How's work been?

Stele: Good luck! Hope your weekend is good and that your first day goes well.

BlackSheep: That's wild. I can't imagine dealing with that stuff.

Bonus_Eruptus: That's so bafflingly stupid. "Managers" that really do the very opposite of managing. They're anti-managers. They just make work harder and lead to less production. Sorry. =\

PurEvil: That's crap that you got short shrift from that person. Honestly, it sounds more like because you did something that was supposed to be done well before now and took it upon yourself to do it, you probably made that person look bad (which is their fault) and they're taking it out on you. Too bad for them!

Don't get too caught up in the other guy's issues. Just keep doing what you're doing and let things happen. It isn't your job to also ensure he is doing his job.

Good job, otherwise, on seemingly doing so well at this new job! I remember reading your war stories with Comcast (was it Comcast). Glad you've got a new gig.

Yeah, it was Comcast. Sometimes I miss my bucket truck and just being on my own and only responsible for my own work. And then I think about working outside during the summer and winter, the long hours, the time driving, and having the police called on me when I shut down someone's service for causing outages... But now that I've been given the green light to attempt to repair their growing stack of servers that were sent back due to malfunctions, I get to fix stuff again and it has me excited. Most of it is just replacing hard drives, but a few will give me a challenge like that PSU this morning.

As for our DTO, she's not really involved in the process at all from sales to engineering to me, beyond kind of overseeing the process. In a way I guess it could look bad on her for not catching it, but she's not really in that loop anyway, so it'd be super easy for her to not know about it. I think it was more an issue of her thinking I was responding to something... I guess above my pay grade. Normally the configurations get vetted by the head of engineering and he moves the job to us. But he missed the email entirely, because he's spread way too thin before considering that he's also trying to micromanage everything he has a hand in... which is everything. Literally every part of the business.

They realized today that he's the only person in charge of so many things that stuff is falling through the cracks, and when he gets back they're going to divide up some of his duties. I don't necessarily get along with this guy, but he's attempting to do the work of about 5-10 people by himself because the company grew too fast to properly spread out responsibilities. This company started with a core of about 6 people and he was one of them, and now we're up to 70 and still hiring. And we just acquired another business with about the same number of employees. It's just too much for one person. Hell, even being on vacation he's probably put in more hours than I have this week.

Overall, I learned that I just don't need the drama of responding to emails, and I can just stand back and let others take the flak for it all. I took my shot at standing up to the plate and got reamed for it, so that's that. I mean, I'm not planning to stay here long term, I'm basically learning and getting experience to boost my resume before looking for greener pastures. This place is a ticking time-bomb of mis-management, and while it's working to my advantage at the moment, it won't always. And considering who some of our customers are, I imagine it won't be too long before one of the bigger companies shows up with a briefcase full of cash to woo our CEO into signing the business over. In fact, I could see Comcast being one of those that might snatch us up. Wouldn't that be interesting... it'd be like I just couldn't escape them. At least I'd get my employee account back, I miss that higher tier internet for like $10 a month.

PurEvil, I really don’t have any clue about most of the stuff you are talking about but I love hearing your stories. I am so incapable of building things that I’m always amazed by people who can just put stuff together.

Hobear wrote:

First interview down, sounds like I will get a 2nd, job sounds awesome only down side is about once or more a month travel which will cause some constraints with my wife's occasional work and family life balance. More pay most likely. Mostly the team and work sounds super cool

Good luck on the job Hobear, will you still be in Minneeesota? And we still need to grab a beer sometime.

Likewise, good luck, Hobear!

Halfwaywrong: sorry to hear about your interviews. I wish you luck in the future.

Thanks. Need to bug them for an update on it. To know when they look to move forward. I will still be here no moving. Agree doc, I could use a beer!

Thanks boog!

Purevil, good luck, playing that game is never fun but sounds like you're doing it right.

Hobear wrote:

Thanks. Need to bug them for an update on it. To know when they look to move forward. I will still be here no moving. Agree doc, I could use a beer!

Thanks boog!

Purevil, good luck, playing that game is never fun but sounds like you're doing it right.

We need to have a Minnesota slap n' tickle, don't think there has been one in quite a while.

BoogtehWoog wrote:

Halfwaywrong: sorry to hear about your interviews. I wish you luck in the future.

Thanks! I was very disheartened at the time, but onwards and upwards I suppose.

I drive mostly tandem tractor trailer sets now. During a pretrip inspection, I see a flat tire on one of my trailers. I call the dispatch office and they say bring it to the garage door. I bring the set to the shop across the yard, and there are 15 doors.

Some people.

Well new job started after the whirlwind couple of weeks.

Looks like a lot of reading, training, etc. for a couple weeks before I really get to dive into code. But so far the place feels good. Turns out my manager is remote from another office, so that's going to be different. I guess I definitely won't be micromanaged though, which is nice.

Also, GWJ isn't blocked on the work network, so that'll be a change, not having to use my phone to hang out with you people.

