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Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

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Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#251

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

mindcrime wrote: post #233
malfist wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? What was advanced auto supposed to do? Hire a person specifically for cleaning the parking lot? There's a reason job postings all say "And other duties as assigned"

Hire a person specifically for cleaning the parking lot? Or do what everybody else does, and contract with one of those companies that comes through a couple of nights a week with one of those parking lot sweeping trucks? The thing is, to a first approximation, nobody asks employees to go out and sweep the god-damn parking lot with a broom. This particular manager was just being a dick for the sake of being a dick. A…

rawr, you showed him! how dare he ... uhhhhh ... ask you to sweep with a broom.... yeah, that dickhead.

What next, will he ask you to go grab shopping carts?!?!

Despite your rationalization, it's not uncommon to have the parking lot cleaned up and swept on a regular basis. I've done it for restaurants I worked at as a teenager, for example.

Your problem is being too sensitive.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#252

Post by trynewideas »

I ran into this at a job. The manager who hired me left a few months in, and the new manager was hellbent on painting me into a corner by having me train to do things I wasn't really experienced with or well suited to doing. The goal was to avoid having to spend money on an engineer by training a non-engineer - me - to do engineering work.

After three years, in my last performance review with that manager, they told me to consider whether I really wanted to stay with the company in a nudge to get me to quit. I really did want to stay at the company, though, so I got on the company's internal job board and applied for a transfer to an open role in another department.

After those three years without a raise above cost of living or any consideration for a promotion, within a year in the new role I got promoted and a performance raise. After two years the company gave me an award, performance bonus, and another promotion at an offsite. I'd gone so deep into the self-loathing hole with my previous manager that I didn't even know work _could_ be like that, anywhere, much less at the same company working with many of the same people.

The new role wasn't even all that different - I still spent more than half my time doing the kind of work I'd expected to do when I joined the company, and even spent a significant chunk working across groups with the same people from my previous team. I was just under a different manager who, instead of trying to warp me into a different version of myself, quickly recognized what I was already good at, found what value that could bring to their team, and set me loose on it. I took off like a rocket.

As a nice side effect, I didn't lose vesting on my options and benefits, even if the options ended up being worthless.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#253

Post by j33zusjuice »

xyzwave wrote: post #77
buscoquadnary wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can and do practice those things in my own time. I love my craft I love to excel at it. I have a period of time coming up where I will not work for several weeks (still paid though), during this time I am planning on working through The Art of Computer Programming and learning mobile development. The responsibility for me to keep my skills sharp is upon me not my employer.

You can, but at what cost? When do you see friends, or cook, or exercise, not to mention sleep. I’m not saying some personal time shouldn’t be dedicated to learning, but if the vast majority of your week is spent on a dead end, the time you have left to keep your skills sharp pales in comparison.

I’m an infra guy, and I’ve had two unexcellent jobs in a row now where I’m the only Linux person, and the most critical things run on Linux, so I spend the majority of my time on break/fix situations and trying to remember what the fuck I was doing before someone bothered me with another broken service. To make things worse, management was and is chaotic and disorganized that I can’t take time to complete a single project at once (and in the case of my current role, an actual barrier to progress, I’m currently getting blocked on something because I haven’t tested a particular method of copying a script to target hosts for a process that we do only twice a year, the difference is as trivial as using rsync instead of scp, but not exactly since I don’t want to give exact details, just in case!). I can tell that I’m not learning anything, and in many ways, my skills are regressing (as has become apparent through all the interviews I bombed in the last six weeks).

The problem is that I’m so irritated and demotivated by this job that I don’t want to look at a computer after I’m done. I don’t want to be in my office after I’m done. I only go in there if I forgot a drink or something on my desk. I need to figure out a way to upskill outside of work since it’s so clearly not going to happen at work, but the mental “anguish” (not quite anguish, really) makes me want to just shut down at the end of the day.

It’s much better when you get to spend a significant part of your work week building new skills, or at least improving existing skills.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#254

Post by tharkun__ »

fluoridation wrote: post #181
mindcrime wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my boss wants to pay me a SWE salary and then insists I clean out the break room fridge on Friday that is his perogrative not mine. I mean... I can buy this to a point. But for me personally, there are lines. And there are things I'm just not going to do. Period. I know it's un-trendy to talk about anything being "beneath you", and I'm not sure that's the wording I would use, but there are simply things that I don…

I think each person has their limits of what they are or are not willing to do, but I have to say, I find it strange where you decided to draw the line. Personally, I wouldn't do anything that grossed me out or that I found demeaning or humiliating. For example, I probably would have refused to sweep that parking lot if I thought the person telling me to do it was doing it just to show that they could; but if it was…

I totally get it.

Think office kitchen. They are always gross. There are always people that just throw their stuff in the sink instead of putting it in the dish washer etc. I've been at places where they wanted to make everyone do kitchen duty meaning cleaning out the sink and stuff on the counter and all that in a round robin fashion because "everyone uses it and we can't figure out who is the culprit".

