Octopus Overlords

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 1:57 pm i was fretting about giving this demo for the 'end of sprint' meeting but i didn't check the meeting title.... a coworker Slacks me 'i think we're going to get laid off' and i was like 'uh what?' then i saw the meeting - all the end of sprint stuff was cancelled and the meeting we were in was just called 'Discussion' and had two of the founders, the CEO, only three other coworkers and a cc: to the part time HR person

one week of severance pay!?

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 1:57 pm i was fretting about giving this demo for the 'end of sprint' meeting but i didn't check the meeting title.... a coworker Slacks me 'i think we're going to get laid off' and i was like 'uh what?' then i saw the meeting - all the end of sprint stuff was cancelled and the meeting we were in was just called 'Discussion' and had two of the founders, the CEO, only three other coworkers and a cc: to the part time HR person

one week of severance pay!?

I see that coming soon here, and welcome it TBH. Place is an absolute shitshow. It's a front at best.

Sales graph from last year looks like a cliff dive. In the midst of that: move the whole company from West to East coast, which means build a whole new building, office, warehouse and lab. Hire as many people, as quickly as you can (and continue to do so, even though the ones they have hired are literally twiddling thumbs).

Not sure if it's simply a tax write-off opportunity for the owner, or something more (I suspect more). Whoever is apparently buying us (which 'management' is calling 'the investors'(!) cannot be legit assuming they gave even a cursory look at our books. Not even sure that's a strategy - buying an obviously terrible or failing business to offset....X??

Owner is in a nasty divorce with an ex in another country, and is being sued (or company, or both) here from the way they incompetently fired my former boss, that was here all of 3 months. Wheeeee!!!

I am not joking at all when I say an FBI raid would not surprise me.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 2:10 pm

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 1:57 pm i was fretting about giving this demo for the 'end of sprint' meeting but i didn't check the meeting title.... a coworker Slacks me 'i think we're going to get laid off' and i was like 'uh what?' then i saw the meeting - all the end of sprint stuff was cancelled and the meeting we were in was just called 'Discussion' and had two of the founders, the CEO, only three other coworkers and a cc: to the part time HR person

one week of severance pay!?

Yeah. That is some bullshit there. indeed.

That's freaking nuts. So sorry to hear that. Hopefully it leads to a much better place. At least a lot of places are still hiring right now. So could be a blessing in disguise?

My wife's job is closing down, but we're actually kind of relieved. She's been making good money, but it's by far the worst thing she has ever done. Working 12-13 hours a day and still being behind on her work. Always being yelled by the clients as well it's insurance claims and nobody is ever happy with what they get or when they are told they aren't covered. It hasn't officially been announced as that will be next week.

She has at least a year to find another job as they legally can't just drop all their existing claims. She will be given a contract next week or the week after that will detail out what the timeline is and what the payout is if they stay until the end. There is a chance she gets a huge payout because they have to keep people on. They suck so much that I'm so not betting on that.

Most of the people that work in the office are from out of the country and can't stay when the company closes. They are all going to lose their shit next week. I always wondered how this place stayed in business. That answered my questions. They had ONE person that processed checks for claims. They went on vacation for two weeks. Nobody can get paid for two weeks. Batshit crazy.

TheMix wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 2:32 pm

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 2:10 pm

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 1:57 pm i was fretting about giving this demo for the 'end of sprint' meeting but i didn't check the meeting title.... a coworker Slacks me 'i think we're going to get laid off' and i was like 'uh what?' then i saw the meeting - all the end of sprint stuff was cancelled and the meeting we were in was just called 'Discussion' and had two of the founders, the CEO, only three other coworkers and a cc: to the part time HR person

one week of severance pay!?

Yeah. That is some bullshit there. indeed.

+1 At least you won't need to give post release support or changes.

Octavious wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 3:25 pm At least a lot of places are still hiring right now. So could be a blessing in disguise?

If the Fed gets its way, that will change. And lots of tech layoffs are coming...

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 4:13 pm

Octavious wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 3:25 pm At least a lot of places are still hiring right now. So could be a blessing in disguise?

If the Fed gets its way, that will change. And lots of tech layoffs are coming...

not surprised LawB came in to dump the bad news on, but it is likely that this could be a repeat of 2008. i was an early lay-off at the startup i was working there, and remained out of work for nine months. as a QA Software Engineer, i'm the canary in the tech coalmine.

