How's work been?

Maybe he enjoys the work? Has nothing to look forward to in retirement?

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Maybe he enjoys the work? Has nothing to look forward to in retirement?

This. Some people just genuinely enjoy their work and don't want to retire until they have to. Good for him.

I have an interview set for next Monday. Wish me luck.

The only reason my grandfather doesn't still come onto the shop floor and do some light repairs in the tool room was 1) he had to look after my grandmother once she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's 2) COVID and 3) he's 90. Showing up here 2-3 times a week was his retirement.

ThatGuy42 wrote:

I have an interview set for next Monday. Wish me luck.

Best of luck!

So, the past month we've been in quite a lull in that we were only doing a few builds here and there. There were projects "coming up" but as we don't hear much about them we tend to just deal with them when they drop.

Unfortunately, there were several projects coming up. They were all getting delayed for different reasons. When the project managers brought up that having them all hit at once would be BAD™, sales just kicked back "Oh, they won't all hit at once". Friday we had one project drop. Monday we had a second. Tuesday we had a third. Today we got word that a fourth is incoming.

The timeline for literally all of them is two weeks. These are hundreds of servers that have to be built and provisioned beforehand. Then shipped. To make matters worse, I crunched the numbers and sales oversold our equipment by about a factor of 3. Emergency orders are being placed. Things are on fire. I spent today literally re-imagining our workflow to try to be more efficient, and I need to sell a couple of the departments on these changes tomorrow (kind of threw myself out there, and we're not really giving them a choice).

I mentioned to one of the engineers today that failure is inevitable, at this point we're just mitigating the extent of failure. Fun times.

Coldstream wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

Maybe he enjoys the work? Has nothing to look forward to in retirement?

This. Some people just genuinely enjoy their work and don't want to retire until they have to. Good for him.

You say that, but you're not stuck providing tech support to a 90yo who refuses to learn anything new (tech-wise, he's happy to learn about anything and everything in geology or seismology).

As an alternate take, a different coworker in his early 60s is about to retire because he's a) financially able to and b) he's well aware that the only reason he has this job is that one of the older guys back in the early 80s retired when it became clear that there was no budget to keep some of the post-doc people around who were looking for full-time work, thus freeing up the money to hire two of them to full-time positions. So he's doing the same thing.

And look, I also love my job -- not always the actual work, but the stuff surrounding it. If I suddenly inherited f*ck you money, I would 100% quit my job so that the salary could go to someone else and then start back up as a volunteer.

I really wish the analyst I've been emailing since Monday would actually reply to my emails. It's been complete radio silence. Of course, if his specs had not been complete garbage from the beginning, that would have been great too, and I would not have to redo the whole thing.

slow.... and well trying to expand to other areas other than HVAC....

ThatGuy42 wrote:

I have an interview set for next Monday. Wish me luck.

Good luck!

Hire that guy!

Just took my first set of double trailers on the little ferry between Vermont and NY on Lake Champlain. Wasn't bad at all, the water was a bit choppy though. The company pays a $55 ferry toll... that's a big toll.

Imagine a computer screen with 9 grey boxes with Greek initials in a circle in the center of each.
Imagine little circles at the bottom, also with Greek initials, anywhere from 3 to 14 of them.

Welcome to Roo's Radio Program, aka my...seven months of online teaching.

I had a Christmas party (it's Greece...literally 98% Greek Orthodox) with each of my classes on the last day of school before Christmas, and instead of my radio show, either half or most of them were on camera, participating, reacting, laughing, singing...

Now, I am lucky if I can get 3 kids to turn on their cameras each class. So, there's no way for me to check for understanding, if I'm going too slow, too fast, losing certain kids...nothing. I do have *them* teaching/presenting/in charge of discussing as much as I can, which does work better. But this does not work for 1/2 of what I need to do. When MS Teams added break out rooms (to split the class into pairs if I want to...), that helped some. Some.

We *almost* went back to in-person lessons, but cases jumped from 300/day to 1100/day, and BAM, no in-person classes except elementary school...which I guess doesn't spread Covid?

Depressing and exhausting as f*ck.

