So I just received an email that due to above expected company performance, we are all eligible for a one-off bonus at the end of the month. Apparently I’m also eligible for an additional bonus that was previously only available to people who started well before I joined.
So I can’t figure out what sort of sick game they are playing here.
So… it’s a trap?
In a way, yes. In all seriousness, it kind of feels like one. Perhaps not intentionally, but from how they describe how the system works it feels like I could get fucked, even if the job seems to be going well.
On the surface, it seems like things are going well. My client likes me and they appear to have work through the next year. So if my job was working at this client full time, it would be, by all accounts, a pretty good job.
The problem is that isn’t really my job. My job is to sell a certain amount of work. Now what is considered a “sell” is a bit fuzzy. It can include extending my team through the year (which is just me), bringing on additional team members, participating in sales at another client, and other activities. The last one I’m a bit fuzzy on how they count it, as the rules have changed recently.
The thing is, with just me at this client, just my hours alone isn’t enough to meet my target.
They don’t seem to have either the budget or the willingness to bring on additional consultants.
Even if they did, we as a firm, don’t seem to have a whole lot of spare people sitting around waiting to go on projects.
And while I am involved in helping partners try and sell additional work, I really have no control over those activities.
Which is a complex and long winded way of saying that at the end of our review period, one year from now, I can see doing a good job that my firm will ultimately not give a shit about from a perspective of raises and promotions.
Which also leads to my second “concern” is that I’m not really sure who I really work for, in the context of my firm. Like I have a “coach” who is my manager more or less and he manages a small team of us. But the partners (of which my coach isn’t one) decide our raises and promotions (and sell the work). My coach has his agenda and goals that we all work towards, but it’s less clear if this is an actual “business unit” within the company in an org chart sense, just some thing he put together or if there is a difference. Like do I even need to listen to this guy? If I go off and work for some other partner who has a client I am more interested in, can I just tell my coach to “fuck off”, so to speak?
I don’t know. At this point, it all kind of seems like bullshit to me. So even if on the surface things seem to be going well, I have trouble feeling particularly enthusiastic about any of it.