...and speaking of... should something like this come to pass, i'm going to take self-paced courses to up my coding skills in an effort to possibly pivot to a software dev role. QA is _always_ the first staff to be laid off at any dev studio, and i am beyond sick of it.

Come to the dev side. We make cookies.

You may want to check out my company (https://careers.craneware.com/).

We used to have a separate QA group, but they were split up and assigned directly to the development teams. I checked and didn't see any open QA positions, but there are some development ones. The main benefit might be the ability to move more easily from a QA role to a development role.

Also, most/all of our developers and qa work from home (I believe).

Edit: Doh I'm on the Sentry Data Systems side of the house. Don't look at the Craneware ones. Completely different.

We pretty much ditched dedicated QA positions 4-5 years ago. With all of the test automation, QA folks were already developers. I know a lot of QA folks that successfully transitioned and a few that went to find dedicated QA jobs elsewhere. Impending recession or not, we are absolutely still hiring for hundreds of open positions.

i'm getting the feeling today these layoffs are not too popular with the other employees. the scheduled monthly 'happy hour' for this month that was going to happen on Thursday was cancelled and replaced with an 'unhappy hour' with everyone except the founders and the CEO invited.

Just had my interview for the next step up in my classification with the State. Competing with a coworker and an outside person. I felt I did well. Should know today or next week if I move on to the 2nd interview with the CIO.

naednek wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 4:55 pm Just had my interview for the next step up in my classification with the State. Competing with a coworker and an outside person. I felt I did well. Should know today or next week if I move on to the 2nd interview with the CIO.

And now I have a 2nd interview this Tuesday. This should be a slam dunk

naednek wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 4:55 pm Just had my interview for the next step up in my classification with the State. Competing with a coworker and an outside person. I felt I did well. Should know today or next week if I move on to the 2nd interview with the CIO.

The State (capitalized)?! As in The (Deep) State?

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Sat Oct 22, 2022 3:30 pm

naednek wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 4:55 pm Just had my interview for the next step up in my classification with the State. Competing with a coworker and an outside person. I felt I did well. Should know today or next week if I move on to the 2nd interview with the CIO.

The State (capitalized)?! As in The (Deep) State?

lol damnit, you're on to me

You need to stop with the caffeine.

naednek wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 6:31 pm

naednek wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 4:55 pm Just had my interview for the next step up in my classification with the State. Competing with a coworker and an outside person. I felt I did well. Should know today or next week if I move on to the 2nd interview with the CIO.

And now I have a 2nd interview this Tuesday. This should be a slam dunk

2nd interview complete.
Before the interview, my boss had an entry in her outlook calendar with the title being "Road behind Ken"

So either they are firing me or I got the job.

Interview went well. It got to the point where my boss and her boss was convincing the CIO how good I was So I just sat back. At one point he said I feel like I'm being interviewed

Hoping to hear it being official soon.

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:46 pm


2nd interview complete.
Before the interview, my boss had an entry in her outlook calendar with the title being "Road behind Ken"

So either they are firing me or I got the job.

Interview went well. It got to the point where my boss and her boss was convincing the CIO how good I was So I just sat back. At one point he said I feel like I'm being interviewed

Hoping to hear it being official soon.

Sweet! I hope you get the good news soon. What would your new responsibilities be?

gbasden wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 3:31 pm

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:46 pm


2nd interview complete.
Before the interview, my boss had an entry in her outlook calendar with the title being "Road behind Ken"

So either they are firing me or I got the job.

Interview went well. It got to the point where my boss and her boss was convincing the CIO how good I was So I just sat back. At one point he said I feel like I'm being interviewed

Hoping to hear it being official soon.

Sweet! I hope you get the good news soon. What would your new responsibilities be?

More cloud infrastructure design\architect stuff (Azure AWS) Working as a Lead, I'm already doing some of that stuff so I doubt there will be a huge change.

(it hasn't been announced, so don't be sharing with your team )

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 4:25 pm

gbasden wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 3:31 pm

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:46 pm


2nd interview complete.
Before the interview, my boss had an entry in her outlook calendar with the title being "Road behind Ken"

So either they are firing me or I got the job.

