New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong As the old saying goes, there are few certainties in life beyond death and taxes. But in this week's On-Call – The Register's regular reader-contributed tales of techies being asked to rescue the ridiculous – we shall consider another: new managers who needlessly change systems that work perfectly well. The source of this …
What I always forget is how it's pronounced. It seems to be a Brit thing; I've never encountered it on the left side of the pond -- or indeed, anywhere outside El Reg.
The only "nous" I'm familiar with is from RightChannelia, means something completely different, and is pronounced "noo".
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"Nous" is by and large an obsolete term. I think I last heard it used by a particularly unpleasant politician a decade or so ago, and before that an equally nasty primary school teacher several decades earlier.And it's seldom, if ever, used in a nice way. Which may explain its obsolescence.
As in "Use a bit of nous" said nastily.
"Technical nous" is a bit more specialised in meaning and maybe should be retained. It covers something that's more than just "knowledge" or "know-how" (shudder) but includes understanding and intuition.
"I didn't receive a word of thanks from the company, and I was never compensated for my lost holidays," he wrote.
Oh dear, but typical of most companies who see employees as glorified lightbulbs.
"And my response to the company was quiet quitting for the next 12 years" – showing up to work without giving it his best effort.
Good! Have a pint. Workers of the world unite etc.
Upvoted and agree.
I really hate that phrase “quiet quitting”. A person has a contract, hours worked money in return. Working those hours are all someone has or should do. What’s the phrase for when the boss only pays what your contract states? Why is it not an issue that they don’t add a few hundred extra at the end of the month??
I agree wholeheartedly with this.
I've said it on El Reg many times but I am contracted for 40 hours a week. You are paying me for 40 hours a week. You get, as a result, 40 hours a week.
There are rare instances (planned work that must be done out of hours or a P1 incident) where I waive this but only for time off in lieu (at the correct 1.5 or 2x rate).
The power of "no" is very freeing and more people should try it.
And indeed - when you point out the hours worked vs contracted, the responses vary from "ok" to "we can find someone else". Go on then.
I worked at one particular place and the manager was a sociopath. Amongst his many bad traits was the he would work most days from 07:00 to 23:00 and boast about it as though it was a good thing. He once accused me of not being committed because he expected all the team to put in those extra (unpaid) hours and was not overly impressed when I pointed out that one of us was an idiot and it wasn't me.
Amongst his many bad traits was the he would work most days from 07:00 to 23:00 and boast about it as though it was a good thing.
Ah, he still thought he was working at a 7-11. I've had the misfortune to have bosses like that, and although they may have been present during those hours, they weren't really working. Plus there are a lot of studies that show performace drops and mistakes increase when people 'work' those kinds of hours.
I'd much rather hire people who can get 8hrs work done in 6 or less.
I'm sure I read a report somewhere recently that all of those CXXXs who say they work 60+ hours a week are including working meals (hmmm), gym sessions (gotta stay in shape!), networking events (you have to *hic* stay in touch with what your competitors are doing), and pretty much anything else that can be related to work, however tenuously.
They usually also get paid a "flat rate" salary (+ perqu's of course, like shares) so the more hours they can show they claim to do, the better it looks for them. The problem is, even if they worked their way up through the ranks, they forget (or never knew) what it's like to be paid hourly under contract and expect everyone to be just like them. Of course, their flat rate salary is way way higher than us peons get so while it may not matter to the bosses, it matters a lot to us.
On the other hand: a college principal (UK so something like 'community college president' in USA I think) did once gently point out that it was her phone number the police had in case of student death, student involvement in terrorist incident or break-in/arson.
There is a 24/7 aspect to a (real) leadership role that perhaps needs to be recognised in some way (not a simple time metric).
Icon: yes, we have had helicopters over the campus now and again...
While I respect the principal, why it is needed that the police has her number? Have this kind of school/college issues gotten so normal in the USA?
I think it's pretty normal, and they're in the UK. Schools, and maybe colleges are a bit special, depending on the age of the students. So AFAIK, if they're under 16, schools are the crazy parents. Or loco parentis while kids are in their care. No idea what 21st Century truancy rules are, but I heard that if police found a kid outside school during school hours, they could contact the school and/or parents. Police didn't seem to accept that we were doing practical physics revision in a local snooker club.
It's also standard for police to have an out-of-hours contact for pretty much any commercial premises so if there's a problem, they can contact a keyholder/responsible adult.
I'm pretty sure the police in the UK will only have the school's official number though there will be a system for contacting key holders - for example if there's a fire or break-in..My wife has been known to get late night calls from the alarm company - as a key holder. And she's a very lowly member of staff, but we're local and she's worked there so long she's almost part of the furniture. (And a governor).
A police liaison officer might well have a direct relationship with a member of the senior leadership team. But even then official contact would normally be only during school hours and on the official number.
@AC
I believe that senior post holders are contactable by police in extreme cases, or at least that was the situation as recently as 10 years ago. Perhaps that was 'informal' and may have been a regional arrangement (midlands). I have never been a senior post holder myself.
@Other replies: UK further education colleges have students from 16 upwards. There may be a small number of 14 to 16 year old students (school refusers & so on) on foundation programs. Universities would probably be different and have looser arrangements I imagine. The loco parentis thing is a bit of a grey area for 16 and up.
"There is a 24/7 aspect to a (real) leadership role that perhaps needs to be recognised in some way"
That depends heavily on whether people are in fact ringing that number. I'm not 24/7 on call anymore, but people at work know my personal number, and if something sufficiently bad happens at night and only I can fix it, then they'll use it. Should that count as 24/7 because people could call at any time, not because my contract doesn't say it is, or not because people don't in practice find any issues requiring them to call so my evenings remain relatively undisturbed? How about in my previous job, where we were assigned to week-long on call shifts where we were responsible to handle incidents at any time of the day or night, but still in practice no sufficiently bad incidents happened after 20:00 or so. If anyone opened one, I'd have gotten a call, so was that 24/7?
