Octopus Overlords

I did not pass the bar exam to file 6 years of e-mails.

On the contrary.

Sorry.

Yesterday I stayed late to negotiate and single a single case agreement for a patient in need of skilled nursing/therapy. Since I'm newish at rev code reimbursement, and since finance had gone home for the day, I involved the floor and case managers to help come up with a bottom line price. Turns out their numbers were right in line with my estimate and I held the line despite a ridiculous offer from the plan. Ended up closing at our price (which was still well below a good price). The nurses sent a glowing email thanking me for the innovative idea of involving them. Really I was just covering my ass because I knew nothing about the rev code but I'm not going to forget their point. Best part, the patient doesn't have to wait the whole weekend to get started on therapy. It was a nice minor victory in after a month of just trying to keep up with all the new stuff.

Oh, and I got ransom-wared on Tuesday. Spent the day with IS sweating it out but thankfully I recognized it from he start and called them right away (they said that it's happened before and people try to delete files and what not, making it worse). Turns out I was used to a very bulet-proof, locked-down environment at my old place. Here, not such a great idea to bypass a bad website security certificate to get to a managed care plan directory. Network was never compromised but my local drive had to be wiped and I lost a few projects. Nothing a 70 hour week couldn't fix.

You store your files on a local hard drive?

Not that it would be that surprising. The IT at the hospital where my wife works is completely inadequate. They never have enough remote desktop logins, her computer was once completely unable to get into the network remotely for over 6 months, and their training is terrible. Most of them don't know what they're doing because whenever they hire someone for IT they want them to have a nursing or other health related degree. The rare IT person they do have is swamped because the rest of them can't figure out how to remove a virus let alone create a template in Epic or set up a new computer.

Our company, if you get with the program, does everything in Google docs. Nothing is ever lost. Those who don't use it and lose their data are mocked mercilessly. Personally, at home I use Office 365 and everything is saved to One Drive. When the extortionists come a callin', I can tell them to get fucked.

Jeff V wrote:Our company, if you get with the program, does everything in Google docs. Nothing is ever lost. Those who don't use it and lose their data are mocked mercilessly. Personally, at home I use Office 365 and everything is saved to One Drive. When the extortionists come a callin', I can tell them to get fucked.

Unless they're from Microsoft, extorting their annual fee for Office 365.

I like the idea of it, but I'm still amortizing my copy of Office 2003.

That monthly fee is pretty cheap ($12 I think), and can be installed on up to 5 machines (your Office 2003 license cannot, legally). And you always have the latest and greatest, I'm running Office 2016 apps at home, while work is still stuck on 2007.

EvilHomer3k wrote:Not that it would be that surprising. The IT at the hospital where my wife works is completely inadequate. They never have enough remote desktop logins, her computer was once completely unable to get into the network remotely for over 6 months, and their training is terrible. Most of them don't know what they're doing because whenever they hire someone for IT they want them to have a nursing or other health related degree. The rare IT person they do have is swamped because the rest of them can't figure out how to remove a virus let alone create a template in Epic or set up a new computer.

That's a horrible hiring method. The primary skillset for the job should be first and foremost, and anything else is simply "nice to have" - I doubt any of their IT people will ever be administering medications, checking bandages, or running IV's.

Healthcare is a mess for IT anyway, by all accounts. I once interviewed for a hospital IT position, and the person interviewing me made it sound as miserable as hell... like "How would you handle a call where the caller says 'My computer isn't working' and hangs up?" Apparently the answer is not "train staff to provide basic information to expedite problem resolution" - the correct answer is to go up to the floor the call came from and start acting like a crime scene investigator and spend an hour looking for clues and witnesses about who made the call and ultimately track them down, and if they're a doctor you have to simply guess at their problem without disturbing them.

When I worked for a hospital, one of the programming managers was an RN. She was good with clinical systems, but not much else. There were a lot more medically-trained people on the Epic transition team (and the nursing informatics people were nearly all RNs), it was a little more than a "nice to have" when designing systems that need to perform well for clinical people. But there are numerous IT jobs in a hospital where such training would be completely unnecessary -- at best, you are over-spending for unneeded qualifications.

And yeah, we'd get a lot of calls from people who had zero inclination to work through the problem by phone. I wonder how that worked out for them after the hospital was acquired and support was moved to an off-site call center.

Well the inevitable happened. I was all set to retire in June, but they begged me to stay. It has been clear for a while that they did not have an adequate replacement, but up until now, not my problem. So I will suck it up and gut it out for another year, going part time for the last 6 months.

