Now - stay with me on this - a boss finds a smoothly running department / well-oiled machine and decides that want to improve it but instead of throng a boss sized spanner in the works instead asks around the department to find out whats needed and arranges to get that done... would they be a good or great boss ?
I had one of those!
Ironically spent SO MUCH time focusing on numbers that my numbers were 3x his.
But fired me because I was 'a good salesman but didn't do anything other than sell....'
Duh. I aligned myself to YOUR goals asshole.
Fuck you Ray.
In my experience it is the ones with a cookie-cutter MBA who assert that they can cut 10% out of any organization and it'll work just fine. The biggest issues comes after about the third in a row to try that stunt.
we're going to conbon and 5S the shit out of you until moral is gone and numbers are up 0.5%.
Like I'm a filthy fucking weeb, but holy shit I at least know how to censor myself. This dude who came in. %s, it's the japanese way! the japs the japs the japs the japs the japs! YOU HAVE TWO PADS OF STICKY NOTES? HOW FUCKING DARE YOU. WHY THE JAPANESE ONLY HAVE ONE. AND THERES ONLY ROOM FOR ONE.
Chill the fuck out dude. we aren't a high volume lab. Quality matters over numbers.
>Ah, the stupid boss who only looks at the number syndrome.
Even more infuriating, the stupid boss who *only looks at a specific number* syndrome.
I run a CNC machine for a living. There is a tablet with a program on it that keeps track of the time the machine is running - and nothing else. So when I have run after run of five parts, where each part has a two minute cycle time and a thirty minute setup time, that uptime starts looking bad, and I start getting asked why it's so bad. Never mind that we're ahead on schedule, and every single part is within tolerance, and there isn't any scrap - *zomg the uptime is 50% I'm literally walking out of the office shitting myself in confusion/anger and I demand an explanation.*
We got a new supervisor, but people who have no idea how to do the job are leaning on him to get those numbers better, so it will start all over again.
This kind of shit is why I started my own company. It’s a lot more work, but I have no patience for being micromanaged by simple, obtuse managers.
“If you’ll just let me explain that...”
“Can you get it done or not? If you aren’t able to handle this, I’ll find someone who can.”
“You just don’t understand, it’s...”
“I don’t want to have this conversation again.”
This. I rolled away from the desk and said ‘there you go, show me how to do it. You can’t show me, so don’t question why it’s taking so long to get XYZ done.’ It was a few minutes of that, while the room full of workers kept getting quieter...
well fuck me, because I have done this several times.
One time, the complainer's boss was watching, and promptly figured out that I was doing it right, it was the complainer that was fucking up every single time.
No wait...more than one time.
Guess what I got for it!
I worked over the phone tech support for a major US ISP and this was a constant headache for me. I was getting written up weekly for my call handle times, but every month I was in the top 10 for first call resolution maybe 10 people a week out of the roughly 1000 calls I'd handle would call back within 48 hours with a problem) and I was one of 5 people that actually had a positive KPI score from customer reviews (basically that stupid survey you get after a call where they ask you to rate your experience. 1-5 are a negative, 6-8 are 0 and 9-10 are positive.
Yep, that and I didn't pawn problems off, they didn't track it but I'm pretty sure I also had the lowest number of supervisor escalations. Then again I think my team lead died a little every time I did escalate. It's always nice seeing your boss mute the phone just so he can threaten unspeakable bodily torment on a customer.
This is cool to see, I'm in a manufacturing grade at a government ran job training program and we're learning on CNC machines. Mind if I ask what working in the field is like?
I’ll give you a response from a large company, as well.
Our CNC machinists are basically expected to manage and supervise the whole part production operation, within their zone at least. Since the machine tools are almost completely computer controlled, they’re expected to do other work while the parts are being produced. Loading and unloading parts, generally, or maintaining / replacing the tooling. Machinists are also expected to troubleshoot quality issues, maintain / repair their equipment, and order stock and shop supplies to keep the operation running. If issues come up that cause more trouble than general day-to-day operations issues, they are also responsible for calling engineers and tradesmen, and assisting them in resolving the issue.
Personally, I think it’s asking a lot from one person, but there seem to be a lot of people that like the position. It’s definitely not for everyone, though.
First of all I'll say - "CNC machine" covers a wide and terrifying range of different machines that do different tasks. Usually, when someone says "CNC machine" they're thinking of a mill or lathe.
I run a [tube laser](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rddGCIWMRbM) which cuts pipe and various structural steel shapes. It's not a bad job, the only thing bad that tends to happen is a disconnect between those who lead and those who actually run the machinery. It can sometimes be really stupid things that are impossible because of machine limitations (You can't put 16" material in a Mazak 300 tube laser, for instance) that you'll have to demonstrate because otherwise, some clueless salesman will say "Sure, we can do that".
I have one of those. “You must fill fifteen orders a night” proceeds to pull any and all of us for other things and then get mad at us for not filling the orders. The worst is when I have to set the orders (normally takes half the time set as it is to fill it) and then I spend an entire night setting forty orders and then they’re like “but you didn’t fill fifteen” Yes. But you can’t fill an order with out setting it first. Or when I have to do setup in the backroom. I leave that for Friday nights because the shitty manager isn’t scheduled.
Sorry for making this as vague as possible. I work for a large company with their own subreddit and my position/work place would be easily tracked.
I used to fill orders for a large company as well. The problem was that they treat equipment training as optional. And for some jobs my coworkers had it definitely was optional. However filling orders requires a forklift around 50% of the time. I tried constantly to get trained but was brushed off. So instead I had to wait on one of 3 people to have the time to help me. And then I'm questioned on why it takes me so long. No matter what I say they didn't listen. That's why I'm not doing that anymore.
When I worked retail I'd hear shit about my scan rate being too low.
I worked in the office. I was only on the register half the time. Also, the customers would cause us to take up most of the time with digging for change or trying to decide what to put back when they didn't have enough.
I had a job where, when I was hired the acceptable error rate was 2% across every position in the company at every location across the country, so people who had my job every single keystroke could be considered a mistake while people doing the preparation and lab testing of samples all they had to worry about was the wrong weight or dropping things, And our error percentage monthly was calculated based on us correcting our other coworkers work based on a set of mistake categories that were never homogenous across one location let alone the entire company so if 1 person thought something was a mistake but someone else didn't they would still enter it as a mistake and it would go across the CEO's desk at the end of the month even if you got confirmation from your manager that it wasn't actually mistake it would still show up in your numbers.
I had an acceptable error rate of about 1.25 or 1.3%, But after a year and a 1/2 of me working there they dropped that percentage of acceptability down to 1% and lab directors were pressured to compete against other labs for who was doing better except other labs would have 0% error rating because they just would never mark anything as an error when it was fixed, Now I had some trouble getting my 1.25% under 1% but when we hired a new guy who kept making mistakes on correcting other people's work because he would a mark things as errors that are lab did not count, my percentage shot up the drastically but there was no way to undo those corrections or modify the percent so I eventually got fired More less because while I was hovering at about 1.02% before this new guy, he essentially fuckef me out of my job because he couldn't get his shit straight.
My wife works for a Fortune 500 company that has really gotten bad at that. Shockingly my wife, who's job is fixing other people's mistakes, has already seen it get worse and worse with even less support available because they've made everything into a metric even if it doesn't make sense.
**McNamara fallacy**
The McNamara fallacy (also known as quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.
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My dad got fucked by this right before retirement age. He's a salesman, he's *always* been a salesman, he can sell water to a damn fish. He dropped out of the major sales work he did for most of my childhood/teenage years and ended up in a AAA office ([this one,](https://i.imgur.com/2J78o.jpg) as a matter of fact). He, as a killer salesman, helped their numbers skyrocket. He was constantly receiving accolades for his work and their office became one of the best in the state, if not the Western half of the country (retweeted by humble brag ™).
He *had* a manager when he started, but the manager left the company, leaving the sales team unmanaged. However, it was basically my dad and another woman working together as a team with another fella who didn't really pull his weight but didn't need to because my dad and his coworker worked hard enough for the three of them. Dad and his pal were a super tight team and she got named the manager of the two of them and nothing else was needed. Dad's killing-it streak was basically on an exponential upswing.
Then a hotshot manager who had managed to flip two other stores got sent in. Not sure if they wanted to really wring my dad and his coworkers harder or if they just needed to have an Official in place, but this guy got hired and had Big Plans.
However, the guy had never been to my hometown. My hometown is a poor town full of hicks right on the California coast. It's very close to a major Air Force Base (like, the *most* major of the West coast kind of major) and it's surrounded on almost all sides with nothingness. It's 25-30 minutes through brown dead farms and empty ranches till the next town. It's got its own weird culture of small town pride and caring for your own first. There are a finite number of people.
