Found out I was making way less than others with the same title
DoNt DiScUsS wAgEs WiTh EmPloYeEs
Fuck that noise. I ask how much everyone is making on day one
Started a job in July I was 60% qualified for. By December I had made enough changes to the job description (by adding things I was able to do that prior people couldn’t), my manager decided to reclassify my job. New title, new description, new salary pay band. Manager hands me an envelope with my new title, description, and rate of pay. I say "thanks, but we just created a job that I’m 95% qualified for. I expect to be in the 95% qualified section of the new pay band, but this rate is for the 60% qualified. We go back and forth for three months. With 1 hour notice he calls me into a phone meeting with his boss where I can state my case for a proper raise to reflect my new duties.
Big boss says “we don’t negotiate raises, you were hired at 60% qualified, you’ll stay there, and get 1-3% raises annually based on merit. If you want a raise, find another job.” I did.
Last I heard my job was filled by one of my subordinates who was maybe 30% qualified. The good news is the job was kind of a joke, so I’m glad one of my old reports was getting a huge raise to do essentially her same job, because even my boss didn’t understand the changes I made, and they were instantly forgotten when I left.
How do you quantify “qualified”? And why were you allowed to completely rewrite your job description to one you were “more qualified” for?
There was a rubric for qualified scores. Software X power user? +8%. Experience in position Y? +1% per year. Bachelor’s degree in the following fields? +20% The premise was "make everything internally clear and we can internally promote, set career progressions and encourage people to remain loyal. This was a huge company that tried to absolve themselves of any accusation of racism/misogyny/ageism by saying “no, we apply the exact metric to everyone”.
I didn’t personally rewrite my job description. I was able to demonstrate other programs and processes were able to achieve the same/better results, and would do so quicker/cheaper/more easily. This was really easy because the job was stuck in the past. Shit like “I can upload a csv to import this data” was basically witchcraft, as the current description called for typing thousands of lines by hand (and rewarded this experience with +2% qualification for every year of data entry experience). Suddenly the two week long job that required ten years of experience was done in thirty minutes.
I convinced them the -35% hit I took on my qualifications because I’d never used done ancient software could be swapped out with a +40% qualification in excel, for example, so my supervisor rewrote the job to include these advancements.
Standing under the fuselage of a Airbus A320 in the pouring rain holding a torch for the “senior” engineer, while watching him fail at troubleshooting a simple door bell circuit.
That was the straw that broke the camels back, I could not spend my career working under someone like that.
I’ve worked with many people during my life, and there are good and bad people at every company. Most are average, as expected. But I have the mindset that it’s not MY company, so I don’t really care if employees are good or bad anymore.
But I’m not really depending on them for my own learning. I’m pretty much always learning on my own. Which could be hard in other fields than IT.
Ah, but when the bad employees make messes that you then need to clean up? Or someone makes a mistake and everyone on the team gets reamed out because “we’re a team and someone should have caught that, so it’s everyone’s fault”?
I’m a software engineer.
Yeah we have the same culture here and it’s bullshit. :)
When my management chain was busy doing everything but listening to engineers, and then tried to do the engineering themselves. A real moment of clarity happened and I realized they were determined to fuck up badly and cost the company money, 8 months of work, and possibly put us in an unrecoverable position.
At another company, we were bought by a private equity firm. There’s only one way those transactions go, and I wanted to be first out the door rather than compete for jobs with thousands of other engineers.
they had me work 9-5 most days, and deploys started at 11pm but were on weekends. It sucks that we were salary and didn’t get comp time for the late nights, but we were salary on the days when there wasn’t much to do too, so it kinda balanced out. Til they decided that they were gonna switch deploys to Tuesday night. So I worked 9-5, came back in at 11, was supposed to be done at 5am and then sleep til 9, but the deploy went over, and we ended up not getting off of the deploy call till about 5pm the next day. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 24 hours out of 30 spent at work. There was no comp time, there was no “attaboy!”, there was no talk of changing the way we do deploys, or having a handoff team available if they run long again. The next two deploys were someone else’s responsibility, but they also went long. Once It seemed to be that this was just how things are, I started looking. They had the nerve to say they were “shocked” when I handed in my notice.
