This Business and Moment...

rypt said:
Found out end of last week that we are going to continue to be on a hiring freeze in our division until at least July... a hiring freeze that started almost a year ago now!

Thing is ... we've had a number of good people leave over the last 12+ months, so we are already understaffed.
Only way to get new head count approved is to get the CFO for the whole Corporation to personally approve it. Our divisional management has a plan though - every other month between now and July they are going to ask the CFO to approve one junior head-count for our division. I've even seen a spreadsheet where they mapped out what they were going to ask for each month.

I'm honestly just laughing on the floor at this point, as our division is making annual profits (2022) that have hit 10 digits, but are slightly down on last year (2021) due to world events.

Oh - our Xmas party was cancelled to "save costs"
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Hey they might not have gotten that final 0 funding your Xmas party!

I used to work for a company who turned a monthly profit of £30,000,000-£40,000,000 which was shared between all of the directors. They had been intending to build a new extension to the already massive logistics hub they had, once they got denied the rights to build they suddenly had hundreds of millions of money "back" that they had intended to spend to build this as they were cash rich they never financed. What did they do with that money? New microwave in the office.
 
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rypt said:
Found out end of last week that we are going to continue to be on a hiring freeze in our division until at least July... a hiring freeze that started almost a year ago now!

Thing is ... we've had a number of good people leave over the last 12+ months, so we are already understaffed.
Only way to get new head count approved is to get the CFO for the whole Corporation to personally approve it. Our divisional management has a plan though - every other month between now and July they are going to ask the CFO to approve one junior head-count for our division. I've even seen a spreadsheet where they mapped out what they were going to ask for each month.

I'm honestly just laughing on the floor at this point, as our division is making annual profits (2022) that have hit 10 digits, but are slightly down on last year (2021) due to world events.

Oh - our Xmas party was cancelled to "save costs"
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Yep, i think this week will rattle some cages. The saga of funding continues as the programme delivery essentially halts this friday because of it. All senior problems worthy of Fawlty Towers and Yes Minister. We’re doing our best to carry-on up the khiber.. it’s like you can see the individual decisions that have ovcured to this point in slow motion.

The joys of having a “business” and a “IT” that is treated like a lowly third party supplier.. welcome to the 1980..
 
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Had a visit today from an office manager and business operations manager from our London office. I run a 4 person test lab outside London, our main office is ~100 people. Despite spending a lot of time last year consulting our team and revising plans with a builder to update the lab, London colleagues have decided it's too drab and uninspiring here and will ask the firm who built our London office to visit. Apparently they know better and the plans I've requested budget for in 2024 can wait until some new people stick their oar in. Also had health and safety nonsense spouted at me all day where I couldn't get a word in edgeways despite being experienced with the subject matter, done my own risk assessments in previous jobs, PAT testing trained, etc etc.

All this while I'm trying to actually run the lab, look after testing, manage staff, and do technical work of my own. I can't deal with the politics and I'm trying to do two people's jobs already. Trying to decide whether to hold the company to ransom for more money, hold them to ransom for more staff/support, or just flounce out.
 
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NickK said:
Yep, i think this week will rattle some cages. The saga of funding continues as the programme delivery essentially halts this friday because of it. All senior problems worthy of Fawlty Towers and Yes Minister. We’re doing our best to carry-on up the khiber.. it’s like you can see the individual decisions that have ovcured to this point in slow motion.

The joys of having a “business” and a “IT” that is treated like a lowly third party supplier.. welcome to the 1980..
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Honestly I've become disillusioned working "traditional" for big corporation.

I think I want my next job to be in either a smaller firm, or in Big Tech.
 
rypt said:
Honestly I've become disillusioned working "traditional" for big corporation.

I think I want my next job to be in either a smaller firm, or in Big Tech.
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I grew up in big software consultancy and the moved with the spinning off of a division into smaller product and then through mainly big Digital/consultancy. The reality is a large portion of a business now is digital technology. The fact that the FTE IT is treated worse than a supplier (or contractor) by the business is a pretty damning inditement of their culture and business mentality. The FTE staff to non-FTE is in the order of 1:20 or even 1:50 and so they've given up attempting to attract skilled individuals and simply have now decided to pretty much outsource completely. The AI presentation was funny and telling -- the management through nothing about directly stating that they're heavily investing in AI to reduce the the need for jobs.. (sounds very computers will replace humans ... what they meant is humans will use excel to talk to other humans)

It all comes down to appreciation of the skillsets - the intelligent companies already know their value and cashflow is enabled by digital, they know that the value is in the technologist fundamentally understanding the business and that is worth paying people for. The problem with keeping IT and business separate. What they don't realise is AI automation needs technologists that understand it to build and maintain it... what AI does is replace business jobs :D (I partly jest, it's a skillset change and human business will simply use AI for one human business person to talk to another).
 