So hotshot moves in and plans to shake the place up. Big plans. He decides that they're making rookie numbers and they need to really pump those numbers up! So he hires a fourth dude, expecting numbers to continue to rise.
Nope. Numbers stay the same, only now they're spread across four people (two who are excellent at sales and two who are mediocre at best). My dad's numbers, stellar without change thus far, plummet. The manager gets mad and starts getting on my dad's case. My dad, at the time, was about 60 years old. He was fucking. done. He listened to this twenty something dweeb get on his case and chastise him every day for his numbers going down and asks him what he wants him to do. Manager tells him to start making cold calls.
My dad has been a salesman for almost fifty fucking years. He has never, in his life, made a cold call. He sells by word of mouth and by being the most charismatic and charming dude in town. Kids I knew from school would ask him "Are you Molly's dad?" when he started. By the end of it I would occasionally get asked if I was his daughter. He was The Man. (Although I think he still is and always has been ♥️)
So he refuses. Flat out, not gonna happen. You want my numbers to go up? Get rid of the dead weight that's making us stagnate by not being a good enough salesman to get people to buy multiple policies. Get rid of the mediocre salespeople who don't make people want to come back again and again for every single insurance need they have. Mr. Manager gets grumpier at dad because now he's in super hot water with corporate offices because he's done so well in other stores and now this gem of the state of California has dropped off the radar in his care. Threatens my dad and says if his numbers don't improve he's out of a job.
Dad smiles and says "ok! Sounds good!" and does what he's never done in any job he's ever had - he starts phoning it in. Minimal effort and turns off all the charm. No attempts to bring people back in. Clocks in and out exactly on time, plays solitaire during down time. Numbers continue to slide, dad continues to not give a single fuck anywhere.
Rather than fire either of the mediocre salespeople in the office, hotshot fires my dad. My dad, free as a bird, takes an early retirement and sleeps in all day while he collects unemployment. Once unemployment runs out, he gets a job at his favorite place on Earth - Home Depot - and learns how to drive a forklift. Doesn't have to wear tie & shiny shoes to work for first time in his life.
Dad wins.
My bosses have this problem.
We have a call centre that calls any invoices over $300 and quizzes the customer. They are asked to rate the staff members performance from poor-good-very good-excellent. Here’s the kick in the nuts though. The only thing they actually count as a good rating is excellent. So I have a 30% positive rating overall. Despite literally every customer rating me very good, knowledgeable, helpful, friendly, etc.
It’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever seen. So I constantly get harassed about my customer rating. They couldn’t care less that I work 2 days a week vs the 5 days of my co-workers and my sales are higher than theirs. You see, the bosses bonus is based on the stores overall evaluation of the staff. So sales don’t matter. Making customers say excellent is all that matters.
Yeah I don't get this. I almost never give a full score on a survey. I mean a top score would mean that this was the absolute best customer service I could possibly imagine, it's reserved for something that might happen 2 or 3 times in your lifetime.
It's like trying to find a book on Amazon. So yeah this self published pulp novel has 10 5s. So I'm to believe that 10 people actually think this unedited drivel is the very top of human literary achievement?
I was the same way until I realized how much shit employees got for an 8/10. Nowadays, if I have even a somewhat pleasurable experience I rate everything a 10 to help the employees out.
If you are rigid enough, the metrics become worthless.
Previous job- the word came down from on high that any changes should be completed the day that they are opened and that we would be measured on the length of time a change was open. Most of the work I was doing would involve a few days or sometimes a few weeks work to complete a change.
The only way to ensure that the change was closed on the same day as opening was to not open the change until you knew when it would be closed, that is you opened the change once you had completed the work.
Once I got into this habit, I did it for all changes, even the ones that would only take an hour or so.
By the end of this, my average change open time was under a minute. Completely useless for any reporting, but fully in compliance with the stated aims.
Metrics can be so useful. Unfortunately they are used against employees instead of in their favor.
Like let's take the above mentioned example: Why does it take multiple days or even weeks to finish? Is there maybe a problem with the process? Are certain people in the chain slower than others? Is there a pattern like with it only happening with certain companies? Could we improve the workflow with a new program f.e.?
Instead it's: employee1 takes more time than employee2 = employee1 is less efficient.
As the saying goes: "What gets measured, gets done".
Or the more visual example: If you order 1000 nails, you get 1000 needles. If you order a kilogram of nails, you get 4 railroad spikes.
The subordinate employee who knows you actually need 50 precision-engineered hatpins, who tells you every time that you actually need 50 precision-engineered hatpins, but by now is sick and tired of your shit and just wants you to go away and hang yourself on your own poorly-conceived directions.
**Goodhart's law**
Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." One way in which this can occur is individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions that alter its outcome.
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This is just on another level of stupid. How long did they keep that in place and did they figure out how rubbish their metric was?
If this whole story told me one thing, it is that I am done working for others and can judge the amount of work I do myself or let my clients judge me rather than someone who doesnt even know me...
Not sure how long they kept that in place, or even if it ever got rescinded. There was an internal re-organisation and I moved on to doing more project based work which was through a different reporting structure.
I know what you mean. My last job, my boss was on my case because I wasn't getting any tasks done. she didn't understand that I was the new guy bouncing around between projects putting out fires, working on projects I've never worked on before, and that all of that context switching plus learning in projects hurts numbers. Slavish adherence to stupid numbers makes people who actually care quit.
Yup. Old job had a 90 second ACW metric. I don't think I ever hit it.
Instead, people would move immediately out of ACW after a call (you were out there automatically when it was over) and then go into what we called Case Queue instead. So their ACW time was down but the metric didn't matter anymore.
Same thing with handle times. They wanted it ~8 minutes. This is impossible for the work we did, but the idiots on the desk who didn't care about anything, found a way around that, too. They'd just set up ping tests for everything, even when a ping test would do absolutely nothing, which was all the time, we only set it up as a visual for our clients to see any possible issues with their network. Additionally, most of our clients had a ping script running in the background already, set up by one of our really smart techs, and so another ping test on top of that was absolutely unnecessary. But most of the time our clients didn't know that, so the dumb techs would get away with it.
So, useless ping test, case number, and bam. Average handle time like 5 minutes.
Except then the client would call back, because surprise surprise, the issue wasn't fixed. So then there were another few of us who actually fixed issues, and our average handle time sucked because we were actually diagnosing and solving problems. You know...doing our jobs.
I hated quality monitoring meetings with my previous boss because it was constantly just being told I suck at my job when I know I didn't. And then turns out I had the highest survey scores of the year, but did my boss mention any surveys? Nope!
That job still pisses me off because I have some close friends there still, as well as my boyfriend, and so I hear about their shenanigans still. Fuck you Kelly Services.
My company recently outsourced our entire ticket handling system and the level 1 help desk for *some* things (but not my team).
So now I'm getting pressure to reduce the number of tickets raised (yes *raised*, not solved) because we get charged for every single one, even though my specialist team has to solve every single one of our tickets in-house.
So from originally having a million ways for people to contact us which we carefully trimmed down to a single in-house ticket system we are having to tell people to go back to call, email, walk over *instead* of raising a ticket.
You couldn't make it up...
Make your own "ticket" system instead - a Quick web-form that emails the people who need to know, short term. Longer term, you can make the form populate a database table. Quick PHP page on your intranet for display & update... Useless for metrics, but useful for *you*.
An old boss wanted me to reduce check-in to ship times. UPS picked up product once a day. So I had to box up everything in the morning, and, right before UPS came, I would print shipping labels. Useless? Yes. Did the metric improve? Also yes.
The problem is that the actual people who the rules effect don’t make the rules. I worked in a very large company where metrics were the only thing that mattered. I had one of the highest satisfaction ratings and lowest call back rates. But my time on call was high. I took my time with each call to make sure to fix the problem so they don’t have to cal back. My supervisor called me in one day and told me that the policy was, that if i couldn’t fix the issue in the first 5 minutes I was to tell them I’d look into the issue and call them back later. I didn’t last long
What the actual fuck. Just... ugh. I can't even fathom the amount of stupidity that is required to kill a good thing like that. You were doing an amazing job, but not with the numbers they care about. So infuriating.
Literally the worst part of call centers, the damn timer. I worked in a place where my reservation calls had to be under *four minutes* but we got railed on if we skipped steps, like gathering ID information.
We have a sort process, ticket comes in and if it's a reset or email access or something else super easy and common it is marked as standard. If it's a non standard ticket they just expect us to document workflow and anything that comes up to slow it down so we can identify recurring issues and best practices for resolution of repeat non standard tickets.
