How's work been?

fangblackbone wrote:

That sounds like my wife's company. They are pretty good at baling themselves out of trouble. But then they f*ck it up as soon as they achieve some success. They have a bunch of managers that step back when things go awry and then usurp control they are unqualified to handle when the ship starts to float.

My wife needs a new job :(

Yeah. When "scrappy underdog" is part of your organizational culture, then, well... it's easy to make sure you're always fighting for survival.

Stealthpizza wrote:

I never understand why people get so focused on sure you have 90% of what we want but you don't know anything about three forms we use in our office. These are important forms and you know nothing. We can't hire you. Are these three documents some otherworldly item that cannot be trained, one must simply understand them?

Bad management.

The philosophy:
- People are cogs
- I don't want to train you
- I'm afraid you might leave (and I'll have "wasted" my investment)
- I only see you as your skills are today, it is not possible you may grow

I’m currently happy I didn’t get the promotion I just applied for, which is a really odd headspace.

My current boss is actually my +2, and he’s looking to fill the gap. I applied, feeling really good about my chances. A couple of days ago, he told me I didn’t get it. He’s looking to fill a specific skills gap that he has; I have that same gap. He and I work extremely well together, but neither of us are good at what he wants this role to be good at. So I’m not being promoted into a role that I wouldn’t be good at.

The great part is that, not only does he still want to promote me, I’m going to be part of defining what that role is. It doesn’t really exist at our company, but we recognize the need for it, and he wants me there. The cherry is the conversation I had with my +3, who told me straight out that I should be promoted and that we will work out the logistics (travel and remote work) now so that when the opportunity becomes available, we’re doing need to figure that stuff out later.

All in all, it’s the best “You didn’t get the job” I can imagine.

Yep. the best jobs I've had are the ones where I had feedback on my duties, based on my skills. It's a great way to build trust with managers and coworkers, because you know what you are doing and you perform consistently well.

Congratulations!

Our NOC is a bit understaffed, and the company has been hiring people in over the past few months. Generally speaking they don't hire in high numbers because training is a bit long and tedious. Bringing in a large group at once would eventually be very helpful, but training would overwhelm the already overwhelmed NOC. I generally don't have a problem with this, and the people they've hired have mostly been pretty chill so far.

One of the guys that was very recently hired (started week before last) is just rubbing me, and everyone I've talked to, the wrong way. It's nothing outright offensive... but lots of little things that are piling up into a generally unpleasant experience dealing with him.

He's an older guy, and overall, the best way I can describe his behavior is that he talks to people with a general sense of unearned arrogance. He talks down to people when it's very clear he literally has no clue what he's talking about. He's been hired for a support position, but acts like he's in management. He also has no sense of personal boundaries, and will pick up and touch things on everyone's desks. This would be concerning even if we weren't still in an active pandemic. We're all vaccinated, and our company policies on social distancing have relaxed to a moderate degree, but even if none of that mattered he's still gets far too close for personal comfort.

What makes things worse, is that the NOC is so hectic at the moment that I think they're putting off this guy's training until after the new year. I think someone in the NOC has been punting him to us to get him out of their hair, but... we absolutely dread seeing him in our area, and there's very little reason for him to come in there. Several times he's walked up behind my coworker or I, and asked us what we were doing. And not in a "I'd like to learn what you're doing" kind of way, but almost like a "are you being productive" kind of way.

I can't entirely fault the NOC because onboarding used to involve new NOC employees spending a couple weeks in Installs helping out, and getting a feel for the types of builds we ship out. But the timing is horrible because around the holidays our queue is generally empty (people take vacations, and put off putting in orders until they get back). We've barely done sh*t for the past month and a half, so all they'd learn at the moment is how much time my coworker spends doing crosswords and shopping for gun parts, and how much time my boss and I spend working on her ARK server or tweaking the hardware in her PC or watching YouTube.