Unless this person was dealing with such incidents at night all the time, and I seriously hope this isn't the case, maybe it wasn't really a 24/7 position. There's a difference between doing something at all hours and having the chance of an emergency at any time.
" Should that count as 24/7 because people could call at any time, not because my contract doesn't say it is, or not because people don't in practice find any issues requiring them to call so my evenings remain relatively undisturbed? How about in my previous job, where we were assigned to week-long on call shifts where we were responsible to handle incidents at any time of the day or night, but still in practice no sufficiently bad incidents happened after 20:00 or so. If anyone opened one, I'd have gotten a call, so was that 24/7?"
Yes, if there is an expectation that you will respond, then that is 24/7
I learned that you should get paid a small amount for every hour on call, because you are not free to do what you want. And then a considerable amount for every hour you have to actually go out. So a small amount because you can’t have some beers during the barbecue, and a lot more for having to leave your barbecue guests.
"you should get paid a small amount for every hour on call, because you are not free to do what you want."
This.
At one job, I was on call every other weekend. On those weekends, I couldn't go out of town, as I otherwise might well have done. (Some things could be dealt with remotely, but others would require my physical presence.) I wasn't compensated for that -- it never occurred to me to ask.
Throughout my career, I was always willing to put in long hours during the week (I was rather a workaholic to be honest), but weekends were *my* time, dammit. Sure, the occasional weekend was par for the course -- server maintenance or an imminent deadline or whatever. But in the above situation, where on-call weekends and the occasional trip in to the office were simply expected, I did feel taken advantage of.
And the one time, in a different job, that I was asked to be on call during my vacation? That was an absolute no -- rather indignantly expressed, I'm afraid.
(Those were both salaried positions, btw.)
On the other hand, in that second job, one time we were hacked. Script kiddies, we thought, but had to assume the worst. Technical details are beside the point, but suffice to say, I put in a very long week or two to get everything sorted out. Near the end of the ordeal, one of the owners stopped by my desk with a $1500(?) thank you. Totally unexpected, but very much appreciated.
At one (very!) previous employer, I was issued a cell phone for the express purpose of being contactable anywhere in the facility during my working hours. "You're NOT on call" my manager very clearly stated. A couple months later he left the company. (Smart of him.) So I started getting calls at all times of the day and night, at least once a week, that apparently he had been handling (they had so much trouble finding a replacement for him at their selected salary that they eventually gave up). As I wasn't officially on call, I was only paid for time at the facility, with no allowance for travel time. Being an hourly employee, I finally wised up and stopped answering the cell phone at night. So they started calling our home phone. At 2ish one morning, the phone rang. My wife, having had quite enough of this, picked it up and, without even asking who it was, told them they had better never call us at night again, and hung up. The calls stopped. A few months later, I finally got so fed up with the place (50+ hour weeks being normal, for instance) that I quit without giving notice, and after 3 months unemployment (mostly just resting, but occasionally applying for something) ended up getting a job with that former manager at the company he was then working for. Stayed with him for 14 years; he was a good manager. Eventually the (first) employer decided, on the corporate level, that that facility wasn't worth keeping around and sold it to the company next door.
At my current employment, I'm salaried and on call one week out of three, with no additional pay for being on call. However, they only call about once every other month, and only after doing preliminary troubleshooting to verify they can't fix it themselves. The base pay makes up for this. Ironically, said current employer is the company next door to the first story, who now owns that old facility!
To put that in context, When I was in school, I think there were two deaths amongst the student corpus of somewhere like 800 students, in the 8 years I was there. One was a very sad RTA involving a drunk sixth-former sitting in the road, and the other was an equally sad death from complications from leukaemia. Now, whilst both are tragic, I suspect the head-teacher had no involvement with the police or emergency services in either case. There were certainly no cases of terrorism or break-ins/arson that I knew of, either.
I expect the most likely thing to ever bother a head teacher / college principle would be to get a call when a burglar alarm goes off in the night. Maybe once, or twice a year? That's fuck all to do with leadership, and I'd happily take my CEO's salary to take on that responsibility. I seriously doubt he's a key-holder in any case, there will be someone in buildings/facility management that gets that headache.
The college in question may be one where students live away from home. If something bad happens to a student, their public home address is the college itself, and the college principal is stand-in for their parent. And may be responsible for communicating with actual parents.
For instance, bad things happened quite often to students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. So it's like that.
I once had the fortune to work under a supervisor that would let us leave whenever we finished the day's work. He had the misfortune of getting fired after it was discovered (by upper management) he was clocking us for a full 8-hour shift. 'Course WE were fully aware of this lapse of accountability...
I worked in research and researchers in our building came and went at all hours of the day/night. One day we all got a memo asking us to say what our building work hours were. We all looked at the memo, couldn't make sense of it, and threw it away. That was the last time we heard of it.
I am currently working part time, about 5 to 6 hours max a day.
I am getting as much done as a full 8 hours.
First day back 4 hours, managed 3/4 of my work.
I even have a snooze after dinner, before restarting work.
Oh the joys of recovery and what feels like permanent fatigue.
Back in the misty past, think early 2000's, I was a contractor for a large bank 40 - 45 hours per week. My job was to ensure the SUN servers were running, and the replication and DR environments were up to date.
The SUN environment was also in good shape, but with the occasional hiccup, but I also had a large tape library for all of the backups.
One day upon arriving at the office, there was a good old fashioned pager, on my desk.
It was requested that I go into the on-call rotation to take some of the pressure off of my co-worker who was based 2000 miles away.
I simply stated that as I was a contractor, that every time the pager went off outside of standard work hours there would be a 4 hour charge added to my time sheet.
Unfortunately he agreed, so I was in the rotation every other week. But all was not lost it was quite lucrative for the next year. The tape library was of an age and in an environment, where drives needed to be replaced about once a week.
