This Business and Moment...

currantloaf said:
Have been working at a multinational company just over 2.5 years. Work in a role support function for a growing area of business . All trackable metrics in my area are up in terms of number of people in the business I support, revenue, client volume, regions of expansion. It is almost a 100% increases YoY on these metrics which I have been holding down. I work hard. Originally had focus on certain region, my knowledge and insights has me now involved globally just because nobody else has the same level of insights . Originally however started on a lower title to my peers and as a result paid less. Colleagues overlook far less.

I have been pretty disgruntled on pay and workload and it has been picked up and in doing so my bosses have proposed a change of title to that of my peers along but with me picking up a direct and indirect report and a more global role to influence the wider business. The standard job title description says no direct reports - ive been told to ignore this. The increase is low double digits. The increase is also bringing me more aligned with my peers who don't have direct reports. My bosses are arguing that it is a pay increase. My argument is that it is a change of job role/title/responsibilities and should not be seen as a straight increase. Ive raised twice and pushed back expecting more but the conversation ended quite frosty.

How would you view/ approach / what would be a fair £x to expect to manage a DR in London?
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I had a similar pay increase when going from developer to managing our test lab, at the time managing 2 DRs. Think they offered 12.x% and when I demanded more they added 1k to make it 14%. "This is the top pay for this band" - in a new role with no equivalent in the company. What ****ing band.

I'm still sore about the pay versus massively increased level of responsibility, stress, now managing 4 people, overload etc etc. But ultimately it was poor negotiation on my part i.e. I should have walked. I've since asked for a pay review and a flexible working review and been stonewalled with a smile. This year I'm likely to start showing up 4 days a week and my boss can do what he likes.

So it sort of depends how attached you are to the role I suppose. Can you suggest that if they don't accommodate your requests, you will start working to the same level as your pay grade?
 
LuckyBenski said:
I had a similar pay increase when going from developer to managing our test lab, at the time managing 2 DRs. Think they offered 12.x% and when I demanded more they added 1k to make it 14%. "This is the top pay for this band" - in a new role with no equivalent in the company. What ****ing band.

I'm still sore about the pay versus massively increased level of responsibility, stress, now managing 4 people, overload etc etc. But ultimately it was poor negotiation on my part i.e. I should have walked. I've since asked for a pay review and a flexible working review and been stonewalled with a smile. This year I'm likely to start showing up 4 days a week and my boss can do what he likes.

So it sort of depends how attached you are to the role I suppose. Can you suggest that if they don't accommodate your requests, you will start working to the same level as your pay grade?
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Thanks for reply. Your experience does seem very similar. My request was 15.5% and change to particular title, was offered 12% and change to same team title is a reduction. It has been assumed I have taken this even though I had asked to speak later when I had the chance to review.

I like the company, my business colleagues and what I am working on. That is the sucker. But don't think I am getting paid fairly. I don't understand what would be the logic in having a disgruntled employee over what is in real terms a rounding error.
 
currantloaf said:
Thanks for reply. Your experience does seem very similar. My request was 15.5% and change to particular title, was offered 12% and change to same team title is a reduction. It has been assumed I have taken this even though I had asked to speak later when I had the chance to review.

I like the company, my business colleagues and what I am working on. That is the sucker. But don't think I am getting paid fairly. I don't understand what would be the logic in having a disgruntled employee over what is in real terms a rounding error.
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Completely relate. I like the people and the work (although we've all been overworked for 18 months now). When I look at how much money we waste/could save with more efficient methods, it seems mad not to pay me a few grand more to keep me happy.
 
Everyone knows that you get the experience in your current workplace and cash it in at the next one. Don't be sore, it's an investment that will pay off hugely if you play it right.
 
NickK said:
I would have a quiet word with HR and other members of the board w.r.t company policy to new parents not being an ****.

I'm surprised that new dads don't get time off for 1-2 weeks. Then into WFH/parttime office.
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We get two weeks off and it's paid, thank ****. But yes, I could have done with the WFH/part time office. It all went through HR, who I believe advocates well for us.

I wish I'd just spoken to my boss myself.

Anyway, we get 13 days per quarter at home and I'll use them how I want to - I'm WFH this morning to take my wife to an appointment.
 
So my parent company (Smiths Group) has announced that they are selling, or demerging my company (Smiths Detection), to focus on "core technologies". Could be an interesting couple of years coming up..
 
Think Im going walk out my job soon before my end date of 30th Feb.

Since they called me into the office to basically sack me in October, I haven't been doing much apart from letting the guys in India take over.

Today I was working from home and my boss asked me about a quote for some servers, we always do video calls and he could see I was at home. I work in the office most of the time, its 1hr on the train, to the office and back.

He sent me an email saying. As its my last month in Feb, he wants me to be in the office 5 days a week to an handover?!!? I thinking to myself why? I have been doing that remotely to the Indian team since November and they haven't hired anyone in the office to replacement me :confused: So I have no one to physically do a handover to.

So he wants me to be at my desk, basically doing nothing apart the odd shoulder tap "oh, my laptop isn't working" :confused:
 
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Weird month. We had a significant outage on system, and it was all hands to the wheel. Then I realized it wasn't all hands to the wheel, the majority of people/managers were furiously organizing meetings to talk about the outage. Creating action points and ticking check boxes. By the time they'd done that a couple of us, had mostly recovered the issue.

