This Business and Moment...

[HangTime]

The saga continues. On wednesday it'll be six weeks since my interview and the 4 weeks since i was told there was a 4 week pause on recruiting activity, ended last Friday. I sen the Hiring manager a message last Wednesday morning to query if there was any update and i've still had no response. If it turns out i dont have the secondment after all this wait I think it safe to say im going to be fairly ******* peeved.

Even if you do get it that doesn't sound great, radio silence from your future manager. Plus the fact that either a) there is something going on behind the scenes that is making it hard to confirm this secondment, some hidden issue you don't know about that could sting you in future or b) they are mega-disorganised, which isn't the best environment to work in.

 

[Zenduri]

Even if you do get it that doesn't sound great, radio silence from your future manager. Plus the fact that either a) there is something going on behind the scenes that is making it hard to confirm this secondment, some hidden issue you don't know about that could sting you in future or b) they are mega-disorganised, which isn't the best environment to work in.

So there was an update yesterday. Apparently they "cant confirm i have the role" as her operation manager is currently discussing the organisational structure for the new financial year so the role may or may not exist and they "cant confirm anything" until the strucutre has been put in place. I've now got no timeframe for when i find out......

 

[HangTime]

When does your financial year end? That would be a valid timeframe to request more info as presumably the org structure will be defined by then.

 

[Screeeech]

Stuck in the middle of a competency crisis.

Normally, in my field of work - I'm surrounded by really good engineers, who are all competing for the really juicy projects to work on, and nobody wants to do the boring mundane stuff, so it's a case of keeping people sweet and rationing out the boring work.

In my current role it's the opposite, it's very hard to deal with - I have heaps of juicy work to do, but absolutely nobody capable of even getting started on it.

I assigned a task to somebody, to produce a technical design document; explain how something works, why we're doing it - how we're doing it, along with the business problems that it solves. The intention being that we have a blueprint for how this specific thing works, to use as a reference.

Half a document gets produced, totally illiterate, unreadable garbage, 4 weeks of work - a joke.

When I asked this person to provide more detail, and re-do certain elements of this - they basically went onto google and just copied and pasted the text from the documentation (from vendor support websites), into their design document, verbatim - word for word. (you could actually google search the text from the document, to find the source material)

I can't work with people like this, I don't know what to do with them, or how to approach it, I manage them - but I didn't hire them, so called "senior engineers" that can't read or write, or even make any effort.

Situation feels unresolvable at the moment, and I don't have the patience for it.

 

[Cadder]

What kind of engineering @Screeeech? In my line of work (mechanical engineering) I have encountered similar.

 

[Screeeech]

What kind of engineering @Screeeech? In my line of work (mechanical engineering) I have encountered similar.

Network engineering (I operate data centres) or I try to.

Most of the people in the game aren't real engineers (that term is a bit overused) as none of them have engineering degrees, but that's open to interpretation I guess!

 

[MichaelAwkward]

Got an interview next Wednesday for a role with an extra day in the office, but closer to home, car allowance and a 20% payrise. Role is much more focused on what I enjoy doing (financial reporting and technical accounting).

Don’t want to get my expectations up until it’s looking more likely but it’s hard not to with my current role being a hot mess.

 

[LuckyBenski]

I can't work with people like this, I don't know what to do with them, or how to approach it, I manage them - but I didn't hire them, so called "senior engineers" that can't read or write, or even make any effort.

Situation feels unresolvable at the moment, and I don't have the patience for it.

Relate to this a lot. I'm only line managing 2 people who are junior test engineers, but I'm very frustrated by the lack of... Awareness? Just feeling like there's no view of the big picture or why we do things by process, document them etc. Let alone getting them to do mundane housekeeping type tasks (we're a small team so have to do a lot of our own facilities management). I find myself doing a lot of small tasks because if I give them more than 2 items in a day, only the first one or two get touched. So I just don't bother putting stuff in their to-do lists, which means I'm overworked with trivial stuff they should be able to handle.

A developer called me last week to say that one of the testers had given him some feedback that was just "It doesn't work".

 

[Screeeech]

Relate to this a lot. I'm only line managing 2 people who are junior test engineers, but I'm very frustrated by the lack of... Awareness? Just feeling like there's no view of the big picture or why we do things by process, document them etc

Yeah it's a tough one to solve when it's like that.

The team I manage - it's like herding cats, one guy I have is really good - the others are absolutely useless and aren't that far away from basic IT support - yet they're calling themselves senior engineers. Which creates another problem - because senior stakeholders in the business think I've got "senior engineers" on my team, when I don't - because that job function can't be performed by them.

It's just a painful cycle of failure and I hate it lol.