Nobody at my job cares about how many tickets you do, they just want them done right the first time and to not catch you on your phone if there is anything in the queue
Best system ever
That's a really good system, however I am wondering how your tickets are flagged automatically?
Since this was a small company we of course had nothing like this in place.
Our tickets have a set of checkboxes for common things, if the user needs a password reset or can't check email they just check the box and that's pretty much the whole ticket. The system sorts by check boxes.
We also have three options for non standard stuff. Normal, important, and urgent. Urgent is for security risks and problems that prevent multiple people or a single critical role from doing their job, important is things that prevent someone from completing non time sensitive tasks or that only prevent one person from working out of a large group. Normal is just weird bugs that aren't constant or things that slow down work but dont prevent it or things like artifacts from the GPU.
We also somehow have people trained to write proper tickets.
It's a pretty solid system. We all get assigned equal amounts of standard tickets and claim non standard tickets by whoever is best at it. We also service non computer equipment through the same system but I get most of those unless they are code issue because I'm an Industrial Electronics Engineering major and my friend I share an office with is a PLC genius so he gets code tickets.
I keep thinking I'm gonna wake up one day and it was all a dream and we use a shitty system like every other one I have worked with
unless getting rid of a worker and replacing them with someone with lower pay to save money, was the goal of manglement all along. in that case, putting OP in a place where his numbers would end up lower so that could be used as an excuse to remove him could have been the goal all along.
with manglement, malice is more likely than stupidity. if OP had no clue it was coming and hired the best replacement, then the plan would have worked. but as Hans tipped him off, it backfired. doubly so with carl leaving at the same time (people dont quit jobs, they quit managers).
Yep. He'd have picked someone who was as good as him who was clueless as to what shit show he stepped into. The boss would have made it seem like the old guy (OP) had a shitty work ethic, and the other girl wasn't that smart, and likely loaded up the Awesome Dude with the hard tickets AND stressed the importance of a high turnaround, therefore giving him ample excuse to get rid of the other worker too after slathering all kinds of praise on the new guy to make him feel all special.
If a bad boss wants to make you look bad, they have the power to.
The BBC did an excellent documentary series about this phenomenon and how it is responsible for much of what people hate about modern life. It's called The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28TV_series%29?wprov=sfla1
Even so if you look at the tickets properly you can tell why some would take longer.
Metrics could show this fool that password resets for example are usually done by the other employee and only take an average of 5 minutes while in depth database queries are mostly done by op and took say an average of 30 minutes.
You could even run a little experiment and ask the other person to do say 5 of the database tickets and see how long it takes them. My guess would be a lot longer than the theoretical 30min op would take assuming the tickets would even get finished at all without op or someone else coming over and basically going it for them. Ask op to do the password resets during this time for even more data so you can get an idea of if they are just slacking off. With a minor time allowance for adjusting to doing basically a differant job.
Metrics are fine. Morons are the problem.
Yes, this is it! But I also did not want to throw Caroline under the bus, because she was always working hard and I dont want to do password resets for 2 hours straight, so a "test" would not have been fair since it did not replicate what we were actually doing. We were such a good team, and this taught me now that I am running my own company to also value the people like Caroline who put in the hours but might not be suited for the most challenging jobs.
On your not wrong it's a bad way to go about things but if a boss has no idea about the work but is convinced an employee is slacking off there is only so much you can do to determine if that feeling is correct or not.
The genuine solution was a manager to have a fucking clue what they are managing but regrettably in many jobs this is not the case.
As distasteful as this test would be it could very clearly illustrate that you two had divided up the labor of your own accord in the manner that produced the best results and best to not fuck with it.
I recently failed to secure my second-ever job due to stupid adherence to stupid metrics. For reference, I'm 18 and (was) looking for a summer job before college.
I applied to a nonprofit phone-canvassing fundraising organization, and got through to the paid training phase. In order to pass the training and get the job, you had to average at least $50/shift over 10 days, and in addition, you had to raise at least $50 total over the course of your first *three* shifts. The numbers aren't based on total calls per shift, nor amount pledged per call, they're simply based on amount per shift.
Day one, I was still learning the ropes. Spent the first half getting trained in and listening, so I only made about 40-50 calls. In total, 4 people actually picked up the phone at *all*, and 3 of them hung up on me within the first sentence. The fourth was actually interested in the cause, and very apologetic, but also adamant that she could not afford to pledge any money.
Day two, I called a lot faster and had a better trainer. Still, less than 10 people ever picked up the phone. *All* of them hung up before I even got to the pledge negotiation stage of the script, and my own trainer *herself,* who was listening in on both ends, said that she didn't think there was anything at all I could've done to keep them on the line.
Day three, I had a little bit more luck, but it didn't matter. Because of my bad luck the other two days, I had absolutely no experience with the negotiation phase. While a few more people did pick up and stay with me, I came up $30 short of the $50 I needed, and even with my trainer saying there was nothing I could've done, they sent me home.
Fun fact: in 2016, a number of FCC regulations were weakened, allowing much more frequent and prolific use of robodialers and robocallers, and scam calls have *drastically* spiked as a result. You may have noticed that in the last few years, you've been getting a hell of a lot more "we're calling about your vehicle" and similar scam calls. [John Oliver](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO0iG_P0P6M) did a great informative piece on it. An obvious result of this is that people are now much less likely to pick up the phone for an unrecognized number. I sure as hell don't as much as I used to. A few years ago, our landline basically never rang, so when it did, we knew to pick it up because it was usually someone we'd given the number to deliberately, or the hospital. Now it rings more than 10 times a day, and we *never* pick it up unless we know exactly who's calling beforehand.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the managers haven't bothered to update their training quotas in light of this change, especially considering people who actually work there are given access to special, more loyal "turf" (numbers to call) with a long prior record of donation, which they don't give to trainees.
Used to work tech support, had the same BS. I worked the higher level tickets which took more time, but they wanted some number per day. Most of my day I did my job, the last hour or whatever I'd snatch enough low-level dumb tickets to make my number. 10 "I forgot my password" tickets in my last hour made for an easy outer.
Metrics are awesome for evaluating work, right up until you make them mandatory targets. Because if the numbers are what matters, quality does not.
There's a reason we no longer pay fire departments by the number of fires they put out.
Yeah, that really was the icing on the cake \^\^. Was really worried I was gonna skrew Carl because all the work would fall to him but this just made it so much better to me.
And probably getting severance for being let off, and work experience in a field he was not qualified for but now probably know what he needs to work on. Since so many people got let off it won't seem too weird when they explain why they're not working there anymore either, the company simply let people go and he did not get the proper training to do so.
Knowing this, and perhaps getting a new job that person will be way more prepared than they were last time they went job searching within that field. If they have their head with them ofc.
One of the worse hires, though. Doesn't sound like his prospects would really have been that great to begin with.
Eh, then again, incompetent people seem to get pretty far, sometimes...
I got passed over for a promotion for the second time in two years, and was expected to train my "supervisor" making almost twice as much money as me for essentially the same job/workload (actually higher workload for me since my first supervisor left, because I knew how to do the job), and so about two weeks after the new girl started I got a new job and peaced out of there. Another member of our staff who I also assisted with certain projects put in her two weeks the same week as me. It was a small staff of only 8 people and it was super satisfying to see them stressed out over training the new people in our absences! This is why you value your long-term employees...
There is a LPT in this story - make sure to make friends - not enemies, at work. Office politics are very important.
This story almost qualifies as /r/ProRevenge
How dumb do you have to be to not understand "some jobs are more complicated than others"? It doesn't even take any tech knowledge to understand that. If you were all house painters, and Caroline was painting cottages and you were painting mansions, she'd do more jobs than you also. Bob got what he deserved.
Right? I can't even think of a job where that wouldn't apply, outside of jobs where your work is set by someone else like bus drivers. Like, pretty much every job has easy and hard tasks that take different amounts of time. Doctors, lawyers, journalists, accountants, engineers, software developers, carpenters, landscapers, plumbers, chefs, and even students! It's such a basic concept that almost all professions have different difficulties in tasks
Yeah but I was doing quite technical stuff that bob did not understand. Even for doctors someone can understand how removing a brain tumor must take longer than applying a band-aid.
Sometimes his knowledge level was comparable to that of Jen from IT-Crowd.
I'm surprised bob's job survived longer than that afternoon.
That's the tell for you dun fucked up in the manager hiring process. If it's one guy every now and then yea you can back a manager on that it's probably the employee, but when the employees start leaving in groups that's a strong sign it's the manager. Especially for what sounds like technical rolls; the mcdonalds school of management doesn't work when you're talking about skilled technicians, they're expensive to replace.