Pager goes off, I check and then call out the Break/Fix engineer for a 10:00 am replacement.
I've had similar. My story was that the monitoring system was REALLY badly configured because alerts were constantly going off.
The ops team were regularly being told off for not fixing stuff or responding to alerts. Management's attitude was "On-call rota is part of their salary, that's why they get paid for". There was a good mix of not quite enough capacity to deal with spikes, alerts would go off if there was high load but it was only considered a problem if it didn't calm back down after 20 mins (alerts pinging every 2 mins the whole time). The ops team were regularly complaining about not having time to do maintenance. They were always tasked with feature work during the office hours and as such alot of what maybe considered housekeeping tasks never got attended to eg ensuring there was correct logrotation so disk space didn't get filled.
As a contractor I ensured that the oncall rate was good and that an alert was a paid call out. While I only managed about 3 hours sleep a night for that week it was a VERY well paid week and strangely for the next 2 weeks the entire team was tasked with ensuring all the housekeeping tasks were sorted out and that the monitoring was appropriately tuned.
On the other hand... My current boss works from about 10:45-1:45, with at least a two hour lunch in there, about 2.5 days a week. I wouldn't say he "boasts", but he doesn't try very hard to disguise his, um, distaste for effort. Of course, every crucial boss-level crisis that he is absent for goes to me to sort out. "Tell the bosses boss!" you say? I would, but they are hard to track down when they are off on the links or in a bar somewhere together. Get it?
"My current boss works from about 10:45-1:45, with at least a two hour lunch in there, about 2.5 days a week."
Is he George Osborne*, or some other former Cabinet Minister by any chance? They do seem to like their 2 day per month executive advisory positions.
* https://inews.co.uk/culture/george-osbornes-many-jobs-former-chancellor-adds-british-museum-chair-to-his-ever-growing-cv-1068914
Same here. It's pretty usual for a company to do the bare minimum to keep it's staff around. I've worked for several that do things like give out below-inflation raises (if any) for years in a row. They consider it good business. But suddenly it's a big issue when an employee doesn't show up to work and give it every ounce of their soul? No. Treat me like that, and I'll treat you the same in turn. I'll show up and do the bare minimum I need to do to get paid. It's not quiet quitting, it's treating the contract the same way the company is.
I would point out that I have also worked for some companies that did better than that. Generally, they got a much better result from me and the rest of their staff.
We, like most people, got a below-inflation pay rise last year. I make the difference about 5%. I'm pretty sure the prices being charged by the company have gone up with inflation, so as a result, they are saying my work is worth 5% less. As a result, I'm quite happy to give them 5% less effort, they still make a decent profit from my output, so fuck 'em. That's about 20 minutes more slacking each day. 20 more minutes of goading certain right-wing idiots in the comments here, for my amusement...
Something, something, karmic retribution...
My former employer didn't do "cost of living increases". So one year we got our annual 2% raise, combined with a 150% increase in medical insurance premiums. They told us they routinely reviewed our salaries to make sure they were in line with other employers; nobody ever got a raise that way. I ended up leaving for a 20% increase elsewhere.
My current employer sent me a letter letting me know that, during a routine review of my salary, they discovered it wasn't in line with the rest of the industry, and so they were giving me a 5% raise, in addition to the annual raise. They also have a fishing tournament, basketball tournament, $5 meals at the cafeteria (restaurant-quality food!), and the kids really enjoyed last year's company summer festival, with lots of rides and games and as much food as you could eat. Like going to the state fair but everything was free.
Some companies talk about how they take care of their employees. Others actually do it.
It depends on what you want from your job. I was always happy to give a little more than required when it was necessary. It paid off handsomely over the years in terms of pay rises, bonuses, promotions etc. although I still made sure I kept a good balance between work and life.
Other colleagues whinged about being "passed over" or unappreciated, but they were usually the clockwatchers who never did one minute more than their contact required.
If people want to do the strict minimum, and are happy with no career prospects, good for them. Some of us want more from our lives.
Yep, agree here. Had a job that was effectively basic QA. During a quiet period, I wrote a bit of VBA (don't judge me) that automated a chunk of my team's very backlogged work and helped treble their output. My manager was over the moon, team was happy as they now had more time to do their job right, and I ended up as an unofficial developer for the team.
Scored 3/5 on my next annual appraisal, on the flimsy excuse that I needed to focus on my customer service (when neither my official role, nor my adoptive one were customer facing).
In my experience the way it worked out for you is very rare.
As an engineer it's in my nature, that if I see a problem I will try and fix it. But woe betide any manager or director that tries and take the piss. One time I had the senior site engineer and the site manager (who got the job because the previous manager quit) for the MSP I was contracting for at the time hauled me into a Teams meeting about complaints the staff were making about how I did my job.
I pointed out that my main office (the one I was supposed to be working in) had no such issues. And I was in this remote office as a favour to them because no one else wanted to do it. After klistening to hot air for a few minutes untill I could get a word in was if they didnt like how I worked then to provide my with my contracted notice period. This resulted in an instant back track from said manager.
But then I could come up with several stories that El-Reg could use about this MSP formally known as Anderson Consulting. Needless to say I will never be working for them again as long as there is a hole in my arse.
As someone who knows a thing or two about these, not everyone has an arse, but every arse has a hole.
Most often they get taken out, but it’s possible never to born with one- I know research was done on transplants, and quite a few patients had muscle flaps formed to function in an arse-like way.
It depends on what you want from your job. I was always happy to give a little more than required when it was necessary.
I think the best approach (1) do be professional, (2) don't be an arse.
This works best when followed by both employee and employer, but employers seem less willing to reciprocate these days.
"the clockwatchers who never did one minute more than their contact required."
It ought to tell you a lot that the people that get ahead are the ones essentially willing to offer some of their time for free.