This is wild to me. I’m on salary. But paid by the minute. We almost never work our full 152 hours per 4 week cycle, usually 130-140 hours. We do anywhere from 4-11 hour shifts. We are rostered for service calls, if any adjustments are made to our shift, the entire shift will be paid overtime @ 1.7 (and not counted towards monthly cycle) if we go over our 152 hours we are paid overtime rate by the minute. And if we reach 11 hours on a shift we are not allowed to do any work or drive any vehicles, we have to call a taxi or get another crew to take us home.
Excuse me, but “full time” is 120 hours in 4 weeks. What’s this 130-140 bullshit, let alone 152?You’re getting screwed even in what you intended to be an example of a better workplace!Edit: I can’t math gud.
40 hours per week, the standard of “full time” in most places, equates to 160 hours per four weeks. 152 hours is the equivalent of a 38 hour week…
Oh shit, I did my math wrong!
You seem salty. What do you do for work? Do you love it? How much do you make?
yeah we were on salary and if you went over 40 in a week then you went over. I ended up leaving for a job that pays about 15% more, has unlimited PTO, full WFH when this job was hybrid and I haven’t put in more than about 35 hours in a week since then
The boss told me to leave and never come back.
Yeah, that’ll do that.
From the CEO: “Our competitors won’t accept these jobs. They result in too many workman’s comp claims. We’ll take them.”
It’s a gig economy company… They are willing to take them because the workers are considered independent contractors and not employees. They offload liability onto the workers themselves.
Good lord do I wish I was recording that when it happened…
My company was discovered using monkeys for emissions tests. They were gassing monkeys, and legitimately used “everyone in the industry does it” as an internal defense to quell upset staff.
Fuck Volkswagen. Straight up. No fucks given, worst job I ever worked.
Jeez… did that story ever reach the press?!?
It seems to be public knowledge. I hadn’t heard of this either. Yet another in a long line of companies doing shitty things and I’m sure a lot of money spent to make sure this didn’t become household knowledge.
a lot of monkey spent
Huehuehehe…, its ok, I’ll show myself out…
It did in the Netherlands. And then people stopped caring as the next hot article got out.
Wait, wtf… Volkswagen killed monkeys in emission tests?
Holy fuck you are right. Wtf is wrong with people…
The people’s car
What’s horrifying to me isn’t that VW used ‘everyone does it’ as a defense, it’s that multiple carmakers are apparently gassing monkeys for emission tests.
Germans and gas chambers, name a more iconic duo.
Username checks out.
OH NO
Reminder that VW was established by Hitler.
I worked a day and a half at Hardee’s. First was half a day of “training” on the nastiest, greasiest tablet you can imagine. It was mostly health and safety protocols and regulations. Next was a full day of not doing any of that shit and selling dirty food. I never went back. It was a really fucking bad time to quit a job, but I couldn’t bring myself to basically give one or more people food poisoning every day…
Wasn’t the location that used to exist at N. Broadway and New Circle Road, by any chance?
Nope! It was between an on ramp embankment and one of those gnarly rural streets that looks like it’s been fucking mortared. It was in a cartoonish shithole of a small town in the moddle of nowhere.
Small tech Company fired a loyal and tireless employee so they could use her salary to hire an executive.
Fuck that shit, I bolted.
Don’t think I’ve ever had a proper FTS moment in my career but the closest was during Covid, before any vaccine had come out and the company mandated RTO. Did the science and worked out I had about 25% chance of DYING if I caught it. I was it wasn’t going to happen, they said yes it was, bit of to and fro then they said “disciplinary” so I said well let’s cut out all the unpleasantness and just go for a mutual agreement. Got three months pay and walked out at the end of the week, shortly afterwards landing another job with a substantial pay rise and 100% WFH.
I had a proper FTS moment in an interview, which the company failed with flying colours. It’s a good job it was a mile walk back to the railway station because if I’d spoken to the agent before that walk (which took about 3 minutes) I’d have said something a lot ruder than FTS.
