How's work been?

And then there was one....my last remaining team mate, that survived the layoffs back in September, turned in his two week notice. He was already taking vacay next week/travelling out of state and I was supposed to take the week after that off. Now its debatable if I get to still take it off. Once he is gone, I am the only one on call for my team and I don't know if I can carry all the work involved.

Take the week off, especially if you already had it scheduled. The company's staffing decisions are not your responsibility...

Just sat through another company all-hands meeting. I can't attend these anymore. Every time I just get more depressed and frustrated with this company.

But, change is coming! My next interview for a new job is broken into two parts, 90 minutes tomorrow, 90 minutes Friday. I'm nervous, but very confident that I can land this opportunity. What I should really be doing is continuing my job search and hedging my bets so that I have more options rather than just putting all my eggs in one basket. But, with all that's going on I haven't been able to do that yet. Let's see if I can put more effort into the job search and get out of the misery of my current leadership.

So, once my team mate leaves, I am being laterally promoted to a Systems Engineer position in our NOC, and getting an 11% raise. My % annual bonus is grandfathered in so I don't lose anything there and I do not lose my quarterly oncall bonus. I'm excited, but its going to be so much work, while I'll still be the cellular SME, I will have to spend the next year learning Azure, AWS, Linux and whatever else I need to know to do the job. I am basically starting a new career, going from a team lead(Analyst III) to a Sys Engineer 1, but keeping my salary/getting a raise.

We had a code freeze last week so that all dependencies could be resolved in the quality environment, which meant that I was able to reduce my work hours to around 27. It was my best week in quite some time. I'm hoping I can get most of my tasks done quickly once coding resume and repeat the experience this week.

One of our devs on our team left about a month ago, another gave his notice today. That leaves only me as the only dev. Our tester and BA have only two weeks left on their contract, but haven't been offered a new one despite being told they would. The powers that be have been really dragging their feet about replacing the last dev. I'm not sure I'm seeing much of a future for our team here right now.

I emailed one of my coworkers yesterday with a question. He sends me an IM 10 minutes later: "I'm too sick of this project, I'm taking the day off, we can talk tomorrow or Wednesday." He was offline all day yesterday. And today. It would not surprise me if he announces that he's leaving the project in the next few days. Whenever we talk, all we can do is complain about how sh*tty the project is.

I received a call from a recruiter today for a contract position at the same place I worked at in 2019, working on the same system I was reverse engineering at the time. (Luckily the new position seems way more interesting than that.) I sent my resume to the recruiter, we'll see if that works out. Start date is April 5th.

I talk about this with another co-worker, and she tells me that she's been sending out resumes, looking for another job as well. My main concern with leaving is that my workload will get dumped on her desk, and she does not think it will happen. (I don't share her optimism.)

I also had to waste 3 hours in performance meetings in which I had to speak for about 30 seconds in total. At least this is billable time. There's another similar meeting planned for tomorrow, but this time I will have Dragon Quest XI installed on my personal laptop, so at least I can grind a few levels during that time.

So, yeah, interesting week so far. And it's only Tuesday.

I'm in a weird place. I have a job that for the current quarter at least I don't really need to do. A few to 20 hours a week right now. My role after being let go last summer has been ok, my vp left and there is a hiring freeze so we can't back fill. It's very redundant of other areas which makes me nervous to stay. I feel so stagnant and yet burnt out and defeated. My last org got canned right as things were really looking up for me. I took this role in another part of the company and it's been hurry up and wait to finish their project build of a program. Then I get my review and I was rated as average and barely got a raise. It was laughable considering I came in and pushed delivery and achievements that mattered.

All that to say I need to reach out to some old teams and brush up on my resume. Tired of this joint. The time is nice but feeling like you're stagnant and not contributing is crap.

Our submission is due in in 67 minutes and I'm still waiting on the small portion from my successor that she has been obsessing over for 3 weeks straight. While I'm waiting she has been emailing me to confirm I properly did stuff unrelated to this thing all morning.

