheduled a video call today.

Well, I have to say this is finally something to get a little excited over. His client bought the international courier services division from my former employer, and the immediate need is provide technical expertise on their end as it relates to the separation. In that project, I'd be working with people I've known for years. I've been involved with many such projects in the past with my former employer, and the project plan he shared with me was completely familiar.

The person who I would be replacing is not considered a technical person, and since I supervised a staff of technicians and in most cases could do their job as well as them or better, I have that going for me. I guess it depends if any of the other 20% are deal-breakers. One thing that isn't a deal-breaker is salary, it pays 15% more in base salary plus a 10% bonus ("bonus" was not a word in my former employers corporate dictionary). It's also largely WFH except for times when I need to be onsite to physically do something.

I try not to get too excited about things this early in the process, but there's a bit of optimism that's been lacking for the past year.

Huzzah! Let's make this happen.

The recruiter's father, incidentally, also used to work for my former company. I really do think he will do his best to sell me; the best pimp is a motivated pimp.

I was just "assessed" and I am pretty sure I passed, as I heard them discussing that tomorrow I enter phase 2 with a different trainer, and probably graduate to the Jaguars, no more minivans. Not that the Jags are any faster.

The Meal wrote: ↑Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:18 pm Huzzah! Let's make this happen.

So after that interview, I asked a former colleague...a peer of my former boss who I was closer to since she was involved in me getting hired with the company my former employer acquired in the first place. She told me what she knew, and mentioned that a manager from the logistics facility I used to spend a day a week at went there. Terrific, I thought, I know her well and AFAIK she likes me and would give me a good recommendation! So I sent an email to the recruiter asking if he knew her...

And almost instantly got a call back. Among the information he withheld from me was the fact this is the woman who I would be replacing and she is not aware she is being replaced! Needless to say I had to stop poking around. At my former job, this woman was director-level and managed the logistics applications support team, which included one of my former minions. I can see where she is not meeting the requirements of the role they apparently thrust upon her, but I hope her failure doesn't give the company a bad impression of anyone who used to work for my former employer.

Dude said he was submitting me for consideration Wednesday night and it might take a few days to hear back. Nothing yet, but I don't ever expect to get any news on a Friday.

Turns out I did NOT pass my first assessment and was remanded to two more days of remedial training. Next assessment is Monday. :-/

EDIT: Assessment passed. However, new training slot is available NEXT (coming) Monday. For now I'm attached to support staff "help out wherever possible".

So coming up on a week, nothing back from the gig that would have had me working with my old company on an acquisition (from the perspective of my would-be employer). I will ping the guy tomorrow but I'm feeling discouraged.

Meanwhile, a three more Indians contacted me for roles, one better than the other. The lesser of the 2 is remote for now, eventually in-office, near O'Hare, about an hour drive from here. The other is downtown, butt-in-the-office. First offer was 10% less than my previous salary, downtown is a 90 minute commute each way and I'd have to pay for childcare to bridge the time gap between my leaving in the morning and wife getting home later in the morning. I indicated this was not desirable and she came back today with $20K more. OK, I thought, I could do that.

Then a short while ago I got a call from another Indian dude from a different company, pimping the same job for $10K more than the girl offered plus a 10% bonus. Well, I sent him everything he wanted and said go ahead and pimp me, but even though I'm well-qualified for the role, I'm not expecting anything to come of it.

While it appears it's different companies every time I get these calls from Indians, the MO is the same, I have to send back a copy of my resume as well as an agreement for them to represent me for the job. I've never had any non-Indian company request such things from me, which makes me wonder since they are all apparently different companies but with the exact same business process.

Jeff V wrote: ↑Wed Jun 16, 2021 9:22 pm While it appears it's different companies every time I get these calls from Indians, the MO is the same, I have to send back a copy of my resume as well as an agreement for them to represent me for the job. I've never had any non-Indian company request such things from me, which makes me wonder since they are all apparently different companies but with the exact same business process.

They probably are. One guy decided to get into the "recruiter game", then needs help and hires/trains another guy, who after a while decided he wants to be a competitor instead of employee, goes off and starts his own recruiter biz. Then he hires/trains another guy... who did the same thing.

Kinda like an MLM.

Reemul wrote: ↑Tue Jun 08, 2021 3:43 pm
Anyways today we had an official meeting with a 2 directors and explained our expectations and requirements. it was like going back to the 1980's and in not a good way.