I hope they feathered your nest egg better than usual for that concession.

stessier wrote:There is a supervisor position open at a plant at my current site (same company, different division). I'm thinking I'm going to apply. I've been doing engineering for 19 years and have always thought I'd enjoy management. This looks to be a decent position too - only 2 direct reports but 55-ish indirect. My biggest concerns are am I going to like it/be able to do it (really no way to know until I try) and how stable is the division (how stable is any company, amiright)?

What's the worst that happens? I hate it, do a poor job and get fired?

Yeah...

I applied but didn't even get an interview - lack of managerial experience. Ye ol' chicken and the egg dilemma.

Well, another one bites the dust, we're going to be down 3 techs now with the split rapidly approaching. This one didn't report to me directly, however I was using a second tech at that location in a Friday coverage for our corporate HQ downtown. Now I might not be able to do that, which ultimately results in me needing to be several places at once.

The good news is the company turned a profit last year. The bad news is, they're basically just giving the employees an "atta boy!" Like Jim Kramer said, "it's [company name] a good investment but you wouldn't want to work there." That they bothered to announce a bonus at all is an insult -- perhaps if our department pooled our windfalls, we could order a pizza.

FWIW, the annual review was last week and was superlative. While I didn't expect anything bad, I didn't expect so much added praise. Then again, it's all just an exercise anyway...in a week or so, they will announce that annual raises remain fixed at 1% across the board.

HR is developing new bi-yearly raise guidelines. My annual review is now 5.5 months overdue, along with the promised raise to go with it. The new boss is being told that any changes will have to wait until the new procedures are finalized. If my back pay raise disappears in the new system, I'm going to be standing in someone's office and screaming at them.

Isgrimnur wrote:If my back pay raise disappears in the new system, I'm going to be standing in someone's office and screaming at them.

They expect you to scream. Speaking with the calm, cool demeanor of your favorite serial killer is much more effective in the long run. You can always fall back on this:

All you have to do is follow three simple rules. One, never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected. Two, take it outside... And three, be nice.

I asked the old boss over a month ago, "who do I need to scream at to get my review done?" He answered that he was the one holding things up through his inaction. I told him to consider himself screamed at. Being calm and cool about it hasn't gotten me anywhere, and HR doesn't give a crap.

The new boss says the right things. I'll give him a chance to make it right once HR gets their shit together.

Just got in to it with my newish boss over annual reviews and goal setting. I'm sick to death of coming up with new ways to expand my responsibilities every year. Goals are puppies. My real goal is to stop taking on more work and get you to hire another goram body with some degree of information technology skills so I can take time out of office and not move closer to 50 hours being the standard work week unless there is more work to do so I can put in considerably more time.

She empathizes with me, as she is in the same boat, but can't or won't do anything, probably because her boss is in the same boat.

Timely update. Magic 8 ball is suggesting my future is moving from Green to Yellow and should start upping the search for additional contract work. At first I sort of liked being connected to the so-called "gig economy" but now, not so much.

Going through my semi annual "they're probably going to fire me because I'm not really doing much right now" panic attacks. It will either pass or come to fruition. If the latter, I'm seriously thinkin' about getting the hell out of Chicago. But I really hope this is just part of my well known neurosis and passes. I'm not a fan of constantly feeling nauseous.

If you do leave, make sure your new job pays a whole lot more. I have it on good authority Hentzau increased the franchise fee for Octocon to triple what he asked for previously (3 dozen donuts and a heaping plate of kiszka).

Paingod wrote:Healthcare is a mess for IT anyway, by all accounts. I once interviewed for a hospital IT position, and the person interviewing me made it sound as miserable as hell... like "How would you handle a call where the caller says 'My computer isn't working' and hangs up?" Apparently the answer is not "train staff to provide basic information to expedite problem resolution" - the correct answer is to go up to the floor the call came from and start acting like a crime scene investigator and spend an hour looking for clues and witnesses about who made the call and ultimately track them down, and if they're a doctor you have to simply guess at their problem without disturbing them.

Ahahahahaha! Imagine getting that page at 2am, and by the time you call back the other person in the NICU informs you that the person who put in the issue has gone home for the night! I get to deal with that every few months when I'm on call. I'm about the 3rd level of support though, so unless something really shitty is going on I don't get called.

Good grief clinicians, we want the systems to work for you too. You don't have to be dicks about it when they don't. Doctors are notorious for "OMG this issue is 100% top priority", but by the time you get to talk to them (or more likely the charge nurse on that floor) it's "he went home, I don't know what you are talking about".