The same person who demands constant email contact, constant phone meetings and constant charts or graphs managing our time and effort from us and is always freaking out about the status of our work seems to then ensure that everything is horrendously rushed at the end because she refuses to focus.

I hope the day she retires arrives before the day I get fired for screaming at her.

I resigned this morning. I expect an angry call from my team lead any minute niw.

Three more weeks, and then I’m done.

kuddles wrote:

The same person who demands constant email contact, constant phone meetings and constant charts or graphs managing our time and effort from us

I don't get it, is this person your boss? If not, why not tell them to get stuffed (nicely of course)?

bobbywatson wrote:

I resigned this morning. I expect an angry call from my team lead any minute niw.

Three more weeks, and then I’m done.

So you resigned with three weeks notice? Pretty generous by US standards. Hopefully this gives you some peace of mind, from your posts it seems like the job has been pretty bad for your mental health.

LeapingGnome wrote:
bobbywatson wrote:

I resigned this morning. I expect an angry call from my team lead any minute niw.

Three more weeks, and then I’m done.

So you resigned with three weeks notice? Pretty generous by US standards. Hopefully this gives you some peace of mind, from your posts it seems like the job has been pretty bad for your mental health.

The only reason for the three weeks is that I'm supposed to cover for a coworker's vacation in the third week, and she deserves it very much. Otherwise, it would have been two weeks.

bobbywatson wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:
bobbywatson wrote:

I resigned this morning. I expect an angry call from my team lead any minute niw.

Three more weeks, and then I’m done.

So you resigned with three weeks notice? Pretty generous by US standards. Hopefully this gives you some peace of mind, from your posts it seems like the job has been pretty bad for your mental health.

The only reason for the three weeks is that I'm supposed to cover for a coworker's vacation in the third week, and she deserves it very much. Otherwise, it would have been two weeks.

This pisses me off.
You care more about the wellbeing of the company's employees than the company, even though you no longer are going to be working for the company.
A company like that does not deserve to stay in business.

Your coworker is entitled to her time off, it is the company's problem to find someone to cover her work if something needs to be covered... not yours or hers. Pisses me off too.

We've been voluntold to do weekend work! Yay!

At least we've been approved for overtime! Yay!

...except there's no end in sight to the reasoning for why weekend work is now needed since management won't answer my question, which is "How are we going to mitigate the flow of traffic when you won't allow us to de-prioritize things?"

The response is "it's all important!"

Not yay!

Wife asks me, "how do I explain to my coworker that "history" is not a verb?"

English is my wife's second language. English is her coworker's first.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Wife asks me, "how do I explain to my coworker that "history" is not a verb?"

English is my wife's second language. English is her coworker's first.

Might I suggest "History is not a verb" as an opening gambit?

Does the sentence "Bob historied Karen" or "Bob historied to Karen" make sense? No?

Then it's not a verb.

Jonman wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

Wife asks me, "how do I explain to my coworker that "history" is not a verb?"

English is my wife's second language. English is her coworker's first.

Might I suggest "History is not a verb" as an opening gambit? :)

Hah--the deeper problem though is, this person seems not to know what a verb is. Also my wife can be pretty blunt, so she's worried she'll sound like a jerk, so the question was more of, how do I do this in a nice way.

Vrikk wrote:

Does the sentence "Bob historied Karen" or "Bob historied to Karen" make sense? No?

Then it's not a verb.

Totally. This came up in the context of the word clearly being used as a noun, however, something like "This is important to the history of blah blah..." Thus my assertion that said person does not know what verbs are, or perhaps is just confusing verbs with nouns. Given their line of work entirely has to do with understanding grammar, however, how she got hired is a mystery to me.

Gods. The general stressers have got to be getting to me.

I just said "there is no non peeing section of a hot tub" on a concall just now.

I need meaningful time off.

Me: Any idea why I'm getting syntax errors all over the place?
Colleague: Did you hear? The admins retrofitted the changes on development X.
Me: After we specifically said that they should NOT do that, in uppercase, bold, and highlighted in yellow?
Colleague: Yep.
Me: After they even said 'Thank you for letting us know not to retrofit'?
Colleague: Yep.
Me: Three weeks after they did the exact same thing and had to restore the whole database?
Colleague: Yep. Except this time they don't want to restore the database. We'll have to do everything manually.
Me: Great.