Interview went well enough that I've got a second round coming up next Wednesday! Woo-hoo!

Lol hire me when you get the gig ;P

I'm currently contracting full time, but my current assignment does not have enough work to keep me busy 40 hours/week. I still bill them. I offered to lower my hours, but I assume that my pimp gets to charge all of those hours back to the client, because they said there was no need. I renewed my contract three weeks ago, and I already regret it. I hate this project and August cannot come soon enough.

I received an email for another six-month opportunity today. I replied that I had about 10-15 hours of bandwidth per week. We'll see if they are interested. With a bit of luck, I might even get a better rate.

If they are, I won't mention it to my current client, and I'll just reduce the number of hours that I bill them, and bill the rest to the new client.

I estimate that early retirement will be a possibility at the end of 2025. Any extra money I earn will just help get me there sooner. After that, I will be happy to never see another SAP screen or to write another line of ABAP again.

Edit: Turns out they might be interested. Looks like I need to update my resume this weekend.

bobbywatson wrote:

After that, I will be happy to never see another SAP screen or to write another line of ABAP again.

I had not heard of ABAP before, looked it up. It looks...not great.

charlemagne wrote:
bobbywatson wrote:

After that, I will be happy to never see another SAP screen or to write another line of ABAP again.

I had not heard of ABAP before, looked it up. It looks...not great.

It's sh*t.

First work day this week, I started not even 30 minutes ago, and I'm already thinking of resigning. This project will be the death of my career. And that might not be a bad thing.

Annual review season has come and gone. We saw a record number of promotions and it really lit the fire beneath me to figure out where I want to take me career within the company. I spent the last year pursuing a role switch that didn’t pan out and definitely feeling the opportunity cost!

On the bright side, I still occupy a valuable niche and have the opportunity now to essentially write my own job description. It didn’t seem possible in the past to write a principal/lead level position for my current role but after a bit of brainstorming I think I may see a path forward. Stagnation is a very real thing after doing my job for 6 years now.

bobbywatson wrote:
charlemagne wrote:
bobbywatson wrote:

After that, I will be happy to never see another SAP screen or to write another line of ABAP again.

I had not heard of ABAP before, looked it up. It looks...not great.

It's sh*t.

First work day this week, I started not even 30 minutes ago, and I'm already thinking of resigning. This project will be the death of my career. And that might not be a bad thing.

Woke up in the middle of the night yesterday and, after realizing that I would not be able to go back to sleep, I went out for a walk. I started thinking about resigning again. Even without finding a job immediately after, I still would have enough savings to be able to afford my (fairly thrifty) lifestyle for quite a while. But then a thought popped in my head: What if I just worked part time? I can still earn a living, put some money in my savings, and get more free time to do things I care about.

And that's what I decided to go with. For now. I may have another contract starting soon (this one part time), so my newly found freedom might disappear in the next few weeks, but for now, I think this is acceptable. I spoke with my team lead yesterday, and he had no objection.

I went out last night for my daily walk feeling happy. Happier than I have in months. Maybe even years. And I had my first full night of medication-free sleep last night since 2017.

That sounds great. I'm glad to hear you're feeling better!

That sounds so good! Congratulations!

I wish it had lasted longer! A week later, I’m again thinking about quitting despite only working 5 or 6 hours a day. My contract expires in August, and I don’t think I will renew. And before I agree to another job, I will make sure integration is not in the job description!

Alea iacta est.

In December I asked for advice here, after my yearly evaluation. The collective response was:
IMAGE(https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_meirg8LP2B1r1mr1po1_500.gifv)

I handed in my resignation last week, and after a company-wide mail today I guess it's okay to post on a public forum now My manager told me the company wouldn't play hardball on my notice term (normally 13 weeks) but now - as I expected - the general manager has decided they need a replacement first. One last dick move from the guy that pushed me over the edge into actively looking for the exit.

I've been informing my closest colleagues of my departure and wow the stuff I heard about that same douchenozzle. How he has treated my colleagues, how he thought I would never leave on my own, but also how little respect he enjoys from top to bottom. I would have left anyway, as I'm totally spent, but it's like a daily confirmation I made the right choice.