Everyday we have to report on how many phone calls we make as well as how many phone calls we receive. The same with Emails in and out. We also have to report how much work we do, any new business we do and when we are in work and not in work during the day.

We also have 2 spreadsheets to fill in daily which allows senior management to monitor our output as well as once a week reporting directly on progress to ensure we are making it...

I generally log in at home 90 minutes before my start time and do some easy stuff but it seems if I do this and make spare time in the afternoon it seems our team will be allocated other people who aren't copings work to do on top of our own as well

aaaaand i'd be out

So I emailed the dude I interviewed with for the job involving a acquisition project with my old company. Apparently, the position is on hold, but the recruiter has a meeting to discuss next week.

Meanwhile, I have an upcoming (time not yet fixed) interview with a fertility clinic. If I'm expected to produce product, it could be rough at my age...

Took long enough, but I am now promoted from "Legal Counsel" to "Sr. Legal Counsel". That "Sr." at the front might not seem like much, and my job won't actually change in any way, but it comes with a nice bump to both base salary and bonus. Reality says that, barring something unusual happening, this is my last promotion at the company. About 95% of lawyers here cap out at this level, and my unusual trajectory to get to where I am now means I'm not really on track for anything bigger. That's OK, though. I'm in a pretty good position as is.

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 8:36 pm

Reemul wrote: ↑Tue Jun 08, 2021 3:43 pm
Anyways today we had an official meeting with a 2 directors and explained our expectations and requirements. it was like going back to the 1980's and in not a good way.

Everyday we have to report on how many phone calls we make as well as how many phone calls we receive. The same with Emails in and out. We also have to report how much work we do, any new business we do and when we are in work and not in work during the day.

We also have 2 spreadsheets to fill in daily which allows senior management to monitor our output as well as once a week reporting directly on progress to ensure we are making it...

I generally log in at home 90 minutes before my start time and do some easy stuff but it seems if I do this and make spare time in the afternoon it seems our team will be allocated other people who aren't copings work to do on top of our own as well

aaaaand i'd be out

Pretty sure "reporting on the number of e-mails I send" is the final boss of micromanagement.

Graduated to driving electric Jaguars... It's kinda weird, as the previous vehicle was actually gas-powered. The handling characteristics are completely different, and takes a bit of getting used to, even in manual ops.

Skinypupy wrote:

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 8:36 pm

Reemul wrote: ↑Tue Jun 08, 2021 3:43 pm
Anyways today we had an official meeting with a 2 directors and explained our expectations and requirements. it was like going back to the 1980's and in not a good way.

Everyday we have to report on how many phone calls we make as well as how many phone calls we receive. The same with Emails in and out. We also have to report how much work we do, any new business we do and when we are in work and not in work during the day.

We also have 2 spreadsheets to fill in daily which allows senior management to monitor our output as well as once a week reporting directly on progress to ensure we are making it...

I generally log in at home 90 minutes before my start time and do some easy stuff but it seems if I do this and make spare time in the afternoon it seems our team will be allocated other people who aren't copings work to do on top of our own as well

aaaaand i'd be out

Pretty sure "reporting on the number of e-mails I send" is the final boss of micromanagement.

Ya that's batshit crazy. And that's coming from me the captain of shitty jobs.

Octavious wrote: ↑Wed Jun 23, 2021 3:45 pm

Skinypupy wrote:

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 8:36 pm

Reemul wrote: ↑Tue Jun 08, 2021 3:43 pm
Anyways today we had an official meeting with a 2 directors and explained our expectations and requirements. it was like going back to the 1980's and in not a good way.

Everyday we have to report on how many phone calls we make as well as how many phone calls we receive. The same with Emails in and out. We also have to report how much work we do, any new business we do and when we are in work and not in work during the day.

We also have 2 spreadsheets to fill in daily which allows senior management to monitor our output as well as once a week reporting directly on progress to ensure we are making it...

I generally log in at home 90 minutes before my start time and do some easy stuff but it seems if I do this and make spare time in the afternoon it seems our team will be allocated other people who aren't copings work to do on top of our own as well

aaaaand i'd be out

Pretty sure "reporting on the number of e-mails I send" is the final boss of micromanagement.

Ya that's batshit crazy. And that's coming from me the captain of shitty jobs.

The crazy part is why aren't they getting that data directly from the systems? Why make the staff collect that data when the systems themselves are already doing it?

That isn't the craziest part to me. It's a terrible metric all around. On top they want people killing time filling out these reports and then analyzing these reports? It is just garbage management. I'm with the others - I'd be thinking hard about pulling the ripcord.

