My job is like this. I work in software QA in California, but because of petty empire-building bullshit, all QA is part of the Las Vegas office, and I fall under their management and HR guidelines. Which sucks, because the team I actually work with is all WFH/hybrid, but Vegas has decreed that QA has to be 100% in office. So I get to go sit in an empty office to have my Zoom meetings, instead of taking them from home.
I have a get-to-know-you meeting tomorrow with new boss. It’ll be interesting to see what she has to say.
StG
I had a call with the new boss today. New job has DAILY team calls - 3 15 minute calls and 2 1 hours calls each week. Plus a 1:1 with the boss every other week. Video calls, for which I’m expected to use the camera on my computer. All requests from the people I support now has to go through an IT ticket process before they can be addressed. How do they get anything done?
This really doesn’t make me happy. Not unhappy enough to quit yet, but pushing me closer to the edge.
StG
They don’t. Soon, they will go out of business, and the top executives will all get huge payouts, and blame others for the failure. Welcome to America.
Any reason why you don’t want to put some feelers out there and start interviewing? At least get some practice. My wife seems to start talking to headhunters or job hunting every two years or so, and it’s worked out really well for her. Seems like every hop she gets a 10-20% increase in salary. (One was much, much more.) And she’s turned down plenty of jobs in the interim, too. You don’t have to accept them if they don’t give you what you feel you need in terms of salary and benefits. She always says it doesn’t hurt to practice and see what you’re worth on the market.
Honestly, I plan to retire in about 2 years. I don’t know that I want to move to another company, learn new systems, etc, for 2 years. If I retire early I can probably afford it, although it means paying for health insurance for that time.
StG
I hate this stuff. No one wants to be surprised at work. No one. And there are no good surprises at work, either. I always keep that in mind when something unexpected emerges - “Who may be surprised by this?”, and work to mitigate the surprise.
This has happened to me twice. Once I applied for and got a transfer to another department because I wanted to broaden my skill set. What I did not know is that my one direct report was also included in the deal, she was surprised as I was. The day after we started in the new group, an announcement came that the team we went to would be merged into IT, with a different manager than the one that recruited me. I lasted 6 months and then left. Another time at my next company I was recruited again, and this time I knew I would be going into IT, but right before my start date there was a manager shuffle and the person I thought I was going to report to, who I liked and wanted to learn from, was not going to be my manager. No explanation, just “You are now going to be reporting to XXX YYY”, someone I had never met. That lasted a couple years.
Ah, I didn’t realize how near retirement you meant. Yeah, I understand sticking it out as best I could in that case.
They did this with the small adhoc reporting group I was in (and other groups in other departments) by folding us back into corporate IT. It didn’t make things more flexible, as they claimed it would, it just made us less responsive and made everybody unhappy. I was lucky to be able to take early retirement not too long after. Good luck to you.
I did contract work for a company whose tech writers for customer service used this method and where talking it up that the team I was on should use it, too. We had a discussion about it and accepted the system because it would help us prioritize the tech writing we did for several departments.
We did implement the change and it really helped our team a lot, allowing us to create and edit materials for all other teams in a timely manner. It also allowed to to change our estimates for getting things done based on things like a change in policy or software change because we could quickly find out how many documents the policy change affected.
One other thing our adopting the ticket method did was discover just how the team who had been using the method had been using it to inflate the amount of work they did. Someone would place a ticket for a misspelled word in a doc, and they would count that as one of the 27 updates they made in a single day, while our group was only updating 1-5 docs a day.
It turned out that our updates were much more complicated than misspellings the other team counted and as a result, we tabled misspellings and suchlike as a reason for updates but made checking for such requests mandatory when updating a doc because of a process change. Lo, and behold, there wasn’t as much work for these other two tech writers so they got brought in to help us with our work. While it cheesed them off at first, I think they enjoyed the greater challenges they now faced. And, sadly, all of us contractors were laid off.
But contractors are often hired to work themselves out of a job. It was one of the best projects I was on.
There was an email I received last week forwarded by a guy who’d had the same thing happen to him (transferred, demoted, new team) who was trying to get HR to switch him to a new team, because he claimed his demotion from Consultant to Sr Analyst was causing him to be bullied. It listed other grievances, such as a lack of diversity (African American and Native American) on our data teams. He named names and tried several times in the last 4 months to work within channels to be switched. It was forwarded to 400 people. I looked today and he’s no longer on the company email server and the email has been deleted from all inboxes. That’s how to go out with a bang.
