Working.... You are doing it right.

Discussion in 'Discussions' started by Createx, Jan 15, 2013.

  1. Createx

    Createx Member

  2. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    I have a story -- not quite as interesting as this, but still true.

    A Headhunter for this collection agency, whose home-office was in Columbus, Ohio, had found me while I was working in Jacksonville, FL. It was perfect timing for me because I was at a point where I was more than ready to leave, not only the company, but Jacksonville as well. And accepting their offer was probably THE best career decision I've ever made. But that's another story.

    When I was first hired, the I.S. department was kind of fragmented -- they had multiple collections systems, including one that I was expert on (which is why I was sought out), and there were only 4 programmers/analysts in our section, two men (including me) and two women. Turns out the other guy was a transplant from New Jersey, he was smart, he knew his way around the company, so we bonded a bit over that.

    Anyway this guy could talk. We used to go to lunch together a lot (Sometimes with or without the other people on the team) and I swear that most of the time he'd end up getting something for free. He'd complain about this or that, or whatever (some legitimate, a lot though was him being really picky), make a big deal over the smallest items. He'd end up getting free desserts, free drinks, etc. It was amazing.

    Well this guy had been there for a lot longer than me and he had his fingers in all sorts of projects for different clients and he was manually doing daily and weekly, uploads and downloads and stuff like that that truly should have been automated -- programmers at any other place would probably not be involved in that sort of stuff. But he also had programming projects and he was ALWAYS behind on them. And when the boss would ask him how this project was going and that project was going, he'd always be able to give excuses, because, after all, he really was doing lots and lots of stuff (right?).

    The boss would actually walk up to him and look over his shoulder and sure enough, there he was with his nose stuck in the program.

    Well one day he called in sick, and the boss decided to take a look at this program that was not getting finished.

    Turns out all the guy had done was create a program header -- had added, basically all the standard includes, etc. But there was nothing else -- no actual code. He'd supposedly been working on it for over a month, and hadn't written a single line of code.
     
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  3. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    In every possible occupation where you *CAN* be elsewhere, there is someone that has been employed to do whatever their job is for many years that has not ever even tried actually doing the work.

    Back a decade or more back I worked as a stocker. I was regularly shuffled around to different areas to do the work. One day I decided I would quit. I stopped working and started coming up with excuses for why I was behind. A week later I finally turned in my resignation.

    My bosses (Plural.) were so very incompetent that I did nothing but make excuses for a week and they never caught on.

    I do not believe there is an exception to this sort of nonsense. If you actually work hard all the time, you are alone. Keep that in mind and be less productive. :confused:
     
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  4. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    No doubt. Don't get me wrong, I loved working at that place in Ohio. But my previous job... by the time that that headhunter had contacted me, I was bored out of my mind with my work, which had gotten ridiculously repetitive, so certainly I was not working all the time I was at my desk. And any excuse to do hardware support instead of actual programming or anything that got me out of the IS department was a good one. (I actually was doing computer support over the phone for our parent company, something which really pissed off my boss -- they knew I was the go-to guy, and I was more than happy to be gabbing about printers or PCs or whatever than writing yet another variant of the same old program I had written a hundred times before).

    But I admit that when I loved what I was doing (which happened at my next job), I was more than willing to put in the time actually working on the projects I was supposed to. Plus my new employers kept life interesting enough for me, trusted my opinions, and so on. It wasn't always candy and roses, of course. Because I was trusted, my life outside the office sometimes blended into my life inside the office, as I'd get frequent calls at night, on weekends, etc. Even when I wasn't on-call, people knew that I was sometimes go-to person for certain types of issues. So that wasn't optimal. But when I pushed back about that, that happened a whole lot less frequently.

    In other words, when you are treated well, you are more willing to put in the effort. And I certainly was on both counts. At least, that was until our company was sold to different owners. But that's a whole 'nother story.
     
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  5. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    BTW, I remember one other part of the story -- the previous company I had worked for, because we had had drastic downsizing, particularly in our department, I ended up automating just about everything as far as nightly, weekly, and month-end processing was concerned, as well as all our uploads and downloads between us and our many clients. I had set up a turnkey system/bulletin board for exchanging data with our clients, which eliminated 99% of the manual stuff our computer operators (nearly all of whom had been previously layed-off) used to do.

    Well, when I had gotten to the company in Ohio, I saw how many manual processes they were doing and I kept urging them to automate at least some of it. I mean, I wasn't trying to put anyone out of a job, but there was no reason why programmers ought to be doing that kind of stuff. There was some resistance to that, but mostly it came from that co-worker who was doing all of those manual processes that, according to him were 'too complex to automate'. (He had previously argued that it was even too complex to turn over to operations lol).

    In retrospect, I think he was afraid that he'd lose all of his 'excuses' for not completing his real work.
     