If the contract states this hour to this hour and there's no overtime and (especially) if you are penalised for being a couple of minutes late...there's nothing wrong with ending your work day exactly on time. Contacts work both ways.
When I was on salary (currently contracting, so not applicable now), it was always expected that you would do "whatever it took" to get the job done. I agreed with that, within reason (I had young kids at the time, and nothing comes before family). However, I have always felt that "it works both ways", which is to say, that if the work gets done, don't nickel and dime me about time I'm taking off to get home an hour early or go to the dentist.
In other words...salaried employees aren't punching a time clock...you don't pay them overtime, but you can't demand that they spend 8 hours every day at work.
And that was always my attitude - I loved my job, had a happy time all day, was hated by some of the gang I worked around because of that, and I got the pay raises etc & they bitched & moaned - but in the end regardless of the extra time i gave the company, which I never counted as anything but trying to get the job done as well as possible for everybody's sake, I was the one who gained from my own attitude to the job ! I see nothing wrong with helping a company succeed, maybe because I have no jealousy in me & helped everybody regardless of who or what they were. Some may say 'more fool you' - I say I was appreciated & recognized as a big asset, so who gained the most ?
I don't get it why you get so many downvotes. In the country I work (i.e. NOT USA) and the for the average employers here I have to say: I agree with what you say.
We need a "Country Badge" on The Register for every account, at least once you have a silver badge, maybe sooner. Else the context on their posting is sometimes off. Especially when it is from the country where so many behave the "we are the only country in the world" way, not helping their already bad reputation rather cementing it.
The downvotes are because he is offering advice based on his own rather rare circumstance - advice that many people know will not pan out well in the majority of circumstances.
I have been in both situations. My more naive, younger self went the extra mile for a company that couldn't give a shit, for about 5 years. The only time I got a raise wasn't due to all the good work I'd done, but when I managed to get them over a barrel. I've also worked for some companies that responded well to people working the extra mile - they were flexible with time-keeping, generous with bonuses, and raises that kept pace with inflation.
In general, I will try going the extra mile with a new employer. But if that isn't reciprocated, I won't be continuing that behaviour.
Doing exactly what you're paid for and what your contract stipulates does not equal being a plodder.
What working to rule means is working the hours you're paid for, not doing unpaid overtime, not coming in on your days off without additional pay, not working through your holidays.
In other words, doing what your employer is paying your to do.
"It also, of course means that your employer won't go the extra mile for you."
That's the point that so many are trying to make to you. Few employers will go the extra mile for you, no matter how often you do so for them. You've either been very lucky with your employers or aren't old enough to have grown cynical yet :-)
Oh, if only everyone had the luxury of being able to pick and choose the job opportunities that come their way :)
I now have enough expertise in my chosen profession that I can be reasonably sure of getting a new job in a month or two if I walked out of my current one. A little over a decade ago, I spent fourteen months out of two years looking desperately for work because the skills I had were no longer being sought. I would have taken anything that paid the bills.
Let me clarify for the down-voter there, who was too cowardly to leave an explanatory comment:
If you are 63, you grew up in a time when a single person's wage in an average job would be enough to buy a house and raise and support a family.
If, like me, you grew up in the following generation under Thatcherism, you got to see the generation before you draw all the cards to their chest, appoint politicians who sold off the family silver for their immediate benefit, and drive up house prices and the cost of living, to the extent that an average house selling for four times an average salary was a thing of distant dreams (it's now more like 10-12 times an average salary in most places, and that is before taking into account the fact that the tax burden is the highest since the end of WW2). The generations after mine are even more screwed.
As for employers; long gone are the days of just walking into a local business and saying "gizzajob!" Most employers these days are large businesses that treated their employees like faceless automata. Even worse, if you happen to work in the public sector, because what might once have been a "cushy" job 40 years ago certainly is not now.
To wander along and imply that those who came after you have the same opportunities as you did is either grossly ignorant or crassly insensitive. It's certainly a fantasy.
You really don't get it do you.
Employers see someone willing to put in that mythical 110% and they get them to do 115%, but do they pay them extra, do they bollocks. Employers have the same mindset as the phone scammers who share the lists of people who fall for their scams.
Don't fall for the scam, do the hours you're paid for, because every minute you work extra is additional cash in your bosses pocket, not yours...
Hey AC, you speak for 4.5% of the world population, known as "leftpondians". Come to a different country, where you are not brainwashed into that. Which means: I work 40 hours per week, and the over-hours are precisely tracked, and you are expected to have NOT too many over hours. Or, if there are too many of them, they are, optionally discussed and agreed on both sides before, paid out. This is a type of freedom USA is not ready for.
And I do get pay rises and bonuses, 'cause of the quality of work I deliver, and not because I waste hours on things which can be done more efficient just to claim "I work over-hours".
Hey Jou, I'm not leftpondian, I've worked in the UK and Europe. You've misunderstood my comment. If, as you say, you agree to work more hours than your contract then of course that, and extra compensation, should be discussed and agreed in advance. That's normal.
If, on the other hand, you take the attitude of "my contract says 40 hours so I won't work a single second more", that's OK but there's no reason you should ever be paid a single penny more than your contact says. It cuts both ways.
Some people are fine with that, I never have been. I'll work more hours if I need to, and that's always been recognised and compensated. I wouldn't work for a company that behaved otherwise.
"A person has a contract"
A person has a contract, but frequently expectations that exceed the contract . . . Scanlon drove five hours, fixed the problem, drove back during his holiday - you might have thought there might have been some consideration involved for doing that instead of just not answering the phone.
Agree, I also don't get why it's called "quiet quitting", since no quitting is involved.
In German, there's the phase "Dienst nach Vorschrift", which translates to "service being rendered as defined by regulation [i.e., the contract]"; I find that this descibes the situation much better than quiet quitting.