So I think I'm going to go to HR about him, not in a "make this stop" kind of way, but just to make her aware. It's sad because our company is very loosely structured and it's insanely rare to have any kind of conflict between anyone, so I don't want to be the guy that rocks the boat and forces more structure on everyone just to reduce interaction with one (IMO) bad apple. But I'm not going to be able to handle him being there long term if this crap continues.

Yeah. That is a conversation with management sort of deal there. It isn't your job to solve that. His boss needs to make that stop. I would inform him/her that said employee is making you and your team uncomfortable and impacting their work environment. If changes don't happen, I would request a skip level and keep escalating until it does.

Additionally, in this kind of position, people count on the non-surge times for a bit of mental retrenchment. A good boss understands this and turns a blind eye during slack periods. Someone looking for a bit of what think is quick advancement might take this as an opportunity to run to his bosses with tales of misdeeds in another group...

Me being at work today serves no real purpose, yet here I am.

I have made it through my first time as US and Canada university admissions counselor at the private high school where I teach (I'm still carrying my full teaching schedule...).

From the Early Decision kids, two of them got full-ride scholarships to two of the best American universities. Like...huge money, two of the best universities on the planet. The family that had some money sent me a gift basket with a lovely note, with 2 expensive bottles of wine, 2 expensive chocolate bars, and a bluetooth gaming headset (because my students know me...heh). The family with no money sent me lovely thank yous. I'm getting kudos from all over the place.

The rest of the kids have submitted all of their stuff on time, and we'll find out February through April what's happening there. The usual number of kids applying is 3-5. I had 16 kids because of Brexit, and students applying to multiple countries to see what they can get.

In a side note, Texas can go f*ck itself. Not only do they insist on their own separate application system, but their gender options are basically "assigned male by Jesus at birth" "assigned female by Jesus at birth" while the Common App for the rest of the American universities has multiple gender options and a clear way to give your preferred name.

So now I enter the time when I keep getting paid more, while instead of working 15-18 hours extra per week, I work 2-3 hours extra per week. Still not paid enough, but I mentioned to my boss' boss that my current pay scale was labeled "assuming you have six students, and we can see about more next year if there's more next year"...and I had 16. So...might get a bonus at some point I hope.

With around 385,000 babies born per day worldwide, that Jesus dude sure gets around.

Nothing signed yet, but apparently I have a job now and I'm going to start soon. It's a six months contract, but hey, progress! And it's for a big firm, so who knows, they might hire me for other contracts later.

Continued from the Loathe thread, the damage at the school where I teach is simply...massive. The huge indoor gym/basketball arena had half of the roof cave in with the heavy snow, and then the school was forced to collapse the rest in a controlled way, so that we weren't waiting for what would happen otherwise.

The area where I had my cubicle for university counseling, along with 5 other cubicle offices, the two teacher tables/lounge area, share a wall with said gym, and the water damage there was somewhat bad, but *somebody* saved most of my stuff (whoo! thanks anonymous person). So where do we fit now? I was the last one to be fit in, since my job is mostly over for the year now that we're past the application deadlines...so my desk in wedged into the hallway that led to my old space, that has been blocked off.

This puts me next to the head of our IB department. Who not-so-secretly smokes cigarettes plugged into those filter things. His office reeks. I'm seriously allergic to cigarettes. He mostly keeps his door closed (this is his last year before retirement). I went directly over his head to remind his boss that smoking is forbidden by school policy for anyone on school grounds (there is A LOT of smoking in Greece compared to the US, and only more recently have laws been made, and ignored, about smoking inside restaurants and such).

Meanwhile, there's a huge piece of low shelving furniture behind my desk, in part to block access to students who want to survey the damage. This *does* give me room to set up my little herbal tea nook that I wanted to put on my old shelves, which is just a couple mugs, a couple boxes of tea, a water heating jug, and some dish soap. What I did not anticipate is that since the teacher break area/tables were also moved (and now kinda suck), and how everyone exiting the IB area directly faces me before turning towards the stairs...other teachers are kind of having a "must be NICE to be ROO" moment...seems my little middle-of-tiny-hallway desk and chair "office" outside the boss' cigarette factory is looking pretty good to others. Dude. My old cubicle was way better...and still much smaller than everyone else on the floor.