Edit: If I have to ask for this again before my time is up, I'll make sure I use font size 24 in addition to everything else. Or would that be considered passive-aggressive? Or just plain aggressive?

Definitely aggressive.

To inject some good work news, I just completed my SAFe SPC certification. I am now officially a giant nerd, and my boss (and his boss, and possibly his boss) actually care about that and value it. Yay!

Edit: WizKid was able to help me find the right thread.

Based on my talks with some people in the office I have a few rumors and gut feelings.

I am pretty sure at least three people at the office would 100% take another job if they were offered the same pay/benefits. Maybe one of them is actively looking for a new job. If we lose one more person everyone left will suddenly have a large stress load on everyone. If that happens I think at least one more person will job hunt or leave.

I don't want to jump too early and apply for a job I don't want but I also don't want to be the person that gets two other people's jobs while we try to find replacements.

How do I solve this math equation during a pandemic?

My raise started today, 10%, new boss tried for more, but no dice. He also has a career path for me, better than the brick wall I was hitting my head on before. So that's exciting. I start transitioning into my new role/start learning system engineering in the next few weeks.

Stealthpizza wrote:

Based on my talks with some people in the office I have a few rumors and gut feelings.

I am pretty sure at least three people at the office would 100% take another job if they were offered the same pay/benefits. Maybe one of them is actively looking for a new job. If we lose one more person everyone left will suddenly have a large stress load on everyone. If that happens I think at least one more person will job hunt or leave.

I don't want to jump too early and apply for a job I don't want but I also don't want to be the person that gets two other people's jobs while we try to find replacements.

How do I solve this math equation during a pandemic?

Start looking now. You're not obligated to take any offer. Do it now, because when you're stressed and burnt out from carrying too much work, looking for a job too might well seem insurmountable.

Stealthpizza wrote:

Based on my talks with some people in the office I have a few rumors and gut feelings.

I am pretty sure at least three people at the office would 100% take another job if they were offered the same pay/benefits. Maybe one of them is actively looking for a new job. If we lose one more person everyone left will suddenly have a large stress load on everyone. If that happens I think at least one more person will job hunt or leave.

I don't want to jump too early and apply for a job I don't want but I also don't want to be the person that gets two other people's jobs while we try to find replacements.

How do I solve this math equation during a pandemic?

Hello, me! I don't know. I bet Malor's right.

I just got my review that was supposed to be effective 10/1/20.
But my manager messed up the submission to HR and I still don't have my retro merit increase. I am due 6 and a half months retro pay at this point.
I got a title change at least which is more in keeping with what I actually do. (Integration and Data Management Architect, which at least sounds fancy)
This has been the story of the past year. Folks have been leaving left and right and we haven't posted a single analyst position even though were going to be running a skeleton crew of what was an already lean operation. They keep saying "We need to re-define the job descriptions first" due to big operational changes due to new software systems but that work keeps not getting done because fires keep starting and there aren't enough staff to put out the fires and do the admin work. This causes more people to get burnt out, and the cycle begins anew.

PS This is a hospital, so it's a bit of an odd machine anyway. The laws of business physics have more or less been suspended as maintaining patient care positions has been the first priority and the administrative end has really suffered in terms of person-power and budgets as we struggle to keep up in spite of being pressed by state and national forces to provide ever greater amounts of data. A fair number of people have just said 'to heck with it' and left.

I have been burning out because of a combination of scheduling (accounts in UK and Japan require me to be in meetings at 7am and 9pm), social isolation, and the inability to take meaningful time off because of covid restrictions. My normal avenues for decompression (jiu jitsu, hanging with friends, eating out, travel...) are not available and I find my mental resiliency diminished.

I just had a look at my payroll summary and it looks like I haven't been accruing any PTO since January because I haven't been taking any time. I am not sure doing so would be terribly helpful as I wouldn't really be able to go anywhere.