Not quite. Working to rule is saying that if you don't pay us extra we aren't going to do any unpaid extras. It is literally doing what you are paid to do. If that sabotages the employer it's because the employer is using the staff's goodwill by asking for additional unpaid work or responsibility. And if the goodwill has been lost the employer takes the consequences even when it's not organised withdrawal but just disenchanted staff unwilling to help the employer out.
As I understand it, the "Work to Rule as sabotage" perception comes from larger companies or environments which were rather heavy with rules and regulations about who could do what etc.
For a techy example, you could then have a whole team reporting as being blocked because the printer was out of paper, thus they couldn't print their reports as per the handbook, and refilling the printer was a facilities job - and Dave from facilities was off ill today.
The term "malicious compliance" is one I've heard. For example, at one employer, the rule from korporate diktat was that "Hard hats will be worn 100% of the time." A co-worker suggested that, if we REALLY wanted to get that rule fixed to "... where required", the easiest way would be to enforce it as written - write up every single person for not wearing a hard hat when at their desk, send it to corporate and ask for a representative to come "give them a talking to" - and then meet them in the parking lot (while wearing a hard hat!) to point out they violated the rule by stepping out of their car without a hard hat on. The rule would be fixed IMMEDIATELY.
To be fair, so would the enforcer's employment...
"Hard hats will be worn 100% of the time"
Maybe you explained the suggestion before but I believe that the "malicious compliance" describe has happened in such a case... maybe here in "On Call", but it doesn't quite fit.
"Malicious compliance" means doing what you were told to do when you know it's going to go wrong.
Possibly in the original story, the optimistic auditor went ahead because the client said go ahead.
I don't like the phrase because I've seen it used for completely different things. I've heard people describe what "quiet quitting" means to them which has covered everything from "I'll work exactly the hours they said on the right tasks at my normal level of productivity, but no overtime" to "I'll sit at my work desk and do literally nothing", with multiple intermediate levels. Choice 1 is being a good employee, and for many people the managers wouldn't know you were doing anything different. Choice 2 is something where being fired should be expected. It's hard to tell what any person means when they say it when there are this many options.
So individuals are important in your view and individual performance is a determinant of economic outcomes?
Why then do HR folk and various directors insist in using language like 'resources' and 'resource action' that tends to treat their workers as standardised cogs?
"People like this is why the economy is doing shit and wages have flatlined."
No wage growth has slowed but that may have more to do with shareholder value engineering than the merits of individual employees.
"Quiet quitting" is a horrible term by a management consultant, describing an employee doing what they are contracted to do. Oh, the horror.
I've done overtime for employers, and have gone over and above my job description with the reasonable expectation that it'd be paid for either directly (via overtime pay) or indirectly (via promotion, pay rise etc).
If it is, then that's all very well and good. Under those circumstances an employer can reasonably expect people to keep doing things over and above the contracted requirements of your job description because doing so is in the self interest of the employee.
If an employer decides to deliberately not reward employees for doing anything above their minimum contracted requirements via not paying overtime, not handing out promotions for hard work etc (in the name of equal pay for every worker) then i'd like an explanation from said employer as to precisely why they think that any rational person would do anything over and above the contracted requirements.
Note; equal pay for equal work should mean "if two people have equal work output then they should both be paid the same". It shouldn't mean that if one person is doing overtime then they shouldn't get paid for it, or that the person not doing overtime should be paid more to make up for the fact that their colleague is getting overtime.
Equal pay for every worker simply creates a situation whereby somebody putting in a lot of extra time and effort and managing double the work output of their colleagues is incentivised to reduce their work output to match the least efficient worker.
"Equal pay" relates to hourly rates. Of COURSE someone doing overtime will get paid more per week/month when overtime is worked than someone not doing it, but they still get the same basic hourly rate. "Equal pay" has never meant everyone goes home with the same wage packet no matter the hours worked.
I've done overtime for employers, and have gone over and above my job description with the reasonable expectation that it'd be paid for either directly (via overtime pay) or indirectly (via promotion, pay rise etc).
In most places a "pay rise" isn't sufficient for what most employees have done. After all unless you're getting a pay rise every year that is line with inflation, then in real terms you're getting a pay cut. The only times I've seen people get a pay rise (in real economic terms) is when they switch employers
"...People like this is why the economy is doing shit and wages have flatlined. All people like this achieve is to make their fellow workers poorer...."
So let me get this right - to you a contract is meaningless? A person's work/life balance is meaningless? I imagine you are one of those people who think it's ok to expect 80 hour working weeks and paying for 40? You also come across as the kind of person who puts themself before anyone else and will happily exploit others to get ahead/make an extra dime.
Fuck. Off.
People are employed to do a job. They bring skills to that role for an agreed number of hours at an agreed salary. By your logic, I can say I will work 20 hours a week but expect to be paid for all 40. You'd soon scream blue murder.
So please explain why you think it's ok to abuse a contract one way by expecting free hours but not the other by expecting to only work half of them? Both, per the above, for the same pay.
We've all worked with people who get away with doing the very minimum possible without getting sacked. Plodders. Also people who work their socks off, and never have time for family or social life.
I look for something in the middle. Work hard and go the extra mile for the 8 hours I'm supposed to be working. Sometimes work later when it's needed for an emergency.
Sometimes take a long lunch to get that back.
It's called balance, whereas "quiet quitting" means doing the minimum.
Stan,: Look. Joanna.
Joanna : Yeah.
Stan, : People can get a cheeseburger anywhere, okay? They come to Chotchkie's for the atmosphere and the attitude. Okay? That's what the flair's about. It's about fun.
Joanna : Yeah. Okay. So more then, yeah?
Stan, Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you?
Joanna : Yeah, yeah.
Stan, : Okay. Great. Great. That's all I ask.
I never said that people should do more hours then they are paid for, try to read what people actually say.
When you are paid for 40 hours of work you are paid to give it your full effort for 40 hours and not slack off, people who decided to half arse everything they do are the ones exploiting others and making things harder for their colleagues.
