But we need you
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About 20 years ago, I worked with R, who couldn 't program his way out of a paper bag, and made his living by cut-n-pasting other folks' code, and who got promoted for simply outlasting people on the job.
About 5 years ago, R has been promoted 3 levels, and I wound up working for M (under R). M was a slave-driving SOB who believed that QA and deployment processes didn't apply to him. Every single little change was an emergency deployment. But he couldn't be bothered getting special-case approvals from QA and deployment teams because it took too long, so he'd have us send out mails saying, in effect: We're bypassing you and your stupid rules too; tough! Though we were just the messengers, and we tried to be very appologetic for our boss, it didn't win us any friends.
After about a year working for M, most of us quit.
Fast forward to present day. I just interviewed for a position in what I believed to be a different department at that company. During the conversation, M and R's names came up and I immediately said I wasn't interested in working for or even near these guys. They asked why and knowing I wasn't taking the job, I spelled it out. The hiring manager admitted that M was pretty hard on his own people as well as his (hiring manager's) team.
A few days later the hiring manager calls and offers me the job. Wait, didn't I tell you I didn't want to work near these other two nutcases? Well, yes, but you are qualified for the job and we really need you...
*sigh*
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@snoofle said:
Well, yes, but you are qualified for the job and we really need you...
Are you taking them up on their kind offer? Is the pay worth it?
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@PJH said:
@snoofle said:
Well, yes, but you are qualified (IE: you've dealt with this shit before, specifically theirs) for the job and we really need you so we can pay you only a token above the gerbil feed we were paying you before.
Are you taking them up on their kind offer? Is the pay worth it?
Fixed that for Snoofle.
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Actually, the last time I was an employee; this time would be as a consultant, at double the pay+benefits as before + overtime beyond 50 hours.
I was emphatic that no amount of money could convince me to put up with that abuse (not from the new manager, but from the other fools).
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@snoofle said:
A few days later the hiring manager calls and offers me the job. Wait, didn't I tell you I didn't want to work near these other two nutcases? Well, yes, but you are qualified for the job and we really need you...
So does this mean they are getting rid of R and M?
I said this once and the manager I wouldn't work for under any means got canned.
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@KattMan said:
So does this mean they are getting rid of R and M?
Time to be thick again
R&M?
Research and management? Repair and Maintainance? Reaming and Mutilation? Render and mortify?
In the context of sofware I've yet to come across a common understanding of what R&M means. (Or even any understanding, in this particular acronym's case.)
Is this something your company's invented? Like my last job's ambigious acronym of PID which meant different things if you were talking to the 'engineers' in the software department or the engineers on the shop floor welding 36''+ bits of pipe together?
Happily, being in one department, and having regular communications to the other, I figured out which PID any particular party was talking about when they mentioned it, but in general, discussions about PIDs were generally clouded in confusion.
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- points finger at the bold letters in the OP *
- points finger at the bold letters in the OP *
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@PJH said:
@KattMan said:
So does this mean they are getting rid of R and M?
Time to be thick again
R&M?
Research and management? Repair and Maintainance? Reaming and Mutilation? Render and mortify?If you reread the original post, I'm sure you'll realize that M and R are actually people.
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@SuperAnalyst said:
@PJH said:
Point taken. Though I did say I was being thick... (OK, not much of a defense when ignoring the whole point of a thread...)@KattMan said:
So does this mean they are getting rid of R and M?
Time to be thick again
If you reread the original post, I'm sure you'll realize that M
and R are actually people.
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@snoofle said:
I was emphatic that no amount of money could convince me to put up with that abuse (not from the new manager, but from the other fools).
No amount of money. Really? NO amount of money? You wouldn't do it for $1,000 an hour? $10,000 an hour? If somebody wanted to pay me $1k per hour to yell at me, I'd be happy to. Yellers don't bother me. Especially those who are willing to waste their own money while slinging insults that I know aren't true. Stay calm, don't yell back, do what you know is right. You're a contractor, you can cut out whenever you want. Remember, you're a better man than he is.
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@smxlong said:
@snoofle said:
I was emphatic that no amount of money could convince me to put up with that abuse (not from the new manager, but from the other fools).
No amount of money. Really? NO amount of money? You wouldn't do it for $1,000 an hour? $10,000 an hour? If somebody wanted to pay me $1k per hour to yell at me, I'd be happy to. Yellers don't bother me. Especially those who are willing to waste their own money while slinging insults that I know aren't true. Stay calm, don't yell back, do what you know is right. You're a contractor, you can cut out whenever you want. Remember, you're a better man than he is.
Sure, everybody has their price, but the kind of people who would want to abuse you like that are obviously most likely aren't the kind of people to pay that money.
When I left my last place, I was asked by my boss what would make me stay. Knowing that his boss, cheap-ass COO wouldn't pay what I wanted, I replied with something like 3 times my annual pay. I felt bad knowing that my boss would have to go the COO with that amount, but oh-well. COO came back with an 8% raise, whereas the place I was going was offering 40% more. Even if by some miracle the COO gave me what I wanted, I probably wouldn't have stayed - the working environment was becoming toxic.
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@PJH said:
Like my last job's ambigious acronym of PID which meant different things if you were talking to the 'engineers' in the software department or the engineers on the shop floor welding 36''+ bits of pipe together?
With my previous employer, the "PID" team is the "Production Integration team for the Distributed computing environment" (Windows & Linux). PIM is "Production Integration for the Mainframe".
My favorite is "TID" (Test Integration Distributred) because it's pronounced as "tit" giggle
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@Kattman - they're not getting rid of either of them; I'd be walking into a meat grinder.
@smxlong - Yes, $1,000/hour sounds nice (the actual amount is more like $100/hr), but after a while, your blood boils over and you just want to walk away. The last time I worked for them, I was making well over $100K/year and after a while I just didn't want the job, at any price, so I walked out.
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@Nexzus said:
@smxlong said:
No amount of money. Really? NO amount of money? You wouldn't do it for $1,000 an hour? $10,000 an hour? If somebody wanted to pay me $1k per hour to yell at me, I'd be happy to. Yellers don't bother me. Especially those who are willing to waste their own money while slinging insults that I know aren't true. Stay calm, don't yell back, do what you know is right. You're a contractor, you can cut out whenever you want. Remember, you're a better man than he is.
Sure, everybody has their price, but the kind of people who would want to abuse you like that are obviously most likely aren't the kind of people to pay that money.
Anyone chosen at random is most likely not the kind of people to pay that kind of money. In my limited experience, the kind of people who would actually want to abuse you like that, or want you to work with people who would abuse you like that, are actually significantly more likely to pay that kind of money (sometimes, because it's the only way they can get the job done.)
Admittedly, the closest I've personally known to a contractor paid like that was a guy who was getting $500 per hour, plus daily round trip flights from Dallas, Tx to Indianapolis, In. (He refused to move or work from a hotel room for the job. So they flew him in.) He was not being paid by the people who were yelling at him - he was, in fact, being paid by the people who would be yelled at, if they didn't have a proxy to stand in for the yelling. Also, his main job was to reduce or eliminate the motivation behind the yelling - not that doing that would necessarily stop or even reduce the yelling.