Interview went well. It got to the point where my boss and her boss was convincing the CIO how good I was So I just sat back. At one point he said I feel like I'm being interviewed

Hoping to hear it being official soon.

Sweet! I hope you get the good news soon. What would your new responsibilities be?

More cloud infrastructure design\architect stuff (Azure AWS) Working as a Lead, I'm already doing some of that stuff so I doubt there will be a huge change.

(it hasn't been announced, so don't be sharing with your team )

I'll keep it under my hat as long as you remember it's AZURE and aws.

gbasden wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 4:31 pm

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 4:25 pm

gbasden wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 3:31 pm

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:46 pm


2nd interview complete.
Before the interview, my boss had an entry in her outlook calendar with the title being "Road behind Ken"

So either they are firing me or I got the job.

Interview went well. It got to the point where my boss and her boss was convincing the CIO how good I was So I just sat back. At one point he said I feel like I'm being interviewed

Hoping to hear it being official soon.

Sweet! I hope you get the good news soon. What would your new responsibilities be?

More cloud infrastructure design\architect stuff (Azure AWS) Working as a Lead, I'm already doing some of that stuff so I doubt there will be a huge change.

(it hasn't been announced, so don't be sharing with your team )

I'll keep it under my hat as long as you remember it's AZURE and aws.

LOL

I thought all the cool kids call it ADO. That's what we say, anyway. *Edited to add: Good luck, naednek!

Edit: per usual for me, way too long...I have bolded the important part for your convenience.

Closing in on 6 months at the shady company I have used/was planning to use to "get back in the saddle" of the professional world, and sales, and trying to claw my way back closer to where I was 7 years ago, financially. Not easy.

Recent events here at the laundry/yayo factory: we continue on a massive hiring spree (again I ask, what "investors" that want to buy the company, would urge that company to ramp up hiring, damn the torpedoes, when our sales are falling off a cliff?!? So weird to me.)

One of the recent hires is a much needed sales manager (a role barely filled until now, by the owner of the company) since our last one (the one that hired me) was fired/quit (and currently suing the company). This lady seems legit, has been in this industry forever, is very professional, etc etc. We are about the same age, and have both been in sales about the same amount of time.

I ask for a 1:1 with her yesterday, and I basically spend 45m airing grievances (not necessarily personal ones, which I really don't have that many, but professional ones where we NEED to be improving, and doing better as a company, to allow us to get some sales going). She listened, thanked me and asked if I wouldn't be happier doing something else? (one thing I told her was I was hired in a bait and switch situation, and she admitted that she also had been told some things BEFORE she was hired, that turned out not to be the case). I also suggested that The Company was not using me to the full extent of my abiltiies and experience, essentially 'wasting' me where am now (I strongly believe this and have said it many times).

So the whammy is that she mentions that the owner has had plans on putting me in a "sourcing manager" role. Which is way out of left field, but TOTALLY consistent with the chaos and madness of the company M.O. so I'm like "sure, why the hell not?" At this point I view this entire company as a joke, but the reality is when I DO actively try to bounce..."Inside Sales Account Manager" is not going to get me very far, and will actually hurt me considering what I used to do. I'm thinking "Sourcing Manager" should put me in a better position, although it's a weird pivot, internally, and I have only the faintest experience with even that concept (I used to seek out and buy data from sources in my former life, all around the world - here I would be looking for and buying ingredients).

Anyway, if anyone is in that space (buying, procurement/sourcing), or has been, I'd love to get some feedback. New Sales Manager Lady is saying it would be a promotion, not just title but more money, and she herself said (she already knows me I guess) that it would look better on my resume for my next "job", than "jr. inside sales monkey".

Note that she was pretty strongly hinting that I should take it (especially when she called me back to discuss more details, 24h later). I suspect that she knows that the buyout/investors thing is pending soon, and I will be cut if I stay in inside sales, or some other reason I can't see right now. We also discussed the possibility of moving to outside sales, which based on the amount of travel these guys are doing, would be cake. I would hesitate to even call them outside since they are rarely in the field from what I can tell.