My first job out of the military, I was hired as a project manager and was largely brought on to improve their processes. After speaking when almost every person in this company (200 or so), documenting the current business processes, and pulling together feedback for areas of improvement, I put together a plan to present to the president of the company (my boss). He said all the right things, but took absolutely no action. A few months and a few repetitions of this, and my boss asked me how I was doing the Wednesday before Christmas. I told him I was frustrated due to the lack of process improvement. He told me “if you can’t find a way to be happy with how things are, maybe it’s time to look elsewhere”
Noted. I had a recruiter call me the next day, and that turned into an offer making another 30%, remote two days a week, shorter hours, and a better work climate. My boss had the audacity to tell me I should’ve talked to him about it
My boss gave me stupid directions - stuff I knew was wrong or inefficient. I tried to convince her otherwise, she wasn’t having it, and I’m in trouble if I don’t do what she says. Fine, I’ll follow your stupid orders, no problem. My dad taught me, “If they want a little bullshit, give 'em a little bullshit.”
Then in a meeting with her and her boss, I get asked why I did the stupid thing. “Well, I was directed specifically do to that very thing.”
He says to me, with her right there, “Well, you need to take responsibility for your actions.”
Started applying the next day, now have a team working for me who are great, and my greatest fear is giving them stupid directions.
Don’t give directions. Offer support. Unblock them. Teach them to be autonomous experts. Good managers help their teams do their work by making sure they don’t have to do anything but their work.
You probably already know this, but I’m saying it for the group. Good managers exist, and their role is to help actual workers work more effectively and remove obstacles to good work. Not to tell people how to work.
I’ve known several people that were good leaders until they became management, then it just became like Danno’s experience. “Fuck you, I got mine” was all too common of a way of thinking at my former place of employment.
When the new general manager (the third one in a year, and 5th since I started) decided to go really big into “Lean” and was literally reading to the office personnel from a Paul Akers book on lean as if we were in the third grade.
I read this comment twice before I figured out you weren’t talking about codeine and soda.
What was he talking about tho
Lean/six sigma. Its kinda hard to describe, but its basically a way of doing business that is ‘more efficient’. Its principles are having as little inventory on hand as possible and trying to make sure there is no process waste by making sure everything happens “just in time”. For everyone but workers it works pretty well to generate more profit and produce more goods, or at least it did until the supply chain got completely fucked.
Yeah. And it’s wildly risky for the business. Another sign that the leadership intends to inflate the stock price, sell their stock, and move to an island somewhere while the company fails.
Not me but my partner.
She was working as a research assistant in a lab for several years. She asked her boss if she could be promoted to a research associate, which was one level above her. She already been doing the job of a researcher (3 levels above her). Her boss said that they were in a hiring freeze and that it wouldn’t be possible, but maybe in 2-3 YEARS she might be up for a promotion. Her boss wanted everyone to get the most they possibly could out of their current position before promotion. What my partner heard was that even if she eventually got the promotion to the next level, it might be 5-7 years after that promotion until the next promotion.
I’ve never seen her so angry when she came home. She immediately started applying to new jobs in a different field. She also stopped doing work above her pay grade, to which her boss actually tried to retaliate against her. Within 2 months, she moved onto a new job that is 75% WFM, pays more, has a better culture and is in a field where she can much more easily move upward.
Her former company has started layoffs.
Not doing more than what you’re paid for was a great lesson to learn early in my working life, good on her for knowing her worth.
I wish I learned it earlier… I’m on the downslope of 30s, and still find myself going above and beyond.
I don’t expect to get anything out of it at this point though… I learned a long long time ago that hard work doesn’t pay off, but I also don’t want to do my actual job, so I find other things I’d rather do, and do that. I can easily justify doing so, because everyone known I’m out soon, and what I’m doing has direct value even if it’s not really “my job”.
And from here on out, I’m just going to take contract work. Zero expectation of going above and beyond, because everyone knows it’s a temporary arrangement. Perfect, because I have no self control and am a major major people pleaser.