The amount of meetings where I heard nothing about recovering from the issue, and all about it being someone else's responsibility was just mind blowing. It was a light blub moment, that its not the place it used to, in the past everyone would have worked together on something like this. Not anymore.
 
malachi said:
Think Im going walk out my job soon before my end date of 30th Feb.

Since they called me into the office to basically sack me in October, I haven't been doing much apart from letting the guys in India take over.

Today I was working from home and my boss asked me about a quote for some servers, we always do video calls and he could see I was at home. I work in the office most of the time, its 1hr on the train, to the office and back.

He sent me an email saying. As its my last month in Feb, he wants me to be in the office 5 days a week to an handover?!!? I thinking to myself why? I have been doing that remotely to the Indian team since November and they haven't hired anyone in the office to replacement me :confused: So I have no one to physically do a handover to.

So he wants me to be at my desk, basically doing nothing apart the odd shoulder tap "oh, my laptop isn't working" :confused:
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I've been in that situation. Its very weird. I had to spend a month basically doing nothing one time.
 
OspreyO said:
Weird month. We had a significant outage on system, and it was all hands to the wheel. Then I realized it wasn't all hands to the wheel, the majority of people/managers were furiously organizing meetings to talk about the outage. Creating action points and ticking check boxes. By the time they'd done that a couple of us, had mostly recovered the issue.

The amount of meetings where I heard nothing about recovering from the issue, and all about it being someone else's responsibility was just mind blowing. It was a light blub moment, that its not the place it used to, in the past everyone would have worked together on something like this. Not anymore.
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It is like this everywhere these days sadly.
 
Rroff said:
It is like this everywhere these days sadly.
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I thought it was just certain peoples tendency to micromanage, or just some people were very poor managers. Now I realise its more like 80%+ are doing this. My opinion of them has just fallen through the floor. I feel like I'm living that movie "..they live..."
 
OspreyO said:
I thought it was just certain peoples tendency to micromanage, or just some people were very poor managers. Now I realise its more like 80%+ are doing this. My opinion of them has just fallen through the floor. I feel like I'm living that movie "..they live..."
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I find it more common than not these days sadly - people will spend a lot of time talking about doing something but trying to avoid actually taking any responsibility.
 
OspreyO said:
Weird month. We had a significant outage on system, and it was all hands to the wheel. Then I realized it wasn't all hands to the wheel, the majority of people/managers were furiously organizing meetings to talk about the outage. Creating action points and ticking check boxes. By the time they'd done that a couple of us, had mostly recovered the issue.

The amount of meetings where I heard nothing about recovering from the issue, and all about it being someone else's responsibility was just mind blowing. It was a light blub moment, that its not the place it used to, in the past everyone would have worked together on something like this. Not anymore.
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In my old place we had significant outages - specifically to the point the regulator may have temporarily retracted the right to operate. 13 incidents were sat at board level. The reasons were simply around issues with moving old critical platforms that had been optimised for the hardware and networking in place, poorly implemented failure management and they'd lifted and shifted into our cloud platform without understanding that (they'd previously outsourced their entire IT and components had not been updated in 10 years).

Luckily my team there to sort out the cloud work, but the CEO had to fund an analysis tool to analyse the logs of the legacy platform that was causing the issues (over 1000 servers makes finding the failure mode and the optimisation difficult).

My folks were asked to step in and help but spent meetings after meetings with the CIO, CDIOs going step by step through operational metrics from AWS with the legacy teams.


There's a strong element of fear in the workplace nowadays.. it also seems that people are being treated as contract (short term employees make cheap contractors) and the desire to upskill is almost zero as they don't want to keep or develop people long term because the board sees AI as the future..
 
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I get the feeling there's a lot of people in the same boat, 2025 is meant to see the shoots of growth but think it's all overoptimistic reporting.

I remember being in the CEO's office with the CTO and the product team (merging of two companies meant rationalisation), the other company director was attempting to screw us over by making it appear we couldn't deliver anything (we'd been forced to use the lowest cost outsourced partner and not the continued engineering we had like they had). They'd canned the UK engineering, the old head of engineering built a company with all the old staff, only for the CEO to turn to the CTO and ask 'why did we make the them redundant only to pay <head of engineering's company> to bring them back in?'. I stuck my head up in that meeting as the strategy was clear and the CEO was asking my management (other company) to have a plan on his desk by friday, and not a plan of a plan.. a short term later I was given the push by the management as they continued to engineer the downfall of the UK office..
I learnt a lot in that CEO office that day..

Today I think it's continue with the training (free courses from google etc). I'm also feeling the drop in motivation after completing the course, so I need to find some focus for motivation. I need some additional traction on job front too but I've also heavily simplified the CV into core messaging.
 
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Might take a week off from job hunting, getting demoralised banging my head against a brick wall.

Had a few recent calls with HR people and first interviews which seem to go well, the calls end with we'll get in touch in a couple of days to book the next stage, then days pass and nothing happens. Really rude imo.
 
In my experience HR depts and Recruitment agencies have established ghosting as the standard response to unsuccessful candidates. So they can hardly complain when candidates now do the same back to them.

I treat every application or interview even 2nd interview as fire and forget. It ceases to exist after I've done it, or applied.

Tbh it's the same at work. A lot of people never reply or acknowledge emails etc. So I usually have a "if no reply" what will happen. That might be the issue will escalated, or considered resolved. In that I'm never held up waiting for a reply. I can move forward or abandon.
 
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