Great post. I sent the link to my manager.
Bored People Quit
111–120 of 156 posts
Re: Bored People Quit
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades. They would look for B or C grades from now on. Wow! What an amazing... company. I am at a loss for words, really. They must be very -- what's the opposite of proud? -- of themselves.
The word you might be looking for is, "overqualified."
Let's see: "What an amazing overqualified company. They must be very overqualified of themselves." No, I don't think so. :-)
Speaking of your actual point (that the employee was overqualified), I think the company that considers A students overqualified for work for which it prefers to hire B and C students is going down a dangerous path. A,B,C here are not the qualification levels but performance levels.
Re: Bored People Quit
#113I am a college student who is currently doing my summer internship at a megacorp as a .NET MVC developer and I would not say the internship was what I was looking for. I am OK with the technologies they are using, it's just the boredom caused by endless waiting between each process that frustrates me. I got hired because I had spent a lot of my spare time working on my own RoR projects and my web development skills m…
You'll probably look back. Small companies suck too, just in different ways than big companies. Same with startups. Everything sucks; what matters is how you deal with it.
Re: Bored People Quit
#114Axiom: Boring work can never compete with Hacker News. Axiom: Hacker News can never compete with interesting work. Theorem: The interestingness of my work is inversely related to my Hacker News participation. Supporting data: Today I'm regression testing. I'll be here all day, folks. Idea: Employers, monitor your logs for Hacker News. Occasional spikes probably indicate boring, but necessary tasks. Chronic use probab…
(1) joking aside, please don't monitor logs like this. instead, treat your employees like real human beings and understand what they feel. not only is it more efficient than trying to reduce complex humans to a few "metrics", but it will allow you to detect more than just "boredom". (2) if you're thinking "how can they be bored when everything is so busy and there's so much to do?" maybe you are one of those over-man…
On the contrary, I think that "aggregate number of hours spent on HN this week" would be a very good metric for "interestingness of work this week". Reversely correlated, of course. I would definitely draw that graph.
Re: Bored People Quit
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
But by your own admission, some levels of management shouldn't have that power - so what should we call them if not managers? Imo, if you are managing a team of people, you're a manager whether or not you have total hiring / firing power.
if you are managing a team of people and you do not have at least firing power, in my experience, you are not actually managing a team of people.
Agreed, it's more like a functional manager.
Re: Bored People Quit
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but this is entirely true. I'm sat here watching a data mining job. It's wasted time, largely brought on because the job doesn't have unit tests, so I have no confidence it'll actually complete correctly, so I need to watch the log and see what its doing. This not a good use of my time, and I hate seeing that console, and I feel bad for being on HN when I could be productive.
./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-(" (season with while , read and grep to taste)
Whoops. Too late to edit, but a correction:
growlnotify -m "Success! "
Re: Bored People Quit
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-(" (season with while , read and grep to taste)
Whoops. Too late to edit, but a correction: growlnotify -m "Success! " (the space tells bash to treat the exclamation point as text)
Or just use \!
Re: Bored People Quit
#118I'm honestly glad to see the reactions here that being bored is not (necessarily) your fault. What I mean is that job ads tend to look for "self-motivated" people and it's easy to conclude that if you're bored, you're just clearly not self-motivated enough. However, there are many things that a company and management can do (or not do) that contribute to a decrease in motivation. Or even the appearance of resentment…
I swear, "self-motivated" and "detail-oriented" are two of the most over-used descriptions in job descriptions. Now I'm not sure, when I see those descriptions, whether they're real, or if they're just boilerplate, or whether they're code for "you should be a very small load on your manager."
Re: Bored People Quit
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The word you might be looking for is, "overqualified."
Let's see: "What an amazing overqualified company. They must be very overqualified of themselves." No, I don't think so. :-) Speaking of your actual point (that the employee was overqualified), I think the company that considers A students overqualified for work for which it prefers to hire B and C students is going down a dangerous path. A,B,C here are not the qualification levels but performance levels.
I don't think I was overqualified for the actual job (by my own interpretation, and of the way it was advertised). I was overqualified for their interpretation of the job role.
More specifically: I was the only full-time developer on a database which processed welfare payments for a smallish country, to the tune of hundreds of USD a year. This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one that the government would want a B or C grade student as the only full-time member on.
The company wanted someone that would essentially keep the lights on, on a legacy system that was woefully inadequate. One particular clanger was a PL/SQL file which was 5000 lines long, and didn't have a single function in it. It had minimal comments, which were frequently wrong. No-one really knew how it worked. There was no automated testing at all (they'd never heard of unit tests).
What the job should have been was thinking of how to provide value to the customer, trying to improve the system and perform code health updates. What they wanted me to do was do as little as possible to satisfy a work order from the government. This thinking was endemic in the company. One job asked another team to add an email reporting service. It worked on their internal Exchange servers, but they weren't able to figure out why emails weren't arriving at the government offices. Finally someone figured out that the emails didn't conform to SMTP at all. The people implementing this didn't know what SMTP was. The team leader/middle-manager in charge responded "They asked us to write an email sending function. We did. They didn't specify that they wanted SMTP, so they'll have to file another work order."
I have many more like this.
Re: Bored People Quit
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's see: "What an amazing overqualified company. They must be very overqualified of themselves." No, I don't think so. :-) Speaking of your actual point (that the employee was overqualified), I think the company that considers A students overqualified for work for which it prefers to hire B and C students is going down a dangerous path. A,B,C here are not the qualification levels but performance levels.
I don't think I was overqualified for the actual job (by my own interpretation, and of the way it was advertised). I was overqualified for their interpretation of the job role. More specifically: I was the only full-time developer on a database which processed welfare payments for a smallish country, to the tune of hundreds of USD a year. This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one…
> This, I think, is not really the sort of system you would call trivial, nor one that the government would want a B or C grade student as the only full-time member on.
While I sympathize with the rest of the story, I think you place too much weight on one's ability to jump through hoops to get grades.
(Disclaimer: My marks were pretty bad, but I was also busy writing games/AIs, and getting into trouble for improving my school's systems.)