The kicker is that 95% of the time it's not actually my team's issue (I work for the corporate-wide IT group), it's the local site's vendor app that's fucking up. So then I get to transfer the ticket to them. Good times!

killbot737 wrote:

Paingod wrote:Healthcare is a mess for IT anyway, by all accounts. I once interviewed for a hospital IT position, and the person interviewing me made it sound as miserable as hell... like "How would you handle a call where the caller says 'My computer isn't working' and hangs up?" Apparently the answer is not "train staff to provide basic information to expedite problem resolution" - the correct answer is to go up to the floor the call came from and start acting like a crime scene investigator and spend an hour looking for clues and witnesses about who made the call and ultimately track them down, and if they're a doctor you have to simply guess at their problem without disturbing them.

Ahahahahaha! Imagine getting that page at 2am, and by the time you call back the other person in the NICU informs you that the person who put in the issue has gone home for the night! I get to deal with that every few months when I'm on call. I'm about the 3rd level of support though, so unless something really shitty is going on I don't get called.

Good grief clinicians, we want the systems to work for you too. You don't have to be dicks about it when they don't. Doctors are notorious for "OMG this issue is 100% top priority", but by the time you get to talk to them (or more likely the charge nurse on that floor) it's "he went home, I don't know what you are talking about".

The kicker is that 95% of the time it's not actually my team's issue (I work for the corporate-wide IT group), it's the local site's vendor app that's fucking up. So then I get to transfer the ticket to them. Good times!

And in that scenario, I'm the vendor app support I absolutely despise the calls where I have no useful information to work on - but if the hospital IT support person at least attempted to get it, I can definitely sympathize that doctors are often total dicks to them. Fairly often I can guess what they mean, since I've been doing it for over 10 years and learned to translate "idiot speak". But if customer can't provide any useful information and I can't magically deduce it, I will basically ignore the support ticket until my shift ends at 6am (or the doctor leaves for the night, whichever comes first). I'm very good at what I do but I'm not psychic.

Of course it doesn't help that I support an app that the company is in the process of sunsetting so even though they pay lip service to "customer satisfaction" and it might hurt my annual review to have bad customer survey metrics - they really don't care that much. I'm also in a really messed-up work situation right now, because they started laying off people that they deemed "unnecessary" but forgot to account for people that saw the writing on the wall and pre-emptively quit. We are now too short-staffed to even provide the level of support that we are contractually obligated to provide. The upper management are clueless enough that they might still lay off someone who's essentially covering for 3 different teams now (me) but before that happens, I'll be milking them for hundreds of hours of overtime.

Today I accepted an offer in the bay area. Trying to decide whether to tell my current employer tomorrow... or a week from Monday... after I get back from GDC... on their dime... AWKWARD!

I probably can't even get any time from our team lead tomorrow. There's a big thing going on. So I may not even have to decide.

tiny ogre wrote:Today I accepted an offer in the bay area. Trying to decide whether to tell my current employer tomorrow... or a week from Monday... after I get back from GDC... on their dime... AWKWARD!

I probably can't even get any time from our team lead tomorrow. There's a big thing going on. So I may not even have to decide.

Congrats and good luck. Hope it's an easy transition for you!

tiny ogre wrote:Today I accepted an offer in the bay area. Trying to decide whether to tell my current employer tomorrow... or a week from Monday... after I get back from GDC... on their dime... AWKWARD!

I probably can't even get any time from our team lead tomorrow. There's a big thing going on. So I may not even have to decide.

That sounds fantastic! Congratulations on the obviously awesome offer they threw at you!

Congrats on that!

In my little realm, the company I work for has been springing leaks for some time and appears to be slowly sinking with weekly layoffs and they just announced a facility closure (with only 3 out of the 5 left still in production). I've been looking for a good opportunity since September when the horizon went dark - and have had a couple calls and interviews, but nothing panned out. I've been resisting the urge to jump at anything in my bailiwick because I don't want to step down too far just to escape; I haven't felt that desperate... but the time is coming close when I think the cost of keeping me will exceed the possible cost of just using a vendor for support enough to make it appealing. They likely won't do me in until I'm running on half-steam, but I don't want to be here until someone else decides I shouldn't be.