Just had an interview with a nationwide fertility company. It would be a 5% paycut, and an hour + commute, but since my wife's salary is up 50% over the past year, I can work with that.

The only concern the HR person had was I might come off as a little too friendly with my subordinates. Sounds like they want more of an asshole like my former boss to help usher in "cultural change." Well, doing so at the sharp end of a whip isn't the way to do that, but I can be aloof, especially when I have no prior ties to the subordinates (unlike my last job, where I was promoted so many of my minions were former peers).

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Jun 23, 2021 4:58 pm That isn't the craziest part to me. It's a terrible metric all around. On top they want people killing time filling out these reports and then analyzing these reports? It is just garbage management. I'm with the others - I'd be thinking hard about pulling the ripcord.

To be clear my response was somewhat sarcastic. On the other hand, having no idea what Reemul does for a living, if it revolves around customer contact via phone and email then having those metrics (among others - call length, hang-up rate, hold times) has some value. They can be used to guide staffing and identify trouble spots. Having the staff do it is completely dumb though which is where I definitely agree on hitting the eject button.

Oh yeah I picked up on the sarcasm. I think it's a terrible metric because those type of mindless counting based metrics often drive the wrong behaviors. Whenever I see them in the real world it is a major red flag.

For example I had a client who measured how quick people closed cybersecurity incidents. Funny enough they closed quicker and quicker over time. An uncounted higher level metric that wasn't being measured until we got into the picture was quantifying the occurence rate of infected machines. It was going through the roof. Why? They were running a quick anti-virus job and closing the tickets out and the machines never actually got cleaned.

ImLawBoy wrote:Took long enough, but I am now promoted from "Legal Counsel" to "Sr. Legal Counsel". That "Sr." at the front might not seem like much, and my job won't actually change in any way,

Congratulations from one Senior Counsel to another. Hope it makes you feel like an acknowledged expert in your field.

In my situation, the next promotion would mean a step down in guaranteed pay and a capital contribution. The problem of negotiating well on the transition, firm politics/economics, and working too much for your colleagues’ clients.

You realize that "senior" just code-word for "crazy shit coming out of him could be due to dementia", right?

malchior wrote: ↑Wed Jun 23, 2021 4:58 pm That isn't the craziest part to me. It's a terrible metric all around. On top they want people killing time filling out these reports and then analyzing these reports? It is just garbage management. I'm with the others - I'd be thinking hard about pulling the ripcord.

Most metrics, if explained, will lead people to "game the system", which leads to more restrictions to combat the "gaming", which leads to even more obscure gaming, until the whole bureaucracy collapses upon itself. And in the meanwhile, morale drops through the floor and HR gets overwhelmed with paperwork requests. Measure the wrong thing, get the wrong results. GIGO.

Though it also speaks to the naivete of management not realizing they measured the wrong thing.

Kasey Chang wrote: ↑Thu Jun 24, 2021 4:12 am Though it also speaks to the naivete of management not realizing they measured the wrong thing.

I would suggest it is extremely difficult to figure out what is the right thing to measure.

Goodhart's law

Goodhart's law is an adage named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who advanced the idea in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom, Problems of Monetary Management: the U.K. Experience:[1][2]

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

...
In a paper published in 1997, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern generalized Goodhart's law beyond statistics and control to evaluation more broadly. The phrase commonly referred to as Goodhart's law comes from Strathern's paper, not from any of Goodhart's writings:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Yes!!

I am now certified as a full-fledged autonomous vehicle operator, and my first "job" starts Monday... evening. They gave me the 7p to 4a shift, probably at the FAR location. I need to think of a cheaper way to get there... Lyft costs me $25 each way, which is kinda hurts. Almost makes me want to buy a motorcycle or moped, as it's 4.5 miles each way, and 30 minutes at least if I bike, a bit less via motorized transport.

EDIT: Oh, wow, they gave me a close location that I can access by bus! Nice! We'll see about first day in about... 16 hours.

Distance is 1.2 miles. I can almost bike it. But I have no place to store the bike. Public transit it will have to be.

Reemul wrote: ↑Tue Jun 08, 2021 3:43 pm Anyways today we had an official meeting with 2 directors and they provided a masterclass in how to avoid employee retention through micromanagement.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it when I was 20, 30, or 40. It's insane busywork. If a company can't measure what you're doing with automation and reporting, then it's okay to manage someone and get to know what they're doing and how and then evaluate it like a sane person.

