Actually, I would love to have an excuse to stop work on every other project and lock myself away for two days’ worth of clicking on every file.
And in my fantasy I’d get the company to let me set up in an unused conference room with a view and a fridge, and buy me a pair of Jerk-Surpressing Headphones.
SharePoint stores files in a database, as I found to my sorrow when I had to transfer all the SharePoint files for the small engineering team I support to Box a few years ago.
No , my annoying cow-orker, I do not want to know “what pisses you off.” You have been ranting for the last three weeks about something I can’t change, and no one else can either. Either suck it up and deal, or make good on your threat to leave. I don’t particularly care which.
You know how they say sometimes you have to shoot the engineer and throw it over the wall to manufacturing? Don’t tempt me.
What a nightmare! Many of my company’s customers have extended data retention periods – 20 to 30 years – written into their contracts and into every single order they place. This gives us the opposite problem; every 5 years or so, corporate IT gets on our collective asses about the amount of stuff being stored on the server. Eventually, after realizing that no one is deleting anything, they will cave and upgrade. Even the public transfer drives that are supposed to be emptied of files older than 3 years or so are left alone now.
As I’ve ranted about many times before, data retention also includes any paper records. This can be a nightmare depending on which department is retaining the records in question…if it’s document control, and the files are being kept on site, everything is fine. If they’re using the off-site document storage company (rhymes with “iron fountain”), it’s likely to turn into a nightmare due to lack of ability to follow directions and excessive billing. And deity of your choice help you if the files are being kept in one of the Conex units out back (I’m pretty sure one of them was used by a previous owner to house distilling equipment).
Small update - They are postponing their clean up because, obviously, we all need more than 1 week of notice.
I know I shouldn’t equate bad english with less intelligence and for the most part I don’t. But I find it hilarious how the worded their notice that they were going to postpone. - “We have received many constructive feedback. We are analyzing your inputs. No clean-up actions will be executed for the moment.”
Are we talking hundreds of files? Or thousands?
Thousands, easily. I’ve got over 2000 CAD drawings alone. (I didn’t make them myself.)
Everyone at my company consistently gets a cost of living raise annually of a little over 3%/yr. That said, what I was recently told, in not quite these words, were:
“There is no amount of work, and no task or responsibility you can take on at this company that will ever lead to a significant salary increase beyond the universal annual cost of living raises. If you were hired in at the low end of the scale, you will forever stay at the low end of the scale.”
Ok . . . I guess it’s time to job hunt if I want to earn more?
Generally true? I was a lifer at AT&T, but after the first couple of years, barring a promotion, raises tended towards ‘cost of living’. People who changed jobs generally got nice bumps (and some ended up coming back for another nice bump).
And yet employers piss and moan about loyalty.
Here’s the thing. What I said above . . .there is no such thing as a promotion at my company. Last year I shifted from what was essentially a “do work that you are responsible for” position to a “be responsible for guiding the process by which people like the former me get assigned work. Also be the person who is accountable for my whole team’s successes and struggles.”
That shift seemed like a very appropriate time to seek a new salary. It was “lateral” move in the sense that there is no explicit hierarchy here (which is not true in practice, but it’s the vibe they try to foster). At the time I was told “no raises at this time, try again later”, so after succeeding at the new position for a year I’ve tried again, and gotten the response I shared in my previous post.
There is no way to get a “promotion” because there are no tiered job descriptions and no levels of management. There is no way to get a raise because we don’t think we can accurately or effectively measure one employee’s value against another’s. But, we do pay across a range where some people are making 3x base salary (rough estimate), so we clearly are valuing some employees much more than others.
Yep. Time to polish up that resume.
Honesty is refreshing. 
Look for a new job. Once you have an offer you’re willing to take, give your company a chance to counter-offer. Be polite, but be clear that you will be leaving in [NUMBER] days unless you get a convincing counter.
That’s the plan. It’s too bad because I’d like to be committed to my current employer until retirement. But, I am not willing to stay at the same pay scale for 30 years until I retire.
One school of thought is to go ahead and leave even if they do make a reasonable counter offer. The reason being is that you’ve announced yourself as a flight risk so they’re going to start looking to replace you with somebody cheaper. Though they’ll frame it as bringing in someone to help you until you get them trained up.
Dear HR,
Not everything needs to be gamified.
I just took my second required training for the year; I have no more trainings available in my queue. Upon completion I was told that I was in 63rd place with 80 points. First place has 463 points. There is nothing I can do to increase my ‘score’. Why is it a ‘competition’ if certain people/departments get more opportunities to participate than other people/departments?
I’m getting mentally prepared for an annoying day tomorrow. I train people at work who have a range of abilities, but so far most people have done just fine with the training. I’ve only ever had one person who really didn’t get it, but she has a lot of other good qualities, so I’m okay with that. I just did a training with someone I thought would do well, but he’s doing some weird things. He has already forgotten some of the basic things we talked about in training, and he deletes things if they’re not working. It seems like it would be easier to fix it than to delete it and create a new one that’s exactly the same! If he’s not doing better by tomorrow, he’s going on my naughty list.
I’m working on a project with another person who’s going to be a problem. This is his first time doing this, and I have many (too many!) years of experience. We have long, rambling meetings that take every ounce of my patience to get through. He edited something I wrote, and it was not an improvement. Now I have to find a diplomatic way to make sure we don’t use the bad edits. I want him to do well at this job, but so far I don’t have a good feeling about it. Maybe he’ll learn. The good thing is, this project won’t last long, so it will be over soon.
I wonder if the actual expenses you’ve incurred might be tax deductible? Not an expert there, and it might be subject to that “2% of AGI” cutoff or something, but it’s worth double checking.
My husband’s company has provided an allowance of 500 bucks or so for the purpose of upgrading one’s home office. Nominally all equipment purchased with that is still the property of the company, so must be returned if he leaves, though I don’t know if they care about getting a monitor, wired keyboard etc. back. They were very specific about the accessories - e.g. they said “wireless keyboard” (but he has a client-furnished laptop, and wireless accessories are not permitted on those). He got a wired one anyway. At least this allowance is not taxable (since the company still owns the stuff). Unfortunately, the keyboard he splurged on doesn’t work with a KVM switch; I’m using it on my client laptop but I have to switch to the other keyboard if I use my corporate laptop.
They also give a yearly “fitness subsidy” which can be used for an interesting variety of stuff, such as ergonomic desktop stuff, office chairs, and fitness equipment. They’ve doubled that, this year (though the money spent IS treated as taxable income). We’re eyeing a SecretLabs chair, and Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!
My company… has not offered anything of the sort. Nominally I think I could request some office supplies such as a mouse, but they make the process so hard, it’s just not worth it. I’ve spent several hundred dollars in the past year or so on office-configuration conveniences. I figure it’s more than offset by the lack of commuting cost, at least.
Home offices were notoriously hard to get right deducting for and the massive change to the tax code in 2017 got rid of a lot of stuff that had been subject to the 2% AGI limit. Combine that with the large increase in the standard deduction, and for a lot of people itemizing suddenly no longer made sense.
Yes. File under: “someone thought this was a good idea based on an incomplete and totally unresearched sense of how the thing is actually implemented across the company in a useful way. Because no one is actually tracking whether the thing is helping the company reach a goal (or has stated how to quantifiably measure what that goal is), we’ll just keep doing it forever because some under-trained HR person decided it would be fun because they read it in a blog post somewhere.”