So apparently my second interview maybe wasn't so bad? I've been offered the job, with the caveat that I'll be working in a different team to what they were originally hoping. Another catch is that I'll be receiving less pay than I asked for. To add to this, literally one week after my first interview for this job, my current employer gave me a payrise which is A$5000 more than what I've been offered. I'd also lose my on-call bonus, making it even less money. On the other hand, any money owed from my accumulated annual and personal leave when I resign my current job ought to cover for that.

And it really seemed like they were pretty sure I wasn't good enough for the job, so I'm worried that I won't even make it past the probation period. I don't know how much of that is Imposter Syndrome or real.

So, I'm undecided. Tomorrow is a public holiday here, so I've got time to think at least.

Good luck on the decision halfway. I'd be wary of anywhere that seems to count you before you hatch. If they don't allow you to negotiate that offer better or if the probationary period is a point they bring up the might be a place that enforces it hard. I worked at one of those and saw so many people let go for bad fit in a toxic work environment.

Good luck and be careful!

Ask them what percentage of people stay on / are retained past the probation period. Definitely negotiate the salary unless you are really looking for an exit from your current job. "Thank you for the offer, however this is less than I make now. I like the position and i am excited to join the team, I will need XX,XXX to make the move." where X is some amount more than you make now.

At least that is the culture in the U.S., not sure about Australia.

Hey all! New here, and I'm really glad I found a community of gamers without the toxicity.

I quit my job of 16 years at the end of last year and started working from home, and it's saving me an hour of prep time to start the day, and having to deal with driving for 2 hours getting to and from work. Now I have a lot of time to game! woot!

See you guys in the other threads!

Welcome to the community! Glad you found your way here.

My current atmosphere at work:

1. We're adding a new application to our product. Here's what it needs to do.

2. This is an abbreviated cycle so we have about a month and a half to do it

3. We start working. Another dev and I have taken over the skeleton of the app created by a dev who just left for a new job.

4. Other dev and I are constantly stepping on each others' toes, meaning lots of git merge conflicts.

5. While we're implementing features, features are constantly changing or being dropped because of time constraints.

6. Oh, we didn't mention that we want almost no back-end changes?

7. More features constantly changing or being dropped because of time constraints.

8. Change this thing because of no reason.

9. Today we're completely redesigning the whole app so testing goes faster.

10. Prod is like Test but the testers pay you to do the testing!

My manager today: "It's not going to be a system tray icon anymore, it's going to be a normal application."

"But closing the window doesn't quit the application?"

"No it still just hides it. It'll work like Skype [For Business]."

"Wait... Skype is a system tray app."

I misread an asset tag today when I was kicking inventory to one of the engineers to have some backend stuff removed for them (these are machines I've fixed over the past couple weeks and are going back into reusable inventory). Basically, the tag was CBD9, and I wrote that on my sheet when I was going through them, but I wrote my 9 like a a 7 and pulled up CBD7 in our inventory program instead.

By a weird chance, CBD7 was a machine that I built last month and we sent to a venue. Worried that I had royally screwed up I went into the ticketing system and read the notes on the job. The box was shipped with some extra equipment last month, but it was a rush job and afterwards the venue couldn't find the box. My anxiety shoots through the roof because now I'm wondering if this got left here and we shipped a mostly empty box. Anyways, the venue didn't find the equipment until after the broadcast it was supposed to be used for, and there was another email chain at the beginning of April about sending it back. Whew, not my screw-up.

The shipping girl gets on the phone to try to figure out why we have this server here, but no box, and we're missing the other equipment that should have been sent back. She hadn't processed it as a return so none of us could explain how this server got here without anything else. During this call she realizes that I put in the wrong tag (which she subsequently gave me sh*t for), but this whole situation made us aware of a box we were supposed to have shipped back a few weeks ago. So... an incredibly improbable yet beneficial accident I guess? She was a little miffed with me until I pointed out that pushing to get this hardware back would make her seem like she'd been keeping track of it all along, even though she completely missed the email asking for return labels.

Other dev just refactored all the code I'm trying to remove because my boss hasn't told him what we're changing. This is just so much fun.

halfwaywrong wrote:

And it really seemed like they were pretty sure I wasn't good enough for the job, so I'm worried that I won't even make it past the probation period. I don't know how much of that is Imposter Syndrome or real.

Hiring people is a pain and a process. It seems pretty unlikely that they'd offer you a job if they didn't think you would fit for the job.

Got an email saying I was rejected for a purchasing job at my company in a department far from my current department. Thing is, I interviewed with four separate managers I. That department. Do I email the other three asking if I’m still in the running for their roles?

The past few days I've been working on a Cisco 10p switch that has failed (SG300-10). Apparently our company bought it through Amazon quite some time ago and Cisco refuses to service it, so it was either fix it or scrap it for parts. It powers on every other time we use a pigtail of DC connectors to boot it up, and with any other DC plug it doesn't work at all. I checked voltage going through the jack and only have a variable 1-3VDC instead of 12VDC. I assume this is just a bad jack, run home, grab a donor board (one of several old Netgear 802.11N routers I had sitting in a box), and go to work. I de-solder the DC jack off the donor board, de-solder the Cisco jack, clean the board of the old solder, then re-solder in the donor jack. No dice, still have the same issue, along with a couple very pissed off fingers that got a little close to the iron (been a while since I got to solder anything, thankfully only glancing burns that have already healed).