The last manager I had that asked for inane details on my day because she didn't get what an IT worker did received a Word document in single-spaced 10pt font that outlined what I did and how long it took, From opening my web browser to research something to testing a fix to calling a co-worker to spending time on emails. I absolutely included all of the time spent documenting it. She received two or three of these painfully detailed reports before she said I didn't have to do that anymore.

Another boss asked me to write documentation on how I did my job. I explained that it was impossible. I mean, the summary is "Go to college for a computer science degree, work in the industry for 15 years" - there's no step-by-step for anything in IT outside the routines, and even those can break and become non-routine.

You have my sympathies and full encouragement to pull out the thick black Sharpie and draw a line through that job as a daily "To Do" list item. There's tolerable change and then there's change designed to break down a person's sense of self-worth until they quit.

The alternative, maybe, is to consider your job title being changed to "Person who fills in status reports"

Outside of the 2013 ice storm, this past weekend was the worst/busiest three-day stretch I've ever worked at the alarm monitoring station. We're of course still chronically understaffed and being impacted by some covid-related absences right now, but on top of that it's the characteristic summer rush, we had thunderstorms in the east, and of course the heatwave in the west playing havoc with clients' alarm systems. I worked about 33 of the past 48 hours and can barely see straight.

Our average response times have continued to climb over the past several years of management turmoil. It used to be we freaked out if inbound call times hit 02:00. For the last few years, they've frequently spiked to 10:00 and even 20:00 on a daily basis. Today, we had holds as high as 30:00. Can you imagine waiting for half an hour to speak to someone about your burglary or fire alarm? I earnestly don't understand how more clients/dealers haven't left us. Some certainly have. For many others, it's likely sunk costs. Transferring a large client base to another monitoring company can be a drawn-out process, and I suspect there's little guarantee that similarly priced competitors who offer as much flexibility as we do can provide much better service. But what a trainwreck.

Survived my first day at work. In a way, it's very Dilbertian Dystopian. I operate an autonomous vehicle, and there are monitoring equipment up the wazoo in the vehicle, including at least two camera on me at all times. One of them was supposed to catch me dozing off, and I admit to have yawned a bit during the night (it's 7p to 4a shift) but they claimed to have caught me with BOTH EYES CLOSED... on camera. Hmmmm... WTF...

Kasey Chang wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 9:22 am Survived my first day at work. In a way, it's very Dilbertian Dystopian. I operate an autonomous vehicle, and there are monitoring equipment up the wazoo in the vehicle, including at least two camera on me at all times. One of them was supposed to catch me dozing off, and I admit to have yawned a bit during the night (it's 7p to 4a shift) but they claimed to have caught me with BOTH EYES CLOSED... on camera. Hmmmm... WTF...

Can you explain this job?
It seems you are operating a driverless car and they monitor you "driving" it for 9 hours a night?

Safety driver, basically, as it drives around town "learning the ropes" and rack up the miles, and handle any emergency situations or potentially unsafe behavior.

They are a bit paranoid about safety as someone apparently crashed one of these vehicles a while back. The vehicle itself was doing fine, and the guy supposedly dozed off behind the wheel, having had a marathon session of COD the night before and held up by Red Bull only. Then the guy's foot slipped and disengaged the "autopilot". He woke up when the car scraped the K-rail. Or so the legend goes.

kinda disillusioned with the team i work with. also this career isn't going to go anywhere - i feel my coding skills going stagnant. also, i've been a contractor here for two years now and i do not know why, despite all the praise i'm getting for my work, they're dragging their feet on hiring me on FTE. i've been putting some feelers out and have one initial interview for Thursday AM...

NVIDIA just offered me the editing gig for their fall GTC conference. It's tedious work, but between this and the big spring GTC, they will account for nearly 1/3 of my income this year.

So I had round 2 interview with the fertility clinic today. I think it went very well; this was with the hiring manager (although not the final interview it seems). What they need seems to fit really well with what I've been successful with in the past, they are transitioning from a midsized company to a large company and need IT process change and business outreach in a way I've been very successful with in the past. The guy who would be my boss is in Maryland and has never been to Chicago before, but would come here to break in whoever he hires. It's a growing company, and this position is expected to evolve into something larger (what I was doing at my last job would consistute something larger with this company).

It was a video call though, and hard to disguise the mere fact I'm old AF. No matter how well I nail the interviews, this seems to always be a potential dealbreaker. I probably have 20 years on the guy who would be my boss. I can only hope that I was able to impress him with my particular track record in what he needs.