Priorities

snoofle

Background:

1. It is our company policy that all employees have laptops.

2. Our company was recently sold off. As such, the new owners are in cost-cutting mode; no money for laptops for new employees (so they work with retired secretary's desktops), etc.

Story:

Just before the new owners took over, it was decided that all four of our 4-stall bathrooms would be redone, 2 at a time. Over an 11 week period (when we redid a full bathroom at home, it took 2.5 days).

They are now in the process of replacing the tile walls with marble, the laminate-covered particle board countertops with granite, and the cheap-o toilet seats with fine wood.

That's right, in only 7 more weeks, half of our team will still have crippled outdated desktops, but we will be able to pee in oppulance.

Justice

@snoofle said:

They are now in the process of replacing the tile walls with marble, the laminate-covered particle board countertops with granite, and the cheap-o toilet seats with fine wood.

That's right, in only 7 more weeks, half of our team will still have crippled outdated desktops, but we will be able to pee in oppulance.

At least they know what's important. Maybe the reason new employees haven't been given laptops is because of the bathroom renovations; the owners are worried that the john will be so nice that people will take their laptops and work in there instead of at their desks. It wouldn't be the first time the bathrooms have been the nicest part of the office.

I'm a little jealous, honestly. I'd be happy just to have fixtures here that consistently flushed properly instead of occasionally spraying water all over the floor.

dhromed

You know in an RTS where you have that black cloud over parts you haven't seen yet, and a grey cloud over areas you have seen but have no units in direct vicinity of?

This is like that. The red units know what the red units see, and the blue units know what the blue units see.

Lacking overview, they act accordingly to what they know. Which leads to shit. Also, to absurdities like v. large companies suing themselves.

davedavenotdavemaybe

What really gets me wound up are the really, blatantly obvious false economies I see all the time. Like saving 20 quid on a pack of spare mice, but losing 20 minutes of highly paid time every time someone goes hunting round the office for the one (possibly) spare mouse. Or losing the 250k per year contract because you didn't want to employ an extra 30k per year mobile engineer because he wouldn't be fully utilised - actually, I think they got away with that, it was trying to save money by not buying a new answering machine that lost that contract before the engineer became an issue. Don't go and buy 50 quids worth of cheap screwdrivers, no, store the screwdrivers in the manager's safe and make people request and return them every time they need them, because his time's not worth anything. And on, and on, and on. Every business I see, you'd think must be an especially bad exception, but no - they're all like that because people don't think more than five minutes ahead.

The_Assimilator

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

What really gets me wound up are the really, blatantly obvious false economies I see all the time. Like saving 20 quid on a pack of spare mice, but losing 20 minutes of highly paid time every time someone goes hunting round the office for the one (possibly) spare mouse. Or losing the 250k per year contract because you didn't want to employ an extra 30k per year mobile engineer because he wouldn't be fully utilised - actually, I think they got away with that, it was trying to save money by not buying a new answering machine that lost that contract before the engineer became an issue. Don't go and buy 50 quids worth of cheap screwdrivers, no, store the screwdrivers in the manager's safe and make people request and return them every time they need them, because his time's not worth anything. And on, and on, and on. Every business I see, you'd think must be an especially bad exception, but no - they're all like that because people don't think more than five minutes ahead.

I work for a software development company. About half of our staff are located on-site at our biggest client's premises, where they get infrastructure provided by the building's IT department. The computers our client gives us to work on are better than the computers our employer gives us.

This, of course, while the directors and PMs of my company each spend $ 1,500 of company money on laptops so that they can be productive "in the field". Most of these laptops are never used outside of work hours, and I never knew 4GB of RAM and a Blu-Ray reader was required for playing in MS Project and reading email all day. Meanwhile, some of the junior devs sit with socket 939 Athlon X2s with 2GB of RAM, and they're expected to run multiple instances of Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, etc.

And then the directors and PMs wonder why their employee turnover rate is so high. (On that topic, I'm pretty sure Joel Spolsky wrote an article on why the PC you give a developer to work on should be at least as powerful as their home PC, but I cannae find it now. If anyone has a link, I'd be most grateful.)

Bumble_Bee_Tuna

At my employer, we spent 2 weeks going through a governance process to get me a computer...two weeks where I sat on my hands with nothing to do, in which I was paid twice the cost of the computer being considered for approval. That seemed mildly inefficient.

blakeyrat

Ok, forgive me for not being British, but what exactly is a "quid?" I hear this word all the time, and it sounds like a quantity of money, but I can't for the life of me figure out which one... is it another word for "pound?"

The_Quiet_One

Blech, fine wood toilet seats? Is your company in the time machine business and you are actually workig in the 1970s?