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  6. Createx

    Createx Member

    Honestly, when I get paid, I usually want to do something. I like to do nothing and procrastinate all days as much as everyone, when I'm at work, why not actually, you know, work? That is if I'm in a decent mood and like my employer, then I'll actively search out work.
    But during the holidays, I worked as a production assistant, night shifts were I was stacking dictionaries and stuff like that for hours straight. Well, I obviously liked my break, but I hated the other downtimes. Why? Because time craaaaawls if you have nothing to do :)
     
  7. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    It's surprising, though, how often that happens, that a person actually likes their employer. Many people learn to hate their jobs, and their employers. And many employers do earn that hatred. But I look back at my employment, and when I've been treated fairly, or have loved my work (preferably both) I've been at my best as far as productivity is concerned.

    My very first programming job, I gradually came to hate my employers. Hate may be the wrong word -- it was more like extreme distrust. They lied to their employees, did all sorts of things that were probably illegal and unethical. A few people at the top of the company (and some at the bottom) were racists so if you were not white, you were probably doomed to a very short career there, no matter how good you were. Heck, they often didn't treat their white employees much better, but at least you had a chance to stay, if you could stomach it (or if you were straight out of college like me, and didn't know any better).
     
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  8. Kazeto

    Kazeto Member

    And really, it can all be summed up with "are employees treated as humans". Because if you are treated well enough, it is very easy to like what you are doing, even just because you got used to it.

    Of course, being "indispensable" helps with that, because if there is one employee who (allegedly) is difficult to be replaced, the employer is bound to be a little less acidic towards him/her even if they treat the rest of their workers like trash. But really, employers who don't have enough dignity to treat their workers humanely won't have happy futures (unless every employer does that), because making employees loyal tends to yield better results than keeping them threatened (and presumably angry).
     
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  9. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    At that first job, I actually was treated (relative to the other programmers) fairly well. But I'm not blind, and some of those people who were mistreated had been friends (or at least potential friends until lthey got fired). I'm sure had I been the immediate victim, I would have left a lot earlier than I did. But it doesn't mean that I Wasn't affected by it, I wasn't angered by it and so on.

    I told you that there was a lot of racism at my first programming job. Well there was this one programmer -- I honestly can't remember his name or national origins -- he was Asian American though. He was hired to do a job that he clearly (at least to me) was overqualilfied for -- but it was still a big project. We had discussions where he would talk about, among other things, the Futures market, because apparently in college he had designed and written a program to analyze futures, he had done a lot of research, etc. (He essentially said, 'don't invest in futures' lol).

    Anyway, just casually, me and my friend Gary went over to meet with him because we were friendly guys, and we liked him, etc. Also, he was isolated from the rest of the programmers (I wasn't aware at the time, but learned by experience that that was the company modus operandi -- to isolate non-white workers from everyone else). He was really excited to demonstrate what he had done on the project, and it looked (at least to me) that he had completed it, or near enough to that. I was thinking great. It's good to see someone you like do well.

    Well, in a few weeks he was fired. No one said why. So Gary and I asked our boss, because we were unhappy about that (losing a potential friend and all). Our boss told us that he couldn't complete the project, he was goofing off, etc. I was dumfounded and told him that we saw a working program -- he had showed it to us. Our boss denied ever seeing it and basically told us to keep quiet, end of conversation. Of course that was bull. I KNEW what that program was supposed to do, and it clearly did it, and it had been done for weeks.

    That was a real shock. At that time, I was somewhat aware of SOME of the racism through stories and rumors. But I think that was the first time I saw it up close.
     
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  10. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    In situations like that it is especially helpful to document everything. If you run into this BS again, giving the unjustly fired person a written testimony that explains that they were fired unjustly and detailing their strengths can go a long way to patch the bad reputation they likely got for being fired.

    I have worked at places that had a hard rule never to hire anyone who had ever been fired for any reason. They did work around that from time to time though, so they can be reasoned with. But without any evidence it would have been impossible to get them to recognize the difference between fired for a good reason and fired for no reason.

    (I am not saying you did anything wrong. I am just suggesting a way to fight such BS in the future. Always keep in personal contact with trustworthy coworkers. You never know when BS may happen and you need a credible witness on your side.)
     
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  11. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    The problem was that I didn't identify it as racism at the time, I thought it was just a mistake. It was the repeated incidents that put it all into perspective. A lot of what I'm saying comes not from what I was thinking then, but from things that happened over time that made a light go off over my head, like in some cartoons.

    It's hard to come to the conclusion of racism because of a single incident, when you aren't expecting it. It's sometimes only after you see the pattern repeating that can come to that conclusion (or a single car ride with a partner in the company, and head accountant -- who I was recruited to drive to work when his car was in the shop. That's the first time I heard the racism (at least at that company) stated so blatantly. I was not only shocked by what he said, but the reckless disregard for me hearing it, as if he was oblivious to there being anything wrong with it. It wasn't the last time, but I's always more shocking the first time.

    Don't get me wrong, mostly racism is pretty subtle, so that you aren't always sure that that's what it is. That's because people are either smart enough or self-deluded enough to not state things so clearly. But this guy, a person of great power in our company really let me know how he felt. That was a lot more than I really wanted to know.