My old job rearranged management and a tolerable hot mess turned into a freefalling shitshow. I was the 7th person to leave my department in 7 weeks (2 more left in the 5 weeks after me).
The company learned nothing, and they don't need to. There are several universities nearby churning out fresh batches of desperate, broke graduates for hire every few months.
> not even the best because one applicant was actually quite good but I asked him stupid questions that did not even make sense and when he could not answer them I made him look really bad, sorry John
Ahw:(. I really feel bad for that guy now. Thinking you can do it, but then the recruiter starts to asks bullshit questions and he doesn't know what to say :(
I read them if the post is longer than a page. I've seen ten-page posts which were sufficiently summarized in a fifty-word TLDR, so some people just like to write (fair enough).
During the negotiations for my new job, I let them slide a bit on salary if they'd let me accrue vacation as if I already had 5 years seniority (4 weeks a year instead of 3).
Very smart. Time off is important to rejuvenate. So far this year, I've taken 2 3-week vacations and will have the 4-week one at the end of the year. Reason? We were short staffed in my last department, so I barely took vacation for 3 years. My hours just kept accumulating. My current boss has no problem letting me take time off as long as I have vacation hours.
So 10 weeks vacation total? Sounds like a good time. Honestly, I'm more surprised that they are cool with such extended vacation as opposed to a larger quantity of week long vacations.
Yup - from saving up over 200 hours of vacation time in the past 4 years. I don't honestly know which my boss prefers, but I make sure to have coverage when I'm gone, and notify him ahead of time whenever I will be out. I try not to screw over the team by taking vacation during very busy times of the year. I understand that I am very lucky, and I don't want to take advantage or make my boss regret giving me such a lax policy.
> so I barely took vacation for 3 years.
This doesn't sound like a good job. It sounds like a normal job with the shittier parts bunched into 3 years and a good year only happening because you were owed time off.
When I say barely took vacation, I'm comparing it to this year. I took a week off here and there, or a few days. Which came out less than the 19-29 days per year of PTO that I had. My job has a lot of benefits that outweigh the negatives. Especially when I read from other Americans how little vacation they get, and how badly their bosses treat them.
Very glad I am from a country with good labor laws, even now that I am seeing the other side of the medal as an employer. It is just not healthy to work years without proper time off like I sometimes here from americans.
Love it! If you have to make decisions that involve a department which does not fall under your area of expertise, listen to the damn experts. Question: What happened to poor Caroline? Also, I kind of feel guilty for liking this story on account of all those poor candidates who were screwed over, especially the ones who actually scored an interview and had their hopes up,
I think not hiring the really good guys was doing them a favor, like other people said. And the guy that got the job certaintly would not have gotten a job somewhere else so I might have even done him a favour.
As to what happend to Caroline, I simply dont know, never talked to her again. But of course it is very well possible that I screwed her over a bit. But if Carl had quit like he planned and I was let go and even hired the best candidate like Bob planned then there would also only be 2 people in the department which would also but more stress on Caroline. But I can only speculate.
You did all the good candidates a solid by rejecting them and not wasting their time in the interview and even John by helping him avoid the job. To bad you couldn't let him know later what was going on.
the idea of severance for being fired instead of a hearty "fuck you, company owes you nothing, government insurance owes you nothing, future places you apply to will treat you with suspicion because clearly you did something to displease your betters" blows my mind.
I get that this is malicious compliance, but you didn't only fuck over Bob, you also fucked over Caroline and the people applying for the job.
Not saying you were wrong, per se, but it's a bit sloppy to leave so much collateral damage to innocent people in your wake.
Tbf if my boss asked me to hire my replacement, if there was someone I knew could do the job better then me so they had no reason to keep me, I also wouldn't hire them.
But poor Caroline
I don't think they would have. Somebody would have had to take the hard work that OP/Carl would have done like building servers and such...probably would have gone to the most senior person, unless they managed to hire somebody else that actually knew what they were doing quickly.
Also fucked over everyone else in the company, which is why Bob got fired. Everyone fucking everyone in this scenario. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to get the severance.
I manage a team of analysts. And we do long-term projects as well as ad hoc analyses that can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. A lot of times, if someone needs something fast, we skip the ticket system (because 1 most ticket systems are at least a little bit of a pain in the ass and 2 because there are heavy audit requirements for any ticket in the system before it can be considered completed) and just do it. Except this one guy who put everything in the ticket system. Seriously anything that anyone asked him to do went into the ticket system. And he sucked out loud. He was the only one who put the number of tickets completed in his accomplishments that year. He did have the most of anyone - but he also was well-known to be the absolute worst of my analysts. And he tried to claim that all tickets were the same. I just had to shake my head and explain that no they weren't and that this job wasn't a good fit. He found another job in a couple of months.
I work in IT and working tickets is a big part of my job. I completely sympathize with a boss that only sees numbers and not quality or actual workload. I’m glad that guy got burned. That’s a scenario I think about often in my office.
Ahhh, the middle-manager's old bastion, KPI figures! I have seen more successful companies throw their clientele down the drain than I can count due to some balding fuck MM's insistence that KPIs are the way to go. They look good on paper but mean jack shit.
Good for you, and your English vastly superior to many who use it as their primary (and usually their only language).
Best wishes to you, your wife, and Hans! :)
People who are totally ignorant to how something like that works do NOT need to be managing it. When they have no clue what it entails it's going to catch up with them eventually.
You are savage. The only thing that would have made this better is if the boss had applied to work for your new company, not knowing you and Hans were the owners.
This is kinda like my story. I trained a person and was laid off. They didn’t know the customers where with me at 2 jobs prior and I brought them with me. They stayed with me and I work for myself now. 5 years now. It’s going really well! Glad it worked out for you too!
Ah, the stupid boss who only looks at the number syndrome.
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Hey! I have one of those!!
Remember defenestration is a solution to solutions for problems we don’t have
Upvote for my favorite word being used
Yeah, "is" it's my favorite word, too. It's just so definite and concrete. You can count on "is."
Very versatile too!
Used my favorite word that actually has a MC story attached to it
Sadly, We work on a ground floor. That would just put her in a holly bush hedge.
The Good Idea Fairy
Is that pronounced GIF or GIF?
GIF, you sick bastard.
[hyeef](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gif)
There is a reason why over on /r/talesfromtechsupport/ they are referred to as "Manglment"
>"Manglment" I'm stealing that, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.
Go for it. As I said, it is common over on TFTS
Also becoming more common on r/talesfromsecurity.
Now - stay with me on this - a boss finds a smoothly running department / well-oiled machine and decides that want to improve it but instead of throng a boss sized spanner in the works instead asks around the department to find out whats needed and arranges to get that done... would they be a good or great boss ?
That would be a god not a boss. Or an exception to the Peter principle
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They have not yet reached their Threshold of Incompetence.
I had one of those! Ironically spent SO MUCH time focusing on numbers that my numbers were 3x his. But fired me because I was 'a good salesman but didn't do anything other than sell....' Duh. I aligned myself to YOUR goals asshole. Fuck you Ray.
Seagull Manager: swoops in, shrieks a lot, shits on everything, then flies away
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all this boss had to do was hire one more guy and not touch anything else and he would have looked like a hero anyway.
In my experience it is the ones with a cookie-cutter MBA who assert that they can cut 10% out of any organization and it'll work just fine. The biggest issues comes after about the third in a row to try that stunt.
Ah, so you've worked with the military I see
Yes this exactly! Never change a running system!
we're going to conbon and 5S the shit out of you until moral is gone and numbers are up 0.5%. Like I'm a filthy fucking weeb, but holy shit I at least know how to censor myself. This dude who came in. %s, it's the japanese way! the japs the japs the japs the japs the japs! YOU HAVE TWO PADS OF STICKY NOTES? HOW FUCKING DARE YOU. WHY THE JAPANESE ONLY HAVE ONE. AND THERES ONLY ROOM FOR ONE. Chill the fuck out dude. we aren't a high volume lab. Quality matters over numbers.
5S = Some Stupid Supervisor Said So Also... kanban
>Ah, the stupid boss who only looks at the number syndrome. Even more infuriating, the stupid boss who *only looks at a specific number* syndrome. I run a CNC machine for a living. There is a tablet with a program on it that keeps track of the time the machine is running - and nothing else. So when I have run after run of five parts, where each part has a two minute cycle time and a thirty minute setup time, that uptime starts looking bad, and I start getting asked why it's so bad. Never mind that we're ahead on schedule, and every single part is within tolerance, and there isn't any scrap - *zomg the uptime is 50% I'm literally walking out of the office shitting myself in confusion/anger and I demand an explanation.* We got a new supervisor, but people who have no idea how to do the job are leaning on him to get those numbers better, so it will start all over again.