 

[LuckyBenski]

It's just a painful cycle of failure and I hate it lol

This is how I feel, I know it's a bad attitude to let fester but I feel like I'm running a remote team with broken culture, so I'm starting to not care :/

 

[Screeeech]

This is how I feel, I know it's a bad attitude to let fester but I feel like I'm running a remote team with broken culture, so I'm starting to not care :/

It's inevitable.

I suppose it really comes down to a question of whether or not you can deal with it personally, some people can just take the money and just accept mediocrity, but I really struggle with it. Previously I had a good 8-10 years of my career, where I was delivering heaps of awesome stuff, alongside really awesome people - and since Covid it's been very difficult to get back to that.

I ended up in my current postion as the money was very good, and I was asked to come in and "fix all the problems", but the one life lesson I've learnt from all of this, is that if the company culture is broken and the problems are the result of lots of bad decisions - it doesn't matter how good you are, you'll never fix it.

 

[rypt]

I ended up in my current postion as the money was very good, and I was asked to come in and "fix all the problems", but the one life lesson I've learnt from all of this, is that if the company culture is broken and the problems are the result of lots of bad decisions - it doesn't matter how good you are, you'll never fix it.

I can relate to this, fixing company culture has to come from a senior level down... by hiring good people in the position of power and cleaning out the bad ones.

 

[HangTime]

I think I was quite fortunate (in some ways) when I managed a team that when I took over it didn't have many perms so there was the flexibility to clear out contractors and third party consultants, I had one rubbish perm but thankfully she resigned as she would've been put on a PIP. Generally the people I hired were good and in some cases excellent, although I had a bit of an awkward scenario whereby I hired a junior and non-junior at basically the same time and the former outperformed the latter (mix of them being good and the other bang average). The problem with having "senior" engineers that aren't very good is they may just stick around blocking a headcount because they are paid well for their skill and may struggle to find a better job elsewhere.

One complete pile of ***** however was the fact that our performance management process was based around having rough percentages of people in different categories. This meant that it was hard to give more than a certain percentage of people good ratings and conversely being forced to give some people bad ratings. This arbitrary grouping sucked because it meant if I hired 10 great people and someone else hired 10 rubbish people that broadly speaking the spread of performance ratings would be similar. Privately we (manager peers) joked that the best strategy was to hire one crap person so they could be the sacrificial lamb to the HR stats police. Thankfully I had a pretty supportive boss and we did a bit of fudging of stats like having people who were leaving counted in the lower buckets.

 

[MichaelAwkward]

I can relate to this, fixing company culture has to come from a senior level down... by hiring good people in the position of power and cleaning out the bad ones.

That's exactly the situation with the company I work for. At first it was made out like there was just a few specific systems related problems that needed fixing but as the months have gone on it's evident that the problems are far more widespread and run deep, and beyond my ability to fix alone and there's no desire from anyone else to even start tackling them.

 

[LuckyBenski]

our performance management process was based around having rough percentages of people in different categories. This meant that it was hard to give more than a certain percentage of people good ratings and conversely being forced to give some people bad ratings. This arbitrary grouping sucked because it meant if I hired 10 great people and someone else hired 10 rubbish people that broadly speaking the spread of performance ratings would be similar.

That's mental! So there's no such thing as a great team or a team needing loads of work. Just makes the assessments pointless surely.

 

[ChrisD.]

It never ceases to amaze me how senior people make BS statements with no actual facts, which can be quite damaging.

'Application A/B/C went down due to product X/Y/Z'.

No. The application went down because someone didn't RTFM and misconfigured the product which caused a L2 loop.

You wouldn't drive a car into a tree, and then blame the car.

 

[Throrik]

You wouldn't drive a car into a tree, and then blame the car.

The people you work with compared to me are obviously much different Because they certainly would.

 

[rypt]

The part that frustrated me the most recently is when people doing the same job are held to different standards.

It's almost a weekly occurrence for me now that "senior" managers challenge why I didn't dot the i or cross a t ... however allow others (including those more senior than me) to completely forget the i/t.

It's not my fault that you expect me to do better than others (including those more senior than me), and I welcome the challenge and pointing out things that could be done better... but you should do it equally to everyone!

 

[malachi]

The people you work with compared to me are obviously much different Because they certainly would.

Or blame the tree for being there.

 

[Screeeech]

Privately we (manager peers) joked that the best strategy was to hire one crap person so they could be the sacrificial lamb to the HR stats police. Thankfully I had a pretty supportive boss and we did a bit of fudging of stats like having people who were leaving counted in the lower buckets.

This is exactly how it worked when I was at AWS,

There are so many people leaving/joining all the time, that the managers generally used up their PIP quota on the leavers - to keep things civil.