@Spazturtle
"When you are paid for 40 hours of work you are paid to give it your full effort for 40 hours and not slack off"
Depends on the what you are doing* - if its extremely mentally demanding then you cannot go "full tilt" for every working hour, its just not possible (and surprisingly often those really nasty problems get solved "in a flash" when you have stepped away from things and had a break to unwind and clear your head)
* When young I did summer jobs (uni holidays) in factories to earn cash toward the next year of study, on production lines. That is the sort of job you can do "full effort" every hour as, once you have mastered the skills needed for the operation you are doing, you can happily be in near autopilot mode with little brain processing needed and so no mental "burnout".
Absolutely correct.
The work I do now, if I did it "full tilt", I'd burn out (and in the past, in previous employment, very nearly have done).
In contrast, when much younger and "between jobs", I took on some temp work in a council plant nursery. This mostly involved pricking out young seedlings. It's the sort of work that is repetitive, relatively unskilled, monotonous, and paid by the hour. We started at a set time, worked for a set amount of time, took fixed breaks at set times, and produced a steady rate of work. There was no problem with this, because it's not the sort of work that will "burn you out". It wasn't bad work, and gives plenty of time to get lost in your own thoughts, but poorly paid (still better than being on benefits though).
It's when an employer mistakes the first kind of work for the second that the problems arise. They're usually the same sort of employer who doesn't understand what the job involves, and certainly couldn't do it themselves, of the mindset that, "it's not what I do, so it must be easy."
Quiet quitting and work to rule are NOT doing a half arsed job.
At my last place I'd picked up a lot of extra roles as initially the company was VERY small but as it grew so did the time taken by those extras to the point where it was impossible to do the actual day job. I'd saved managements backside from the fire so many times it was beyond a joke and they had come to expect that I would continue to save them to such an extent that at during performance reviews other departments that I should not be working for were complaining that they were not getting swift enough responses from me.
New job, more ££, 90% less responsibility, sorted!
I'll talk to you again after your inevitable burnout after putting in way more hours than contracted and your employer getting rid of you for it. (Or if you're self employed, after your inevitable burnout that caused your life's savings to evaporate).
I do for my employer what I'm contracted to do. And on average not an hour more. Tell me, why should I do anything over what I'm contracted for?
People like this is why the economy is doing shit
No, managament like that is why economies flatline. If people were honest about the full cost picture of staffing they would see that management treating people that work for them as human beings comes with significant financial upsides because a member of staff is not just a number on a spreadsheet, they're also a collection of expertise and institutionalised knowledge that you somehow magically have to recreate when you lose them and that is especially the case for the kinds of people you can call up in the middle of the night and can fix things with merely thinking their way through the issue and pulling in the right resources to fix it there and then.
Being nice does, of course mean that you start with not employing entitled f*ckwits or mates but people who can genuinely lead a company but it is possible. There are some examples out there.
There is another factor at play here: plain greed. If you do not squeeze the absolute last drop out of a company you also end up with some safety margin that will help when things get tough. Squeeze staff, and you will pay eventually.
People like this is why the economy is doing shit and wages have flatlined. All people like this achieve is to make their fellow workers poorer.
People not being like this is exactly why wealth is floating to the top and causing the economy to stagnate, whilst the richest get appreciably richer off the back of reaping the profits of other people working for free.
If you work in a mutually-owned cooperative, then that is the only time when "not going the extra mile" might be detrimental to yourself and your co-workers. Most people these days do not, because rampant terminal-stage capitalism has taken over, and all the benefit from those extra hours you are coerced into doing is going straight to the billionaire class.
"People not being like this is exactly why wealth is floating to the top and causing the economy to stagnate, whilst the richest get appreciably richer off the back of reaping the profits of other people working for free."
Like, for example, some of the richest companies in the world laying off 1000's of staff because there's a downturn in revenue. Note especially that they are NOT booking losses, just a reduction in profits. In some cases, they were extra hires during the COVID up-tick that many in IT saw, bit not all of them. They could probably afford to "coast" for at least 12 months but the stock market wouldn't like that and depress the share value.
The reason the global economy hasn't yet suffered "the big one" is that the myth of eternal growth hasn't yet peaked. However, a good measure of how close it is would be to look at how much global wealth is concentrated in an ever smaller number of hands. There will inevitably come a point where the vast majority of human activity can no longer support the greed of a tiny minority, as it has repeatedly throughout history. It will get very messy for a while and then the cycle will repeat, but with fewer resources left to drive it the next time.
I've related this one before but it's due another airing.
We were running a 486 SCO Unix box for our manufacturing/business systems, with about a dozen terminals. It had a DAT tape drive for backups which, with a sensible rotation & off siting policy, was about as good as things got then. I went away for a week but took the office "mobile" with me (a Motorola car phone attached to a big battery). On about the Wednesday the office called to say the tape wasn't ejecting. My response was, "OK, it's not critical, just leave it alone until I'm back next Monday!"
That wasn't good enough for the parent company though, they sent an engineer from their PC support from Hampshire to Northants to have a look, without bothering to consult me or at least say they were doing so. As the engineer had never worked with Unix he just switched the box off, replaced the tape drive and turned it back on, then he wondered why he was getting multiple error messages about corrupted file systems and a failure to boot.
The end result was exactly what I'd been trying to avoid, once I got back in on the Monday (it wasn't physically possible for me to get back sooner) and then rebuilt everything and restored back to the previous Monday (the last usable backup) the company had lost, or had to repeat, over a week's work. The parent company later tried to get me to go down south and work for them when they closed the Northants operation but I refused!
Years later, a big WW DC was entirely monitored by HP VPO (or whatever names it was back then, since it was changing on a yearly basis).
A lot of alerts were pushed daily to it from every layers of OS or apps, and a 24X7 operators shift was in place.
So, VPO was really critical, like the radar of an airplane.