StG
My reaction is that this signals the beginning of that process, with a gradual “at work” retirement. I’m your age, and I’m not thrilled to say it, but the time is past that I eagerly look for new challenges at work, or opportunities to impress new supervisors. Your employer has shown what it thinks of you; it only seems reasonable to reciprocate.
I’m not saying, “Don’t do any work.” Just no need to set the curve. Plenty of room at the middle (or slightly below.) Give someone else the chance to be top dog.
Who knows - if you put less of yourself into your job, and expect nothing other than a paycheck, you might find that it is more tolerable (in a completely unfulfilling sort of way.) And the continued paycheck/benefits might actually be worth pushing retirement back a ways. Especially with the benefit of working at home. Even if you CAN afford retiring early, each extra year you work would likely make it more comfortable.
Take this time to enjoy your beasts, take care of yourself, and give serious thoughts to how you want to spend the next couple of decades you have on this planet.
'Zactly. Get your emotional mind into retirement mode even if your intellectual mind and body are still stuck in work mode 40-ish hours a week.
IMO getting ready to retire is a process that takes wading into. Going full-bore hard-charging work mode to the last day then being bewildered the next Monday when the wake-up alarm doesn’t go off is a recipe for disorientation and unhappiness.
I’ve got a bit over 10 months left. It’s admittedly a strange feeling to know it’s all going to end soon whether I want that or not. But at the same time I’ve enjoyed various periods of very low workload or outright sabbatical over the years. I expect to adapt emotionally just fine. Now we just need to not melt down the economy so I can adapt financially just fine too.
Understood, but why don’t you give it 3 months or so before making what might turn out to be a rash decision? I’m thinking the “couple of years away” would make an economic difference in your retirement so, in this instance, patience might truly be a virtue.
I’m not someone to do things rashly, and I’ll give it a chance. Today I was playing with the camera on my computer to prep for the first team video call tomorrow. I hate all of that. I’m not of the selfie generation, I don’t want to have to feel like I have to put makeup on for these calls, but boy, do I need makeup!
Dinsdale - I already told the new boss I was planning to retire in a couple years, and really didn’t want to learn new systems. Our conversion to SAP a year ago was so hard, and is still playing out, and I won’t do that again.
Preach it.
StG
Daily team calls does seem a bit excessive, though 15 minute calls are practically just bumping into a coworker in the hallway, but having 2 hour long meetings is a
I’m actually a fan of regular team meetings, one business unit here has 3 video meetings a week, lasting about 10min, and they were better when it was an in person meeting with a dozen of the managers in a room. They’d take less than a minute each to brief the group on their upcoming activity, and if it impacted any other group, they could run through it right there. After the meeting broke up, it would inevitably break into 3-4 hallway meetings because “Oh, I wanted to ask you about something”.
What @Dinsdale said. Two years before retirement everything changed at work. I looked at the marketplace for insurance. Would have cost me $800 a month. I decided to deal work. I kept up my same excellent standards but emotionally started withdrawing. If I had to sit through a meeting (all virtual) I kept my camera on and zoned out. I stopped caring about the enterprise and went to work just for the paycheck. Nothing bad happened. Once you become a cog, nobody pays attention and that was fine with me.
That sucks not being allowed to WFH, but I get why they want to have QA centralized. If your boss or second level boss in a product team has a bonus dependent on getting the product out on time, QA reporting to them might be a problem.
I was involved with testing hardware, and sometimes it got to test until pass - flaky stuff gets retested until it passes, then ship it.
You’re not quite there yet, but you qualify for COBRA for 18 months, where you pay the company contribution but get to stay with the company plan. I did this before I retired a bit early. It was far better coverage than the exchange could offer.
Also, it sounds like they are keeping you in the same place. If so, your work relationships might not change as much as you fear.
Also, as you get closer to retirement the chance they are going to give you much of a raise diminishes, so you can relax. And hope for a layoff with decent compensation.
I fully expected to do that, but ended up doing the opposite.
Knowing I was leaving in a year meant I didn’t care if I rocked the boat, or pissed off some boss I didn’t report to, or broke long-held beliefs and procedures.
So I did a lot of things the way I thought they should’ve been done all along.
(And, to be honest, found ways to weasel out of tedious busywork I hated doing).
I’d like to think I changed part of the corporate culture, but just talked to a former coworker and in some ways it’s worse than ever. Sigh…
Oh, well, at least I loved my last year. And really feel like I went out on a high note.