I don't put stuff into the sink or use the dish washer and I don't use the fridge for my food. I have my cup, which I keep at my desk and wash up from time to time and take back to my desk. In between it doesn't need cleaning and just stays on my desk.

Hire a cleaner if you can't get these gross people to clean up after themselves but do not make me clean up after other people in a "communal space" I don't even use.

Needless to say I refused. A lot of people caved. "not worth the fight" was something I heard a lot.

Sorry but I am very principled that way. Yes worth the fight every day. You want to fire one of your best developers over a kitchen sink because you can't do your job properly? Be my guest.

That said I was civil about it but very firm.

Needless to say nobody was fired and they solved the problem a different way.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#255

Post by throwawaymaths »

Completely agree. I'm basically in the same situation at work now. I got islanded on a side project (systems dashboard) and am completely inessential except for political reasons, and for a while I had the worst kind of supervisor -- someone superficially nice but constantly changes the sw contract on you so you keep getting screwed over (it's awful getting the "hi friend" greeting every morning while having a knife stabbed into your career). Now he stepped down from group leader and got replaced by an management hired from the outside that is injecting chaos and has poor Technical judgement. Meanwhile the codebase that's underneath me is spiralling out of control, has very few tests, etc.

I'm only sticking around in the hopes of transferring to another department where my friend is the group leader.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#256

Post by fluoridation »

tharkun__ wrote: post #254
fluoridation wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think each person has their limits of what they are or are not willing to do, but I have to say, I find it strange where you decided to draw the line. Personally, I wouldn't do anything that grossed me out or that I found demeaning or humiliating. For example, I probably would have refused to sweep that parking lot if I thought the person telling me to do it was doing it just to show that they could; but if it was…

I totally get it. Think office kitchen. They are always gross. There are always people that just throw their stuff in the sink instead of putting it in the dish washer etc. I've been at places where they wanted to make everyone do kitchen duty meaning cleaning out the sink and stuff on the counter and all that in a round robin fashion because "everyone uses it and we can't figure out who is the culprit". I don't put…

If it's about cleaning what you use and you don't use those facilities, then I would have to agree that you shouldn't be made to do it. Myself, I do on occasion use the dishes at the office, and in such a situation I would have found a way to eat without using them, rather than cleaning after some slob who can't be civil without being forced to do so.

That said, if I was your employer and everyone had taken your stance, even the ones who do use the kitchen, I would have simply taken the dishes and utensils away. At that point it's just people being unreasonable.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#257

Post by tharkun__ »

fluoridation wrote: post #256
tharkun__ wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally get it. Think office kitchen. They are always gross. There are always people that just throw their stuff in the sink instead of putting it in the dish washer etc. I've been at places where they wanted to make everyone do kitchen duty meaning cleaning out the sink and stuff on the counter and all that in a round robin fashion because "everyone uses it and we can't figure out who is the culprit". I don't put…

If it's about cleaning what you use and you don't use those facilities, then I would have to agree that you shouldn't be made to do it. Myself, I do on occasion use the dishes at the office, and in such a situation I would have found a way to eat without using them, rather than cleaning after some slob who can't be civil without being forced to do so. That said, if I was your employer and everyone had taken your stan…

I can absolutely agree with that. Wouldn't mind at all. Bring your own cup.

Which actually I learned not to ever do because not only do people slob with communal areas, they also don't respect personal cups.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#258

Post by doubled112 »

jcadam wrote: post #135
bombcar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will often be a small company/large company divide. If you started at a small company, you'll be used to doing all sorts of things "outside of your job description" (usually below) like restocking toilet paper, etc, simply because there is nobody else to do it. If you started at a large company, you'll likely be used to "you cannot whatsoever move your computer to the other side of your cubicle without contactin…

LOL, once spent a few days on SWE salary (along with a few other guys) physically moving server racks from one facility to another. Yes, small company. As a one-off that sort of stuff is fine.

The "promotion" to MAC (moves additions changes) technician was my first raise.

Please go to this client, take these monitors upstairs, and deploy them. We expect this to be your next few months.

For $4 an hour more than I was making as MSP sysadmin? Sounds awesome!

I was disappointed when that contract ran out.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#259

Post by ajkjk »

duped wrote: post #238
ajkjk wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well -- if they react poorly, I'll quit sooner, dodging a bullet in the process.

It sounds like you're the one who is reacting poorly in this context. OP is describing exactly what you're talking about without being an asshole about it.

It really comes down to what you think of "...know that he was the boss and I'd do my best to accomplish anything he assigned me." To me that is... 20th century-style salaryman subservience, aka, super problematic and repulsive. The idea that the bosses' whim is your command is disgusting to me.

Re: Tell HN: Beware 'Ungrowth' in Your Job

#260

Post by throwarayes »

trynewideas wrote: post #252

I ran into this at a job. The manager who hired me left a few months in, and the new manager was hellbent on painting me into a corner by having me train to do things I wasn't really experienced with or well suited to doing. The goal was to avoid having to spend money on an engineer by training a non-engineer - me - to do engineering work. After three years, in my last performance review with that manager, they told…

Thanks for sharing. It gives me a great deal of hope <3
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