21–30 of 32 posts
Happy days.
I was invited back for an "extended interview" on a Saturday, "compensated, of course", where I did sysadmin stuff including setting up a work email for myself.
Taken out for lunch by the guy running my "interview" who bought me a burger, and said "He (the CEO) is a bit cavalier in making promises, so I want to make sure you get something out of today".
So basically I was paid a burger to onboard myself on a Saturday. A week later I'd received an offer from elsewhere, informed Company A, and got the saltiest email from their CEO about my unethical behaviour.
Green energy project in the western US, on ancestral tribal land so we were advised to keep our eyes out for historical sites, and to let tribal advisors/inspectors know if we found any. Well, we (my group was a subcontractor, and some of the first out pioneering through new areas) found some ancient hunting blinds on either side of a saddle through a ridge, complete with trash pits/stone knapping shards and even som…
At the start of this project, product management didn't have time to decide what the requirements were. So the engineers spent a couple weeks interviewing customers and finding out what they needed.
So, yeah, we're three weeks from release, and now product management shows up. They said, "We like what you're doing. But we need these additional features. Oh, and you can't change the release date. So you're all going to work 68-hour weeks until it ships." Of course, we still couldn't do it in three weeks. It took three months. It would have taken three months without the overtime (everyone got slower as they burned out).
It was the 1980s, and I had just started working in the stock room at the local Montgomery Wards (A department store similar to Sears). Less than 2 months in, most of my co-workers were arrested and taken to jail, (they had been stealing by the truck load!) leaving me to handle all the pickups (the dock at the back of the store where you get your TV, etc) by myself on the Friday before Christmas. I did the best I cou…
Interesting. My dad worked for Montgomery Wards in a warehouse and has lots of stories about Montgomery Wards setting up various traps to tempt employees to steal. Usually it was something like leaving high priced jewelry in a seemingly unwatched area, but there would be a security worker nearby hiding in a refrigerator box or something along those lines. This was in the late 1970s.
Green energy project in the western US, on ancestral tribal land so we were advised to keep our eyes out for historical sites, and to let tribal advisors/inspectors know if we found any. Well, we (my group was a subcontractor, and some of the first out pioneering through new areas) found some ancient hunting blinds on either side of a saddle through a ridge, complete with trash pits/stone knapping shards and even som…
Something tells me this is not the first time the GC took such an approach.
First job, support technician on a years work experience from college. That was the year the great storm brought down trees and power cables over half of southern England. The office where I was working was without power for three days. Boss still insisted that I came into work (a journey of several miles over roads which only passable on foot) to "provide support" for users who were not there on computers which were…
We had a slowdown in a manufacturing warehouse due to a computer issue. In order for us to get paid, they had us work to peel stickers from and wipe marker off of the previously used plastic bags so they could be reused. It would have been more efficient to just use new bags, but they could only justify paying us if we were doing something.