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[Darvi]

Build a house within a month?! Even I know that ain't fucking lego.

[RedKing]

Build a house within a month?! Even I know that ain't fucking lego.

Yeah, well....unrealistic timeframes are part of the job. Part of the reason we do project schedules is so we can go back to the client and say "Unless you have a temporal nullifer, an army of slave labor, or are willing to throw an absolute shit-ton of money at this, it's not happening on the timeline you asked for."

[timferius]

I will have a temporal nullifier, but it was being taken away.

[SalmonGod]

It sounds like our work frustrations are very similar, Redking.

[nenjin]

Although.... if you have an especially chill middle manager, they might have a hidden 5th type of meeting.  The "morale is low and we can afford a breather right now, so let's use the pretense of a team meeting in this semi-private room to just all bullshit together for a while, away from the hawkish observation of the lifeless office drama lovers on the other shifts" meeting.  I had one of those managers once.

I have a manager who is this guy. It's not like, deceptive or anything. It's just when we have our support meetings, they inevitably turn away from what we're doing, to what the rest of the company is doing, and all the business drama that's going on.

I like it, personally. It's my in to how things are going outside of my work bubble. But yeah, it's a very intentional technique to put middle management on the same level as the grunts for a little while.

My company is exceptionally flat in structure so I don't necessarily have the corporate type meetings you describe. But we do have an assload of meetings, sometimes meetings to plan other meetings.

[Levi]

Meetings aren't all bad.  Sometimes its an hour long period of time I can brainstorm how I'm going to write a piece of software.  Scribbling like a madman in my notebook probably looks like I'm taking notes and paying attention.

[SalmonGod]

So... the shit has totally hit the fan at work. 

It's always been a tense environment, but there has been a further pressure build-up taking place for the past 5-6 months.  There have been two teams, of 5 and 6 people, that have been complaining for about that long about being understaffed and drowning in work.  This has been a terminal complaint for years as I understand, but it's been insanely bad for this period.  There have been favorites slowly shrugging their workloads off onto other people, and new projects expanding our workload, without ever any hiring to compensate.

On top of that, there is a general trend towards everything getting increasingly complex over time.  Something will happen that results in a complain with our customer.  This will catch upper management's attention and they will be unable to accept that this situation was a rare fluke.  They will insist that a new process be put in place to prevent the same thing from ever happening again, and we will be drilled about it until we come up with something, even if the extra process we come up with does nothing to address the thing that happened.  It's all about appearances all the time.  This constant build-up of extra bullshit work and complexity results in more mistakes, which results in more customer complaints, and it's a compounding cycle.

Furthermore, our station manager is a perfectionist with absolutely no grounding in reality.  If she catches wind of anything going wrong, no matter how inconsequential, she interrogates.  She never gives her employees the benefit of the doubt about anything, and will waste hours of your time trying to find some way to determine that it was your fault, if you happen to be the person she catches with your hands on the case when she hears about it.  And she really enjoys doing this in group settings.  She is a predator.  She LOVES putting people on the spot and making them squirm.  When she is stressed out, she will prowl around the office looking for an excuse to use an employee as her personal chew toy to take her frustrations out on.  And her answer to every problem is to complicate processes and apply more intimidation.

So that shit has been reaching critical mass for a while now.  Half the operation was talking about looking for other jobs by late November/early December.  Then came the biggest nail in the coffin they could have possibly produced.

They hired two new people around mid-December.  But they didn't hire them as workers.  They hired them each to act as a supervisor over each team.  To keep us all motivated, on-task, and to improve our processes.  They did this when there were people on both teams that had already expressed interest in moving up to leadership positions for years that were already proven incredibly well-suited to the task.

So the other team that was 6 people (plus their new supervisor) has already lost 3.  The station manager is freaking out.  Panicking.  And taking it out on everyone.  Seriously doubling down on the shit that is driving everyone away.  She was prowling about today with that obvious facial expression and gait that reads "who can I chew on... I need to rip into somebody."  And sure enough, she abducted one from my team into her office today for an hour and a half over something that wasn't their fault in the slightest.

My team, which hasn't lost anyone yet, is likely to lose 4 in the near future (but none of those 4 have talked about it yet, except amongst each other), and the new supervisor already looks like she's on the verge of being fired for not working any miracles.  That would put my team at one person... not me.

As mentioned in the happy thread, I have two interviews on Thursday.  Trying really hard not to be one of the last people out the door!

Fucking business world is so stupid, there are not words to describe it.

[Baffler]

Shit dude, that sounds terrible. Has anyone said anything to the station manager about that nonsense, or talked to the higher ups about it? I guess to you that probably sounds like speculating on crazy solutions to the mold problem in the break room at the nuclear power plant when the reactor coolant is leaking.

[SalmonGod]

I don't think she's likely to ever understand her role in what's going on.  She's just not the type to learn.  Now that I'm this close to leaving, I will explain to her how it's her own fault if she decides to try and pick on me.  But otherwise, I will just be content to watch the business crash and burn from a distance, and know that she got what she deserved.  And it will be a big hit to the company.  I believe the account I work on is the third largest that company has.  And it's going to fail hard and fast.  I'll be surprised if they still have it by the end of summer.  And now that I've been there a while, I can't say that the company as a whole doesn't deserve it, too.  I hear the founding family is pretty cool, but our regional executive is a sleezeball shithead.  And the general mandate from corporate office since the time I arrived has been "We have ambitious targets for revenue growth this year, which means you just have to suck it up."  Let's see you make your numbers this year!