I've got an interview today with a company that I think fits my skill set perfectly. I just need to not botch it, and not push too hard on salary. I think I lost the last possible job I interviewed for because I was too aggressive with my salary requirements. Honestly, by the end of the interview, I got the feeling that they didn't really know what they wanted and could make due with a Desktop Support role that also dabbled in servers, not an IT Manager. The job I'm interviewing for is a substantial step up in company size (more than double), and I'd be in a leadership role in the IT department and working with a team - not just an "IT Manager" working all by myself. The title is less prestigious, which matters little since the job duties are that of a manager.

I've been reading personnel lists on LinkedIn and looking at the business structure, and I've got a couple small red flags that I might be hallucinating - but overall it looks good.

The red flags are...

1. The COO is the primary contact for receiving resumes, not the HR Department or the existing IT Director. That struck me as odd.
2. The COO has been on board with this company for 6 months, and before that he was an IT Director for 8 years somewhere else.
3. The existing IT Director has been here for over 18 years and has college degrees in Anthropology, not Computer Science.
4. For some reason, the COO's email address breaks the established convention everyone else has (he uses firstname.lastname instead of just a firstinitiallastname). This could easily be an IT person who deviated from standards, or the COO could have requested it.
5. I got a call to interview with them the 14 hours after I submitted my resume, and the interview was scheduled for 2 days later. The COO seems very eager.
6. I'm not interviewing with the IT Director, but directly with the COO.
7. The job posted lists managing IT staff as a duty, which may mean the IT Director manages just me, with the COO managing her?

I could be imagining it - but all of that feels like it adds up to the COO wanting to shake things up now that he's in charge there - or the current IT Director is stepping down. If he's out to stir things up, that could cause some elevated stress levels. If the IT Director is stepping down and the COO is just looking to close the gap between the posted job and is own role, that's something I can do.

I'll find out in 6 hours. I also need to keep looking over HIPAA guidelines to see how it affects an IT Department. That's something I've never dealt with. I don't want to walk in and be completely unaware of it and have to fall back on making hippopotamus jokes.

My youngest stepson just got laid off his job of 20+ years. He was lucky tho and got an extra two years more work that 90% of the people at his shop.

tiny ogre wrote:Today I accepted an offer in the bay area. Trying to decide whether to tell my current employer tomorrow... or a week from Monday... after I get back from GDC... on their dime... AWKWARD!

I probably can't even get any time from our team lead tomorrow. There's a big thing going on. So I may not even have to decide.

Congratulations, Tiny Ogre. New jobs are exciting.

Doctors are notorious for "OMG this issue is 100% top priority", but by the time you get to talk to them (or more likely the charge nurse on that floor) it's "he went home, I don't know what you are talking about".

It's not just doctors. Professors are the same way. Then when you go to help them it's something like a warning message that they just need to click OK to or a pop-up that went behind their browser because they double click everything. Stop double-clicking every single thing on the computer.

Congrats, TO! Did you pick out a nice river spot yet?

Paingod wrote:
I also need to keep looking over HIPAA guidelines to see how it affects an IT Department. That's something I've never dealt with. I don't want to walk in and be completely unaware of it and have to fall back on making hippopotamus jokes.

PHI is your Lord and Master.

I'm pretty sure HIPAA regulations didn't cover IT staff looking at pictures of naked pharm techs on the home drives of doctors...

Paingod wrote:If the IT Director is stepping down and the COO is just looking to close the gap between the posted job and is own role, that's something I can do.

Yup.

So the IT Director isn't just stepping down, she's gone. The COO posted a job to see who'd bite and during the interview he made it clear that the responsibilities of the job cover all the territory vacated by the former IT Director - planning, oversight, vendors, networking, admin duties, escalation, budgeting etc... The kicker is that he's watered down the job description (despite verbally wanting all the same performance) and watered down the salary range to roughly the level of a well qualified Desktop Support specialist.

So they dump an IT Director that was probably making a good IT Director salary, and want to bring in a new guy to be a "Senior Network Admin" for roughly the cost of a Desktop Support tech. I'm sure it makes sense to an executive on paper, but in practice that's beyond insane. I stuck with my general range of salary and tried very hard to not appear offended.

He might still bite, but my numbers were well in excess of his. I'm just hoping that my qualifications make it appealing. I'm sure they'd still save over what they had been paying the former IT Director.

Danger! Danger, Paingod! Whoop! Whoop!

Team leads told. GDC trip cancelled, the extra week makes it easier to rearrange our lives anyway. And it's less awkward.

Jeff V wrote:Congrats, TO! Did you pick out a nice river spot yet?

We're looking. Very likely we'll be in short term corporate housing for a month or two, then renting (a van down by the river) while we look for a permanent place (an RV down by the river) in the likely event we don't find one very quickly. There are definitely places we like and can afford, but we can't realistically put any offers in until we sell down here. The logistics of this are really terrible! Never a dull moment!