I can see you nodding your head, thinking "ok, NOW he's back where he was...this will end well" But the problem with that, dear reader, is not the travel at this point...it's the actual sales process, and the fact that NO ONE wants to buy from us (I suspect we have a bad rep, at the LEAST ). NO ONE is selling. We can't ( I won't go into all the possible reasons for that, but it is not bc the sales team are incompetent newbie boobs). That path just leads to more frustration, and I am familiar with 10% sales success if you're lucky...also familiar with 90%, so I have seen both sides.

So we'll see what they offer me. I suspect a shitty $5K pay raise, but I doubt I have much room to negotiate here (if any, consdiering I have almost no experience). Considering the almost zero sales, that's not too bad. If (more, bigger) sales were possible, I would balk at losing the ability to boost my salary by 30% or so via commission, but that is not even close to possible here, in the current situation.

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 4:33 pm

gbasden wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 4:31 pm

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 4:25 pm

gbasden wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 3:31 pm

naednek wrote: ↑Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:46 pm


2nd interview complete.
Before the interview, my boss had an entry in her outlook calendar with the title being "Road behind Ken"

So either they are firing me or I got the job.

Interview went well. It got to the point where my boss and her boss was convincing the CIO how good I was So I just sat back. At one point he said I feel like I'm being interviewed

Hoping to hear it being official soon.

Sweet! I hope you get the good news soon. What would your new responsibilities be?

More cloud infrastructure design\architect stuff (Azure AWS) Working as a Lead, I'm already doing some of that stuff so I doubt there will be a huge change.

(it hasn't been announced, so don't be sharing with your team )

I'll keep it under my hat as long as you remember it's AZURE and aws.

LOL

And now it's official. I officially start on the 7th

Grats Naednek!

Today is the last day of subsidized health care. I turned all my equipment and they shut off my ID. I have kitchen table and no means to do contract work even if they want me to.

It's the first I'm actually going to feel retired.




You know how they say budget 75% monthly expenses in retirement? So far it looks like my post work budget is going to be between 150 to 200% of my working expenses if I continue or increase the rate at which I am fix and replace things. (Still ignoring the big ones) Still, unless things continue down the shitter, I'm in good shape, I think.

LordMortis wrote: ↑Mon Oct 31, 2022 12:01 pm You know how they say budget 75% monthly expenses in retirement? So far it looks like my post work budget is going to be between 150 to 200% of my working expenses if I continue or increase the rate at which I am fix and replace things. (Still ignoring the big ones) Still, unless things continue down the shitter, I'm in good shape, I think.

At some point you will run out of things to fix and those expenses will drop. Or at least they should! On the other hand I'm in the process of buying a 100+ year old house so I'm probably way too optimistic about the costs of fixing things!

No thank you. I wish I had the temperament to go back to apartment dwelling. Maintenance is not my thing.

In two days, it is the Bullshit Day holiday. That's the day when I've accomplished what I said I would do at work. I'll have 32 years in, and after Thursday, it's as much bullshit as I'm willing to put up with.

The idea of letting go of the paycheck is still slightly unnerving.

And yeah, no paycheck is crazy unnerving but we'll settle in eventually. Previously to my leaving I've spend all of two weeks not working from the age of 14. I've had vacations longer than my time unemployed in that time.

LordMortis wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 12:24 pm

And yeah, no paycheck is crazy unnerving but we'll settle in eventually. Previously to my leaving I've spend all of two weeks not working from the age of 14. I've had vacations longer than my time unemployed in that time.

I've found driving Uber to be very relaxing for the most part. No problems with riders (I don't do the late night drunk shift). If you want to make some money basically sitting on your ass and driving around, you might give it a try. Renting a car from Uber will also save you from burning up your own car. And the more you can engage people in conversation (not a requirement), the better the tips tend to be. Rent a Tesla and half the people will want to talk about the car.

it's super awesome when one is attempting to fill out yet another profile on a company's job application portal, and the resume auto parser just can't figure out how to separate job title, company, dates worked and job summary in Web 2.0 / the year of our lord 2022 so one spends twenty minutes re-filling out incorrectly populated fields, only for an auto-populating field to bug out and become unresponsive upon hitting 'Save and Continue', so one spends an extra ten minutes trying to figure this out and nothing happens, so one deletes the entire field and hits 'Save and Continue' only to be met with a message informing one the job application portal is now undergoing scheduled maintenance and all your - i mean, one's busywork is lost

My biggest client approved my 25% rate hike effective in January. I had been charging all of my other clients $75/hr since last January, but kept my bread-and-butter account at $60 all year. They were reluctant -- I probably make more per hour than their staff does now, and $15/hr is a pretty big jump -- but they agreed that I'm worth it and got it approved. Yay me.