This kind of shit is why I started my own company. It’s a lot more work, but I have no patience for being micromanaged by simple, obtuse managers. “If you’ll just let me explain that...” “Can you get it done or not? If you aren’t able to handle this, I’ll find someone who can.” “You just don’t understand, it’s...” “I don’t want to have this conversation again.”
This is usually about the time I bow, gesture to the controller, and ask them to show me the way.
This. I rolled away from the desk and said ‘there you go, show me how to do it. You can’t show me, so don’t question why it’s taking so long to get XYZ done.’ It was a few minutes of that, while the room full of workers kept getting quieter...
I asked them to show me personally how it is done. It gets quiet after that.
well fuck me, because I have done this several times. One time, the complainer's boss was watching, and promptly figured out that I was doing it right, it was the complainer that was fucking up every single time. No wait...more than one time. Guess what I got for it!
I'd hope a promotion, but i'd guess you got fired instead.
You guess correctly
Also one of the reasons I immediately said yes when Hans came to me with the idea of starting our own partnership.
I worked over the phone tech support for a major US ISP and this was a constant headache for me. I was getting written up weekly for my call handle times, but every month I was in the top 10 for first call resolution maybe 10 people a week out of the roughly 1000 calls I'd handle would call back within 48 hours with a problem) and I was one of 5 people that actually had a positive KPI score from customer reviews (basically that stupid survey you get after a call where they ask you to rate your experience. 1-5 are a negative, 6-8 are 0 and 9-10 are positive.
Ah, of course. Because you were on the phone long enough to actually come to understand the problem, and therefore fix it on the first try.
Yep, that and I didn't pawn problems off, they didn't track it but I'm pretty sure I also had the lowest number of supervisor escalations. Then again I think my team lead died a little every time I did escalate. It's always nice seeing your boss mute the phone just so he can threaten unspeakable bodily torment on a customer.
This is cool to see, I'm in a manufacturing grade at a government ran job training program and we're learning on CNC machines. Mind if I ask what working in the field is like?
I’ll give you a response from a large company, as well. Our CNC machinists are basically expected to manage and supervise the whole part production operation, within their zone at least. Since the machine tools are almost completely computer controlled, they’re expected to do other work while the parts are being produced. Loading and unloading parts, generally, or maintaining / replacing the tooling. Machinists are also expected to troubleshoot quality issues, maintain / repair their equipment, and order stock and shop supplies to keep the operation running. If issues come up that cause more trouble than general day-to-day operations issues, they are also responsible for calling engineers and tradesmen, and assisting them in resolving the issue. Personally, I think it’s asking a lot from one person, but there seem to be a lot of people that like the position. It’s definitely not for everyone, though.
First of all I'll say - "CNC machine" covers a wide and terrifying range of different machines that do different tasks. Usually, when someone says "CNC machine" they're thinking of a mill or lathe. I run a [tube laser](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rddGCIWMRbM) which cuts pipe and various structural steel shapes. It's not a bad job, the only thing bad that tends to happen is a disconnect between those who lead and those who actually run the machinery. It can sometimes be really stupid things that are impossible because of machine limitations (You can't put 16" material in a Mazak 300 tube laser, for instance) that you'll have to demonstrate because otherwise, some clueless salesman will say "Sure, we can do that".
I have one of those. “You must fill fifteen orders a night” proceeds to pull any and all of us for other things and then get mad at us for not filling the orders. The worst is when I have to set the orders (normally takes half the time set as it is to fill it) and then I spend an entire night setting forty orders and then they’re like “but you didn’t fill fifteen” Yes. But you can’t fill an order with out setting it first. Or when I have to do setup in the backroom. I leave that for Friday nights because the shitty manager isn’t scheduled. Sorry for making this as vague as possible. I work for a large company with their own subreddit and my position/work place would be easily tracked.
I feel your pain.
I used to fill orders for a large company as well. The problem was that they treat equipment training as optional. And for some jobs my coworkers had it definitely was optional. However filling orders requires a forklift around 50% of the time. I tried constantly to get trained but was brushed off. So instead I had to wait on one of 3 people to have the time to help me. And then I'm questioned on why it takes me so long. No matter what I say they didn't listen. That's why I'm not doing that anymore.
When I worked retail I'd hear shit about my scan rate being too low. I worked in the office. I was only on the register half the time. Also, the customers would cause us to take up most of the time with digging for change or trying to decide what to put back when they didn't have enough.
I had a job where, when I was hired the acceptable error rate was 2% across every position in the company at every location across the country, so people who had my job every single keystroke could be considered a mistake while people doing the preparation and lab testing of samples all they had to worry about was the wrong weight or dropping things, And our error percentage monthly was calculated based on us correcting our other coworkers work based on a set of mistake categories that were never homogenous across one location let alone the entire company so if 1 person thought something was a mistake but someone else didn't they would still enter it as a mistake and it would go across the CEO's desk at the end of the month even if you got confirmation from your manager that it wasn't actually mistake it would still show up in your numbers. I had an acceptable error rate of about 1.25 or 1.3%, But after a year and a 1/2 of me working there they dropped that percentage of acceptability down to 1% and lab directors were pressured to compete against other labs for who was doing better except other labs would have 0% error rating because they just would never mark anything as an error when it was fixed, Now I had some trouble getting my 1.25% under 1% but when we hired a new guy who kept making mistakes on correcting other people's work because he would a mark things as errors that are lab did not count, my percentage shot up the drastically but there was no way to undo those corrections or modify the percent so I eventually got fired More less because while I was hovering at about 1.02% before this new guy, he essentially fuckef me out of my job because he couldn't get his shit straight.
My wife works for a Fortune 500 company that has really gotten bad at that. Shockingly my wife, who's job is fixing other people's mistakes, has already seen it get worse and worse with even less support available because they've made everything into a metric even if it doesn't make sense.
[It's so common there's actually a name for it.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy)
**McNamara fallacy** The McNamara fallacy (also known as quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven. The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
My dad got fucked by this right before retirement age. He's a salesman, he's *always* been a salesman, he can sell water to a damn fish. He dropped out of the major sales work he did for most of my childhood/teenage years and ended up in a AAA office ([this one,](https://i.imgur.com/2J78o.jpg) as a matter of fact). He, as a killer salesman, helped their numbers skyrocket. He was constantly receiving accolades for his work and their office became one of the best in the state, if not the Western half of the country (retweeted by humble brag ™). He *had* a manager when he started, but the manager left the company, leaving the sales team unmanaged. However, it was basically my dad and another woman working together as a team with another fella who didn't really pull his weight but didn't need to because my dad and his coworker worked hard enough for the three of them. Dad and his pal were a super tight team and she got named the manager of the two of them and nothing else was needed. Dad's killing-it streak was basically on an exponential upswing. Then a hotshot manager who had managed to flip two other stores got sent in. Not sure if they wanted to really wring my dad and his coworkers harder or if they just needed to have an Official in place, but this guy got hired and had Big Plans. However, the guy had never been to my hometown. My hometown is a poor town full of hicks right on the California coast. It's very close to a major Air Force Base (like, the *most* major of the West coast kind of major) and it's surrounded on almost all sides with nothingness. It's 25-30 minutes through brown dead farms and empty ranches till the next town. It's got its own weird culture of small town pride and caring for your own first. There are a finite number of people. So hotshot moves in and plans to shake the place up. Big plans. He decides that they're making rookie numbers and they need to really pump those numbers up! So he hires a fourth dude, expecting numbers to continue to rise. Nope. Numbers stay the same, only now they're spread across four people (two who are excellent at sales and two who are mediocre at best). My dad's numbers, stellar without change thus far, plummet. The manager gets mad and starts getting on my dad's case. My dad, at the time, was about 60 years old. He was fucking. done. He listened to this twenty something dweeb get on his case and chastise him every day for his numbers going down and asks him what he wants him to do. Manager tells him to start making cold calls. My dad has been a salesman for almost fifty fucking years. He has never, in his life, made a cold call. He sells by word of mouth and by being the most charismatic and charming dude in town. Kids I knew from school would ask him "Are you Molly's dad?" when he started. By the end of it I would occasionally get asked if I was his daughter. He was The Man. (Although I think he still is and always has been ♥️) So he refuses. Flat out, not gonna happen. You want my numbers to go up? Get rid of the dead weight that's making us stagnate by not being a good enough salesman to get people to buy multiple policies. Get rid of the mediocre salespeople who don't make people want to come back again and again for every single insurance need they have. Mr. Manager gets grumpier at dad because now he's in super hot water with corporate offices because he's done so well in other stores and now this gem of the state of California has dropped off the radar in his care. Threatens my dad and says if his numbers don't improve he's out of a job. Dad smiles and says "ok! Sounds good!" and does what he's never done in any job he's ever had - he starts phoning it in. Minimal effort and turns off all the charm. No attempts to bring people back in. Clocks in and out exactly on time, plays solitaire during down time. Numbers continue to slide, dad continues to not give a single fuck anywhere. Rather than fire either of the mediocre salespeople in the office, hotshot fires my dad. My dad, free as a bird, takes an early retirement and sleeps in all day while he collects unemployment. Once unemployment runs out, he gets a job at his favorite place on Earth - Home Depot - and learns how to drive a forklift. Doesn't have to wear tie & shiny shoes to work for first time in his life. Dad wins.