At this point I'm in a weird position because I can't think of a way to Google this. If I search for troubleshooting Cisco hardware I only really get their own pages stating to send the hardware to them, and they refused to take it. If I search switches not powering on, I get thousands of pages troubleshooting light switches. If I search for DC jacks not passing 12VDC, I get car guides for cigarette lighter 12VDC ports. Given that I'm reasonably sure it's something with the board that I'll never figure out, I tossed it in a pile and I'll utilize it's case at some point to make a battered working one look near new again.

Beyond that, I'm starting to wonder if my coworker is just dumb or is actively trying to lose his job. We have a good handful of credentials to do my job. I have different passwords for my laptop, password manager, email, Application1, Application2, Application3, PEM key, sudo, appliance password, Slack, and a couple others. Setting them all up was an absolute pain, there's quite a bit of documentation to follow. And two of these (PEM/appliance) are not only key to doing the job, but would be a massive pain in a few people's asses to change. He set those two and couldn't remember what he set them to. He literally can't do his job until basically the head of engineering wipes those two credentials out and starts him over.

Today we did the first build we've done all week (IT'S SO SLOW I'M LOSING MY MIND) and he was told he needed to do it start to finish to see what craps out. He can do everything in the three applications we use (mostly data entry paperwork for other departments), but can't set up an install package for the servers, and can't finish the setup at the end... which means all he can do is check IPs and do a video test.

jrralls wrote:

Got an email saying I was rejected for a purchasing job at my company in a department far from my current department. Thing is, I interviewed with four separate managers I. That department. Do I email the other three asking if I’m still in the running for their roles?

I would reply back to whoever sent the rejection and ask which manager this was for, or does the email have a requisition number you can trace back to the job posting?

LeapingGnome wrote:

Ask them what percentage of people stay on / are retained past the probation period. Definitely negotiate the salary unless you are really looking for an exit from your current job. "Thank you for the offer, however this is less than I make now. I like the position and i am excited to join the team, I will need XX,XXX to make the move." where X is some amount more than you make now.

At least that is the culture in the U.S., not sure about Australia.

This is basically what I did. They agreed to match the salary, so I've signed on. Handed the resignation in to my current job today. It's pretty sad because as much as the work here sucks, the people are really nice and they're disappointed that I'm leaving.

Still, looking forward to new challenges. Hoping it all goes well. Thanks everyone for the advice and kind words.

Just went through the same. I miss my old co-workers but week 1 at the new gig went pretty well.

Stele wrote:

Just went through the same. I miss my old co-workers but week 1 at the new gig went pretty well.

Congrats, man! Sometimes newer pastures are indeed greener. And occasionally the green isn't toxic sludge!

Here at my failing business in a dying industry, we are maybe starting to think about possibly moving out of the Daily Bugle's great big HQ building that's only about 25 percent occupied. I was conducting a salvage operation in the old advertising area (what's left of the department moved to another part of the building recently) and noticed some printed signs atop some of the desks: SAVE FOR NEWS

It appears (based on what I see but without confirming through a second or third source) that we'll be taking some of our old junk with us. So much for the faint promise of new furniture when we moved.

Prederick wrote:

I've had three interviews for new positions in the last three months, and in each one, I've been trying to find the most professional, diplomatic way of saying "I will literally do anything you ask for this job, please help me get out of my current place of employment."

Got offered a new gig today, and accepted it.

Best Friday I've had in years.

Grats Pred! Meetings and hilarious inability of other parties to cooperate notwithstanding, I've been looking for something for years. Know how good it feels to finally get something good.

Have a new job. Mostly it's way more interesting than the old one.

The one downside so far: listening to three people try to work out a solution for a wall narrowing too close to a piece of equipment. In 7 actual days of work I bet I've stood by for three hours of this exact same conversation.

They still haven't resolved it.

My entire input is "the structure has to be 14 feet five inches to allow maintenance access to parts of the equipment. You have to have a foot on the outside edge on both wall openings."

How they solve this problem has *nothing* to do with me. My company's contract means I am straight up not allowed to even offer suggestions. I exist there to tell them they currently aren't meeting requirements and that they have to fix it or the owner will reject the project when they try to finalize. At which point they'll have to fix it anyway after construction is finished and it will cost far more money.

I'm headed for another meeting where this will come up again in about an hour.

My boss and I both are at a point where we're going to highlight the wall opening measurements in red on the design prints, prop it up in front of our chairs, and then just leave the room.

Meetings! A thing I've never had to do before. Yeesh.

4 weeks at my new gig and still no actual code written. Lots of HR stuff, some red tape with customer access to data, etc. that took up a couple weeks. But I'm hopefully coming out of that fog. I'm into documentation and running projects in my local VM at least. Seeing code finally although not tinkering yet.

Overall it's been a nice change of pace but I'm getting antsy and want to feel like I'm earning my paycheck.