I'm capped at 10 hours per week so it's $150 max. In reality, I usually come in under that cap. So the actual hit to their budget isn't huge.

I'm planning to retire next December, which just means that I'll start drawing Social Security and stop taking jobs that I don't want. I intend to keep working for these folks indefinitely.

Mannnn, I could use some advice.

Backstory: I started at Bank X in January as a manager. Before I started, the district manager, current manager and previous manager warned me about one specific teller who was mad because she wanted the job. Sure enough, right after I started, a nasty campaign started. I didn't feel safe coming in to work. They started fights over vaccination (a thing I never brought up), they tried to paint me as some weirdo deviant and started making fun of my hair and clothes.

After a while, the district manager came in and said that they'd all told him that I was incredibly rude and I was thiiiiiis close to sexual harassment. I apologized profusely, and they had an idea of switching me to a different branch under a different manager. Meanwhile, the ringleader got my job, just the way she wanted.

At the new branch, I was desperate to be liked, and it kind of showed. A recruiter reached out to me about a position doing financial planning, and I took the interview even though I didn't have the licenses. They liked me, but they didn't have the right spot for me right away, so I focused on getting the licenses I needed.

My manager at the new branch finally sat me down and told me that the new manager at my old branch was having problems with the ringleader and that they were pulling the same shit again. It actually settled me down. I felt like I was in a groove at the new branch. I relaxed, and people actually started to like me. I was doing my work better, and meanwhile I kept studying for the licenses.

My manager suggested a position in our internal contact center, since she knows that I like solving problems but hate sales quotas. I had a nice meeting with the manager of that department, who encouraged me to apply, so I did today.

Four hours later, they rejected the application.

So now I feel like a huge idiot. I was actually kind of looking forward to this role, which would be another pay bump and working from home, and I got my hopes up for nothing. I feel kind of betrayed.

I feel really checked out now. If this is the way they're going to treat me when things are going well, I feel like they don't deserve me there. I feel like I should talk to a recruiter for an insurance company who bugged me a while ago or keep working on my securities license instead of putting up with this bullshit.

I dunno, maybe I don't need advice so much as venting? This has been my hardest year professionally speaking and I just want an extra pair of eyes.

Eel Snave wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 8:45 pm My manager suggested a position in our internal contact center, since she knows that I like solving problems but hate sales quotas. I had a nice meeting with the manager of that department, who encouraged me to apply, so I did today.

Four hours later, they rejected the application.

So now I feel like a huge idiot. I was actually kind of looking forward to this role, which would be another pay bump and working from home, and I got my hopes up for nothing. I feel kind of betrayed.

Was a reason given with the rejection? If not, would you feel comfortable reaching out to ask? There is nothing unprofessional about wanting to know why, particularly with such a quick turn around.

Eel Snave wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 8:45 pm ....
My manager suggested a position in our internal contact center, since she knows that I like solving problems but hate sales quotas. I had a nice meeting with the manager of that department, who encouraged me to apply, so I did today.

Four hours later, they rejected the application.

So now I feel like a huge idiot.....

Nope. Nope. Nope. File this under "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take." and keep plugging away with your plan and the new licenses.

Be grateful you are away from the turkeys and look for things you want to do.

You might have separate AAR's with the managers who suggested the application to show interest.

dfs wrote: ↑Tue Nov 29, 2022 9:16 pm
Nope. Nope. Nope. File this under "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take." and keep plugging away with your plan and the new licenses.

Be grateful you are away from the turkeys and look for things you want to do.

You might have separate AAR's with the managers who suggested the application to show interest.

Agreed. Having your manager think you would be great for a promotion is a good thing! It's far preferable that one that actively works to keep you down. Just because a different manager didn't think you were the right fit doesn't mean anything nefarious is going on.

As it turns out, I was declined for the role because I have to stay in my current role at least a year to be considered for a transfer. I'm going to keep on with the plan and trust the plan.

Thanks for letting me vent a bit, it's appreciated.