The union contract greatly inhibits the “creative destruction” of policies and procedures each time a new Pointy-Haired Boss is hired from another company into middle management. IOW, no change just for change sake.
Separately, due to the seniority system operating among the union workforce, there is a strong incentive for all those workers to stay here on the job, not to job hop to other companies. As a consequence, you have a much more stable workforce and avoid all the costs of worker churn.
Admittedly, it can be harder to fire or discipline. But truth be told, as long as management and HR are able to construct a paper case as they should everywhere, the bad apples can be weeded out. It’s just the martinet shouting “you’re fired!” for any reason or no reason that’s no longer possible.
I love mine too! It was something that I had wanted for a long time, but I hesitated to buy one because I didn’t know if I would use it often enough to justify the price.
Me, too! I’m 67 and I’ve wanted one my whole life. It was over $300 for a fuckin’ pot! But I bit the bullet, and I love it! You can do everything from bake bread in it, to make stews and pot roasts, and soups. Plus Corned Beef and cabbage!
(You guys - I thought yesterday was St. Patrick’s day. I’m so dumb. But I made Corned Beef and cabbage and potatoes and carrots in my Le Creuset pot! It was delicious.)
It has happened again. We have one network tech/engineer that treats us developers, at least in my group as if we are help desk callers/users. I am not contacting network support when I can’t log in to a server because I had caps lock on, or don’t know the proper way to type in my user name, I asking for your help because clearly the server is not behaving as it should. The “it works for me, you must be typing in the wrong thing” or whatever, does not apply. We try everything and from different machines/servers before contacting you guys, but you think it is just that we don’t know how to do the basic thing we do every day! Aaarg.
Oh and the other thing that I run into that bothers me is when they assume that you must be encountering a particular situation because it happens in Chrome. I almost never use Chrome, so don’t give a statement like you might experience this, make it your might experience this if you use Chrome.
Perhaps time for their supervisor to be informed of their disrespectful unprofessionalism. Especially since they’re the only one in the department doing it.
Yep, there is a network engineer I have to work with sometimes, who always seems to have the attitude of “Prove to me it’s not a problem on your end before I’ll look at it.” He will ask me all kinds of basic questions and I want to respond “Look, I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, I think I know how to troubleshoot.” So infuriating sometimes.
Adobe Acrobat is a steaming pile of shit. It randomly decided to update today at work (even though such things are supposed to be controlled by IT), which caused my computer to grind to a halt and eventually crash. I got everything back up and running, but Acrobat wiped my signature and initial files, even though both seem to be attached to my account. Apparently the feature that allows you to send a link to a mobile device so you can neatly create a signature has been stripped from the main program, so I had to create a signature from a scanned document.
And IT has upgraded the security on Citrix, which has had the apparent side effect of preventing me from logging into my computer remotely. Nice.
Once again, corporate IT decided to roll out a new policy without telling anyone ahead of time, and suddenly the shit hits the fan. This has happened at least three times so far this year. Stuff works one day, the next day it doesn’t. You open a ticket with the service desk and it gets kicked around from the network group to zscaler to crowdstrike to desktop until finally someone has a clue what’s going on. Meanwhile production processing for the programs I support is down for a week. I am so fucking sick of this shit. I can’t wait until retirement.
I have just learned that the company I love, and who I manage a store for (that is my pride and joy) is being liquidated. I feel like I’m watching a dear friend die, and at the end of it I’ll be out of a job.
I’m hosting an online conference next month. There is information to convey to the attendees. I try to convey just necessary information, and also pre-answer two common questions, so my emails to the attendees are long. Sometimes it is impossible to be both brief and thorough. Just can’t be done.
All morning I’ve been fielding emails with people asking those two questions. Not once have I been asked a question other than those two. I’ve been doing this a long time, I know what questions people have.
You’d think, if you receive a long email you don’t read, and you have a question about it, maybe you should look at the email to see if your question is answered before just hitting reply to ask the question.
I did write the answers in such a way that I can just copy and paste them from the big email into “personalized” replies to the question askers. Just got a “thank you for clarifying” response from someone for resending the exact same text that they already have in their inbox.
I hate that the most important question about any job, how much the position pays, isn’t listed on the advertisements lboe are you supposed to ask about it during the interview.
It’s none of your business. Or at least that’s most managements’ attitudes. you ought to pay them for the honor of slaving away for the CEO’s slush fund and the shareholder’s dividends.
I interviewed a candidate a little while back. The candidate is not local, so all interviews were done by Zoom. During my interview, I became convinced the candidate was using AI to answer a lot of my questions. Specifically I’d ask a fairly detailed technical question, and instead of the normal “talking/thinking your way through the answer as you go” that you’d expect from a person in an interview, she would sit perfectly silent for several seconds, then just rattle off a pretty detailed answer with no pauses, no breaks. After a few of those I noticed that her eyes were literally moving slowly to her right, then jumping back to the left as she was speaking.
When I asked her questions about specific things that she’s personally done, her behavior changed completely to a more typical method of talking your way through the answer.
In the interviewers followup meeting, we all said we thought she was using AI. As far as I was concerned, meeting over, cheating on interviews not allowed, do not proceed with candidate. But two of the managers present said “We want to hire people who already know how to use AI” and debated whether we should fly her in for some followup in person interviews. I argued strenuously against this, but the managers didn’t see this as a dealbreaker (though we eventually went with another candidate).
So I told our recruiter in any future Zoom interviews I’m going to politely inform the candidate that using AI is not permitted. But I’ve since been instructed not to do so.