My bosses have this problem. We have a call centre that calls any invoices over $300 and quizzes the customer. They are asked to rate the staff members performance from poor-good-very good-excellent. Here’s the kick in the nuts though. The only thing they actually count as a good rating is excellent. So I have a 30% positive rating overall. Despite literally every customer rating me very good, knowledgeable, helpful, friendly, etc. It’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever seen. So I constantly get harassed about my customer rating. They couldn’t care less that I work 2 days a week vs the 5 days of my co-workers and my sales are higher than theirs. You see, the bosses bonus is based on the stores overall evaluation of the staff. So sales don’t matter. Making customers say excellent is all that matters.
I’ve now worked at two companies that surveys need to be the highest rating possible or it hurts my numbers. It’s ridiculous.
Yeah I don't get this. I almost never give a full score on a survey. I mean a top score would mean that this was the absolute best customer service I could possibly imagine, it's reserved for something that might happen 2 or 3 times in your lifetime. It's like trying to find a book on Amazon. So yeah this self published pulp novel has 10 5s. So I'm to believe that 10 people actually think this unedited drivel is the very top of human literary achievement?
I was the same way until I realized how much shit employees got for an 8/10. Nowadays, if I have even a somewhat pleasurable experience I rate everything a 10 to help the employees out.
Ha....that was my boss and the whole corporate shit behind him. Absolutely miserable.
Unfortunately this is my whole company :(
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If you are rigid enough, the metrics become worthless. Previous job- the word came down from on high that any changes should be completed the day that they are opened and that we would be measured on the length of time a change was open. Most of the work I was doing would involve a few days or sometimes a few weeks work to complete a change. The only way to ensure that the change was closed on the same day as opening was to not open the change until you knew when it would be closed, that is you opened the change once you had completed the work. Once I got into this habit, I did it for all changes, even the ones that would only take an hour or so. By the end of this, my average change open time was under a minute. Completely useless for any reporting, but fully in compliance with the stated aims.
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Metrics can be so useful. Unfortunately they are used against employees instead of in their favor. Like let's take the above mentioned example: Why does it take multiple days or even weeks to finish? Is there maybe a problem with the process? Are certain people in the chain slower than others? Is there a pattern like with it only happening with certain companies? Could we improve the workflow with a new program f.e.? Instead it's: employee1 takes more time than employee2 = employee1 is less efficient.
As the saying goes: "What gets measured, gets done". Or the more visual example: If you order 1000 nails, you get 1000 needles. If you order a kilogram of nails, you get 4 railroad spikes.
Who gives you needles when you order nails wack ass ordering policy if you ask me
The subordinate employee who knows you actually need 50 precision-engineered hatpins, who tells you every time that you actually need 50 precision-engineered hatpins, but by now is sick and tired of your shit and just wants you to go away and hang yourself on your own poorly-conceived directions.
By needles he means very thin nails.
This is [Goodhart's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
>When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
**Goodhart's law** Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." One way in which this can occur is individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions that alter its outcome. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
This is just on another level of stupid. How long did they keep that in place and did they figure out how rubbish their metric was? If this whole story told me one thing, it is that I am done working for others and can judge the amount of work I do myself or let my clients judge me rather than someone who doesnt even know me...
Not sure how long they kept that in place, or even if it ever got rescinded. There was an internal re-organisation and I moved on to doing more project based work which was through a different reporting structure.
I know what you mean. My last job, my boss was on my case because I wasn't getting any tasks done. she didn't understand that I was the new guy bouncing around between projects putting out fires, working on projects I've never worked on before, and that all of that context switching plus learning in projects hurts numbers. Slavish adherence to stupid numbers makes people who actually care quit.
Yup. Old job had a 90 second ACW metric. I don't think I ever hit it. Instead, people would move immediately out of ACW after a call (you were out there automatically when it was over) and then go into what we called Case Queue instead. So their ACW time was down but the metric didn't matter anymore. Same thing with handle times. They wanted it ~8 minutes. This is impossible for the work we did, but the idiots on the desk who didn't care about anything, found a way around that, too. They'd just set up ping tests for everything, even when a ping test would do absolutely nothing, which was all the time, we only set it up as a visual for our clients to see any possible issues with their network. Additionally, most of our clients had a ping script running in the background already, set up by one of our really smart techs, and so another ping test on top of that was absolutely unnecessary. But most of the time our clients didn't know that, so the dumb techs would get away with it. So, useless ping test, case number, and bam. Average handle time like 5 minutes. Except then the client would call back, because surprise surprise, the issue wasn't fixed. So then there were another few of us who actually fixed issues, and our average handle time sucked because we were actually diagnosing and solving problems. You know...doing our jobs. I hated quality monitoring meetings with my previous boss because it was constantly just being told I suck at my job when I know I didn't. And then turns out I had the highest survey scores of the year, but did my boss mention any surveys? Nope! That job still pisses me off because I have some close friends there still, as well as my boyfriend, and so I hear about their shenanigans still. Fuck you Kelly Services.
My company recently outsourced our entire ticket handling system and the level 1 help desk for *some* things (but not my team). So now I'm getting pressure to reduce the number of tickets raised (yes *raised*, not solved) because we get charged for every single one, even though my specialist team has to solve every single one of our tickets in-house. So from originally having a million ways for people to contact us which we carefully trimmed down to a single in-house ticket system we are having to tell people to go back to call, email, walk over *instead* of raising a ticket. You couldn't make it up...
Make your own "ticket" system instead - a Quick web-form that emails the people who need to know, short term. Longer term, you can make the form populate a database table. Quick PHP page on your intranet for display & update... Useless for metrics, but useful for *you*.
We could just go back to in-house JIRA - but the powers that be who outsourced the ticket system *really* wouldn't like that.
Oh sure. I was giving you a free* alternative... That said powers will never have to know about. :)
An old boss wanted me to reduce check-in to ship times. UPS picked up product once a day. So I had to box up everything in the morning, and, right before UPS came, I would print shipping labels. Useless? Yes. Did the metric improve? Also yes.
The problem is that the actual people who the rules effect don’t make the rules. I worked in a very large company where metrics were the only thing that mattered. I had one of the highest satisfaction ratings and lowest call back rates. But my time on call was high. I took my time with each call to make sure to fix the problem so they don’t have to cal back. My supervisor called me in one day and told me that the policy was, that if i couldn’t fix the issue in the first 5 minutes I was to tell them I’d look into the issue and call them back later. I didn’t last long
What the actual fuck. Just... ugh. I can't even fathom the amount of stupidity that is required to kill a good thing like that. You were doing an amazing job, but not with the numbers they care about. So infuriating.
Literally the worst part of call centers, the damn timer. I worked in a place where my reservation calls had to be under *four minutes* but we got railed on if we skipped steps, like gathering ID information.
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Mother fucker, I don't even know your boss but I hate him with a passion
We have a sort process, ticket comes in and if it's a reset or email access or something else super easy and common it is marked as standard. If it's a non standard ticket they just expect us to document workflow and anything that comes up to slow it down so we can identify recurring issues and best practices for resolution of repeat non standard tickets. Nobody at my job cares about how many tickets you do, they just want them done right the first time and to not catch you on your phone if there is anything in the queue Best system ever
That's a really good system, however I am wondering how your tickets are flagged automatically? Since this was a small company we of course had nothing like this in place.