[Vattic]

Our meetings are mostly fine. We get a terrible video from head office which is filmed like a bad breakfast morning show. We all jeer at it and make snide remarks. My department management mostly "forgets" to show us it.

We've a new team leader where I work (like a deputy department manager). The guy keeps telling people to do things that make no sense.

Latest example: Everyone asks what we're all doing tonight. He says the usual and we get on with it. A couple of hours later he calls everyone over and says he has a new plan and lays it out for us. Someone points out that he hasn't put anyone on fresh foods and he replies that James will do it. We point out that James is off sick and he replies "but he did it last week".

Before that he came and told me he needed me to do something else, but to finish everything on the aisle I was working on first, and to leave anything I don't finish on a cage somewhere in the warehouse where it'll be obvious for working later. I asked for clarification on me leaving some unworked and he said for me not to, but to make sure I left a cage for anything I left unworked.

He had a go at me last week for taking too long when I was well within the time he set me for the job. He also did the same with two other members of the team.

Recently he started to realise that everyone dislikes working for him as nobody will do overtime on the nights he works.

This is on top of our store manager being very contrary. One day he complains about things not being like X, the next he complains that is is like X and demands to know why we did something so stupid. If his football team loses he also lets it out on everyone.

[Reelya]

Yeah... I suppose there are professions in the business world where my categories wouldn't apply so much.  And of course, I have little experience outside of business-y type workplace settings (office work/sales).

I do not envy retail work, though I doubt you'd find office work to be that much better.  Dealing with customers is horrible... but office culture has a reputation for generating the worst management and petty cut-throat politics that make sane people feel like dissidents in the Cold War.

On that count there's the Peter Principle:

The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in their current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."

So, in other words as long as you're good at your current job, you'll get promoted to a different job. This process only stops when everyone lands in a job they suck at, at which point they're not good enough to get promoted, but not bad enough to get fired.

[Vattic]

We've a related problem where I work in so much as competent employees won't apply for the lowest management position on nights (due to how said managers get treated by the company). It leaves us with dunces in charge and all the best people leaving for better, often management, jobs in other companies.

The current guy is a little different. He managed a different sort of business, got a job at the company I work for as a department manager, fucked it up and got moved down a peg.

[MaximumZero]

I don't think she's likely to ever understand her role in what's going on.  She's just not the type to learn.  Now that I'm this close to leaving, I will explain to her how it's her own fault if she decides to try and pick on me.  But otherwise, I will just be content to watch the business crash and burn from a distance, and know that she got what she deserved.  And it will be a big hit to the company.  I believe the account I work on is the third largest that company has.  And it's going to fail hard and fast.  I'll be surprised if they still have it by the end of summer.  And now that I've been there a while, I can't say that the company as a whole doesn't deserve it, too.  I hear the founding family is pretty cool, but our regional executive is a sleezeball shithead.  And the general mandate from corporate office since the time I arrived has been "We have ambitious targets for revenue growth this year, which means you just have to suck it up."  Let's see you make your numbers this year!

I hate to say this, but if I were you I'd be warning your accounts that, "I'm going to X Company, and if you liked my service, you should think about it, too."

[SalmonGod]

The Peter Principle is the natural consequence of the idea that people are only as valuable as the work that they do.  Want to reward someone for being an exceptional ditch digger?  You can only reward a ditch digger so much, before the only way you can reward them further is by making them something else.

I don't think she's likely to ever understand her role in what's going on.  She's just not the type to learn.  Now that I'm this close to leaving, I will explain to her how it's her own fault if she decides to try and pick on me.  But otherwise, I will just be content to watch the business crash and burn from a distance, and know that she got what she deserved.  And it will be a big hit to the company.  I believe the account I work on is the third largest that company has.  And it's going to fail hard and fast.  I'll be surprised if they still have it by the end of summer.  And now that I've been there a while, I can't say that the company as a whole doesn't deserve it, too.  I hear the founding family is pretty cool, but our regional executive is a sleezeball shithead.  And the general mandate from corporate office since the time I arrived has been "We have ambitious targets for revenue growth this year, which means you just have to suck it up."  Let's see you make your numbers this year!

I hate to say this, but if I were you I'd be warning your accounts that, "I'm going to X Company, and if you liked my service, you should think about it, too."

I've thought about it... but this account is horrible to work for.  They're a very demanding and ungracious customer.  There are a few nice people, but in general they all suck at their jobs and then pass the blame on to you when their fuck ups catch up with them.  It's not my fault if I can't make miracles happen to rescue them from their own supply chain management, but they do everything they can do hold us accountable as if it is.  And our station manager only amplified the effect of their attitude.

[SalmonGod]

Sure enough, the big boss is pulling everyone into her office one by one to talk about what's going on -- "Are you planning on leaving?  How can I make things better?"

Everyone's being very honest with her.  She just finished with one of the people she likes picking on the most, and couldn't understand when she brought her in why the poor girl was shaking.  After that one, she left her office looking pretty pissed off.

I'll be next as soon as I get back from lunch... 90% sure of it.  This is going to be an interesting conversation.