One day, manglement sent to us an HP expert to audit the thing.
He sat in the open space for multiple days, without mentioning to us, the ops teams what he was doing at all, and went back home (early) the friday end of the afternoon.
We had on call L2, and the guy had a completely hellish week-end, that week: VPO was crashing, the DB was hanging. He basically spent the whole week-end trying to get to the issue.
What happened was: the HP guy discovered multiple hundreds of thousands uncategorized alerts, stale alerts. What did he do just before leaving for the WE: yep, select the first, scroll down to the last, select all, then acknowledge the alerts. Without telling anyone, then fucked off.
VPO went on working full stream acking every one of them, creating MASSIVE numbers of DB transactions, causing the DB to switch logs almost each second, pilling all archived logs in the archive FS, filling it up again and again !
Peace was only restored when all alerts were all acked, with the L2 guy frantically emptying the archived logs FS as fast as possible (and no, we were not in the position to back them up so fastly, so had to delete them) for the whole WE.
Gosh, this HP guy was never allowed again in our buildings.
> WW DC was entirely monitored by HP VPO
"DC" = Datacenter. What is WW? HP can only be Hewlett Packard, but what is VPO? 95.5% of the world is not USA, please enlighten us. But even in the USA you might get asked "what do those two abbreviations mean?".
Even Google shows, for VPO, that is was "now called OpenView Operations". And for the other only "World Wide Developer Conference" shows up.
Why, for the sudden in the last few month, show so many commentards here such an extreme "I live in my bubble, and that's the only thing that counts" trait? This is soooo weird.
As for the rest of your posting, the story is good and classical IT, but tainted by using abbreviations noone outside your personal bubble can understand - even from an IT point of view.
By which I refer to the lack of remuneration or additional holiday for time taken out. That would have been resolved on my return, dangerous precedent set otherwise.
Regarding the Ops Dir, I reckon we've all seen the revolving door effect a few times when a WonderSuit with glowing credentials and a CV to match don't make it through probation
Come into a new position and make your mark by changing everything "for the better".
Make lots on bonuses.
Leave for next lucrative job, before you have to clean up from this one.
Seen it in all companies I have worked for with more than 20 employees.
It's not just IT, take the UK's NHS (on a slightly longer timescale) going around and around with the same 'local group' reorganisations in roughly 5 year cycles.
I was once heavily involved in a project to convert a whole government building to a fresh network system.
Luckily each small department had its own server, so could be treated as an independent unit.
The aim was for their staff to leave on Friday evening and return to their desks at 09:00 on Monday to find a fresh network stack (LAN Manager!), with all their files and apps intact. This obviously involved weekend working. This was an organisation where a "working day" for us techies meant "until things are working", but weekends would obviously need something extra.
So the firm came up with a scheme - you got £x for each weekend day, plus £y for unsocial hours. You would be expected to take Monday and Tuesday as your "weekend", while a few others did the inevitable mopping up. The company would claw back the £x for each of those days, but you would keep the unsocial hours part.
Then the beancounters obviously leapt in. If you work less than a day, it's pro rata.
That obviously meant that if you worked MORE than 8 hours, it's STILL pro rata.
We would hit one large or two small departments each weekend. So we ended up spending Tuesday to Friday on prep work, creating accounts and groups on LAN Manager and trial running of scripts. On Saturday we would do the bulk of the conversions in 12 hours, On Sunday we would check the data transfers and hit the users' boxes.
Unfortunately that LAN Manager had a stupid "feature" where it only allowed 8 sessions, despite having a licence for many more. Once you reached 8, you needed to reboot the server to get another batch added. Once you reach the new limit, restart it again. This meant touring the offices restarting PCs too - some half a dozen times.
It was usually about 08:00 on Monday when we had got every box up and running at the same time. Big fry-up breakfast in a cafe up the road, then off to bed.
So the overtime was enormous - 4.5 times £x+y, with £x clawed back for our Monday recovery period. For three months, my overtime payment, which had never been seen on my payslip before, was larger than my salary.
I took a job with a Technical Publications company as a Technical Author, based in a suburb of Birmingham (UK). Suddenly, they asked me to work from a site which was 99 miles from my home (office was 30), and wanted me to be there for 0900 to meet with site personnel. This meant I had to leave home at 0700, drive 99 miles, put in a full day's work, drive 99 miles back, getting in at 1900.
Even after they had subtracted the 30 miles and half an hour travelling time at each end of what would have been a normal day at the office, I still made more from the mileage allowance and overtime that my basic salary.
Luckily (or maybe not) this posting only lasted three months (December to February) before I was back in head office for a rest.
An upvote because I agree. Though it is used often as meaning a prearranged and formalised meeting rather than a casual one, and can be useful in that regard, so I guess it's going to be part of how we speak. See also "meet up with" which is often used to denote a catch-up meeting.
Because, in English, "meet" and "meet with" are different terms. If I say I met Alice, the implication is that I did not know Alice before, but now we do know each other, whereas if I say "I met with Alice", the implication is that we organized a meeting and have now conducted that meeting. There are extra definitions, for example "meet" can also mean that we happened to be in the same place, but it usually doesn't have the indications of a planned meeting for a specific purpose that "meet with" tends to. Sometimes terms are created by combining existing words, such as back up, write off, or call out. You know what all of those things mean, but if I say that I backed the disk, wrote the broken server, and called the bad maintenance that led to this situation, I sound wrong.