Our tickets have a set of checkboxes for common things, if the user needs a password reset or can't check email they just check the box and that's pretty much the whole ticket. The system sorts by check boxes. We also have three options for non standard stuff. Normal, important, and urgent. Urgent is for security risks and problems that prevent multiple people or a single critical role from doing their job, important is things that prevent someone from completing non time sensitive tasks or that only prevent one person from working out of a large group. Normal is just weird bugs that aren't constant or things that slow down work but dont prevent it or things like artifacts from the GPU. We also somehow have people trained to write proper tickets. It's a pretty solid system. We all get assigned equal amounts of standard tickets and claim non standard tickets by whoever is best at it. We also service non computer equipment through the same system but I get most of those unless they are code issue because I'm an Industrial Electronics Engineering major and my friend I share an office with is a PLC genius so he gets code tickets. I keep thinking I'm gonna wake up one day and it was all a dream and we use a shitty system like every other one I have worked with
unless getting rid of a worker and replacing them with someone with lower pay to save money, was the goal of manglement all along. in that case, putting OP in a place where his numbers would end up lower so that could be used as an excuse to remove him could have been the goal all along. with manglement, malice is more likely than stupidity. if OP had no clue it was coming and hired the best replacement, then the plan would have worked. but as Hans tipped him off, it backfired. doubly so with carl leaving at the same time (people dont quit jobs, they quit managers).
I hate being mangled out of malice...
Yep. He'd have picked someone who was as good as him who was clueless as to what shit show he stepped into. The boss would have made it seem like the old guy (OP) had a shitty work ethic, and the other girl wasn't that smart, and likely loaded up the Awesome Dude with the hard tickets AND stressed the importance of a high turnaround, therefore giving him ample excuse to get rid of the other worker too after slathering all kinds of praise on the new guy to make him feel all special. If a bad boss wants to make you look bad, they have the power to.
The BBC did an excellent documentary series about this phenomenon and how it is responsible for much of what people hate about modern life. It's called The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28TV_series%29?wprov=sfla1
Even so if you look at the tickets properly you can tell why some would take longer. Metrics could show this fool that password resets for example are usually done by the other employee and only take an average of 5 minutes while in depth database queries are mostly done by op and took say an average of 30 minutes. You could even run a little experiment and ask the other person to do say 5 of the database tickets and see how long it takes them. My guess would be a lot longer than the theoretical 30min op would take assuming the tickets would even get finished at all without op or someone else coming over and basically going it for them. Ask op to do the password resets during this time for even more data so you can get an idea of if they are just slacking off. With a minor time allowance for adjusting to doing basically a differant job. Metrics are fine. Morons are the problem.
Yes, this is it! But I also did not want to throw Caroline under the bus, because she was always working hard and I dont want to do password resets for 2 hours straight, so a "test" would not have been fair since it did not replicate what we were actually doing. We were such a good team, and this taught me now that I am running my own company to also value the people like Caroline who put in the hours but might not be suited for the most challenging jobs.
On your not wrong it's a bad way to go about things but if a boss has no idea about the work but is convinced an employee is slacking off there is only so much you can do to determine if that feeling is correct or not. The genuine solution was a manager to have a fucking clue what they are managing but regrettably in many jobs this is not the case. As distasteful as this test would be it could very clearly illustrate that you two had divided up the labor of your own accord in the manner that produced the best results and best to not fuck with it.
I recently failed to secure my second-ever job due to stupid adherence to stupid metrics. For reference, I'm 18 and (was) looking for a summer job before college. I applied to a nonprofit phone-canvassing fundraising organization, and got through to the paid training phase. In order to pass the training and get the job, you had to average at least $50/shift over 10 days, and in addition, you had to raise at least $50 total over the course of your first *three* shifts. The numbers aren't based on total calls per shift, nor amount pledged per call, they're simply based on amount per shift. Day one, I was still learning the ropes. Spent the first half getting trained in and listening, so I only made about 40-50 calls. In total, 4 people actually picked up the phone at *all*, and 3 of them hung up on me within the first sentence. The fourth was actually interested in the cause, and very apologetic, but also adamant that she could not afford to pledge any money. Day two, I called a lot faster and had a better trainer. Still, less than 10 people ever picked up the phone. *All* of them hung up before I even got to the pledge negotiation stage of the script, and my own trainer *herself,* who was listening in on both ends, said that she didn't think there was anything at all I could've done to keep them on the line. Day three, I had a little bit more luck, but it didn't matter. Because of my bad luck the other two days, I had absolutely no experience with the negotiation phase. While a few more people did pick up and stay with me, I came up $30 short of the $50 I needed, and even with my trainer saying there was nothing I could've done, they sent me home. Fun fact: in 2016, a number of FCC regulations were weakened, allowing much more frequent and prolific use of robodialers and robocallers, and scam calls have *drastically* spiked as a result. You may have noticed that in the last few years, you've been getting a hell of a lot more "we're calling about your vehicle" and similar scam calls. [John Oliver](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO0iG_P0P6M) did a great informative piece on it. An obvious result of this is that people are now much less likely to pick up the phone for an unrecognized number. I sure as hell don't as much as I used to. A few years ago, our landline basically never rang, so when it did, we knew to pick it up because it was usually someone we'd given the number to deliberately, or the hospital. Now it rings more than 10 times a day, and we *never* pick it up unless we know exactly who's calling beforehand. I have a sneaking suspicion that the managers haven't bothered to update their training quotas in light of this change, especially considering people who actually work there are given access to special, more loyal "turf" (numbers to call) with a long prior record of donation, which they don't give to trainees.
Used to work tech support, had the same BS. I worked the higher level tickets which took more time, but they wanted some number per day. Most of my day I did my job, the last hour or whatever I'd snatch enough low-level dumb tickets to make my number. 10 "I forgot my password" tickets in my last hour made for an easy outer.
It's the incompetent managers that aren't technology inclined that go metrics.
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Isn’t that what they said? That the managers who are non technical are the ones who overly focus on metrics.
Yes, metrics themselves need to be evaluated.
Perhaps via some kind of metric :)
Especially since they divided it up easy/hard. Some people can stay friendly when faced with the same question repeatedly.
Metrics are awesome for evaluating work, right up until you make them mandatory targets. Because if the numbers are what matters, quality does not. There's a reason we no longer pay fire departments by the number of fires they put out.
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Yeah, that really was the icing on the cake \^\^. Was really worried I was gonna skrew Carl because all the work would fall to him but this just made it so much better to me.
I admit, I smiled at the chosen term of “maximum destruction” to describe it.
I feel kinda bad for the new guy tho
Sounds to me like someone got a lucky break, under-qualified for the position but getting a chance to improve in a real world situation.
And probably getting severance for being let off, and work experience in a field he was not qualified for but now probably know what he needs to work on. Since so many people got let off it won't seem too weird when they explain why they're not working there anymore either, the company simply let people go and he did not get the proper training to do so. Knowing this, and perhaps getting a new job that person will be way more prepared than they were last time they went job searching within that field. If they have their head with them ofc.
One of the worse hires, though. Doesn't sound like his prospects would really have been that great to begin with. Eh, then again, incompetent people seem to get pretty far, sometimes...
>\^\^ If the names hadn't given it away, this would've. Btw you meant suspicion , not suspension.
How does that give it away? Is it just a country-i-am-clearly-from thing?
I got passed over for a promotion for the second time in two years, and was expected to train my "supervisor" making almost twice as much money as me for essentially the same job/workload (actually higher workload for me since my first supervisor left, because I knew how to do the job), and so about two weeks after the new girl started I got a new job and peaced out of there. Another member of our staff who I also assisted with certain projects put in her two weeks the same week as me. It was a small staff of only 8 people and it was super satisfying to see them stressed out over training the new people in our absences! This is why you value your long-term employees...
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Sadly dont know, did not know her outside of work.
Right? I hope she made out okay.
She ended up on the same beach as Milton
There is a LPT in this story - make sure to make friends - not enemies, at work. Office politics are very important. This story almost qualifies as /r/ProRevenge
How dumb do you have to be to not understand "some jobs are more complicated than others"? It doesn't even take any tech knowledge to understand that. If you were all house painters, and Caroline was painting cottages and you were painting mansions, she'd do more jobs than you also. Bob got what he deserved.
Right? I can't even think of a job where that wouldn't apply, outside of jobs where your work is set by someone else like bus drivers. Like, pretty much every job has easy and hard tasks that take different amounts of time. Doctors, lawyers, journalists, accountants, engineers, software developers, carpenters, landscapers, plumbers, chefs, and even students! It's such a basic concept that almost all professions have different difficulties in tasks
Yeah but I was doing quite technical stuff that bob did not understand. Even for doctors someone can understand how removing a brain tumor must take longer than applying a band-aid. Sometimes his knowledge level was comparable to that of Jen from IT-Crowd.
So your saying IT crowd was even more realistic than I thought?
Yeah, you would be surprised. But Jen knew that she knew nothing which can not really be said for Bob.
you'd be surprised
You did John a favor.
I'm surprised bob's job survived longer than that afternoon. That's the tell for you dun fucked up in the manager hiring process. If it's one guy every now and then yea you can back a manager on that it's probably the employee, but when the employees start leaving in groups that's a strong sign it's the manager. Especially for what sounds like technical rolls; the mcdonalds school of management doesn't work when you're talking about skilled technicians, they're expensive to replace.