Isgrimnur wrote:Danger! Danger, Paingod! Whoop! Whoop!

No kidding. I'm up at 1:00am, drafting an email that I intend to send to the guy tomorrow that explains what I've seen historically in terms of salary, and that the range he is offering is a touch more than I was making as an intern, and less than I was getting as a Junior Network Engineer - let alone "Senior Network & Security Administrator in charge of Everything".

It's actually kept me from sleeping, my stomach is churning, and I just want to let this guy know he's flipped his lid. I've never been completely insulted by a salary offering before, but he pulled it off.

Explain nothing. You communicated your expectations. Either they'll match or they won't.

Zarathud wrote:Explain nothing. You communicated your expectations. Either they'll match or they won't.

Writing it out helped, and I haven't sent it. I doubt they'll bite at my counter-offer, but I dearly want to let the guy know he's so far off base that it's insulting... and he used to be an IT Director before he took his current job. He should know what an IT person is worth - so double shame on him.

Paingod wrote:

Zarathud wrote:Explain nothing. You communicated your expectations. Either they'll match or they won't.

Writing it out helped, and I haven't sent it. I doubt they'll bite at my counter-offer, but I dearly want to let the guy know he's so far off base that it's insulting... and he used to be an IT Director before he took his current job. He should know what an IT person is worth - so double shame on him.

They'll find a bigger fool who will take the low-ball offer in exchange for the title. Service will go to hell, but the salary numbers will look great for a couple of years. By the time they realize what they've destroyed current "management" will have moved on and somebody will have to pick up the pieces.

Run to a different company where things like knowing how to do things are valued. Don't spend your hard earned waking hours tutoring toddlers who know everything.

My public university is in trouble with INS because higher ups wanted to play visa games with cheap foreign labor instead of paying our own graduates the market rate. If you've got the ability to move away from bad management, run now.

Once when working as a contractor, the sales rep came to me with an offer for some place that two years earlier, eliminated their entire networking staff thinking that once it was built, it would just run by itself without maintenance. Well, after 2 years, it was in pretty sad shape. She told me they wanted a CCNP, MCSE, CNE, and certs in Oracle and a few other things to help straighten things out. I didn't have these, but she thought I could bullshit my way through them.

Then she mentioned it was just part time, no more than 20 hours per week. OK, I thought, with those qualifications, it ought to pay more than double I was making at my last gig through this company. I'm expecting well north of $50 per hour (today, expectations would be triple that).

She told me it paid $17 per hour. I told her she should not even attempt to recruit that position -- obviously, the client is in some state of delusion, and for what they did to their own staff, they deserve to pay dearly for rescue. I don't know if she ever did find someone to work that job, but I don't really care.

One of my former bosses told me once, "always stand firm and get your price, never settle for less than you can afford to do the job for." He was talking specifically about pricing his widgets (which I was involved with), but it applies to salaries as well. I've had numerous spells of unemployment over the years due to the nature of the IT field; and while there have been frequent times that I almost resigned myself into thinking I'd have to accept a substantially lower salary, someone would always step up and pay my price (or better!)

So my wife has somewhat of a career dilemma. She will be done with school in June; and her school is pushing all of the students to take the exam review (for LPN) in July and the exam in August. Probably this is in part due to a last ditch effort to save their accreditation; they are looking to be out of business if they lose that and apparently they are at the breaking point. This review class will make it nearly impossible for my wife to work her current job (I don't know how she manages now...her schedule is just crazy). She said her current job rarely has openings at the LPN level, the current LPNs are happy there and have been there a long time. It's likely she'll have to quit, and since she'd due in September, we're looking at maybe 5 months with her not working.

Meanwhile, she's being recruited by a place that jacked her around before, this time they are offering a bonus. No idea if that offer will stand once they see she is pregnant. Her old job is willing to take her back too...and it's likely they will work with her to accommodate any scheduling demands she has, perhaps enabling her to work until September. It seems more probably she can advance almost immediately into an LPN role there, but this place pays very low and has triple the nurse-patient ratio compared to where she's at now. Still, her future prospects open up tremendously if she can sell herself as an experienced LPN, so if she can get some assurance of the role, this might be a better long-term move.

Coincidentally, the clinical training for her school happens to be at that nursing home where she used to work. Every week after her Saturday morning clinicals, she tells me about how happy her old patients are to see her again. She might be talking herself into going this route.