I'm the CEO of a biotech start-up as of yesterday... so work is going well, I guess?

Nice!
How is the executive bathroom? Does it really have golden faucets?

fangblackbone wrote:

Nice!
How is the executive bathroom? Does it really have golden faucets?

It looks very similar to the office bathroom that I've been using for the last two years.

But gold right? Right?
What does the key look like?

Gold plated, let's not be crazy here. The key is awesome, looks exactly like a human hand turning a doorknob!

Need a slightly used materials scientist to pitch wild ideas of how to solve problems?

manta173 wrote:

Need a slightly used materials scientist to pitch wild ideas of how to solve problems?

Do you know anything about formulation of lipid nanoparticles? I could use expertise on that front.

manta173 wrote:

Need a slightly used materials scientist to pitch wild ideas of how to solve problems?

What degree do you need to work with slightly used materials?

Tach wrote:
manta173 wrote:

Need a slightly used materials scientist to pitch wild ideas of how to solve problems?

Do you know anything about formulation of lipid nanoparticles? I could use expertise on that front.

In my experience, formulation is formulation... its just the ingredients and test methods that differ. But although I have a decent amount of formulations experience, none of it is lipids based. I did do some protein folding and phases modeling in grad school though.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
manta173 wrote:

Need a slightly used materials scientist to pitch wild ideas of how to solve problems?

What degree do you need to work with slightly used materials?

You can tell I went to an undergrad with no English classes huh?...

What degree do you need to work with slightly used materials?

No no no. They are trying to be inclusive of scientists without the resources for new, expensive materials (for study and equipment)

Tach wrote:

I'm the CEO of a biotech start-up as of yesterday... so work is going well, I guess?

Do you have a website I can share?

mudbunny wrote:

Do you have a website I can share?

Not yet. Still stealth, getting everything set up (literally nothing but a bank account, IP and me at this point).

This week kicked off the new "2 days in-office" policy at work. So now I'm expected to go into the office Tuesdays and Thursdays from now on and I f*cking hate it.

We do 1 week in office then 1 week from home.

The week we are in office we have the option to work from home on Mondays and Wednesdays, so it's not too bad.

Our company started allowing people to go into the offices with proof of vaccination, entirely voluntary. Since they fired all of the facilities people they dropped the administration of badge access to my IT team. They also dropped all shipping and receiving on my team since my guys already had to go in to ship equipment since the pandemic started. No additional budget. After HR complained to my VP that my guys weren't spending enough time orienting new hires I had to write up a report of all the additional work that's been forced upon us. My guys on the help desk are facing increased ticket count with everything being remote and my sys admins are facing additional VM administration tasks. I had more than one heated discussion about my team's output this week, it's incredibly frustrating.

Maybe ask them to assign a project manager to generate staffing for your new tasks? Should be hard to ignore what they do for clients.

My job search is back at the "So, what would I rather be doing?" stage, and the database migration has finally reached a stage where I can't do my regular work. So I've decided to start learning Power Automate.

I just got word that I've been extended at BU till May
And it could be extended more after that but there are changes to budgeting and planning then.

I love my work. I couldn't think of a better job more tuned to my skillset. I've done this type of work at many of my prior jobs but they have always run out of complex technical projects for me to dive in and see through. But at a university every semester brings new challenges so there doesn't seem to be an end

And oddly while I love being around people and the energy they bring, being remote is definitely a perk. I am able to focus because I'm not constantly being distracted. I don't feel like I'm being watched or hounded for looking busy. I make it look easy and look like nothing bothers me so I must be slacking...