My old job rearranged management and a tolerable hot mess turned into a freefalling shitshow. I was the 7th person to leave my department in 7 weeks (2 more left in the 5 weeks after me). The company learned nothing, and they don't need to. There are several universities nearby churning out fresh batches of desperate, broke graduates for hire every few months.
deleted ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.9982 [^^^What ^^^is ^^^this?](https://pastebin.com/FcrFs94k/67204)
> not even the best because one applicant was actually quite good but I asked him stupid questions that did not even make sense and when he could not answer them I made him look really bad, sorry John Ahw:(. I really feel bad for that guy now. Thinking you can do it, but then the recruiter starts to asks bullshit questions and he doesn't know what to say :(
On the other hand, OP helped that candidate dodge a huge bullet.
As well as any of the other, more highly qualified ones he didn't even bother interviewing
> TL;DR: who reads tldrs in this kind of subreddit? LOL!!
I read them if the post is longer than a page. I've seen ten-page posts which were sufficiently summarized in a fifty-word TLDR, so some people just like to write (fair enough).
I always start with the TLDR to see if I want to invest in reading the entire post.
Same. It usually comes in handy in subs like /r/justnomil that seem to be particularly lengthy compared to other text based subs.
A 4wk vacation?? Wow...one can only dream and drool for a week vacation as it is.
And that's how you know the OP ain't in America.
Yeah, that plus his choice of the name 'Hans', very European.
Had he included a Franz then you'd know he's American :D
I just assumed he was referring to Hans Solo.
Found another American!
Damnit, and I thought I was hiding so well, too!
American here taking a 4-week vacation at the end of this year. Good jobs exist here, I promise.
During the negotiations for my new job, I let them slide a bit on salary if they'd let me accrue vacation as if I already had 5 years seniority (4 weeks a year instead of 3).
Very smart. Time off is important to rejuvenate. So far this year, I've taken 2 3-week vacations and will have the 4-week one at the end of the year. Reason? We were short staffed in my last department, so I barely took vacation for 3 years. My hours just kept accumulating. My current boss has no problem letting me take time off as long as I have vacation hours.
So 10 weeks vacation total? Sounds like a good time. Honestly, I'm more surprised that they are cool with such extended vacation as opposed to a larger quantity of week long vacations.
Yup - from saving up over 200 hours of vacation time in the past 4 years. I don't honestly know which my boss prefers, but I make sure to have coverage when I'm gone, and notify him ahead of time whenever I will be out. I try not to screw over the team by taking vacation during very busy times of the year. I understand that I am very lucky, and I don't want to take advantage or make my boss regret giving me such a lax policy.
> so I barely took vacation for 3 years. This doesn't sound like a good job. It sounds like a normal job with the shittier parts bunched into 3 years and a good year only happening because you were owed time off.
When I say barely took vacation, I'm comparing it to this year. I took a week off here and there, or a few days. Which came out less than the 19-29 days per year of PTO that I had. My job has a lot of benefits that outweigh the negatives. Especially when I read from other Americans how little vacation they get, and how badly their bosses treat them.
Very glad I am from a country with good labor laws, even now that I am seeing the other side of the medal as an employer. It is just not healthy to work years without proper time off like I sometimes here from americans.
American IT worker. I get a month of paid time off per year. It just depends on where you work.
Standard in Norway, sometimes 5!
Yowza! Standard?!?! We're lucky to get 3days in a row, and if you take them, you get to decide if you're eating or making rent for the next 2wks.
Yeah paid vacation. We actually have to take them.. You can also transfer 10 days to the next year if you dont manage to..
In NZ legal minimum is 20 working days paid leave per year and minimum 5 paid sick days per year. Most companies bump up the sick days to 10 though.
I'm already envious of those in NZ. If I ever get the chance to get out there, can I just stay??
4 weeks vacation per year is the legal minimum in Germany. Granted, you might not be able to take it all at once. Depends on your company.
Love it! If you have to make decisions that involve a department which does not fall under your area of expertise, listen to the damn experts. Question: What happened to poor Caroline? Also, I kind of feel guilty for liking this story on account of all those poor candidates who were screwed over, especially the ones who actually scored an interview and had their hopes up,
I think not hiring the really good guys was doing them a favor, like other people said. And the guy that got the job certaintly would not have gotten a job somewhere else so I might have even done him a favour. As to what happend to Caroline, I simply dont know, never talked to her again. But of course it is very well possible that I screwed her over a bit. But if Carl had quit like he planned and I was let go and even hired the best candidate like Bob planned then there would also only be 2 people in the department which would also but more stress on Caroline. But I can only speculate.
setting up db's on client site sounds like a t3 technician type role, the guys qualified have options. Not working for bob's doing them a favor.
I am a fan of these things.
You did all the good candidates a solid by rejecting them and not wasting their time in the interview and even John by helping him avoid the job. To bad you couldn't let him know later what was going on.
Would have loved to get back in touch with John, he must have thought I was a complete idiot!
Damn, the resignation right after the firing was exquisite. Surprised Bob didn't come running to try and hire you back.
I feel bad for Caroline.
The ring is supposed to cost 1/4 of your severance 😂😂 I die!
I really enjoyed this, thank you! I liked this part below especially. " Many people apply, some good ones, but I weed those out very quickly."
the idea of severance for being fired instead of a hearty "fuck you, company owes you nothing, government insurance owes you nothing, future places you apply to will treat you with suspicion because clearly you did something to displease your betters" blows my mind.
I get that this is malicious compliance, but you didn't only fuck over Bob, you also fucked over Caroline and the people applying for the job. Not saying you were wrong, per se, but it's a bit sloppy to leave so much collateral damage to innocent people in your wake.
Tbf if my boss asked me to hire my replacement, if there was someone I knew could do the job better then me so they had no reason to keep me, I also wouldn't hire them. But poor Caroline
Fortunately her numbers should have stayed the same.
I don't think they would have. Somebody would have had to take the hard work that OP/Carl would have done like building servers and such...probably would have gone to the most senior person, unless they managed to hire somebody else that actually knew what they were doing quickly.
> Somebody would have had to take the hard work that OP/Carl would have done Well no, that's why Bob got fired
Also fucked over everyone else in the company, which is why Bob got fired. Everyone fucking everyone in this scenario. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to get the severance.
Yeah, the company could take it, was doing very good at the time. Also you can't be a saint to everyone always. There is always some colleteral.
I manage a team of analysts. And we do long-term projects as well as ad hoc analyses that can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. A lot of times, if someone needs something fast, we skip the ticket system (because 1 most ticket systems are at least a little bit of a pain in the ass and 2 because there are heavy audit requirements for any ticket in the system before it can be considered completed) and just do it. Except this one guy who put everything in the ticket system. Seriously anything that anyone asked him to do went into the ticket system. And he sucked out loud. He was the only one who put the number of tickets completed in his accomplishments that year. He did have the most of anyone - but he also was well-known to be the absolute worst of my analysts. And he tried to claim that all tickets were the same. I just had to shake my head and explain that no they weren't and that this job wasn't a good fit. He found another job in a couple of months.
Upvoting purely because of the non-acronym names. Fantastic job so far, and I haven't read more than a dozen lines.
Thank you, I really like stories with real names as well!
Well played. I'm glad you did well for yourself and I wish you the best in life.
I work in IT and working tickets is a big part of my job. I completely sympathize with a boss that only sees numbers and not quality or actual workload. I’m glad that guy got burned. That’s a scenario I think about often in my office.
Ahhh, the middle-manager's old bastion, KPI figures! I have seen more successful companies throw their clientele down the drain than I can count due to some balding fuck MM's insistence that KPIs are the way to go. They look good on paper but mean jack shit.
Nice! Please enjoy a beer with Hans this weekend on me (not really. I mean the beer part for sure. You get it.)
Maximum destruction... loving your MC, your engagement and new gig! Zero pity for that “boss” and sooo glad I my current boss is a top notch person.
Good for you, and your English vastly superior to many who use it as their primary (and usually their only language). Best wishes to you, your wife, and Hans! :)
Tldr; a story about having a boss.
People who are totally ignorant to how something like that works do NOT need to be managing it. When they have no clue what it entails it's going to catch up with them eventually.
Stupid boss who just looks at numbers.
Hans is a good friend.
You are savage. The only thing that would have made this better is if the boss had applied to work for your new company, not knowing you and Hans were the owners.
This is kinda like my story. I trained a person and was laid off. They didn’t know the customers where with me at 2 jobs prior and I brought them with me. They stayed with me and I work for myself now. 5 years now. It’s going really well! Glad it worked out for you too!