I had to meet with the customer's personnel at the various sites, they had to accompany us for security reasons. If we had not prearranged the meetings, we would not have been able to access the equipment we were there to examine and write about, as it was all inside secure enclosures,
My boss is great, not a technical genius but knows enough to be of assistance and not a danger. If she "yes a she" asks for an extra hour here and there I give it free, in return, never moans about a doctors appointment, short notice school run. if we do overtime, she pays and supplies the munchies, goes out of her way to shield us from the top brass, even if we've made a booboo or blows our trumpet as loud as she can when we do something the world needs to hear about and the most important thing, pays what we are worth, even when top brass try not too.
and that's what makes a great boss. I had a boss like that she was fab and I like to think when I took over from her when she left I followed in her foot steps until I left. Looking at some of the managers where I work now I despair They're not the worst in the world by any means but some times I just think why the feck are you doing that! Treat your staff nice and they will return the favour. I'm of the mentality that holds a grudge, I file any bit of shit you give me away for future use, you need something doing urgent out of hours but moaned when I was late in 1 day as the car broke down, etc, then tuff shit.
this story sound so much like 4 jobs(and 20yrs) ago, where they hired super whizzy mangler whose bright idea was speed everything up in order to make more money
Sadly ended badly as increased wear to the tooling caused a great deal of delays.. hey ho
And as for the quiet quitting... good luck on that
I've been doing that most of the morning where I suppossed to poking around with the CAD system on some aerospace BS, but I'm investigating booby trapping Mr Blobby (a big lump of blue tack I found in the opposite desk) because I'd fed up with, having made him back to a human figure, that someone comes along and squishes him again.
I'm considering a couple of nails up his legs.. but how long to I make the nails......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcvgpNFynVo
Voice mail greeting....
"Thank you for calling. I am out of the office on vacation until (date) and will not receive your message until I return from the (mountain, cave, ship) which I am hiding on. During my absence, please reach out to (boss) directly who can arrange immediate assistance for you."
If you answer a call while on vacation, that is your own fault.
That said... Quid pro quo. You might be the one left behind next time and may need a favor from your pal on holiday.
The way I try to do it is that I give my personal number to a few people, and every one of them is a person I trust to only call me if it's absolutely necessary. If my boss isn't one of those people, then they'll just have to explain the problem to my colleagues who will either fix it or relay the message to me. This probably doesn't work for everyone, but it's worth trying if it sounds feasible.
Fortunate to have a manager and management team who asks lot but always appreciates the extra free or O/T time we put in, will always name people who've put themselves out for projects when they complete even if they're a little late. Every single time I've asked my manager to leave early to get something done, never once has he said no. He sees us alright and in exchange you don't mind putting in a a few extra hours a week for free here and there when things get busy, just to make sure we all sleep easy when on call and he gets less grief in the weekly manager meetings.
Respect is give and take, manager respect staff and staff will respect manager. Treat staff like shite and sooner or later you'll be in HR explaining why your team headcount turnover is so high!
Back in the age of the dinosaurs ( early 90s ) I was the one-person sysadmin staff for a small software house. In the first full year handling the position, I had multiple vacation requests denied, and had to go to HR finally to get a resolution on either allowing vacation at year-end, or deferring it to the following year. Strangely enough, I did learn something useful from the experience.
The following year, I scheduled two weeks of time off late in the year ( November ) and made arrangements for alternate support of normal operations while I was absent. All personnel involved with the alternate support were given VERY SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS about when it was appropriate to call me. After these were made clear, it was also plainly stated that since the minimum increment of vacation time was 1/2 day, any call to me that was made would result in a MINIMUM charge of 1/2 day vacation returned to me.
During the two weeks off, I was called twice, spent about 15 minutes total on the phone, and turned in a time sheet listing 9 days vacation expended and 2 half-days of work. This timesheet was APPROVED without a murmur from anyone.
Take heart, people. It CAN BE DONE.
I'd let it go to voicemail, then decide whether to call them back. If I chose to, I'd insist on full replacement of vacation days affected by this (i.e. if I take the call on Tuesday afternoon, drive in and work on stuff and go back to my vacation Wednesday afternoon that's Tuesday and Wednesday that need replacement since both were affected) plus a bonus vacation day to compensate for the disruption. If they refused, I'd wish them good luck on cleaning up the mess and I'll see them when I return and hang up and not answer subsequent calls unless a voicemail is left agreeing to my (quite reasonable, IMHO) terms.
Some might be afraid to do this due to fear of future retribution (lower raise, less chance of promotion, etc) but think how someone willing to give up their vacation without compensation will be viewed? They will know that is someone who can be pushed around and is afraid to push back, and unless you have a really good boss protecting you (which you don't, because you got a call and went into work on your vacation without any compensation made) they will take advantage of that situation again and again in the future.
Another good reason why you should either not tell your employer where you are going for vacation, or lie and tell them it is much further away and you are much more unreachable than you really will be. Going to another country used to be like going to the Moon as far as ability to be reached but with satellite communication beginning to become possible on phones eventually you won't have an excuse even if you are on a dogsled mushing towards the North Pole!
No compensation for what he did? Quitting quiet yes, searching for a better job while keeping the current one and off you go. But 12 years? Since this is obviously USA you can just go to your boss and say "Last day today, at about right now, bye" without a slightest bit of warning ahead. Also a typical USA sign: Unpaid over hours. Cattle gets better treatment than workers in the US.
should have got hold of the contractor who made the mess.
In a previous job, a guy at the US end "revamped" the network, causing the network at the west-Asia end to crap out, stop work when we came in to work (10 times zones away). I found out his home 'phone #, and he got a call at (his) 2AM.
I also expressed a pious wish his balls would be "revamped" off.
I once got a late evening (10-11 ish) call from some irate manager at work who started by complaining that I was difficult to reach. I asked if he had looked me up in BT's online directory. I have an uncommon surname and there were only two in the county the office was in, and we are related. He hadn't thought to do this. I then asked if he had spoken to my direct manager, who did happen to have my personal number. He hadn't. I then stated that I was not on call, and he could call me again, via my office number, in the morning, if the matter was still important then.
If he had called my manager first he would have got a right ear-full. It is nice when when you have a team manager who you can count on to shield you from idiocy. With enough grovelling he might have even been given the number of the on-call mobile so he could speak to the correct person.
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