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Martynt74 said:
Every year i tell myself i'm in a better place and more organised and that the year end period won't be as bad as last year, then i find myself doing 14hr days all this week :(
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Yup. I did 97 hours one week due to this places' ability.. (a) nothing is ever enough and (b) not enough authority to change to fix it means it's not worth staying to fix it. Personally I think they'll off load to EU (Poland) and close down UK ops in the longer term..
 
NickK said:
Yup. I did 97 hours one week due to this places' ability.. (a) nothing is ever enough and (b) not enough authority to change to fix it means it's not worth staying to fix it. Personally I think they'll off load to EU (Poland) and close down UK ops in the longer term..
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It's ok, i've found a way to cope (don't judge me on the curtains. It's a rental!)

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Was going to write a long rant but long story short it seems a lot of the recruitment issues I mentioned recently come down to certain people, especially when it involved agencies, basically doing the minimum and forwarding and/or signing off on the first non-terrible candidate instead of narrowing it down to the best...

On the flip side I made some decent money over the Christmas period from the overtime sorting out the mess but not sure it is worth the headache.
 
Friday was fun.. steerco hard and deep conversations. Now we're into the last phases of the programme (about 40 product services being delivered), I'm being re-targetted with my number two.. challenge - how to get that programme of work duplicated in a different business in month or so. Should be entertaining and long hours for a few weeks.
 
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Rroff said:
Was going to write a long rant but long story short it seems a lot of the recruitment issues I mentioned recently come down to certain people, especially when it involved agencies, basically doing the minimum and forwarding and/or signing off on the first non-terrible candidate instead of narrowing it down to the best...
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We've touched on this before but from what you've written in the past there is some serious issue with recruitment at your place. 50% of hires don't come back after a week or something? That's not just bad luck, or half of workers are useless, fundamentally something is misaligned somewhere with your processes in terms of how the job is being advertised, who you are bringing in, the expectations being set around the job etc (potentially all of the above). Needs a proper drains-up probably. To repeat myself, if 10% of workers quit after a week, that's possibly a 'them' problem. If 50% of workers quit after a week, that's an "us" problem.
 
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I suspect there's awful amount of churn (People joining and leaving) in my own place. They keep banging on about how great it so many new people have joined, but the head count seems to stay the same.
 
I have totally clocked out at work.
It's so stupid that I get asked to align with X person on X topic so we can progress them. X person declines last minute 4 meetings now hahaha I am just like whatever.

I now just chat **** in my 1:1s and am the most expensive paperweight possible. I'll take that ****. Not sticking my head out. I'll let them give me little bits and pieces but I'm not going to be jumping up and down for work. I suppose this is the pure definition of phoning it in at this point.
 
I would be wary of being passive in that situation. It gives the person who won't engage the opportunity to use you as the fall guy for their lack of progress on a work item.

I'd be trying to move laterally away from that line manager.
 
OspreyO said:
I'd be trying to move laterally away from that line manager.
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Not a line manager, in a different team and just supposed to be "working with me" to get stuff done.

I will see how it all goes. I am cognizant of detaching too much from work haha so I have crafted a plan to make sure I drive a new project (not as the PM, **** that, we have PMs for that) but as SME to drive some standardization of business data for data driven decisions. It would me a little more work, make it look good for me, and keep me relevant haha

You have to play the game, man :cry:
 
I've just had the official "your job is likely to be impacted" - i.e. we're probably going to **** you off :D soz.

Bless my boss, she did not want to do that but it's business innit. The risk of not getting this head of product ops role last time was that this would happen, so you know. There are over 40 engineers impacted, too. So it's a large culling.

I have been given a list of jobs to apply for (should I want, which I will to play the game) and will find out about April time whether I get anything from that, and if not, I'll be in line for the official steps to get rid of me.

I could have to play the game, and if I get a sense that this is happening, it's all very stressful and causes people to get super sick. Which is covered for up to 2 years. I just need a doctors note... so you know.

Getting rid of anyone here is long though, so it'll be probably end of the year even if I wasn't sick from it.

I felt for my boss delivering the news. I was like, don't stress for me. It's all good. It will come to what it comes to and I appreciate your empathy, but you don't need to worry for me.

It's quite an exciting feeling tbf! Never thought I'd say that in this situation ha
 
Have you gone through it before?

Sometimes it's change and if you've been in a place a long time that's exciting. Long time ago now. But when I changed from a long term job I tried some new stuff but rushed back to a permanent job a bit quick in hindsight.
 
OspreyO said:
Sometimes it's change and if you've been in a place a long time that's exciting. Long time ago now. But when I changed from a long term job I tried some new stuff but rushed back to a permanent job a bit quick in hindsight.
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Been there like 4 yrs in this role. The thing is money is good and so are benefits. I'll milk it for as long as I can really.
But it's not exactly exciting. It's dull as ****.
I'm going to commit to some of my own stuff and double down on it, hopefully while I still bring in this salary and see what sticks.
 
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