So at the latest on 21 May I will be starting a new career, starting a license desk in a smaller company. A lot of growth opportunity but hey it could also go wrong. I'm stoked!

Well, today's the day I have my meeting with my direct report to tell him he didn't get the promotion I was pushing for. I signed him up for it, I got his hopes up for it, and then my boss's boss denied it on the grounds that he "didn't do enough". I am still very angry about this. This decision by the VP to deny my guy's promotion is why I have decided to find another job. As far as I'm concerned, we did everything right. We had a clear roadmap/gameplan on what my guy needed to do for the promotion, and the VP pulled the rug right out from under him. In a direct meeting with him I told him "you changed the rules after the game has been played and won. This is not okay." So yeah. Not looking forward to this meeting, but at least it's at the end of the day, and hopefully he can just log out of work and go blow off steam after I break the bad news.

Now the good news is that my 3rd round of interviews for a new job is next week, so hopefully I can get away from this sh*tty company, get in at the new gig, and maybe hire some of my old team to come with me at the new place.

Dejanzie, what are the repercussions if you say screw it I am not showing up for 13 weeks? That seems like a crazy long notice period. In the US, two weeks is common but it isn’t too unusual to give even one day notice.

My previous job in academia had a notice period of 6 months so you couldn’t up and leave in the middle of a semester.

dejanzie, congrats on leaving!

tg42, that’s horrible but it sounds like you did everything you could for them.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Dejanzie, what are the repercussions if you say screw it I am not showing up for 13 weeks? That seems like a crazy long notice period. In the US, two weeks is common but it isn’t too unusual to give even one day notice.

It's the flip side of Belgian worker protections. If I had been fired, I would have gotten a year's severance pay, as I've been working here for 13 years now. But of course the notice period is never going to be the most productive, so in most cases an agreement is made between employee and employer. I proposed 1 April, somewhere in the middle, leaving enough time to hand over current projects and neatly after the end of Q1. Upper management decided to be a dick about it though.

So I will be working in a reactive mode, no stress and no f*cks given about management's wants or needs. But still helping the colleagues on the floor, the ones also affected by our overlord's mismanagement. Maybe I will tackle some long pending issues nobody has the time to dig into, as a farewell gift to my co-workers.

And I will be heeding a former colleagues' advice, who said she didn't leave enough time to unwind after leaving our company. She took the mental fatigue to her new job, something that's still unprocessed after 1,5 years (with the lockdown fatigue as the icing on the cake of course). I will not make that mistake.

I don't think I ever knew this thread existed (after 15+ years of hanging out here!). I just wanted to say good luck to all of you who are going to job interviews, waiting to hear back, or working on finding that job that really makes them happy.

Mostly venting here, but it's been an interesting couple of days.

It was my birthday yesterday and another co-workers today. My team decided to spontaneously take us out for lunch, shouting me food and too many drinks and just generally having fun throughout the day. I'm usually not much of a birthday celebration person so I often go to work on my birthday - this was easily the best work birthday I've had.

To cut a long story somewhat short, today I was asked to help on a major incident mostly because there's only one other person here that really knows this application and it's tangentially related to something our team is working on. It's not our teams responsibility, but I helped out anyway. I did the required triage, fixed the problem and did post-fix work & evidence gathering. I was feeling super proud, only for the one other person that knows the application to come along and say that I was completely wrong, I didn't do anything and someone else fixed it. Like I was making it up to win points or something? Or maybe he wanted to take credit for it? I asked him what they did to fix it and he dodged the question, so I followed up again and just hit a brick wall. He's adamant that I didn't fix it and he wants everyone to know it. And because the original request cc'd high level managers, it's now become a big deal. Managers were brought in, meetings were scheduled etc. We'll see how that pans out next week.

I kind of feel bad for the other guy, because he's been made a team lead a couple of months ago and seems to be really struggling. But at the same time, maybe things would be easier for him if he wasn't trying to crucify people that are actively helping him out.

This job is not too bad when it's just our team doing our thing, but the more wannabe cooks join, the more they spoil the broth.